24H2 Experiences

I had the chance to try Windows 11 24H2 at work today… (shudder) I think I lasted at most, a few hours… Just horribly janky, slow, and full of UI inconsistency and horrible ad-focused design. It has this amazing ‘feature’ of rendering the UI in light mode first, and then drawing on top of it with dark mode, so you end up getting a flashbang effect if you have even remotely older hardware or drivers.

One migraine later, I have never been so glad to come home to a sane alternative… I am not in any way looking forward to the time when this gets forced on everyone who has to deal with it as part of their job. :frowning:

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But UI inconsistency is part of the windows experience though. If I decide I want a bit of visual madness in my life instead of getting drunk I can use Windows for a bit, cheaper too.

The UI is actually one of the many things that impressed me the most with Linux, at least with desktop environments, something as basic as selecting a colour and seeing it update everywhere and all the software in real time with no issue blew my mind the first time I experienced it. The other was dark mode actually being dark mode everywhere and working on application too.

All the wasted space in the Windows settings panel and random blue text links and other stuff, huge boxes around simple options and padding. I notices it more after using linux distro for a while.

I use Windows 10 and 11 at work and it’s very frustrating, Windows 10 is even more inconsistent than Windows 11 too.

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The only way that I can explain is, is that Plasma, while it shares a similar design paradigm, is far, far more consistent. And it’s, for want of a better word, “peaceful” - the cognitive load is an order of magnitude lower, it’s not exhausting to use.

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After seeing the ̶d̶u̶l̶l̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶u̶n̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶e̶s̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶A̶I̶ ̶g̶a̶r̶b̶a̶g̶e̶ very cool additions in 24H2, I decided it was time for me to finally jump ship to EOS once and for all. Thank you Microsoft for that final push.

The only way I could stand 24H2 was by using 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC. No other way. The only Windows PC in my house (my little brother’s) is using that edition, heavily neutered by me to send as little data back home as possible. I would love if he switched to Linux Mint or something, but he still needs to play Windows only games.

As for the UI, I loved Plasma in EndeavourOS out of the box and I don’t even need to theme it. All I did was change the start menu icon to the EOS logo and I was satisfied. That should tell you everything about its consistency. Dark mode is vomit inducing in Windows. Lovely in Plasma. I still believe that light mode Plasma is the sleekest looking desktop environment to date.

Windows is an inconsistent mess, and Microsoft is not in any way interested in fixing that, rather interested in shoving the latest AI fad in your face.

Just compare something like Dolphin to Explorer. So much more functionality to be had in Dolphin. I love the Split view or terminal-within functions and I’m appalled Explorer still doesn’t have that.

The ‘start menu’ (I should get used to calling it the app launcher) in Plasma is extremely customizable and much more pleasant to use in comparison to 11’s white space simulator. I’m serious, after installing IoT Enterprise, the start menu was entirely blank. That looks laughable. You can see it was designed with bloat in mind. StartAllBack does it so much better.

Using Linux, you feel like you’re using an actually modern OS built to be robust and to be yours. Using Windows, I feel like I’m using second rate hardware and that I am renting the PC.

What’s funny, I have a 14th gen i9, and Linux is actually better at scheduling and using my best cores than Windows - an OS that should be the de facto choice for such a CPU in the first place.

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Indeed - that’s how I would describe my experience of using EOS again after some years, and this time definitively. It’s peaceful. I feel like I’m in control and not some company that dictates how to use my PC. Same goes for our family PC I installed Mint on. The difference in atmosphere is astounding.

Just try opening up Edge for the first time on Windows, for example. Instantly get hit with a barrage of pop-ups, and inquiries, like “hey, do you want us to sell your data for the best experience??!!11one” and things like that. Start up Firefox in any Linux distro, and it’s just a few questions about importing data, recommending some privacy focused extensions like Privacy Badger, CanvasBlocker and Facebook Container - and you’re off to the races.

No questions about if I would ‘recommend this PC to a friend or colleague’ - nevermind that it’s a custom built PC, Microsoft. No random pesterings of feedback that inevitably goes unnoticed regardless. No forced updates, nothing is forced upon you in Linux and you are free to do as you please. That is what I love most about it. It’s peaceful. And calming to use.

If you do find something in Windows annoying, good luck trying to communicate that to Microsoft who continue to ignore the biggest problems people post on the Feedback Hub that are on the front page. That leaves you with trying to get rid of it yourself, and unless there’s a registry key or group policy that does what you want, you are out of luck. Using Home edition? You don’t even have a group policy! Entirely opposite experience to Linux where you can modify whatever you want and anything that bothers you can be easily rectified with the community’s help.

Soul wise, XP was the peak of Windows. And then it only went downhill from there… becoming more and more corporate, and ominous. Gone are the days of calming music and beautiful presentation-like slides in OOBE as it was in XP - now you just want to get through it as quick as possible.

I remain a huge fan of old Windows, the likes of 95, 98 SE, 2000, XP and so on. But anything after 7 I despise immensely - with a soft spot for 8.1 because, despite the horrible UX, I loved its speed back then and it made my Celeron crapbox usable (after installing Open Shell of course…)

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Funny thing is: Here I was, raging about the dreadded “FLOATING PANEL - THEY CHANGED MY UI, HOW DARE THEY ARE!!!”. Then I go to work, log in to windows, it tells me my office suite needs a restart and I just laugh out loud about my beloved panel - the first “big” UI change since like… Plasma 4? What had we back then, Win 2k? It is just such a mess, and the thing is: It sucks in Windows behaviour, management and stability. And it is in it’s name. It is called Windows. Such a shitshow :D:D:D

I absolutely loved Windows 7, but, from a visually impaired user’s perspective, Windows 8 was the point at which that OS wasn’t usable anymore. Obfuscating the UI in an effort to make it touch friendly, hiding the start menu, breaking a11y tools, I just gave up and switched fully. I can build custom high contrast themes in Plasma that reflect how my vision is on any given day, week or month (blindness and visual impairment isn’t a binary situation, it can change).

There’s a point for everyone where the pain just wasn’t worth it, that was mine…

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Yeah, understandable. Back then I was mostly concerned about performance and 8.1 won over 7 at that. Horrible at everything else though, had to use third party tools to make it usable.

For some reason, 7 wasn’t as pleasant to use nor as fast as Vista SP2, in my experience. It kinda ruined Aero by overdoing it, too. Vista’s Aero was perfect.

I was already pretty done with Windows lately but my breaking point was all this AI trash that they keep pushing. And deferring of updates for non Copilot+ PCs which I absolutely disagree with.

Honestly we should try and get everyone of Windows. At this point I don’t care which other OS they will be using. Ubuntu, Pop!, Debian, Mint, MacOS, I don’t care. By not allowing users to uninstall Recall they confirmed what most of us expected, they will let Recall creep into every part of the OS and it will surveil its users.

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The ironic point on this, and I say this with kindness, is that most people don’t care either, - in the opposite way… :slight_smile: The OS is going be irrelevant eventually. We’re always going to be a subset of a subset, and that’s fine by me. I figure just let people use what they want to use when they have a choice and have actively chosen. If there was a “get people off” anything, it would be SaaS, software as a service, which in recent times is the core of what we would define as a point of surveillance and revenue-specific telemetry.

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You are probably (I just dont want to admit it completely because its sad) right with what you are saying. However, I think most people do not know enough about Recall and understand its implications, therefore I think they cannot decide freely. And in addition, Windows has advantages to them, so they might endure Recall because they cannot use Linux the way they want and the way their skillset allows.

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We’re slipping into sociological commentary here, about indifference, and being incurious, and that’s a rabbit hole I’m happy to just leave alone. Sometimes life is too short… :slight_smile: Who knows what other OS’s will be like in another decade. I’d like to think just like Android came out of nowhere, Valve will end up sparking a renaissance in alternate OS’s as a side-effect of their work on Steam…

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You are right, we should not make our days more miserable. And enjoy our freedom. Cheers.

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I just looked up what Recall is… that is abhorrent.

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Recall was the final straw that made me switch to Linux, switched over in June and haven’t logged in to Windows since then.

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Linus Torvalds:
“I’m not really worried about destroying Microsoft. That will just be a side effect” (in an interview with the New York Times)

:rofl:

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It’s absolutely bonkers - building in a feature of the OS that helpfully collates all the data any bad actor could possibly want into one place and assuming that it’ll just be “secure enough” is insane to me.

They have recently talked about how they’ve now built tools into it to try and exclude specific pieces of sensitive information, but personally all that tells me is that they’ve seemingly “helpfully” preconfigured a system that knows what sensitive information looks like and is now just waiting for some enterprising soul to turn it inside out :laughing:

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