I have windows on my desktop pc because it's easier to get executable mods (downgraders, engine fixes, etc) working on windows than linux. There's also the matter of 'kernel level anti-cheat' games not working.

But if I just judge windows vs linux, on even ground, W11 is painful. I've main'd linux on my laptop for ~ 25 years. There was a time when it was a jank experience that I put up with for better devex, but that ended in the late 00's. From that point forward, unless you were trying to get bleeding edge hardware to work, linux has been hands down better.

It's enough that I've considered giving up online play all together just to have a nicer computing experience.

I just run two drives - one with windows and one with Linux.

I treat the windows one as a console essentially, not even logged into my password manager or email or anything. It is only for games. Basically an Xbox, with all sorts of normal annoying UX, but it doesn’t matter for all of the ~2 minutes until I can launch a game

Separate linux drive for everything else.

I've considered this for consolidating core hardware, but dual-boot doesn't do trust boundaries well. The Windows kernel still has full block access to the other device, so if it gets admin-level malware, it has free rein to infect the other system. At one point several years ago I got partway through a plan involving having most disks be externally pluggable (and assuming that firmware-level malware persistence is unlikely, which I'm not as sure about these days) but gave up for unclear reasons. I think if I were to try that again (and if I had the hardware for it) I'd try some kind of NAS approach to separate storage credentials from the OS.

You could run windows in the VM. Pcie passthrough is a thing just be careful with the Mobo.

You could indeed run Windows in a VM with PCI passthrough, and for a while long ago my desktop was Xen and I ran a Windows 7 domU which was attached to a second graphics card. Sharing a GPU at least used to be much harder; I think there's better options nowadays than before (paravirtualization-style GPU-command-level passthrough devices, and I assume some graphics hardware supports being split up for partial IOMMU passthrough in the way some high-end network cards do), but I don't know how they stack up for gaming performance.

However, the use case under discussion touches on things like handling kernel-level anti-cheat requirements, which is exactly the kind of place where I'd expect you to get in trouble trying to jigger around with virtual machines. Even before that point, I get the general feeling games and game platforms can get tetchy when you're not on Real Recognizable Hardware.

Normal/classical FDE doesn't truly protect integrity, only confidentiality. Supposedly LUKS2 allows you to run with --integrity, but it's an extra layer of I/O amplification, and if you're willing to take that hit then there's less incentive not to just use an external drive. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/87367/does-luks...

As for Secure Boot, maybe? I haven't thought through how that would help in this context, but my instinct is to ask how you'd do the binding between “I intend to boot Y instead of X” and “only accept the boot signature for Y instead of X”, so that malware can't try to unexpectedly substitute X. It feels like there's probably places for attackers to mess around here unless you're very careful.

Not really. Regular exploits that allow attackers to gain SYSTEM level access frequently crop up in Windows (like the recent regpwn exploit). Someone who games on PC is likely into modding as well, and this is a frequent attack vector - so an innocent-looking mod executable could gain admin rights and make use of secure boot exploits like CVE-2023-24932 (assuming the system is using an unpatched BIOS). Even if the BIOS is patched, there's no guarantee that a similar exploit won't crop up in the future. You could update your system regularly to stay on top of things, but zero days exploits are also a thing - like, do you install updates the minute they come out? Probably not. And even if you do, it takes time to download and apply those updates, a window which could be used to execute zero days, by a hidden RAT.

You don't need any major resources to exploit systems these days in this manner, especially with AI in the mix.

I have a windows machine connected to my TV for games. Thats it. 1000 Euro machine with 500 Euro GPU. Also use it for govts windows only thingies.

I was going to go this route, but with all the GPU's sitting around in data centers now, you can get Steam cloud gaming for stupid cheap. I pay $10/month for 4k@120Hz (up to 80mbps video bitrate, they're experimenting with HDR), with my MacBook connected to my TV. It would take 12 years of subscriptions to equal the price of a PC, which is realistically more like 20 since I pause the subscription for months that I don't play. And, if I want to play some multiplayer game with a family member, I just add another subscription for $10, we play the game until they're done, then cancel.

I'll probably pick up a PC at some point, but this has been completely fine.

Similar for me but I mostly play single player small studio games/no mods, and on Steam/Linux there are enough "out of the box working" games to fill all the time I still have left for gaming.

It's not perfect, but I anyway had the computer for other reasons and may need it for the other reasons again after which I would need to re-setup anything. Bazite default/w. SteamOS UI install + a minor number of setting changes (1) and a login to steam and it's ready to go again. Can't complain. Just which the SteamOS UI version would also do the same background download+apply of updates the main versions or distros like Fedora Silverblue do.

While not quite yet console experience, for many games it really is not "that" far away. (For some other games very much very far away, don't expect any competitive PvP games or games with real world money related online economy working. To some degree it's not even about anti-cheat not working on Linux. It's about many such games struggling making it work on Windows and having no room to bother with another platform, and dishonest managers potentially using "all Linux fault" as an excuse when the anti-cheating strategy failed on Windows where most of their players where... (happened before))

--

(1): Mainly SteamOS UI is made for Handhelds and as such has some bad defaults for more powerful desktops (which likely will change soon). I'm only couch gaming on it, hence close to everything else just stays with default settings. Sure it's not fancy customized Linux or most maximal privacy preserving Linux. But it's in the "good enough" area of settings, privacy and similar, which Windows in many aspects isn't anymore. No fighting windows forcing things down your throat, weather it's Copilot, the nasty way it tries to deceive you into using it's online drive, etc.

---

Oh and as minor tip: You can majorly micro optimize kernels, schedulers, drivers etc. If you don't need to, then don't bother. That is where unexpected perf. regressions, issues after updates etc. come in. Like you still find reports about Bazzite being slower then windows due to them having don that in the past and having run into an unexpected perf. regression on some hardware without realizing. I mean it is fun to tinker. But I'm in the "please mostly just work" age by now.

Glad to see Windows is still treated basically the same as DOS, but with slightly better graphics and mouse support.

DOS had mouse support, going at least as far back as 1983.

TIL

I installed Proxmox on my main desktop - with GPU passthrough I can quickly switch to a Windows desktop for the rare games that need it (mostly VR).

This is basically how I use linux. PC plugged in to the TV running bazzite. No keyboard or mouse, just an xbox controller. The experience is so seamless now.

Y'all just need to game on Linux when and where possible, to the extent that it is possible.

Be the change the market needs to see to adjust development practices.

Valve is doing their part. I get playing on Windows when there are mods, but if you can play a new game vanilla at launch on Linux - do it. It shows demand.

Steam is a wonderful boot loader.

That's ...not the dumbest idea I've ever heard. Now I just have to wait till prices come down on ssds again. While I can of course afford it, it wounds my soul to pay the AI / tariff tax on components.

I typically install both systems on the same disk, different partitions. Then work with additional SSDs strictly for game storage. Only annoying bit is that some games _need_ to be on C, but very few in my experience. If you have enough space to shrink your Windows partition, that could work without waiting for an SSD. Though I guess the one OS per disk setup is ultimately cleaner.

Been dual booting for >20 years now. It's nice that some games work on Linux pretty well these days, and of course I had fun messing with Wine manually to get some stuff to work decades ago. But it really doesn't bother me too much to reboot when switching between gaming and literally anything else.

The issue that has occurred a few times is that some windows updates will decide that they 'own' the disk it's installed on or knows better than whoever is running the system, and overwrite any other boot manager with window's own and you may need to break out a live boot to recover it. Using a single isolated disc at OS install time (if you can have multiple physical drives) and using a motherboard boot selection hotkey means that risk likely goes away.

I use BIOS boot selection to dual-boot. MS has broken it twice. I turned off SecureBoot now and just don't run games that require it.

Apparently you can get a mobo with switchable BIOS config (or was it just a switchable SSD?) so the OS didn't even know that there's a second OS around. If there's no connection of the other OS then MS can't break it [as easily]!

IMO it must be malicious, because otherwise it would be caught with remedial testing. I can't believe MS don't include dual boot setups in their testing.

Microsoft got rid of QA years ago. If it was targeted sabotage they could break dual boot setups every single Patch Tuesday. It's just disrespect for users. Like how Copilot and other shovelware such as Candy Crush keep getting reinstalled every few updates, and privacy settings reset every once in a while. Dual booting is likely not even on their radar.

Many newer computers now have a rudimentary bootloader integrated in the EFI. Some are actually quite nice, allowing you to browse partitions to choose which image to boot. HPs have this. You just hit a key during uefi “post” and voilà.

The functionality is present on my new Lenovo laptop, various generations of HP elite/pro books/desks, old asus mobo and newer cheap gigabyte mobo, 7th gen intel nuc.

> It's nice that some games work on Linux pretty well these days

This description doesn't really do it justice. ~75% of top 100 games work well out of the box/with minimal tinkering according to https://www.protondb.com/dashboard (it varies a bit based on the rating scale)

Many work perfectly and many work even better than they do on Windows. Valve's work really changed the game over the past few years.

> Now I just have to wait till prices come down on ssds again

oh man, do I have some really bad news for you:

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/chart/SNDK

Using Proton tricks hasn't been too difficult a task for me on Bazzite and my steam deck. But my modding experience hasn't been that extensive. Mostly tinkering with Deus ex and Starwars x-wing alliance

I could tolerate Windows more if it stopped being a rental OS that thinks MS own your laptop more than you do. Like it was in Windows 7.

All I ask is that things I uninstall stay uninstalled -- I got rid of OneDrive and Teams for a reason, stop adding that shit back! -- and that it doesn't shove Edge and Bing down my throat and decide that MS knows better than I do about what I want.

For me last year was the tipping point, with Windows 10 hitting EOL I refused to move to the buggy mess of 11. All the games I regularly play are now nearly flawless in proton and games that refuse to run on Linux just don't exist for me anymore. Admittedly I already didn't play the kinds of highly competitive online games that like to use KLAC, so might be a tougher sell if that's your jam. Most of my game time goes to FF14 and GW2.

> It's enough that I've considered giving up online play all together just to have a nicer computing experience.

Why don't you play games that actually work online, instead of giving it up altogether?

Diablo 2/3/4/D2R/PD2, Path of Exile 1/2, Last Epoch, Fall Guys, Age of Empires, Forza, MS Flight Simulator, Quake 3/4/Champions, The Finals, CS2, TF2, Halo Infinite... there's a bunch more I'm missing, but you can certainly game online on Linux.

I assume this isn't the case with every machine, but every hardware I've ever owned (including the Framework 13, which has pretty good Linux support) has had worse battery life under Linux (mainstream distros like Fedora and Ubuntu).

To say nothing of the truly excellent battery life Macs these days get.

That's the only reason to avoid Linux on a laptop these days, IMO.

Have you tried a ThinkPad? They have official support for Linux and generally have excellent battery life. At least that's been the case for me on my ThinkPad Z13 running CachyOS. I did install TLP for better battery life, but TLP is a must-have for all Linux ThinkPad users anyways.

> That's the only reason to avoid Linux on a laptop these days, IMO.

Pop_os! with the system76 power daemon makes a world of difference on my tiny AMD powered Lenovo ideapad.

My scrolling is screwed up everytime I try to run Linux on my laptop.

David Heinemeier Hansson reports excellent battery life on 2026 Dell XPS 14 with Panther Lake https://world.hey.com/dhh/panther-lake-is-the-real-deal-4bd7...

I'm a little gun-shy of getting another Dell after two bad machines in a row (two separate models with swollen batteries < 3 years old), but I'll admit the 14 looks nice now that they've brought back the physical function keys!

I'm waiting to see some other reviews of the Omarchy and Dell XPS combo on battery life. DHH has overhyped some things in the past - he posted a screenshot on X last week showing ~40 hours battery life remaining on the Dell.

But it's so good to see the Windows side catching up to Macs now. So tempted to try out Omarchy on the XPS.

What's so special about Omarchy? It's reskinned arch with a bunch of extra junk installed.

nothing special - just seems like an easy way to try out Linux for someone that hasn't tried it before

I repeat this story every now and then but I "maintain" a 18 years old laptop with Ubuntu (mainly for Internet) for non-tech savvy user. I put it in quotes because I just run apt update every now and then - that's it. Just works. The only bottleneck is how resource-hungry browsers got over time but it remains usable. Ubuntu was installed sometime back in 2017 and there was no need for fresh reinstall since then.

I did that for my mom. At some point she learned to click through the Ubuntu updater and she kept her machine updated by herself. I only kept tabs on her computer via the server monitoring tooling I had on my network.

This sounds like the move, vs. having mum on Win+Chrome.

If people had set their family members up with Firefox and Ublock Origin, then the Manifest v2 deprecation wouldn’t have resulted in seniors getting hit with certain scams. Specifically over the period between deprecation and the next visit from tech savvy family members.

Unforgivable btw

Edit - Linux bit’s important too b/c of MS nagscreens that could try to upsell

That can't be literally true, no release of Ubuntu is still getting updates after 18 years. At some point you have to upgrade to the next release, and that's not quite as simple.

The 'upgrade to next version of ubuntu' has gotten pretty good these days.

The only thing I would make sure to do is to have a separate home partition / volume so if you had to blow the underlying OS away after a botched upgrade, it's easily doable.

For the life of me I don't understand why having a separate area for your personal files isn't the default on every OS. Just pick a reasonable size for the OS part (20-30G?) and give the rest to /home

Check out the volume scheme in macOS.

The laptop is 18 years old, Ubuntu was installed in 2017.

It might not be 2035 but give it a few weeks and we will be there. Or at least it will feel like it only took a few weeks.

Anecdotally, my (smart but doesn't really care much about computers) fiancee was able to get all dozen of her mods for The Sims working on Bazzite Linux without any help from me besides a chmod +x to one script.

But we don't play any online multiplayer games, so YMMV on that one.

Multiplayer online games work mostly fine. There is just a small fraction that is not.

I switched from Windows to Linux because I got a Steam Deck, which caused me to realize that the only games in my library that don't also run flawlessly on Linux are the ones that have invasive anticheat that I'm really not comfortable installing.

Having to enable TPM or device integrity or whatever it is on my own computer just to run my own games is just too much power to hand to some garbage corporation that shits on its users. Rubbed me so far the wrong that way that I gave it up. The fact that Win 11 is no longer just an easy and hands-off solution that "just works" but is bloated with dark patterns and "AI" bullshit certainly helped cement the decision.

Have a Linux gaming machine with bazzite. Fantastic! So far any game I care about works and with AMD drivers it’s even stable..

I tend to run pretty close to the edge on hardware (9950x, 9070xt, gen5 nvme)... I've had a few issues with that in Linux... that said, I've been using Linux as the main OS on my desktop for a while now, and when I upgraded about a year ago, I ditched the Windows drive entirely.

I do have a Windows Server 2025 and Win11 VM running for a couple testing issues, but that's about it. That said, there seems to be a few integration issues on Wayland where the RDP client or the VM UI both will not intercept hotkeys like alt-tab, which makes it kind of painful to use the VM effectively.

Even with the rough edges in Cosmic, I'll still take it over the jank they keep addding to Windows.

I had an RX 5700XT at launch, that was about the most painful... but 6mo later it worked fine... But by then I did switch back to Windows because I couldn't deal with the day to day issues... A year later, I went back to Linux and haven't looked back though.

I usually don't care enough about the games that only run on Windows. Most of the games I play are 100% playable on Linux, even the online competitive ones. Never liked League, PUBG or GTA Online anyway

Linux is missing good vm defaults (dirty_bytes etc.) - out of the box settings on the distros I tried are abysmal; both windows and macos are much saner.

Other than that, yeah, it's a royal pain in the ass. It's treating the user primarily as an upsell funnel.

Its always been a momentum thing for me, grew up on Windows, esp in my LAN party days. The guys running linux couldn't play 90% of the games the rest of us were. When dev became more important to me I would typically reach for something else because the windows dev experience always kind of sucked IMO (unless you were a .NET person, which for the most part I was not).

I have a spare laptop with Pop OS on it now and I'm really enjoying it. Kind of forget I'm on it sometimes. I'm considering putting it as my OS for my main powerful laptop that I play most of my games on.

I haven't had Windows in the home for maybe 10ish years. It is funny how quickly you forget about it once you are entirely over to your new normal.

I am only reminded when very occasionally someone is around and they see my system running, they ask "What is that?", but most of the time nobody notices or cares.

I dual boot Windows and Pop OS. I find the Windows 10 LTSC experience totally perfect, and it has a longer EOL.

LTSC is the “real” Windows. It’s so boring and terrific.

What I don’t understand is why they don’t make it more available. Just let people pay for it. I do not understand why they don’t.

For the same reason everything is moving to being ad based - because ads pay more, and because the high income users who are willing to pay to get rid of ads are the most valuable users to show ads to.

Google and Facebook showed the way. Consumers see FREE service and it sets the market equilibrium. Retail Windows licenses were already a slim minority. Those who would buy Windows 11 LTSC for Home would be an even smaller group.

There is like 20 online games that don't work... No need to give it all up if you switch

I don't seem to have issues modding games like Skyrim, Fallout 4 or Factorio on Linux

Do you use executable mods? Downgraders, engine fixes, etc? I'm also curious what mod manager you use, because getting MO2 to work under linux is a bit janky as well.

Janky but works. I started experiment with game scope I think is called. Interesting results upscaling some games. Fiddly though

I use MO2 on Linux through Steam's Proton runtime, to play TTW (Fallout NV mod). Works fine. The TTW installer did require an older Proton version though.

Probably not often I'd say, but at least there were some games I played with wine where some executables to apply mods also ran in wine and worked, I vaguely remember some fix to make something be able to use more than a few GB of ram to allow farther or better remdering, sometimes just a strange combination of things is needed to get something to work. But that's actually long ago, these days everything just works in Steam instead

> I vaguely remember some fix to make something be able to use more than a few GB of ram to allow farther or better remdering.

A 4gb patch probably (let's you use 4gb instead of 2gb for x86 executables).

it's a question of tooling, modding kits

most times it this tooling which causes issues not the mod itself

For very popular games it's not rare if moddingkit/tooling producer (or contributes) made the tooling work on Linux, but it can be very hit or miss.

but it increasingly more "just works", kinda, somewhat

Yeah. I recently tried to run an auxiliary program (Mass Effect save editor because the character creator sucks) on Linux which was only written for Windows. Getting it running in the same Proton "space" (bottle?) was not an enormous challenge, but it was very far from "just works".

If you avoid games that demand kernel-level access, gaming on Linux works just fine.

Honestly, I don't trust game producers enough to grant then kernel access. Do you? Really?

I don't trust windows with access to sensitive data, much less games. I do all banking, etc on my linux laptop. My desktop is for messing around with AI / ML / games

Install the IoT LTSC edition. No crapware at all. It's a really solid OS. Less painful than Linux overall.

Is there any legitimate way to do that? Last I heard, that version needed an Enterprise license which end-users realistically can't realistically get.

I run Windows 11 as my main desktop (and use Mac at work and have a bunch of servers / NAS where I run debian), and W11 is not painful at all.

I installed the Professional edition, disabled a few settings that I don't like the first time I installed it, and haven't had any issue or friction since then.

Meanwhile I'm constantly frustrated at MacOS and obviously you can't do anything on Linux without running into some sort of trouble.

Some people don't mind ads on the radio, when they're watching a show, some people don't mind pop-ups, etc.

Now, if I search on win11 to start a program (which is what they want you to do), why does auto complete call out to the Internet? Users had had browsers for over two decades, who has asked Microsoft to mix local search, application startup and web search?

As it turns out, I really hated on-call my whole career. I guess different personalities here, as well.

> if I search on win11 to start a program (which is what they want you to do), why does auto complete call out to the Internet?

This is how I launch most of my programs and it has literally never been an issue for me, it always does exactly what I expect, which is to launch the program I have installed locally.

I don't give a fuck if it makes an HTTP call or performs an incantation to the god of search in the background, as long as it just gives me my locally installed software instantly, which it does.

> As it turns out, I really hated on-call my whole career.

Read my bio.

Sometimes its not instant though.. sometime web search completes faster then locally installed software and because of muscle memory I accidentally opened a bing page about scrcpy (where the first result is an unaffiliated web page instead of official github page!) instead of my locally installed scrcpy

Last time I checked, Linux didn't have hardware acceleration for videos in most browsers. I think it was 2 or 3 years ago, certainly way after "the late 00's".

In my opinion, an operating system that sucks the battery out of your laptop is not good enough.

Just one exemple but I think it's pretty straightforward.

Worse: while, as a technical user with decades of *nix experience (SunOS since 4.1.x, FreeBSD since 2.x, Linux since Red Hat [not Enterprise] 6, NEXTSTEP and its successors since 3.3, etc.), I've never had trouble getting hardware decoding working in Linux browsers with a little elbow grease, the overall support picture is not straightforward at all.

Whether hardware decoding works in browsers on Linux depends on the Linux distro, the browser, the hardware, and how the browser is packaged and configured.

It may be disabled by default. X11 backends may in some cases have broader decode support than Wayland backends or vice versa. And at least one popular distro, Fedora, packages video decoding libraries with patent-encumbered codecs disabled, which need to be replaced with libraries from a third-party repo for hardware decoding to work except in the case of applications installed via packaging mechanisms that vendor dependencies like Flatpak.

This one is a real pain yes. Contributes a lot to bad battery life on laptops

Microsoft put AI, Tabs, a login portal, a 'search with bing' action and text formatting on notepad before a 'redo' button to pair with the 'undo' action.

That says everything about the current product priorities that you need to know.

My recent frustration is with Powerpoint Designer suggestions. Who asked for this? The suggestions don't make sense or look good. And then microsoft provides a helpful tip to not pop open suggestions till the next time powerpoint is opened

Those do super fun things to slide numbering too sometimes, so you get 2 slide sixes, and no slide eight.

This is why I don't believe in AI.

Every time I open Google it shuffles the images/videos/shopping/maps tabs randomly. There is no UI research on the universe that would say this is a good thing. It has been happening for years.

Does anyone seriously want me to believe a company that thinks that that is a good idea can make AI work?

Google trends now has less features than it used to have. Search Console changes routinely, somehow never gets any actual new features. I think the funniest past was introducing an AI chatbot in Search Console that isn't able to answer most users' number 1 query: "how can I make my website get more clicks?"

I actually believe if you make an AI chatbot just to tell users how to use your app, you're admitting you have no idea how to make the app usable. If the app was intuitive, by definition, nobody would need a chatbot. If the documentation was easy to read, nobody would need a chatbot. If the search results actually worked, nobody would need AI overview (which, by the day, I feel has been becoming slower and slower to load every day)

On Whatsapp, I remember struggling to search for my contacts because where I expected a search box was replaced with Meta's AI text box. The funniest thing is that I remember someone who isn't good with computers telling me they asked the Whatsapp AI how to delete files in their smartphone that was full. Now this "AI" has probably become IT support for countless of its less tech savvy users, probably giving them completely wrong information sometimes.

All of this AI integration feels so offensive because every software you'll ever use always has a huge list of features that users would want and have wanted for years, and what is getting added first is some shoddy AI nobody asked for. People are seeing AI integration get top priority in spite of zero demand while their own issues with the software remain ignored. It's going to make people lose trust in software.

From the article: "Additionally, AI features in Notepad settings has been renamed to Advanced features and it allows users to toggle off AI capabilities within the app."

I honestly don't mind this, as long as it's not being forced. And I believe this feature exists only within their npu PCs.

But it's just so unnecessary. Everyone has always expected Notepad to be a simple utility as it has always been, why does it need optional AI features? It just feels like bloat.

When I stopped using Windows, it was because it required so much constant upkeep and maintenance to stay usable. You had to stay on top of the latest tool that disables tracking, things like Cortana you'd want to remove, the latest toggles you have to disable, what toggles revert themselves when you update. These all exist behind different shifting UI toggles which are not accessibly automatable. And all the while, you have to hope your registry edits don't force you to a lengthy reinstall where you have to redo all of these.

I could be wrong, but as far as I know there's not one "Fix Windows 11" tool maintained to do all this for you.

"You have to toggle AI features off in Notepad, and they changed the name to Advanced Features now," is just another heaving brick on the pile.

> When I stopped using Windows, it was because it required so much constant upkeep and maintenance to stay usable.

i actually had to spin up a windows vm last week to fix some dumb excel workbook vba nonsense a coworker was having issues with.

i laughed so hard at the amount of "debloat" powershell tools out there for windows that are basically a non-negotiable now to have a normal operating system experience. just surfing around the web and seeing people say "yeah install OS then run _ tool" like that is a normal "this is fine" thing was so entertaining.

i destroyed that VM when i was done. then took a shower

You do you, but I never bothered with anything like that and just used Windows as it is. It works. Yes, it probably tracks me and sends some stuff to MS servers but I don't care. I trust them enough to run their proprietary code on my machine with the highest privileges, anyway.

The problems with VM experience is because Windows seems to perform some tasks after installation or after long absence, like installing updates and stuff. That makes it slow for a while. But when you use it every day, it's not an issue.

That's the same reason I deleted my Facebook account.

I really think MS should have just resurrected the "Wordpad" app name for what the new "Nptepad" does. It would be far less annoying if they'd just done that.

Based on the timelines, it seems like the WordPad EoL was going on at the same time as the plans to add crap to Notepad. They might well have killed WordPad so that they could turn Notepad into the pile of crap it became.

lol holy moly i totally forgot about how annoying it was when something opened in the bastard child that was wordpad.

kinda crazy to me how terrible the entire windows experience is as a whole, i really think people have just lost sight of how computing should be.

there's just too many cats outta the bag here that microsoft is going to cling to for dear life, they can back pedal all they want in blogs promising different, but we can already see here they're not willing to let go of the stuff they've woven into things that people hate.

im gonna be blunt, windows kinda sux. this is already not a promising outlook for windows enjoyers. and it's only been what, like 2-3 weeks since they were putting out this nonsense

> "You will see us be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows, focusing on experiences that are genuinely useful and well‑crafted. As part of this, we are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad."

let me guess: copilot stuff remains on by default. lol, lmao even

> im gonna be blunt, windows kinda sux.

No argument from me... I switched my personal devices off Windows several years ago... I still use a Mac laptop, and that may even be my last Apple device.

I really wish that MS would have spent far more time making Win11 consistent instead of introducing so many new features throughout... Win7 was the last version of Windows that even resembled consistent. That doesn't even go into a lot of the bloat and stuff that doesn't necessarily belong in an OS imo. Completing the UI transition should be the second priority only after long standing bugs and usability issues. The AI enshitification is horrible. I'm not even against an option for AI tooling... give me a selection dialog/wizard ONCE on account login/creation... then leave me alone.

I’d argue it is Microsoft’s own damn fault. They seem to have completely abandoned improving their system, in favour of dumping everything in their apps. Apple has introduced writing tools at the OS level, so you can use their LLM in TextEdit and no one complains.

I complain. I don't need AI on OS level.

With Apple, can you leave the LLM features turned off?

Yes you can keep Apple Intelligence turned off at the system level, which I do

I don't need anything more than a simple text editor. Notepad worked fine for a long time, but the bloat is real. I tried a bunch of replacement editors, but none really scratched that Notepad itch. Surprisingly, I'm now a fan of MS Edit:

https://github.com/microsoft/edit

It's very simple and here's hoping they don't bloat this one out, too.

I like kde's Kate. A bit more than notepad but not as crazy as notepad++. More like notepad 2

Reminder that this is the company that decided to replace Paint with something called "Paint 3D", the laggiest and bloatiest "literally nobody wanted this" drawing app I've ever seen.

It was never replaced. Paint 3D was an entirely different app for 3D art only. It's also been gone for a few years now.

It was absolutely sold as a replacement. And it's gone now because literally nobody wanted it, used it, or understood why it existed. Sure, you could still find the old Paint in a disused lavatory behind a locked door with a sign "beware of the leopard". It wasn't even installed by default, unlike the 3D version, or do I recall incorrectly? Even MS isn't so stupid as to ship two separate accessories both called "Paint" in the same OS by default!

And a weird obsession with making it impossible to customize the sidebar in Explorer, so there was a “3D Objects” folder stuck there permanently unless you’re the kind of user who doesn’t mind a trip to the registry editor.

What percent of users ever found that useful? I think I’m being generous to guess one in ten thousand.

Absolutely braindead management running Windows development.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/remove-3d-objects-folder-wino...

> one in ten thousand.

For their default file explorer experience, the prominent fourth option right in the sidebar. Oh my gosh, that is hilarious. Did someone think it made the computer look advanced (or did they want you to buy apps to uh make 3D stuff from them)?

I think they wanted you to buy a Windows Mixed Reality headset and use it for Paint 3D

Yeah, the "3D Objects" thing is just surreal. You can't make this stuff up.

It was a relic from a time when it looked like 3D printing was going to be the next big thing.

Agreed, it looked like VR was going to be big, MS & Meta were pushing it hard.

Looking back, I understood with Windows XP that I wasn't in the target group. Win 95/98 had a simple but functional file search. Being naive, I was expecting some power user features in the future, like regex search.

Win XP replaced the classic file search with one that had an animated dog in it.

The dog search was completely, utterly useless. You would not find anything with it. It was so bad I still vividly remember my bafflement about it.

Ugh, I can no longer press win key and type "p a i enter". I now have to find the old paint manually.

Give FlowLauncher[0] or Windows Powertoys Run[1] a shot.

There are some amazing tools like that (and Everything[2], which replaces Windows' inferior search) that really change how one interacts with Windows.

There are other tricks like putting scripts or shortcuts or executables in a directory referenced by your PATH variable, which can make the Win+R trick better too.

[0] https://www.flowlauncher.com/ [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run [2] https://www.voidtools.com/

Switch to Open-Shell's start menu and don't look back.

win+r - mspaint - enter

Thanks! Also useful for an old win10 machine I have, and probably shouldn't be using anymore, that no longer responds to clicking the start menu button...

Don't throw it away. Install windows 8, and the last offline version of office you can find. It makes for a great distraction free workstation and a monitor for your android (scrcpy).

Or, you can install and reinstall linux distros and learn the ropes.

You should be fine as long as you use a proper firewall device and access only manually withelisted websites, but it is always better to keep it offline. That said, it can become your next firewall device.

I built it circa 2012 or 2013 and still have the physical win8 disc. I considered futzing with linux on it. The extent of my linux experience is via SSH to a raspberry pi kludging some docker containers for this and that. SSH/linux terminal feels like fumbling in a dark room flipping random switches until something works.

>scrcpy

I also have a pixel 5a whose screen doesn't work, but I think functions otherwise. Would this allow me to interface with it?

I think the pixel 5a can be connected to tv through an hdmi cable. If so, plug that and a mouse to setup adb (toggle enable adb and toggle debug permissions, then accept adb host)

Or just install Win10 IoT LTSC, which is supported until 2032.

They don't even do substring search??

Back in the 90s doing substring match was probably deemed way too expensive and so just calling the executable name directly was as optimized as it got... and it's beautiful :)

Apparently there’s a proper app launcher in PowerToys.

Must be some Mandela effect but I'm sure that Paint.net was supposed to replace mspaint when it was started.

Paint.NET wasn't Microsoft's, but was an independent app: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.NET

It was supposed to be a third-party replacement, sure, but certainly not an official one. It started as a student project. It's just the prefix that tricks your brain to associate it with MS's own .NET branded applications.

To be fair, the .NET brand is already super convoluted (there's .NET framework, the .NET core, .NET runtime, the .NET desktop runtime, the .NET sdk, and I'm genuinely not even sure which if any of these might refer to the same thing), on top of it weirdly sounding like something internet related to a casual user.

Yes, "Copilot" is not the first brand that MS has tried to stick to everything while being just as confused about it as (inevitably) the consumers. Although somehow they did manage to keep .NET mostly aimed at developers - besides the actual frameworks there's Visual Studio .NET and other dev tools, but I'm actually a bit surprised that they never had "Office .NET" or "Outlook .NET" or even "Windows .NET Edition" or something like that. Maybe they still had some sane people in charge of marketing and brand management back then.

They did brand the Microsoft accounts themselves, from “Passport” to “.NET Passport” for a while. That was before they were “Windows Live IDs.”

I think that crown belongs to the pile of pig shit that was the Windows 10 photo viewer. My first experience with that trash fire was opening a simple 2k photo which took 15 seconds and 150 MB of memory on a six core i5 with 16GB RAM. Viewing images was pain and suffering until I gave up and re-enabled the Win 7 viewer which was thankfully still included.

I remember how Skype, an awesome piece of software transformed into Lync, which worked fairly well, slowly transformed into whatever MS wanted to call it year after year, slower and more buggy than the year before.

> Everyone has always expected Notepad to be a simple utility as it has always been

Except the youngest of the demography who don't have this expectation, and live in AI hype era since they're kids.

If I'm understanding correctly, you have to go into "advanced" features to turn off AI? So someone who doesn't think they're an expert who needs advanced features might not ever go and look there? I'd argue that "advanced" features are something that a casual user would expect to be off by default and need to go out of their way to enable.

"advanced" in 2026 is closer to "using the app how you want to as rather than the way that will generate the corporation maximum profits"

This stretches back much farther than the 2020s unfortunately...

Even with it off, you can still see that it uses a lot of resources for a basic Notepad. I've ditched Windows for work, second drive now has Windows for gaming and that is all. I can do all my work on Linux and that is fine by me.

IMHO they're just hiding the wolf in sheep clothing. Can't complain about AI if it's not called AI. Modern problems require modern solutions, you get the idea. The snark in TFA about shareholders and stakeholders hits the nail on the head.

Be better if there was a global "Disable AI" option easily found in the settings that is a flag everywhere.

Some of us (including very much me) simply do not want Copilot/AI anything and playing whackamole with settings is annoying but we'll do it anyway and it leaves a bad taste.

Since it's the software equivalent of been in a filing cabinet in the basement behind a door that has a sign saying "Beware the Leopard".

In reality it's a moot point, I disable AI features and Windows is a gloried steamos box for me at this point, I do my actual computing booted into Linux and have for decades.

The "AI" additions to Notepad are not limited to systems with an NPU. Why would they be, it's powered by LLMs running on Azure [0].

These sudden additions also correlated with the first CVE [1] in Notepad since its inception, so maybe their attention isn't where it should be.

I for one very much mind this and many other inclusions including the metastatic takeover off Office. OneDrive also was forced upon and severely worsened functioning software, despite not being "AI", so there is precedent at least.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-wri...

[1] https://infosecwriteups.com/the-dumb-editor-that-got-too-sma...

I would prefer off by default.

No nags, just a simple, "We are offering you this feature, use it or don't, it's your computer".

> I honestly don't mind this, as long as it's not being forced.

This is indeed a step forward. With QuickBooks, there is currently no way to disable their extremely intrusive AI. I may just vibe-code a browser extension to block it. Fight fire with fire.

So they didn't remove it, they just renamed it? Reminds me of that time we fixed racism by renaming the master branch to main.

Slavery. It was meant to fix slavery.

Rasism was fixed by not using black- and whitelists on firewalls. Separate endeavour.

At least Comcast isn't the company with the worst customer support now, we can give that honor to Xfinity

People who claim the goal of changing the common terminology was to abolish or discourage racism are an example of why we are still having such prevalent racism all around.

What was the goal then? Of those who demanded the change.

The BDSM community felt attacked.

If the pun was not intended, it should be.

Maybe comparing <the sum total of annoyance from reading the old name> to <the current sum total of annoyance reading the current name>, it was a positive direction overall?

I don’t believe that more than .0001% of people actually felt annoyance. Master branch was used referencing a master, as in the master copy of a record, not a slave master. No normal people were actually annoyed by that.

You need to add all of the real world breakage to scripts and tutorials on the right side of that ledger. Plus the negative effects of virtue signaling undermining efforts at substantive change.

Also, are we supposed to ban the word master from all of it's dozens of normal English use-cases? I never got a clear answer on why git branch names were so much more harmful than someone mastering a skill or making a master record.

I suggest we all boycott Mastercard until they rename to Maincard. I simply cannot bring myself to generate revenue for a company so bigoted they'd use such an egregious name.

And somehow academia, the most enlightened among us, kept their master's degrees.

Somehow, "primary degree" really doesn't have the same ring to it.

Can you name any person who publicly registered any form of annoyance reading the old name, prior to the movement to replace the name?

Can you cite any person, before, during or after, who gave a valid, coherent argument as to why the old name should annoy anyone? (Or are you willing to attempt one yourself?)

Note: the two arguments I am familiar with boil down to "it could be understood as describing a bad historical event, and ipso facto must not be uttered", and "if I am annoyed by something then that is inherently valid and you lack standing to question me, on account of my identity characteristics". I don't accept either of these as valid, for hopefully obvious reasons.

(And in fact, I can't recall actually ever seeing the second argument deployed honestly. I can only recall seeing people not of the relevant identity characteristics presuming that they were defending people who would feel that way.)

It was preformative nonsense that caused (and still causes!) more hassle than it was worth

I mean, if you were to do that, I'd wager more people are annoyed with the change than were annoyed with the original name. So no, it was a negative direction overall.

You'll be happy to know in the context of a "master branch" it never had any connotation to slavery, except in the minds of people who see everything as a question of race*

Anyway I'm off to listen to the 50th anniversary Dark Side of the Moon remaster. Wait, is "dark" an okay word? I didn't get a master's degree in English

* Parallel ATA on the other hand, yeah, yikes

> virtue signaling is fixing symptoms of the problem

It diminishes the seriousness of the entire anti-racism movement by making it look petty, out of touch and more interested in creating nuisances than solving real problems. The San Francisco school board got fired for doing similar nonsense during COVID, renaming schools and thus showing they weren’t serious people.

> by making it look

I have yet to see a good reason to believe that it isn't actually the case.

Can you, perhaps, cite your own pre-2020 writing attesting to the problem, and explaining why it should be considered a problem?

Do you consider that using the name "master" for a branch tends to endorse or normalize slavery, or (even stochastically) increase the amount of slavery that occurs in the world?

If so, how?

If not, why is it actually a problem to reference the concept (even disregarding the evidence that it was not intended to do so)?

I honestly don't understand Microsoft's AI strategy. It seems to be built around automating the writing process. If you ask MS 365 Copilot (as opposed to the many other Copilots) what it can do, it's deeply disappointing:

"Can you edit the Word document so the format is in line with these requirements?"

"No, but I can help you draft an implementation consistent with the requirements."

"Can you add this section to the 35 individual copies of this document in this OneDrive folder?"

"No, but I can help you draft [something]."

This is NOT the AI revolution anyone was waiting for.

This is decidedly the result of a lack of strategy. Microsoft isn’t a single unified borg.

Instead, all the little individual teams got their hands on these capabilities and they figured out where to shove it. At “best” there would have been the head of Windows or Office or whatever saying to all their reports “go do AI!”

Atleast someone at some level need to think about how the user is going to use copilot right?

Its shocking how they didnt. Imagine how shit the culture must be when employees arent bothering to consider how the user will use the feature, just focussing on getting it through

It looks like you're trying to write something! Click here to have me fuck it up for you!

Here is a fun one. I had a column with around 200 entries and there were some duplicates in it. I just wanted to see which were duplicates and remove some of them.

I selected the cells and asked copilot to tell me which ones were duplicated. Copilot had to ask me to copy and paste the cell contents in its chat box. It couldn't even detect which cells were selected and read them

Why even have copilot inside excel when it can't even read a cell? This is what happens when all you care is about KPI metrics or what not

> This is NOT the AI revolution anyone was waiting for.

It's Clippy. All over again.

Don't let Louis Rossmann hear you say that, though.

> At this point, Microsoft is walking a tightrope. It cannot appease everyone since it also has its shareholders and investors to think about, but then there's also a rather large Windows 11 user base which really is fed up of AI experiences being shoved down its throats.

Are shareholders and investors stupid enough to think that AI hated by users is still desirable?

Please let it be Cortana. Don't give up on her.

For real, it was insane to drop Cortana. Halo-aside, it’s a great name for an AI assistant.

Deep lore, seems helpful, cute avatar, becomes evil? Yeah it's a perfect name for an AI assistant

And since Cortana isn’t a widely used name like Alexa, it spares a whole generation of people named Alexa from that inconvenience.

I have been using Windows on my laptop and been annoyed by how performance have really degraded.

RAM consumption on startup is 50% (of 16Gi).

I asked claude to help me remove bloat and was horrified by all the different background services and "enhanced" and "advanced" features that are always ON.

I don't think it's fair to say "no AI in any app", however. That should depend on the value delivered in the app.

But I do wish there was some honest restraint on all these weird OS services that no one wants/uses.

Good news: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/03/23/microsoft-confirms-...

Seems like it makes more sense to keep "Windows" security and bugfix only, and to do new feature development, such as AI, in a newer OS.

They’re doomed to repeat the cycle of reinventing Clippy every few years and always failing at it.

Looking forward to seeing "AI for Copilot" released before someone at MS finally realizes they're idiots at marketing.

> At the start of the year, Microsoft generated a lot of goodwill among Windows 11 fans when it announced its big plan to fix the operating system in 2026.

Interesting, I can't recall a single voice "Oh I'm so happy they changed their corporate strategy" but many of "I'll believe it when I see it".

Ah, you make a great point - I made almost the same comment a moment ago, because I remember that Microslop babbled about "we will listen to the community" some weeks ago. Guess it was indeed at the start of the year.

So those who were skeptic were right - one can not trust Microslop. Its AI addiction is too strong already. It sold its soul to AI. There is no way back for Microslop anymore. All Win11 users will have to support AI. AI up all the things! \o/

Moved to MacOS, chao Copilot...

So they're reshuffling the branding again. At this rate they'll rename it three more times before most people figure out what it does.

I think we'll see this happen over time in all tools - individual AI brands replaced by generic AI icons.

The real question is this: While the floppy disk became the standard "Save" icon, what will eventually become the standard "AI functionality" icon?

I'm guessing the 'sparkle' icon will stick around, for better or worse

I think it's even more than that, they'll be features without AI even being mentioned

Microsoft is collapsing under the weight of their own bloat.

Seems like what Apple does with Writing Assistant. At least in this case, it’s opt-in. You have to click. I don’t run Windows so I don’t know if this implementation is vastly superior or not.

If you turn off Apple Intelligence, it’s one switch and features like that are gone from every single location.

I had no clue that you could switch it off. Thanks.

> At the start of the year, Microsoft generated a lot of goodwill among Windows 11 fans when it announced its big plan to fix the operating system in 2026

The only thing generated was boatloads of incredulity and some laughs.

Yeah, I remember the same. Also, "Windows 11 fans" sounds like an oxymoron.

Might be considered "Windows 11 Hostages" instead given they've dropped support for using anything else.

Wondering how long I can hold out on Win10...

It could relate to the amount of *pu and system fans needed to run so much bloatware :)

I hope this is better than seeing that Copilot logo infecting every menu, I’ve had to use registry hacks to get rid of that thing.

Turns out users don't want your AI features. But, sure, paint the dumpster fire.

I spun up an old laptop the other day and it has Windows 10 on it. I can't believe how snappy and fast that old laptop felt in comparison to what I've been experiencing on Windows 11.

Especially when you consider that the old laptop has inferior hardware to my newer one with twice the RAM.

I just hate using windows at this point.

Microsoft Live Copilot anyone?

Needs more 'Clippy'.

Live Clippy sounds very creepy.

Live Clippy Copilot powered by AI. All turtles to the end...

Nah: Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Clippy Copilot Live Foundation with MSN .NET Framework version 2026

windos copilot will become cortana. (as a useless feature of the OS)

The copilot executable and the edge executable are actually the same! It looks at argv[0] to decide which to show you. You can move mscopilot.exe to msedge.exe, it still opens edge. And vice versa.

No surprise for large companies, one company even renamed itself but its approval ratings still stayed in the basement.

A fortune 500 company I worked for renamed internal projects many times when the original failed. But they continued dumping money into those black holes. One dollar eating project was renamed 3 times and was on its way for a 4th rename when I left. That project was started between 2005 and 2010. I was not involved with it, but everyone knew it would fail.

So M/S renaming copilot ? I expect a few more renames as time goes on :)

Microslop? No trust.

Previously:

Microsoft starts removing Copilot buttons from Windows 11 apps

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722136

Deep copilot integration feels so intrusive. It pops up with your recent files. What if they were my bank accounts or api keys? Whoever thought that would be a good use experience should be fired.

Please just make W11 IOT LTSC more available. Please. Pretty please?

who of you is using Notepad for anything?

I built a new PC at around the same time that notepad++ was exploited so I steered clear of it for a bit. And VSCode was becoming too clunky to use as a general purpose text editor. So I tried the new notepad. The new version is also clunky and sluggish, and I didn’t want Copilot, so I switched back to notepad++ after a few days.

It's almost as if Microsoft really loves to assault and abuse its users and claim its for our own good.

I'm tired of being a victim.

I just want to be able to disable AI. Its just garbage. I do not want Clippy 2.0 inserting slop into my work product.

If only there was a virtual machine I could run Windows in with full hardware passthrough, I think I wouldn't ever install Windows as main system anymore.

Welcome to the new FartPilot!

LOL ... of course it is.

I like Copilot. Don't hate any OS, Windows, MacOS or Linux. Just don't see much thought put into the design, engineering and User Experience aspect of some of these OS iterations. As far as Copilot, I can't see a way to exist without it because it keeps me off my mobile phone :)

Didn't Microsoft say it will listen to the community, some weeks ago? And now it looks as if Microsoft did not tell the truth. To be fair: I think Microsoft actually has no alternative option. They sold out to AI and all Win11 users will have to support the hype train. I am so glad to have switched to Linux a long time ago.

Well, they heard that we don't like copilot in notepad so they removed "copilot" from notepad.

And right after that they added a brand new feature called tolipoc that will revolutionize the way you analyze your logs or modify your 17 year old cmd file!

Want to create a file with the current date and time? No need to google for it, tolipoc will do it for you!

Is the last sentence a reference to the .LOG classic notepad hack?

You prob recall this thing from 23 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47459296

For me there's nothing MS could do at this point that would bring me back. And as I said in that thread, it's too late for them - people are moving elsewhere, maybe not in big numbers but exodus is in progress. MS harassed their users/clients too hard and for too long; now it's time to "enjoy" fruits of their deranged actions and decisions.

Microsoft has jumped onto the Friedman doctrine with full force. [0] Following this doctrine takes you down only one path, Enshitification.

All the major Wall Street players are doing it too; Nestle with removing real chocolate in their chocolate candy, McDonald's now costing the same as a sit down with lower quality product, car industry rejecting affordable vehicles for production. [1] [2]

The only end users Microsoft concern themselves with are the _Share Holders_. They reject the developers, maintainers, and consumers as their focal user groups. This is how you get shit-ware and people leaving your platform.

My major goal this year is to get our solutions running on Linux so we can fully ditch the trash fire that Windows IoT / Embedded has become. It originally was fully customizable now it is bloated with Copilot, XBox gaming, and working to force the creation of @Microsoft.com accounts versus local ones.

I support local restaurants, businesses, and breweries. While Wall Street companies are last in line to receive my income, if at all. I will not spend a penny personally financially supporting large players like McDonald's, Microsoft, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Molson Coors, AB InBev ...

Everything these companies say is just PR to try and win back those they lost and those that are walking away. Only trust an origination's actions because their messages are meaningless and without value.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79x7q325p3o

[2] https://daxstreet.com/news/243275/affordable-cars-disappear-...

Copilot has been reduced to "Internet Explorer" status, where it is the "AI to download another AI".

That is a smart move from them. People have AI advertising fatigue but they sure like some of the features it allows. I don't know of anyone asking their 15y nephew to edit their ex or a photobomber out of a photo anymore, they just do themselves from their smartphone. They use automatic translation everywhere, they don't even look at links in web search but read the answer provided by an LLM, they sure fall into periodic meme/trends like converting photos to Studio Ghibli like drawing a year ago or whatever is trendy today, etc.