I’ll start: printers.
I bought an HP in March 2020 when my job went remote and HP bricked it remotely after only 100 pages because I wouldn’t sign up for their subscription program. Ended up trashing a perfectly good printer.
Luckily my library’s close by and I can print there remotely.
Micro$oft. Everything from them. Windows, Office, etc.
Only yesterday I bought a piece of hardware, an old surface tablet, and immediately installed Linux on it to make it usable and safe.
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Don’t let your own stopping reading confuse you. I told the solution right there.
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Windows is fine. But it’s a lot harder to justify when “for brainless morons like me!” distros like Bazzite are so readily available and robust and SteamOS is right there too.
But like. It’s fine. You can turn most of the annoying stupid shit like copilot off.
you can turn most of it off… by hunting the internet for the right tools for that. Because built in settings certainly don’t allow disabling the majority of it. until they turn them back on with an update.
and the rest you just can’t turn off, or can’t reasonably discover.
windows is not fine. that ended with windows 7.
I agree with both of you. Windows is not fine. But it can be made fine with an easy privacy modification.
I recommend ameliorated.io to everybody who needs to use windows. It makes it a viable OS, stripping out the junk, and setting better defaults for security and UI. I run it in VMs whenever I need it.
That seems like a pretty useful tool. Thanks!
But why is its website written like it’s trying to sell me something?
I never thought of it as salesy before, but I can see that.
They are not selling anything. The tool is free to use. The playbooks are free too. Or you can make your own, but I’ve never done that.
I’ve used this since I learned about it on multiple machines, and never need to think about it again other than when recommending it.
Probably the only “bad” thing is you need a legitimate, activated instance of windows.
Hello, I run an easy privacy modification modified windows installation as a dual boot with Arch. Windows is still not fine. It still manages to enrage me every now and then.
It’s definitely a lot more usable and acceptable than a vanilla install (god forbid using an out-of-box windows installation), but Arch is still so much more stable and sensible.
Also like every update just decides to go ahead and undo a “make windows usable” modification so its kind of a constant uphill battle if you dont completely turn updates off. I have completely turned updates off and now it always thinks there is an update available and bugs me to reboot to apply it, only to end up not applying any updates because updates are disabled.
I understand that switching to Linux (and especially Arch) requires a lot more “dealing with stuff” until you get used to it, but the amount of dealing with stuff is not a whole lot nowadays with “easy” distros and after you get used to it and find your groove the dealing with stuff just kinda stops, unlike windows. Not to mention that the way you’re using your OS isnt some kind of weird hack coupled together with a few different debloaters. I really can’t see how much more difficult installing and getting used to something like Ubuntu or Mint can be compared to setting up a good debloated windows install.
I use Windows 10 with unatendedwinstall and a few more tweaks added on top with cttwinutil. I’d reccomend it.
I’m coming from the same place. My windows updates are off (that’s one of the mods that ameliorated makes) and I have not had a problem with it for a few years now.
I’m not saying that windows should be the choice, but I am saying that when I have to use it (there are legit reasons) then my ameliorated version is fantastic.
I use windows at work daily so I am very well aware of out of the box experience. No way I would ever use that for my personal computing.
Ameliorated is something I always recommend and it sounds like while what you are doing is pretty good, there are some shortcomings. I don’t know, maybe ameliorated won’t work for you either, but its worth a try.
Thanks! I didn’t know about this tool before. I’ll look into it :)
I haven’t needed a single tool to turn off the junk in w11 that’s annoying, replace the dumb icon-based UI with the previous text, and so on.
W11 is fine. It’s not good, but it’s fine.
only thing that means is ypu don’t know what else is it doing in the background. you are operating in “what I don’t see doesn’t exist” mode