. yeah fucking manufacturers are often held accountable are you like 10 years old?

or we can maybe just kill the oil companies.
but sure if you rather.

Ok bet. I barely drive. Maybe we need regulations forcing you to do the same or maybe we can maybe just once hold someone responsible instead of letting them cuck us into thinking its our fault.

Let's just send them into combat anyhow and UCMJ anyone who refuses.

woosh!

Actually thats what it always turns into so. Yeah read that first in a 2nd grade history book and several times since so.

Oh yeah I'm totally under the thrall of my political leadership
*wank hand moton*

Not sure if you're agreeing/disagreeing/or something else.
But yeah it was a sort of defacto standard upgrade workflow and it's pretty clear to me that it was established before I got my first computer and probably before I was born. I'm no spring chicken either.

Feels like a lot of old things that worked well but unfortunately involved reading a few pages of text has all been replaced with beginner friendly tools that fuck up if you do anything without them. Then that was replaced by overly complicated configuration management tools in the enterprise.

I'm old but got into real computing at a young age so it's really fun watching all this shit get reinvented on Hacker News except shitty and in javascript. Shame on them, shame on us, shame on everyone the future is slower and harder to use.

Sir sir sir please calm down. Yes we are indeed sinking.. But not into the sea as you say sir! This is a freshwater lake!

Thanks for the reply! Didn't read!

You're the parent who gets every childhood fad banned from the playground with their complaining.

KiDs MurDer EaCh oTheR ovEr PoGZ!
SnAP bracLeTs wuLL SliT uR WriStS!
WeN u SaY HoK ToooaH iTs SeXuaL asSault!

I think pop hits are the things AI will be good at actually.
Most of the songs sang by whatever sexy pop diva of the moment, are actually written by fat middle aged dudes.

May I remind you Snoop Dogg is in this song for reasons.
The kind of music it won't be able to make is the shit most people don't even listen to. You can follow various avant garde lineages and see how they introduced things that eventually over 10 or 20 years would get polished and work their way into the mainstream... that's what AI won't be able to do.

The workaround he's talking about only applies during install time.
After that I still had to run a debloater script.
I did this to the education enterprise version of windows 11 which supposedly already has a lot of anti consumer features turned off.
I still had every corner of the OS begging me like HAL9000 getting unplugged. Please keep bing! You know edge is really good? Hey heres OneDrive, your new BFF for saving things anywhere!

So there was still some manual nonsense and artificial barriers to overcome just to get a plain jane windows install.

There's still copilot branding all over the place which is confusing as fuck because a lot of it doesn't seem copilot related so "copilot settings" might just actually be "settings".

That all said by the end of the week the windows 11 install seemed to be mostly serving my needs as an OS and not as a strongarm advertising vehicle for o366 subscriptions and LLM nonsense.

I honestly think my Win11 will probably stay usable and in this state. I know microsoft did some borderline criminal shit turning unwanted win10 features back on before but my gut feeling is they're giving up so they can focus on sucking the vast majority of windows users into the MS cloud ecosystem and they're ignoring all the people who bother to extract themselves... at least until they can identify a killer workflow feature and turn it into the thing that everyone needs and conveniently break it when a microsoft cloud account isn't logged in.

Problem with that strategy is that in 2025 nobody drinks tech kool-aid harder than the people drawing up the product roadmap. Not just at MS, but everywhere, companies have a harder and harder time delivering features people actually want. In the early 2010s i had a bar buddy who was a manager from MS and whenever I talked about tech he would just excitedly turn everything into a cloud discussion. The cloud has panned out but compared to his bold barstool proclamations.... the cloud reality in the past 15 years so pales in comparison that I'd call the cloud a flat out failure.

Who provides free tech support for windows?

  If you say microsoft I suggest you check the official MS support forums because they're staffed by morons. I've seen lots of dumb stuff but can't remember much except one where the support guy was like "Tell me if this random program fixes your problem, but please be sure it doesn't have malware because its not microsoft" and he provided a link to some random website.

I knew a girl who worked microsoft xbox support and they didn't get her contracting company their microsoft.com emails and they weren't allowed to do any work. They were told not to but they all signed up for gmail accounts and used them to handle their tickets because "We live in the real world dumbass" and started using those to communicate their ticket work. I rolled my eyes as she told the story, imagining all the customers who now think gmail.com is an acceptable email address for someone claiming to work for MS and expecting her whole contracting company to get fired any day over the incident.

Well anyhow I digress, end user desktop support from microsoft is probably less than an LLM at this point and shouldn't be a reason to use windows. If you're a corporate customer then you should buy a support contract from your vendor and it'll be way less than any microsoft licensing contract anyhow.

Understandable. Problem is there are no doubt multiple linuxes that do fit your bill but people who talk about Linux usually don't know what they are.

Way back in the day I installed something called Mandrake which is discontinued now but it was like 2001 and is still one of the smoothest installs of any OS I've encountered to date.

https://www.openmandriva.org/

This is supposed to be a fork, don't know if its good or not 20 years later. Someone else suggested Manjaro, maybe that's good?
All this aside Windows 11 requires at least as much fiddling not to be shit as any reasonable desktop linux distro.
Hell even OSX requires a substantial amount of fiddling with shit if you want their cloud features without getting locked into their overpriced icloud stuff.