so many of my regular tasks depend on tools made for Windows.

Ok but the OP is taking about people who just use their computer for browsing the internet, so how is this relevant?

Fair enough, I use 10 and 11 at work and hate it ... I used to like 7, using the control panel, search, default paths and stuff seemed a lot more intuitive.

That's why I stick with Linux at home, it feels a lot more like Windows used to, lol

Yeah the control panel revisions took some getting used to, but now I think it's not so bad. I know where to find everything but I can see how it's frustrating for others. What's most important to me is that I have local admin rights on my work PC and can customize it to my liking. Many companies lock their devices down heavily, and I don't want to deal with that.

Indeed, I don't have admin rights for anything outside of IP address changes at work.

I just thought of another bug bear, start menu lag on mouse clicks is a very odd problem, I don't remember anything like that, even on the first release of Windows 95 which I ran on a laptop with 25MHz and 8 Mb of ram.

I just wanted to note that the 2nd paragraph made me downvote, the first one iust made me roll my eyes

I've heard about that but haven't noticed it myself. It does sound annoying.

This is the way of the world, but only because people are allowing it. I will never understand "I'm too lazy to care about my privacy", which undermines our security way more than we even know.

The worst part is that, no matter how some of us care and do something about our privacy, the ones that we interact with that don't care still expose us to all this BS. Until the world changes it's mindset, this will not change, and only get worse (I'm not holding my breath for people to care though).

Second paragraph isn't wrong though.

I don't think so. I don't think it is blown out of proportion, I actually think it is that bad, and I also think that if you think you can just disable it and be done with it, you don't have any experience with microsoft products and services. they regularly reset privacy settings, both on windows, and yesterday I found that even in their android apps like the swiftkey keyboard.

another example of this tendency, is that a few days ago I was helping a friend with computer problems who stuck on windows 7, and I have seen that microsoft yas gone out of its way to push an update or something that installed their edge browser, pinned it to the taskbar and automatically opened it on boot.

I've never had that issue on Professional editions of Windows 10 or 11. Home edition? Maybe. But Pro lets you override almost anything you want with group policies.

I also rely on group policies. they do get reverted. o&o shutup10 has a feature to detect it and point that out, and I see it almost every time I open it. I use it rarely per machine, but I use it on multiple machines and each does this.

then sometimes the setting is just ignored. I was baffled when the policy to disable the start menu automatic bing search -which basically uploads all your local searches to microsoft bing - did not work, even after 2 reboots. I think it was this year, perhaps the last one

I will when either Nvidia supports it fully, or AMD releases a GPU that can keep up in the ray tracing department.

Also, HDR support in Linux needs to get a lot better. Like an order of magnitude better. Then and only then will I switch.

Damn, that sucks. It's been forever since I set that one so I checked and it looks like I'm using the registry edit method for that particular one. My start menu has looked like this for as long as I can remember so I'm not sure what's keeping it from changing with updates. searching for anything not on my local system results in 'no results found'

edit I am using OOSU10 but unless it has some auto-reset feature then it isn't what's keeping my changes in place through upgrades. I'm even on the beta channel for windows.

Yup, and it's on what was a mid-line laptop from 3 years ago. Only just started recently.

At home I use a thinkpad that I got 2nd hand 10 years back, and it feels like warp speed by comparison.

I will say that I would absolutely be championing linux if not for relying way too much on RTX features For example, their inverse tone mapping (SDR-to-HDR) is far far superior to the Windows AutoHDR solution as long as you're willing to spend a bit of time tuning it for your display. That said, if anyone wants to do an equivalent trade for a freshly re-pasted 3080 10GB I might consider going AMD lol.

So my dad has been using an ancient Atom laptop that ran Windows 10. It happened to finally fail a few months ago and I've been trying, unsuccessfully, to get Quicken Classic Deluxe running in Wine since then. I virtualized his laptop install and threw it on my mom's system through hyper-v and that's been getting him through the day but I would rather come up with a solution that doesn't involve using an offline VM just for running Quicken. For reference, the linux laptop I have is running fully up-to-date EndeavourOS (Arch). I tried a solution from winehq.org but it didn't seem to make any progress. Someone suggested that the repo version of Wine was incompatible and that I should build from AUR, which I tried as well, but gave up after about 3 hours of compiling on this 12th-gen mobile i7.

A friend of mine just installed CachyOS Desktop Edition (plasma) and I brought up the HDR calibration in windows, thinking that was something linux still didn't have. Turns out at least some DEs (i think thats a DE thing?) do have decent HDR support now. I still want RTX features tho.

Or . . at this point, if you don't have a very good reason to keep using windows, (eg: work, professional software unavailable on linux/through wine), just stop making concessions for windows and use Linux.

This just reads as "here's a pill to make that stick up your ass hurt less" just pull it out ffs

Im so glad I finally made the jump to linux. For anyone still on the fence about it, do it. It's so easy to switch, I've been using Kubuntu for a few weeks now and I have had maybe one issue with playing games, and it was solved by changing the Steam compatibility layer version.

When I switched, I installed a fresh (debloated) Windows instance on another SSD just in case. You know how many times I've used it? ONCE, and it was only be cause a buddy wanted me to try a game that had anticheat (I think Rocket League). Other than that I've had no reason to use it. There's a decent replacement for just about every Windows software out there, and if I ever come across a need for software I can't run on Linux, I'll just use the Windows instance for it. Other than that Microsoft can suck it. They're not getting any more of my info.

Now if only I didn't just get a new Android phone, I'd swap over to a de-Googled phone....

Oh come on, you think it's not in the OS itself with no ability to disable it? AdGuard is not going to necessarily help the fundamental issue here.