After installing an SSD and a couple of hours of clean-up, it was as fast as new. I guess with proper maintenance it can be good enough.

The reason people say Windows is “crap” isn’t the performance, it’s the ads.

I would say upgrading to an SSD is like a magic wand for an ailing system, regardless of OS.

As others have said, at the core the issue is enshittification, be it AI, or Recall, or ads, or Microsoft account requirements.

Truth is, if Microsoft had taken all of that out, left me with something that was functionally very much like what was available in the XP & 7 era, then eh… Windows would probably still be my daily driver. I still have to use it for work. But there has just too much encroachment on the ways I want to use and control what is on my system that I couldn’t justify using it anymore, let alone pay for it.

All my home computers are on Arch or Debian now, and I couldn’t be happier.

The only reason has wider device adoption (if that argument can even be made) is because manufacturers were given incentives for a long time to ship drivers for Windows. As it became the defacto desktop in corporations, they were further incentivized to ensure their hardware or peripherals had drivers available. The tides are turning a bit more towards Linux again, with every hardware manufacturer who even cares to dream of selling their products to the largest buyers (data centers) provides extensive support for Linux, because that’s what the backbone of everything really runs on anymore. Windows isn’t even a contender in the DC space in comparison, so much so that the entirety of Azure runs on Linux, and Microsoft has their own Linux Distribution.

Windows has been fine for years. It’s being more rapidly enshittified to death recently.

I think the biggest problem is Windows behaves like freeware with it’s ads but it’s not even cheap, let alone free.

There are CPU spikes when you search for an app because search-bar runs chrome in the back to render its graphics.

I was a Windows user up until last year. I ditched it for EOS after I got tired of telling Windows NO I DON’T WANT WINDOWS 11 for the 500th time. Between having to manually remove Cortana, Edge, trackers and spyware and having ads shoved in my notifications, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

Now, as an average user they’re not gonna care about any of that. Hell, I didn’t start caring until I upgraded from 7 to 10 (I deliberately skipped 8) and they started enshitification. 10 was good, at first. It’s what they added that made it unbearable.

My biggest praise of Linux over Windows is not having to check for updates for different programs manually. I just hit sudo pacman -Syu and it does it all. Proton just makes my games work and I can do everything I did in Windows. Can I play AAA games with anticheat? Yes, but not all games. The ones I can’t, I really don’t feel the desire to play anymore anyway.

I still have a laptop with a tiny shrunken Windows partition on it in case I need it for some reason, but I’ve not actually booted it since installing debian. I can’t be bothered to figure out how to clean up the bloat, disarm the telemetry, avoid the online MS services, block the ads, dodge the bugs, wait for the updates, get used to all the various stupid ways the UI has changed since the win XP I was familiar with, et cetera.

Using Windows these days is just way too much work, I don’t know how anyone even does it.

I have to use MS Windows and their office suite daily at work. I can certify they’re crap. And it has been getting worse since 11.

I haven’t had a computer running Windows in my home for like a decade or so but I get exposure to it because of working at large corpos. Frankly, LTSC + proper policy set by administrators is okay for day to day work. It is kind of annoying and decaying in terms of usability but the core experience hasn’t changed that much. My partner works at a company that doesn’t use LTSC and that’s a big oof - unwanted features get shoved in your face all the time, breaking basic functionality like search etc. I can’t even imagine how it looks like in a regular consumer version.

I use both at home and at work. For work some of our contract work is supporting large customer installs. There was a definite performance hit with Windows 10 (upgrading software on same hardware). So much so that we had endless customer calls on why the application was now slow. Windows11 has the same issue, plus some other janky stuff. But now windows 11 has ai.exe and aimgr.DLLs running in the background as part of Office install. It will regularly grind PCs to a halt, even when not using Office.

The one work application had a Linux version, the Linux version remained the same speed as always. While the windows app gets slower every release.

At home my wife’s laptop was 2010, upgrading to W10 made it absolutely unusable to even navigate with file explorer. I put Linux on it, and she runs spreadsheet and her zoom calls as well as my brand new work workstation. Granted it can’t compete for video edit render output, just doesn’t have modern CPU/GPU.

There may be some odd hardware where you have to find a driver, but 95% of drivers are built into the kernel. You just plug stuff in and it works without having to install shady apps like windows.

If you have a specific Windows only app(that for some reason can’t run under WINE) then stay with Windows, but otherwise with some mental adjustment you will find Linux just works and makes for a nicer user experience.

Windows Recall should turn off everybody. A system that captures everything you do and holds it forever is going to be a backdoor hack into your entire life. All a country has to do is get Pegasus software to infiltrate your system via a bad URL vulner and they can watch everything you do.

Finally, somebody gets it. Everyone with a bit of IT backbone in them for used to knowing how to deal with Windows and don’t realize it’s something they need to relearn for other OSes.

While I don’t like 11 (have to use it daily for work), my biggest gripe is it’s even harder to fix than the last couple of releases of windows before it. In XP and 7, you just adjusted settings in the control panel, and if it was a niche setting, it was in the control panel, probably a few layers deep. In 10, you had the settings app, which was fine for basic stuff, but if you went beyond the basics you were going to control panel (and yes, it coexists with a settings app). Now in 11, the settings app was expanded, but there still exists a bunch of stuff in the control panel, but it’s often not obvious where you would do something.

It’s virtue signaling. Like in politics. It’s disconnected from real life or common use.

I partitioned 80gb off for work and installed Windows 10 on it. Install was fast, it found all of the drivers itself and had no bloatware using the Windows Media Creation Tool for another machine. Every device I have plugged into it or connected via Bluetooth has just worked. I don’t have a printer, but I imagine if you have an old printer that you will have to fuck around with drivers to get it working if you can’t use a generalized pcl driver for it. The entire OS with LibreOffice, and the work software I need runs on ~48gb with more than 30gb still free if I need random stuff but I don’t think I will as I’ve been using it for 2 weeks already.

I don’t have a Microsoft account signed into anything, and when I went to Windows Updates the first time I clicked the button that said “Don’t upgrade to Windows 11”.

Overall the OS is solid, I think it’s mostly people worrying about bloatware (which often comes from Manufacturers, though Windows does some) and advertisements, and Microsoft trying to monitor people.