198 lines
10 KiB
Markdown
198 lines
10 KiB
Markdown
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> Daily drive windows 11 for a week.
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> I dare you.
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A friend challenged me to run Windows 11 for a full week. How could I possibly
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refuse?
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Now that a week has passed, it is about time to talk about the experience and
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what it is like to use.
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## Installation
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Installing Windows 11 was definitely an experience. First of all, the installer
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for Windows is prehistoric. It "works" but I almost overwrote my Gentoo
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installation. Compared to the tools on GNU/Linux and even macOS, the
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partitioning tools are terrible. I did not have to worry about secure boot
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though. It has always been disabled, and Windows did not complain about
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that. My hardware *is* modern enough to officially support Windows 11,
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so I had no issues there.
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After a reboot, you get to OOBE, where you'll quickly find out that there is
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seemingly no way to create a local account. You can bypass this stupid
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requirement though. You can do this by pressing Shift+F10 before creating an
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account, typing in `OOBE\BYPASSNRO`, waiting for the machine to reboot,
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once again opening up a command prompt, typing in `ipconfig /release`,
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and finally going through the setup normally. That is a lot of effort, and
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I think Microsoft did that on purpose so that normies won't bother with
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a local account.
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After the installation, I had to install a proper graphics card driver as well,
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and that was also a pain thanks to the awful AMD control panel thing. It has
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this awful gamer design which makes it incredibly slow. Finally, I activated
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Windows using Microsoft-Activation-Scripts on GitHub and debloated it using
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Chris Titus Tech's script. I just want to point out that I could've installed
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Arch Linux probably 20 times in the time it took to set up Windows properly.
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## Programs
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I installed Chromium, Neovim, mpv, Git, Arch Linux WSL (only used it for
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retrieving passwords), ArmCord and Element. Many of the GUI programs I
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was using on GNU/Linux naturally work great on Windows.
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My workflow is largely command line based. I use the command line all the
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time for many, many things. This is where Windows fails. Windows is not a
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UNIX like operating system and as a result, the command line is awful.
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Of course, none of my shell scripts work and none of my command line
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programs work. This made it incredibly difficult to do anything other
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than play games, to be honest.
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I did try to write code in Neovim, and Neovim works almost as well on
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Windows as it does on GNU/Linux. However, I quickly realized that
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the Windows build tools are terrible. Most of my projects depend on
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GNU/Linux or UNIX tools in general, so I couldn't really use or
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test many of my projects.
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## Games
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I installed Steam and Geometry Dash, because I've enjoyed playing it
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recently. It runs fine, but I noticed that sometimes it will have
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much more input lag. In a game like this, every millisecond counts,
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and as a result the physics are completely screwed up sometimes.
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On Gentoo, this input lag simply does not exist. I am not sure if
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this is a bug in the game, if Gentoo somehow removes input lag
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or if Windows adds input lag. All I know is, the experience was slightly
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(but noticeably) worse on Windows. Ironically, that means I had a *better*
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experience playing games on Gentoo than I had on Windows.
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The game ran well, which I would expect, considering Windows
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is (still) the best operating system specifically for playing games.
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If you play other games that aren't as precise, I'm sure you'll have
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a pretty good time on Windows.
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## General experience
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At first, everything felt ***really*** slow. As I later found out however,
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this is mostly because of all the animations/transitions Windows has
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enabled by default. If you disable those you can not only get better
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performance out of your computer but things seem to happen a lot quicker.
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Of course, some people might like the aesthetics animations provide,
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but I personally find them annoying when it takes an eternity to do anything.
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Often, it comes off as slow rather than pretty. Perhaps Windows could use
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a transition time slider or something somewhere.
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The settings app is terrible, and I really think they should just abandon that
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thing in favor of the control panel users are already familiar with. The
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control panel could use a redesign, sure but it's so hard to find settings
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in the settings app. You can find basic settings, but as soon as you need
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something more advanced you'll end up in the older control panel anyway.
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I wanted to move the taskbar to the top and enable smaller icons (decreasing
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the size of the taskbar) but with Windows 11 the option to do that was removed.
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Yes, it is possible to move it to the top, but there is no official option
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and doing so will break things pretty badly. As for small icons, I have no
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idea. It was usable without it, but the taskbar was big and it would've been
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really nice to have that screen space for something more useful.
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Window tiling is floating/stacking, as you might expect. While I am used to
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tiling window managers, and don't particularly enjoy stacking window managers,
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it's still usable and I was eventually able to get sort of used to moving
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windows around with my mouse and using Alt+Tab and Win+Tab to switch workspaces.
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Recently, Microsoft redesigned the task manager. The problem is, it sucks.
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It's incredibly slow and I even managed to get it to stop responding once,
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which is not great. What do you do when your *task manager* stops responding?
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If there is one application that should be simple and not consume much of
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your resources, it should be the task manager. The task manager should
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run on as little as possible, so that when you have almost no resources left,
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because of a memory leak or something, you can kill a program and have a
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usable computer again.
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Installing programs is relatively easy, especially with Winget. Winget isn't
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great, namely because it uses IDs rather than simple package names. If you
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have to install something without Winget, you can expect to open up your
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web browser, download an installer executable, carefully clicking next
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to make sure you don't install any malware, and then you'll have your
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program. While this isn't difficult, I think this approach is terrible,
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and Winget is a complete failure. Every single GNU/Linux package manager
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outclasses it in every way you can imagine. But, at least Windows now
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(officially) has a package manager, which is better than none. There
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is also Chocolatey and Scoop, if you find that Winget is *too* terrible.
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For users though, the main problem is the risk of installing malware by
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accident.
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The main advantage Windows has over GNU/Linux is stability. Almost everything
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I tried to do (that is possible on Windows) worked flawlessly. I don't
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think I need to repeat myself on the problems GNU/Linux has, but Windows is
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solid, and I honestly have more trust in it than I have in Debian GNU/Linux.
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## How could Windows be improved?
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- Better tiling
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Windows could certainly use better tiling. While most normal people will not
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care about it, power users would probably really appreciate something like a
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tiling window manager on Windows. Yes, I know third-party options exist
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but they just don't work all that well, because Windows itself wasn't
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designed around it. KDE and even GNOME are doing it, so Windows should
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be doing it as well. Many power users on Windows might not know that
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tiling window managers are what they've wanted for years, so if Microsoft
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provided a built in option, that would probably make a lot of people's
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experience better.
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- Bundle Visual C++ and other libraries with Windows
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There are a lot of programs that depend on Visual C++ Redistributable
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and other libraries. If you've ever had an error like
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'Missing dll msvcp140.dll' or similar, this is because you're missing
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this library. Windows comes with so much extra junk that most people
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don't use or care about, but they can't seem to include basic libraries
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that MANY programs depend on.
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- Stop forcing your Microsoft junk services
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We get it, you want users to use your Microsoft accounts rather than
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offline accounts. But when it gets to the point where you need to
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disable the network adapter and run a command in a command prompt,
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it has gone too far. Users should not be forced to have a Microsoft
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account, in an operating system that is **not** free, on a computer
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that they have paid money for.
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Another great example is Microsoft Edge. Remember when you installed
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Mozilla Firefox or any other browser and it would ask you if you wanted
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to set it as your default web browser? Now, Microsoft doesn't allow
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third-party applications to override the default web browser. This
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is clearly because they don't want users to switch away from Microsoft
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Edge. In order to switch your default browser, you have to change it
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from Edge to your new browser for every last possible action and file
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extension there is. It takes an eternity, and it should not be this
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complicated.
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- Improve the Settings app
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Windows UI is very, VERY inconsistent. As I mentioned earlier, the
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new Settings app which is designed to replace the older Control Panel
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which has worked fine for decades. The Settings app looks better, but
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in terms of usability and features it falls behind significantly.
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Also worth noting that dark UI does not apply everywhere because
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older programs do not support it.
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## Conclusion
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You know when you're at someone's house and you're being extremely careful?
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To me, this is what Windows feels like. Even a week later. Windows just doesn't
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feel like home to me. It feels uncomfortable and foreign, almost as if it wasn't
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designed around me.
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I will continue to use Gentoo. However, I now know exactly *why* I don't like
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Windows. Could I use it as my desktop operating system? Yes. But do I feel
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comfortable with it? Do I waste less time on Windows? The answer is no.
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Do I regret using Windows for a week? Also no.
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If you have any questions (I feel like you might), feel free to ask on
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[the Matrix space](https://matrix.speedie.site) or
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[email me](mailto:speedie@speedie.site). Have a good day!
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