“Pay hundreds of dollars for a new computer”?
Forget this guy’s struggles with Windows, I want to know where they’re buying sub-1K PCs in 2025. I’ll debloat Windows 8 for that deal if I have to.
Let me open a random online computer shop here in Central Europe, and I am greeted with this:
Ranging from shit-tier 300€ office and youtube machine to 1k€ entry-level macbook. Sure, it’s no thinkpad carbon pro ultra leet, but face it, most people don’t buy that (or buy that used)
And that is laptops, desktop PCs usually tend to be a bit cheaper for the same performance level.
You haven’t looked at all. There’s zillions of them everywhere
“New” can also mean “new to me”.
2000 is still hundreds
that’s another order of magnitude
One thousand is just ten hundreds if you really think about it.
Recently I installed Linux mint on my laptop, and then my main PC died so I replaced it with windows 11. I’ve had the unique experience of setting them both up from scratch alongside each other.
Windows 11 took longer to set up (4 days), but was 80% via GUI, and the 20% I did in PowerShell was mostly using winget with very few failures. I used ChatGPT for some planning and checklist and also used it to craft a PowerShell script that would silently install about 35 applications that I was too lazy to do manually by downloading the exe’s, but I could have gotten there without it.
Mint took 2 days to set up but was 80% terminal, and I would not have been able to install half the things I wanted without the help of ChatGPT crafting baffling workarounds for me that I would not have found on my own.
In the end, both systems are 95% how I want them, with 5% unattainable due to their own unique issues.
I’ll continue to use both for now, and see how I go in a year or so.
Edit: I must add that I am extraordinarily fussy about my OS configuration, it needs to look, act, and respond exactly how I want it to or I’m dissatisfied
I got mint up and running with zero terminal input. It was so slick. Idk what you did, but maybe just try booting mint up yourself and leave chat gp out of it.
Which additional software in all did you install after boot though?
Real basic. Steam, VLC, and a torrent client. Setting up a VPN was probably the toughest part. But even that was easy.
I think a lot of people get into trouble trying to do a partition, which windows will try to hunt down and breach. In the name of
securitycapitalism.I just single-booted mine, so no Windows partition, but I use my laptop for video editing, graphic design, and a bunch of other tasks, so I have to install a range of other software and productivity apps like Autokey, Flameshot, image resizer, fancy file nenamer, Figma, rustdesk, bitwarden, and like at least 20 others. Not all of these went easy, especially since there are some Linux software that runs on debian based systems using .deb files, and others that aren’t designed for use with Mint at all, so it’s hard or impossible to get these going.
The fact it took you that long to set up either OS tells us you’re definitely the problem here.
I didn’t even let my latest laptop boot to Windows when I first turned it on, the Linux USB stick went in right away. But for those who use Windows for one reason or another, always perform a clean install; manufacturers love including all sorts of crap by default.
I wanted to check if everything worked correctly out of the box (and not have trouble with any warranty if it didn’t), and doing the initial round of bios updates was easier on windows. So, I booted to windows, played around a bit, and then installed Linux.
My laptop booted in to Windows once. I missed my first guess on the key to enter setup and USB storage didn’t have a higher boot order than internal storage.
theres also these fantastic tools: https://privacy.sexy/ https://github.com/builtbybel/Bloatynosy/releases https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
Not FOSS: https://winaero.com/download-winaero-tweaker/
Someone’s curated list: https://github.com/TemporalAgent7/awesome-windows-privacy
Anon’s on 4chan. He literally just has to go from v to g to have a treasure trove of information on how to not deal with this exact problem.
I got this same pop up ad on my work computer. Beyond stupid.
ERROR! Please drink a verification can!
Today I booted my work laptop to be greeted with a fucken ad glazing AI and trying to tell me its the future. Its junk microsoft and you cannot convince me otherwise.
Work laptop = not your problem
I’m in the same situation. If I wanna dick around on the internet at work, I have my phone and personal laptop, which happens to be a Thinkpad T14 G1 (running LMDE 6) and blends right in.
I remember some linux laptops my employer handed out to devs that absolutely needed them. Horrendously outdated and misconfigured, half-assed ports of the company software, you had to have a second laptop to read the knowledge base if it broke again. Not fun. Imagine all the shitshow of corporate windows, but with 1/100th the budget.
Yikes. How’d that get resolved? If at all?
Hah. I made it work enough to do my work, and handed it in as soon as I was done
I literally just want Windows 7 again but with security updates, driver support, and back end technology upgrades.
For now I’m settling with Window’s current state with some Linux use mixed in with the intent to nearly fully migrate for my next desktop build. I’ll only use Windows for whatever games refuse to budge on anti-cheat, assuming by then I’m even still interested in playing pvp games at all considering how enshittified they are with engagement based matchmaking and FOMO battlepasses.
what about win10/11 ltsc?
No, they are bad. Boo windows 10 and the one that is even worse.
damn, I should’ve know that I’ll get this respond haha. I personally use dual boot Ubuntu 25.04 and win11 ltsc (cursed by some people’s standard I know but just hear me out I hate snap as much as you do) and I just thought win11 ltsc is the closest thing (the security updates, no AI, bloat bs) to what op was looking for from my experiences:
I literally just want Windows 7 again but with security updates, driver support, and back end technology upgrades.
I personally see Linux Mint exactly as a Windows 7 but with modern support (there is even a cool Aero theme for it) :P
It’s… It’s beautiful
I use mint in my stores so I am no mint hater, but I still find windows 7 to be a nicer user experience. And funny enough “modern support” is still seemingly a thing for my old windows 7 machine. I am often shocked at how well new hardware just works with it. I would have changed it to mint years ago if it showed even a hint of obsolescence, but it seems to just keep trucking on and on. The same can not be said for other windows machines I have tried to put on line (for fun I have done windows XP, vista, 8 and 2000).
In my case I didn’t have much luck with support for newer hardware, sadly. And as much as I love Mint I have to agree that no OS beats Windows 7 UX up to this date. But I even then, I personally don’t feel much safe using it nowadays because of security vulnerabilities (since it’s EOL), I had issues with ransomware on Win 10 so God knows what I would infect myself with on win 7 😁
What made me switch permanently to Linux was the KDE Plasma Desktop Enviorment, using Archlinux (SomeOrdinaryGamers had this as his setup.) Basically has what I love about windows 7, and more. Even the desktop widgets!
For me, learning the GUI isn’t the biggest issue but taking full advantage of my hardware and some online game’s anti-cheat.
I know Linux driver support that Nvidia has put out has brought it to a pretty good place, but my understanding is that its still not at parity and there is a performance impact to switching.
It’s a big incentive for me to make my next card upgrade an AMD card. That’s already a laundry list of other good reasons to do so nowadays, but it’s real hard to justify buying a graphics card in this economy.
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I know, I own one. I just also have a desktop with a 4070 super.
Can’t say much on the technical shit, but I’ve only had one game perform worse on linux. Most actually seem to do better, and I have an nvidia card. Though I don’t play much in the way of multi-player or online stuff, so mileage may vary.
Fair enough, maybe I could give it another try.
The performance issue is there’s no frame gen with DLSS yet. Other than that, I get better performance from my NVIDIA card on Linux than I do on windows.
I still use 7 on my media PC in the living room. Its wild how much better it still is to use. Gamepass seems to be all that is keeping one PC in my home running windows 10, and when that ends so will my use. Never going to 11.
Unless that windows 7 computer is entirely air-gapped from your network, you should switch it to Linux or Windows 10 (which is going out of support in October).
Even if you have it on a separate VLAN or have it restricted from accessing the internet, there are attacks that can use another device on the network as a starting point for attacks.
Having a Windows 7 computer anywhere near your network is an enormous security risk. And one that is frankly not worth it, given the alternatives that exist.
Ha, no it is not. As someone who worked many years in the industry, nothing is really secure but also nothing is really attacked in that way anymore. (Unless you think people are going around warwalking looking for vulnerabilities in private networks). There are are still many networked devices running old windows even now (in some really sensitive areas as well). The constant fear mongering about security updates from Microsoft being anything but too little/too late is just crap talk to keep people employed.
The main risk currently is social engineering, to a degree that (outside major nations/companies) the other attack vectors are a rounding error. You and anyone else worth less then a few millions best approach to online security is to back up often, change passwords often, and don’t click links in emails.
Window’s 11 is pretty annoying to use on various levels. I only upgraded to it because my brother encouraged me. Hes always been a little bit of a mainstream tech cheerleader though. Hes always cheered on Intel, Nvidia, and Windows. Its funny though right now I (somewhat resentfully) have an Nvidia because of my performance demand and he has a Radeon because of budget.
I think I might need to start trusting myself on my hardware searches a lot more. Of course I probably wont be buying new hardware for a while anyway.
there is a program that makes windows 11 exactly like windows 7, it’s called StartAllBack:
https://www.xda-developers.com/startallback-review/i switched to windows 11 recently, spent about a week battling all the bullshit, then found StartAllBack and it’s been beautiful.
i also recommend MalwareBytes “Windows Firewall Control”, which is actually free without pirating it… which i’m sure no one on here would ever do… but it lets you control exactly what programs can access the internet….
like, every time i open the file manager, explorer.exe tries to access the internet, i’ve been manually denying it for a while and it works exactly the same, so now i can just permanently disable it from going online….but, StartAllBack is amazing, and everyone should have it… or really there should be an open source version by now….
Like Glasswire i think it was? And Tinywall. That category is called application firewall.
neato
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lol, no… the link i posted is to a review about it.
i do love it, though….
Figure it out.
I can mind the popups and ads but its the surveillance that I don’t like. Mc recall was the whole reason I deleted my os and got arch
It’s not as bad as people make out, but buying a brand new Windows machine is a pretty annoying experience.
I’m on Windows 11 and I don’t recall ever seeing a pop-up like this but it looks like a standard notification from the Microsoft Store App, which means it SHOULD be possible to suppress by turning off notifications for that app (Open Settings, go to System -> Notifications -> Microsoft Store and just set the toggle to “Off”).
Yes, that turns off ALL Notifications for the Store App, but it doesn’t really have any useful ones anyways so it’s not a big loss.
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now that is a well-boiled frog
Could well be European. EU Windows installs are significantly less bloaty than shit than US installs are.
I believe this is very true. I’m from Europe and nothing in the greentext made any sense to me. Never seen a Windows install with any of the mentioned “features”.
Forget the “bloat”. Windows has an advertisements engine. I’m not talking about some stupid OEM bullshit bundled thing… I’m saying the operating system itself.
My OS (that I fucking paid for, no less) shouldn’t be piping me advertisements and it sure as shit shouldn’t be harvesting screenshots to train an AI model.
Then just disable suggestions with a simple checkbox in the settings.
Windows only has ads if you let it.
You can be upset about 2 things: where things are, and where things are going.
It’s become very fashionable to ignore a trajectory. “Build 3 more prisons in El Salvador”.
The issue isn’t that at this moment I can opt-out. The issue is that the infrastructure inevitably demands usage.
If you’re not upset you’re a collaborator.
Windows peaked at XP. Vista was the plateau on the other side, followed by the sheer cliff of windows 7.
Windows 7 was pretty damn good.
What? Windows 7 was probably the best version of windows ever just ahead of 2000.
Windows 8 was where the cliff was.
People look back at XP through rose tinted glasses. It was incredibly insecure in every way. Vista made the security architecture changes needed. Windows 7 was polish on top.
Windows 8 was where metro, start menu ads, auto installing unwanted apps, and ruining Windows control panel / settings happened.
XP was just 2000 with a teletubby desktop. I absolutely hated it.
you take that back!
Bliss is beautiful >:c
They’re right though, XP’s Luna was garbage.
I liked it. But I also used the “classic” interface anyway, so…
Prolly, I don’t really remember tbh.
That makes sense. Lol.
Whatever Windows you matured with is the best Windows. Mine was Windows 2000. Thanks, Dad 😂
Except ME. We don’t talk about that one…
So, DOS?
DOS isn’t Windows. Consumer versions of Windows happened to run on top of DOS until XP was released in 2001.
Maybe I should rephrase: the OS you matured with is the best OS.
Half the programs I needed to use in Windows 3.1, and 3.11 required a DOS prompt to run. It wasn’t until NT that almost all software caught up enough to not need that DOS prompt so much. Although AutoCAD R9 ran like crap in NT on the 386 with math co-processor. So I needed to reboot into DOS every time I needed CAD.
10 introduced a bunch of cool stuff that made it seem like it was going places: WSL, the new terminal, multiple desktops. If you’re able to ignore the sad state of the control panel and settings apps, 10 was peak windows experience (feature-wise).
Then 11 came around and fucked everything up. As someone who subscribed to MS Insider to run beta builds of windows and get updates earlier, win 11 was the first iteration that really felt like there was just no upside to it. It was exactly the same as win10, but with some features removed and a much heavier hardware requirement. Even Vista (microsoft’s most successful OS) had some cool stuff going for it back in the day, but win11 was nothing but one disappointment after another. Shit it wouldn’t even let you keep a clock on the second screen until like a year after release.
I’ve been using windows my entire life and have never run into any of the issues Linux users talk about all the time.
I dont think annon is a Linux user
I don’t know of anyone who uses any other OS that complain about windows the way Linux users do
Have you seen Windows users? Most of them here Windows
Lucky you.
I just had to use my job’s OEM device to connect to our new contactor’s site since it doesn’t work with my machines for some reason (standard deb stable and a popos machine). When I boot into it the lock screen was so overwhelming with weather info, news and other junk I just had to laugh. Its crazy how much junk you need to disable to have a usable device. I haven’t really seen vanilla windows for awhile, but it seemed like Vegas slot machine with how many notifications I was getting.
I have a Win11 ThinkPad for work, so I get MS ads, Lenovo ads, and 2 or 3 versions each of Teams and Outlook. We use SharePoint, so when I open a file from there via the web interface, I don’t want to deal with that BS for printing. Depending if it’s Word or Excel, the button/link for opening in the desktop app will be located differently (or maybe it’s based on editing permissions), but it never fails to throw a dialog saying it couldn’t open the file in desktop mode and asking if i want to cancel or try again…just before the desktop app opens.
Some of these things don’t happen every day, but they all happen every week, and anyone who doesn’t see a problem with that hasn’t used a half-decent OS (and I’m willing to include early-release Win10 in that group, telemetry and Cortana notwithstanding).
We may call it junk, but a lot of users want those kinds of features.
It also isn’t an “unusable device” just because it shows if it is going to be cloudy. Stop being so pedantic.
And all of it can easily be disabled with a simple easy-to-find setting. But it is on by default because a majority of users don’t look into their settings and thus wouldn’t know it is available.
You have to remember that Windows was made for non-tech savvy users. Not for you and me.
a lot of users want those kinds of features
I had to re-enable them on computers at my company. I changed a policy to get rid of it and by the end of the day I had a dozen or so emails (~10% of the company) asking for them back.
YMMV of course and I don’t personally like them. But a lot of people actually do. I think a lot of the people in communities like this forget how much of a power user they really are, and what actual users really want.
I mean it was 4 years ago (still 10) and in rough EU area (luckily, nobody but Apple cares enough to not include Swiss) so it was no that bad. But it was a developer device with admin rights, so everything that popped up a notification without good reason got removed.
Btw, every and each driver vendor installs a background service “for updates” on Windows, that tracks you and occasionally shows ads or flips out to eat all CPU. You can just copy the driver file, uninstall that crap and install the driver file via HWManager. Sorry, i don’t remember the file extension, have to google it.
This is why I run MAGA Linux with the Kristi Gnome desktop. Problem is my Java imports cost more.
i dont even know this comment can be called. Politically-online? that Doesnt integrate the linux bit though only the irony and the politics 😭 you’ve created art today jaybone.
Reminds me of when I use to watch leftist political streamers 24/7 (mainly Vaush). Good thing I stopped watching, no matter how depressed afterwards I was.
Oh shit if you have a dog you need to shut down the computer right now no time to explain
Better than Python import tarrifs.
It’s not entirely clear from the post, but allow me to provide some further context as I received this same pop-up myself.
I had purchased a legit Windows 10 Pro license with my own money for a custom built PC. Was always a trim installation because that’s how I roll. Still got this out of nowhere when I booted back into my Windows partition the other day, was unclear what app or process pushed it. Some update either added a new app responsible for pushing these desktop level ads or enabled a pre-existing notification feature I had previously disabled. Just a typical Win10 toast notification a few moments after logging in. Dismissed it quickly and did not care to investigate, but that’s about as bad as you can really get, IMHO. They’ve slowly been pushing the bounds, but here we are: ads straight to the desktop.
Multiple full screen intrusive ads for win 11, one during a fucking interview, pushed me to finally install Linux last weekend. No regrets, I’m loving it
Windows is only getting harder to control and Linux is easier than ever to get on board and learn. Are we at a tipping poing? Maybe. With what Valve is doing for PC gaming, Microsoft’s introduction of Recall for Windows 11 and killing off (for home users at least) Windows 10 in October, who knows, maybe we’ll look back and see 2025 was the year of the Linux desktop.
