Good point - my thought is to go through that pain now while I’m still learning to use Linux properly. I’m not tied into anything yet so I can always swap something out if it doesn’t play with Wayland and gets too troublesome.

Began moving all my hardware to Linux this year since none of them will run win11 without fk-about-ing - and I just don’t want to. So my server, media box and laptop are all cut over, only my main desktop left on windows a bit longer but it’s goose is cooked too.

I’ve tried dozens of distros over the years but I’ve settled on Fedora KDE.

The why:

• Skipping x11 and head straight into Wayland so I don’t have to worry about that in the future.
• I wanted something more up to date than debian-based and less cutting edge then Arch-based.
• Stability and support of being in the RHEL family
• Flatpaks
• Tried to get on with gnome to get away from the ‘start menu’ paradigm but ended up getting on with kde better.

And a formatting-stripping tool

Lord of War: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0399295/

Not OP but I suspect they mean adults that struggle with normal technology but thrive on ipads (can remember the button they use to open sodoku)

Nothing at all wrong with making technology easy to use for the masses, but this can create problems.

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It seems to me that its the profits that cause the crisis

Why aren’t the Dems packaging this message accurately?

“Trump wants to stop you dipping your wick. Will ban condoms - practically eliminating your chance of getting laid”

I’m sure this fat greedy fuck would be edible if we slow roasted him, basted with a nice strong chili sauce

He’s not been knighted - yet…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Johnson_(racing_driver)

Little red hatchback: Elmo Blue SUV with a big, ugly nose: Gonzo

Phase one: force everyone’s data into their OneDrive account. OneDrive now at capacity, you must upgrade to ensure all your data is backed up and retained.

Phase two: MS secretly (or not so secretly) use all this data to train copilot.

Human generated content to feed into ai systems is the new good rush

Fatal Racing

Yes! There is a website somewhere that has a tonne of fake os screens - updating/upgrading windows, bsod loop etc.

Run a scary looking one of those, disconnect mouse/keyboard so it can’t be interrupted and let the boss discover it

Got a well specced 4th Gen i7 that does everything I need so unless it blows up, I won’t be upgrading. Started working on the plan this week. Been using Mint on my secondary (non essential laptop) but never had the stones to take the plunge on my main rig.

Watching MS stepping into the enshittification trend and AI with Win11 means this is the last straw, particularly now I don’t need to rely on keeping up with windows for work. Currently bashing on Linux Mint DE in a VM to test what I need and have working to be happy:

Outlook/Office - Thunderbird is good but it’s been a while since I’ve used Libre Office but didn’t have much luck with it in the past - trashing the formatting when bouncing between LO & MSO. Hoping the more recent versions are better else office web will have to do for those documents that don’t play nice.

Steam - make sure I can get it going, several key games. This is the least of my worries after seeing what others have said. NVIDIA graphics may be a bit more painful.

RDP - I still have another headless win10 media box. VNC as backup. This box will be the next on the chopping block if all goes well.

Backup - this is the big one. Currently use Backblaze for unlimited backup and love the set & forget nature. No native Linux client so would require moving to their B2 platform with a third party interface - do-able, just need to get off my butt to work it out :p

File structure - always struggled with this in my playing with Linux, need to become more comfortable with where files live and general directory structure.

Will slowly pick those off over the next couple of weeks and then I should be good to go.

Quite a few things - mostly used it for capturing images, loading drivers and updates into images but can also be used to pull apps out of the image too.

For a live windows install there are PowerShell commands to do this

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/add-or-remove-packages-offline-using-dism?view=windows-11

I’m not sure about this one - it’s definately not my experience but yours could be very different.

The system definitely reports data back to MS but I’ve never seen a box have issues because we denied it the ability to dial home or update. Unless the PC is online and the user is actively trying to prevent the updates installing? I’ve seen users pull the plug on a PC that started/midway though updates hoping to stop them and it would often make a mess of things.

We had a small handful of XP then Win7 boxes that were completely off the grid/standalone as SCADA access points/controllers? for several years without issues.

Likewise, we had one box where the vendor did not allow any updates despite it being networked and online. They had disabled win updates completely without our input. It ran just fine for a few years until it was picked up in a security audit. We didn’t understand why updates were disabled at that time so we switched them back on and updated. The PC ran just fine until it’s eventual retirement.

That’s right! I remember those signed drivers where also why early XP (pre SP2) had a bad rep. Not as bad as ME but users were swearing on the graves of dead relatives they would never give up W98 or W2k. Without new or signed drivers, a lot of hardware struggled but by the time SP2 rolled out, hardware vendors had mostly caught up and the OS had matured.

Vista had similar issues (so, so many issues with Vista) with it’s security changes which made life difficult for badly written/insecure software (wanting admin rights to run or write access to system folders/reg keys). Those changes in Vista paved the way for Win7 to be so much better at launch since most software had caught up by then.

I think the issue with disabling components is 90% how users remove them. Pulling them out via “official” methods hasn’t ever caused me issues - DISM is really handy - particularly for permanently removing the default apps. Those deeply connected functions can be a pain!

My dumb arse used to do this to win 98/me when I was a student. “Optimising” everything and deleting anything I would never use, trying to squeeze every mb out of my limited 2gb disk space but the damn thing was so unreliable I was constantly reinstalling windows.

After one reload, I finished late at night and just left it alone, forgetting to perform all my “power user customisation” until I remembered a week later when it suddenly dawned on me that it was running fast AND stable - I hadn’t had a single crash that week. As a final test, I applied all my “optimisations” again and “oh, look! It’s crashing constantly again”. I was a slow learner and turns out I don’t know better than the people that built the system!

I always think of this when I see threads about win7 - 11 being unstable, because it just isn’t. As you dig through the thread, the op reveals more - they’ve chopped out all sorts of system components with registry hacks and third party tools or blocked updates and then bitch about windows being garbage - don’t get me wrong, they simultaneously make it better and worse with every release so I sympathize why people try chopping out edge, copilot etc - but just don’t.

Disabling services and uninstalling functions the non-hacky way ‘should’ be fine (and likely reversable) but if someone wants to bare-bone their OS or be data gathering-free, they’d be better off learning Linux.

Capped - gotta keep the connection usable and in my eyes availability > speed.

Very few things I need “right now” so I can be patient as not being able to find something can be much more frustrating.

Saying that, if you need to switch off, do so. If they really want it, they’ll leave it queued and it’s not on you to act as the entire distribution source (unless it’s your distro!)