I’m a teacher and our division just “upgraded” to W11 with a new version of outlook that is basically a web app on desktop. Several times a day my laptop comes to a complete crawl while Teams decides to open itself. Can’t open or close programs, Firefox won’t register mouse clicks, nothing. Graphical glitches appear al the time with menu bars and task bars disappearing regularly, requiring force quitting the app or logging out of the desktop.
When I first switched to Linux I assumed my experience would be like this. But now it’s the other way around.
Rant over.
As someone who has a good windows laptop at home, windows at work is actual garbage. We had a month where you just couldn’t use the search function, because the act of typing in the search bar caused enough problems it would close the search bar.
Odds are your home computer is somewhat competent and your work one is a steaming pile of trash not fit for purpose.
We just had Windows Update brick itself due to a faulty update. The fix required updating them manually while connected to the office network, making them unusable for 2-3 hours. Another issue we’ve had is that Windows appears to be monopolizing virtualization HW acceleration for some memory integrity protection, which made our VMs slow and laggy. Fixing it required a combination of shell commands, settings changes and IT support remotely changing some permission, but the issue also comes back after some updates.
Though I’ve also had quite a lot of Windows problems at home, when I was still using it regularly. Not saying Linux usage has been problem free, but there I can at least fix things. Windows has a tendency to give unusable error messages and make troubleshooting difficult, and even when you figure out what’s wrong you’re at the mercy of Microsoft if you are allowed to change things on your own computer, due to their operating system’s proprietary nature.
TL; DR
My experience between Windows and Linux is not much different with how often I have issues. But given the choice I much more prefer my Linux experience.I hate Windows just as much as the next guy, but this comment section smells a little of confirmation bias.
From my experiece (web dev in a mainly MS branded stack) Windows mostly just works. Yes there are horrendous design, UX choices forced upon me, but I can usually force the OS to do what I need and how I need it.
Now comparing it to my home Pop setup it also mostly just works. There are occasional freezes that require a restart and such, but I wouldn’t say it’s much more different from Windows.
Now what does differ a lot is that I don’t need to fight the OS to do shit. It’s way better productivitywise, when I know what I’m doing. Which is deffinetly not the case everytime.
Yeah no, the experience really is ass.
We use Lenovo IdeaPads at work, a model with an i7 and a Nvidia GPU, and Windows constantly chugs and has weird UI issues, even though the machines are not running heavy software and are on a pretty fresh install.-
Sometimes when I wake the laptop from sleep, it sits and the lock screen showing my wallpaper and NOTHING else.
Clicking, typing does nothing, I just have to sit there and wait like 2 minutes until it finally decides to show the input field and let me login again. -
The Network/Sound/Battery tray flyout frequently stops responding. Only goes back to normal after restarting explorer.exe
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The internal display has scaling while the external doesn’t. So every time you drag a window across it “snags” in between them while the application flickers and struggles to switch the scaling.
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Switching between virtual desktops is so sloooow, if you use a different wallpaper on each you can literally see Windows struggling to swap the wallpapers in time.
It’s impressive how a native OS feature feels like a third-party kludge.
Great work Microsoft.
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The funniest thing is it doesn’t even have to be this way with Windows. I’ve unfortunately had to go back to dual booting lately but I’m using Win 10 LTSC and I have to say I’m surprised how tolerable it is. I’d still rather not use it but eeh it’s fine.
You can control what programs open on boot in the task manager. Teams was one of the first things I disabled.
That is, if the laptop isn’t totally locked down by IT. But knowing school’s IT budget that probably isn’t the case.
IT “locking down” Laptops often means they just give all power to Microsoft I assume
For us you get a popup that sends a ticket to IT and you have to fill out a reason why you need to do whatever it is you are trying to do. Then you wait like 10 minutes and try again to see if it was approved. If it asks for permission again then you need to assume they rejected it
Hate to say but in our office it’s the other way around. Teams HAS to start automatically before outlook can be opened manually otherwise the addin for meetings won’t load. Every morning I log in, make some coffee and then go talk to colleagues… Thanks Microsoft for the slow morning, other see this as luxury!
And here I am looking to move away from Linux after they started rejecting contributions for political reasons.
They removed maintainers that work for Russian corporations, they are not blocking submissions from any Russian citizen.
That doesn’t invalidate my statement though.
The reason I replied is because of the “submissions” part. They aren’t doing that, everyone can still submit code that might get accepted. What they did was remove some of the people in charge of deciding what gets accepted from the team.
I think that entire comment is actually incorrect. My understanding is that they did not “remove” any maintainers, but actually rejected patches from Russian citizens (because of their employer), and also removed some Russian names from the maintainers list who already have code in the kernel.
I requested a Windows machine at work a few years ago, because the specs were amazing, and I was getting frustrated with Mac OS. After using the Windows machine for a couple days I was reminded why I don’t like Windows anymore, and returned the machine, despite its amazing specs. It just wasn’t worth it.
My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.
I’m consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.
Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.
I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn’t connect to anything and the tray app wouldn’t pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.
Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?
Windows on the other hand… Lets just say there’s a reason I push updates at the end of the day.
Vista all over again?
Worse, Vista you could wrestle into submission, Windows11 is so deeply embedded with ads, spyware, bloat, and spaghetti code, it’s almost impossible to get it clean.
And even when you do, you have to constantly fight to keep it that way. The fact that Windows will change your settings for default apps and privacy preferences without your permission after a major update is absolutely insane and disgusting.
I shouldn’t have to constantly be on guard for my OS Which I paid $200 for professional licensing to just sneak its own preferences and settings back to what it wants.
I have to use SharePoint on a daily basis.
We have Linux workstations at work…and these can only be used to access a remote desktop of a Windows 10 virtual machine. 👍
My boss told me to get a laptop and I’d be reimbursed, so I got a System76 with Fedora. “How are you going to use (company proprietary software that only works on Windows)?” I told him I could run it on wine (and I have). But he ended up assigning me a Windows 365 cloud, so now I have a very nice laptop that just works, and I only fire up the cloud crap if I really need to.
Suffice it to say that I’m the only upper management member that barely interacts with the IT department, I don’t need to 🤣🤣
It is basically http://mail.office365.com in an electron shell. I’m pretty sure all the non ‘classic’ apps are this way now. I’m currently trying out Thunderbird to see if I like it.
Personally I’ve been using outlook via pwa for months anyway
If they’re gonna put it in an electron container anyway you be may as well cut out the middleman and just use the web app Microsoft’s ones are actually quite good now
Had the same issue with outlook last weeks. 60% CPU usage, doing nothing.
As an admin who manages windows devices, it’s not only a pain for the end users. I will readily admit that the management tools are quite extensive and somewhat easy to use, but they’re damn near impossible to debug when they don’t work, and that’s quite often. Gpo’s often refuse to apply without reason, those ads on the Lock Screen? You can remove those if you pay for enterprise or education edition. Running pro? Nope you get ads.
My main gripe with windows is that it’s gradually turning to adware/spyware after MS decided to go for that sweet data collection revenue. That also means a shift in the focus of the development of the OS, as it’s not being developed for the benefit of the users anymore.
That, and software development processed are more tedious. Although today I’m sure I could find a workflow that works with WSL or vcpkg.
Edit: Oh, and everything turning to webapps on the desktop. Love staring at white canvas while it waits for a server response.
Gradually? By 10’s launch, it was already adware/spyware. 11 is not even attempting to hide it, if you look at it objectively past the PR.
What a big pile of shit software, I swear I’m just gonna quit because of this ass smelling garbage.
Today I discovered that C:/Users/MyUser was silently an alias of C:/Users/OneDriveBullshit/MyUser only in the explorer. So I just figured out why some documents were often disappearing for months, I’m just working on a multiverse were depending on the application the same path don’t lead to the same folder.
Earlier this week I unzipped a file and couldn’t remove resulting files without administrator privileges.
I’ve never lost so much time for any fucking software, let alone a paid one. And don’t even get me starting on the fucking ads they put everywhere even if you unchecked the 154 options in 42 different menus.
My current company just got bought out earlier this year, we are in the process of rolling all our stuff into their IT infrastructure.
I was lucky enough to get to use Debian as my OS on my old company laptop because I was the only IT at this company. Last week they finally issued me my new corporate laptop, which of course is Windows because the company that bought us out is a 100% Microsoft house.
One of their sys admins was on a call with me to get the laptop set up and working on their VPN, MFA enrollment, it was supposed to be a “quick 15 minute call.”
I watched him as he fought remotely with my machine for almost an hour. The VPN wouldn’t work no matter what he tried, then the GUI started acting up, then RDP wasn’t working right, then MFA wasn’t working. This was a brand new installation from their golden image too on a brand new high end laptop.
After about 20 minutes, I told him I was gunna stay on the call muted and to just let me know when everything was working properly. Then I hopped back onto my Linux laptop and spent the rest of the call getting actual work done while their new Windows machine was pooping the bed.
He didn’t actually even get it working at the end of the hour lol. He had to remote in later that evening to finish doing a bunch of registry fixes and file purges to finally get the VPN to connect.
Also, I don’t get how people just accept that any input they perform will require an average of 1s for feedback.
But at least now I understand why macs are so popular…
I also experienced less “hiccups” since switching to Linux with KDE but I’d like to know on what combination of hardware and Windows you experienced anywhere close to an average of 1s response time to “any input”.
It’s a ~5 years old thinkpad. It may be due to it not being well managed but it really disn’t up to the task. Being in a Teams call while using an external displays makes the framerate drop to ~10fps for example 🤷
That’s mostly down to Teams though (being the bloated web app that it is), and not the underlying operating system.