If you want to feel real madness try reinstalling Win10 from even the latest installation media, checking for updates, finding none, and then finding your computer restarted the next day with a new iteration of the Bing search box on your taskbar, and repeating this experience at least 4 times.
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UQZ5oQg8XA
The defaults are not at all extreme with the knife, it takes away all the advertorial ad-ons and shows how to disable more (including Edge and defaulting to Edge from system links).
Also includes the ability to mod your own ISO to make a lean clean fast install | boot disk for later on or friends.
It's "open" if you read powershell scripts, it's literally just a pipe from a readable GIT reposity to a powershell GUI that toggles scripts that can be read by clicking on [?]'s.
If nothing else you can select the default recommended updates setting which is no new features just security updates.
I don't love having to keep a loaded gun pointed at tower and constantly being on guard with supposedly above-board software but it seems to stay down.
If you're running a version of windows that includes group policy editor, it does. Given the way windows 10+ disregards if not outright changes settings, I wouldn't exactly bet my life or my PC on it anyways.
My specific point, at any rate, was that Windows does not respect settings regarding metered connection.
Too often, people everywhere, even on HN, talk as if end-of-support means you can't use it anywhere anymore.
IMHO if you're behind a NAT, not running random binaries, and not visiting untrustworthy pages with JS on, that already gets rid of 99.99% of the attack surface. Keep RDP and SMB off the Internet and shut off the other listening ports too.
We shouldn't encourage people to run new, untested software. They will be part of a botnet sooner or later.
Assuming your browser is up-to-date and there isn't a 0-day being exploited, can a malicious website even do anything?
Firewall.
Bad ISP routers with/without NAT are no good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing_Group
Windows on the other hand has me wrapped around a post about 50 times regarding all of its UX quirks. Even the slightest deviation in anything Microsoft always puts me on a ballistic trajectory.
Honestly, Visual Studio is way more upsetting to me than Windows is these days. They are clearly making that experience worse on purpose just to prove they can.
PopOS is a wonderful, free, Ubuntu derivative that works really well with video games.
Does not matter if its Windows 11, Windows 10... or even if its Windows 98. I just want GNU/Linux on it!
All my other machines have Linux.
(to note -- it is Windows 11.. and I have mixed feelings about it)
People will not buy new computers, while their old one is still technically good, because Microsoft wants them to run Windows 11 on "compatible hardware".
Between them removing administrative controls and the lowest-common-denominator tabletization of the UI, I need to look harder at putting it in a VM or doing plain old dual-boot. (For a gaming machine, so that imposes some minimal ties to the ecosystem.)
Is it perfect? No, of course not. But my god it definitely is good enough to cut myself free of MS’s terrible decision-making the last 5ish years.
Also, I’m really curious how Big Picture can be so broken on NVIDIA. It’s a webview driven by Chromium AFAIK, does general Chrome suffer the same?
In all seriousness though, everything else is pretty amazing. Proton is awesome.
I don’t bleeding edge cards, but I’m also thinking about moving my gaming machine away from Windows.
I’ve seen people on Reddit report issues with both types of card, so it’s really just try it and see for your particular setup.
- acquiesce to everything Win11 entails
- be a weirdo and run a server SKU
- run insecure EOL OS on hardware
- run insecure EOL OS on some less-begrudged hypervisor
- fully migrate to preferred Linux distro and sacrifice some amount of game compatibility, though less than I'm conditioned to believe per https://www.protondb.com/
I have no Windows-specific software other than games.
https://blog.0patch.com/2024/06/long-live-windows-10-with-0p...
Kinda sucks that the only fully correct way to play games is on an OS that continues to suck more and more, and that I have to wear a virtual condom to do so.
Edit: okay, the firewall might become annoying to maintain if multiplayer gaming is your thing
Been doing that for 10 years.
There are decent WinMod ISO communities out there that have open readable tools, changes, suggestions, and forums that keep things clean of cryptofarming process and all that BS.
See, for example:
Revision: (as used by Qubes folk for Win Qubes) https://revi.cc/docs/playbook/general
or WinUtil: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41843917
What I 100% expect with every new release of Windows is that they'll have some genuinely good ideas, remove or break a ton of existing workflows trying to implement those changes but only getting them halfway to where they need to go, and then fix it over the coming years. E.g. with Windows 11 they rewrote the taskbar and it was missing drag and drop, positioning, clocks on multiple monitors, useful right click shortcuts on the taskbar, "Never Combine" to not group windows, the smaller taskbar, showing the text label next to things in the taskbar, and probably more I'm forgetting. At this point nearly all of those are fixed (small taskbar is about to be, position is still unthinkable for now apparently).
Typically I'll just move to the latest. Yeah, it'll suck to adjust at first, but quickly it'll improve and start to have features beyond the first. Some prefer to hang on to the previous one until it drops so the next one is already pretty fixed up. Either way, most folks end up liking the older versions even though most folks hate them at the start. Part of that is also rose colored glasses too though.
Except having to revert right click context menu and worse task bar I don't see bigger differences except more beautiful UI
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1g0pjl9/is_th...
edit: Plus, Distant Horizons, which is unbelievable.
Has anyone done the numbers on what the costs wouild be?
Also, what might I not like about Windows Server 2019????
Windows Server 2019 is going to have some wonky defaults and components out of the box. Some apps will report not being compatible but it's not usually a problem. That said, Windows Server 2019 is neither the oldest or newest version of Windows Server based on the Windows 10 codebase so I'm not sure why you'd bother with it in particular.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10I...
Fine print: You need a non-windows user agent, otherwise you get redirected to a windows-specific page with no ISOs.
As an aside, you might want to install Ventoy to your flashdrive:
https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
That way you just need to copy the ISO to the flashdrive.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10I...
I think visiting it on Linux (I assume anything non-Windows) shows a download link for the ISO instead.
Thanks!
There is Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 with 10 year support until 2032.