Windows 11 IoT LTSC is the best answer at the moment. I’ve had no ads, no AI nonsense, the only setting I’ve had to change is to restore the sane position of the start menu. Oh also I did use the default options in Rufus which I think disables some annoyances. Despite all the moaning about it, Windows 11 itself is actually a small improvement on Windows 10 so I’m happy to upgrade.
Overall it’s is a lot nicer than dealing with Linux’s downsides (I have enough of that at work).
I’ll stick with this until Microsoft forces my hand.
What downsides?
Hardware not working as well. Poor battery life. Worse game compatibility. Worse stability (yeah really). More bugs (yeah really; at this point Windows is quite a bit less buggy than Linux in my experience). More annoying to configure things / set things up usually.
Those are all only on average. Obviously there are times when Windows has bugs or sends you to the command line or fails to connect to WiFi or whatever… But by this point they’re pretty rare.
I use Windows and Linux regularly and for Windows my complaints are:
- If I leave my playstation controller plugged in the PC never sleeps. Took me a while to figure that out! Probably a driver bug.
- That’s actually it. I can’t remember the last time the OS crashed.
For Linux:
- Until I enabled a huge swap file whenever it ran out of physical ram it would hard reboot. This is just Linux’s shitty memory management.
- I recently installed a kernel update and now it hard freezes every week or two. I’m guessing a driver bug. Impossible to debug though.
- Sometimes when I unplug the laptop while it’s sleeping it gets confused and the only thing it responds to is the power button (it does a clean shutdown but that’s still annoying).
- Quite often the login screen freezes for a few seconds when I try to put my password in.
- It asks me every time I plug my headphones in if they are headphones. Take a hint! Windows never asked that.
- I set up a network to auto-connect to a VPN, then deleted that VPN. This confused the absolute bejesus out of it so it wouldn’t even connect to WiFi. No error messages. Even dmesg only had some vague deauth message. Took me a long time to figure that out!
There’s definitely more that I’ve forgotten.
In fairness this is Linux running on a shitty Dell laptop vs Windows running on a normal desktop. Still…
That does sound unpleasant and I can understand why you prefer Windows. Personally, I rarely have problems with Linux that aren’t self inflicted and IMO Windows is an absolute garbage fire of an OS so there’s no way I’d ever daily drive it.
What distro are you using?
Some have burned out and live on riverboats with solar panels writing retro 6502 games on an original Commodore 64.
Now that sounds like a life worth having
Do you know about 100 Rabbits? I’ve been occasionally following them online for a few years now. They’re an art collective, living on a boat, writing code and sailing the world.
It is both my “living the dream” and my antidote to being overly romantic about what such a life entails.
This is the goal. I just need a lot of money, it’s not cheap to live light in this country
While it may not be the most popular move - I left windows for macOS over a decade ago and haven’t looked back once.
