Won? They will do it again. The only winning move is not to play their game. Choose Free Software.
Genuine question: What do you recommend? I want to replace Windows 10 on a 8-year-old midrange laptop with something that works reasonably well in terms of performance with a connected 4K monitor.
I’ve already tried Ubuntu, but unfortunately the experience has been marred by bugs such as poor performance, visual glitches, windows jumping around when attempting to move them, and DPI settings not being able to be applied per screen.
Linux is definitely the route. A lot of people use Mint or Ubuntu. But they are usually running out of date drivers.
I’d recommend looking into distros based on Fedora Workstation. It stays up to date but not as much as Arch so that it’s stable.
My recommendation is any of the Universal Blue images that fit your need. They are based off of the Fedora Atomic image with added quality of life features.
I’ve had more luck with Mint, thanks to its Windows-adjacent GUI and user-friendly on ramp. Still encountered a few issues (a couple of peripherals that didn’t support Linux drivers). But on the whole, it’s improved system performance over Win10 and synced smoothly with my workstation.
If you identify your laptop (including model number) someone who has the same hardware might be able to make a solid recommendation.
It’s a HP Pavilion Power 15-cb091nd.
I can’t say I’ve had those issues myself, so my recommendation may not be valid in your case. I’d say maybe give Fedora with KDE Plasma a try, and try switching between X11 and Wayland sessions if issues persist.
I personally don’t like Ubuntu, but that’s mostly because of Canonical making the occasional sketchy decision.
On the whole, distro choice doesn’t matter quite as much these days, as most distros should work fine out of the box. Whatever issues you have should technically be solvable with a bit of troubleshooting.
Sometimes Linux just doesn’t play well with your setup. Good luck, and I hope you find something that works for you!
I am more impressed you got windows 10 to work well on 8 year old computers ngl. I had an HP pavillion around that age and it had torturingly low startup speed.
Definetely try mint-cinnamon and mint-xfce4, latter one uses xfce4 which has very good performance.
A lot of experienced users will find linux run without bugs for them but that’s because it’s an OS that gets better as you learn more.
In my case battery life was 2 hours on windows and 1.5 hours on linux. But once I past the skill-curve I tweaked it to be 6 hours because I knew how to find what caused the problem and fix it.
Either that or there is the IT-guy effect going on where once an experienced user shows up the aura just makes computers work normal again lmao.
LOL, I won when I installed Mint.
Cheers
The only thing they’re rethinking is how to repackage this so people accept it. They learned a lot from this, but I promise you it wasn’t the right lesson.
My first thought exactly
Thats bad actually, the free advertising to linux was a good thing. Now Windows users will slip back into apathy.
Windows will continue to degrade as Microsoft fires more of its professional staff and turns to “Vibes Coding” for increasingly delicate systems development. They’ll keep pushing out the OS as a vector for unwanted third-party advertisements. They’ll keep ratcheting user control of the OS away from the hardware owners. And they’ll keep injecting bloatware into their applications and services.
This isn’t the end of enshitification. It is a brief retreat and regrouping by a company that has invested tens of billions of dollars into the AI sunk cost.
I hope you’re right because I am enjoying Microsoft’s failures and I would like them to continue.
I wish these were proper failures. They’re such an entrenched monopoly, a whole lot would have to change before a $3.2T company sees any kind of tangible penalties.
don’t believe it. ms is in for the long game.
“Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift” For Now.
Give them 6-8 months, they’ll shove it back in quietly in a way you can’t see it happening as easily.
Absolutely.
This just means “We pushed our crap too fast and people noticed, so we’re letting things cool off slightly to quiet down the critics, and next time we’ll boil the frog more slowly.”
I think you’ve just neatly summarized, uh …
… The world (such as we’ve incentivized it, anyway).
Sadly, yes.
What it comes down to is that any product or service with a profit incentive will inevitably betray you, no matter how good or how well-intentioned it started out.
Our only saviour is open source, self hosting, and federation.
It’s why ownership rather than rental is the model we should all individually be pursuing.
Deleted - Duplicate
Yeah they will recall their plan soon enough
ba-da-tisss
love it
I am kinda glad they went to shit so quickly. If it were slow, I probably would never have gone fully Linux. Now, I have all 5 of my machines free of corporate spyware. I am having fun again configuring and learning. Thanks microslop! I needed the push.
Which distro has been working well for you? So for I have Mint and Bazzite on my list to try. Also do you have any pointers?
I’m using mint and loving the experience so far. My kids find it easy to use and even my wife, who was a bit worried having to switch to a new environment, came to realise that it works just as well if not better then windows.
Badass, appreciate the info!
I’m using CachyOS currently. It’s fast, so far stable and suits me.
Best pointer I can give you loads them all onto a USB with Ventoy and test them all on the live environment. What works for others may not work for you so go ham, break shit and have fun while exploring
I use Mint on my laptops and I know it is not for everyone, but I started with Debian stable on my gaming desktop with an ARC B580 and upgraded the kernel, installed drivers, and added packages one at a time so I could see the difference. Debian stable on my server for many years, so I have some experience.
What makes you say Mint isn’t for everyone? UI is weird?
Oh, I think Mint is one of the most accessible distros. I use Cinnamon desktop environment and that is very nice for new users. I was referring to starting with Debian stable, it is pretty baseline with no frills. Great for a server, but you will need to research what additional packages and repositories you want to get from it what you want. I just like how almost all software made for Linux has instructions for installing on Debian, that is not the case for most other distros.
Fedora workstation can be a real nice no trouble install.
Personally love to add pop-shell extension to GNOME - if you use big monitors, it’s an awesome autotiler.
Good info as I have a huge monitor and has been part of my worry from a compatibility standpoint.
Bullshit and too late, bitches
I read “a major shit”
common freudian slip when talking about windows
Oh, and only now am I re-reading it to see that’s not what it actually said…
Understand that they’re not doing this because of user feedback; they’re doing this because shareholders got cold feet about the whole thing after the backlash (so indirectly it’s still down to user feedback, but not really)
It mostly looks like a mild slow down of user-facing release and rebrand of unpopular features.
It is not a retreat. The marketing team is just trying to figure out how to reframe things that caused public backlash.
Too late.
Major shit
shift
I haven’t won until Microslop is a company that is used in past tense.
Microslopped
Stop using Windows any, it’s a US company that’s too large.
I mean by that logic, stop using Steam. It’s (marginally) possible for a company to get big, and not do terrible things. Just keep an eye on them and don’t become fully reliant on them.
And we should be wary of steam, or keep at least an eye out for dark patterns. Fortunately Steam is doesn’t have to listen to shareholders, this might be a reason why they don’t do those things, but that could all change if Gabe isn’t there anymore.
