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Yesterday I prepared a few years old Windows laptop for my daughter to use in school. It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh m

• onemoresoop 5y ago
  Windows is horrible in this regard. And what's worse is that the users seem not to care such that this behavior proliferates. I have a windows machine that I take it offline and want it running at all times. No updates possible, Wi-Fi is turned of right? Wrong, windows does restart machine and enables Wi-Fi. It pisses me to no end how little control I have of this machine
  • jaywalk 5y ago
    Sounds like you're just using the basic toggle switch to "disable" Wi-Fi when that's not really the purpose of the switch. If you actually want the Wi-Fi disabled, you have to do it right. Do it in the UEFI menu, or disable it in Device Manager if that option isn't available. It won't get re-enabled if you do it right.
    • onemoresoop 5y ago
      You're absolutely right if I wanted to disable Wi-Fi permanently. The problem is that I want it enabled at times without rebooting the system.
      • jaywalk 5y ago
        So that rules out the UEFI method, but you can enable and disable in Device Manager without a reboot.
• aunty_helen 5y ago
  In reality, you just don't realise how much bloatware osx has. Install a firewall and watch as studentd or 100 other services you never use contacts apple. Edit: List of most recent and trying not to include things that may be useful to me syncdefaultsd, nsurlsessiond, apsd, cloudd, transparencyd, mapspushd, cloudphotod, akd, parsec-fbf, appstoreagent, AddressBookSourceSync, com.apple.iCloudHelper.xpc, familycircled, trustd, AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc, imagent, indentyservicesd, com.apple.sbd, studentd, airportd, configd, parsecd, com.apple.geod.xpc, com.apple.geod.xpc, avconferenced, rapportd, trustd, remindd, helpd, syspolicyd Long list right.... that's from the previous 3 hours.
  • buildbot 5y ago
    But that's 1st party vs. 3rd party, big difference!
    • Steltek 5y ago
      I can't tell if this is a defense or outrage? 1st party seems worse as, depending on the purpose, it might be harder to remove.
      • oopsyDoodl 5y ago
        Last I checked even server focused Linux distros ship with a firewall. Bash? Fucking savages! Zsh or gtfo Not everyone has time to memorize Linux From Scratch and git commit a CI/CD pipeline towards the perfect distro Maybe if programmers were interested in teaching versus making bank at big corp.
        • kymaz 5y ago
          Need big bank to support the home loan and childcare.
          • oopsyDoodl 5y ago
            As long as corporate banking is our value store that’s true. I’d rather see humans themselves as our value store and motivate, teach, and mentor each other to do the logistics work to that end. Letting banks gamble with our deposits when we’re all in the habit of doing these things daily anyway seems like pointless extra steps. I think people are more willing to be a stable mesh network of agents for each other than history full of feudal warlords will let us believe, we don’t need to prop up ephemeral tent poles. That’s just old story. Bonobo tribes have been observed killing alphas and then developing social harmony. Not saying we should behead billionaires, but austerity for elites would be a figurative death.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• moralestapia 5y ago
  Yeah that sucks, but on OSX side I have to restart my computer every week or so because of forced updates. Restarting really is a big deal for me as my workspace consists of several dozen open windows, some of them I have to login, navigate to a particular place, etc... also you lose your train of thought. It has gotten that bad for me, that I have to take screenshots before restarting every time, so I don't lose track of where I was. I understand not everybody has my same use case but for me it truly is a PITA. Of course, the alternative is to just click on "Install Later" every 8 hours for the rest of your life, and then the one time you miss that button for a few pixels and click on "Install Now" everything gets closed and obliterated in an instant. But yeah, at least now I have the latest version of Safari which I haven't used in 10 years.
  • valine 5y ago
    MacOS Monterey added an option to disable automatic updates. It's been the biggest annoyance for years, now it's just a checkbox in settings.
    • moralestapia 5y ago
      Thank you, I didn't know that. That's actually a big incentive for me to update.
    • null_object 5y ago
      > MacOS Monterey added an option to disable automatic updates. It's been the biggest annoyance for years, now it's just a checkbox in settings The ability to disable automatic updates goes back far more years than I can remember - possibly even a decade.
      • valine 5y ago
        You could disable the auto install, but not the nag.
  • mnadkvlb 5y ago
    Of course its better to have a system which will not install the updates automatically and will just be stuck at restart (windows 10 wink). If i disable apple updates on a macbook, it will show the notification but will never update without my permission, good luck doing that on windows.
• sabellito 5y ago
  Definitely not defending windows here, but don't you find that macs come with bloatware as well? Safari, apple music, maps, etc - some of which you cannot uninstall as well.
  • rp1 5y ago
    Definitely a difference between first and third party bloatware though
  • buildbot 5y ago
    Sure, but Win 10/11 have had stuff like candy crush and other 3rd party apps installed by default for a bit. MacOS only has 1st party bloat, which may be a big difference for some.
    • sabellito 5y ago
      Fair point, I agree there's a difference.
    • leucineleprec0n 5y ago
      First party bloat is arguably worse.
  • irskep 5y ago
    The difference is that none of that stuff is running in the background when you aren't using it. Maps doesn't take up a global menu slot. Apple Music doesn't open unless you explicitly open it (unless you happen to hit an Apple Music URL on the web). You can ignore it and it doesn't bother you. Whereas on Windows, bloatware tends to add a Start menu icon, tray icon, background process, startup item, etc. And Apple's built-in apps aren't harmful, they're just unnecessary. In the early 2000s, my parents got me a Mac that came with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. :-)
    • afandian 5y ago
      I never found a way of disabling the automatic starting of iTunes when you press the play/pause button on the keyboard. How do I choose my own music player app? And my new Mac has things like (can't remember exactly) 'musiccreationd'. These count as 'startup items' to me.
• passivate 5y ago
  Sounds like your PC vendor installed a whole bunch of crap. I put W10 on a fresh PC just a couple of months back and it was a painless process. It was a W10 Pro ISO from Microsoft.
  • TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
    This is the way. The last time I looked at Windows computers at Best Buy a year ago, anything mid-level and below was almost unusable because McAfee was using all the CPU. I bought a Windows laptop (wanted to game with a modern-ish GPU). Step 1 was uninstall McAfee, and turn on Windows Defender for some modicum of protection. There are error popups for software I haven't installed when it boots. My parents have a new Windows computer which was showing popups advertising an extended warranty when I visited this weekend. A fresh install of Win10 from the Microsoft ISO is very different from the typical factory configuration found on new hardware.
  • slownews45 5y ago
    I deploy windows 10 pro. Loaded down with crap. What businesses want Xbox companion and xbox game bar running on all their work computers - seriously -> if you are on Microsoft search for xbox on your work computer. Does Candy Crush Saga still come on the business pro ISO installs? That used to make the office laugh - who is paying $200/machine to get candy crush saga pre-installed. In fact, the trick was they also had a separate app called app updater that would reload these things even if you uninstalled Candy Crush. Too funny! The only way to get candy crush to go away was to uninstall it, then uninstall app updater - though people didn't date do that biz side because they didn't know what else app updater supported. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/candy-crush-saga-keeps-reinstalling/2d8a797e-fd1b-4df5-8668-0fb4b8fde743 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/candy-...
    • mattferderer 5y ago
      Every business should enable & demo Xbox Game bar. The video capture is awesome for helping debug things. Just record what's happening & send it over with your Help Desk ticket. It's free, easy to use & comes with Windows. Microsoft could & should also just load that as a stand alone tool like the snipping tool. But they haven't, so I encourage Xbox Game bar.
• superasn 5y ago
  1. Yes first thing I run if I ever have to use a Windows PC is this little gem called Shutup 10 (1). 2. Then there is another software called 10AppsManager (2) to remove further bloatware like Onedrive, Skype, etc. 3. After that I visit ninite.com (3) to get the usual software without toolbars and spyware. 4. For other software like ffmpeg I use choco or chocolatey (4). I am now a full time linux user but this was the least painful way to get my PC running before that. I'm sure things have changed or improved since, but this really worked for me 2 years ago.. hope this helps someone. (1) https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 (2) https://www.thewindowsclub.com/10appsmanager-windows-10 https://www.thewindowsclub.com/10appsmanager-windows-10 (3) https://www.ninite.com https://www.ninite.com (4) https://chocolatey.org/ https://chocolatey.org/
  • nathanaldensr 5y ago
    They haven't changed. That's nearly the exact process I still use for for work and home PCs.
  • linuxlizard 5y ago
    This is some great stuff. Thank you! I'm definitely going to lean into chocolatey. My daily driver is Linux but I still need a Windows machine around.
  • dharmon 5y ago
    This is great! Thanks! I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work, and to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my open sessions are gone. How do you turn this off?! I try turning off the setting but it randomly turns itself back on. Also, how do people set up a reasonable dev environment not built around Visual Studio? On my Mac I just use Terminal + MacVim (with my plugins), so I don't have particularly demanding needs. I tried WSL, but its just Linux side-by-side with Windows, not integrated with windows. If that's what I wanted I would just use Linux, but I need a command-line where I can still build Windows apps. Currently I use bash-for-git (so I can run `cmake --build ...`) but its so non-standard in lots of ways that it drives me a little nutty.
• okareaman 5y ago
  Windows in the Ballmer Era, Vista to Windows 8, was a disaster. Windows 10 was released a year after Satya Nadella took over and was an improvement. Windows 11 of the Nadella era is a big improvement. It seems like Microsoft decided to spend the money to get it right to create something stable and pleasing. I've been running it for a month and highly recommend it. I think a big attraction to Mac OS is that the UI hasn't changed much over the years. Time will tell if Microsoft is on board with that. I don't listen to the Microsoft or Apple haters who are always on here telling me one or the other sucks.
  • xattt 5y ago
    Common refrain from the fanboys: You’re enjoying the things you like wrong. Seriously, I am using Windows 11 since official release and I am getting to a point where things are just the way I like them. I was lucky enough to have a machine that just met the TPM/processor requirements cutoff. There are a few annoyances: I would like to use the dashboard/widgets for weather, etc but they force their newsfeed on you.
  • pas 5y ago
    Win11 UI is noticeably bad. Harder to read, harder to notice buttons. Useful functionality is hidden behind more clicks, etc... It might have some aesthetic value, but it's not necessarily nicer, just different and more trendy. Which quickly wears off.
    • okareaman 5y ago
      I believe Windows 11 is that last desktop machine UI we'll see for awhile from Microsoft as they intend to refine and improve this one and stop irritating people with changes. I'm happy finding work arounds for things that don't work for me. For example, I can no longer read the time from the task bar from a distance, so I have a browser tab loaded with a time service that I like better. https://www.clocktab.com/ https://www.clocktab.com/
      • pseudalopex 5y ago
        > I believe Windows 11 is that last desktop machine UI we'll see for awhile from Microsoft as they intend to refine and improve this one and stop irritating people with changes. Wasn't Windows 10 supposed to be that?
• underscore_ku 5y ago
  why do you people bother with windows? just use linux
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    Windows and linux don't overlap much in use cases. I think macos and linux are more interchangeable
    • idrios 5y ago
      Linux Mint looks and feels exactly like Windows 7
    • dkersten 5y ago
      What are the Windows use cases that Linux doesn’t do? General web browsing type tasks are solid, text editing/note taking works. Videos and audio (including Spotify) work. Steam and games generally work (even most windows games through Proton). What else does ones daughter need for school? She’s not video editing or creating music (two use cases where you may need windows or OSX; art is more or less covered through blender/Inkscape/krita) Mint or Manjaro are easy to install and setup and come with good defaults that should be pretty easy to navigate for someone new to Linux.
      • criddell 5y ago
        > She’s not video editing or creating music In my experience, kids do these things all the time for school projects.
      • cblconfederate 5y ago
        Gaming; general office stuff ; peripherals
        • dkersten 5y ago
          Dunno what you mean by peripherals, at least ones that don't work on Linux, but the other two categories work just fine. Gaming has come a long way thanks to Valve and their work on Proton.
• arthur_sav 5y ago
  I wish we had more options though. Between Windows and Apple there's no other real competition. Linux is cool and all... but not user friendly (not even Ubuntu)
  • BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
    I don't understand this attitude. I spend countless hours trying to keep my wife's work computers working. Getting windows to connect to a printer is a frequent ordeal and fixes seem to always be ephemeral, things soon breaking again. Her Macs are not as bad but still have lots of hiccups. Meanwhile I've been on Ubuntu for more than a decade and as far as I can remember, for example, printing consists of printer just magically appearing in my apps without me ever having to install anything and I press print and it prints. That's user friendliness to me. At least for my workflows (mostly web browsing, software dev and office stuff), there is vastly less fiddling and head scratching to keep things working on Ubuntu.
    • leucineleprec0n 5y ago
      Frankly if the drivers didn’t suck hot shit I think many of us would.
    • mattlondon 5y ago
      My work Linux laptop frequently (several times daily) breaks Bluetooth, breaks audio, does not wake from sleep, wakes from sleep but only shows the mouse pointer on a black screen, stops throttling the CPU down, resets the DHCP-specified DNS server to 0.0.0.0, sends stuff to printers that cause them to just spit out endless blank sheets of paper. The "solutions" to all of these are multi-step manual disasters... uninstall pulse audio, restart cinnamon, reinstall blueman, upgrade Jack, manually create config files from copying some file on a GitHub repo, downgrade to some specific version of CUPS, mess about with apt-get repos to not get the latest version of whatever...wtf?! That is not user friendly. My personal Windows laptop has never had a single one of those problems. It has been faultless from day 1 without a single issue.
      • 5y ago
• smoldesu 5y ago
  You should probably just toss Fedora on it if she only intends to browse the web and edit documents.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• grumpyprole 5y ago
  At least one can remove the bloatware from Windows!
• noir_lord 5y ago
  I put the boy on an old Dell Vostro running Fedora. Installation and updates took about 30 minutes. Updating the machine is a `sudo dnf update` and done. Though I did get in trouble when I shelled into his machine did and update and rebooted without checking he was using it first - killing his call to his (not)girlfriend in the process. He's just start secondary (high) school and they are using Google Classroom so all he really needs is a browser and a webcam/mic.
  • clarge1120 5y ago
    I am thinking of starting the young man with Ubuntu, rather than Windows or OSX. Since his (not) gf only uses iPhone tech, I won't be able to accidentally interrupt any calls.
    • flatiron 5y ago
      Take a look at neon. Probably a good distribution for a kid. I still run my kids computers so they run arch.
    • velosol 5y ago
      I wonder if FaceTime web [1] actually will work on Firefox or Chromium on Linux. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619
  • MikusR 5y ago
    Was that a few year old installation of Fedora?
• salamandersauce 5y ago
  Is this not true on Mac? Updates in particular take forever on MacOS. I find Windows updates take like 5 minutes usually. MacOS has been a half hour or more for some of the point updates I've done. Bloatware is still there, iMovie, Garageband, iWork is IMO bloat. Slightly more quality bloat maybe but I don't need 20GB taken up by stuff I'll literally never use.
  • Tagbert 5y ago
    IMovie, GarageBand and iWork are not installed by default and you can remove them at any time. Recent Mac OS updates are monolithic signed binaries that load into the protected disk partitions reserved for the OS. This is security feature to limit which processes can modify the OS. The downside is that it can’t do differential updates. I hope that, at some point, Apple will work out how to securely do differential updates and speed this up, but I’m satisfied with slower updates if it maintains security.
    • salamandersauce 5y ago
      When did they stop including them because they were absolutely included on both the Macs I bought a few years ago...
      • woodson 5y ago
        The are still included and installed by default.
    • sahaskatta 5y ago
      I just got a brand new Macbook Air M1 a few days ago. It probably took an hour to update to Monterey out of the box. It failed and I had to reboot a few times and re-install again. Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, and iMovie are pre-installed. I don't use these apps and they are easy to uninstall, but they definitely came pre-loaded.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  I'm no fan of Microsoft, but a vanilla Windows 10 install isn't very bloated imo. Did you perhaps start with an image provided by the laptop vendor? It's not Microsoft's fault that they're usually full of trash.
  • Anunayj 5y ago
    I think perhaps you are in the EU and were using the "N" version of windows 10. I realized that the normal windows 10 installs a LOT of bloatware (Like I don't need candy crush), while the N version did not do that.
    • __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      Oh that's a good point. I'm in the US, but yes whenever I select the image to download I do pick the N version.
  • josephg 5y ago
    Unfortunately it doesn’t really matter who’s fault it is from the perspective of the user. All the windows computers at the computer shop ship with bloated 3rd party crap. Except the apple computers. It’s also not Google’s fault that most android vendors don’t support old devices for long. Or Linux’s fault that hardware vendors make linux drivers an afterthought. As a consumer, I don’t care why any of this happens. I just want the things I buy to work properly.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • ziml77 5y ago
      Who decides what's bloat? macOS ships with Apple News, Podcasts, the App Store, Books, Garageband, Stocks, iMovie, Keynote, etc. A lot of their stuff is even pinned to the taskbar by default. Should be consider that bloat? I don't need any of those programs (or prefer alternatives), so it seems like it's bloat for me.
• paxys 5y ago
  For a fair comparison you have to use an equivalent priced device sold by Microsoft itself (so a premium Surface), and that has none of the problems you described.
• Andrex 5y ago
  Yesterday I finally made the decision to ditch Windows 10 and move to Elementary OS on my desktop computer (my laptop is a Pixelbook). I was attempting to edit videos. I plug in an external hard drive with my footage, and... nothing. Well, not nothing. It's there in Devices & Printers. It's able to be ejected safely. Troubleshooter has no problems. But nothing in Explorer or any other obvious place you'd think. Panicking, I plugged the same drive into Chrome OS. Literally three seconds later I was browsing my footage. That's the point I got up from my desk and said, "I'm done." I'm so over Windows. They spend how much time and effort shoving a Linux environment into things when they apparently can't even support widely-used filesystems. The fact my external drive is mountable by both Chrome OS (where the code for mounting is open source) and macOS (a closed-source OS used by a minority of the populace) but not Windows is an utter joke. I shouldn't have to spend all this time trying to access my files in 2021. This is something that should Just Work. This was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've had several minor and major annoyances with Microsoft's treatment of Windows ever since Windows 8, and none of them have gotten better. - WTF is "3D Objects" and why does it always bubble up from the pits of hell even when I delete it? Microsoft is very opinionated about the User folder in general, while I think they should be as hands-off as possible. Stop adding folders I didn't ask for and stop resurrecting them after they're deleted. Why is this so hard? - Ditto the last point for OneDrive. - Windows 11-specific, but adding ads to the taskbar? In a paid OS that the OEMs are already footing the bill for and bundling whatever extra crapware they want? https://betanews.com/2021/09/04/microsoft-crowbars-ads-into-windows-11-and-breaks-the-start-menu-and-taskbar/ https://betanews.com/2021/09/04/microsoft-crowbars-ads-into-... - Obscuring local account creation to a ridiculous degree in Windows 10 (you need to literally disable Wi-Fi or unplug Ethernet to even see the option) has gotten even WORSE in Windows 11. Now you can't even set up a local account at all unless you shell out extra for Windows 11 Pro! They've learned nothing from the Xbox One always-online debacle, and honestly looking back, this should have been the dealbreaker. But I thought, "hey, I don't create accounts that often, this is something I can live with." No longer. - The amount of analytics and data-gathering in Windows is the worst it's ever been, and worse than any comparable OS. "You can turn it off though." Well, maybe. Until Windows Update decides it knows better and turns it back on. - This is purely aesthetic, but Windows 8 and 10 looked utterly horrible if you did anything more than look at the desktop and open the Start Menu. Clashing styles and UX edicts from decades of past releases, in very visible places. It gives the impression Microsoft just doesn't give a shit. And don't tell me "it's too hard to update everything in time for release." It's not everything, and Microsoft is a big boy with lots of money and developers. They decided they just don't care. And today, I read this: "Microsoft to Block Windows 11 Browser Workarounds" https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/259208/windows-11-to-block-windows-11-browser-workarounds https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/259208/windows-1... It's not getting better or even staying the same. Microsoft is actively making Windows worse for their own ends. Thankfully I have the choice and ability to install an alternative, but my heart goes out to those with no choice. It's Orwellian.
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  There was a time when a fresh install of Windows required over a day to bring up to current, if you didn't have install media with the latest service pack already applied. MacOS updates are fairly slow, though, so I don't know if it's a clear win. But I also don't think anything has gotten significantly worse in recent years; there have always been good parts & bad parts.