Buy Win10 gear and use it offline. Use Linux for online....or Android I suppose.

Yeah... I recently migrated to Linux to do normal day-to-day stuff and use either retro Win 98/XP PC or older Win 7 box for gaming.

I have one computer with Win 11 now (dont ask, didnt have a choice) and boy is it awful.

For example Win 11 apparently cannot manage to update the "most often used emoticons" list. At least mine always stays the same, which sort of defeats the purpose of such a list.

And you cannot expand the taskbar anymore. It seems genuinely impossible. A feature I use all the time on Win 10.

And it comes with a ton of functionality that I never asked for that just gets on my nerves. Like creating additional desktops. Yeah I know it was already possible before but now its in your face.

Thought MS also removed Control Panel comepletely....

Plus, they added the option to place advertising in the file explorer. That may not be implemented yet, but it was leaked.

Another thing thats killing my last nerve: the system aggressively wants to snap your programs into places all the time. If you just get a program too near a border of the screen, BAM its maximized.

Basically the idea to have multiple programs at the same time on the screen and wanting to use the full available space, something I do under Win10 all the time, is now far too complex for modern M$ programmers to grasp. Maybe they assume all users are twentysomethings using 8K monitors and having large spaces that show nothing is no issue.

For the same reason we probably have now rounded edges everywhere. Which are completely pointless and look really stupid and cut away part of the available information for no reason.



I never was a fan of Windows; Windows in no version ever came close to the user experience I had with Linux in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The persistent problems with the Windows Explorer alone are reason enough why Windows cannot remotely hold a candle to any Unix system. The fact that all Windows on X Windows are controlled by the system and the programs cannot violate any of the rules enforced by the system even if they want to is another huge advantage. This for example made it really easy and intuitivee to have multiple desktops.

But Win11 is a huge step backward compared to Win10. My honest assessment is frankly that its a stinking pile of you know what. No idea who honestly thinks this would be a system anyone would want to work with.

And Win10 was a huge step backward from Win7. Lucky for me, my computer is offline and still happily running Win7. Haven't had any game compatibility issues from anything on GOG so far. So long as that ancient bucket of PCB meets a game's other system requirements, the OS hasn't been an issue for me. I didn't initially realize that GOG likes to slap Win10 or Win11 on as a generic system requirement until I accidentally bought a game that claimed it needed that and it turned out to run fine on Win7.

But geez I miss WinXP more and more every day...

And the ONLY thing I'm not looking forward to whenever I manage to replace my old computer is having to deal with a newer, less usable version of Windows.

Windows Defender will probably keep working and keep being updated.
O&O ShutUp10++ will help you significantly with the MS' privacy unfriendly settings in 10 and 11. Though you need to recheck after every update.
At the moment it's still possible to activate 11 without an MS account, though MS is closing those options..

Thanks for those pointers.

Yeah I had to get help to get Win11 running without M$ account.

Unfortunately I need Windows for work - and for that matter, for games - so even if I will get a Linux system again I cant get rid of Windows completely.