Source: OSNews
Article note: I did the OOTB experience with a new consumer-class (Ideapad) laptop running Windows 11 in the last few days.
It's _unimaginably_ bad.
The "Welcome" process is a series of updates, followed by clicking through a fire-hose of unwanted features like "No, No, What?! No! No. Never. No. Gotta fix that. Where did they hide? No." followed by another series of updates that happen partially in the background and make the computer wonky during fist use.
Some of the preinstalled crapware or updates or a bad vendor image or something on this example self-destructed so badly after a few hours it required a reinstall. Repair attempts involved repeatedly typing out a long encryption unlock key that can be extracted from Microsoft online so does little against a real adversary, somehow capturing most of the downsides of FDE and no encryption at once, after which it would do nothing (because somehow it corrupted its ESP?) and repeat. Windows media is now apparently twitchy about how it is imaged and you get _bootable but buggy_ media if you just image an iso to a flash drive like we've done for decades, so you have to make your Windows media with a piece of Windows-only media creation software. I had to inject drivers (randomly downloaded from the internet, albeit at least from Lenovo) from an extra flash drive by bringing up a command prompt with a magic key combination to run an installer during install to get it online so it could finish the install... I haven't had to do that shit with a Linux installer in like 20 years.
Unless you're _very_ attentive, once installed your user storage is on OneDrive in a way that will unexpectedly upload everything you touch to Microsoft then start breaking the instant you use any meaningful amount of storage in your user folder.
It's not rose-tinted glasses, Windows 7 was peak Windows. Windows 8 was a flail toward things the rapidly expanding mobile market were doing, trying to catch the already departed bus by copying it, Windows 10 was just-tolerable because they hadn't figured out how to maximally enshittify, and 11 is an aggressive enshittification engine that happens to boot on top of an NT kernel.
For compatibility and not-being-instantly-added-to-a-botnet reasons, you probably shouldn't try to daily Windows 7... but you shouldn't try to daily Windows 11 either. No wonder my students' machines are always fucked up.
Quite often, I wonder how much nostalgia plays part in our perception of past events. Luckily, with software, you can go “back” and retest it, and so there’s no need for any illusions and misconceptions. To wit, I decided to reinstall and try Windows 7 again (as a virtual machine, but still), to see whether my impressions of the dross we call “modern” software today are justified.
↫ Igor Ljubuncic
The conclusion is that, yes, you can still get quite far today with Windows 7, and I honestly don’t fault anyone for longing for those days. Windows 7 sits dead smack in the middle between the dreadfulness of Windows XP and pre-patches Vista on one extreme, and the ad-infested, “AI”-slop that are Windows 10 and 11. Its Aero look also happens to be experiencing somewhat of a revival, with both Apple and Google borrowing heavily from it for their latest software releases. Transparent blurred glass is making a comeback, but I doubt the current crop of designers at Apple and Google will be able to top just how nice Aero Glass looked in Windows 7.
Still, I don’t think you should be using an out-of-support version of Windows for anything more than retrocomputing and as a curiosity, for obvious reasons we’re all aware of. With the end of support for Windows 10 – still used by two-thirds of Window users – approaching quickly, a lot of people are going to have to make the same choice that fans of Windows 7 made years ago: keep using what I like, risks and all, or move on to what I don’t like, but is at least maintained and supported? That is, assuming you can even make that choice in the first place, since in the current economic uncertainty, most definitely cannot.
Maybe the Windows world will dodge a bullet, and the circumstances force Microsoft to extend support for Windows 10, like they did with Office applications. Let’s see if they blink, again.
A view of the RCA Spectra 70/35 computer control panel before (right) and after (left) its owner cleaned it up.
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