this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024

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I'm done with Windows and Microsoft. (lemmy.ca)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/linux

47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Recently I had a hiccup with my main SSD drive. I have a dual boot Win/Kubuntu setup. Linux was crashing hard and Windows was giving me blue screens. After I resolved the issue (cooling/loose connection, idk) my Linux was doing fine, but Windows was giving me blue screens. I think it was doing an update when it crashed.

After a couple of hours messing with my recovery USB and booting in safe mode, I was able to fix the bad update and reboot normally.

I tried to open Firefox and it couldn't find the executable. Looking into the Program Files Mozilla folder, I found the .exe files had been renamed to .exe.sig??????

Then looking for the Edge browser, I suddenly found out that Microsoft Copilot AI had been installed!?!?!?!?!?!?

What the actual fuck???

I never wanted that trash on my PC! That's one of the reasons out of the many that I didn't want to use Windows 11.

And it's a weird fucking coincidence that Firefox was fucked. I couldn't even rename the files to .exe because they wouldn't execute. Looks like they were encrypted or some shit? What the fuck is Microsoft pulling?

It's a happy coincidence because you know what? I've been thinking about going full Linux install since all my games and Windows applications work with Steam, Proton and Bottles now.

I really don't see any fucking reason to keep using Windows. Fuck this shit and fuck Microsoft.

Edit: Oh and that's on top of all the other bullshit like forcing users to create a MS account to install Windows 10 now and having to jump through hoops to have an offline installation. And also defaulting to having all your user folder documents into their fucking One Drive cloud.

I'm done.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Embrace it. Most of us used to use Windows at some point. But I think it's really nice here on the other side. Hope you find your nice and bullshit-free way to use your computer.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

My only fond memories of Windows is as the Backyard Baseball machine when I was a kid... It probably won't even run that game anymore

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Windows is as the Backyard Baseball machine when I was a kid... It probably won't even run that game anymore

If there's one thing windows does well, it's maintaining backwards compatibility.

Most of my childhood games from that era run with little issue. Biggest issue is going to be 16bit stuff, but IME, it's mostly been the installers that are 16bit only and the actual executable was 32bit and ran fine

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I saw a post a while ago that made the point that wine might end up being the stable Linux abi, we might come full circle

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Awesome and good to hear. Gotta find a torremt next time I'm feeling nostalgic. Bet my crappy 10 yr old laptop can run it at the highest settings 🤣

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I have not had issue running any old game on both Ubuntu and arch, there are emulators for dogs and 3d0 and all sorts of stuff.

My wife wanted to play one of those myst-for-kids games with cartoon graphics, kings quest 7. Works great so far, can't speak for every game of course. Theres a cool app called Emubox I think tries to make it easy to make an all-in-one emulator launcher, I made one of my machines essentially dedicated to it with like 2 tb of games from the 80s to the 2010s.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Welcome in from the cold. We have blankets and cocoa.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And cats 😺

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And penguins 🐧

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And like one fox.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The wolf ate the fox

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No the other fox. The one that isn't on fire and is queer instead.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Huh, first time I heard about this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

She DID lose the mascot contest back in '96, buuuut queer hackers rediscovered her and are keeping the flame alive now

Which is good, she's adorable.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You found a .sig file where you expected a .exe? Did Windows crash while the Mozilla Updater was running? Sounds like a file that’d be present to verify that a new copy of the .exe was legit and complete, but the .exe itself was never written to disk.

As shitty as Microsoft is, I don’t think they encrypted your Firefox.exe…

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ah that could be it. It was such a weird coincidence.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

How auspicious that this popped up on my Lemmy feed

Earlier on my Misskey I was bitching about how like

Holy shit

I hadn't realllly used windows in 2 years (only for emergencies, and my emergency windows install is a debloated windows 10 AME thing that I set up one geological era ago). But today I was setting it up in a family member's laptop as a favour. It somehow got even worse in the past few years!

Like to not even get into the whole privacy and control over one's machine discussion (someone smarter can explain that in an eloquent way that isn't just "windows bad", though windows IS terrible for that, mind) -- it's just annoying!

Like you can't even start using the computer without setting up a Microsoft account, and then you have to go through seven different screens where Microsoft wants you to give consent to them spying on you, and even if you were to say yes (don't), it still is slow and plodding to do. And THEN after that it still sees fit to drop advertisements for Microsoft 365 and Gamepass because hey you just bought a license key to premium software? How would you like some fucking subscription services with that?

Everytime I use a windows machine it's a real "damn bitch you LIVE like this?" moment

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Same. And I'm going insane over Android and Google/Samsung as well. How much control over our personal data do these companies want???

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Microshit is minting more new linux enjoyers than any linux shill campaign ever could.

Thank you Satya the creep, your weird behaviors are driving linux growth!

Pro tip, LLMs are an amazing resource for Linux, if you got a modern GPU, they run decently locally. 24gb you can run GPT3.5 level.

Careful what commands you putting in though, i deff lost files by overriding directories. Don't want you rage switching back to microshit

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Brother, I've been using Linux for 24 years. 😎

It was nearly my daily driver for several of those years, especially in college.

I really liked Windows 10 when it came out and I've enjoyed using it until it became enshitified.

I've been using Linux on the daily for the past couple months and haven't even noticed. I've been blown away by the progress in Wine and Proton and Bottles.

[–] FizzyOrange 12 points 3 months ago (3 children)

If you are expecting stuff to never go wrong and software to never be updated in a way you disagree with on Linux then you're in for disappointment.

Remember the KDE kidney bean? What about Gnome's idiotic hamburger menus?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

They are expecting linux to be honest. If a change is made there likely will be open documentation and discussion about it.i

I really dont think the OP is making a point about buggy software, they even repaired their windows boot after fixing the linux one, despite not needing the windows one.

We dont want software that is deceptive and antagonistic, and tries to steal whatever it can by calling it free.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

No that's not the point.

Of course software can go bad and files get corrupt, especially when hardware fails.

But I won't expect some corporate AI spyware to get installed and my files to be put in a cloud to be scanned and analysed without my consent.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

They are expecting linux to be honest. If a change is made there likely will be open documentation and discussion about it.i

I really dont think the OP is making a point about buggy software, they even repaired their windows boot after fixing the linux one, despite not needing the windows one.

We dont want software that is deceptive and antagonistic, and tries to steal whatever it can by calling it free.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If you run Windows, it's not your computer. I won't let that shit anywhere near my machine any more.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

🤣🤣🤣

That's the AT&Tv building in New York. The one used by the government for mass telecom surveillance. It's also the building used as the place for the game Control.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Understandable. I want to tell you a little story for the lolz too.

A few years back, I was dual booting with Ubuntu and Windows 10 to play certain games. 2016 released a highly anticipated game for me, Civilization 6. I think that I purchased it in its release period on Windows and ... it did not start. I've researched and tried to find a solution, but nothing worked. After a few days later contacting the support in Steam, we found out it was because the Skype installer. Go figure.

So I removed the Skype installer and the game run! How**?!** I didn't even had the Skype installer before. Windows got me it without asking me through some updates. That's pretty spicy, but not all! See, I'm saying "Skype installer", because this is not even the application itself, its just the installer for Skype. I'm asking again, How**!?** (Notice this time the exclamation mark has priority over question mark...)

At that time, I already had enough of Windows for years. But purchased a license and installed it after years without Windows, because I couldn't play some of my favorite games otherwise (Overwatch wasn't playable on Linux in the beginning, Street Fighter 5, Civilization 6 and many other games...). Someday I nuked that Windows installation too, as it was just not worth it anymore.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

That's so weird.

And yeah, wasn't Skype another software pushed onto users in Windows?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

To be real I have had a similar experience with data loss and broken links on an install drive, requiring the reinstallation of impacted apps. Honesty it's probably not a great idea for me to keep using that disk lol. Reason it comes to mind is that my Firefox install was impacted in exactly the same way as on your end. It was also caused by an interrupted update.

I hope you find that you have everything you need on the other side. People here might be able to help fill in the gaps if not.

[–] refalo 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

system files getting corrupted under linux is way harder to fix than on windows... most distros do not even have a tool to check for integrity/existance of all the necessary base system package files.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Not sure what you're on about, most package managers have a literal database of most package manager installed files. Debian and derivatives have dpkg --verify or debsums to verify the files, arch has paccheck, I'm sure other distros have something similar. And fixing them is just a matter of reinstalling the package, which you can do from a chroot if the system won't boot.

Or you can just run your system on a checksumming FS like btrfs which will instantly tell you when a file goes bad.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

As long as your home directory is intact, you can simply reinstall. You can also easily reinstall individual modules and overwrite bad file. There's so many ways you can fix a Linux installation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Most package managers store md5sums. A few times I've used that to validate package binaries. I'm not sure what tool you'd use for it, since I always just whip up a bash one-liner for it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

The thing holding me back is multi monitor support. It's just atrocious on Linux (and has been for a long time). I have issues with:

can't duplicate screens ("not supported" huh?),
random screen not detected,
broken layout when screen changed,
flickering and constant layout changes

Not sure if anyone has tips? NVIDIA and Intel displays, scarred to even try VR.

[–] onlinepersona 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

NVIDIA

That's your problem right there. So often, when somebody says "I have a problem with Linux", they mention NVIDIA. Sir/Madam, you have a problem with NVIDIA. Those fucks have been a thorn in the backside for more than a decade. As the creator of linux said "single worst company they've dealt with".

Tips... uh... in rising order of monetary cost

no cost: install a distro that might have support for downloading the right proprietary drivers (linux mint, Pop!OS, ubuntu, bazzite? nobara?)
no cost: try to install the proprietary drivers yourself
variable cost: get a geeky friend to try and fix it for you, compensate with a beer, meal, or vacation depending on how annoying it was
buy an AMD GPU

For temporal cost, reverse the order.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Running Bazzite with an Nvidia graphics card, ymmv but it just works on my computer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I have a simple setup with only one monitor. I haven't messed around with having two screens yet. But I used to when I had a laptop and I don't remember it being that difficult. I dunno.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

In the few cases I need Windows, I use it on a VM, and usually through an old iso I keep around and with Windows Update Blocker. Maybe it would be viable for you too?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Yeah. That's probably what I'll do. Install it without an internet connection, then remove all the bloat and online stuff. Then keep it as minimal as possible. Just as a backup.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Were you using an antivirus program on Windows?

Edit: for the benefit of people downvoting this question: missing executables sounds like the behavior of an overzealous antivirus. It's a relevant question to ruling out what may have caused the issue.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The best antivirus program to run on a windows system is "fdisk" .
/jk

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Just read fdisk in my head as “fuck disk” for the first time ever possibly due to the inclusion of Microsoft in the current context

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Yeah I know that you mean. When I searched for my .Sig file issue, I saw some older posts about Avast doing this to programs.

According to other people on here, my Firefox was probably in the middle of an update when it crashed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Sounds like bit locker got turned on for that drive

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Windows shouldn't be blue screening. Check your hardware before installing Linux. If the hardware checks out (I doubt it will) go ahead and install.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah it was an SSD issue. It's fixed. It was just loose.