I can tell this is fake from the fact the explorer context menu and the start menu open in under 2 seconds (on a top end Ryzen CPU, nonetheless).
gumby271 3 hours ago
Yeah the volume slider wasn't disabled for 2 seconds after opening the dialog, Microsoft should take notes!
epistasis 2 hours ago
Honestly the entire UI was so responsive and fast.
We've come a long way when web apps feel faster and more native than native apps.
5555624 an hour ago
Well, it does say "Unofficial parody" on the initial, loading, screen
accrual 4 hours ago
This is insanely good and mimics my personal experience of Windows these days. I literally say "pop-up! pop-up! pop-up!" out loud during a normal workday where one pop-up or prompt is rapidly replaced by another. Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop unless you configure the hell out of it (and even that is no longer enough).
My favorite "joke" from this site:
> Scan complete: 1 threat found — ChromeSetup.exe
FWIW, I switched to Fedora in January and have no plans to look back. Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.
MarkusWandel 4 hours ago
"always something trying to grab attention", that's the root problem right there. Even on a work computer unless you've changed your homepage, every time you open a tab on Edge you get a screen full of distraction clickbait. And then you wonder why you never manage to concentrate any more.
creaturemachine 2 hours ago
Whoever curates the Edge homepage knows they have mere seconds to capture a new recruit before they manage to escape to a different browser. Their jobs depend on the amount of bait they can dump in one window.
cwnyth 4 hours ago
Welcome to Fedora! I've missed literally nothing about Windows since switching to it about a decade ago now (around the time they announced Win7 EOL), and every time I had to use it for work (thankfully never these days), I grew more and more confident that I never will need to return and that Windows is only getting worse.
savolai 2 hours ago
I tried installing fedora on mac m1 vmware recently, and enabled 3d acceleration separately. Llm seemed to think 3d acceleration would work better on fusion.
Performance sucked bad, particularly on games. Tux games were unplayable. I am confused what the bubble is on hn or on my end. Before that, on utm I think i tried ubuntu. After decades, linux is still hard to try out.
ianlevesque an hour ago
There’s a lot to unpack here but if you want acceleration to work better in a VM you should use Parallels instead. VMware on mac has been in life support only mode for years and has not kept up in this area. You are also handicapping performance using the VM at all. M1 is well supported by Asahi at this point and even has native 3D acceleration. Not saying your lived experience isn’t real but the issue you experienced reflects a lot more on the state of mac virtualization and Vmware than linux.
chrismustcode 3 hours ago
It's soul destroying going from personal computer Linux (been figuring out the distro for me) to Windows for work.
Even worse they use Office 365 with sharepoint, they've even turned off web search somehow on copilot and can only search internal servicenow and SharePoint pages making it worse.
Things are pretty dire.
Anybody hiring who uses Google workspace and (preferably) Linux or MacOS let me know.
zdragnar 41 minutes ago
Any big name is going to be Windows or Mac, 95% of the time. There's not many UEM / RMM tools that handle linux well, and if they do, it'll only be for one or two distros like Ubuntu.
anakaine 27 minutes ago
Lmfao. What are they even doing with Copilot? Paying for premium and then handicapping it because they think that being able to search online sources might exfiltrate your sharepoint data? That is not at all how that works.
marcduck 3 hours ago
What WM/DE do you use? As much as I find Windows annoying sometimes, I haven't found anything for linux that feels as polished.
delecti 2 hours ago
The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%. The OS settings are conveniently located in a sensibly organized system settings manager and it works great. Then you need to mount a network drive (temporarily or permanently) and simply cannot do so in a GUI. If you're comfortable dealing with that small handful of outlier tasks (and if you're here, you can probably manage), then they're all already there.
[0] I use KDE, but it's essentially true of all of them
[1] that is, they require the command line
cess11 2 hours ago
IIRC in Thunar you just open a dialog and paste the connection string and you're done. Pretty much the same as in Windows but you don't need to execute some icky looking binary from some web page to e.g. get support for sshfs.
delecti an hour ago
That was mostly just chosen as an example of something KDE lacks, but which feels like it should be possible to do in a UI. I have no doubt that Xfce has plenty of comparable examples.
But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.
cess11 2 hours ago
"I haven't found anything for linux that feels as polished."
Really? In my experience you can go for pretty much anything and it will be more coherent and less buggy than the Windows shell.
Try Gnome or XFCE. As a bonus you'll be able to remap Caps Lock with ease.
qlte an hour ago
This is straightforward with Powertoys (official config utility from Microsoft) on Windows.
tapoxi 2 hours ago
I've been on KDE for the past 2 years and it's been a great experience. I wiped Windows everywhere (impractical before).
I keep it installed on a secondary drive just-in-case but I haven't booted into it in months.
bpye 2 hours ago
I've been using KDE for the last few years, it's been the most familiar experience.
neutronicus an hour ago
I use the KDE Plasma Fedora. It feels basically like Windows 10.
reaperducer 3 hours ago
Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop
One of the things that most impressed me when I switched from Windows to OSX was that OSX prohibited programs from stealing focus.
Sadly, that prohibition ended maybe five versions ago, and now macOS is like Windows -- You can be typing a document in a word processor, and then suddenly for no reason you're typing it into a browser, and then into a password field that popped up out of nowhere.
Hey, Johnny Apple! Fix this!
technothrasher 3 hours ago
> Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.
I'm in the exact opposite situation as you. I managed late last year to switch at work to Debian full time on both my machines. The few older Windows only programs I need run just fine under wine. But I'm stuck with a Windows machine at home because of Lightroom/Photoshop. They are tantalizingly close to running well under wine, but not quite there yet for me.
bpye 2 hours ago
CAD and video games are the areas where I struggle to ditch Windows. Many games work well under Proton and I have had luck with running Windows with an assigned GPU - but that does sometimes break for seemingly no reason.
anakaine 31 minutes ago
Sounds like Proton and SteamOS are very successfully closing the gap with games. Ironically hardware pricing might be the reason SteamOS doesnt progress at the same speed that it has been as Steam machines are pricey.
Specialist software on the otherhand. I get that. Its the same reasonw hy I have a macboom for academic work and Windows for other work. Vendors not building across ecosystems is frustrating, though presumably thats due to tooling lock in.
cgio an hour ago
I only have Windows at work, which means less pop ups. Nevertheless, lately I get forced updates with 5 minutes “grace period” more often than I’d like. Soon will be approaching pop up frequency.
jedbrooke 4 hours ago
It’s too snappy and responsive, real windows I gotta wait with the spinning blue ring thing for a few seconds after clicking ‘x’ on the notifications. That is when they’re generous enough to give an ‘x’ and not force the user through some onboarding flow with no easy way to opt out
burnt-resistor 3 hours ago
Yes. And some apps should freeze for 10-40 seconds despite having an SSD and 32 GiB of RAM.
ducktective 3 hours ago
You're doing something serious aaand suddenly out of nowhere the fan starts screaming cause some cryptically named process decides right now is the time to get stuck in some loop
drnick1 3 hours ago
It must be hard for Windows users to imagine that on Linux there are is no activation, no Microsoft account, no cloud backup, and no pop-up requesting that you install crapware when you plug in a peripheral.[0] You also own your disk encryption keys and are not assigned an identifier that can be used against you.[1]
Yes but every program you run can do anything you can do with your user account, which is catastrophic.
drnick1 2 hours ago
I haven't used Windows in a long time, but IIRC Windows behaves the same way. At least, on Linux, there is an expectation that user accounts be actively used, and this is indeed the model followed by most critical software like nginx, postfix, dovecot, etc.
5G_activated 2 hours ago
This is true for essentially all Win32 programs too, including the ones that have started to appear in the MS Store. Developers can play in the sandbox from the get go by using Windows Runtime, but no one wants to rewrite their application with a library or environment that Microsoft is going to deprecate and replace in 6 months time.
It's not like Flatpak is perfect, but at least it uses primitives that we understand through containers, and can apply to already existing programs. Even though they were written without playing in the sandbox and might expect full access to services and files, we can fudge it for the most part with bind mounts and open up safer doors through Portal and widget toolkits over time.
somerandomqaguy 2 hours ago
......? Windows 95 to Vista all had similar installation workflows to Linux sans an extra step to enter the install key. 7 and 10 made it easier since the hardware ID would make having to enter the key manually on hardware unnecessary. Until 11, there was no need for MS account, cloud, etc.
If anything Linux gave me more grief.
Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 2 hours ago
Windows 10 definitely begged you to use a Microsoft account to log in. IIRC you couldn't even set it up with a local account unless you told the install process you didn't have internet. I believe it also moved your home folder to onedrive without asking with no way to fully undo that
t-writescode 2 hours ago
And to continue to get Windows 10 security updates right now, I had to sign in to a Microsoft
Account to do it, so it’s even pushier.
glitchcrab an hour ago
I get updates for 10 without having signed into an account (I refuse to).
ComplexSystems an hour ago
Someday I'd like to see someone do a similar parody of Linux where your job is to get a printer working in Kubuntu. Preferably on a laptop with a HiDPI monitor.
Dylan16807 34 minutes ago
My impression was that these days a printer is more likely to just work on Linux than on Windows. And without the bloatware.
dataflow an hour ago
Meanwhile Linux updates and upgrades have given me grief far more than Windows ones have, FWIW. As does the UX, all the time. As do a million other things I have no energy to list. Every OS has nonsense you have to wade through. It's just that love is blind, and Windows's feels like it's more out of spite than ignorance.
novafunc 29 minutes ago
I've had a pretty good track record with Fedora Atomic / Silverblue. The thing I like best about it is that I can have updates safely staged in the background invisibily. And next time I reboot my computer, I boot into that new version. No waiting around or anything.
That's not to say it's perfect. There was a pretty bad bug maybe around 2 years ago where upgrades just stopped working and without any warnings. You had a notice the issue and run a special command to fix the issue. I've also had quite a few AMD/kernel regressions recently that resulted in artifacts in the desktop and AV1 video decode.
I wish there was like a Debian but atomic that has broad support like Fedora does. Though I did see that openSUSE leap 16.1 introduced an immutable option.
dijit an hour ago
Over time it’s becoming this way.
Have you subscribed to Mozilla VPN?!
How about your Canonical Pro subscription?
bradfitz 4 hours ago
This is not realistic; the start menu opens way too quickly.
marcosdumay 4 hours ago
True, but the search fails to reduce the number of options, so some things are right.
throooooo 4 hours ago
I can feel my blood pressure raising. Very accurate to the Windows experience.
metadat 4 hours ago
Win XP was peak computing for the masses, and most didn’t have a clue!
throooooo 4 hours ago
I preferred 2000, but admit that didn't make it to the masses.
burnt-resistor 3 hours ago
2k appeared to retain NT's responsiveness with seemingly separate threads for processing UI stuff where XP appeared to devolve to Windows 98 (pre NT) in terms of UI and app event processing merged together into a single foreground event loop.
black_knight 9 minutes ago
I dont even remember now why windows 2000 was superior to XP, but I ran it until I switched to Linux some time in 2004, despite having XP available too. Installed XP on other people’s computers though, FCKGW…
cwnyth 3 hours ago
A mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible. You could easily configure it so that it stayed out of your way, and only the updates were a headache. Windows 8 and those beyond were all downright atrocious. While I had dabbled in Linux for years before then, announcing Win7 EOL finally pushed me 100% into the Linux camp.
Animats 2 hours ago
> A mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible.
Yes. Microsoft peaked with Windows 7. Microsoft had finally fixed their long-standing stability problems. Internally, they had two main tools. One was the Static Driver Verifier, which verified that kernel drivers wouldn't take down the whole OS. The other was a classifier that took in crash dump reports and clustered them into groups given to one developer per bug area. That was enough to stop almost all Blue Screen of Death problems.
Windows 7 didn't have ads, license renewals, integration with Microsoft paid services. It just did the job of an operating system.
It's the last Windows I had. I've been all Linux for years now.
mistic92 30 minutes ago
I feel like its experience in US version of Windows. I never had so many popups in EU. Whats funny, I feel this way with macos, even after a year after setup I get some start notifications which I clicked many times.
AceJohnny2 25 minutes ago
The "Advanced sound settings" "this setting has moved three times" has triggered me. And I'm still on Windows 10!
ajkjk 3 hours ago
My windows 10 pc continues to bother me to update because I won't get security patches anymore. I will absolutely never update to Windows 11. The only way they ever get me to pay for an OS again is if they go far out of their way to be respectful to the user to compensate for all the disrespect.
Thanemate 2 hours ago
That's just awesome and makes me regret not switching to Linux earlier. I wish the creator of this made the start menu suddenly change after running Windows update, because Microsoft knows best on which folders you need to be visible by default. It can be customized, but you can't go back to how the start menu was.
doawoo 3 hours ago
> Windows is activated with a digital license. The parody watermark will remain because it is part of the joke.
Thank you for a good laugh
sensanaty 4 hours ago
My mother-in-law bought a new laptop last week and asked me to set it up for her, it came with Win11 by default. I was genuinely flabbergasted at how terrible of an experience it was, screen after screen of "We respect your privacy. Let Microsoft collect every single thing you have ever dared to breath onto this computer?" right in the install screen. After that lovely experience you're greeted with a billion random junkware preinstalled like fucking Candy Crush. I wanted to crash out when I clicked around in explorer and saw every UI element buffer for a split second, and after further research it seems they're using React in explorer these days.
What the hell happened?
miek 3 hours ago
My aunt pulled a Windows XP computer out of storage recently because she's sick of Win 11. I'm excited to hear updates from my cousin (though unfortunately, I have to expect this experiment will fail)
stackghost 3 hours ago
I hope she doesn't log into anything important on that computer because it's unlikely it can be made sufficiently secure for today's internet.
Don't worry, AI's gonna fix it in Rust in Windows 12
the__alchemist 3 hours ago
Valid. The good news is it's a nicer experience once you click through those. (Be careful; there are a few tricks where the "skip" button changes position and emphasis). Then sometimes a Windows update will make you go through part of it again; once every 3 months or so.
beloch 3 hours ago
Nice. A couple thoughts:
1. It needs to take a minute to load. While doing so it should display an "Installing Updates" progress bar that is controlled by a random number generator.
2. After booting in, it should try to sell you several services. The decline options should be hidden and possibly moving around evasively. Clicking them should have good chance of backing up all your files to OneDrive anyways.
kodama-lens 22 minutes ago
Nice, search does nothing - as always
itronitron 3 hours ago
just want to add that if the creator adds Powerpoint, then starting a Powerpoint presentation should prompt a 10 second countdown to a forced update and restart...
gpvos 4 hours ago
The "fix everything" button should link to a Linux installer.
riskable 4 hours ago
Proving once again that Windows isn't ready for the desktop.
austy69 3 hours ago
I recently switched back to windows so I could play Wardogs with the boys and I’m not enjoying my fans running at 100% when I’m not even running a game and the constant notifications. I’ll be back on Linux within a month
keithnz an hour ago
they say wardogs will support proton at some point... looking forward to the day linux is the default gaming OS.
zhrvoj 2 hours ago
Will anybody, ever, write an OS that doesn't serve the purpose of itself? Like Solaris, Win 3.11.. So many pop-ups, every so often... very nice, very useful, thank you. Worse than Micro and soft guy os.
Dwedit 4 hours ago
Back when Windows RG (2001) was considered a sharp mockery.
(Random fact, at the time that flash came out, clicking on the A: drive made your real floppy drive light up)
comandillos 3 hours ago
I've spent a few months trying to convince my management on getting a Macbook after fighting with a kernel memory leak that consumes the 128Gb of RAM in my freshly new Dell Pro Max 16 with Windows 11. It seems the best solution my IT gives me is to replace my laptop... which I have already done... three times.
rasse 4 hours ago
Stop giving Microsoft ideas!
LunicLynx 2 hours ago
As many comments already mention, windows is way worse than this.
Some obscure background task consuming all cpu. Burning your battery when on a laptop.
There is just so much crap in windows, it’s not even funny.
And man I really really liked it. Windows 7 + the performance work they did for 8 that was the last time it felt like they cared.
johnecheck 3 hours ago
Missed opportunity to have that say "365 Microsoft apps installed"
