Windows Goodbye

(pic related) Hi lainons, with the recent increase in bundleware on paid hardware i.e. the whole fuaarkbook and occulus account merging. It appears windows is really pushing the same soykaf. I'm sure you all know that windows is full of bundleware to begin with, however recently every 3~ days I get a popup on boot after login; this popup is an operating system block asking you for consent to sign into your microsoft account and steal all your data under the guise of "The Windows Experience"t At the time this was manageable (i could just click "skip for now") and leave it at that, wouldn't see it for a week or two, it's inconvenient and abhorrent but I have a computer. However recently there was no "skip for now" it was now "remind me in 3 days." This is basically extortion. One should not have to be forced into giving away their privacy through some "windows experience" harvest let alone be bugged til the ends of the earth about it. Where is the option to "shut the fuaaarrk up and don't ask me again."? Surely there should be some laws against this practice? If any lainons have any permanent solutions, please share. > in b4 "Install Linux" - I don't have the time to learn it right now, and I'm chained to some really good windows-only software, in the future I will. I'm sick of this soykaf. Is it time to take the plunge and go full linux lainons?

>>12806 > in b4 "Install Linux" - I don't have the time to learn it right now, and I'm chained to some really good windows-only software, in the future I will. You can go for a "beginner" distro. Mint is a very good opening to the world of Linux. For your super windows based softwares I don't know. Dualboot? Wine (don't always work as expected sadly)? VM (need powa to do good things tho).

>>12807 >Dualboot Beware, don't do it on the same hard drive. It might work on different hard drives, but it would probably be best to just use separate machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9iX2qSfMhE

> I've never installed GNU/Linux t. Richard M. Stallman Have someone install GNU/Linux for you, the installation really is too complicated for the end user, you shouldn't have to install it. Ask in the lain meetup thread, ask craig, find a LUG.

You could look into Windows LTSC, they say that it comes with no bloat. Or you could just do what others have already said, install a "beginner" Linux distro or get someone to install one for you. Or even both. From personal experience I can say that it doesn't take much effort to move basic computing tasks to Linux system from Windows, by basic I mean stuff like web browsing, text editing (programming too), music, etc.

Google how to install custom ISO's. No bloat or Microsoft backdoor into it.

>>12809 >the installation really is too complicated for the end user, you shouldn't have to install it The installation process for most distros is no more complicated than installing Windows. Distros like Gentoo and Arch are the exception, not the rule.

>>12812 >The installation process for most distros is no more complicated than installing Windows A while ago my sister's macbook ran out of batteries in the middle of a system update. The user data was safe but the OS was totally corrupted and wouldn't boot. The solution was obviously to simply back up the user data and re-install macos. She had absolutely no idea how to do this, so I had to do it for her. Bear in mind that reinstalling macos does not involve downloading an ISO and writing a live USB boot drive like linux does. You literally just boot into recovery mode and click some buttons. This is the level most people are operating on. If I was not there she probably would have brought it to the apple store. "Installing an operating system" is not something your average person can do. It's not even about ability, it's about lack of confidence that they won't somehow fuarrrk it up. It's all about being the default OS that comes on the computer. That's why chromeos is gaining popularity all the time while ubuntu or fedora (which are arguably easier to use day-to-day) are still niche.

>>12807 OP here, I have used mint in the past, it was nice but the GUI broke and it killed the GPU on my poor little old HP Stream (piece of soykaf hardware) I guess I could try again. >>12809 >>12810 >>12811 >>12812 I do apologise I think my brevity of "Install Linux" has been misinterpreted. I know my way around imaging, flashing, etc. Hell, I'm even proficient with windows diskpart util. The problem I have is learning linux; the command line primarily. If I change over I'd like to go with arch and step up my knowledgebase but I just don't know enough about how the system actually functions to do any of that, to be able to fix it if anything goes to soykaf. >>12808 I don't have multiple drives, so it's not really an option for stability reasons. And VM's are out, I don't have hardware powerful enough to run them.

>>12814 If you're concerned about things you have two choices: get win10 pro and manually disable telemetry and customize the rest to your liking. For instance you can get rid of all the bloatware that comes with win10 by running a simple command. Run powershell as admin and copy and paste this: Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage It removes all windows bloatware including the microsoft store. There's also codes to disable the specific bloatwares you want to get rid of and a number of other ways to strip windows for performance. Just search the internet for "windows finetuning" and start small: don't make too many changes, reboot and see if you didn't break anything. It's the only way to do this properly since here are no legal distros of a "stripped" windows. I also suggest you search "how to disable windows popups" which can be done by simply changing a settting. Your other option is to grab a ubuntu distro that doesn't require much finetuning. For instance there's lubuntu if you want a stripped version of ubuntu. It will also require researching and trying around things until you get the end results you desired. Oh, and copy and paste Get-AppxPackage -allusers | foreach {Add-AppxPackage -register "$($_.InstallLocation)\appxmanifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode} to get back your bloatware bro (it's a pretty neat prank actually)

>>12815 Thank you so much, this is exactly what I needed. Though, I will move to linux soonish, window's increasingly aggressive advertising is concerning to say the least.

>>12816 Another possibility would be Windows Ameliorated. https://ameliorated.info/ I tossed it on an old HDD and it's been working quite nicely. If you're the type to prefer a video walkthrough here's a good one from Wolfgang's Channel. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=YTL0i5XzS7k If you have a flash drive lying around you could throw a linux distro on it to help you get more used to a linux system. It would provide a simple and safe environment for tinkering leaving your drive unharmed if you screw something up. Just booting into it for casual use so you can get comfortable with it hands on, start finding how you want to tweak things, and see what you want to learn first is as good a way to start as any. Also if you're unsure about trying Windows Ameliorated because it says the methods are based on Windows 10 build 1903 I used the latest build of Windows 10 when doing this myself (build 2004) and it's worked fine.

OP here Update: After several hours of config I have a persistent USB install of Arch Linux, GRUB bootloader isn't configured right and there is absolutely nothing online that works. This is where my lack of understanding towards linux systems comes in. I can install it, I can partition and do all that crap. But I have no idea how to use it.

>>12806 >not leaving windows after a lainon published the "customer experience improvement program" infographic Just a heads up: Customer Experience cannot be turned off and it is not new. Even most advanced windows users can't turn it off. Why would you use windows 10 though? Even LTSC is like kicking dead whales down the beach unless your card/games are platform specific which sux. In order, just install windows 8/8.1 without internet, install DWS, remove windows defender, disable windows update immediately, before connecting to internet, use proxifierPE and set whitelist mode, set firewall rules on built-in windows firewall, configure Viper msconfig settings. If update is required (like intel gpu drivers), just manually download and disable updates again, re-run DWS just in case. >>12824 Backstory on why became much harder to install linux: https://www.lainchan.org/%CE%A9/res/32222.html#34234 I have several questions: >EFI BIOS or legacy BIOS or both? >GPT or MBR? >where is /boot partition? (usb or hdd?) >what is "/" root and "/boot" file system? (EXT4 XFS NTFS)?

>>12824 You should probably just use linux from a USB drive for now. If you watched this video >>12808 you would see what a mess using a single drive becomes with bootloaders and everything.

>>12827 That's what I'm planning, I haven't had time to watch the vod yet, will do. >>12825 I don't really understand the first part to this post, I'll get back to you on that after some research. For the second part, I'll check out that thread and get back to you. >EFI BIOS or legacy BIOS or both? both >GPT or MBR? GPT installing the GRUB bootloader directly to the USB so it's persistent across all hardware (efi and bios) >where is /boot partition? (usb or hdd?) USB SanDisk Ultra Fit >what is "/" root and "/boot" file system? (EXT4 XFS NTFS)? Root is EXT4 Boot/EFI is FAT32 (so it's compatible with EFI) I have a 1GiB swap partition aswell though should I remove swap entirely because it's USB?

Just switched to linux mint too Sadly lost all of my data cuz of a silly mistake still I'm enjoying it also really the basics can be learned in ten minutes or so i didn't need to look up anything till now really other than "what is vulkan", "what is ppa", "appimage vs deb", "installing deb files"

>>12996 Are you OP? Rookie mistake. If you shrink the NTFS inside of mint (or any) installer, it will get corrupted.

>>13001 No not op And yeah the original plan was to make an ext4 /home that is larger than my NTFS and transfer my data there then delete the NTFS and give ext4 the space but i sadly fuarrrked up during the installation Anyways my stuff wasn't that important anyways so i keep enjoying mint and playing with my terminal Just learned how to turn rpm to deb but it took like an hour to do oracle is like kicking dead whales down the beach for only making rpm no deb for 11g which i need for school sadly

>>12813 probably, but my view is that anyone *could* do it but they are just too scared to fuarrrk it up so they dont or sometimes they are too scared to click something wrong when given multiple options and, while windows generally just wipes your hard drive, most GUI linux installers still ask to pick a partition and all that. Confusing if you dont know what that means even if you can just click the reccomended option and thats all

>>12806 I do not recommend linux on notebook. Even if many daemon and whatnot to help, your battery will go down too fast, it will temperature will increase too fast and so on. The reason is because support from many companies to linux in notebook is like kicking dead whales down the beach. A lot. I went from 5 hours(windows) to 2 hours(linux, originally it was 1 hour, but installed some stuff to help). I had to come back to windows because of uni(forced to use a lot of windows-only software). My plan right now is to have some money and but a computer and install linux on it. So I can let this notebook for uni/job related until I don't need windows anymore in my life.

>>12814 >old HP Stream I have found that Xubuntu works best on those pieces of crap. I have one laying around and put that on it with no issues. Of course I'm using 20.04 LTS and not 20.10 for stability reasons.

>>13276 To get proper battery life on modern hardware, you always have to update the kernel, install the proper drivers and set various configuration options like CPU frequency governer or DPMS backlight dimming.

>>13276 Every notebook computer I've ever owned, I managed to vastly outlast other OSes in battery life with Linux distros. By vastly I meant on the order of thrice as much usable life. The most important setting, really, is screen brightness. 40% darker can mean as much as 1.5 hours on some machines.

Make a debloated win10 iso on NTLite

>>13292 Xubuntu is also available as 32 bit version, so it consumes less memory and CPU caches work better with low end hardware.

>>12814 >I have used mint in the past, it was nice but the GUI broke and it killed the GPU on my poor little old HP Stream I have used Antix on hardware from early 00's and it worked better than Windows XP would. From what I see it should work on x64 hardware. https://antixlinux.com/

Is using a KVM a good idea for Windows?

>>13409 if you're not doing anything that needs graphics acceleration, yes.

>>13411 ? you can do gpu passthrough and get same performance as native windows.

>>13416 IME it's really buggy and you basically can't use any of your linux stuff at the same time unless you have two screens, so there's not really a reason not to boot into windows at that point

>>13417 Maybe im in a bubble but i thought 2 screens is the norm by now. The only people i know without multi-screen setups are casuals who use a notebook and dont even have a desktop pc.

>>13417 This is partly true. You need a second GPU, possibly implying a second monitor, or KVM of some kind. Performance is excellent, and I haven't encountered any terrible bugs.

>>13421 >You need a second GPU This is the one reason why I just dual boot instead of using a VM. I do machine learning on linux so even if I had two nice GPUs I'd still rather have both of them on the linux side for training rather than sacrificing one to a windows VM.

>>13422 If you configure it properly, it is possible in some cases to rebind the GPUs, so you could have the best of both worlds.

>>13434 I have read a couple forum posts that say it's possible, but never with enough detail for me to understand how it works. Also from what I've read it can be somewhat inconsistent. That is ideally what I'd like to do though. Even if the two vms can't be booted at the same time it'd be good enough.

>>13437 It can be inconsistent, and it depends on both your motherboard and GPU. A disturbingly significant number of GPUs cannot be fully reset without a power cycle, and it seems impossible to get them to come up after switching them to another VM.

>>13421 What about just using the on board GPU?

>>13440 >What about just using the on board GPU? That would be smart. You can also just buy a 20 year old GPU for $10. This isn't a thread for smart people though.

>>13466 I tried getting a cheap GPU. Can't find one with a display port. I would use the on board but it only has one HDMI port. Not that this is really an issue. I can just use my old 1050Ti.

>>12806 >inb4 "Install Linux" - I don't have the time to learn it right now Linux has come a long way. A distro like Mint has a simple graphical installer and will likely work out of the box.

>>14501 Basically any that have a live cd-dvd and you be careful, then ANY work out of the box. Just pay attention to what hardware you have and what the installer-guides tell you to do. Also, install the hardware you want to use before OS install. Doing peripheral swaps after installed OS is the one thing that remains a spicy meme on linux

There are scripts that will debloat Windows extensively. Look up Chris Titus' Windows Debloating Script. Also, install Blackbird.exe.

>>14501 This Linux has really found a way to create and implement very simplistic and and intuitive interfaces over the last 5 years. I can't see a reason to use windows at all if privacy is your concern. The reasons to use windows are as follows: familiarity or windows specific software... Otherwise (especially in the case of privacy) there really isn't a reason to use windows as an OS. A vast majority of people can use mint or Ubuntu with little to no day to day impact.

>>12808 Please tl;dw me on that video, I'm not sitting through a 30m video essay. I've been dualbooting since I started using Linux with Ubuntu 8.04, more than a decade ago. Always on a single drive. Partitioning is extremely simple with either gparted or whatever your distro's installer does, and GRUB has installed and detected windows for the boot menu perfectly for ages. The worst thing that can happen is windows removing your bootloader after some update or windows boot repair, but there's enough guides on how to run an equivalent GRUB boot repair to restore it. And now with UEFI and UEFI boot menus it's even less of an issue, as the worst windows will do to you is change the boot priority! It will literally, always, "just work", with some minor, easily fixed quirks. One of them is windows 10's fast startup which will hibernate the machine instead of shutting down. Disable it so you can always enter the boot menu. The other is UTC vs localtime for the hardware clock. Make sure your linux install's clock settings match windows'. Using a separate drive makes no difference at all with any of this.

OP, if you're dependent on Windows, then I would recommend installing Windows 10 Ameliorated. Its like Windows 10, but with the telemetry either removed or circumvented. If you want to try linux, I would personally recommend trying Manjaro.

>>12806 Go back to windows 7 if you don't want to use windows 10 and don't want to change to linux. If you are worried about 7 EOL, there's ESU until 2023. Your other option is 8.1 which is basically 10 minus the bloatware and telemetry.

>>15470 Adding to that, I wouldn't recommend using third party windows 10 isos. They might have removed the microsoft spyware, but who knows if they haven't added theirs? Unless you can reproduce 1:1 what they did, I'd rather trust a clean iso from microsoft.

>>12814 I got bullied by a fellow student to switch from Windows to Arch, best thing that happened, Wiki is extremely good and you will learn fast. But that was back around 2011, so back then pacman broke constantly, so I switched to Ubuntu. Back to Arch since a few years, it's stable now. just don't to partial updates.

>>12813 >It's not even about ability, it's about lack of confidence that they won't somehow fuarrrk it up. charitable take. laymen are often smart enough to know there are unknown unknowns with something as complex as a PC, and the risk if they do something wrong that they couldn't intuit is too high to be worth stumbling through it. I'm the same way with car issues. >>12825 >why would you ever use W10 when you could do this complicated process to remove most of the spyware we know of? see above. OP's not even confident enough to move to linux, I'm not sure how helpful this is.

>>12806 <> in b4 "Install Linux" - I don't have the time to learn it right now This is a deprecated stereotype; Linux systems are very easy to use depending on the distribution. >'m chained to some really good windows-only software Elaborate, perhaps some people here can tell you alternatives to use which Linux systems support. >n the future I will. No, you won't, no matter how much you tell yourself this. As you explained earlier "I'm chained to some really good windows-only software".