In my view, this is unacceptable…
They changed my background (previously there was a default blue window), placed an icon in the bottom corner of the screen that read “Learn more about this photo”, and re-added the search bar that I had previously removed.
Fortunately, I don’t have to deal with this on a daily basis.
Oh, didn’t you know? It’s not really your PC any longer.
Fortunately, it’s actually mine, cuz I use Fedora with Gnome, which doesn’t do these magic tricks 😁
Tricks are something Microsoft does for money.
Coo-coo-ka-cha!
Owning your computer is an ILLUSION
The PC might be yours, but that virtual machine is Microsoft’s little bitch
I actually enjoy playing with Windows and Active Directory. I think it is ahead in terms of management and needing hacky workarounds
I used to use Fedora on my Asus gaming laptop, and loved it. More recently I’ve chosen to switch over to Manjaro, because I wanted something based on Arch that was more lightweight than Garuda. Gotta love that Linux life.
Have you tried reborn or endeavor?
I tried EndeavourOS, but it didn’t fully support my hardware like Manjaro does
Interesting. I’ve only had one system that had hardware issue with any of them. And it was of course the finger print reader. Though I suppose it could be a WiFi issue.
The issue I had with my Asus ROG laptop was that EndeavourOS didn’t support the volume buttons on the keyboard, along with some other keys. It was annoying enough that I went to Manjaro.
Well yea, you turned off the windows search/Cortana/Bing bar, but now it’s called copilot/recall bar which you haven’t turned off yet.
/S
Soon I won’t have to anymore. This is the last Windows virtual machine I have that sometimes I have to use 😀
I have a virtual machine with WinXP and one with 98, for when I’m feeling nostalgic :)
Sorry to hear you have to use Windows… I’m still stuck on 10 but I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Mint Xfce and I’ll complete the move soon enough!
How would one go about setting up a win 98 at this point? Do you need an ISO of it already, or can you find that somewhere for that specific use?
I ask because I have a game that I want to play for nostalgia reasons (it’s a kids game from waaay back, but I remember it fondly, and I bet I’d do a touch better now) but I can’t get it to play in any compatibility mode or anything. It just flat refuses to launch.
You can find plenty of ISO files on archive.org. I’m not sure about the legality of it, so I’ll say I don’t condone doing it, etc. But some of them have been there for several years, so I think MS doesn’t care.
Just be careful about clinking links in the user comments. People have been known to post shady links and moderation seems to be lacking, from what I’ve seen.
Good luck getting your game to run! Oh, and long live archive.org!
For operating systems https://winworldpc.com/library is easier to find things in and has way faster download speeds
This is really cool, thanks for sharing!
At some point M$ allowed the free download of something called “Windows XP Mode for Windows 7”. It was some virtual machine or something. What matters is that it’s possible to extract an XP ISO from this, which I have successfully used to spin up a virtual machine! It still complains about a license key, though.
The reason I mention this is that this is still available on archive.org, and it’s signed by M$, so you know it’s legit. I don’t know if other ISOs available have such a receipt of authenticity. Probably, but I never cared enough to check, especially since I grabbed this from the official website while it was available.
Have you tried React OS?
OUR desktop wallpaper, comrade
They don’t do this shit in Linux.
Come join us, Comrade.
Hmm, on one of the KDE plasma updates, my wallpaper did change to their infamous teletubby wallpaper. Mind you, I was still using the default wallpaper at that time, and this was their new default wallpaper, so that’s probably why.
Dont say it… dont say it… dont saaaayyyy iiiiitt!!!
Have you considered Linux Mint?
Damn… sorry… was I the first to suggest it this time?
You were, but it appears OP is running Windows in a VM on Linux.
I already use Fedora Linux, and this Windows is in a virtual machine because sometimes my school requires me to use software that simply doesn’t run on Linux
That’s where Windows belongs now, in a VM.
“what is my purpose?”
“you stay in a vm until i need to update my mouse firmware”
In a VM, in a box, at the bottom of the sea.
*Gnome Boxes
I bought a cheap laptop for school just to run their windows anti cheat crap. Do you have to run something similar?
Fortunately, no. My school expects me to use XAMPP (a LAMP stack but without “L” cuz it’s on Windows) and Microsoft Office applications like Word, Access, and Excel.
While in the case of LAMP, I can install the individual services (Apache, PHP, MySQL) myself from command line, Microsoft Office applications won’t work like that.
I guess I should count myself lucky everything is expected in be turned in as a PDF and Google docs is used for everything else. The anticheat recognizes it’s running on a VM and throws and error.
Use Libreoffice where you can and just open it up in Word to verify
You’re right though. I recently installed it and it is so much more user friendly and does everything I need it to.
I hate that goddamn searchbar
Tell me about it. Useless. The whole start menu is fucked honestly. Can’t ever find anything you’re looking for. WHY THE FUCK WOULD I WANT BING WEB SEARCH RESULTS HERE!?!?
Just booted? Better wait 45 seconds and many failed searches, because DNS isn’t resolving.
Doesn’t matter that you are trying to launch a local program, it absolutely must delay the user experience until it can successfully resolve a DNS query.
Disgusting
don’t look now but they’ve probably installed a new version to Teams along with everything else, lol
I have two versions of Teams installed on my work PC. The regular old Teams that is apparently not long for this world anymore. And New Teams, which is exactly the same as old teams but on a different tech stack (?) That will replace the old one. MS has lost the plot, they have somehow a worse product management than Google.
There’s a third Teams
Teams Classic
Teams NEW
Teams Personal
Someone else in another thread I read recently, I think they worked for Microsoft at some point, said that it’s due for different departments all competing for corporate attention. Doing the big new thing to keep their job. Rather than just fine tuning for performance or longevity. Something like that.
But the old one will still be installed so you will just repeatedly get popups to switch
no no no, it asked your permission. It’s just that the “we added back the search bar, is that ok” dialog defaults to “yes” after some short time. Extremely fucking annoying change
the dialog:
I had no dialog
The dialog goes away after a short time defaulting to “yes I want the useless search bar”
It happened on all my PCs, I was infuriated
According to the screenshot the question is only asked embedded in the start menu. Windows 10 does that all the time without actually asking. Win11 is better at actually keeping the configuration.
All it did to you was cosmetic.
Windows 10’s “feature” updates consistently also re-enable the “fast startup” option on my machine when they install. Which, on my particular motherboard and SSD combination, causes Windows to take about 30 minutes to boot when left enabled for reasons I have never been able to comprehend. A regular cold boot only takes like 20 seconds, so… I definitely tend to notice when it does this behind my back yet again.
It also does it so that you no longer hit the bootloader. My one last dual boot machine is normally a Linux setup, but every so often I have to use the real MS Office tools (some collaborator or publisher demands it), so I boot windows. Then windows patches and stops actually hitting grub so it acts like a windows only machine until I fix whatever Microsoft fucks up yet again.
It’s time to move to a VM for this garbage. I just don’t neet it more than once every other year so I never seem to get around to nuking it.
How’s gaming on Linux working out lately? I have a newer Windows 11 machine and looking to jump ship, asap.
It’s really good. Proton works great for everything over tried to play. It’s pretty amazing actually
Ive been 100% linux since 2016, and while there are some pain points, the games that work, work amazingly well.
I have epic games, gog, steam games all working through launchers that work pretty perfectly. The biggest pain points are developers with intrusive anticheats.
Check the games you/your friends play against protondb.com or areweanticheatyet.com before committing yourself.
My favorite part is how it broke the Intel wifi card during my Linux install until I booted back into windows just to turn fast boot off. Maybe some hackery to skip initializing wifi hardware or something?
It’s a nice wallpaper though for what it’s worth.
My windows vm runs Cairo shell as the desktop and I’ve replaced the file manager with Dolphin and the command prompt with Konsole and notepad with Kate and it almost feels like a usable operating system
Kindows
Get used to it. It is not your machine, its Microsofts.
What VM software are you using?
“Boxes” from Gnome shipped by default with Fedora
your background? Since when is this Windows computer your computer? Microsoft has been very clear that we no longer own our computers if we choose to use Windows.
Chris Titus made this tool. I use it to debloat windows, disable all the telemetry, then pause all feature updates for two years and let only security updates through. As an added bonus (and if you want win11), he added a tool to create a micro windows iso. I am running the micro and it has been fantastic. I even removed defender and other garbage they force on people.
Time to switch to Windows 11 as Microsoft is going to make your experience as bad as possible
If you need Windows I would create Samba AD DC and then join the machine to the domain. From there you can configure it with group policy
