I just contributed to this. My gf bought her old work laptop as an employee perk for simple survivors-like games. It should have been perfectly capable machine (i5-8350u) and it’s compatible with Windows 11 so I went with that. I’m a Mac guy these days and but use Windows at work so I’m only familiar with LTSC versions. I wasn’t ready for how much of a shitshow it is.

Couple of hours later I had debloated it and disabled Defender yet it was still running dog slow. The laptop had trouble with Thunderbolt 3 docking station, not recognising anything beyond connected displays. Intel graphics drivers were so unstable games kept crashing left and right.

I got tired of fighting it and installed vanilla Ubuntu (didn’t want to disable Secure Boot). I stumbled on Bitlocker protection that I’m 100% sure is there to discourage people from switching. Microsoft set it up so that when you look at it funny you have to find unlock keys at your account page. Funny thing about that - when my gf was typing the address for that page in Safari with Google search on her phone the first autocompleting result was a scam page. I’m fairly sure Google does this to spite Microsoft. Fuck big tech but I digress.

After that it took an hour to install including figuring out that I had to add DisplayLink drivers for the dock myself. The process wasn’t great but I guess it’s a real niche case. Either way, this machine is now flying and Steam+Proton handle everything pretty well.

Last time I used Windows on desktop was around W8 and it wasn’t half that bad. Microsoft is doomed if they offer this kind of experience. I was critical of Proton before but I need to acknowledge that some working solution had to be created ASAP to get people off this dumpster fire.

The whole of those 2% are on Lemmy.

How do I know? Because they really like to tell you about it.