Windows 11

[Santilli]

I can't believe this Windows Media Player Legacy actually made it easier to rip a CD to mp3 then using Exact Audio Copy!!!!
God is amazing sometimes...

 

[Santilli]

Sidebar: Went back to a full sized NuPHY V6 D3 Too much time on the old full sized keyboards, but, need the stiff switches, and the lights. Used the same, big letter caps...

 

[Santilli]

WHY, sometimes, does Win 11 take forever to boot?
Then goes back to loading quickly, when no changes have been made?????

 

[Mercutio]

WHY, sometimes, does Win 11 take forever to boot?
Then goes back to loading quickly, when no changes have been made?????

It might be making a boot optimization pass. Either that or you got some updates that installed silently and it did more than usual back-end work during your next startup.

With regard to low cost, reasonably powerful systems, I can't recall seeing mini PCs with Ryzen 3550H CPUs before, but Amazon has several of them today, 16GB/500GB systems that are around 40% faster than an N150 and prices around $210. I wonder if this is a response to the cost per unit for newer but much more common Ryzen 5500 and 5800 mini PCs going up.

 

[Mercutio]

One of my customers had an issue that it took me a couple days to find and deal with. They had a bunch of weird, invalid text in a database they're using, starting a couple weeks ago. Turned out that one of their employees has turned on an AI translation feature in Edge, such that it was taking their text input and translating it into Polish. The text looked right on their screen as they typed, but it was being translated before it was sent.

So that's a new thing we all have to look out for.

 

[fb]

Interesting with AI auto translate, especially on the database side if you don't store the input as unicode (or do not store it properly as unicode).

 

[Mercutio]

What my customer actually noticed was "funny characters" and partial nonsense, which they assumed were data corruption, showing up in a daily report. I was terrified I had bad RAM in a server until my customer let me know that one of his employees had a bunch of the same weird characters and nonsense in emails they were sending.

The user swears they have no idea how the translation software got turned on. The only non-English language I even occasionally encounter here in the US Midwest is Spanish.

 

[mubs]

Apparently, the next version of Windows will be essentially immutable, just as ChromeOS, Android, iOS, MacOS and some versions of Linux are. The idea is that there will be a compatibility layer for software that expects to make changes inside the Windows directory. On one hand, this isn't a terrible idea from a stability standpoint.

On the other hand, the people doing this think OneDrive and Recall should be part of the OS.

Microsoft dropped future support for Windows Deployment Toolkit a couple days ago. It's not the end of the world for me because I can get away with a lot in terms of running automation with an unattend.xml and as much Powershell as I need, but I'm still disappointed because it was a great and useful free tool.

There's a fairly substantial amount of Windows-related functionality I can't access because it's tied to Azure (e.g. Intune), something none of my customers are big enough to want to buy into. Windows does not look like a professional future for me unless something changes drastically about cloud versus on premesis software.

Time to install Linux in a VM and start getting used to it??

 

[Mercutio]

Time to install Linux in a VM and start getting used to it??

Linux from the end user side isn't genuinely too different from Windows or MacOS. There are a couple small exceptions, one being that there really aren't official clients for cloud storage and another being locked out of full-fat desktop MS Office. A variety of third party clients for storage exist and you can use the web version of MS Office and/or look at GDocs or LibreOffice, but I know a lot of people who have spent their whole lives seeing ever problem as Excel-specific solutions.

Content creation on Linux can be a headache. Resolve Studio, Reaper, Inkscape and Affinity Photo work but most tools for creatives don't. A few types of games don't work (mainly online-only titles with anticheat systems). Other than that, the main thing is just knowing that the filesystem outside home folders is different and the minor annoyances of having a new Window Management system. The same people who already aren't configuring VMs or setting up private server applications will continue to not do that on their Fedora or Mint or whatever system.

 

[Mercutio]

Several US States and multiple countries are in the process of trying to force OS vendors to add an age verification tool to their account generation process. This is something that could put the nail in the coffin for Local Accounts on Windows, but moreover, how the hell would niche OSes like NetBSD handle these requirements?

I want to say that my main Google account is more than 20 years old and that attestation should be enough, but my fear is that, should this be implemented, lawmakers would add more and more identity information to the requirement, which could be a real problem for all sorts of reasons, chief among hem gender identity and race.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, apparently Newsom himself said that the law wasn't enforceable as-is because it was so vague, but urged it to be pushed through anyway as it can be amended later on. Or something.

I find it entertaining that a BSD fork responded by modifying their license to prohibit use in California.

My question is, how do you enforce this for servers, which have no real primary user to verify? Or for corporate-owned machines? If there's a way to mass-tick a flag saying "this user is an adult, trust me bro" it'll be found and abused immediately, rendering the law moot.

 

[Mercutio]

Think about all the weird stuff we use that technically has an OS and probably talk to the internet. Copy machines, medical and industrial equipment, routers and switches, IoT gear... how silly is this going to have to be?

I am mostly concerned what this does for the state of anonymity online and perhaps it will be EU privacy regulations that win out with these things, but as I understand it, the EU wants to implement a digital identity system that has just as many issues as anything else. Mostly, I just don't want to be force to sign up for any sort of universal ID I have to use on the internet that will be tracked and controlled by the State, particularly this State. No one who has an interest in civil liberties should be OK with this and yes I do think that letting non-adult see boobs and trans and dead bodies and racism on gross web sites is the price we have to pay for that, because the alternative is an infrastructure for censorship and State-sponsored repression.

 

[sedrosken]

I saw all kinds of stuff I was never meant to online as a kid and while I can't say I turned out fine I am a functional tax-paying member of society. I completely agree.

 

[jtr1962]

I saw all kinds of stuff I was never meant to online as a kid and while I can't say I turned out fine I am a functional tax-paying member of society. I completely agree.

Even before the Internet kids got their fill of that stuff looking at dirty magazines. I remember the time me and my siblings stumbled across my father's stash. My mother of course went ballistic that he even had that stuff in the house, especially with young children around.

 

[Chewy509]

The thing is, I see Microsoft wanting to implement this with Windows, especially as a way to kill local accounts. (which imho is a shit idea).
GNU/Linux and the *BSDs will simple put a notice on the download page stating that the software can't be used in California. (or any other state that wants to do the same). IIRC this is a loophole in the legislation.
The interesting one will be Apple and its devices. If using iCloud it's currently optionally and really is a 'trust me bro' field, but for local accounts (remember of macOS, all accounts are local accounts), will it ask for the age? Apple with it's privacy focus, and about protecting users privacy being a key tenant (remember the push back against US three-letter agencies and law enforcement), it'll be interesting to see what Apple does.

 

[sedrosken]

Even before the Internet kids got their fill of that stuff looking at dirty magazines. I remember the time me and my siblings stumbled across my father's stash. My mother of course went ballistic that he even had that stuff in the house, especially with young children around.

I’m not even talking about the kind of stuff that gets printed and sold behind the counter. No, I’m talking about the shock sites and various prototypes to stuff you’d find on LiveLeak now.

I won’t name anything in specific, and I doubt I’ve seen anything outright illegal more than just disgusting, but none of it is great for a developing mind. It was just the reality of the internet in the mid-2000s.

 

[Mercutio]

Brazil's OS-based age verification rules take effect on March 17, 2026. California, New York, Colorado and Illinois have proposals for OS-level age verification. These laws are being framed as protection for children. They WILL pass. There's not a doubt in my mind that age is only the first step and OS vendors will end up with mandates to provide even more demographic information.

 

[ddrueding]

Linux seems to be getting good at gaming just in time.

 

[sedrosken]

Linux seems to be getting good at gaming just in time.

In a couple years, any platform that can't give the "are you an adult" flag won't be allowed to load most websites, most likely.

 

[Mercutio]

As I mentioned in the Gaming thread over in the Pub, CachyOS is really fuss free, especially for something based on the normally extremely fussy Arch Linux. I had to do one entire thing to enable GoG, Epic and Amazon game support and controllers and bluetooth both worked out of the box on systems with AMD GPUs.

I just ran across AtlasOS, which is a Playbook of customization steps from a Baseline Windows Pro ISO. I haven't done anything with it yet, but I'm interested enough to link it here. It might be a good intermediate step for you guys not ready to contemplate Linux yet.

 

[Mercutio]

Apparently, Microsoft is now saying that 32GB is the baseline for "worry free" Windows Gaming PCs.
That does actually make sense, but I'm seeing NUC-type client systems shipping out with 4GB RAM than I did 10 years ago when that might've actually been acceptable.

 

[Mercutio]

Microsoft has an internal Windows build focused on improving Windows 11 "pain points" including overall Explorer and GUI responsiveness and a de-emphasis on AI components. No, we can't see it. But they're working on it. Maybe it'll make its way to public testing. Maybe they'll turn the whole UI into a Copilot prompt instead with a real-time video feed of how many kilowatt hours your request consumed. I consider both to be equally likely.

 

[Mercutio]

It's fairly tangential to Windows 11 as such, but the newly announced version of MacOS does not support any Intel hardware. If they aren't releasing x86 binaries, that's the end of the road for the Hackintosh community as well, and that's one less choice for the rest of us as well.

 

[mubs]

W11 had downloaded updates (2nd Tuesday stuff). I asked it to install. rebooted, and in a black screen it showed the progress. However, it got stuck at 40%. After a long time it said something went wrong and it would uninstall. Rebooted a couple of times and came to the log in prompt and booted normally.

I did a manual update check, and it downloaded the patch again - security update KB5094126 (26200.8655). Then the whole thing repeated. Is there a problem with this update or is it something specific to my PC?

 

[sedrosken]

Looks like one they're reporting some problems with. Some people are having it halfway install and kill their start menu, other people are like you and having it revert itself in a loop.

 

[Gödel]

I signed up for the 1-year Win 10 security-update extension.

I'll be interested to see if MS has squashed Flyby11 by the time I try to install it next year.

MS just quietly extended the Win 10 extension by another year:

From https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/extended-security-updates: "You can enroll in ESU any time until the program ends on October 12, 2027. If you’re already enrolled, your coverage will automatically continue through that date—no action needed."