A Brief Encounter with Windows 11
My venerable old sticker-encrusted laptop finally died after ten years of faithful service through coffee shops, airports, office breakrooms et al. God rest its slimline DVD drive. It was an ugly beast and hardly top of the line when I got it, but it was a workhorse, with a decent keyboard, and all the ports you could possibly want.
(Well, it's no longer usable as a laptop anyway. Seems like its battery controller is knackered and it will only power up on mains with no battery connected at all. And yes, I've tried all the things.)
So I finally pulled the trigger and bought myself a new one. It came, as expected with Windows 11 pre-installed.
I dare say that you can figure out where this is going...
I've been using Linux as my daily driver on both my desktop and that old laptop for a while now, but I occasionally dual-boot into Win10 for the odd thing, mainly FLStudio since I've never gotten it to play nice with my audio interface when running in WINE.
Since I want to use this laptop for music stuff, amongst other things, I was considering either installing Linux in a dual-boot configuration (can be fiddly, and I'm lazy) or even just leaving Windows on it as-is. It can't be that bad, surely, I thought.
It's not like I'm a massive Linux nerd. The old laptop didn't meet the requirements for 11, and I peevishly didn't like the nagging to upgrade. But Win10 was fine. It worked. Hell, I even defended Windows 8. Win 8 had some nice improvements over 7, and the much-hated fullscreen launcher that everyone moaned about didn't bother me in the least. I could still hit the Windows key, type the first few letters of the application I wanted to launch, and hit return to launch it. It was barely ever on the screen for more than a few seconds.
I was willing to give 11 a chance, I really was, but the first time startup process was SO FUCKING ANNOYING. Gigabytes of updates to download, ads for Office 365, insistence that I sign in to an MS account, AI bullshit, cajoling to sign up for GamePass, asking me to turn on Recall (fuck. no.) etc etc. By the time I finally saw the desktop I was so pissed off that I almost immediately shut it off and began preparing a Linux install on a USB stick.
Which is where you find me now. I'm not even dual-booting. Fuck it. I'll fiddle with FLStudio some more and if I still can't get audio recording to work I'll look for an alternative. Bitwig looks nice,
I know it's been said a million times before but my god have Microsoft ever shat the bed.
I expect I could have persevered, disabled all the AI guff, ran de-bloat scripts and bullied it into something usable (at least until the next update turned all that shit on again) but I really can't be arsed.
Not that Mint is perfect. I had an issue with it freezing up which required a bit of searching and an adjustment to a configuration file. But at least it's not constantly trying to sell me shit I neither want nor need.
