I thought I’d chuck windows on my gaming laptop an Acer nitro 5 from last year, to see how it’s going do some bits I can’t on Linux VR, certain multiplayer games etc.
What a disaster! I’ve spent the whole day brute forcing drivers and generally dicking about trying to get my setup sorted.
Upon installation, Wi-Fi drivers don’t exist, so you cannot use the internet while installing if you’re on Wi-Fi. Mint’s had this since what 2006? But that’s cool, Cortana is here to chat away and not understand any requests. Once finally in the OS after 20 questions that could be considered harassment if it was a person, nothing was ready to go. Every single driver needed sourcing and installing.
People have the cheek to complain about Linux’s Nvidia install, literally two clicks on most distros if it isn’t already baked in. Go to website find driver, download click click click agree click wait more software click click wait.
Plug in my sound card OK it’s a bit old now UA-25 but nothing happens…hmm find obscure video partially install a driver from Vista then cancel the installation program so you can side load a driver from 8,1 but wait there’s more disable core isolation to allow the driver to work reboot into a now slightly more compromised OS.
OK plug in wheel again not new stuff G25 oh it works cool. Oh, no H-shifter OK download driver. “Can’t find device, ensure it’s plugged in”. Windows decided it knew better, downloaded its own driver that blocks the official one and loads a steering wheel as a gamepad…GG cool cool.
I do not understand why we still have this image that Windows is noob friendly, it’s such a convoluted obfuscated process to do anything. It does worse than nothing, it thinks it’s smart enough to carry out tasks on the user behalf and just bork it.
All of these issues are because I don’t have the new shiny things, but it really highlighted why I love Linux now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to install a distro and play on my 20-year-old peripherals
This is a good thing with modern Windows. You don’t want it online while it’s installing, you want to install, lock things down a bit and then connect.
Unless you’re using one of the more recent Win11 builds, where you won’t be able to finish OOBE without an internet connection unless you had the foresight to patch the installer beforehand.
Mind you, I haven’t installed a Windows Home OS since ever, but Shift+F10 and then using OOBE\bypassnro works just fine for me.
Yeah I mean I downgrade new computers to Windows 10 Enterprise and
patchauthenticate with MAS. I tried using Windows 11, but the taskbar pissed me off too much - I want separate tabs starting from the left, not combined, and everything always showing in the notification area. I was going to put up with the tab thing but having to manually set every single notification icon to not hide itself away was just a dealbreaker. I want to know what’s running, so I know to kill it.