I’m helping a family member build a pc. He wanted to use Windows because “Linux can’t play games” despite me having a perfectly good gaming laptop running Linux that runs all my games, even graphically intensive ones.
2 days later, no game has been played yet. We can’t even get steam to start. I even installed Arch on a sata ssd I donated just to verify the pc parts actually work (took less than an hour). It took 1 and a half days to even get the Windows 11 installer to get past like the 3rd screen.
Fucking fuck. Dealing with all this fucking bullshit is far worse than not being able to play a few trashy anticheat pay 2 win games. The anti Linux circlejerk is real.
So I install windows all the time for work but I noticed something. We found an old laptop running windows 7. It has an inferior CPU, slower ram compared to our windows 10 and windows 11 systems. The only thing similar is both use integrated graphics.
The 7, which does struggle to boot, is far more responsive than our enterprise 10 and 11 systems after startup. The search function works much better on the 7. I wasn’t served a single ad or suggestion on the 7.
This is mostly an observation and it’s completely anecdotal, I just enjoyed the 7 more than the modern windows experience. In fact it felt closer to my Steam Deck which has now pushed me over to just dumping windows at home and trying to go Linux only.
Windows 7 was fantastic. It was the last windows OS I liked. My work is almost exclusively like 10 year old i3 systems that originally ran fine on 7 but after they were updated to 10 are sluggish and barely work.
Windows 7 had basically no bloat, functional search in the start menu, and looked rather nice. 10 is an infested dog by comparison.