The Windows OS Thread - Formerly THE OS for gamers and normies, now sadly ruined by Pajeets

[jeff7989]

Got forced onto New Outlook at work because crucial plugin got updated and it's now broken on Classic. Dark mode is a fucking joke, if all you do is invert colors then you may shove it.
As if Inbox filters breaking every couple months wasn't annoying enough. Reply to all is abused at my place, please do the needful saar

I hate everything about Thunderbird.

What annoys you about it? I use it for my private stuff at home, so nothing crazy. Just avoiding having to login into shit multiple times.

>b-but only loonixtroons do that winblows is meant to just werk out of the box

I'd end up replacing stuff even on the most "it just werks" troonix distros, like braindead video player choices. Defaults are just that, defaults.

 

[The Ugly One]

What annoys you about it? I use it for my private stuff at home, so nothing crazy. Just avoiding having to login into shit multiple times.

The signature functionality sucks, every new piece I haven't touched putting defaulting to newest at the bottom is annoying, its inability to sync my GMail calender correctly and consistently is infuriating, incorrectly importing Teams invites is inexcusable, and there seems to be some key piece of it that is single-threaded and causes the entire UI to freeze from time to time. Those are the big ones.

 

[Betonhaus]

Have either of you tried mailbird or superhuman?

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

Because the Microsoft options are, or at least used to be, good enough, and it's not worth the effort to go find a replacement for something that isn't a pain point. And until New Outlook, Outlook was way better than Thunderbird. I hate everything about Thunderbird. Without exaggeration, there is not a single thing this program does that I like, and I use it every day. I used Outlook before the pajeets broke it and overwhelmingly prefer it.

Thankfully, perpetual Office 2024 still ships the proper Outlook program, and not the new stupid one.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is only supporting perpetual Office with updates for 5 years now instead of 10, probably to slowly push everyone to only using 365 and MS can kill perpetual Office.
Its a good enough solution until 2029 at least.

 

[Slav Power]

mailbird

Had a displeasure of encountering it at work. They limit the amount of accounts you can add in the free version. I swapped it for Betterbird and no one had any complaints so far.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Have either of you tried mailbird or superhuman?

I looked into Superhuman once but it seemed very much geared toward people who answer emails for a living - like, there are a trillion incoming emails to help@megacorp.biz and you're one of the minimum-wagers pasting in replies.
"Achieve superhuman performance, now you can reply to 7500 emails a day!"
Doesn't seem like the right thing for managing your own personal correspondence.

 

[Elysian]

Have either of you tried mailbird or superhuman?

If you’re on Windows I’ve also heard good things about Pegasus Mail, although I haven’t used it myself. It’s been around since like 1990, which is pretty cool.

 

[Betonhaus]

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

View attachment 7419452

Jeetware at work. Probably written more by Copilot then by Jeets.
Replaced the start menu with StartAllBack a while back which actually fucking works and doesn't lag out the system.
Fucking crazy how you need to pay for software to fix something core to the OS that's completely broken. Not some extra program like an image viewer.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

Jeetware at work. Probably written more by Copilot then by Jeets.
Replaced the start menu with StartAllBack a while back which actually fucking works and doesn't lag out the system.
Fucking crazy how you need to pay for software to fix something core to the OS that's completely broken. Not some extra program like an image viewer.

>paying for software
>when OpenShell and Winaero Tweaker exists

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

>paying for software
>when OpenShell and Winaero Tweaker exists

I tried OpenShell first, didn't like it. Winaero Tweaker is just a handy GUI to the Registry but that doesn't fix the main problems with Windows 11, which is the terrible new Start Menu, Taskbar and Explorer.
Is $5 too much? I thought being poor was for Linuxfags.

 

[Historical Strelkov]

I think when Windows 10 is over, I'm going to abandon Microsoft as much as possible, on the personal use side. I just can't deal with it becoming worse and worse over time, and I'm not interested in doing a fresh install of everything on this new bullshit.

ReactOS looks promising but its not there yet. I think I'll just bite the bullet and go Mac and suffer over there. "Getting windows to work right" is becoming Linux tier trouble for me, and the cost savings are not worth it.

 

[Demonslayer1776]

View attachment 7419451View attachment 7419452

I wonder if its restarting the JS runtime each time its opened. It isn't intended to be spammed, so it might start from scratch each time.

 

[Baraka Obama]

I think when Windows 10 is over, I'm going to abandon Microsoft as much as possible, on the personal use side. I just can't deal with it becoming worse and worse over time, and I'm not interested in doing a fresh install of everything on this new bullshit.

ReactOS looks promising but its not there yet. I think I'll just bite the bullet and go Mac and suffer over there. "Getting windows to work right" is becoming Linux tier trouble for me, and the cost savings are not worth it.

I tried to do Windows 10, I never ever liked it. As Windows 11 came along and the OS deteriorated further I moved back to Windows 7. So I'm a few years ahead of you on this.

My X570 system with a Titan X Pascal runs Windows 7 well, good for day to day stuff and legacy games & software. You can get Steam running with some caveats; DX12 games don't work but great for older games. RedFox is a nice backported Firefox. File Explorer is good. Last avenue for extended security updates, Windows Server 2008 R2 updates, will end in a few months, but IDK I'm sure it will be fine, there are people using Windows XP every day that should have computer AIDS by now but are doing ok. Windows 10 will be like this in a few years except explorer.exe will still be slow.

Game consoles for running other games, steam deck or bazzite is a good option for continued support on a modern steam library. It's not like Windows 11 is even good for gaming these days.

Then a macbook for everything else. The price is painful but my m1 macbook air is past 4 years old which is way longer than I've gotten out of any windows laptop and doesn't feel like it will be obsolete for a long time.

 

[Overly Serious]

ReactOS looks promising but its not there yet. I think I'll just bite the bullet and go Mac and suffer over there. "Getting windows to work right" is becoming Linux tier trouble for me, and the cost savings are not worth it.

I think Windows -> Mac is painful. There are many things wrong with modern Windows but Mac OS was never designed with multi-monitor and multi-tasking in mind. It's all so bolted on and unintuitive for power users. I really think for people ditching Windows, some variety of Linux is best. Mint for example is quite intuitive if you're coming from Windows and you can run it on the same hardware your Windows 10 OS was installed on.

Of course if someone is already very familiar with Mac that's a different story. But for me there's less of a transition from Windows -> Linux than Windows -> Mac, depending on the GUI you pick. Mac OS drove me crazy when I was forced to use it.

 

[Slav Power]

It isn't intended to be spammed

Which is most likely why this level of inefficiency is accepted given how the start menu does open instantaneously despite being written in React. When I did the Win key spam, yes, CPU usage noticeably jumped up. But when I only hit it once there was no noticeable increase. You could probably find similar inefficiencies in third party software that doesn't expect you to spam a bit of UI to stress test it, but is otherwise responsive.

Though the bigger sin of Win11's start menu is putting pinned programs and the program list into two separate views, with the pinned programs being the default view. Even if you don't have the "recommended" ads on there, you don't usually want to see the few programs you've pinned, you want to see all of them, right?

There are Windhawk mods that modify it so that you get closer to how it was in Windows 10.

Seriously, was it really that hard to do this? Though this is the positive edge of the double edged sword that is webshit. Yes, it is bloated, but you have a ton of ability to mod it. Kinda like people were able to really go all out and theme Steam into looking like the OG 2003 one once Valve moved everything, including the UI to webshit.

Still, not my problem as I don't touch the start menu anymore. Not on 10, not on 11. Keyboard launchers FTW, just switch to Flow Launcher and forget about start menus. You already know the name of the thing you want to run, right? Then just type a shorthand of it and hit Enter instead of navigating lists with a mouse. Even Microsoft is embracing them with PowerToys' Command Pallette. The Start menu is a dated concept back when everyone thought GUI's operated with a mouse would be the next big thing. Turns out combining keyboard oriented controls of TUI's with the flexibility of GUI's is the real revolution.

 

[Overly Serious]

Still, not my problem as I don't touch the start menu anymore. Not on 10, not on 11. Keyboard launchers FTW, just switch to Flow Launcher and forget about start menus. You already know the name of the thing you want to run, right? Then just type a shorthand of it and hit Enter instead of navigating lists with a mouse. Even Microsoft is embracing them with PowerToys' Command Pallette. The Start menu is a dated concept back when everyone thought GUI's operated with a mouse would be the next big thing. Turns out combining keyboard oriented controls of TUI's with the flexibility of GUI's is the real revolution.

That's why I liked the Windows 8 Start Screen. Instant full screen organised list of all my installed programs that served as a reminder - given I have a lot of regularly used software - then I'd just start typing what I wanted. Best of both worlds.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Even if you don't have the "recommended" ads on there, you don't usually want to see the few programs you've pinned, you want to see all of them, right?

You can get rid of the recommended section altogether with some policy tweaks in GPEDIT.

 

[Slav Power]

You can get rid of the recommended section altogether with some policy tweaks in GPEDIT.

I know, I just mentioned that to point out how even if you don't have that advertisement section (which is probably why MS redesigned the main menu this way) after removing it, the pinned start menu items are pretty much useless and you'll want to open the all programs list regardless. The Windhawk mod does what MS should've done from day one. You still get your programs list and you still get your advertisement real estate. A win-win for the slightly inconvenienced users and Microsoft's investors.

 

[They were once men]

is 7-zip still the fastest zip extractor software?