back to article Stop. Look... Install Linux? The Reg solves Microsoft's latest Windows teaser

Fans eagerly awaiting the emission of Windows 11 have been treated to a teaser of today's big event, ending with Microsoft giving us all... the finger? "Feel what's next for Windows," exhorts Microsoft. Based on Vista and Windows 8, we'd have to say we're getting a sense of impending doom. Or perhaps we should be feeling …

  1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Aggregate audio device

    Something nobody talks about, but Windows has been lacking this essential feature forever. Is 11 going to be the one (or two ones)?

    1. Dacarlo

      Re: Aggregate audio device

      They could start by fixing the randomly vanishing and reappearing volume icon from the system tray.

      My personal wishlist also includes finally introducing nested virtualisation support on AMD processors for the general public. This preview BS has been going on far too long.

      1. Chris G

        Re: Aggregate audio device

        Volume icon?

        Oh, I thought that was a feature to see if you are paying attention.

        I would like the indelible weather widget to bugger off though.

        Whatever else they come up with, I suspect bloat and features you could never have imagined you needed will still be a thing.

        1. Anonymous Custard
          Headmaster

          Re: Aggregate audio device

          I would like the indelible weather widget to bugger off though.

          Right click on the task bar, go to "News and Interests" and select off.

          Of course it's still there in the code, but at least it's not taking up valuable task bar space any more and can be forgotten about.

      2. Snake Silver badge

        Re: disappearing volume icon

        That is very strange as on the four Win10 devices that I personally own, plus the one at my office, I have never have had that occur.

        I see it is possible, however. Have you tried the solutions on

        https://windowsreport.com/volume-icon-missing-windows-10/

  2. MyffyW Silver badge

    My wild guess: Windows to be a window manager and desktop environment atop a GNU/Linux OS (Debian for preference).

    1. NoneSuch Silver badge
      FAIL

      Time For a Real Upgrade

      My wild guess is I'll be converting everything over to Linux in the next few months. It's only a matter of time until they introduce a monthly "access" fee for Win 11 and they can kiss my posterior for that.

      I'll keep my Win 10 box for Steam / VR games that are unsupported on my distro, but that's it.

      1. Youngone Silver badge

        Re: Time For a Real Upgrade

        I have had a wee play with the leaked Win11 iso in a virtual machine, and almost everything prompts a login to the Microsoft cloud.

        POP_os seems to support the Steam games I play, so once Win 10 is out of support I'll probably switch to that full time.

      2. Sandtitz Silver badge
        Stop

        Re: Time For a Real Upgrade

        "It's only a matter of time until they introduce a monthly "access" fee for Win 11 and they can kiss my posterior for that."

        Hah. Some zealots have been claiming the monthly fee coming "any minute now, ya hear!" since Win10 was announced. About as much reality as with the year of the linux desktop thing.

        "I'll keep my Win 10 box for Steam / VR games that are unsupported on my distro, but that's it."

        Why? The acolytes' have given several sermons at this very site how Wine actually runs everything harder, better, faster, stronger - than Windows ever could.

    2. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      This makes sense - they successfully tried a similar thing with Edge.

    3. oiseau
      Stop

      Wild?

      ... wild guess: Windows to be a window manager and desktop environment atop a GNU/Linux ...

      Wild you say?

      Debian?

      Can you imagine the sort of abomination the mating of a Windows OS and Poettering's pet virus application systemd could spawn?

      Think septicaemia and osteosarcoma at the same time.

      O.

  3. Jason Hindle

    Will WSL become LSW?

    Enquiring minds need to know.

    1. CountCadaver Silver badge

      Re: Will WSL become LSW?

      I reckon its got to be coming, MS certified compatibility layer - way to easily get corporate customers on the new version - enhanced stability, lightning fast response, rock solid security and certified compatibility with leading business applications - get every PHB boss in the land reaching for the company credit card....

    2. myithingwontcharge

      Re: Will WSL become LSW?

      "Will WSL become LSW? "

      A subsystem is something that runs under something else... i.e "Windows Subsystem for Linux" already implies Windows running under Linux. The name has already been chosen to reflect the final goal.

    3. jake Silver badge

      Re: Will WSL become LSW?

      In my mind it doesn't matter. I have made Redmond superfluous to my requirements.

  4. DailyLlama

    wishes...

    I just want them to get rid of all the Candy Crush style nonsense from Professional and Enterprise editions.

    Give us a stable platform to work from, without all the home user junk in it. Not that I want it at home either, tbh...

    1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      Re: wishes...

      oh and the "telemetry"! Hope you'll be able to fully disable it.

      I don't work on Windows purely because I don't know what they are sending to uncle Sam.

      1. Zarno

        Re: wishes...

        To this day I can not understand how a law firm, county court, etc can use windows with the telemetry.

        And no, most law firms/independent lawyers/county offices do not shell out for the Enterprise version where you can cut telemetry off. It's well outside a normal operations budget unless you meet the minimum seat requirements.

        That may have changed recently, but it was like that around the transition from 7 to 10.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @"the Enterprise version where you can cut telemetry off"

          Reduce perhaps but never disable completely, that being said one wonders what data MS and Friends have yet to harvest from their users.

        2. jake Silver badge

          Re: wishes...

          "To this day I can not understand how a law firm, county court, etc can use windows with the telemetry."

          Indeed. One wonders why Corporate Lawyers even let the thing in the door ... Especially seeing as the EULA clearly states that anything that goes wrong is NOT the fault of Microsoft, but rather it's YOUR fault for choosing to run their product. Presumably this includes Microsoft's cloud leaking all the telemetry they slurped.

    2. oiseau
      Facepalm

      Re: wishes...

      ... a stable platform to work from, without all the home user junk ...

      It's already available.

      It is called Linux Devuan.

      O.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: wishes...

        I much prefer Slackware, but yes.

    3. blah@blag.com

      Re: wishes...

      "I just want them to get rid of all the Candy Crush style nonsense from Professional and Enterprise editions.

      Give us a stable platform to work from, without all the home user junk in it. Not that I want it at home either, tbh..."

      I prefer Linux for most things but for work (& gaming pretty much) I have to use Windows. It's not so bad, I install Classic Shell and then have to tweak lots of stuff (telemetry, Cortana off, use UAC, etc, etc) but I end up with a fairly bare install that has crashed less than five times in the last 3 years. Not as stable as my linux boxes but good enough.

      I'm actually quite curious about running Android apps if it's as easy as install/run.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: wishes...

        "I have to use Windows."

        No, you don't. You choose to use Windows.

        1. Anonymous Kiwi

          Re: wishes...

          There are plenty of applications people's businesses force on them that don't run through WINE...

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: wishes...

          There's still a lot of situations where Windows is forced on the users and the whole infrastructure is so locked-in to MS products that there's no alternative...

          I'd love nothing more than to ditch the truly awful Win 10 machine I'm forced to use for my work but even when physically present in the office I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to stand any chance of making a Linux machine connect and then the security team would almost certainly notice and pay me a visit.

          But remotely (which I do due to the pandemic), the only way in is via Microsoft DirectAccees which so far as I'm aware is 100% proprietary and Windows-only.

          I think it's a non-starter. Even if I got lucky and found a Linux client it would need valid certificates and quite likely an AD trust relationship - I'd have a very slim chance of convincing anybody to approve doing that.

        3. Martin
          FAIL

          Re: wishes...

          You choose to use Windows.

          At home, possibly. But at work, if I had said to my boss "Sorry, I choose not to use Windows", he'd have said "Fine. I choose not to employ you."

          Fortunately, I'm now retired, so I can now, finally, choose not to use Windows.

  5. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    That video...

    ...just goes round and round in an endless loop and eventually I had to terminate it.

  6. Fignuts

    A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

    “The web itself was born and grew up on Windows” – Satya Nadella, Windows 11 announcement

    I'm not sure history agrees with that statement in any way considering Microsoft purloined the code for Internet Explorer from Mosaic after Bill Gates backed off on his rhetoric:

    "The Internet? We are not interested in it." - - Bill Gates 1993

    "I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least 10 years." - - Bill Gates 1994

    "Today's internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway" - - Bill Gates; excerpt from "The Road Ahead" in 1995.

    To say the web was born and grew up on Windows is an outright falsehood and an absolute slap in the face to the work and legacy of Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

    If Microsoft's attempts at revisionist history (optimistically) or outright falsehood (more likely) come out of announcement videos like today's, one can only wonder what else they are willing to mislead us on.

    Tragic.

    1. David 132 Silver badge

      Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

      “The web itself was born and grew up on Windows” – Satya Nadella, Windows 11 announcement

      Indeed. Didn't Sir TB-L do his early development of the WWW on a NeXT cube? Bit rich of Nadella to be retrospectively rewriting history like that. War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength. We have always been at war with Oceania...

    2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

      I was a subscriber to Byte magazine when it was distributed directly from the States. I had the special edition which majored on Smalltalk. (If only I'd kept it!).

      Smalltalk was the precursor of all GUI systems, developed by Xerox.

      Nadella should know better.

      1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

        Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

        https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

      2. jake Silver badge

        Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

        "Smalltalk was the precursor of all GUI systems, developed by Xerox."

        Not quite. Smalltalk is a programming language, not an OS.

        More precisely, Smalltalk-76 (later Smalltalk-80) was the development environment that ran on the Xerox Alto. The actual graphical operating system itself is called the Alto Executive.

        Note that while there were prior contenders for the first Graphical User Interface (Sketchpad and NLS come to mind), the Alto was the first Graphical Operating System.

        If you want to drive your favorite Apple user nuts, point out that their favorite computer interface is just a GUI pasted onto a CLI ... it doesn't actually have a graphical operating system.

      3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

        What are you getting at? The WWW is not a "GUI system", and has nothing to do with Smalltalk.

        AHI's NLS is often cited as the first GUI. It was publicly demonstrated in Englebart's Mother of All Demos in 1968. Smalltalk was first released in 1972. So Smalltalk certainly was innovative if it could have been the precursor of a system introduced four years earlier.

        GUIs are not inherent to Smalltalk. In fact I think Smalltalk-76 was the first one to have anything GUI-related in it.

    3. Richard Plinston

      Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

      > To say the web was born and grew up on Windows is an outright falsehood

      Not only that but Windows 95 initially attempted to replace the internet with Microsoft's own network, the original MSN. To access the internet one needed to buy the Plus pack or use 3rd party software. Later releases did include internet access because MSN failed.

    4. Denarius

      Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

      indeed. As Netscape appeared I grabbed a copy of the last Mosaic browser for comparison. Even by Win3.1 standards it fell over remarkably often and quickly. No wonder Internet Exploder had that moniker.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

        Microsoft have been rewriting history for years, I am surpised only in that you are suprised.

        Classic M$ is to buddy up with another company that has something they want, get access to source then recode and release their own version with the M$ stamp on it then wait to see if buddy can raise funds sufficent to challenge the grab in court.

        US business has been reliant upon justice being all about the "golden rule" (he who has the gold makes the rules) since I can remember

    5. jake Silver badge

      Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

      "an outright falsehood"

      You are entirely too kind.

      I would say it's fucking bullshit, and Satya Nadella is a goddamn liar.

      "Tragic"

      No. Marketing re-inventing history. Or, as I said above, fucking bullshit and goddamn lies.

  7. carl0s

    More Edge pushing

    I expect the main feature of Windows 11 will be more things that automatically open up Edge and completely ignore your choice of browser. Like the current start menu in Windows 10, the search box, and the new weather bollocks widget.

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