Windows for Beginners

Operating Systems & Open Source Windows
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So I am one of the rare Zoomers in the L1 community. I like hearing Wendell, Krista, and Ryan talk about my generation from their perspective. I’m an older Zoomer though; and as a 1999 baby, I like to think of myself as an honorary 90s kid xD. Lame jokes aside, I bring my generation into the discussion because I think it has some pretty interesting implications. The earliest Windows version I remember using were the Windows XP computers in my elementary school computer labs. I don’t know if the computers we had in kindergarten were Windows XP though because they were quite older - the CRT kind that still had slots for floppy disks. Although I think they used HDDs for their main form of secondary storage. That was so long ago, though, and I am trying to remember through the perspective of a kindergartner. The upgrade to the first, second, and third grade computer lab was quite a leap though.

In eighth grade, however, my school system started trying to hop onto the Chromebook trend sweeping the nation’s schools. We were the guinea pig class that school year. It was a horrible experience because they chose like the cheapest HP Chromebooks that used micro USB for charging. The following year, they rolled out Chromebooks across all middle and high school classes - though thankfully they gave us all more rugged Dell Chromebooks that had a barrel charging adapter. I grew up without a personal computer of my own. For me though, it wasn’t because I didn’t want one; I really wanted one as I was always attracted to technology and found that it came pretty natural to me. I yearned to build my own gaming computer one day too.

In the summer of 2016, the start of my junior year, I was nominated for a STEM camp at a local 4-year university. Keep in mind that this was just a few months after the release of Windows 10 to retail. I remember it not being very well received initially. It got a little better, but Windows 11 is having a not-too-dissimilar reception right now. I feel like people forgot how terrible the jump from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was (Windows 8 doesn’t count). But Windows 8 and 10 started the jump to dark patterns in the Windows UI, installing apps without the user’s consent, Windows updates, etc. Anyway, at STEM camp, the thing that captivated me the most was programming this microcontroller by Parallax. (That hardware is like 8 years old by now for the record).

This was the point in which I realized that I loved programming. After the three-day STEM camp, we got to keep our boards. I explained to the professor leading the program that I didn’t have access to a PC that I could use to program it, and he recommended that I get a Raspberry Pi. This is where it all started.

TLDR

So to sum up, the chips were lining up in my life perfectly to turn me away from Windows. Windows 10 had just been released with all of its telemetry, ads, anti-features, and dark patterns. I hadn’t used Windows at all in like 4 years, and I just bought my gateway drug into Linux: a Raspberry Pi. Another thing that I haven’t mentioned before is that when we read 1984 during my senior year, I really became ostracized even further from using proprietary software. At this point, I am having to use Windows at work. I don’t like it at all. My primary gripe is because we develop Linux software and so we have to use VMWare VMs and it really sucks. If we don’t bite the bullet and run our IDEs or text editors inside the VM; we end up having to deal with weird path issues, ACL annoyances, and corporate IT policy breaking things. My company is a government contractor for the record…

TLDR for the TLDR

The other main issue I have with Windows is because I am not used to it. I only got a Windows machine of my own in 2018 when I graduated high school. Even then, I primarily used Linux on that machine. I’d made a rule to myself that I would only use the Windows install if absolutely necessary and I would store no personal data on the disk. (My ThinkPad T480 had an unused NVME slot that was meant to be used for a modem, but I slotted in an aftermarket 2242). I know this wasn’t a perfect way of keeping my data safe from the rampant data collection by Microsoft, governments, Lenovo, Intel, and who knows who else; but I was happy with this as a solution for mitigation. Since starting to use Windows at work, I have gotten more used to it, but I have some huge frustrations with it. I am looking for some advice on using Windows - both for my personal systems and for my work computer:

  • First and foremost, how do I get the settings menu to not have the stupid banner with buttons for OneDrive, Windows Update, and Bing Rewards. This doesn’t show up on my work laptop. It’s blissfully plain. I have a Windows 10 Pro license (which I upgraded for free from Windows 10 Home through Windows 10 Education edition).

    • There’s a few other issues like this where my work laptop has a seemingly better experience than my personal laptop. I’ll post them later as I think of them. In general, I’d like to get the Windows 10 Pro experience on my personal laptop that I get from the Windows 10 Pro on my work laptop.

  • How do I get Window tiling to work properly on Windows. I’ve tried using PowerToys fancy zones, but it’s worse than even KDE tiling.

  • Barring the tiling thing, is there a tiling terminal emulator that I can use on Windows - primarily as an SSH client? Or heck, is there a better SSH client? I don’t like Putty tbh. It looks ancient, and seems too obtuse to use. MobaXTerm is a common one we use at work, but I think it’s too busy.

  • My work computer seems to have an OpenSSH client installed on it so that I can use, for example Windows terminal, to SSH into the VM. That’d be cool to get an open ssh client for sshing into some of my personal Linux machines from my personal Windows device, but I can’t figure out how to get OpenSSH installed on the system like it is on my work laptop.

  • Do any of you have any Windows Power user tips and tricks for me? What about scripts and tools you use to debloat or improve the default settings via a script. (If my personal Windows laptop gets a virus, I don’t care as I can just reinstall it with only a loss of time).

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Please don’t take it personally, but I did not read all of that, it contains way too much subjective stuff for me, but I did manage to get the gist of your topic.

Just install LTSC editions of Windows and no one will have the issues they complain about on Windows.

By the way, Windows 7 plenty of times had issues with the update system, it would hog memory and CPU usage in the background or it can just stop working altogether and then you need to go and source a helper that would reset it and sometimes even reinstall it’s components such as the System Update Readiness tool from Microsoft.
Or you used DISM in CMD.

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most of those difference between your ‘work’ and ‘home’ pc are configurations based on group policy and active directory from your work. you can use local group policy on your home device to make more detailed configuration changes not available in menus. there are millions of options though so you will need to google what thing you are actively seeking to change with the term ‘local group policy’ to find it.

this issue typically happens when using the wrong powershell IE: x86 powershell on a x64 pc. that is, if you have verified that you have the OpenSSH package installed on your home machine. again, your work PC probably has setup and config for it automated.

Windows has a thing called AME Wizard for running playbooks that are used to debloat. a common one is Atlas. https://atlasos.net/ it is marked for gamers but i have used it to make windows usable on older hardware also.

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I would suggest MobaXTerm. Although it’s a bit heavy, but so far the closest to Linux level of terminal comfort.

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If you haven’t already, use Winaero Tweaker, it’s a suite of tools that does a lot of things including options for stripping out the ads and telemetry.

Personally, I did the easy thing of just installing WSL, normal default Ubuntu, and doing my SSH through that. I think for native Windows it might be using WinGet?

A friend of mine swears by the PowerToys tiling, I’ve found that with a lot of Powertoys the default is pretty eh and you have to mess with the settings to get it where it works for you.

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TBH I would suggest editing the OP or at least putting the bullet points in another post so people don’t get confused as to what your goals are, because the fact you’d rather not use Windows takes up most of the post.

  • Tiling, as in i3 et all behaviour? I don’t think exists where it’s automatic. But on W10 right now I can drag windows to edges and have at least the basic splits. Winkey + arrows works too.

  • Not sure what you mean by SSH Client, to be honest. But I’ve used Cygwin as a shell for both lftp and ssh use with no issues. I even have Alacritty working with fish shell just by pointing the appropriate line in the .yaml to the Cygwin fish.exe.

  • Cygwin has a lot of packages available, OpenSSH is among them I believe. Not sure whether that’s what you want or not.

  • I wouldn’t bother with “debloat” scripts, whenever I’ve seen people talk about them, it’s in one of two contexts. One is the script didn’t break anything, but they’re sick of having to reapply it after every single update or small change. Or it just broke things because it’s ripping things out of the OS and/or they also tend to keep poking and prodding and playing with it, and it unsurprisingly breaks. It’s okay to just use the machine for work tasks or whatever have you, it’s not going to be Linux.

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That’s a fair point. I knew it was quite long-winded, but I guess I wanted to share my tech journey. I also tried to be a little funny by putting a TLDR for the TLDR.

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I mean, you can certainly do that, and I’m not here to ruin the thread or anything but you stated you need help, so I’m keen to make sure you get that.

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The title was a bit of a joke too. I kinda hoped people would look at that like :face_with_monocle: I originally titled it “Windows Gripes”.

Yes there is a help aspect about it too, but that was an afterthought. I was just mostly stream of conscious throwing things out there and then I kinda thought, “Why not also ask and see what other people in the community do to their Windows boxes.”

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Yeah. So something I am not clear about is where I am asking questions about my work machine and my personal machine. I have two Windows VMs on a couple of Linux machines (one leverages VFIO, and it exists for a very specific use case), but other than that the only bare metal Windows machine is my old ThinkPad whose screen died so it can’t be used as a laptop anymore, sadly. It makes a great remote desktop machine. The other Windows VM I have is for using Microsoft Office on my laptop tbh (I’ve found Libre Office somewhat inadequate.

So me wanting to use Windows like I would use Linux is applicable only to my work machine. See we’re a company whose development environments exist on Windows, but the software runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is the annoying part. It is so frustrating, and bass ackwards to me. It just breaks everything and causes more weird problems that could all be avoided if we used Linux development environments. This is the area where I’m looking to make Windows run more like Linux. And if it just so happens that I can use those techniques on my uses of Windows at home, then great! I have had a Windows machine in some capacity since I started college, but it’s always been for applications and use cases that Windows Excels at. (Pun not originally intended, but now it is)!

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The sad part is its exponentially more difficult to switch a commercial enterprise to using linux, let alone even upgrade versions of windows.
(That is unless it drastically affects their profits)
Its not the users who have to be convinced but the bean counting trolls in corporate and the stockholders.

Point in case! Prior to my retirement I had streamlined everything and set up a computer with all the records and inventory control polished to perfection.
Documentation available to edit or print out.
Training procedures outlined and job run history records, equipment repair files.

All unrepairables were scrapped.
The rest of the guys in the shop absolutely loved it.

But corporate weasels scrapped the system because they couldnt control it.

You can make your system convenient to you but in a corporate world if you put any work documentation on it, it then becomes their property.
This is something people need to be aware of.

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Yes, this is infuriating. There’s a reason Linux user stats have been growing so fast for developers. The dev experience is horrible on Windows. Even just dealing with the file system is torture.

I know they won’t care about the other reasons, but the bean counting trolls don’t understand “free” (no license anyway)? Heck nevermind Windows, even just switching to LibreOffice would save some beans. Users would cry about it of course “OMG my crappy document doesn’t open correctly!”, if that happens, everyone knows it would be impossible to migrate it to a compatible open format. Impossible! (Never mind the fact that techies have to do much more complicated versions of this all the time to deal with change, and nobody asks us if we mind.)

In my experience the tech side also resists it, because they don’t want to support Linux PCs. There are some practical challenges but a lot of it seems like intellectual laziness.

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Or the fear of appearing ignorant in unfamiliar territory.
That is the driving force of resistance by techs.

On the other hand those of us who constantly shine our skill set are often looked on as wierd or trying to make them look bad.
Or our skills are often over exploited by those too lazy to learn.
Sure many of my client are unable to do many of the skills i have due to age or health, thats one thing.
But i also get a few " users" too

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Yeah for me, I am just the junior software engineer who outperforms all the other juniors and gets paid less, but get’s volunteered for the project with the shortest timeline and least amount of funds.

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P.S. omg. I am so used to Teams’ f’d-up markdown flavor that discourse is so refreshing.

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Yeah at my former employment the plants engineer ( an absolutes unmitigated round mouthed a$$ hat)
Was constantly dumping on my skill level because i didnt go to his college.
( that is until i repaired a machine they couldnt)
And it only took me 5 minutes.
And still it took me hacking his cellphone remotely until he figured out i know what im doing.

I often wished for work in a place that appreciated skills.
But im retired now so its their loss.

There are numerous programming languages out there, some dead easy and some a bit harsh.
But learning them is valuable.

Another skill quite important to industry and commands top pay is plc/ slc programming.
A skilled programmer in this field often travels from site to site programming automation equipment.
Often some factories use different platforms( modbus, profibus, allen bradley, siemans, etc.)

One visiting programmer recieved approx. $750 to nearly $ 1,000.00 per machine plus milage and perdiem

So yes it is a good field to get into.

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That’s incredibly stupid.

I’ve never thought much (or anything at all really) of the school someone went to. Until they’ve proven themselves they’re just another developer, I couldn’t care less about the credentials.

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In my experience the tech side also resists it, because they don’t want to support Linux PCs. There are some practical challenges but a lot of it seems like intellectual laziness.

I currently work IT support(Sys admin). Our main issue is usually that we don’t want end users to have root access to their systems(outside of special cases) and that we need to manage/audit them post deployment, usually with SCCM which you can’t do natively with Linux anymore as of 2019. I do know there are other solutions, but even the free ones still take time/money and most IT shops are at the bottom of the list when it comes to budget. I know if my work was to take on Linux as a supported OS we would need at least another sys admin and end-user tech and my dept isn’t going to pay for intern on a good year lol

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Sounds like intellectual laziness to me. Not sorry for being harsh. It’s just that I am a year into my career and already over the Windows at work. If we developed Windows software, then okay. But we develop Linux software. So all reasons not to are lame excuses for intellectual laziness.

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I don’t see how IT not having the man power/resources/budget=intellectual laziness. It takes a lot more than the willingness to learn. There is lot of back-end stuff that needs to be done/maintained and that takes time/man power. I’m not overworking myself anymore than I have to and I doubt your local IT is either.

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