Windows 11 has reached an absurd level of obnoxiousness with mandatory accounts, bundled random microsoft crap, and intrusive offers to upsell me on office360 and whatnot. Especially for an OS I have to pay for, this is pretty ridiculous.
I only have Win11 on a machine as a "Steam HAL" for gaming. Given Valve's progress on SteamDeck I am hopeful that within a few years I'll be able to ditch Windows entirely and still have everything I need for PC gaming.
I can't speak highly enough for the steam deck. I've got a gaming rig that I haven't used for gaming at all since I got a deck. I've been killing my backlog, plus it's more convenient in every way. Wife loves it too. I can be present with her watching her shows on the couch instead of in the back of the house out of earshot. The thing is just fantastic. I'm definitely preordering their next version.
@swetland agree. I’m using it as a daily driver in large part because I need to to increase dogfooding population for work stuff but it seems to be in constant incremental decay. WSL works remarkably well but almost every consumer facing GUI change feels bad. Notepad is laggy now. Start menu makes slow http requests (even with most stuff disabled). Lots of broken GUI that used to work (context menus, tray icon persistence), it goes on.
@raggi@swetland I can only assume the move these days for windows is to get a license for whatever the enterprise sku is, and slipstream the zillion registry knobs required to turn off all the spam. Surely, surely enterprise IT doesn't put up with their users constantly writing in about the latest thing their computer pestered them about, so there has to be some way to turn it off... Right?...
@raggi@swetland Ah, yeah, makes sense that an AD domain would be the thing you must have to keep everything in check. Sigh.
Thankfully Proton's become good enough that even though my personal desktop still has a windows install on it, I don't think I've booted into it once for the entire lifetime of the computer. I should probably pull the trigger and reclaim the half-terabyte...
@raggi@danderson@swetland AMD is a lot better yeah, it's nearly plug and play to the point that people are confused that they don't need to install a driver
@cadey@raggi@swetland that's certainly been my experience, although I also don't tend to chase the "all bleeding edge features fully enabled" gaming experience, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing? But 6800XT plus steam, I rarely encounter something that doesn't work.
The main caveats I'm still aware of are anything requiring anti-cheat, and old/janky games require about as much cajoling as they do on Windows.
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