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There are plenty of youtube videos from lots of tech OS experts ( of varying skill levels 😉 ) telling you how to tame & restrict Win 11.
I have used some of them & they have the desired results, so far as I can tell.
🙂
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Why not try another operating system, specifically the excellent Linux and one of its many distributions (versions)?
I put up with Windows 11 for two and a half months before I absolutely hated it and gradually replaced it with Linux Mint.
Linux Mint is well-designed, elegant, and very user-friendly, and my PC's performance (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti) is much better.
Plus, DAZ Studio and Blender run without any issues.Linux eh?
I'm pretty astute with computers, having started in the 70's on an IBM 1130 mainframe. After increasing dissatisfaction with Windows 8 a few years ago, I gave Ubuntu a try. I formatted my drive and went all in, no dual boot. Right off the bat I ran into a problem. Once it was installed, all the icons where huge. In Windows you hold down a couple of keys and the scrollwheel makes the icons bigger or un-bigger....easy-peasy. I searched for the answer in Linux and was told to download some script, insert it in *here* in some obscure file then recompile the kernal....What!? That's crap. I just lived with the big icons. I went looking for an image browser similar to Windows programs like ACDSee Classic, or Irfanview or XnView. I found viewers but no browsers that would show me a directory with thumbnails. And this was the tip of the iceberg with Linux.
1) There's no commonality. Ever developer, because of their huge effing ego thinks that HIS GUI is the best and everyone should use it. I ran into stuff that was ridiculous and arcane. One had no controls whatsoever that I could find. Many expected users to know a ba-zillion obscure text commands. In Windows EVERY program comes with the line of dropdown boxes at the top left allowing users to get working immediately.
Don't even ask about common file formats or shortcuts.
2) Linux user groups and help forums are full of pompous assholes who make it their hobby to insult new users. Newbie friendly forums are anything but.Linux users are like car nuts. We go out and make it a badge of honour to fiddle with carburettors and manually set timing. We do all our own work, hours, days, weeks, months (years in some cases) of it to go for a Sunday drive. We love it and look down on people driving boring automatics with no style. I still have the first car I bought 50 years ago. People in 'regular' cars aren't stupid or lazy, they just have no interest in working on them. It's a transportation tool and they expect to climb in, turn the key, put it in Drive and go, letting the car handle all the boring mechanical stuff of shifting and attending to engine management.
Linux users are like us car nuts, they love fiddling and pounding away at the command line. It's a point of pride to them and they look down on Windows users. I just want to get work done on my PC and I expect the OS to take care of all the behind-the-scenes stuff. I'm not stupid or lazy, I just have no interest in fiddling with the guts. I don't write programs, that's a programmer's job.
Then there's the complete lack of usable programs. Windows users can grab a mind-boggling array of great software for any conceivable task. For graphics work it's almost overwhelming. Linux users love to scream hysterically about the billions of programs for Linux. Ok...lets see....there's millions of command line programs, we'll forget about those. Then there's the never ending tidal wave of text editors. Every programmer or wanna-be programmer has his own text editor that is virtually identical to the other million text Linux editors, differing only in some obscure way. Real, honest-to-goodness, usable programs that normal folks would want?....cue the sound of crickets. And don't talk to me about the Gimp. It's apply named as it is a gimpy offering. I used Photoshop professionally and the gimp is a joke, it lacks so many tools and capabilities that I needed as a pro. When I tried it, it would only display one image at a time and it had no CMYK support...how the hell do you print?
Drivers? I had a driver for my NVidia graphics card that would stop working every day as if it was on a time clock. It would come back to life after a moment (thankfully) and the forums complained that it was NVidia's fault. I don't care who's fault it is, I just want it to work.After all that, I grabbed a hacked version of Windows 7 and installed it. It still runs on my older PC that I use online (this one right now) and I have no problems with it. I have a similarly hacked version of Windows 10 for my offline graphics computer. It also runs fine.
If you're a serious geek and love fiddling and command lining, then have a ball with Linux. One of the biggest problems with Linux is that there's a million versions. That's why there's no commonality. There isn't even one damn desktop. Many programs only run one one version. That's crap. I have a million more complaints but I'm sure I've made my point here.If Linux wants to be taken seriously and become a viable, usable OS it needs to be wrangled into one damn release that looks and works the same, with ALL programs meeting a common standard of functionality.
And it's not so much Windows itself that people hate, it's Microsoft. This recent spurt of greed has caused the present surge of attempts to control users. Thankfully the hacker world is wrestling it under control and giving it back to us.
Rank:Ethiopia, I agree with you on certain points, but, unless I am mistaken, your words sometimes strike me as a bit condescending, even though you do not know me.
Ya....I do tend to go too far. I wasn't intending to insult anyone. I feel that the car hobby is the best way to see the difference. I can put dozens of hours fiddling with my old car just to go into town for shopping at the Saturday morning market, and I'll drive every kilometre with a big stupid grin on my face. My wife will get into the Honda, push a couple buttons and get to the same place. She's not less capable or lazy, she just wants to get somewhere.
I feel the same way about Linux. I hate all fiddling needed to do stuff in Linux and I hated that every damn program worked differently and required a LOT of fiddling.
I guess I see it like having all major controls on cars in the same positions and operating the same way. Linux is like every car manufacturer putting the controls in wildly different places in/on/under the car.
Sometimes having so many different releases is NOT a good thing.Rank:Ethiopia, your message does you great credit.
Not if that keylogger is stripped out like it is in custom versions designed to remove all that nonsense. But only certain distributions can be hacked up to a certain version of 10 or 11. After that it's really hard to hack them.
You chose possibly the absolute worst distro of Linux. I know it's "highly recommended", but Ubuntu is a resource hog, and one of the worst when it comes to privacy. So much so that many other distributions have blocked the Ubuntu repository so you can't even use their apps on another distribution. If you want a clean experience, one of the best is Linux Mint. It's easy to customize, easy to learn, and it has a user friendly interface, not to mention compatability with Debian repository and others. I know some people prefer other distros but that's been the most hassle free IMHO, and I've been messing with Linux since the infamous Lindows. Then later on I tried out stuff like Gnu, before they started to release distros with a complete install and you still needed to boot it up from the command line terminal. Like if you wanted to have it automatically boot you had to compile a script that bypassed the terminal by automating it. There was no such thing as turning the PC on and going straight to the desktop. Now it's a lot easier with most distributions to have a Windows-like experience in Linux. My early experienc with Linux was also back when you could mix and match application packages from just about any distribution you wanted to, as long as you could access the other repositories. Now that's a lot more limited because not all distros are compatible. of course there are some things you can't do as well in Linux as in Windows, but it's not by much. With Wine, it's even easier now to run Windows programs on Linux, just very technical. But that's also a potential security risk.
@josiebethlewis2019, Thanks for that reply, you illustrate perfectly why Linux is still regarded as a geek-only tool. When you use "In my opinion" you nail it. Your opinion, no matter how well versed and knowledgeable you are, is just one of millions(?) of opinions held by the Linux faithful. They argue endlessly about which release/version is best (for what?) and which version should a newbie use. When I was looking for a release, the widely held opinion was that Ubuntu was the one true and holy version to use.
Again, my garage is chocked full of special tools that few people know how to use. Years ago I rebuilt my wire wheels; I aligned and tightened all 72 new spokes, adjusted their tension and trued the rim to a higher degree of accuracy than the original build. I rebuilt the engine a few years ago and did everything myself except for the machining. I'm proud (and a little cocky) of being able to do that stuff. You're the computer version of me and my old car hobby. When I sit down at my PC I want my (actually my wife's) automatic Honda Accord with air conditioning, antilock brakes and a key fob that recognizes me. I love the cruise control. This is what the average PC user wants. For the geeks there's Linux. If (and that's a huge, massive and gargantuan 'if') Linux ever gets to that point and can guarantee staying there for decades, I'll be all in.
Until then I'll use hacked versions of Windows whatever. I'm hoping that the present screaming about Window's increasingly invasive nature will force a significant change. There's also been some rumblings from the EU about making a Windows-like and universal version of Linux that will run all windows programs. They know that it's a Windows world and this might be a way to force (hopefully) Microsoft to change. I'd love to see the EU tell Microsoft to just eff-off and make it legal to run hacked Windows. I'm sure you're reading SlashDot so you've seen the ongoing debates.Windows has taken Linux to court and vice versa for decades already. Windows has tried to sue Linux for copying it's interface. Linux won because even Mac has a similar interface, so it's not something limited to one brand. Linux sued windows for trying to force manufacturers to lock Linux out from UEFI, and they were all forced to release the keys to enable Linux install on the new UEFI boards. The only definite win for Microsoft was when Lindows came out and obviously copied everything about Windows, even to the point of running Windows programs. I've been waiting for a distro that runs Windows exes seamlessly forever, but every time one is anounced, it never gets developed. We're still stuck with Wine or Playonlinux because of it. I thought that Steamdeck was going to do that and it apparently never did. I don't have to do much in the terminal with Mint, most of it is just as easy to update as Windows, and unless you're doing something very specialized, most people never have to touch the terminal. It also runs really well on older hardware, something that Ubuntu can't do very well. In spite of the hype it gets from guys who run computer shops. But they'll tell you anything to make a buck, which is why I've been building my own PCs since 2002, right after my first bought PC turned out to be a ripoff scam and would need a reinstall of Windows every couple of months at the shop.
@josiebethlewis2019, I'm with you there regarding building one's own PCs. There's a small Mom-n-Pop shop run by an uber geek who sells to all the local gamers and many businesses. He's always willing to do some horse trading for older trade-in equipment too. He got me an excellent deal on a new 12GB 3060 card (EVGA too!) when NFT's collapsed and he's watching AI closely. He's got ties back in China and I'm hoping to get some serious hardware when the hype over AI data centers collapses.
...aaand another new Linux version.
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/08/09/0226209/slashdot-reader-builds-spaced-linux-a-new-devuan-based-user-friendly-desktop-distroI usually shop around for GPUs if I need one, and can often find a pretty good one for a reasonable price, but lately it's been pretty slim. Luckily I don't need one immediately. I wish I could find a 3060 that sips electricity instead of guzzling it, but those are rare. My last 12 GB GPU was an energy hog so it demands a huge power supply to work right. I swapped it out for an 8 GB card that runs on a little less juice. And I have a lot bigger power supply than the PC needs.
I don't think the AI bubble is going to pop. Under normal circumstances sure, but not this time. I think whoever is the winning tech bro with AI is going to do a rug pull. As soon as they get enough datacenters & feel confident enough to start murdering people with drones. At that point who could stop them? They'd just take over the other corporations & say it was the spoils of war. Anyone who doesn't like it can kick rocks. I know that sounds far fetched but if you had an army of killer drones, who would be able to stop you if you'd already infiltrated every defense organization in the country & basically control the police AI too? Police & Military leaders have already been convinced they need to replace officers & soldiers with AI murder bots. They even floated the idea to replace judges & politicians with AI in publications. They'd even make us vote for AI politicians too. It's like crazy town.
The tech bros are like a bunch of mad scientists who think the perfect world is one they control down to the molecule, rather than just staying out of people's business & going about their own business. They have to meddle in everything because they're controlled by fear. The fear of growing old & dying. The fear that they'll be insignificant because they're jerks. The fear that they'll get a disease from the poors who never even go near them. Not once do they take a moment to reflect & think maybe being a better person would give them the legacy they want. Instead they idolize tyrants like Caligula & envision themselves to be the next Caesar, dominating the world with tech. That they'd better get us before we get them. As if any of us really wakes up to obsess about murdering them constantly like they do about us. Every single one of them has this flaw. From Bill gates to Sam Altman. The more power they gain, the more they become psychopaths. They all behave like they have a villains origin story from super hero comics, when the truth is they're spoiled brats, their story was never sad. The only thing they ever had hurt was their feelings, but they still plot "revenge" on the masses. It's insane.
It would be laughable if what they got away with wasn't so serious, & what they've openly talked about wasn't so freaking evil. Instead of anyone in government saying "uh, wait a second, you think it's ok to jail people for their opinions & even murder them based on AI surveillance?" & treating them like self incriminating @$$holes, they just hand wave it away & pretend they need these weirdos with a proclivity for murder. In a sane society they'd already be under the prison.
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