I really hate Windows 11. It doesn’t run on several of my computers due to its system requirements and for those that it does run on I find the UX to be such a huge step backwards that I find myself continually fighting with the shell rather than actually getting work done. So, I’ve been steadfastly sticking to Windows 10 on machines where I need Windows.
There’s so many things completely artificially gated to Windows 11. The new Apple Music Preview which is gated to 11 can be easily patched to run on 10 just by editing the manifest. I’ve found many other “Windows 11 only” things to be entirely “paper” limitations. I tried to hack WSA onto 10 a while back but quickly realized it was more than a manifest change and lost interest because it wasn’t important enough to me to pursue further.
I’m glad someone took the time to figure it out and I tip my hat to the folks that took the time to debug and reverse engineer this solution. The relative simplicity of the resulting hack to run WSA on Windows 10 shows that it seems to be more of an unwillingness to backport some new APIs rather than any sort of deep technological changes in the OS.
When Windows 10 came along, people happily moved over from 8.x, as it was such an improvement. Those who stuck with 7 decided to still stick with 7 for a while longer.
When 7 came around, same thing: most Vista users happily switched, XP users held out until the bitter end.
Every time the sentiment was similar to the comment I'm replying to. Somehow people must be forgetting that the previous thing they had was already better then the current thing. Maybe helped by the fact that the next thing seems to suck even more.
Wait until support for 10 ends and 12 has full screen unmutable video ads. 11 will only seem half bad.
The difference between 7 and basically every other Windows OS since XP was that it was actually really really good. They took Vista and fixed most of the things that pissed everyone off about it. I don't remember a lot of problems with 7 at all.
Then they scrapped it for 8 which was a UX disaster. Win10 was OK, but still quirky as hell with lots of weird 8 carry over. I loathed when I finally upgraded from 7 to 10.
I've been using Win11 Pro for gaming mostly and it's OK but not great once I moved the task bar back to the left. I dunno why anyone felt that was worth mucking with. What I really resent about Win11 is the desire to connect my Microsoft account to everything.
Someday I'm gonna seriously give the Steam/Proton thing a try on Linux. I'm battle scarred from trying to game on Linux in the early 2000's... but I need to give it another chance. I'd much rather stay on my Linux host for both work and fun rather than just work.
As a game developer (and avid player), I moved to straight Linux last year. Proton is really damn good, I think I only had (trivially fixable) issues with two games so far (out of like 30 I played).
Unfortunately my game engine of choice (Unity) has pretty spotty support, but even with it crashing every 3 hours (as opposed to once a day on Mac or once a week on Windows), the performance is still much much better than when running the editor under Windows. You win some, lose some.
But as a user, my setup is nearly flawless, and I didn't have to fiddle with any custom stuff beyond what I was already doing on Windows either, maybe less if you count not having to reset my browser from Edge back to Firefox every major update. (Weren't M$ sued to high hell back in the IE days just for bundling it? This seems 10x pushier)
Proton is incredible, I had an itch to play GTA IV recently. I was on Windows but due to the old DX calls used in the game (it's something like 14 years old), it didn't play well on Windows.
I dropped DXVK on it under Windows and it worked better but was constantly stuttering.
I moved over to Linux (I dual boot) and Steam+Proton ran the game flawlessly. I had to install the xone driver to get my Xbox S/X controller working (and it's a little janky to get connected after restarting) but the game ran _flawlessly_. I was even able to OC my TV to 90Hz under Linux!
It's wild that I used Linux to play a game that wouldn't run under Windows.
I personally find Gnome 4x fantastic, it still feels incomplete but I like the direction it's going.
My only gripe with Linux is applications can be a little janky. Chrome runs like crap (I know people tell me to use Firefox, I am already so deep in the Google ecosystem I don't want to change) - I run it with wayland and regularly submit bug reports to the Chromium team.
Once Chrome is as nice as it is on Windows, I will likely move to Linux as my primary OS.
I'm on the KDE camp, but I got to say both are shaping up incredibly.
Did not have any problems with the Xbox controller, though I believe mine is from a Xbox One. Just plug (or bluetooth, which also works fine, unlike in the past!) in and play.
Can't speak about Chrome, I've been on Firefox since 2014.
Various issues; Disclaimer - Might only be present on Gnome and I am a stickler for UX so they are minor annoyances.
Until Chrome 109 the scroll speed was too slow. Chromium devs solved this by statically increasing the scroll speed hardcoded in the source, but it still wasn't something defined by the DE so scrolling just doesn't feel like it does under Firefox.
Chrome doesn't respect system defined dark mode.
Dragging tabs off the window to open in its own window isn't implemented correctly. You can drag the window off the tab-bar but you cannot position it on the desktop. You must first drag the tab off the tab-bar, then drag the newly created window to the desired position.
Broadly chrome doesn't really integrate well with GTK, with inconsistent window decorations - like the profile window having a different top bar than the main window.
Edge does a better job than Chrome as far as experience is concerned, but it has its own issues.
Like if you highlight text, you are unable to click anything else on the page without first hitting ESC to unhighlight the text.
Firefox works flawlessly though. If Chrome worked as well as Firefox I'd be happy (haha I know, "then why not just use Firefox" - that's what I do on Linux, but it does keep me away not having my bookmarks, passwords, etc synced between Windows and Linux. Plus I use Chrome for my work and also use PWAs)
It might, though I honestly really like Gnome. Going between MacOS, Windows and Linux on a near daily basis (work laptop and dual booted personal desktop), I am drawn to the flash of Gnome. It's reminiscent of MacOS but with some more sensible UX decisions.
> Someday I'm gonna seriously give the Steam/Proton thing a try on Linux. I'm battle scarred from trying to game on Linux in the early 2000's... but I need to give it another chance. I'd much rather stay on my Linux host for both work and fun rather than just work.
I sometimes forget to even look up Linux compatibility on steam games causeI assume they work, especially with single player games. We are at what feels like 98% compatibility and it's usually at worst looking up a few cmdline switches on protondb
Do it. I've been gaming solely on Linux for the last five years. Sure, you miss out on a handful of popular triple-A multiplayer titles with incompatible anti-cheat, but I don't miss them. Also, the more users Linux gets, the less it will be ignored by developers and publishers.
I've been trying to game on Linux for a long time too. Have been dabbling on and off for a long time.
I can honestly say that it is better than ever.
You really need a distro that stays up to date. Fedora, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch, something like that. Ubuntu is probably a close runner up since they release their HWE updates once in a while.
When I say up to date, it is the kind of up to date where some of the new improvements in Proton/Steam/DXVK need Nvidia drivers/Mesa published this month. Although I'd have loved to use Debian stable everywhere, it was the wrong fit for this purpose, and only caused me pain.
i really loved Vista, don't really get the hate. I recently used a computer with vista, and oh boy it is BEAUTIFUL! more prettier than modern flat bland paint-made Windows
Ok then, but in which ways was it better than 7? I'm firmly in the "Vista was pretty unpolished" camp, and it wasn't helped by the fact that like the majority of people, I first experienced it on underpowered hardware, adding insult to injury. The story goes that during development, Microsoft overestimated the advances that would be made regarding raw computing power, extrapolated from previous years where we did in fact move crazy fast. So when 7 rolled along, half of the performance issues were solved by hw finally catching up, the other half were tweaks and fixes by MS. The UI I think was improved across the board. So that's why I'm curious what the Vista fans loved so much about it compared to 7.
I didn’t hate vista. It was the same as 7 just that 7 was without the drm and a new coat of paint.
Vista mainly got a bad rap in the beginning cos driver support sucked. Had 7 come out instead of vista then the same driver issues would have existed. However when all the drivers were out 7 came out and used all those same drivers and people were like “omg it’s soooo much better” even tho it was basically the same thing.
Vista lets you turn off ClearType, has the classic start menu, still retains the older quick launch, has the fully-featured classic theme customization, Paint and WordPad didn't get assaulted with a ribbon facelift yet.
Windows 7 isn't unworkable with the addition of some third-party customization apps, but you could do a lot more to smack sense into Vista without reaching for them.
> Ok then, but in which ways was it better than 7?
The way I remember it it was less gratuitously flashy, or at least easier to switch back into a win2k-like mode. Doesn't 7 force you to use a GPU-accelerated desktop or something?
You could still switch to the classic look & feel on Windows 7, which turned off DWM (GPU acceleration). It was Windows 8 that removed that option, forcing DWM.
Vista had a lot of genuine security improvements for corporates, the extent to which you could create a much more reliable environment with judicious use of group policy was actually genuinely impressive.
Honestly, apart from the horrible mistake they made around UAC prompting, most of the rough edges didn't bother me and once I got used to it and could just follow the paths I'd beaten previously to get it to do what I wanted it to, for me it was "mostly just another slightly different Windows UI atop a kernel+OS layer that for my purposes appeared to Just Work.
I am well aware this was not the experience a lot of people had with Vista.
What horrible mistake was made with UAC prompting?
The alternative is admin-privileged programs do not run. See Linux and sudo for an actual terrible decision in privilege escalation in terms of desktop usage.
Sudo is unusable in a GUI. Simple as that. It's unintuitive to create a user with sudo rights, and it is unintuitive to run a program with admin rights in a DE.
Vista upgraded the security expectations, although rather harshly compared to XP, but much more useful than anything Linux had or still has. Being prompted vs. looking up commands in manpages/wikis/blogs are two very different things.
Pretending that blindly typing "sudo" in a terminal prompt anytime a command doesn't work without it doesn't make it any better than UAC.
I imagine usability might've changed over time, but in my default Ubuntu DE I can't run an app as Admin via a "Run As" option. Have to delve into config files to change either shortcut properties or to manually create a "Run As" option.
As far as prompts go - why does Chrome/Chromium prompt me on a clean install for a gpg key ring password upon every run?
Is that not worse Than Vista?
My point is, Linux, even at its most refined, most popular version, lags behind Vista.
Based on my admittedly shoddy memory, I believe most of the hate against Vista was due to its early release and lack of drivers with moving to a new model requiring signing. This broke a lot of legacy drivers and thus the hardware no longer worked without the manufacturers providing an update. I was mostly on newer hardware so didn't have the compatibility issues a number of users experienced with that migration.
I wouldn’t say I was thrilled to go to 10. Initial releases were really rough, but it got better really quickly and many of my early complaints were addressed.
11 seems to have stumbled out of the gate and it doesn’t feel to me like any of the even most basic complaints I have will ever be addressed. The taskbar for one still has piss-poor usability and represents a huge (and completely unnecessary) backslide from previous versions of Windows. I also hate that I can’t turn off rounded corners. (Yes it’s a minor thing but it really irks me.)
Yeah, I went to 10 as Microsoft wouldn't sell me new license key for 7. A year or two later I would have had to move for software support.
But if I had to name user facing things that are nicer in 10 than 7, I struggle. I'm left at stuff like.... the win-p project/extend/mirror toggle menu?
Obviously there have been developer facing improvements like modern TLS versions or DirectStorage, but none of them couldn't have been done without the UI or privacy changes
When Windows 10 came along, people happily moved over from 8.x, as it was such an improvement
That's... not how I remember it. What I remember is that people hated the first Windows 10 builds so much that Microsoft not only couldn't give it away for free, but they had to use deceptive techniques -- essentially leveraging Windows Update as a malware distribution channel -- to force them to upgrade.
That's not I remember it.
My company at that time completely skipped windows 8, I can count with an hand the people I knew that used windows 8 at all, almost everybody jumped from 7 to 10.
"people hated the first Windows 10 builds so much"
I don't remember this at all, quite the opposite, I remember being one of the last to switch from 7 to 10 at my company, everybody on 10 was quite happy.
Windows 10 was published almost 8 years ago, it changed quite a lot since then. Look at shutup10 changelog, first versions features were quite different.
Yeah admittedly it's been a while, and it didn't help that most of my peer group was in the 7 camp, but after some initial hesitation and "let's wait for others to try it first", Windows 8 folks seemed rather happy about the free upgrade. I can think of only one person from my group that really loved 8 and only just switched when 8.1 support ended.
The reception of 10 was pretty good and a step in the right direction from the tablet/desktop aio that was 8 and 8.1. Plus it was free and didn’t have as many restriction to upgrade as say 11. It was a challenge for enterprise but people adopted 10 fairly quickly. Even if you google the stats of it :
It didn't "sell." Upgrades were free (and still are, AFAIK.)
Windows 8 was widely (and correctly) perceived as a disaster, so it's not a valid benchmark for market share comparison. Windows 7 was the target Microsoft wanted to hit, and that didn't happen until Q4 2018: https://windowsreport.com/windows-10-7-market-share/
Erm. Thats not how I remember it. There was a lot of "Microsoft forcing Windows 7 and 8.1 users to install Windows 10" articles in that time. Articles "How to STOP Windows 7 auto Upgrade to Windows 10" was popular too in that time.
The theory has always been that every other release of Windows is terrible; so, while Vista and 8 sucked, XP, 7, and 10 were OK... based on the historical evidence, 12 should be fine despite 11 being trash.
I recently switched from the windows 11 task manager to the windows 7 legacy task manager. I’m delighted how the legacy task manager just opens instantly and unlike the win11 task manager it doesn't lag for a whole second when switching from the process to the service tab.
Same for the start menu: I installed start11 yesterday and the old start menu is just sooo much faster.
My CPU is a few years old (i7 8700k), and I thought about upgrading because windows 11 was always so laggy, but this showed me that Microsoft is only releasing poor software as their flagship product.
Tried Win11 and reverted back to 10 within a day. Gonna give it another shot soon with start menu patching, I guess. At least MS has a revert-back feature.
There are some minimal benefits in scheduling threads on big.LITTLE Intel processors, such as mine, through Intel's Thread Director in Win 11. It's just so annoying to have to hack around an OS when they could easily provide something as basic as moving the taskbar on the left (not the icons, the actual taskbar - using a 32:9 monitor).
While the current task manager is rather slow to launch, it also is more functional than the Win7 version. Disk and GPU monitoring being big ones.
Somewhat related side note: check out Process Explorer for in-depth monitoring of every process' attributes/state. It can replace Task Manager in Windows as well, if you want, via a setting.
I agree, the shell changes are a big step backwards for the sake of some eye candy. Personally I use ExplorerPatcher [1] to restore most of the shell UI back to stock Win10, and it's been working pretty well for me without any problems.
ExplorerPatcher is great and the developer that works on it is doing a service for us all. However it’s also very brittle and if you’re not using mainline builds it will definitely break.
I’ve looked a lot at its source code and it relies on an incredible amount of hackery to actually work. A lot of what it does is injects itself into various parts of the OS and shims in its own behavior. It’ll do things like redirect API calls to older DLLs or even modify data structures on the fly. It’s how it can do all kinds of cool stuff that your typical “Windows tweaked” apps that only rely on registry changes can’t do. (Not surprisingly the kind of things it does can look a lot like malware to heuristic analyzers.) It’s an incredible piece of reverse engineering but it shouldn’t even be necessary to get back such basic things like squared corners and old taskbar behaviors.
So many of the Windows 11 changes are just…odd. Like no longer being able to disable taskbar grouping, or the explorer right-click menu getting half the options hidden under ”show more”
One would think there was some reasoning behind this, but it all just seems like ”let’s make it different because if it’s the same people complain that there’s nothing new in Windows 11”
Start 11 ( https://www.stardock.com/products/start11/ ) can ungroup the taskbar, but at the cost of making the Start menu / taskbar / systray generally unstable. They are reasonably good at restarting Explorer as needed, but you can definitely tell that something's wrong.
These artifial limitations and heavy handed approach from MS are only encouraging me to delay even more. Similarly, proper transparecy for the new Windows Terminal is gated behind windows 11. It makes me never want to use terminal even though it's available.
This is working as well as it does on Windows 11. Root access with magisk is working as intended and I set up Play services and the subsystem was able to successfully log in. There is hardware accelerated x264 playback, I was able to play 1080p youtube with very few problems. The playback occasionally stutters and the youtube player itself occasionally crashes, but that feels unrelated to the underlying ability to playback video. Graphics happen via "Subsystem OpenGL ES Translator" because this is effectively virtualized. Graphics performance on my rtx 2070 (laptop) are buttery smooth, but interfacing with a touch only UI with software mapping is weird at times.
I have no issues with storage or sideloading. The only part where I had to take steps outside of the standard guide was to reinstall a specific appx and manually register a manifest.xml. It looked like it was working without this step but then wouldn't reopen after opening the very first time. I had to enable developer options in both the android system settings and windows subsystem settings, they are two seperate things and I am not sure if they are supposed to sync. Enabling dev options and usb debugging in just android wasn't enough, there was a seperate setting in "windows subsystem for android settings".
Android system storage is a VHDX, I have been unsuccessful trying to mount it. There's no easy way to transfer files back and forth between android and windows. I am not sure if samba will work since it is the same ip. The only other option seems to be ADB.
This has all of the basically all of the downsides of hypervisors. Bluetooth also isn't working.
I think the benefit of WSA is that Microsoft is significantly more trustworthy (shoot me, fml) than whoever is making the popular Android emulator of the day.
edit: Just noticed Anbox and Waydroid are open source projects for Linux. Can't say much about them. I was thinking in terms of other Android emulators on Windows like BlueStacks.
I was just answering the question in general, not in regards to the above patch. The patch would need to be evaluated to see how it works and whether it's safe.
Anbox is old stuff. Waydroid is improving with each release (which happened several times in the last few months), and it's great overall, but tricky to set up properly: kernel modules, mutter (if your desktop is under X), and the Google activation step for your new device; then houdini and possibly other stuff (eg. to fake wifi if using ethernet, Magisk...). Once you do that, it's almost as native and it usually supports your GPU.
With the latest Ubuntu release, it just works with `apt install waydroid`. Got it up and running in literally 3 minutes and with a few mindless clicks.
I tried to use Anbox a few times over the last 4 years, it doesn't work.
I'm sure I could get it to work on a dedicated system, where I matched whatever point release of the kernel and userspace it was designed to run with, but on a normal debian (I think it was buster) install it "shat the bed" so to speak and didn't even offer the reward of actually running the apps I wanted to.
My experience with Anbox and Waydroid on recent Linux kernels wasn't great. The kernel modules required were a major problem that made my laptop unbootable several times and just didn't want to load on my desktop.
I doubt. Microsoft definition of Windows nowadays is "we don't care what your operating system is, your executables should run on our WinOS as well". And if somebody actually does this port from 11 to 10, they'll be happy about it. More developers will run from other OS'es to Win
I doubt that they are super happy about it. Many of their newer software are gatekeeped to Win11 without a strong reason. They are pushing people to switch to 11.
11 and also edge. They still care a lot whether people use their stuff.
The whole reason behind WSL was to stop the Exodus of cloud developers to running Linux on their laptops (though most of them at my work still prefer it over WSL)
They removed support for lots of perfectly adequate and capable hardware. There are no legit reasons for this, and I would say for e-waste concerns it probably enters into unethical territory.
It requires TPM, and for a while AMD's software TPM implementation was buggy and caused stutters. That got me to push back my update to 11 to 'at least a year from now'; I don't want to suffer a bug while waiting for a BIOS patch if there's another issue like that.
> For fork developers: Please don't build using GitHub Actions, as GitHub will count your forked GitHub Actions usage against this upstream repository, which may cause this upstream repository gets disabled by GitHub staff like MagiskOnWSA because of numerous forks building GitHub Actions, and counting the forks' Action usage against this upstream repository.
is that even remotely true?
If there's any "disabled by GitHub staff" going on, it's likely due to DMCA nonsense, not due to forks having their GitHub Actions billed against the upstream repo. Related to that, I'm surprised to see the submitted repo distribute icu.dll and winhttp.dll, versus telling interested parties to extract them out of the Win11 ISO. I bet Microsoft won't bother striking the repo over 2 random dlls but why roll the dice?
Rather than hosting the build artifacts, MagiskOnWSA asked users to fork the repo and run a GitHub action to build a 2GB file. Given that they had over 100,000 forks (or at least 200TB of identical artifacts), it's pretty clear why GitHub disabled their repo.
I really wish MS would remove the TPM requirement, so that I could stop sympathizing with the people who seem to have an obsessive hobby with making maintenance burdens for themselves, or will opine about Linux maintenance while spending countless unaccounted time mucking with Windows like this -_-.
> I really wish MS would remove the TPM requirement
That's not going to happen. For one, having a more secure OS is actually a good thing, but especially for the even larger amounts of control they'll gain over your computer as they move to Pluton and beyond. Imagine, for instance, having your bank verify your OS and software running before doing business with you. Remote attestation is definitely in the plans, see e.g. https://twitter.com/marypcbuk/status/1478416836647657479
You could keep hoping Microsoft will do what you want with their OS, or you could get out while you can.
I haven't run Windows in a very, very long time, maybe I was too subtle with my dig at this type of content (a day after the "slimmed down" Win11 image was posted and discussed widely).
Now, if only there was a clean and performant way to run Android apps on my existing Debian system...
Currently, I've had the best experience (programs work and do what they're supposed to) with Android-x86, but it's generally a few versions out of date and running a whole qemu instance is heavyweight.
It might, I haven't tried it (though maybe I should).
I thought (maybe incorrectly) it was "super bleeding edge", depending on changing and bloating so many aspects of my existing setup as to make the setup useless to me for existing tasks. For instance, I don't have (and don't want) GNOME installed, or any sort of desktop environment, or wayland -- I'd probably have to relearn how to accomplish the tasks I ordinarily do, and it's not worth the cost.
I wonder if you can use a proxy with this, I would like to run this through MITM Proxy to see the requests made by different Android apps. Current I am using Android Studio or GenyMotion
Unless you found a way to break HTTPS, that won't do. Android uses certificate pinning, and any MITM attempt (such as running through a proxy) won't even send the requests through.
Android apps do not trust anything out of the system default CA since Android 7.0, which is "light" pinning. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/07/changes-to.... Additionally, certificate pinning can be done in multiple ways, and your Frida bypass will not do anything in the case of a simple reimplementation of pinning for OkHttp means you now have to find also that code (which has most likely been proguarded and obfuscated) to replace.
The only ways your certificate works are:
* Your self signed certificates are marked as trusted in the app manifest (which, since it isn't your app, you have to rebuild an APK to modify the network_security_config)
* There's a leftover "accept everything" in the manifest, and that can only work with debug builds.
* You ran it through apktool/equivalent to insert a permissive network_security_config (which only has this ability since 2022, but other scripts have existed before).
Running it through Frida for that purpose is needlessly overkill.
The system volume on WSA is a static image and can’t be mounted as readwrite the last time I checked. You pretty much have to use something like MagiskTrustUserCerts.
This is great. Also hoping someone creates a patch/hack that allows Google Play Games for Winwos (https://play.google.com/googleplaygames) to run any Android app.
Man, these names keep being disappointing. Initial reaction: Sweet! Now people can run their Windows apps on Linux/ Android. A second later: oh, bah. More X-on-Windows.
Even historically there isn't a particularly well defined set of requirements for a subsystem. The closest to win32 was the subsystem for Unix applications, that loaded psdll.dll and used PE format executables even in the "Unix" environnement. WSL1 used elf files and required a custom execution process: bash.exe called com which called into the kernel to set up a special lightweight process supporting Linux syscall translation/implementation. Wsl2/wsa are Hyper-V based.
They claimed it was for trademark reasons. I think it's bullshit. They could have come up with a better phrasing that still puts the word Windows first, and whatever additional criteria that legal was worried about. They just don't care about making sense.
Even making it "Windows subsystem for Android applications", a one word addition, would be clearer.
I really hate Windows 11. It doesn’t run on several of my computers due to its system requirements and for those that it does run on I find the UX to be such a huge step backwards that I find myself continually fighting with the shell rather than actually getting work done. So, I’ve been steadfastly sticking to Windows 10 on machines where I need Windows.
There’s so many things completely artificially gated to Windows 11. The new Apple Music Preview which is gated to 11 can be easily patched to run on 10 just by editing the manifest. I’ve found many other “Windows 11 only” things to be entirely “paper” limitations. I tried to hack WSA onto 10 a while back but quickly realized it was more than a manifest change and lost interest because it wasn’t important enough to me to pursue further.
I’m glad someone took the time to figure it out and I tip my hat to the folks that took the time to debug and reverse engineer this solution. The relative simplicity of the resulting hack to run WSA on Windows 10 shows that it seems to be more of an unwillingness to backport some new APIs rather than any sort of deep technological changes in the OS.