I'll be switching to Windows 10

...well, I've been already using Windows 10 because even the earliest iGPU driver still requires 1607, and with no hacking can I get it working on 8.1, so I decided to give in.


The reason for this sudden change will be explained in the rest of this post. Those who know that I have a very big grudge against Windows 10 will be surprised by this, so hear me out.

For those who don't know, I used a MacBook Pro (2011, 13", i7-2620M, 8Gigs of RAM) before I got this laptop, but I accidently fried the board twice, so it no longer works, and costs too much to repair, so I gave up on it. With some complications I bought the laptop I'm using now (which is a very boring story).


So, I was initially biased against Windows 10 at the time (and still am :ha:) because of the negative experience I accumulated from the last month of school and my IT exam, so me getting a Windows 10 laptop wasn't something I really appreciated.

When I first powered on the laptop, I got jumpscared by Cortana on max volume with Dol️by drivers (which boost the output volume, so 8% with Dol️by drivers was like 20% or 40% with Realtek / HDA drivers, imagine how loud 100% was...), and because I didn't find the mute button, I force powered off the machine. This was a big mistake, as this action already broke Windows from the very start, AND I DIDN'T EVEN START USING IT YET :rofl2:. But the breaking only has began here...

Not even two days in, the dreaded Windows Update keeps spinning the CPU out, and disabling wuauserv has no effect, so I wasn't able to suspend the updates even for a damn second. Because of this, the updates kept coming, and coming, and slowly making the system slower and more broken.
First the audio broke, because Windows Update kept reinstalling the f------ Realtek driver I didn't want (I prefer HDA drivers because it has (cheap) Bass Boost), and managed to earrape me so many times that I attempted to disable Windows Update even more, and managed to somewhat destroy it enough for the updates to stop coming for almost a week because I kept constantly breaking it because it kept re-enabling itself magically.

But once I forgot to break Windows Update, so it pushed 1709 on me. It bricked safe mode, and the ability to log in (after logging in, it instantly throws you back to the login screen due to a crash). I spent countless hours in the Get Help applet because of this. Since this update, I can't enable HDR support, and the screen is driven at 6bits instead of 8bits color which causes very noticable and headache-inducing flicker, which is ESPECIALLY noticable when using a dedicated GPU -accelerated program (like a video editor), because the UI flickers just ever so slightly due to the bit difference. Some updates also broke some other things, but they probably weren't so significant because I forgot them.

1803 was what tipped the piss jar. It bricked login again (which meant more hours spent in Get Help), broke multilingual keyboard support (if I did something, the keyboard got reset to USA instead of staying on Hungarian), updated Intel drivers to a newer version which were awfully slow and CPU-intensive, and it just generally rendered my device unusable due to all the countless things it broke. So I reverted back to 1709 which resetted a lot of my settings (a penalty for not taking the big wide long cactus up the wastepipe), and introduced general instability and freezes.

At this point I was so fed up, that I used psexec to competely ruin Windows Update as much as possible (and it turns out that THIS was the right way to delete those nasty protected sheduled tasks), and managed to keep the system in this broken state without an another f------- update breaking it even more. I just don't trust these updates anymore, not even if they ACTUALLY manage to fix ANYTHING without additionally breaking the rest of the system.

For a very long time (many, many months, or probably even half a year) I was using this half-assedly broken install until one day I left to take images in Vienna using one of the cameras I got from mom's boss. I took some nice pictures which are worthy of a separate blog post.

Anyways, when I came back I noticed that 3 new folders appeared in the C:\ folder, which are the signs of a very big Windows update (almost the same as upgrading from XP to Vista, or 7 to 8.0). This is where it started going exponentially bad.

From that poin on, I wasn't able to type in Start Menu to search for anything. I had to manually click the letters to search for an entry.
A week later the videos applet stopped opening. Almost a day later the Photos app stopped working.

A few days ago the Start Menu and the time popup stopped working. I can kinda live without the Start Menu (albeit very painfully and inefficiently), but considering that I used the most out of the time popout, it breaking was a motivation to install a test Windows on the HDD.

After deleting the leftover folders from a test Windows 8.1 install using icacls, takeown, and rm -rf, I used dism (formerly only found in ImageX) to install Windows on the HDD without the installer. (if you want a tutorial on this then write a comment)

I chose LTSB 2016 nov (1607), because that's the earliest version for which I have iGPU drivers for, and because this laptop actually came with factory 1607, so I thought I'd give it yet another chance.
I chose LTSB, because I don't need Windows Store, I want to be able to disable updates at my will without nuking half of the system in the process, and just generally want to get rid of all the bloat which is present in the Home edition (which is what I got an OEM license for).

And damn, was this a good choice! At the start I had very low expectations. I spent countless hours installing ALL updates, because I was too slow to disable them, and didn't wanted to break the system because I was too impatient. In hindsight, this was a VERY wise choice, and I got rewarded for it.

LTSB 1607 is SO stable with all the updates installed! I have very low latency in osu (same settings, 0.28 in Windows 8.0, 3.8 in Home 1709, and 0.70 in LTSB 1607), and the iGPU drivers are VERY responsive (again, in osu, I get 4.2-4.6ms avg. in Home 1709, and I get 1.2-1.8ms in LTSB 1607 WITH iGPU!), opening a new tab in Firefox no longer softlocks EVERYTHING for a whole second, and it even starts up very fast from HDD, even though this HDD is AWFULLY slow (for comparison, Windows 8.0 took AT LEAST two minutes to start up, when a fully updated Windows 8.0 on my Athlon PC starts up in LESS THAN 20s FROM HDD USING FLOPPY BOOT)

So I'm trying to figure out a way to save most of the installed programs and their configs from the already existing broken install, wipe the SSD, and reinstall LTSB completely fresh on the SSD.

However I still think that people who praise Windows 10 and tell me that it's stable are full of biowaste exerted out of a bull :)

tl;dr
Losedows 10 is shitty and broken, the Home edition is a sin, fully updated LTSB 1607 rulez! I'll be upgrading from Home 1709 to LTSB 1607. Yes, upgrading, because it does feel like an ACTUAL upgrade from something very beta to a working and stable product, JUST LIKE HOW IT SHOULD BE IN THE FIRST PLACE :angry: If you praise any version past 1607 then you're full of SHIT.
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Sono
@Orangy57: I mentioned on the previous page of comments (just at the very bottom) that I did try Linux at first, but Ethernet didn't work, and nVidia drivers crashed either X, or took the whole kernel down. I'd be using Linux otherwise, and this blog post wouldn't exist.

@Oleboy555: thanks for mentioning that LTSB/LTSC is better than Pro. I was telling as a joke to people that if they'd give me a Pro license then I wouldn't disable updates. But now you convinced me to try the 2019 version after I wipe the SSD and install 2016 LTSB on it. I wonder what features the 2019 version packs. The only things I miss from 1709 is mono audio, and a proper game bar.

@the_randomizer: please, don't take this as an attack (because it isn't), but if you have ever used Linux on Windows then please don't recommend it. I did try it out, and it lacks everything, and nothing I wanted to use it for works. It doesn't even emulate block devices :angry: It's completely useless in its current form, sadly :( At that point even msys is more useful than Linux on Windows.
 
the_randomizer
I know, I'm not taking it as an attack, I'm just saying me and Linux aren't in harmony and I don't know anything about CLI/Terminal commands, which are what stop me from using it in the first place.
 
Dust2dust
@the_randomizer : Some versions of Linux are very user-friendly (like Mint) and you barely have to use the terminal at all. But yeah, sometimes, to achieve a task with the maximum efficiency, knowing a little bit how to use the terminal is handy. You just have to google how to do it, and copy/paste the command, then. Having a dual boot is still the best setup for me. If an OS crashes or have serious problems (usually Windows), you still have the other one as a backup on the same computer.
 
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jurassicplayer
@The Real Jdbye No, I know what I need to get my printer working, I just don't use it. It's a shared network printer (Dell c1660w). I use the Win10VM for the printer because if "shit hits the fan", it's got nothing to do with whatever my linux things do. For the record (if someone happens to have the same printer), Xerox Phaser 6000 drivers apparently work with possible caveats, or a patched version of foo2zjs with support for HBPLv1 printers.

@kuwanger The gold rating on protonDB is supposed to signify that tweaks may be needed in order for the game to work, but in theory those with gold ratings work perfectly after said tweaks. ProtonDB rating breakdown

@Sono Some of those issues sound like a distro-specific thing, and others sound like you would need to do some more head bashing to setup correctly. I can't imagine your hardware is so niche that linux isn't viable (then again YMMV), but that isn't to say that you might have to take a fat chunk of time to go around punching walls and solving any niggling issues. If you feel an urge to waste time chatting on the GBATemp discord with me, just ping me there and we can maybe work together to solve your linux-y issues in a fresh attempt.
 
Sono
@jurassicplayer I'm pretty sure it's niche hardware. Google shows no useful results for my motherboard (though to be honest, laptop motherboards are NOT supposed to show up in Google, lol), and sometimes even Windows itself has problems with the drivers, and the only functional drivers I can find have to be downloaded from sketchy Russian websites.

But surprisingly Linux works, INCLUDING BACKLIGHT, OEM-specific stuff, and even WiFi (Intel AC 9xxx) worked before I swapped it to a BCM card which never worked in Linux, so I don't have ANY internet in Linux anymore. It's just the awfully bad performance, and the lack of Ethernet which turn me away from Linux on this particular laptop :/

I'd love to figure out how to get Linux working, but I have sadly ran out of disk space, so I can't install it anymore :/
 
kuwanger
@jurassicplayer - In context, "Gold (runs perfectly after tweaks)" vs "Silver (runs with minor issues, but generally is playable)" vs "Bronze (runs, but often crashes or has issues preventing from playing comfortably)" tends to imply to me "runs perfectly after tweaks" does not mean "doesn't run at all until tweaks"*. There's also, like I said, MMLC2/MMLCX1-2 where people are labeling as Bronze because it'll get to the menu but one or all the games don't run. Maybe I'm just wrong about that interpretation, but then I find the ProtonDB as mostly useless if it's touting Gold+. Platinum should be the Gold standard. Based on that, "Platinum (runs perfectly out of the box)" is only 11% for the top 1000.

* To me a large thing that Proton was supposed to be about is getting stuff "just working" as the biggest reason WINE is such a pain is all the "tweaks" that need to be done--winetricks, a mix of overrides that changes per game, and having multiple versions of WINE for when certain games break. I'm not saying ProtonDB can't have tweaks listed, or Gold can't require a few tweaks to get optimal performance. But if it doesn't run at all, then that should be fixed at the Proton level before calling it Gold. Or call it Gold* or something.
 
jurassicplayer
@kuwanger There is no distinction between "runs, but runs perfect with tweaks" and "doesn't run, but runs perfect with tweaks" because that would be nuts. There is no way to guarantee a user's system defaults under linux and changing them without user knowledge/consent is a bad...excessively bad idea.

Consider the Esync option. It's an option that reduces wineserver overhead for synchronization objects, which in general sounds like a great idea, which is why proton uses it by default. The only problem is sometimes the distros have a lower limit of file descriptors available (aka, the game loads up more shit that the system is configured to allow) and thus the game would obviously fail to run since it only loads some of the files instead of all of the files. This is an example out of the box experience, but more likely than not, it failed to run.

Now solving this issue could be done with two methods, one of which is disabling esync outright with proton (and living with the corresponding wineserver overhead) OR increasing the system's configured limit, both of which would allow more files to be loaded and thus the game would load. Everything else about the game could run perfectly except for the file loading, but this DOES require some sort of user tweaking and IS considered not working out of the box.

The other possible out of gold rating is that the game works out of the box with tweaks, so to extrapolate our current example, it doesn't have esync problems, but there are a host of other optimizations that the user STILL NEEDS to tweak to get that perfect experience.

Thus we come to the rating system. If there is a game that only requires one tweak to get up and running perfectly versus one that works out of the box but requires an extra 2-4 tweaks to get running perfectly. Under the idea of "if it doesn't work out of the box", the game that requires one tweak gets ranked lower than the one that requires the extra 2-4 even though in comparison, in order to get a perfect experience it's 1 vs 2-4 tweaks.

Keep in mind that this is just ONE tweak, and it deals with only a small specific thing. Also, ProtonDB isn't part of Steam, so it's up to Steam to decide how to implement fixes that would remove the need for certain tweaks. The rating system is sensible in that "if it has a Gold+ rating, you can get the experience equal or better to that in another operating system" (YMMV). If there were no bronze ranking, there would be no determining border between larger issue that inhibits the program from running entirely, or something within the program that fails to run, which is why the introduced the current rating system (because unstable-stable is incredibly vague).

For the MMLC2/MMLCX1-2, MMLC2 says "Borked" so I'll just ignore that one. MMLCX1 is bronze with tweaks and "X1-3 work, but x4 refuses to play" which sounds about right to what the ProtonDB definition is, as I understand it (there are a couple of dolts who labeled it as gold who clearly didn't follow the rating system). The MMLCX2 is labeled as Bronze, but there are only 4 reports to go off (2 borked, 2 bronze), so that is a mixture of the small sample size and ProtonDB's averaging system.

Keep in mind, it's been less than a year since proton came out. Getting Steam's entire library from "not working" to "just works" doesn't happen in a finger snap. Maybe in the far future it may actually come to a point where Proton makes things "just work", but that takes time.
 
kuwanger
@jurassicplayer - I get what you're saying, but I honestly disagree. There's simply no reason for anyone to claim MMLCX2 is anything but borked. It's precisely your whole discussion about Esync, different distros, and trying to come up with sensible results which is a large part of what Proton should be addressing automatically vs borking out and leaving it to people on ProtonDB to guide you to a solution. Simply put, ProtonDB is as you note not Steam's creation, and so it really comes down to judging Proton more by its whitelist than what you can technically get working.

To that end, my biggest gripe is precisely that Steam hasn't really gone out of its way to make a simply list of whitelisted games nor add it to the Steam store clearly for browsing nor have they done that decent a job of actually going through and whitelisting games. Maybe that last part is precisely because so few games are Platinum? Regardless, this is not about expecting the entire library to go from "not working" to "just works" in under a year--which conveniently forgets how much work has gone into the WINE and DXVK projects, btw. It's about, yet again, people overstating the degree of compatibility and understating the amount of work involved. Hell, even a direct link for every game on Windows Steam to the ProtonDB that was Gold+ on exactly what workaround are necessary would be a long way towards helping. So would more general coordination with ProtonDB and Steam.

I'm not trying to understate how impressive WINE or DXVK or Proton is. I'm speaking from the mindset of someone who uses Windows who just wants to migrate to Linux and continue playing Windows games. If you don't clearly present exactly what's involved and that, yes, you will have to tweak a lot of games and, no, a lot of games still won't work, then people will consider your as proselytizing and unintentional or not disingenuous.
 
The Real Jdbye
@the_randomizer That sounds cool. I guess this means we may get hardware acceleration support and other nice things not currently possible with WSL, like audio (at least, to my knowledge audio isn't possible right now - that may be able to be worked around by using some audio server on the Windows side with the Linux side streaming to it - I think PulseAudio supports this but in my experience many things don't support PulseAudio)
 
the_randomizer
@The Real Jdbye I know nothing about Linux, what APIs it uses, how to use Terminal properly, it's not the OS for people like me I'm afraid.
 
The Real Jdbye
That's fine. I just have WSL because sometimes it's easier to do things in a Linux terminal than in Windows. Don't really use it much, and I don't actually need it, it's just nice to have. But if you've never used Linux you're not missing out on much.
 
the_randomizer
Yeah, I mean it's a useful environment for programmers, but on the other hand, Windows 10 has been the most stable Windows I've used since XP.
 
V
idk if this is an elaborate troll or anything, but 1709 was the most stable version of Windows ever. It was great, actually amazing. I'll praise it all I want thank you very much. But you absolutely CANNOT compare a home version to LBGT version. LBT version cuts out alot of fat from Windows 10, it's made for more embedded system types
 
kuwanger
Personally, I'm more inclined to go with MinGW/MSYS/MSYS2 over WSL. This might change when the Windows Terminal becomes a thing. It's most the terminal and bash scripting that I miss in Windows, cmdline wise. The other big advantage is, of course, that MSYS is available in all versions of Windows since I think Windows 95--later versions may have dropped support. I don't have some great need or desire to run actual Linux programs on Windows, so *shrug*.
 

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