Today I got blind-sided by having Windows 11 pushed onto my workstation.
TL;DR: Microsoft is getting more pushy about Windows 11. I reverted an unwanted “upgrade”, but I learned they remove the option to roll-back the install after 10 days.
I know many of us on Lemmy are IT professionals and probably running Linux already for use cases where it makes sense. If so, great. Good for you. So do I, mostly. Feel free to disregard this post. Unfortunately, I have a number of use cases that require me to keep my workstation on Windows (for now.)
Microsoft has been getting increasingly pushy and sneaky about the free (as in beer) Windows 11 upgrade. For me, this was reason enough to refuse to upgrade. In my experience with corporations, if they are pushing anything this hard, it is probably not in my best interests. In case you needed more reasons to decline the upgrade, I assure you there are plenty. I won’t go into that too much here, but I hadn’t planned on ever upgrading, and I despise Microsoft and Windows 11 even more now.
My lame story
About a year ago,IIRC, I set a registry key that purported to block the Windows 11 upgrade on my workstation. Or maybe I set the group policy. I forget which specifically it was as it’s been an eventful year. Whatever it was I had done to block Windows 11, I either fucked it up or they stopped respecting it. Anyway, whatever happened, Microsoft kept nagging me over and over. I’d tell it “No, fuck off.” But Microsoft won’t take “No” for an answer. Eventually, I guess they just stopped asking and just installed it. I use this mostly via RDP, so it’s possible I accidentally clicked something that triggered an upgrade? Not sure on that. I know I didn’t choose to upgrade.
This morning, some stuff that normally runs on my workstation was not running correctly, which usually indicates that Microsoft has forced a reboot for updates again. I’m used to it, so I opened my macbook to remote into the workstation and get everything going again. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that my machine had been enshittified with Windows 11 against my will. Everything looked cartoonish and terrible. (Though it did seem to work for the 30 seconds I used it.)
I didn’t panic, because even a lazy half-assed used-to-be-sysadmin like myself has set up backups and has a recovery drive handy. But that is still a pain in my ass, and I’d rather just get my machine back without the hassle.
After some quick searxing, I immediately found a guide to uninstall windows 11. Fortunately, Microsoft did make this part of the process relatively painless. Fuck Microsoft with a spiked buttplug for doing this in the first place, but at least I was able to get my installation back without having to resort to a manual system restore.
It is important to note here that the “go back to windows 10” option gets removed after 10 days. So if this happens to you, do not procrastinate like I usually do. Instead just go revert to Windows 10 immediately. After 10 days, they remove the windows.old directory and you’ll have to do a clean install to get back to Windows 10.
Key Take-aways
- Microsoft is pushing Windows 11 hard.
- It was surprisingly easy to revert back to Windows 10. It took me about 5 minutes.
- I need to accelerate our migration away from relying on non-free software and services, especially Windows and Plex. Unfortunately, (at the risk of sounding like an IT middle-manager)… There is a long project backlog and the legacy tail is real.
HOW TO REVERT TO WINDOWS 10
aka roll-back or downgrade or windows 11 (courtesy of TomsHardware.com)
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Navigate to the Recovery submenu of Settings. The fastest way to get there is to search for “go back to Windows 10” and click the top result. You can also browser to Settings->System->Recovery.
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Click “Go back”
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Check off one or more reasons for your uninstall when prompted.
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Click “No, thanks” when asked to check for updates instead of rolling back.
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Click Next, Click Next, Click “Go back to Windows 10.”
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Machine reboots, takes a couple of minutes, and then boots back into Windows 10.
If you’re not married to Windows, I implore you to escape while you can.
I miss windows 7
Yup. A lot of people say XP was the best but IMO that’s just nostalgia talking. XP was pretty unstable, horrendously insecure to an extreme degree, and missing a lot of creature comforts.
It was so common for one program not responding to freeze up the whole system and necessitate a hard reboot. Just made it frustrating to use. There are some things I miss though.
Peak computing.
Last good version of Windows, RIP 🙏
everything after xp was bloat
Thankfully, Windows 11 is supposedly incompatible with my 2-3yr old PC, so I don’t have to worry about Microsoft pushing it on me. It’s probably just a bios thing I have enabled/disabled, but I’ll be hanging onto windows 10 until Microsoft discontinues updates, and then probably move to Linux. The reason why I haven’t yet is because the Nvidia Linux drivers are apparently still not that great and don’t support all of the GPU features.
Maybe your mainboard doesn’t have a TPM-chip. In that case Windows will tell you that your computer is not compatible with Windows 11 (you could still install it anyway though, but it takes a little more work).
TPM is almost 15 years old.
Their motherboard most likely does have a TPM chip, it just isn’t activated in the BIOS.
I got blind-sided by having Windows 11 pushed onto my workstation
The upgrade is not automatic. You interacted with a prompt to approve the upgrade, you just might not realize it because it may have been on impulse.
I manage Windows installations for tons of folks and I’ve never seen the level of repeated prompting / nagging you’re describing.
For anyone who has wanted to stick with 10, it has been enough to decline the upgrade from the full screen prompt and then choose “Stay on Windows 10 for now” from Windows Update.
It’s possible that your registry changes had something to do with your unusual experience. I run into a lot of folks who complain about OneDrive “ruining their computer” after they’ve tried some obscure method of disabling it when all they had to do was uninstall the program like any other.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty Microsoft does wrong but compared to the Windows 10 shitshow I’ve found they’re actually handling this transition quite well.
Reminder that a lot of these design trends are intended for the average basic user, not power users with strong preferences. They make up the majority and need quite a bit of handholding.
Yeah, and if it really bothers you, just disable TPM in your BIOS and it will be incapable of updating to Windows 11 without jumping through hoops.
So you could say you’re stuck with Windows 11 by day 11.
I don’t understand the hate towards windows 11. Even if it is mostly just a reskinned 10, I still find it much better to work with. My work pc is 11 and my gaming pc is 10 (Im getting real sick of my gaming pc’s interface now)
Lemmy only uses stuff that’s 90% as good as the mainstream option and takes previous knowledge to work around it’s many issues, but they’ll tell you it’s flawless because they forgot all of the configuring they did previously.
Uh, no
I had an absolutely normie non-tech brother who came to me asking me to install him Linux.
It was Debian. He wanted something rock stable.
He never looked back since.
Linux is not just a technomaniac’s dream or a product of our privacy/configurability/something-else-maximalism. While many of us come there looking for that, we end up with much more - a truly snappy system, without bloat, without all distractions, automatic updates, and corporate shit pushed on.
As that same brother said to me: “It’s such peace and quiet. You turn on your PC - and you’re all set to do whatever you have to do”
Also, Linux with reasonable modern DEs doesn’t ever require a normie to go terminal. Like, at all. It’s just that Lemmy users are more techy, and they’d need such advanced features in Windows too.
If you ask me, one of the primary reasons normies don’t regularly use Linux is because they don’t know what Linux even is. For them Windows is computer. Then there are some who know of Linux, but think “it’s more of a server thing”. Then there are some who played around with it in VM, but saw it more as a toy. And then there are brave souls who actually did a switch.
For all I know, most of the latter never looked back.
So your brother could not install it themselves because they were unable to.
Which wouldn’t have been the case with Windows on any new computer.
Thanks for proving their point.
No, he didn’t try and was afraid to break something.
Linux is easier to install than Windows, it takes 5 minutes of your time without any special knowledge to install any distro through Calamares, which is now a standard for most of them.
The reason Windows is the king is that it’s a “standard” and comes pre-installed on most computers today. Most users simply never face Windows installation process.
Solution? Preinstall Linux! A few laptops actually are now shipped with Linux preinstalled, and that’s a good, even if humble, beginning.
What does he use his computer for?
Every time I do a deep dive and look into switching to linux, I look to the comments on post to see how the other normies are doing and I always see past the people that clearly either 1- Know what they’re doing and exactly how to fix things and 2- the people that do very basic stuff with their install and look for the one that have specific hardware or use cases. They are the ones that talk about having an issue with this or that and having to search forums to find a solution or distro hop for one reason or another.
I don’t have the patience to fix the issues and learn the quirks that I know I’ll run into. Linux just isn’t quite there for a lot of people and I’m one of them.
Mostly browsing, document processing, and gaming.
I recognize the arguments you have, but, being more on a power user side, I rarely have to fix anything either. But maybe that’s me.
Personally, I’ve found Win11 to be snappier and more responsive than Win10. It has taken a couple things to get it working for me though (StartAllBack, Fancy Zones, Display Fusion, etc.)
Blahblahinb4linux, I use Mint and Ubuntu and KDE Plasma, too. Sometimes MacOS, but fuck that noise.
That said, on one of my systems the Win11 was sluggish and slow for no apparent reason. I ended up factory resetting it (to Win11 instead of Win10) and it was magically some 5x better. Not honestly sure what went wrong during the upgrade process.
StartAllBack and PowerZones, heck pretty much everything in PowerToys is great. PowerToys should just be standard windows features.
I’ve also dabbled with Linux from time to time (i really like Linux Mint) but for my work we use a lot of Microsoft tools so it makes sense to stay with Windows, I can’t get VS Code to work the way I want it to coming from Visual Studio, I’ve tried so many times but running and debugging just befuddles me and I dont have the time to spend looking at all of the configurations due to to tight deadlines.
My official work machine is eventually going to get forced to 11. But thanks to corporate America being relatively slow to respond (thanks, leadership!), that will be sometime in 2024Q4 or later.
Everything else, including the machines I use to get most of my work actually done, is non-MS.
Thanks for the PSA, the threat is real.
I recommend using Timeshift instead.
