alt Hacker NewsI'm a macos / linux user who bought a second-hand windows PC last year for CAD and games. Windows 11 is worse than you think it is.
It's worse than the data harvesting (which required two hours to turn off), irritating ads (for an OS you pay for) and generally schizophrenic UX (don't get me started on the Start menu).
The Windows team has gone far beyond typical bugs. They're introducing new classes of bugs; one day your computer's working fine and the next, your GPU's 3D performance (somehow) drops by a half — you know, the thing I bought the computer for? — https://www.guru3d.com/story/windows-11-kb5066835-update-tri...
The bug impacted CAD too, AFAICT btw, though I couldn't find a publication that tested this update on solidworks / shapr 3D etc.
They shipped a patch that started bricking SSDs, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/latest-windo... / https://www.pcmag.com/news/pc-building-group-figures-out-why... / https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/reports-...
Another that kept crashing on certain motherboards and processors with integrated graphics, https://windowsforum.com/threads/windows-11-24h2-intel-z890-...
If I didn't have a Solidworks license and Solidworks wasn't Windows only, I'd have switched to Steam OS or another linux distro a long time ago. I'm currently being held hostage by Dassault (and – to a lesser degree — the Windows-Gaming Industrial Complex).
Forget Apple Maps bad, this is Windows 11 bad.
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Have you tried using OnShape? One of the reasons that I switched to OnShape recently is that I can run it on my MacBook. This makes switching between my mechanical design & app development workflows seamless. There are some things to get used to with the transition to a cloud system, but knowing what I know now I would make the same decision again.
At this point I'm using Windows almost exclusively for gaming (and it sounds like non Windows options have been getting better recently, so I may be able to step away from the Windows ecosystem entirely when that machine eventually dies).
I think if Dassault et. al. released a version of their software for Linux or Mac OS then the only excuse I have left to boot Windows would be gone completely. Hell even if it worked somewhat reliably as a viewer on Valve's Proton I'd be happy.
As someone who has been primarily Mac for most of my life, I started using a Windows machine fairly recently for work.
I'm tied down to the Windows eco-system (Teams, Outlook, etc).
I still haven't gotten use to the idea of every link in Microsoft apps opening in Edge regardless of your settings.
This might seem like a small thing, but the entire UX seems to be designed around benefiting Microsoft, not the user.