TLDR:
Windows 11 v24H2 and beyond will have Recall installed on every system. Attempting to remove Recall will now break some file explorer features such as tabs.
YT Video (5min)
Microsoft has been the single most effective marketing asset for GNU/Linux distributions in recent years.
I’m so fucking glad I switched to Linux this year.
Well Valve was doing too well with the steam deck in that area so they had to trump them, second place is just the first loser.
Valve is holding the carrot, Microsoft the stick.
Tbf in recent decades.
Even tho googled-android should have been even more so, but the hardware licence fuchshittery is a huge obstacle.
So true. I got fed up with all this Recall and AI BS and recently replaced Win 11 (which I upgraded to by accident) with PopOS. No issues so far and PopOS is much faster than Windows.
PC gamer for a lot of my life. My old Win8.1 system is slowly dieing and I can play less and less games…win 11 has made me decide to leave the hobby. I may grab a Steamdeck, but I think I am done with PC gaming (and consoles are just shit PCs now). I have a Linux work PC, but I am not bothering with making a gaming Linux rig when I can just go the Steamdeck route.
Just popping in to mention that Bazzite can be put on your win8 machine and it will prob run games better than win does. in case you don’t know, Bazzite is installable on PC’s where steamOS isn’t yet and it’s as close to SteamOS as they can get.
I have a SD docked and plugged into a TV with a controller at home. It works great, I swore off Win PC’s about when win8 came out, so I haven’t used it in a long time except for work, and every day I’m glad I upgraded to Linux.
Steam Deck is great, 10/10, would recommend, but you could also just load Linux on your old system and keep using it.
I can better justify taking the out presented and using the Steamdeck for my fix. It will be cathartic lol
Just want to add that most games just work on Linux now. Valve has done some amazing work on this front. The Steam deck, or really any gaming PC with Steam, are perfectly good gaming boxes. Check out Proton DB if you want game-specific info.
absolutely. I had tried Linux on various machines long ago but was one of the people that was put off by older distro’s learning curves - I’m now daily driving Linux on both my laptop and desktop and the main push for the switch is microsoft fucking around with settings, installing candy crush after updates (on a paid OS), adding more and more dumb, unsolicited, privacy invading AI bullshit with every feature update, and running like shit on a perfectly adequate machine.
Modern Linux, with flatpak support? I haven’t looked back once - had to help a friend fix something on a win11 desktop recently and was reminded of every reason I made the switch. Even if I had to jump in the terminal every day like long ago, it would still be worth it to not have bing, copilot, and edge rammed down my throat, whether I want them or not.
Windows is getting so shitty that completely non-technical users are tired of it… as soon as somewhat open minded users start to experiment and realise that Linux feature and UX parity has been achieved - I hope microsoft fucking collapses and we can all finally walk into the sunlight that open source OSes and software represent.
Not effective enough, it seems.
Windows Debloat Tool:
https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools
I run this on any new Win install. I also suggest Portmaster so you know where your data is going (I use it on Linux too!)
However, if you can, it is really worth switching to Linux. Linux is built as a tool by the people using the tool. Windows is making a product. Enough said.
If people would like to “try Linux before you buy,” check out DistroSea. It spins up a virtual machine of whatever distro and flavour you choose to try.
There are a surprising and growing number of Linux compatible tools. Software is usually why people have a hard time switching. If you’re dependent on Photoshop/Adobe, check out:
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
Gamers should check out:
This site shows how well games run on Proton (compatibility tool) and people offer solutions to get them running if there’s any snags.
Wow this doesn’t affect me at all thank fully
This is absolutely insane
My condolences to all Windows 11 users.It’s becoming common knowledge that:
- It’s not a matter of if but when will xyz service/application be breached and what are the potential damages it could do to me and others?
"I assume every online service is not if; it’s when is it going to be breached? Right? So I operate under that assumption, that everything is going to be breached at some point. And so that’s why Recall was so scary to me where it’s like, I don’t care how secure they say it is, like you look at Spectre and Meltdown no one thought these things were going to affect millions of CPUs and here we are, right?
- Steve from Gamers Nexus
[Level1Techs] Microsoft Is KILLING Windows | ft. Steve @GamersNexus
I guess I just have to keep Windows 10 with a custom group policy that disables all updates either forever or until I learn Linux.
Linux gaming is getting to the point that I could consider the switch, but I hear scary stories about Nvidia drivers.
I have a GTX 1080 and I’ve been gaming on Linux for over a year now. No issues. Only thing that you cant do is some of the new generation window managers (wayland) but even that is working well in the nvidia drivers that arent on stable yet. In any case, the previous generations window managers work great and if wayland doesnt work properly for you, you can just as easily do without it.
Point is, its worth it to make the switch. I set my partner up with Linux Mint when their machine didnt qualify for windows updates anymore and they’ve had no problems, games and all. And they would never touch the command line.
Would recommend
Yep same with PoPOS. Great little distro. It’s been my daily driver for years now.
hey GTX1080 user! Have you been able to get any games running with RTX? I picked mine up used a while back, and I kinda stopped PC gaming ages ago, but it’d be nice to use these features if I could. I haven’t been able to get RTX Portal or RTX Quake 2 to work right via Steam, so i figured the card/drivers just can’t handle it and I should just play vanilla DOOM instead.
My understanding is the 1080 predated the RTX stuff by a generation, even when I was on Windows I don’t think the Nvidia drivers for the 1080 supported RTX well, if at all
Correct.
I still have a 1080Ti in one machine and it definitely does not support RTX of any stripe, on any OS.
Nvidia drivers are mostly OK now.
If you have a new NVIDIA GPU (Turing+), you can use the new open kernel module. If you have older ones, I guess you’re stuck with the proprietary or bad unofficial open source ones. The open kernel module works good and gets the job done. No need to be afraid of it. I get over 1000fps in (optimized) minecraft with shaders. I couldn’t do that in windows.
Which GPU do you have? I’m looking for an upgrade and those framerates make me drool.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Mobile
Turing +, not tuner +
done
Running EndeavourOS with Nvidia on Wayland for some months now. Prior to 555 it was a bit janky at times. Since then, and now with 560, the only issue I’m having is related to sleep/hibernation mode. Game wise everything runs fine.
I’ve had no significant driver issues with Mint and a 2080, myself. I switched back in February, and most things – games included – just work. The few that didn’t, were easy to fix with some searching on stackoverflow and reddit (about the only thing that site is good for now).
if an idiot like me can do it, so can you.
You can run Windows in virtual machine, you know.
It would be the best if you could have dedicated GPU for it, to be able to run games with nearly 100% performance.
Worst thing is you may have to learn downgrade commands on PopOS if a game breaks with driver updates.
I guess it depends on what you do, but as an awerage user - not really much to learn in terms of Linux. No special knowledge needed to use it like a normal person. I had to reformat some drives so Linux can use them and learning about Heroic games launcher, Lutris and Bottles to run non-steam games and windows software amd learn about compatibility layer built into Steam.
Otherwise it just works. Using Linux Mint. Didn’t boot to Windows pretty much since I installed it - there was no need.
As others have already pointed out Nvidia drivers aren’t that bad. The only game I’ve had issues with is Star Wars Outlaws, but I think that has more to do with the game itself than Nvidia drivers (It’s not exactly a stable experience on Windows either).
The only big thing holding Linux gaming back is anti-cheat, but that’s mostly because AAA developers don’t want to allow anti-cheat on Linux. It’s worth checking out if your favorite online game can be played on Linux.
I had no issues with Nvidia. PopOs has support for Nvidia on install…I used it and it worked
I had minor issues when I first installed, but I worked them all out.
Install and give it a week. Seven days. If you can’t get it all figured out by then head back to windows. If you can figure it out, you probably won’t go back.
EndeavourOS (Arch-based) works fantastic with latest Nvidia drivers, for me
Including for sleep and hibernate? Those are what I’ve run into issues with with EndeavourOS and Garuda with my NVIDIA gpu
Hmm I never use hibernate but sleep seems fine for me
I use Garuda and NVIDIA gives me no troubles
I made the switch with my old 1080ti the newer GPUs work even better and mine has given me almost 0 issues with Linux mint. It’s worth the dive. Mint also “just works” so it’s super easy to get into from Windows.
It may have been the case in the past but Ive used both the GTX 680 and RTX 3060 on Fedora with no issue whatsoever. I have veen using the nvidia peoprietary drivers and they work well.
Try a Live USB and find out for yourself if your distro of choice plays nice with your rig. You could have your answer in an hour or so of following YouTube tutorials.
I moved to Linux Mint after a brief stint with Manjaro. I don’t prefer the Cinnamon interface, but gaming has been perfect. Bottles, allows me to install GOG Galaxy and the games run. I even modded Skyrim using a manual process and a ton of animation mods, that worked alright a lot of times with Vortex ( for the most part).
Linux can handle NTFS partitions, and just take a small line to fix if they are open during a crash. Flatpak software is really stable to install and keep installed.
I haven’t yet had a problem with steam games.
The only problem I have is with streaming services forcing Windows usage, so I got a VPN and raised the Jolly Roger to watch streaming services.
My 3080 plays games fine, and the few times it got a little slow I rebooted and it all worked fine. Discord calls and Twitch work fine. I even take my VA Online appointments with no issues.
It’s closer to going back to Windows 7 or XP, with a decent free office software.
Nvidia drivers are the reason I end up going back to windows every time. Once installed they work fine, but installation and updating were always fraught with issues, and would inevitably break and piss me off to the point I gave up and went back to windows.
Haven’t tried since I got my amd card, but maybe Nvidia Linux drivers are less terrible than they had been.
Okay, this might be a non-issue: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/issues/2697#issuecomment-2403792309
To those that arrive here from any Youtube or Twitter posts, please know that disabling Recall via DISM works fine, and preserves the modern File Explorer (though some might consider this an anti-feature). CBS correctly disables it, and the disablement is preserved through reboots, just like with any other feature.
Edit: of course, the big problem here is that it’s still present (even disabled) and hence malware could turn it back on without you realising. Ugh.
Its odd to call Windows Update “Malware”.
Windows Update is 100% malware by definition. Remember when Windows 7 had a free upgrade to Windows 10? It would force itself into the update queue with regular updates regardless of the user’s permission, and even after x days after the user explicitly said they didn’t want Windows 10. I worked in a computer repair shop in that time. The Windows 10 upgrade that people didn’t want or agree to often failed, breaking the machine. Sometimes we could recover the installation. Sometimes the OS had to be reinstalled. It was intentionally pushing software in deceiving ways to unconsenting users that broke their machine.
All of Windows is malware. By default you have adverts in your start menu, you have pop ups (which is not the same thing as Windows Update, pop ups are a service provided by Explorer) which maliciously install unwanted web browsers.
You can’t support Trump and then claim that only a small part of his following is due to racist bigots.
You can’t support AI and claim that only a small part of it damages the atmosphere.
You can’t support Windows and claim that only part of it is malware.
Windows 100% enables and supports this nefarious behaviour. It’s the abusive spouse trapping you before beating the shit out of you for your own good.
Yeah, you are already running Windows.
If you still consider Windows Update malware then you completely missed the other 90% of your hostile environment.
A lot of unpopular “features” and behaviors used to have DISM, policy, or registry workarounds. And MS seems to love to kill those workarounds during later updates.
If MS isn’t letting people uninstall it, there’s a reason for it, and I’d be willing to bet that users will one day find that it has been magically re-enabled by an update.
There will 100% be a policy to disable it. Microsoft may shit on their retail users, but there’s no way they’d force it on their enterprise clients. It’s a security and compliance nightmare and they know it.
Problem is disabling it will likely be locked behind the Enterprise edition.
Kind of like the “Recommended” section in the Start menu. There is actually a way to disable that entirely…if you have an Enterprise license. There is no way to do it on any other version.
I said it was back when they took Group Policy out of the Home edition: the long term goal is to make truly controlling Windows a premium feature that only corporations can afford, and you see that with the slow elimination of many of those settings.
So how can users band together to buy enterprise licenses from each other?
If MS isn’t letting people uninstall it, there’s a reason for it,
🤑 and control
Malware could also reinstall it to be fair, or just create screenshots on its own.
Still smells fishy that Explorer has it as a dependency, “disabled” or not.
Recall is malware, at least according to Malwarebytes!
Malware, or “malicious software,” is an umbrella term that refers to any malicious program or code that is harmful to systems.
(though some might consider this an anti-feature)
To be fair, not everyone would say that, and the only reason you would call it an “anti-feature” is if you had an accurate understanding of the issues.
What the actual fuck, microsoft?
“We’re entitled to everything to do, every scrap of data, everything you create, so we can feed our AI to make even more money, because you are
making the mistake ofusing our product. If someone does hack our systems and steals all your data, who fucking cares? You aren’t me. I still get paid.”-Microsuck execs.
🤑 Marketing for the marketing god! Data for the data throne!
Warhammer was close, but the grim dark was way off
grim
darkdankI’m just waiting for the grimdrip. I need new styles.
Can’t wait for those plasteel chinos.
What’s an alternative to explorer?
Unfortunately, just switch to Linux is not an option.
So, iirc, recall was a copilot+ PC “feature”. Will this recall integration be the case on “normal” x86 PCs as well?
I moved all my personal stuff over to linux
Windowsabout a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, there’s still a few things in my life that requires windows…Edit: I can’t type, apparently
MIT license:
Explore a beautiful Windows-first design. Manage all your files with increased productivity. Work across multiple folders with tabs. And so much more.
It looks nice, and has extra features like tabs, tagging 7zip/archive management, cloud drives, git integration, comparing file hashes, etc.
The only issue I had was performance, it took a long time to start each time. I’m planning on trying it again sometime later
Whoa. I wonder if explorer can be ripped out entirely and replace with this
explorer.exeis still used for desktop and probably other stuff as well, so it might not be possible without using 3rd party shell replacement and not many exist.
Might be a stupid question but this requires a NPU right? I told some fellas about it and there response was something like does not matter because they have older hardware so it can’t run anyway. So what happens to win 11 PCs with no NPU?
AFAIK Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, which in and of itself limits hardware ('cos who cares about ewaste, right?), but am unaware of anything hardware-specific for “AI”.
Your PC needs the following minimum system requirements for Recall:
- A Copilot+ PC
That links to https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/copilot-plus-pcs#faq1
Copilot+ PCs are a new class of Windows 11 AI PCs that are powered by a turbocharged neural processing unit (NPU) – a specialised computer chip for AI-intensive processes like real-time translations and image generation – that can perform more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
So just the Surface thingies?
There’s Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung laptops too: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/copilot-plus-pcs
So they’re expanding… still seems to be not all that much hardware support, weird that they’re pushing it so soon.
Recall was the headline feature for Copilot+ PCs.
When a wave of ARM powered Windows laptops, and now a few desktops launched, they were all Copilot+ for whatever reason. They all marketed the NPU, but struggled to really say what the NPU unlocked that you couldn’t do with a CPU or GPU. Other marketing gimmicks were a better background blur and an AI drawing assistant in I think paint. I think you could also do “AI stuff” in photos, but don’t think that was local.
Honestly, I think everyone missed the punchline on ARM. The promise is lower heat and greater battery life. There was no need to bundle that with AI gimmicks. But clearly a PM thought so and now they’re trying to save face. Really taking advantage of ARM and pushing for battery life, by optimizing the kernal and changing what happens in standby, would probably be a bigger engineering lift.
/Thoughts from a rando who bought an ARM powered Windows laptop and generally likes it but has never touched the NPU enabled stuff
The promise is lower heat and greater battery life. There was no need to bundle that with AI gimmicks.
But how else are you gonna bring down battery life to be on par with x86?
/s
So what happens when a win 11 PC with no NPU gets updated to the version of windows with recall and recall is installed? Does it just sit dormant like it’s deactivated because there are tons of win 11 PC that have no NPU.
I assume that’s what happens, but you know what happens when you do that!
It probably does, like Cortana after they deactivated the servers.
You couldn’t remove it for a good while, so there was a gap where it would be stuck there.
turbocharged
I wonder where the exhaust fumes come from for the turbocharger. How many cylinders do you think the engine of an average Copilot+ PC have? How much extra torque can they get out of it?
Fuck idiotic marketing, words have meaning.
This one annoys me almost as much as “overdrive.” And Intel was guilty of that one, back in the 90’s.
That word does not mean what everyone thinks it means…
Recall does not utilize NPU, people got it running on pre X Elite Arm PCs.
THIS IS WHY I AM STILL ON WINDOWS 10 AND DUALBOOTING LINUX
Based on the comments here you’d think Copilot+ PC’s are actually a popular thing. Nobody here has a PC that will run Recall. Essentially nobody has a Copilot+ PC at the moment.
Side note: Recall isn’t the boogeyman it’s being made out to be.
Just like systemd became a dependency for stuff that never needed it in the first place…
I guess you were downvoted because Recall is a closed-source privacy nightmare, and systemd, for all its flaws, is open source.
Does it relate to your statement? No. But people will take pitchforks if you compare the two, I fancy.
I fancy
I’m not saying you aren’t fancy, but grab a pitchfork and start fencing with it!!
(But yes, I was a bit confused by downvotes too but your explanation makes sense - which is weird bcs now that I understand it as such I’m def in the pitchfork crowd, even if I think we should be either way more lenient or give waaay more funding for the open sauce peeps providing us the rescue we don’t deserve)
Comparing systemd to recall is like comparing apples to gauges of guitar strings.
I was comparing the approach, not the products.
The context matters, doesn’t it? Like it or not, systemd is essential for moderns Linux systems by design, it’s necessary for them to work. You can’t say the same about recall. Comparing the approach without comparing the products is unfair.
systemd is essential for moderns Linux systems
And yet moderm linux systems existed prior to systemd, as modern windows exited without recall… Yes i can say the same. You can run linux without systemd (ask Gentoo, Devuan, Slackware and others) and you can run windows without recall. The dependency is forced and artificial.
It’s almost as if standardization under Systemd can be beneficial. Still, I’m not a fan of the monolithic approach.
Not a huge fan but systemd does a lot of stuff necessary to run linux. Of course there’s more than one way to skin a cat, but it makes sense to have systemd as a dependency. Recall does exactly zero essential functionality to the OS that would justify making it a dependency to something as important as explorer.exe on Windows.
Oh my fucking god.
If I still knew anyone who uses Windows I would be laughing at them.
Wow you must not be very social. Windows is the most used OS by a long shot.
You are correct, I am not very social.
EDIT: I am also not of the mind that just because something is common and popular doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid, broken and horrible.
… Working as a DB admin / analyst at MSFT through the Windows 8 release also didn’t help.
3 weeks. 3 weeks where we couldn’t do a goddamned bit of work because SQL manager didn’t work properly and you couldn’t have more than 2 panes open at once.
They really, truly thought that taking the windows out of Windows would be just fine for desktop users. We had to argue with people until they stopped lying and admitted that a Win 7 style mode did exist and was useable underneath the Win 8 interface, and they reluctantly made it easier to switch to without following 3 pages of procedures.
MSFT fucking sucks.
Its more than just ‘I’m not very social’, its also, ‘I have a grudge against MSFT from working for them for pennies and being gaslit and lied to routinely, obviously, without shame, for years.’
Google may be getting a looksy from the DOJ for being a monopoly, and now MSFT is doing the same shit that got them antitrusted 20ish years ago, again, on steroids.
I pray that the marinara may flow, that the noodly appendage of the meatball’d one strikes down this objectively evil giant megacorp.
How did you not know about the “Windows 7 mode” in 8 by the time of release? Wasn’t that sorted out in the preview builds?
We got dogfed (dogfooded?) the preview builds.
At some point, one preview was considered ‘good enough’ that basically everyone at MSFT was forced to switch over to it.
Backlash from MSFTs own employees who were forced to use the pre Windows 7 mode version is a huge reason why they ‘sorted it out’.
EDIT: If you don’t know… and maybe they don’t still do this, but I seriously doubt it, MSFT does what they call dogfooding. Most new software versions are released internally to MSFT employees before it goes public, so that they can functionally beta test everything.
Usually it just causes some work loss in minor ways, but with certain widely used or critical software, it can blow up entire projects and workflows for a while.
Thank goodness for Linux.
After all the fud and opposition they’ve pushed against it over the years. It’s nice to see them finally do things to help it.
Quick edit to add that it couldn’t come at a better time now that there are companies like system 76 out there. Making Linux compatible systems that ship with Linux that you can actually recommend to someone who is a novice to pick up. They may be on a more expensive side. But what’s your privacy worth?
After all the fud and opposition they’ve pushed against it over the years.
what did they do?? i havent heard of this before damn
They did PR campaigns against Linux and OpenOffice for quite some time – until cloud computing took off and it turned out they could earn more money by supporting Linux than by fighting it.
In fact, Microsoft weren’t happy about FOSS in general. I can still remember when they tried to make “shared source” a thing: They made their own ersatz OSI with its own set of licenses, some of which didn’t grant proper reuse rights – like only allowing you to use the source code to write Windows applications.
Privacy, security, intellectual property
But what’s your privacy worth?
I think society has shown us time and time again over several decades that the answer to that question is “not a God damned thing”.
A few cents per gigabyte ackshually.
Owned a system 76 unit years ago. Was lacking in the QC area.
Their laptops are built on third party chassis. I have their keyboard and that thing is SOLID. I expect their desktops (that are custom made) are also quite solid.
Laptops… I’d lean frame.work if you know your way around a Linux installer. That said, there are rumors that system76 is working on a custom laptop chassis (still, framework is hard to beat for modularity).
Edit: while not specifically QC related… I suspect the things that aren’t really custom built for them might not get the same level of care/might be more on their supplier depending on the issue.
IIRC Framework can preinstall fedora for you since it’s officially supported. I use Fedora on an AMD Framework 13 and its been very smooth. Even the fingerprint sensor works.
EDIT: They will not install linux for unfortunately but it is still supported
I have a Gazelle12 from 2018 and it’s chassis is dogshit, but when I did my research before purchasing I saw a lot of reviews. They all pointed out that the case was made of flimsy plastic, so I was aware ahead of time of that potential problem. The Oryx Pro was the next Model up for several hundreds more, though. Ultimately, I am happy with my laptop even if I have to disassemble it just to repair the chassis with epoxy periodically. It’s 6 years later and the specs are still more than adequate for 99% of my needs, except for my specific intel processor which isn’t supported by Win11. I consider that a feature as oppose to a problem. The software bloat and planned obsolessence through slowdowns of software on Windows based computers are things I do not miss one bit.
They have since changed their model lineup and I bet the build quality on the other models today aee much better then the Gazelle of 2018.
Also have their keyboard and its amazing. I’ll be doing the same, System76 Desktop and Framework Laptop for my next upgrades.
I build my own desktops, but they do sell their case individually. I’ll definitely be considering that for my next upgrade.
I switched to a Framework 13 after having a system76 Darter Pro, and it’s a whole other league. Incredibly well-built, feels great, runs great, flashy as hell, even the fingerprint reader works out of the box with Fedora KDE.
I’m sudoing in the terminal with my fingers! It’s magic! And it just works!
Also, I managed to drop it in the most stupid way so it bent the whole case, and I could get it fixed for 200 EUR, one day shipping and 20 minutes of work by myself, and that was a full casing swap, so bottom assembly plus keyboard assembly, whole case but the mobo and the stuff on it.
This is what having a laptop should work like. That’s what they took from you.
Switched a few months ago and glad I did
