When I set up my new PC, I wanted to again do a dual boot Windows/Linux setup–and I did, putting Linux Mint on my external 2TB Samsung SSD.
I later decided that having dual boot with an external SSD was not the way to go, so yesterday I undid this, with the intent of going back to Windows-only temporarily, before getting an internal drive setup for a Linux distro (likely Mint again).
I knew in undoing the dual boot that I had to be careful to not mess up things like Windows’ MBR–Master Boot Record, which could prevent the system from booting up at all.
I messed up the MBR.
Ironically, my still functioning old PC (also a dual boot system) allowed me to make a bootable USB drive for Windows and after a number of false starts, the MBR was repaired and everything is working normally again on the new PC, minus Linux Mint (for now)
I have some quaint old-fashioned paper notes on what to do should this happen again.
And now that I’ve cleaned up the mess I made, I can get back to what I was doing before I rudely interrupted myself.
I have a new PC. It’s mere months old, and yet already Windows 11 is bugging out and acting weird. Some examples:
The context menu you get by right-clicking will randomly switch between the new Windows 11 style and the older version used in Windows 10.
Snipping Tool will sometimes fail to open, producing a dialog to find another app in the Microsoft Store (trying again usually works).
Other random applications will just stop working, needing to be ended via Task Manager. The main culprit remains File Explorer, which will occasionally stop responding, even when opening a window with as few as two files in it. Sometimes it eventually recovers, sometimes it just needs a full restart.
General snappiness is already eroding as Windows does whatever it does to make everything slower.
Even the usually sturdy PowerToys sometimes has its tools fail to work (like Preview) until you recite the proper incantation.
Anyway, rather than just complaining, this may finally inspire me to move the drives from the old PC into the new one, and get a proper dual boot system going again. That way I can install Windows XP, a stable operating system.
Just kidding.
(Although it wasn’t bad once you had all three service packs and patches installed.)
I’m going to install some Linux distro. My short list is:
Linux Mint (I’m most familiar with it)
Kubuntu (because I like KDE Plasma and this is one of the more mainstream distros to use it)
??? A lot of others could go here. My bootable USB stick is ready.
A note, to start: My Mac Studio has largely sat idle or even powered off for most of 2025. I’m not sure why, exactly, but at some point I just found I didn’t enjoy using macOS anymore. It could be as simple as I’m much more used to the things that annoy me on Windows. Whatever the case, I will not be including Mac software below.
I will also not be listing any phone apps.
What I will be listing:
Software I use in Windows 11
Software I use in Linux Mint
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) I use in both (or even the Mac, should I turn it back on)
Windows 11
Browser: Firefox. Backup: Vivaldi.
Diary/Journal: Diarium
Tasks: TickTick
Email: Fastmail (I use the web-based version)
Blogging: WordPress (I have tried many alternatives, none have stuck so far)
Text Editor: This is complicated. I can’t make up my mind, so I’m dabbling with all of these to varying degrees:
Obsidian
Notepad (built-in Windows app)
Notepad++
Zed
Messaging: Signal
Group chat: Discord
Social media: I am only on Mastodon now, I use the Phanpy web app as the client.
Music: The built-in Windows Media Player
Word Processor: I don’t use one much these days, but when I do, it’s LibreOffice Writer.
Fiction writing, with the caveat that I haven’t done much for the past few years:
Scrivener
novelWriter
Photo editing:
Affinity Photo
Photos (the built-in app)
Luminar Neo
Drawing: I do this on a tablet now, so nothing here
Audio editing: Audacity (I rarely do audio editing, though)
Video editing: DaVinci Resolve (I rarely do video editing)
RSS reader: Good question! I keep flipping through a bunch.
Read later: Folio (browser extension for Firefox)
The apps listed above that are paid:
Diarium (one-time purchase through the Microsoft Store)
TickTick (optional yearly subscription to open more features)
Affinity Photo (one-time purchase. This was before Affinity Studio launched, which is completely free but gates AI features behind a Canva subscription)
Luminar Neo (one-time purchase)
Scrivener (one-time purchase)
Linux Mint
Browser: Firefox. Backup: Vivaldi.
Diary/Journal: Zed
Tasks: TickTick (web version, as no native Linux version exists)
Email: Fastmail (I use the web-based version)
Blogging: WordPress
Text Editor: This is complicated. I can’t make up my mind, so I’m dabbling with all of these to varying degrees:
Obsidian
Sublime Text
Zed
Messaging: Signal
Group chat: Discord
Social media: I am only on Mastodon now, I use the Phanpy web app as the client.
Music: Rhythmbox (included with Mint). Backup: VLC Player.
Word Processor: LibreOffice Writer (included with Mint)
Fiction writing, with the caveat that I haven’t done much for the past few years:
Scrivener (I have the Windows version running through Lutris)
novelWriter
Photo editing:
Pix (included with Mint)
Drawing: I do this on a tablet now, so nothing here
Audio editing: Audacity (I rarely do audio editing, though)
Video editing: I have not done this on Mint.
RSS reader: Newsflash
Read later: Folio (browser extension for Firefox)
As you can see, there is a lot of overlap with Windows, which shows how much Linux software has matured in recent years. The one place I feel it lags is in photo/graphics editing (no, I will not use Gimp, the interface just repels me, for some reason1Also, they really should just change the name.).
Paid programs in Linux Mint are the same as Windows.
I think I covered all major categories, but if I’ve forgotten something, I’ll edit it in later.
A breathtaking example of dark patterns and how not asking for consent from a user can lead to a tech-related catastrophe filled with bogus warnings and alerts.
A neat tale of dogged perseverance beyond what most people would do, with connecting-the-dots and searching saving the day.
A sad testament to what a big ol’ pile of poop Windows has become in its latest incarnation. For every good feature, it feels like there are two user-hostile ones added.
My own experience with Windows 11 has increasingly soured since its debut, which is a neat trick, considering an OS normally starts out kind of janky and unstable when it launches and smooths out over time. Instead, Windows 11 has become both increasingly fragile and obnoxious, with ads, dark patterns and AI shoved into every corner of it, even basic apps like Paint and Notepad.
The other night I thought to myself that I’ve been taking photos with my new camera, but hardly ever post any of them. So I went through and tagged a bunch I took on Saturday and found I had 51 apparently worth considering. That’s way too many, but it was a starting point. I did the tagging in Linux Mint, but photo editing is still a bit iffy there, so I switched back to Windows 11 and my main photo editing software, Affinity Photo.
I edited one raw image of a barn swallow, then loaded a second image, of a house sparrow. After doing this, Windows 11 turned into this weird, laggy mess. The mouse cursor would slowly drift across the screen on its own, as if it weighed several tons, never fully stopping, never responding to any clicks, though I could get it to slowly move in other directions. The keyboard was also non-responsive, so I could not invoke task manager by using CTRL-ALT-DEL to see what program had gone rogue., or if it was Windows itself.
In the end, I rebooted the PC. It was such an unpleasant experience I even briefly thought of switching over to the Mac, then remembered the security hell of trying to install mouse drivers on it that led me to abandoning it for what has now been multiple weeks, because I am done with modern computers constantly throwing obstacles in the way of a pleasant, or even just nondescript, user experience.
Windows 11 has been behaving so far since the reboot, but I’ve only edited a single photo. I’ll have the full batch of selected photos from last Saturday posted sometime in 2028, probably.
In the meantime, here is that one photo, of a barn swallow.
First, the good news, which started with Very Bad News.
I got Jeff a Lenovo YOGA 2-in-1 laptop a few months back to replace the aging and decrepit 2017 iPad Pro I gave him when I got a new one in 2020. It has worked OK since, but there have been a few little glitches and weirdness. I was unsure how much was to blame on the hardware, Windows or moon phases.
I got my answer a few days ago when the laptop booted up to an obscure Bitlocker error. I did not realize Bitlocker was even on–it’s activated by default on the Windows 11 install. Researching the error, I was not able to find a reliable solution. Jeff gave the thumbs up to the “nuke from orbit” option. I selected the Windows reset option that blows everything away. It produced an error message with no description other than “an error occurred.” I then offered to install Linux Mint. He said go ahead.
I prepped a Mint USB stick.
I inserted the stick and booted from it.
I chose the Install Linux Mint option on the desktop.
Linux Mint installed and was ready in significantly less time than it took to get to the Windows 11 desktop after unboxing the laptop–and Windows 11 is pre-installed.
Mint automatically recognized the Brother printer once it connected to the Wi-Fi. The touchpad was recognized, as was the included pen when using the built-in drawing app, cleverly named Drawing.
Everything is working just fine. The laptop, to me, feels snappier and more responsive. It may actually be a better laptop now with Mint than the bloated mess that is Windows 11. This is good news.
Now, the bad news. On my PC, I dual boot between Windows 11 and Mint. Mint has generally given me no issues, but at some point recently and issue did arise. It may have been an update or something else, I’m not sure. It’s not Bitlocker, at least.
The issue seems to be related to Firefox, the built-in browser (and my browser of choice) and YouTube. At some point, while watching a YouTube video, the whole system will freeze and continue to freeze intermittently. The only way to fix it once it starts showing this behaviour is to shut down Firefox.
The issue might be Firefox. It might be YouTube. It might be something else. I have done no troubleshooting. What I have done is started testing to see if the issue replicates in Vivaldi, my backup browser of choice. So far, it has not happened with Vivaldi. This makes me sad, because I want to keep using Firefox in Mint, but I also really don’t want to spend time troubleshooting this when a) I may spend a lot of time on it when I could be doing something productive or at least entertaining and b) I may find no actual solution. So this is bad news.
But I may do a little troubleshooting, at some point. Maybe.
Eventually I’ll probably crash File Explorer by just opening it. It seems to crash a lot now, regardless of circumstance.
And I don’t troubleshoot it anymore, because there are so many possible reasons it might be crashing. I just live with it. Or spend more time in Linux Mint, whose file manager does not constantly crash (yet).
Has it really come to this, feeling fondness and nostalgia for Windows 95? I’m sure it was horrible in its own way, and I’ve just blocked the details, but still.
My Canon camera took 78 photos today without issue. It then stopped taking photos, without explanation or apparent cause.
While editing a few of the good photos taken today, Windows 11 hard-locked, forcing me to reboot it. This has happened several times since installing the major fall patch.
TBD. There is still time before I turn in for the evening.
I have no idea what to do about the camera. For Windows 11, I am teaching it a lesson by rebooting into Linux Mint. It’s tough love, see.
I don’t know. It seems to have started in the past week and everything feels just sluggish enough to notice and, thus, be irritating.
I am typing this in Linux Mint, using Firefox, which remains snappy and responsive here in neckbeard land.
The slowness is probably some obscure bug in the major patch that came out this fall, or one of the billion processes always running in the background going wonky. You know, the kind of thing that is all but impossible to troubleshoot these days. We may be back to the days when you just reformat and start all over again.
Linux is getting closer to all I need for an operating system. Just a few more things and I can leave Windows behind after using it for the past hundred thousand years.
I just need to figure out how to play Diablo 3 in Mint. I mean, choose a good writing app. Yeah, that’s it.
It may not work for you, but it sure works for me!
Start Windows 11.
Open File Explorer.
Open a tab in File Explorer.
Repeat Step 3 until you have four or five tabs open.
Wait a short time.
Watch as File Explorer freezes, then crashes and restarts.
The good news is it usually restarts. If it doesn’t, press Win + R and enter explore.exe. This will restart File Explorer.
I will add this caveat: I run a lot of apps and background thingies, ranging from PowerToys to Discord, so who knows what dark magic is really making File Explorer upend itself, but whatever it is, it does not seem to like its new tabs being used.
I got presented with this dialog box in Windows 11 today. I can confirm it left me unsure on how to proceed.
(I also confirmed that at least the current version of Windows 11 I’m running gets a bit snaky with programs if you leave them open and running for long periods of time.)
UPDATE, August 26, 2024: Microsoft has changed the wording of the note that resulted in the Ars Technica article. The update is in the same article link below, but for the link-averse, here's the before/after:
BEFORE: "The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience."
NOW: "Many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience."
It’s explained in the story that the time between announcing official deprecation of the Control Panel (now) and it actually being removed from Windows could span years. The current Settings app has a few things to recommend it:
Generally it looks nicer and more modern
It features breadcrumb navigation
The search (which you will probably need) works reasonably well in my experience
But it also falls short:
Many Control Panel settings are absent, especially ones for more advanced options
The categories are, I think, not as straightforward
System seems to be a dumping ground for “Where do we put this setting?”
It’s a single window, so you can’t have two of them open at the same time
The home page is filled with information pseudo-ads for Microsoft services, such as OneDrive, Microsoft 365 and more
The comments on the article are a mix of nostalgia and the expected nerd rage against the generally considered-to-be inferior Settings app. This comment resonated with me:
The reason it resonates is that I feel that same nostalgia when I see that mid-90s Windows GUI. I feel that GUI, with higher-resolution elements and a few tweaks, would look fine today and in some ways, even better than what we have with Windows 11 (also see my post on Windows GUI: Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (Ranked)). The post also hits on an issue that has been happening since the Settings app was introduced in 2012 with Windows 8: A constant visual clash between Settings and Control Panel. Also, it’s been 12 years! Why is Microsoft still not finished moving over everything in the Control Panel to Settings1This is the mild exasperation referenced in the title? ~nerd rage intensifies~
Anyway, I actually rarely use Control Panel these days, as Windows mostly just works (and I use PowerToys, which probably helps), but the article did prompt me to pin Control Panel to the Start menu, just in case. Then I went in and looked through some of the options, pretending it was suddenly 1999 again and computers were cool. They were still tools, but they were also just kind of neat. To nerds, at least.
