Windows 11 25h2 October Update Bug Renders Recovery Environment Unusable

I've used Arch on both servers and on desktop for a few years, and the only issue I ever had was pacman breaking due to both signing and file conflicts. I also had this on Debian and Ubuntu, (apt just simply stopped working, and nothing I did would make it work), so it isn't unique to Arch.

I'm not being defensive of Arch, I just think a lot of folks think rolling release = bugs. For the ones that do have stuff break, they typically modify their environment with huge customizations that would break anything, including Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, or any other OS.

I'll report back if my CachyOS install ever breaks, however, the only reason I stopped using Arch prior to this was that I was playing a few games that didn't work. Now, they do, and I don't really play new games or games with anti-cheat, and all my other software (I'm a retired/disabled dev) works fine.

DirectX because steam defacto runs on Windows only for the vast majority of games, and not everyone wants a steam deck form

I can't think of any other S tier use cases tbh

I think there is more to it: IT desktop admins mostly trained on the microsoft ecosystem, GPOs, etc.

In my case I went with an old thinkpad X220, the battery is heavily degraded and It can't do less than 13W while streaming even with hardware video decoding due to the old inefficient chips in it, but even then I get between 3 to 4 hours of remote usage out of it. I can connect it to my computer using whatever available wi-fi or 4g/5g tethering, tailscale takes care of encryption and making a direct connection (no hops, thats important for latency). I've swapped the wlan card (multiple generations behind) with a modern intel wlan with wi-fi 6 which helps getting good network performance.

Sunshine can achieve a fluid performance (60fps, low latency, low res) as long as it can get between 200KiB/s (idling) and 300KiB/s of bandwidth. Tuning sunshine was a bit of a pain since it was really made for local ethernet streaming at 10MiB/s+. The first thing is to sacrifice encoding latency by swapping the "inefficient" hardware encoder with a software encoder set to one of the "slow" presets. This will lower your bandwidth req. right away and the latency increase is negligible when taking into account typical wan network latency. Host CPU load is minor at low resolutions and 60fps. H264 is all that X220 can decode, so H264 it is, but newer machines should afford you fancier video encoders. For some reason you can't control the Opus encoder bitrate and in my tests it was encoding at 64KiB/s (512kbps !), so usually I disable sound. There seems to be a 128kbps mode in the code but it might be busted for now. Disabling FEC also helps. Just remember that sticking to low resolutions makes everything quadratically more efficient :). Chroma subsampling is the enemy of colorful text, so you will want to enable 4:4:4 mode in moonlight if your hardware decoder supports it! (and of course the X220 hardware dec. can't do that, so no sharp syntax highlight for me when on battery!, though because of my astigmatism I like using bold text which is less susceptible to that....)

Anyway, sorry for my info dump, just wanted to share.

I am getting about ~4 hours of active usage where the display is on full time and I'm doing things (code editing web apps and scripts, running Docker containers, browsing, listening to music, etc.). I wouldn't mind more battery life out of it if possible, but it's not the end of the world.

What I'm really happy about is the price / performance ratio of Nimo's laptops.

I picked this one up: https://www.nimopc.com/products/nimo-15-6-n155-r7-6800h-fhd-...

It was $575 on Amazon a few months ago. It's a 15" 1080p IPS display, Ryzen 7 6800H (8 core / 16 threads), 32 GB of memory, 1TB SSD with an integrated AMD 680M GPU. That GPU can use up to 8 GB of system memory as its VRAM (you can configure the amount in the BIOS). It also has a 2 year warranty.

I initially got it as a travel laptop since I mainly use desktop machines. The keyboard is good and has a backlight, the trackpad is good to the point where I don't use trackpads much at all and I don't feel like it's in the way or a problem. Niri is super trackpad optimized too, I'm using 3-4 finger gestures a lot.

It's quite fast for what I'm doing with it and like it a lot. Once I'm back from traveling, I'll write an extensive blog post on my experience with it.

I don't work for the company or have any affiliation with them, I bought it with my own money. The only interaction I had with them was calling their support before I bought it to see if it was still returnable if I formatted the drive and put Linux on it. They said absolutely, it's no problem. I had no intent on returning it unless the hardware died early. For reference when I called I got a human very quickly and they were friendly.

If you spend some time tweaking some settings and tuning drivers, I've been able to squeeze 10-12hrs out of an 16t Zen 3 laptop on 7nm node, and 8-12hrs out of a 16t Zen 4 refresh laptop on a 4nm node. You should be able to squeeze more out of a Zen 5 refresh with efficiency cores on a smaller node.

Out of the box, Linux is configured for the widest compatibility, and that means not enabling or tuning all settings for optimal battery life. Getting good battery life is achievable, just expect to do some tweaking.

For example:

- Using the amd_pstate in active mode

- TuneD (or power-profiles-daemon, but it's less comprehensive)

- powertop --auto-tune

- ASPM in powersave mode

- WiFi/BT driver power management

- Tweaking amdgpu power management settings

- Adjusting brightness/backlight timeout

- Downclocking & undervolting CPU/APU

- Also look into the kernel's thermal governors

TuneD + powertop will take care of most of that for you automatically, modern Linux distros enable amd_pstate in active mode by default, there are tools for automating GPU powersaving, and backlight behavior has a GUI in DEs.

See:

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Category:Power_management

- https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Power_management

- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/power/index.html

- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/pm/devices...

- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/thermal/in...

- Tree view on main panel (can expand folders without navigating into them).

- Checksum validation under "properties".

- Filter function (like search, but faster and persistent across navigation).

- When dragging and dropping, explicit distinction between "move here", "copy here", "link here", and "move into new folder".

- Browsing SFTP drives natively.

- Native Git integration.

- Well integrated notifications for long operations.

- Disk usage statistics (technically "filelight"). Like WinDirStat, but with circles.

In what way is the MS Windows file explorer good? It neither has tabs, side-by-side view, pattern selection, performant search, an UI, that doesn't regularly blocks and becomes unresponsive, etc... .

What feature does it have, that some other file manager, doesn't have? I can't think of any?

Maybe the crashes could be solved with a more stable os like debian, but the explorer shell integration is on windows on another level with network storage.

Good joke, made my day! : )

(very sorry, it is late, would love to collect and expand in a dedicated thread later. a prime reason for hating to turn on my work computer - no Windows at home! -, me, the tech enthusiast since learned how to hold a screwdriver, is Windows Explorer. so many senseless inconsistencies with unfinished junk petrified into unmutable practicies that changing line of work where never ever need to use Windows again is getting increasingly attractive very fast. even goat herding sounds a sensible alternative sometimes)

I upgraded back down to Win10 and plan on making it my absolute last Windows version I ever use, Win 11 is just unbelievably shit in so many ways even by M$ standards.

How come? I can't think of a single redeeming feature of windows file explorer that I need (or use).

Heck, it effectively doesn't have text search (grep -R) and b/c it's so bad there is the "window search" service that even worse. It has the absolutely worst imaginable zip file (erm folder) reader as a side bonus. Security file permissions management is just horrid (along with the fact some of them are coupled with registry paths)

I don't recall seeing a correct file system operation time estimation.

Edit - since explorer.exe is both the shell and the file manager, and the former craps itself often enough (task manager or taskkill /im explorer.exe), it's another negative point.

For me the perfect file manager is Total Commander or Midnight Commander or Double Commadner.

As a systems guy by trade and now a security guy by role, that scares the every living fuck out of me.

Windows used to be about backwards compatibility. Microsoft was proud of it. Twenty year old software ran on it.

Now it is all about AI stuff that I do not give a fuck about.

The first issue is you don't meaningfully control the timing (ie. defer until you have time to deal with any fallout, which may be >30 days), and that you can't manage your risk by reviewing what's in them and selectively picking the ones you want (ie. true security fixes with limited surface area to bork things).

Once upon a time both those things were easy (eg. meaningful descriptions) and under your control.

The reason for the mismatch was the cleared positions are Azure, so was hoping for a position as a developer on the Defender product, but they don't really have that in the cleared space.