Windows 11 25H2 - I'm so happy to not be using this
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Windows 11 25H2 - I'm so happy to not be using this
Updated: June 17, 2026
Ever since I purchased myself a<br>Macbook Pro, a big stone has lifted off me chest. While I already<br>did have significant usability with Linux, until that point, I still carried a little bit of doubt in<br>me heart. The reasons were varied, from consistency to quality to backward compatibility to<br>availability of "official" software that sometimes intrudes into a person's life. I couldn't truly have<br>these guarantees with Linux. But with this new machine, I was able to cover the gap left by my choice<br>to stop using Windows for anything meaningful or serious.
Don't get me wrong, I still have a couple of Windows 10 systems. But they are properly isolated, and<br>used either for silly stuff, like gaming, or they live in their own virtual machine, for if and when I<br>might need that one piece of software that has no macOS or Linux equivalent. However, the heavy<br>emotional burden of using the modern Windows is gone. Yes! Now, I also happen to have a test box with<br>Windows 11. Whenever my need for masochism hits hard, I power it on, boot into this<br>pointless operating system, and run my checks.<br>Behold, this is the latest report of that exercise. Follow me.
Updates for days
What does a responsible person do whenever they fire up a machine they haven't used for a while?<br>They run security updates. Yay. Well, I tried. And right away, I ran into tons and tons of problems.<br>Windows 11 refused to install its latest pack, 25H2. Not only were the downloads and the installation<br>attempts slow, they also didn't work. Great start.
I then decided to do some maintenance. Start a command prompt (as Administrator), run some DISM and<br>SFC for good measure. Nope, this did not help either. I went online and did a lot of random reading,<br>using the error codes as my beacon of hope. After a while, I found a note that said 25H2 requires 40 GB<br>of free space to install. What nonsense. As it happens, my system had about that, but not quite. Disk<br>cleanup, here we go.
"Modern" storage utility
If you need an example of why modern software is so crappy, let me show you. In a nutshell, any<br>"modern" app running on the desktop is going to be an inferior piece of dog turd compared to classic PC<br>programs. Microsoft decided to get rid of the simply cleanmgr.exe tool and replace it with Storage.<br>Now, the old utility isn't gone, you can invoke it from the command prompt, or through the system menu,<br>but it does not show in the C: drive properties anymore.
I launched it, selected all the different bits and pieces to clean and let it run. It worked, but it<br>would crash halfway through multiple times. And the disk usage numbers did not change. Perhaps<br>Microsoft managed to break this utility. I am not 100% sure, but I didn't get far.
I tried Storage next. Holy. So slow. It keeps running its timer animation and thinking. Everything<br>is so sluggish. And stupid. Look at the numbers. The tool reports silly figures way beyond the capacity<br>of my internal disk. Going into any one sub-view takes forever. And when you go back up, it refreshes<br>and does all the thinking again and again. This is not even undergraduate-level coding sad.
Look at this crap. Look at the reported sizes. Look at those stupid spinning<br>circles.
Now, look at the numbers yet again. That's "modern" software for you.
Look at that helpful utility. Look how good it is. The "largest" folder it could<br>find and couldn't characterize is a 60KB search something. That's what you get rather than using "old"<br>and "ugly" but totally functional and properly coded non-Web REAL desktop programs.
Eventually, I manually purged a bunch of stuff from the disk, just to get going. Forty gigs,<br>son!
Finally, the update did complete. Once it was installed, the post-reboot setup took maybe a minute.<br>My dual-boot configuration was not altered. Hint, the system also runs Linux, and Secure Boot is<br>disabled, along with every other "modern" inconvenience. But yeah, all in all, I did succeed. It only<br>took about two days of debugging and failed updates.
What's 25H2 like?
I'm going to be objective, as always. The 25H2 update does bring some nice improvements:
The desktop speed and responsiveness are significantly improved compared to whatever was<br>before. This is the first time EVER that I feel Windows 11 has a normal desktop behavior, and isn't<br>just a total flop. I am actually surprised. It only took, what, five years to get here?<br>Blimey!
My security and privacy settings<br>have not been changed. I couldn't find a<br>single un-tweak. Good.
Windows Explorer is snappier. Sure, it runs better with<br>my own tweak already, but even with the normalcy<br>settings in place, and none of that modern nonsense, you still get an extra nice performance<br>boost.
The missing window control buttons issue I...