I installed Windows 11 on my new office PC yesterday, and it took hours.
The initial boot took forever because it decided it needed to do an update as part of the install,
Then after install when you enter your Microsoft account details so it downloads the entire internet including OneDrive (gross),
Then you switch to AU locale because despite saying I’m in Australia during install it’s set me up as US language and currency and imperial measurements etc but Melbourne timezone (also incorrect),
Then you uninstall and disable all the stupid Candy Crush and celebrity news (in the start menu?? why??) and LinkedIn and Xbox gaming crap and all this other stuff that just appears,
Allocate another day to uninstall all the MS Office stuff I don’t want (especially OneDrive),
Then you can install Firefox and Thunderbird and Nextcloud and Libre Office and Irfanview and accounting software,
And finally everything starts syncing and away we go time to be productive…
Jokes! Critical update and it’s time to reboot multiple times.
I can boot from a Ventoy USB and have a new distro installed and working on my laptop in under an hour ffs.
Irfanview is definitely one of the image viewers of all time.
When I moved away from Windows one of the things I missed was the super lightweight image viewer from the XP and 7 days (even on Windows 10 I used to still copy the exe over from a backup because it was way better than the bloated shitty Photos app, or whatever Microsoft was trying to push)
I really wanted a replacement image viewer that was minimalistic, lightweight, and supported deleting images with a keystroke from the viewer - a feature absolutely essential as I like to arrow-key back and forth through photos and trim the fat, a feature many viewers somehow don’t support.
After trying out just about every option there was, my favourite has ended up being qView.
It’s FOSS, cross platform (Linux, macos, Windows) and pleasantly fast.
XnView is quite feature-complete for my needs, but it’s constantly trying to phone home to Google, so better run it in a sandbox.
Geeqie is better in several ways - e.g. it supports avif and jxl - but it’s missing some features I’ve come to like.
I’ve yet to try qView.
XnView is what I currently use as a Temu Irfanview on Linux. But it’s so awkward compared to Irfanview - everything seems to involve clicks or loading galleries or choosing templates every time. Irfanview does everything I want within a button press or two, and being able to just loop through directories with the mouse wheel is awesome.
Ventoy works pretty well, though some people will tell you not to use it due to there being transparency issues with the source code (something about “BLOBS”? I dunno, I’m not a programmer).
The accounting software we use (which does NOT run under WINE, despite many hours trying to make it so) and Irfanview are my sole remaining reasons. At home everything is some flavour of Linux.
Also the lack of virtual filesystem support for Nextcloud is a secondary factor. Important as my Nextcloud storage is significantly larger than a reasonably priced SSD. I believe it’s technically available in a bit of an alpha stage under Linux now though?
Nextcloud supports webdav, which you can just mount as a virtual filesystem either with GVFS or some KIO slave.
AFAIR there is a fuse implementation as well.
For your single application a Windows VM may be suitable. Maybe even on some remote system in your company cloud. Single application forwarding is a long established technique.
For IrfanView itself I don’t know the capabilities, so can’t advise on it.
Most folks using irfanview started using it as an image viewer 10-15 years ago and never gave native ones on other OSes a chance. Maybe there’s an obscure format it supports but honestly I’ve actually found others to support more.
Personally, I found Irfanview with Ghostscript to be the easiest way to turn multipage color PDFs into single page black and white tiffs with a simple repeatable script. I don’t know if there’s a better way to do that now, but I don’t have to anymore.
As to just viewing images, it wasn’t even all that much better than windows viewer at the time. It really shined as a lightweight image manipulator.
This has happened twice now: I’ll build a new PC about the time my father will buy a tower from Dell.
Mine comes in 4 boxes from 3 vendors over the course of a few days. His arrives fully assembled with an OS installed.
I take 3 or 4 hours to put the machine together, boot into a Linux live session, let the installer run, I get up and do something else while that goes. When that’s done, I boot into the OS, run a big ol apt or dnf or whatever command to install most of the software I like, that runs for awhile, that installs my backup software. I restore a file backup from my old machine, that runs for an hour or so, gotta love spinning rust external hard drives. And then I’m moved in and up and running.
My father, meanwhile, will:
Erase the copy of Windows that Dell included on the machine and install it fresh, which might be the only way to actually remove McAfee.
Spend an entire week, full time, installing software. Downloading setup.exes from vendor websites, running install wizards, telling Windows “Yes, put these program files in the Program Files folder” several dozen times in a row, installing some stuff to include MS Office from disc, which Windows increasingly fights him about.
Somehow also taking a rather long time manually restoring file backups.
Tweaking settings for DAYS.
I’ll have an SSD fail. I’ll go to Best Buy, buy another off the shelf, pop the thing in, and either reinstall the OS and my software, which is a rather straightforward automatic process, or simply restore my most recent file backup, which is a couple clicks, depending if it’s my / or /home drive.
My father…look, some men build model train sets, some men paint, some men plant gardens, some men fish, my father backs up his computer. I have a cabinet full of HIS backup hard drives because he’s playing pretend he has “offsite backups.” When he suffers an SSD failure, he:
Comes over to my house to monologue about it for 5 to 10 minutes
Spends an afternoon on the phone with Dell. At some point he convinces them to honor the warranty he paid extra for.
1.5 weeks later the one service tech Dell has for this state arrives with an SSD and installs it.
Engage the full manual reinstall business, because 1. he’s got his whole system on one drive, and 2. for some reason he isn’t willing to actually use the full system image backups he takes.
I see and acknowledge your /s, but the serious answer is Ventoy doesn’t but many Linux distros offer OneDrive support out of the box and the onboarding process will help you set it up.
Installing Windows 10 or 11 has never taken more than an hour for me, from initial boot all the way to finalizing all updates. Don’t know what your issue was, but it is not the norm.
I had to have Windows not in a virtual machine for a work thing. Installed Windows 10 off a USB in a dual boot on a laptop that was already running Mint (last week). Install time was ~7-10 mins, no Microsoft account required or tricks to get around it. It pulled all the drivers for the Thinkpad when I connected to WiFi on the Desktop screen, and it updated and restarted in about 10 mins. Throw in that I configured my tool bar and themes and set my background to a flat color / changed the settings for performance over looks. Maybe 25 minutes total.
No candy crush or anything to uninstall because the install was created using the Media Creation Tool using the selection to install on another machine.
I use Linux on my machines standardly, and prefer it. My biggest issue was that I had to decide if I wanted to install Grub afterwords because Windows will overwrite your bootloader or just hit f12 everytime.
I installed Windows 11 on my new office PC yesterday, and it took hours.
I can boot from a Ventoy USB and have a new distro installed and working on my laptop in under an hour ffs.
It’s a good thing that windows is so easy and user friendly. Right?
Right guys?
IfranView 🥹 respect 🫡
Irfanview is definitely one of the image viewers of all time.
When I moved away from Windows one of the things I missed was the super lightweight image viewer from the XP and 7 days (even on Windows 10 I used to still copy the exe over from a backup because it was way better than the bloated shitty Photos app, or whatever Microsoft was trying to push)
I really wanted a replacement image viewer that was minimalistic, lightweight, and supported deleting images with a keystroke from the viewer - a feature absolutely essential as I like to arrow-key back and forth through photos and trim the fat, a feature many viewers somehow don’t support.
After trying out just about every option there was, my favourite has ended up being qView.
It’s FOSS, cross platform (Linux, macos, Windows) and pleasantly fast.
https://interversehq.com/qview
I’ve been using it for… god, feels like centuries at this point. Nothing else will do.
It also has an awesome compression if you resave oversized iphone photos for quick 'net sharing
XnView is quite feature-complete for my needs, but it’s constantly trying to phone home to Google, so better run it in a sandbox.
Geeqie is better in several ways - e.g. it supports avif and jxl - but it’s missing some features I’ve come to like.
I’ve yet to try qView.
XnView is what I currently use as a Temu Irfanview on Linux. But it’s so awkward compared to Irfanview - everything seems to involve clicks or loading galleries or choosing templates every time. Irfanview does everything I want within a button press or two, and being able to just loop through directories with the mouse wheel is awesome.
Qview is very light on features, so if you like featureful it probably isn’t for you :)
If you still want (or need) to use Windows, I’ve found Ninite to be a great time saver.
I really need to try Ventoy. I’ve had 3 people recommend it to me so far.
Ninite was clutch back in my Windows days.
Ventoy works pretty well, though some people will tell you not to use it due to there being transparency issues with the source code (something about “BLOBS”? I dunno, I’m not a programmer).
Considering all the OSS you’re using, why not run Linux? Not permitted by work?
The accounting software we use (which does NOT run under WINE, despite many hours trying to make it so) and Irfanview are my sole remaining reasons. At home everything is some flavour of Linux.
Also the lack of virtual filesystem support for Nextcloud is a secondary factor. Important as my Nextcloud storage is significantly larger than a reasonably priced SSD. I believe it’s technically available in a bit of an alpha stage under Linux now though?
Nextcloud supports webdav, which you can just mount as a virtual filesystem either with GVFS or some KIO slave. AFAIR there is a fuse implementation as well.
For your single application a Windows VM may be suitable. Maybe even on some remote system in your company cloud. Single application forwarding is a long established technique.
For IrfanView itself I don’t know the capabilities, so can’t advise on it.
Most folks using irfanview started using it as an image viewer 10-15 years ago and never gave native ones on other OSes a chance. Maybe there’s an obscure format it supports but honestly I’ve actually found others to support more.
Personally, I found Irfanview with Ghostscript to be the easiest way to turn multipage color PDFs into single page black and white tiffs with a simple repeatable script. I don’t know if there’s a better way to do that now, but I don’t have to anymore.
As to just viewing images, it wasn’t even all that much better than windows viewer at the time. It really shined as a lightweight image manipulator.
Honestly, if VLC doesn’t open it, it’s a lost cause.
This has happened twice now: I’ll build a new PC about the time my father will buy a tower from Dell.
Mine comes in 4 boxes from 3 vendors over the course of a few days. His arrives fully assembled with an OS installed.
I take 3 or 4 hours to put the machine together, boot into a Linux live session, let the installer run, I get up and do something else while that goes. When that’s done, I boot into the OS, run a big ol apt or dnf or whatever command to install most of the software I like, that runs for awhile, that installs my backup software. I restore a file backup from my old machine, that runs for an hour or so, gotta love spinning rust external hard drives. And then I’m moved in and up and running.
My father, meanwhile, will:
I’ll have an SSD fail. I’ll go to Best Buy, buy another off the shelf, pop the thing in, and either reinstall the OS and my software, which is a rather straightforward automatic process, or simply restore my most recent file backup, which is a couple clicks, depending if it’s my / or /home drive.
My father…look, some men build model train sets, some men paint, some men plant gardens, some men fish, my father backs up his computer. I have a cabinet full of HIS backup hard drives because he’s playing pretend he has “offsite backups.” When he suffers an SSD failure, he:
Your dad got a long beard by any chance? Has he got a pointy hat with stars on it?
No, he’s a clean shaven 70 year old who has been a computer nerd since punch cards.
But does Ventoy have OneDrive?
/s
I see and acknowledge your /s, but the serious answer is Ventoy doesn’t but many Linux distros offer OneDrive support out of the box and the onboarding process will help you set it up.
Don’t forget the whack-a-mole of finding which ‘features’ got turned back on with the critical updates.
This might assist you in the windows horrors
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
Use Windows LTSC
Installing Windows 10 or 11 has never taken more than an hour for me, from initial boot all the way to finalizing all updates. Don’t know what your issue was, but it is not the norm.
I had to have Windows not in a virtual machine for a work thing. Installed Windows 10 off a USB in a dual boot on a laptop that was already running Mint (last week). Install time was ~7-10 mins, no Microsoft account required or tricks to get around it. It pulled all the drivers for the Thinkpad when I connected to WiFi on the Desktop screen, and it updated and restarted in about 10 mins. Throw in that I configured my tool bar and themes and set my background to a flat color / changed the settings for performance over looks. Maybe 25 minutes total.
No candy crush or anything to uninstall because the install was created using the Media Creation Tool using the selection to install on another machine.
I use Linux on my machines standardly, and prefer it. My biggest issue was that I had to decide if I wanted to install Grub afterwords because Windows will overwrite your bootloader or just hit f12 everytime.
I don’t think it’s taken less than an hour for me in the past decade
I’ve built probably 350 PCs for customers over the last decade. Not the norm.