I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators. I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.
On the Windows side, things started going downhill starting with the Windows XP era, and on the Mac the annoyances began sometime in the mid-2010s.
It seems Microsoft, Apple, and other companies realized that they’re leaving money on the table by not exploiting their platforms. Thus, they’re no longer selling simple tools, but rather they are selling us services.
Yes, there are good Linux distributions that don’t annoy me, and the BSDs never nag me, but the problem with switching to these platforms is that I still need Microsoft Office and other proprietary software tools that are not available outside “Big Tech.” There are other matters that make switching away from Windows and macOS challenging, such as hardware support and laptop battery life.
Easy answer to your last point: Work machine and Non-work machine. If I'm working for a company and the company needs MS Office, they will give me a machine with MS Office. I will treat that machine like a radioactive zone. Full Hazmat suit. Not a shred of personal interaction with that machine. It exists only to do work on and that's that. The company can take care of keeping it up to date, and the company's IT department can do the bending over the table on my behest as MS approaches with dildos marked "Copilot" or "Recall" or "Cortana" or "React Native Start Menu" or "OneDrive" or whatever.
Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.
This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.
A variation I've done occasionally is to run the Microsoft Windows software in a VM on my Linux laptop.
When I last had the MS office suite inflicted upon me, a couple years ago, I was able to run it in a Web browser on Linux.
It's important to remember, though, that these measures probably won't work long-term.
Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame. (It's usually not originating bottom-up from the ICs, and I know some nice people from there, but upper corporate is totally like that, demonstrating it again and again, for decades.)
Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
> Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame.
The Windows 10 bait n switch to Windows 11.
Hundreds of millions of PC users worldwide on old hardware using old Windows OSes were offered Win10 as free upgrade, with the promise that Win10 is the final Windows edition.
Later though, M$ announced Win11 and it would work only on new hardware (BIOS TPM 2.0 constraint), and Win10 is no longer being supported for personal use (except via some complicated ways to get an extension for the Win10 updates). And not only is Win11 buggy and full of ads, its performance is also bad.
Well, the good thing is that such shenanigans are pushing PC users to migrate to Linux.
Valve saw the writing on the wall when Windows 8 was released. Their investment made Linux more feasible for the average user.
This makes me wonder how much better the world would be if corporations didn't have to answer to shareholders. Valve isn't publicly traded, Microsoft is.
> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
My current employer is so great that I have casually mentioned that I might stay until I retire a bunch of times since joining. I've never said that about any other job. We have Word because there are industry requirements that it meets in terms of formatting legal documents. Can other apps supplant it? Possibly, but no one is spending the time and money to find out and it's not my decision to make.
I understand the motivation of the statement, but it's a fallacy.
You just described an exceptionally good place to work (because, how many places would an employee casually mention a bunch of times that they might stay until retirement).
Congrats on findind that situation, but I don't think it's evidence of fallacy of my statement.
Have a new laptop arriving shortly with enough RAM and storage, that - me being a historically "Windows as primary OS" kind-of-person, with the enshitification of their adding CoPilot to everything and turning Windows 11 into an "agentic" OS, my installation will be Linux-first, and then run Windows via LKVM (hopefully with proper pass-through for TPM + GPU).
Yes - I have "noodled" with Linux in VM's and Raspberry Pi's - but it has never been my primary OS.
> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
This seems like an over generalization, though I agree with your other points. Microsoft is not a good company, but are any of the big tech behemoths?
I could buy an argument that requiring Windows for devs might be a red flag, unless said company is making Windows software or games, but there are plenty of valid reasons to standardize on Windows & Microsoft 365 across the office, especially in very large companies. Even if a company issues macs, they are still probably on M365 unless they are in silicon valley or a startup using Google Workspace.
Consumers aren't Microsoft's customer, and to be honest, I get the vibe that Microsoft would just prefer to stop selling to and catering to consumers/personal users entirely for Windows. Windows in an enterprise, properly reined in by a competent IT department, isn't too bad. Windows gives a lot of tools to IT and the business that you would otherwise have to build yourself, which for non-tech company or a company where software isn't their revenue generating product, has a lot of appeal.
The distaste everyone feels for it is because Windows isn't built for the end user anymore, it's built for the person signing the checks at the company, who usually has different needs. Doesn't mean it's a bad product (although, it's not great), just that you, the user, isn't who its designed for.
> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
Microsoft being shitty notwithstanding…I think you don’t really grasp just how prevalent Microsoft is in the business world - it is not the indicator you think it is.
Too true... even then, there are some MS things I actually like... VS Code and C# at the top of the list. I also like a lot of the things in MS office over alternatives in practice. LibreOffice is just annoying to me every time I use it, and I use it regularly, OnlyOffice has been less reliable still. I still don't equate any of the alternatives to Visio as close to equal despite regularly using them as well.
That said, I emphatically despise a lot of the decision making behind Windows and a lot of MS products... I really wish it was managed/governed more by technical influences than business/fincancial ones in practice. You can see where a lot of the lines are drawn and it's a bit fascinating.
Despite Microsoft's behavior and all of Windows' flaws, when properly managed and controlled in an enterprise, it's not so bad, and there's still a ton of software out there that is Windows only.
Where I work now is pretty much like that. Windows on end-user endpoints, Linux everywhere else.
I like this in theory but as someone who travels often with my work laptop, it's nice to be able to use the same hardware for personal use as carrying a second computer is impractical regarding carry weight and packing.
Apple used to allow installing a second copy of MacOS without it being subject to the work profile - completely isolated from the work partition (because you could ignore the "set up work profile" prompts after installation).
I would simply restart my MacBook into the personal install after work & on weekends.
Apple have recently updated the MacOS installer to be always online so I can no longer install a seperate MacOS partition without a work profile.
I ended up buying an ROG Ally but it's honestly not that portable. The power brick is almost the same size as the handheld and it occupies about as much space as a laptop in my carry on.
When I travel for work, I take my work laptop and an iPad in a keyboard case. It’s under 2lbs (0.9kg), it can charge off the same brick as my phone or even pass through charge off my work laptop itself, and keeps me connected to my personal digital life without having to put anything personal on the work machine. It also never raises an eye with security if you have a laptop + iPad.
Usually, the iPad apps are "good enough" (in some ways, they are actually better for travel, as they are designed with features like offline downloads), but if they are not a "real" computer is only a tailscale connection to my home network away over VNC.
Edit: specifically, the iPad + Laptop combo never raises an eye at customs houses. Inside the USA, I've taken as many as 3 laptops for a work trip before, and I can not express how much the TSA does not care. On the other hand, when you go through customs in another country, they can be bit ornery (i.e. suspect you of trying to avoid import tax), so I never want to take more than one laptop through a customs barrier.
p.s. if you want to game in your downtime, such trips are an awesome time to break out the emulator and retro game, an iPad has more than enough power for this, and SNES / d-pad type games work great with a keyboard case as a controller (or, you can just bring a real controller).
All of these gaming laptops really do suck. I feel like these days your better off having a small form factor pc or just remote into your machine from far away.
I never understood the point/market for gaming laptops. They seem popular enough for OEMs to still keep them around, but in almost every way you are much better off with a desktop if you need that much compute.
They can't be used on battery; the discrete GPU will chew through your battery in minutes. They are heavy, loud, hot.
Tried one for a while a long time ago, hated it. I never wanted to bring it anywhere it was so heavy and bulky, so I figured what's the point in having a laptop if I never want to take it with me.
Got a powerful desktop for gaming now, and my portal device is either my iPad or a Macbook air, and I can just remote into my desktop anytime I need.
I actually ended up buying a travel router and 60% of my gaming was done by remoting into my ROG Ally from my work laptop (they didn't block Steam). The remaining 40% of gaming was done plugged into a TV + controller.
For normal browsing I would use RDP - though it would be amazing if Apple supported some kind of displayport in on the MacBook so it could be used as a screen for an external device.
I've been considering selling my Ally and buying a mini PC with a half decent APU as I seldom use it as a handheld.
I'm still using my M1 air for personal use... though I opted for 16gb and 1tb storage, I will wireguard+ssh to my desktop as needed... remote editing in VS Code is nice AF.
If you aren't into gaming at all, you might consider a smaller Macbook Air for personal use... mine is mostly relegated to occasional use unless I'm traveling, where it's mostly email/web use. Small, light, fits my needs and can charge via the same USB adapter I carry for my phone anyway. I have a rather heavy laptop bag so the difference between 1 or two laptops and the portable display isn't that big a difference.
Two laptops is easier than you’d think if you have the right bag.
My work lap is so locked down I cannot do anything personal on it, so when I go into the office I always carry two laptops, and the personal one is an old thick heavy dinosaur; it’s got to be at least five pounds. However, with a good bag that has a (non-padded) belt and sternum strap, it is not difficult. The belt carries most of the load and my shoulders don’t hurt; they hardly feel anything.
I deliberately park in the farthest spot at the other side of campus (about a half mile, and up four flights in the garage) to get in exercise steps with the heavy pack.
It’s good exercise but I absolutely need a belt and sternum pack to do it. Wouldn’t dream of trying that with only shoulder straps.
Heh - going on 20+ years, my "running joke" is if the only exercise I truly get is lugging my laptop(s) around (sometimes as many as 3, depending on client-load) + "kit" (Kobo eReader, cables, powerbricks (although if it is an ongoing thing, I leave those onsite or rely on docks), powerbank, and various other gear (occasionally an active "gimbal", occasionally an HT radio + it's gear) - then at least one of them might as well be extremely heavy...
Haven't seen many "laptop-focused" backpacks that have both belts and sternum straps, would love any recommendations.
Tell that to airport check-in staff haha. A laptop and charger are around 3kg and there's only so much clothing I can take out of my suitcase and wear to make it passed check-in.
But I hear you. It's annoying that I can't reuse perfectly good hardware, but it's fine - we make do.
The added scrutiny at some border crossings can be problematic too. Explaining to the inspectors at the Turkey/Bulgaria border why I had two phones and two laptops (and dissuading them of the suspicion that I was smuggling electronics to friends/family) through language barriers was a pain.
I do tell that to airport check-in staff :-) I just take both laptops out. I only do carry-ons and no checked bags and am able to stuff everything needed into one mid-sized tac pack.
> I deliberately park in the farthest spot at the other side of campus (about a half mile, and up four flights in the garage) to get in exercise steps with the heavy pack.
As a side note, this is an excellent habit, sadly I noticed people discover that avoiding effort is not always the best strategy when their muscle mass decreases, and adding elements of strength exercise to their daily routine can be more effective than going to the gym, for various reasons.
I can do work on the computer running BSD/Linux, save it in a text-only format, transfer it to the work computer then import into Excel, PowerPoint or Word
It's been over 20 years since I had a home computer running Windows (and well over 30 since I've used a mouse)
I think the GP comment is evidence that Microsoft can get away with what it is doing. Even people who can use Linux or BSD will not stop using Windows at home no matter how obnoxious it becomes
There is a substantial difference between complaining and actually taking action and the company seems to recognise that
I'm using Debian an when working for a client that requires Windows, I'm working in a VirtualBox with Windows Server 2022 as my desktop OS.
It works really well (running mainly Visual Studio) and licenses are pretty cheap. But the best part is, that there are no ads and other Windows 11 Copilot nonsense.
Same. Work provides the idiot box. I give it its own segmented network too, cause work spyware and all... then run a personal workstation with linux next door to it.
The problem with Linux is that there is no legitimate place to direct your rage at. It is free, nobody owes you anything and every installation is different. When Windows is awful, virtually everyone is being sympathetic. When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
I'm slowly moving away from the Apple ecosystem, and this is what I rather like about Linux. I find it obviates the anger — there's no specific entity making decisions that make my user experience worse. If something's annoying me, it's quite likely to be my own fault.
You could argue that, with Windows there is a legitimate place to direct your rage at, but the action of directing your rage does not actually have any effect on improving your experience. With Win and Mac, no one cares, because they already have their customers locked in and tight, they will accept any experience degradation. With Linux, you are not a customer so no customer complaints, but still arguably much better support.
Agreed. And also, if there's something you don't like or a project going in a direction you don't agree with, there is virtually guaranteed to be other people out there that feel the same that are building something different
If you come at it like a sinner asking for penance, the englightened may come to guide, but that's not what I'm talking about. If you to rage, these same people will become inquistors. Rage isn't all about solving a problem, it's about catharsis. It's not so much about technical support, it's about emotional support. A bad design decision (like the GNOME desktop redesign) is not a technical problem. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
There are also people who often claim that their installation of Linux always crashes after every single update, their favourite commodity hardware that's a decade old still doesnt work out of the box on Linux etc etc.
The truth is somewhere in between and its a lot closer to the positive experience these days compared to the old days.
> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
On the one hand, yes, this is not a nice thing to have happen. The frustrations shouldn't happen to begin with, and then people shouldn't be using the reverse Uno card on you just for that.
On the other hand, Linux has a lot fewer of these frustrations (in my experience), and a lot of frustrations are being fixed with time, since you're likely not the only one who is frustrated by it.
On the third hand, the situation being shit for obvious human reasons, not enough dev time, disagreements about the way forward, as is the case with Linux development, is a much, much nicer thing to have your problems caused by, rather than the source of Windows being shit, that is, someone wasn't happy with their dashboard this morning and decided to make that your problem today.
You can always buy someone to direct your rage at if you are a business and wanting to deploy Linux though. Red Hat, Suse, Canonical will all happily sell you support contracts and guarantees.
I raged a lot when my Arch machine would break after an update and I'd have to do config file surgery on a machine that no longer wanted to boot into a graphical desktop. I've never had that sort of thing happen on Mac or Windows.
Well, that's definitely on you. Arch do warn people to actually read the changelogs if you're going to update/upgrade everything. Whenever I've hit a problem with an Arch machine (I think it's only twice), it was written quite clearly in the update notes along with the fix.
It's actually surprising just how stable Arch Linux can be considering that it's typically using the newest code for everything. If you really want Arch and stability, maybe using something like SteamOS would be better - Arch, but designed to be stable.
Yeah, I stopped using it myself as I didn't really need a bleeding edge system. It's actually surprising just how reliable Arch is - I think if you want to run it in production system, you don't bother doing a system upgrade without testing it first.
I do like the Arch wiki though - probably the best source of information on Linux tools etc.
> Well, that's definitely on you. Arch do warn people to actually read the changelogs if you're going to update/upgrade everything.
"There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now."
It's a while since I used Arch (apart from my Steam Deck, but that's a bit different as it's curated and has a read only root filesystem by default), so I've had a look around and I think I meant reading the "Latest News" at https://archlinux.org/
e.g.
> NVIDIA 590 driver drops Pascal and lower support; main packages switch to Open Kernel Modules
> 2025-12-20
> With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the nvidia package with nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms, and nvidia-lts with nvidia-lts-open.
> Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment.
> Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:
> Uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms packages.
> Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR
> Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.
Personally, I used to just run an upgrade and then go look for known problems if pacman threw an error. Of course, the recommendation is to have a good backup before running the upgrade and just roll it back if it has issues (then read the notes).
sudo pacman -Syu. -> Secure boot config broken, OS won't boot (Manjaro this summer with some Intel firmware update).
No HDMI sound on nvidia for some distros until recently.
Getting the Wifi to work ootb on Mint is not always easy..
That's your problem right there. EndeavourOS is also a beginner-friendly Arch derivative but less breaky.
> Wifi to work ootb
I definitely feel you on that one, it's just the luck of the draw sometimes... If you haven't considered it, in some laptops the wifi module is a replacable mPCIe or m2 module and if that's the case, more compatible replacements shouldn't be hard to find for cheap or salvaged from broken laptops.
Idk. My main frustration with Linux has nothing to do with the OS itself. Linux is pretty good actually. My main frustration has to do with software that doesn't run on Linux that I have to use occasionally. So things that force me not to use Linux. But that has gotten much better over the years.
And meanwhile my Windows and MacOS experience has gotten much worse. So I feel pretty good with using Linux as my daily driver for the past 6 years.
> Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates
Even Windows 95 came bundled with MSN on the desktop which had a paid monthly fee to access. And its lack of automatic updates was a real problem, as you had to manually find the service packs and security patches. The automatic updates in Windows XP were vastly more convenient.
Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.
> Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.
That was true right up until companies started routinely pushing updates that broke things, removed useful features, added user hostile features, or even outright ads. If I have to give up automatic security updates to not have my software get worse on me over time, I will gladly do so. I would rather have security updates and not have the user-hostile stuff, but we seem to be unable to get that, so the next best thing would be no automatic updates at all.
Installing Internet Explorer 4 on Windows 95 opened up the first version of Windows Update, when it started as a web app with some custom ActiveX plugins. Windows 98 was the first time Windows Update had a bundled link in the OS, and shortly after Windows 98 introduced a "Critical Update" notification that would prompt users to open Windows Update.
Automatic updates arrived in Windows ME.
It's interesting the timeframes on Windows are often earlier than you think they are. Admittedly, a lot of users skipped Windows ME and its strange reputation, so Windows XP may have been their first time seeing automatic updates.
I know you won't believe me, and my precious karma score may suffer by stating reality: you don't NEED security updates. A properly hardened server with no patches will outlive cobbled together trash library patch over garbage code pasted from ai vibing script kiddies. Would you shake your head in disbelief if I told you 'security patches' are the fix delivered by a dealer to quell your shivers?
Give me functionality updates, cumulative service packs, and the just after BBS days when an exploit discovered in your software meant it was used by no one, anywhere, because we no longer trust your coding or your 'fix'
Nobody's talking about "properly hardened servers" here. We're talking about the OS used on desktops and laptops by everyday consumers, connecting to the Internet across a wide variety of Wi-Fi access points.
Do you not see the constant stream of zero-day exploits coming out for consumer operating systems? Do you think those don't need to be fixed?
I'm genuinely curious -- I've never come across anyone with your perspective before, so I'm struggling to understand where it's coming from.
Usually i post and forget but your reasonable reply prompted some effort on my part.
I live life so that at any moment, if modern services of society (food, internet, power, shelter, entertsinment, transport, personal defense) ended, and I was forced to use what I had access to, that my quality of life would persist. Besides physical considerations (hydroponics, solar, guns, hardened vehicles), I maintain nonvolitile backups of the same software I use daily - vanilla(unpatched) OSs from xp to 11), current and older browsers, non-ssl based content and servers, games, music, movies, hoards of older hardware in a cage that may may an emp.. never tested it. Anything computer related I have works from a bare metal install with no internet connection period.
I use the same retail desktop, laptop, wifi, cellular, and wan hardware used by most consumers but only if I can reset and inialize it offline, and can use the built in firewall to restrict outgoing connections to a single executable single port whitelist including my phone. Which means no nags, no updates, no new features, no removed features, no app stores, no federated os logins, no new terms of service, and no telemetry unless I choose to connect that program to the internet and the program is flexible enough to use a single port.
Zero day exploits won't work on my android 11 s9 with no play services, deny all firewall, and non standard chrome build. In app browser updates don't work until I manually install the binary, most AI features are broken by default even on my win11 laptop.
It's not an easy life. But if you insist that software and hardware do what you wish, your actions should back that. My actions probably more than most. I pass on a decent amount of IT gigs because they require app tracking or that I use their monitoring software, or vpn... but everything I have I KNOW I control now and until it stops working and I buy two more identical and grossly obsolete replacements.
The internet was a big part of it. Most home users did not have internet access in the System 7 days. When it came out in 1991 no country had more than 1% of its population with internet access. By the time Windows 95 came out around 10% of US users had internet access.
It wasn't until 2001 that the US reached 50% of users having internet access.
Without internet there wasn't really a good way to distribute updates to most users.
As a developer in that era working at a company that made software for PCs and Macs it was great. It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.
We'd only make more money from someone who bought our software if that software made a good enough impression that they bought more of our software. We'd lose money if any software went out with enough bugs or a confusing enough interface or a poorly enough written manual that a lot of people made a lot of calls to our toll free tech support.
This was great because it largely aligned what developers wanted to do (write a feature complete program with a great UI and no bugs) and what management wanted (happy users who do not call tech support).
With internet giving us the ability to push updates at almost zero cost and as often as we want people who release incomplete programs early and add the missing parts in updates are going to outcompete people who don't release until the program is complete and nearly bug free.
Once you get there it is not much of a leap to decide that what you are really selling is not software to do X but rather the service of providing software to do X. Customers subscribe to that service and you continuously improve its ability to do X.
> It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.
On the topic of Windows, this is why Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility was and is such a huge deal.
It wasn't so easy to just update your software if Windows ever made breaking changes, and your users would, rightly, be pretty ticked off if suddenly what they bought no longer works because they upgraded from Win 95 to 98, or 98 to XP.
You had confidence that you could buy a program once, and it'll just happily continue to run for the foreseeable future.
This also made businesses happy. If you liked a particular version of a software product, you bought it, ran it on Windows, and could rest easy knowing it'll just continue to work through version upgrades of the OS.
I stopped using Windows over 15 years ago and moved to Ubuntu that was running all the servers. Unfortunately Ubuntu decided to do the same garbage trying to shove their pro crap down my throat, made it impossible to remove (by making a desktop requirement) and resorted to the game of trying to re-enable it during updates
I finally moved everything to just Debian itself that never nags me and just works with everything I need, including games (thanks to steam)
Only time I boot a Win10 VM is to compile apps for for windows, otherwise it has zero use or need anymore
I supported Ubuntu when they started but gave up on them after they sent people's local file searches to third parties so they could push amazon ads. They're totally corrupted as far as I can tell.
I too remember the days when every unpatched Windows PC was a member of a botnet. Perhaps less fondly than you.
And thankfully this was before a time when everyone’s computers and phones had access to their bank accounts, credit cards, and before email was the gateway to virtually your entire life.
I miss when I felt that personal computers were a new wave of democratized capital, a kind of affordable factory for individual owners to use pursuing their own autonomy and power... and not just for programmers.
I underestimated the economic forces trying to turn them into devices for enforcing the interests of a large company onto the owner and turning the owner into a renter.
Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364[1]. If we can find enough people willing to pay $364 for an OS that values privacy and doesn't push needless upgrades, that'll be a start. But XP itself was probably priced based on the belief that people would be upgrading in a few years to Windows Vista. So we might need more than that.
[1] - According to minneapolisfed.org, which uses the official economist-approved inflation rates. Not that I'm implying that there's anything wrong with that. I have all of the orthodox beliefs about inflation that a good citizen should have.
Windows 11 Pro is still $200 [1]. Of course most people don't pay anything directly as it's bundled with their PC and they won't think to question why that is.
> Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364
I assume you used the overall CPI rate rather than the software rate. but using the Software CPI its more like $58. and that seems like an easier sell (for the user, maybe not the developer).
Can you provide some details on the reasons for needing MS Offfice? I'm genuinely curious. What does LibreOffice do differently that makes it a problem for you to use? Personally my only complaint is the performance of LO, which could be better.
I'm not GP but I do know it's rare to open an existing .docx in LibreOffice and have it look right; who knows what it looks like in Word after I've edited and saved it. It's fine creating new documents, and Excel/Calc is better than Word (inherent in being more structured I suppose), but it's not a drop-in replacement. I've used web Office365 when necessary though, not Windows.
> I do know it's rare to open an existing .docx in LibreOffice and have it look right; who knows what it looks like in Word after I've edited and saved it.
This is not true except as hyperbole. Most docx open and let themselves edit quite well in LibreOffice Writer, and they look right.
However, you still have a point. There are always some cases when the compatibility is not good, and the only way to use said docx files would be in MS Word.
Excel I'd argue is the primary reason for most in the business world.
What LibreOffice misses, and sheets to a lesser extent, is that Excel isn't just a spreadsheet app. It's a general-purpose programming environment for non-devs (although, at a certain point, you could argue they are effectively programming even if they don't see it that way).
Yeah, there are better solutions. At a certain level of complexity, you probably shouldn't be using Excel and should switch to Python+some SQL database, but there's something to be said about the visual environment Excel provides.
> It's a general-purpose programming environment for non-devs
Google sheets's programmability is way better (than the last time I used) Excel, with direct support for python, which Gemini can write just fine. It's a bit fiddly in places, I'll admit, but Google sheets is definitely a programming environment.
Hardware support isn't all that bad anymore. Certainly better than it was when I started using Linux.
It isn't perfect. You'll probably have a better experience with AMD than Nvidia GPUs, most fingerprint readers probably won't work, and newly released hardware might not have drivers for a few months, but most stuff just works.
Do not connect it to the internet. Problem solved.
Basically anything in a social network needs to learn to defend itself against threats. Make computer a hermit, and it can go without updates for a long time.
(Oh, but you don't like that? Well, Microsoft doesn't like getting in the news for some worldwide botnet of all Windows 10 machines. I bet they'll figure this out sooner or later.)
Microsoft Office somewhat works in the browser. Certainly good enough for me, although 99% of my actions is upload document to onedirve, open it in web MS Office version, export to pdf and then read with standard tools.
What kills me is there seems to be no option for accounting that is acceptable to CPAs besides being held captive paying whatever QuickBooks cloud demands. It's not like dual entry accounting has changed much in 500 years. There are bank integrations and service contracts (notably Apple Card wasn't willing to pay licensing fees for the quickbooks file format, so you simply couldn't syncronize your accounts with your spending, instead falling back to manual import), but they would not make investors happy by merely offering bank connection services
(God forbid banks be required by law to offer a web connector that allows you to request your own data. A workaround I've tried is to have my bank send me an email alert on every transaction over a penny, so at least I have a record, but never got around to setting up an auto import from my inbox)
I've heard that many times, but the 3 accounting firms I've worked with for my business didn't care what accounting software I used. They were all happy to work with Gnucash so long as I could provide the needed reports, all of which were pre-configured in Gnucash. Two were small firms, but one was part of a major national accounting firm/franchise.
> Microsoft Office Online works fine on Linux. In fact, it’s superior to native MS Office in terms of stability.
It may work for your case - good. Many companies have custom VBA macros that runs on their Excel sheets to get data or validate it. Try to use a document like this on your online Office and you will understand why most Office users can't easily migrate.
> I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.
I 'member the days of Win 98, Win ME and Win XP... made good money cleaning up malware - browser toolbars, dialers, god knows what - from computers. Some came from the hellholes that were Java, ActiveX or Flash, some came from browser drive-by exploits served from advertising networks, but others just came from computers that were attached directly to the Internet from their modems.
And I also 'member Windows being prone to crashes, particularly graphics drivers, until Windows 7 revamped the entire driver model.
Oh, and (unrelated) I also 'member websites you could use to root a fair amount of Android and Apple phones.
All of that is gone now, it has gotten so, so much better thanks to a variety of protection mechanisms.
Security and upselling are orthogonal; I can make a secure operating system that doesn’t notify the user of OneDrive, iCloud, and other services.
Things get more nuanced when we talk about other types of notifications and about whether updates should be automatic or always require a user’s explicit consent. I personally believe that a key tenet of personal computing is that the owner of the computer, not the hardware or software vendor, should have full control over the hardware and software on the computer. This control is undermined when systems are designed in ways to give users less control. There may be legitimate security benefits to mandatory automatic updates, for example, but there are risks, such as buggy updates leading to broken installations or even lost data, and there’s also having to deal with unwanted UI/UX changes.
As a power user, developer, and researcher, I want control over my computing environment. Unfortunately Windows and macOS have been trending toward more paternalism, more nagging, and more upselling. Thankfully Linux exists, but at the cost of needing to switch away from convenient proprietary software tools like Microsoft Office. I can do without Word or Excel, but PowerPoint is what keeps me on Office (I’ve tried LibreOffice and the Beamer LaTeX template). I’m also concerned about hardware getting increasingly locked down, which will hurt Linux.
I had the same reading, it sounded like Windows is worse now than Windows 95, which would be a hot take indeed. But it seems the intent was purely on these nagging aspects which have definitely gotten worse.
It might be easier to swallow the message focusing on Windows 8+ when it really jumped the shark. Windows 7 was a pretty good OS holistically I think even if there are aspects lost compared to the pure simplicity of those really old ones.
I know it goes against the grain here; but so what. It's the users prerogative to do with their device, what the wish. Nag for security updates, sure. But automatic updates of anything is user hostile and should be abolished. Especially when those automatic updates remove features or introduce a shit ton of new bugs.
Problem is the history o people failing to patch causing widespread Internet outages, such as via SQL Slammer; a SQL Server patch had been available for six months to protect against the vulnerability. Microsoft learned the lesson that users, even the “professional” ones that should know better, fail to patch, which brings us to the current automated patch situation.
> It's the users prerogative to do with their device, what the wish.
The problem is, users are still part of the Internet. And historically, users haven't taken care about update nags, that's how we ended up with giant ass botnets.
The size of the botnets and raw bandwidth they have access to now is staggering. (DDoS, "Residential Proxies", ”Anti-Censorship VPNs”, etc. All just compromised residential devices.
> I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators.
> System 7 and Windows 95
If Windows 95 was the complexity level of a pencil to you, Win 10/11 is merely a color pencil. You should be fine getting rid of the nagging and adapting it to your needs, it hasn't become 10x or 100x more complex, merely incrementally more.
> Microsoft [...] not exploiting their platforms.
That's a phrase I didn't expect. What part of Microsoft do you feel was leaving money on the table, as they were sued by basically the whole globefor their business practices ?
Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out?
There is no price/performance improvement. Nor will there be for the next five years or so. NVidia says to expect 10% price increases each year. DRAM prices have doubled, and Samsung says not to expect price cuts. Micron just exited the retail RAM business.
Microsoft is trying to escape this trap by pivoting to Windows as a subscription service. It will get worse, not better.
Yes. So Microsoft (which manufactures hardware itself and has close ties to other hardware manufacturers) needed to find... other ways to, er, motivate people to buy new hardware anyway. Which brings us back to the blog post we are commenting on.
Not sure Windows as a subscription service is the end goal though. But maybe we should all wish for M$ to do that, maybe that would be what's needed to finally bring about the Year of The Linux Desktop™.
I don't think selling more hardware is the primary motivation. The motivation is ensuring everyone has TPM 2.0 enabled on their device.
This allows Microsoft to protect parts of their software even from the user that owns the hardware it's running on. With TPM enabled you finally give up the last bit of control you had over the software running on your hardware.
Unbreakable DRM for software, such as for your $80 billion game business or your subscription office suite.
As a bonus, it prevents those pesky Windows API compatibility tools like Wine from working if the application is designed to expect signed and trusted Windows.
The mass exodus to Linux gaming is already causing a push back against kernel level anti-cheat.
People who 5 years ago didn't give a hoot about computing outside of running steam games are now actively discussing their favorite Linux distro and giving advice to friends and family about how to make the jump.
As much as I hope it to be mass exodus, and as someone who switched over to CachyOS as my main OS in Nov 2025, I'm not sure that 3% of the steam user base really qualifies as a 'mass' exodus.
Going back to my Windows install every now and then to do things feels uncomfortable. Almost like I'm sullying myself! The extent of Microsoft's intrusiveness kind of makes it feel like entering a poorly maintained public space...at least compared to my linux install.
I'm not sure that the majority of people feel this way about Windows 11. They just put up with it in the same way as they do YouTube ads, web browsing without ublock origin, social media dark patterns etc. But certainly, never been a better time I think to move to linux for my kind of user, i.e. the only mildly technologically adept.
There are a lot of Steam gamers with 5 games in their library who log on once a month. There are a few Steam gamers with 5000 games in their library who are permanently logged in. There's folks who play one game obsessively, and folks who tinker around with many games.
I'm willing to bet that the 3% are the kind of people who buy a lot of games.
I'd love to see that "what percentage of games have been bought by people on which platform?" metric. I think it'd be a lot more than 3% on Linux, even if you count Steam Deck as a separate platform.
I agree. Would be fascinating how that 3% breaks down. Although excluding the SteamOS/steam deck users that desktop segment drops to about 2.25%, seeing how 25% of Linux installs are steamOS.
I think SteamOS being available for PC and promoted by Valve could be a game changer. It provides a trusted and familiar pathway for a different way of doing things. But while it would perhaps reduce Windows installs, I can't see it help grow a user base of DIY linux tinkerers, if that is of any importance. I can kind of see it being a bit like Android makes the majority of phone users linux users, but not entirely sure what that means for linux desktop.
I think SteamOS's desktop mode will get used more as people discover it. I was kinda impressed that I could just switch out to a desktop on my Steam Deck, and then used it to play videos while travelling.
The whole "it's better than a console at being a PC, and better than a PC at being a console" thing. It'll be interesting to see if it takes off.
I think you'd lose that bet. The kind of people who buy a lot of games are also the people who are not going to be tolerant of game compatibility issues on Linux; they want to play the game, not futz with their OS.
2 years ago I would have agreed with you, but the game compatibility issues really aren't there any more. Proton has made huge strides, and the Steam Deck has forced a lot of game companies to make sure that there aren't any issues.
> I'm not sure that 3% of the steam user base really qualifies as a 'mass' exodus.
Major tech reviewers are talking about Bazzite. Reddit gaming forums are full of people talking about Win11 vs Linux.
Microsoft only has two strangle holds on PCs - gaming and office apps. For home users they literally have 0 lock in now days other than familiarity. No one is writing native windows apps outside of legacy productivity apps and games. Even Microsoft is writing Windows components in React now days.
I moved to Linux earlier this year and literally none of my apps were unavailable. Everything is a browser window now days.
15 years ago that would've been crazy, I had tons of native windows apps I used every day.
I know linux gaming is getting a buzz and I'm happy to see it. I'm honestly surprised it took so long for people like Gamers Nexus to review linux, but thankful that they did.
But by saying 'For home users they literally have 0 lock in now days other than familiarity.' I think you severely underestimate how powerful familiarity is in anchoring non-tech users to particular platforms. However dysfunctional they can be.
As I mentioned, I moved to linux myself earlier this year. But the first time I tried it was probably around 2004. And I've dipped in and out occasionally but not stuck with it until this year, when I've found it to be a significant improvement on the Windows alternative.
Microsofts own creation presents a real opportunity for an uptake in linux adoption. But I do think it still presents sufficient friction and unfamiliarity for average non-tech users to take on. The only significant issue I had with your initial comment was with your reference to a 'mass' exodus, even if it is confined to the gaming community.
Happy to be proven wrong of course. And perhaps to the annoyance of my friends, willing to help anyone I know interested with a linux install.
But looking forward to the Dec 2025 steam survey. Looking forward to the tiny contribution my little install will make to the linux numbers!
Unfortunately Linux requires zero effter to create cheats on, might as well run no anti cheat. And the root stuff is overblown as user space programs can already read all your files and process memory of that user. How many bother with multiple users?
Not all gamers are playing games where cheating is an issue. It's really only the MOBA Call of Battlefield AAA crowd who care about that. That's not the largest group of gamers, and certainly not the largest market for games.
Fortnite and Call of Duty are consistently the #1 and #2 games every year. The others like GTA, Battlefield, League of Legends and Valorant also have anti-cheat that blocks Linux. It's not a minor issue.
The top game tag by sales [0] is #singleplayer, which obviously doesn't care about anti-cheat.
There's a demographic of gamers who only play the one competitive multiplayer game (such as Fornite or CoD). They don't buy many games, they're not the most lucrative market for game publishers, but they do keep those titles in business. And yes, for them, anti-cheat is important and they're unlikely to move to Linux.
The push back on kernel level anti-cheat on security grounds has always felt odd to me. If you don't trust them to run kernel level code why do you trust them to run usermode code as your user? A rogue anticheat software could still do enormous damage in usermode, running as your user, no kernel access required.
Being in kernel mode does give the rogue software more power, but the threat model is all wrong. If you're against kernel anti-cheat you should be against all anti-cheat. At the end of the day you have to chose to trust the software author no matter where the code runs.
it isn't about what I allow them run on my computer, it's about what they don't allow me run on my own goddamn computer. you can't run modded biıs, self compiled kernel or unsigned drivers. with secure boot enabled.
Maybe instead Microsoft could allow Windows 11 to install and run on machines that are otherwise capable and just flash red screens at you all the time where otherwise ads would show up that constantly nag that "THIS COMPUTER IS FUCKING INSECURE!" or something. It would be equally as annoying but I'm sure running latest Windows 11 but with TPM 1.0 instead of TPM 2.0 will be more secure than running Windows 10 without bug fixes and security patches.
(But my understanding is there were other things like bumping minimum supported instruction sets that happened to mismatch a few CPUs that support the newer instruction sets but were shipped with chipsets using the older TPM)
Registry keys and autoattend.xml config keys are not clever people finding a way, it's people using stuff Microsoft put there to do just this for now. I.e. Windows 11 has not been strictly enforcing these yet, they are just "officially" requirements so when they eventually decide to enforce in a newer version (be it an 11 update or some other number) they'll then be able to say "well it's really been an official requirement for many years now, and over 99% of Windows 11 installs which has been the only supported OS for a while now are working that way" at that time. If they just went straight from Windows 10 to strictly enforced Windows 11 options it'd've been harder to defend.
Windows 12 will close the loophole: your CPU will require a signed code path from boot down to application level code. No option to disable Secure Boot or install your own keys. But there needs to be an installed base of secure hardware for this to happen, hence the TPM 2.0 requirements for Windows 11.
Hardware key storage is a low level security primitive. Both Android and iOS have mandated it for far longer. It's a low level security primitive that enables a lot of scenarios, not just DRM.
For example - it's not possible to protect SSH keys from malware that achieves root without hardware storage. Only hardware storage can offer the "Unplug It" guarantee - that unplugging a compromised machine ends the compromise.
And if you want to play sound, you buy a sound card. Computers integrate components that approximately everybody needs. Hardware storage for keys is just the latest example
> With TPM enabled you finally give up the last bit of control you had over the software running on your hardware.
The overwhelming majority of users never had any kind of control over the software running on their hardware, because they don’t know (and don’t want to know) how the magical thinking machine works. These people will benefit from a secure subsystem that the OS can entrust with private key material. I absolutely see your point, but this will improve the overall security of most people.
> The overwhelming majority of users never had any kind of control
Uninterested is vastly different than unable, especially when that majority is still latently "able" to use some software that a knowledgeable-minority creates to Help Do The Thing.
The corporate goal is to block anyone else from providing users that control if/when the situation becomes intolerable enough for the majority to desire it.
Most people don't move away from their state of residence either, but we should be very concerned if someone floats a law stating that you are not permitted to leave without prior approval.
Governments around the world are finding ways of doing that well before big tech will get to it.
This big push for Age/ID verification & "trusted" operating systems is going to ruin what's left of free (as in freedom), general purpose computing. Governments are getting frothy at the mouth for every device to have remote attestation like google play protect/whatever iOS does.
Open source drivers, and a sense that Linux support will forever be top priority, would be a motivator for me. Most of my tech spend has been with Valve in the past few years. I'd love if there was another company I actually enjoy giving my money to.
But that is squandered by piss-poor programming and stupid visual gimmicks.
I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.
You're not wrong. But, I recently did the mistake of upgrading my iPad to version 26 (the liquid glass version). I had a relatively smooth experience on my 6 year old tablet which now runs painfully slowly. Even scrolling through different parts of home-screen lags.
My point being, with time performance might go up. But instead of that making my device faster/long-lasting, developers use that extra performance to cram in more stuff, at the end of which I come out only slightly better if not worse (as is in my case)
You're not wrong, but I was disappointed recently by how well an eleven-year-old Macbook Air still works. I installed NixOS on it, and it's still pretty usable even on modern websites.
An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.
Progress in software is supposed to just needing more computing resources by your definition? As in, basically slowing everything down? Well, we got local AI for that I guess.
I'm not saying that things should slow down arbitrarily, but I feel like we should have progressed more to use the resources. A Windows 95 computer would not be expected to run much made in 2006, and that's because we added a lot to the experience that required more resources.
Thank the web for that. We have lost more control of our devices and our privacy; the more we depend on the web and SaaS. We need to get back to writing native software, be it for Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, or Windows. We need to make the local device the priority.
Well said. Vote with your wallet. Use software that doesn't require an internet connection, write software that doesn't use s3 or online dependencies, stop patronizing online gaming communities, no adobe, no QuickBooks cloud, , pirate apps(not because it's free, because they work offline)
I'd argue that pirating apps is actually the wrong direction for this, not for any kind of ethical objection, but since it's kind of a concession that these applications can't be replicated in a non-awful pricing model.
I think the better way is honestly just to make something competitive, preferably FOSS, and I actually do think we're getting there. Blender, for example, is an extremely decent animation tool nowadays, Krita is a very good digital art program, OpenToonz/Tahoma2D are pretty ok 2D animation programs, Godot is a decent-enough game engine, etc.
Yeah there are still gaps and I'm not claiming everything has parity with everything with awful pricing models, but I think we're getting there, and I think that's a more sustainable model than piracy.
My only complain is that nowadays laptops are usually poorly built, so unless one purchases an expensive guarantee, anything beyond the default guarantee is not guaranteed.
And the manufacturers are in a quest to remove as many keys as they can from the keyboard. Like you can hardly find any light laptop today with page up/down keys anymore. Why?.... Haven't these guys heard of keyboard shortcuts?
Yes, it's a miracle that after 40 years of typing every day, my fingers still work. But that may be a biased view on my part; there may be lots of programmers out there with arthritis in their fingers, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other occupational diseases.
Worse than that, there's no consistency in Fn+key shortcuts. Recently acquired an HP Ergonomic Keyboard as a replacement for a broken Sculpt, only to find out that it literally cannot send Ctrl+Break -- there's no key for it, no Fn+key shortcut for it and the remapping software doesn't simulate it properly.
The keyboard I was mentioning isn't a laptop keyboard, actually, but laptop keyboards tend to be in a slightly better spot as the major vendors typically have Fn shortcuts for the missing keys, like Fn+B for Break, and they also document them in the user guides.
Detached keyboards seem to be more of a wild west, especially when they target multiplatform -- and it's always the stuff they don't document that screws you.
I dunno, I actually prefer Fn+Up/Dn. I just find it more logical, and it feels standard to me now. I press them surely hundreds of times a day and have no problem with it.
Nothing tops Apple's infantile refusal to put a (real) Delete key on their laptops. Instead, they have a Backspace key mislabeled "delete."
When the Eject key became obsolete, Apple had a perfect opportunity to fix this omission with essentially no effort. NOPE. Meanwhile, everybody else managed to have a proper Delete key on their laptops.
A hill that I'll die on is that Apple's terminology is more correct than PC terminology for this.
Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter.
Delete makes sense if you consider the actions from first principles.
Consider the various forms of deletion (forward, backward, word, file deletion, etc.) Each of these just has a modifier key in Apple's way of thinking. (None, Fn, Option, Cmd) which makes complete sense when viewed against how consistent it is with the whole set of interface design guidelines for Apple software.
The only reason that this doesn't make sense is that it's incompatible with your world view brought from places with different standards. They will never "fix" this as there's just nothing to fix.
> Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter.
Backspace on a typewriter only moved the position (~cursor) back one space. Hence why its symbol is the same as the left arrow key's.
Backwards Delete was a separate additional key, if the typewriter even had one, and its symbol was a cross inside an outlined left-arrow: ⌫.
Current Apple keyboard has this symbol on the "Backspace" key in some regions instead of the text "delete", but older ones did have the left arrow.
Apple calling it "Delete" goes back to Apple II. Many other older computer platforms also called it "Delete". DEC used the ⌫ symbol.
At least you don't have to type the same letters while holding a thin tape over your screen to erase them!
Apple also had separate Return and Enter symbols on keyboards for a while, which also sounds like typewriter territory but their intended use was a bit different: https://creativepro.com/a-tale-of-two-enter-keys/
Not many people use forward-deleting. I find it much easier to just Fn+Backspace anyways, especially when Del is usually part of the shorter function row that you really have to stretch for.
And delete is a perfectly fine name -- it deletes the character you just typed. I've always thought the supposed distinction between backspace and delete was bizarre. If anything, it's the forward-delete that needs a better term, like... well, forward-delete. Fwd-Del.
It's just deleting. And that's a questionable assertion for which you've provided no support. You seriously think people Backspace old E-mails away? They Backspace unwanted files away? They Backspace selected areas away in Photoshop? OK.
"I find it much easier to just Fn+Backspace"
Except most people don't find that at all, because it's not marked on the keyboard. And again, you're asserting that a secret, two-keyed, two-handed hotkey is easier than pressing a clearly marked button?
If you watch real users when they're faced with the lack of Delete, they use the arrow keys to move the cursor across the characters they want to delete, and then Backspace them away. Twice as much work. Or they reach for the mouse or trackpad and tediously highlight the characters to delete.
And there is no separate function row on Apple laptops. The Eject key was right above the Backspace key... easily reachable.
> And that's a questionable assertion for which you've provided no support.
You're the one who's provided zero evidence that the Del key is used with any appreciable frequency at all. And the fact that Apple doesn't even bother to include one strongly suggests it's rarely used. You're literally the first person I've ever heard even complain about it. Since you've started this topic, if you want evidence from someone else, you really ought to start by providing your own.
> You seriously think people Backspace old E-mails away? They Backspace unwanted files away? They Backspace selected areas away in Photoshop? OK.
Um, yes? If you insist on calling it Backspace, the key that deletes the previous character is also the key that deletes e-mails in Mail.app, that deletes files in Finder (with Cmd), and that deletes the selected area in Photoshop on a Mac. Which is why it also makes sense that it's called Delete on a Mac. It's all extremely consistent and logical.
> Except most people don't find that at all, because it's not marked on the keyboard.
And most people don't need to, because they never want to use it anyways, even when it's a dedicated key wasting spacing on the keyboard.
> And again, you're asserting that a secret, two-keyed, two-handed hotkey is easier than pressing a clearly marked button?
Yes, because the Del position on most PC laptops is awkwardly far away and smaller than Backspace. If you find two hands or two keys difficult, are capital letters with Shift hard for you?
> And there is no separate function row on Apple laptops.
I don't know what that means? Apple laptops certainly have a function row, which is where the Eject button you're talking about has always been. And where the Eject key was is where the TouchID button is now.
> ... easily reachable.
Eject/TouchID is one of the two farthest keys on the keyboard, the polar opposite of "easily reachable". There is literally no position less reachable on the keyboard. It's not ergonomic to make it something used in regular text editing, if you're one of the few people who utilize forward delete.
"You're the one who's provided zero evidence that the Del key is used with any appreciable frequency at all."
I never said it was. You're the one who pompously declared the opposite. I merely pointed out an easily-verifiable fact: Apple neglects to provide it.
But since you've exposed yourself to statistics-based ridicule now, I'll lazily rely on Google's so-called "AI"-based indictment of your absurd position:
"Apple's global PC market share generally hovers around 8% to 10%"
This indicates that 90% of the world's computer-using population apparently DOES find Delete to be a compellingly distinct function from Backspace, and sees fit to include a dedicated key for it on its keyboards.
So you can continue to protest and cry about the harmless inclusion of a useful key that doesn't impede YOUR mode of operation at all, while the vast majority of the computer-using world demonstrates its disagreement with you by including it.
Oh yeah, they sometimes put page up and down on up and down which infuriates me very much. There are other issues like less USB ports, but overall quality is poor comparing to MacBooks.
I’m actually happy about DRAM prices and hope more people share your mindset. This is the only thing that can force developers to start optimizing memory usage instead of externalizing the costs onto the poorest users.
I sincerely hope it works out this way instead of pricing out open sourced development. A couple open sourced projects changed their licensing to help mitigate the increased cost burden from skyrocketing hardware costs. It'll be a sad and potentially dangerous day if most people are permanently priced out.
Well it also means it could be a good time to buy so you won't have to pay even more overprice for the same performance years down the line.
I just bought one a good month ago. My old one was over 10 years old, not worn out, but not upgradeable to Win 11. I had been thinking waiting one more year before the security updates to Win10 are out... But I bought in when the first stories hit of the DDR5 price rises - at that time there had 'only' been a doubling, now the price is a further 3x of what I paid a good month ago. I thought it might be a good time to buy given the machine was so old and component prices were going up, and might for a long time.
But yeah, performance improvements aren't what they used to. Part of the reason is that normal things were already felt so fast on the old one ;-) But I did get a much better gfx cards allowing some games that were unplayable before, and I think the CPU upgrade was needed for that as well, and then you might as well overhaul the machine. I also went from 16 to 64 GB, and the 16 GB had been a bit too little for some things.
I'm getting to that point where I may need to upgrade. Now I need to delay it more because AI is gonna make electronics even more expensive than the tarriffs in 2026.
2026 seems to just be becoming the "please don't break" era unless I can find some proper work this time. Car is on its last legs, a variety of housing appliances to repair, computer I use professionally. If nothing else, I upgraded my phone this year so that should get me through 2028 at least.
Any computer that can't run Windows 11 is almost a decade old. There has been plenty of improvement. Compare a laptop with a high end Intel i7 7920HK to even a lower end part like the Core Ultra 5 226V. Right now prices on pre-builts and laptops aren't totally reflecting the craziness at least.
A decade in computing used to mean revolutionary improvements:
- from the C64 to the Pentium
- from the Playstation 1 to the Xbox360
- from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.
Each of these in roughly a decade.
But 2015-2025 in terms of desktop PCs? Some decent (but not revolutionary) steps forward with GPUs, and much more affordable+speedy SSDs. But everything else has been pretty small and incremental.
And when enthusiasts upgrade, the old parts usually find new homes. My old 6th-gen i7 from a decade ago still has more than enough power for my Dad to use as a home PC for basic photo editing, web browsing, and spreadsheets. But Win10 end-of-life wants to turn that machine into e-waste.
I think that is normal across most technologies or fields. Progress is an S curve (or series of curves), and it's easy to be amazed when looking at the steep bit. Early on progress is slow due to not much investment and going down lots of dead ends, while later progress faces increased complexity and no low hanging fruit left.
The middle bit is where the disadvantages of the early phase has gone, but the disadvantages of late phase hasn't kicked in yet.
I have a brand-new work laptop which absolutely crawls compared to my nearly-15-year-old Thinkpad T430. Is this slowness the Windows 11 advantage? My personal laptop runs plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 perfectly, and everything works.
In my experience, i don't consider work laptops as worth anything performance wise since they're loaded up with antivirus, scanning and compulsory work sync software accessing the network for every mouse click that means it crawls and has half second latency for anything.
The antivirus / EDR / monitoring / inventory software that most corporate IT departments installs ages computers ten years. We constantly had problems with such services slamming the disk, holding files open, breaking software, running CPUs at 100%, etc.
Crowdstrike Falcon is likely the only reason my work M1 Pro machine runs like a dog. Any time it's being a laggy piece of junk you can open Activity Monitor and see Falcon just slamming it.
Not my problem. You wouldn't need an antivirus with a properly locked browser with UBlock Origin and OFC no damn HTML email. GPO's blocking anything not being under an executable whitelist.
If any, your email client should open any attachment under a sandbox, such as Sandboxie, under a libre license:
My daily desktop is mostly 2012 vintage. This hardware is still in use and works fine.
For what it's worth, that machine is being used while I upgrade my 2001 Computer Of Theseus once more. It's now getting it's third motherboard with CPU - this one salvaged from a 2018 or 2019 gaming machine. It's on its second case, and has seen more hard drive and memory upgrades than I can count - all of them piecemeal. Other than perhaps the motherboard screws and hard drive screws, I'm not sure if anything actually purchased in 2001 still survives in there. Maybe the power cable and pc speaker. And I don't remember ever replacing the rear case fan now that I'm looking at it.
Many budget laptops from 2020 don't support Windows 11. HP laptops with AMD A4-9125, HP notebooks with AMD A6-7310 APU, HP Envy x360 models with first-generation AMD Ryzen processors.
2020 Apple MacBook pro has an i9-9880HK, more than enough, but lacks TPM2.0. The issue is this is just a waste of resources and money for a large number of people and the TPM2.0 requirement is silly.
I have sub 1year old enterprise CPUs in my home lab. Disabling TPM is the first thing I do on bring up. Assuming that's a hard requirement, how do I install w11?
The software I use for hobbies is locked in to windows. A lot of extremely good software in the DIY world is locked to windows.
Coincidentally I can run it all on a 10 year old PC. I see no reason I need to upgrade. I’d happily pay a small yearly fee for patches.
But that’s not why Microsoft did all of this. Their goal is to Hoover all your data into their cloud and lock your PC down so you can’t do anything but use their stuff. Their profit numbers are insane despite losing marketshare. It’s working because the current CEO is a ruthless non-tech moron.
People want to hate on Microsoft. Rightfully so. Apple has done the same thing. Once you’re locked into the Apple ecosystem it’s hard to switch. They push iCloud and Siri on you at every turn. They just made a “one OS” choice so it doesn’t feel as bad.
Anyone who says Linux solves all the problems has not tried to make something like solidworks and masterCAM run on it. I love Linux, I use it on servers, but it has 3% marketshare for a reason.
Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS.
Between these and services that suddenly suffer from amnesia and spamming me with marketing notifications and emails after months or years of silence, it’s becoming more tiring to use any service that grows significantly enough where they don’t need to care about what their users actually want.
The worst is when the only 'dismiss'-option is "I will do it later"... even if you have no intention of ever doing it... essentially forcing you to lie. It has been a while since I've seen it though, so that's progress!
> Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS.
I can offer a slightly different perspective. I remember Microsoft from the 90s and early 2000s. And while technical details differ, their attitude towards users didn't change that much.
I used Rufus to make a Windows 11 installer USB drive that bypasses the TPM check and online account setup and a couple of other things. I've been using that along with O&O Shut Up 10++, and Firefox with uBlock Origin to refresh computers for local folks.
With the "requirements" check bypassed, Windows 11 actually runs on the Intel 1st gen Core i-series and newer, as well as any Ryzen CPU and, I think, a couple of earlier AMD generations. (It requires the popcount instruction, which isn't present on the Core 2 and older.)
Anything older gets Windows 10 IoT which gets updates until 2032.
One of the reasons I made the jump to Linux was the level of effort it took to disable all the shit that I don't want Windows to do. It became easier to just install Linux (Ubuntu, PopOS) and not have to futz with configuration to turn a bunch of unnecessary 'default on' stuff off - just get on and use the thing.
Wait so the TPM check is not some kind of real Windows 11 limitation? They could make an option to bypass this check (with all kind of "I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING" checkboxes I assume), they just chose not to do it? This is madness
They just really, really want to force the use of bitlocker on drives, which makes both "evil maid" attacks and data recovery harder. Coincidentally they're also trying to make everyone put everything in OneDrive.
Yes. I think that initially there was even official documentation from Microsoft for how to bypass the check, although I can't find that now, just "unofficial" things like this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2121461/.... (The top two comments have two different ways of bypassing the check: a command line flag for the installer and a registry change.)
So far updates work fine. It may change eventually, but as I noted in another comment, it's been 4 years, and none of the updates have required a TPM yet.
The Rufus way will break on updates. But there is a fully supported version of Windows 11 that doesn't have those requirements. Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC
The most egregious thing in recent iterations of Win11 is that a fresh installation will basically map all of your home folder to OneDrive. My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, etc. A recent Windows update also told me that I need OneDrive now to back up my files. Yup, apparently you really, really need it.
Now Windows 11 also pops up a scary security notification saying Windows Security found a problem, then when you click on it it tells you that you're not using OneDrive and you should turn that on immediately.
This threw me so hard when I grabbed a cheap laptop from Costco with win11 pre installed. I was saving files to c:/users/me/desktop and then when I opened Desktop in File Explorer, my shit was gone.
My dad has been raving because he discovered that his Windows computer has been uploading all of his pictures to OneDrive. He doesn't remember an option to enable that behavior and can't find any ways to simply turn it off. This is on top of the other nags and sketchy behavior that Windows has been pushing on him normally. He's fed up with it
The silver lining is that my dad's finally getting a new Linux machine for Christmas :^)
Worse is that the notification for this “error” telling me I couldn’t back up without OneDrive was behind the little dot in the restart/logout menu in the start menu, which (until now) only showed me that updates were required. Now that they’ve infested that notification with ads there’s no reason for me to ever look at it again. Good job, Microsoft.
Linux has made an insane amount of progress in recent years. Atomic distros like Bazzite and Aurora are so polished, modern, easy to use, and virtually unbreakable. Even most Windows games work perfectly out of the box (often better than on Windows). Anyone who tried Linux in the past and wasn't happy, should take another look. These distros are so incredible it's hard to believe.
Meanwhile Windows has been getting worse and worse. Completely unreasonable and unnecessary hardware requirements, spyware, constantly running antivirus and other processes you don't want, forced updates and reboots, shoving AI down your throat. In other words, you pay money to have a worse experience and less control over your own PC.
I've been ideologically opposed to Windows for a while, but a few years ago Linux required many trade-offs and compromises, to the point I wouldn't have recommended to most people. But now things are completely different and I would happily recommend it to anyone except those who have a hard requirement for MS software (or Adobe).
Okay, I’ll bite. Tell me the linux laptop to get, and the distro to use. Cost is no issue, but suspend/hibernate has to work and so does fractional scaling. Also WiFi.
I have an Acer Predator Helios 16. I have been running Kubuntu on it for around a year with almost zero issues. The only one I had was issues with secure boot and Nvidia drivers. I play WoW, Helldivers, and a bunch of other smaller games with no issue.
For many types of users, Windows is no longer viable. I have friends who work at a .NET shop and most of that team now uses Macs. Unthinkable just a few years ago. Meanwhile, I checked ProtonDB and now 90% of my Steam library is Platinum or Native. So I finally switched my gaming PC to Linux. Microsoft's priorities are elsewhere, Windows doesn't have a bright future.
Yeah. It really does seem that Microsoft is giving up on... everything? Like Xbox is kinda out, Windows is not great, and their AI never comes up as meaningful.
I wouldn't personally work for them ever. I've only heard bad things about their codebase... and I know people like to complain, but it's usually comedy levels of bad.
The only reason I keep my home PC with windows still is that I use it mainly to play games and some have anti-cheat systems that are not compatible with Linux. But I play those games less and less the older I get, I play mostly older games / emulators. I see it very likely that I won't install whatever comes after Windows 11 and at that point I might move over to Linux for good.
Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use.
I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
>I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I've been using Arch for about two months now. It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction because I have two literal decades of experience using a windows machine. That experience has value and the idea of throwing it away is a barrier.
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
They don't. They switched over to iPad 10-ish years ago. Most normies I know use phones and/or tablets full-time for their personal computing. Laptops and desktops are either work machines, for games, or for work without wages (studies, excel, other things which are inconvenient or impossible on a phone).
Grandma is on Linux Mint since she still wants to do her banking on a computer and not an iPad. She'd be on Windows 11 if I weren't her tech support, since then she'd have bought whatever idiot at the local shop would have recommended, wasting a lot of money, and probably still have thrown her arms up in despair after a while due to the shit user experience. If the local shop had machines with Mint preinstalled, I'd imagine that would have gone well, if a lot slower than it would have with my help.
No Windows casual out there has ever even installed Windows, never mind another OS, on their computer, even if they theoretically want to. They can't have what they don't know about, and that barrier is probably never going to go away.
Completely agree. Modern computers are basically just web terminals for most people, so a basic Linux distro + browser is all they need.
Windows is actually terrible for non-technical users now. The constant pop-ups, nagging messages, and decision prompts create genuine anxiety. People don't know what they're clicking on half the time. Yet somehow most technical people I talk to haven't caught on to this.
Look at what younger generations are actually using: Chromebooks in schools, Google Drive instead of Microsoft Office. Even people who legitimately need Office aren't on Windows anymore, they're on Macbooks. That's the case at my company anyway.
At this point Windows is really just gamers, engineers who need CAD, and office workers stuck on it from inertia. There's nothing inherently attracting new users to the platform anymore. I honestly don't know who their primary audience even is at this point.
Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook? Also Windows is increasing in its share again. Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.
> Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook?
They're not? They're combining it with Android, which honestly seems like a decent bet for what Chromebooks are meant to be. The end result will have a different name, but it will still be a cheap laptop to do school work and simple computing, and that isn't a Windows machine.
> Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook?
They're not killing it, they're merging it into Android. Makes sense. Android already does everything ChromeOS does, it just needs better desktop input support. Google said this was to compete with iPads, which only reinforces my point.
> Also Windows is increasing in its share again.
Short-term fluctuations don't change the long-term trend. We're talking about where things are headed over the next decade vs where it once was
> Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.
My company went all-in on Copilot, but I'm not seeing this translate to more Windows usage. Copilot works fine on Macbooks, and that's what most people here use. When management gets excited about it, they talk about Outlook and Teams integration. Nobody cares about Windows-specific features. What does OS integration even buy you? Access to local files that are already in the cloud anyway? I'm using Copilot on my company-issued Ubuntu laptop right now. And honestly, the fact that IT at a massive, conservative corporation even started offering Ubuntu as an option says a lot about where things are headed.
Microsoft will be fine, but I'd bet on Windows declining over the next 10 years, not growing.
>Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
Because if they switch to Linux, I'll be on the hook for tech support. If they stay on windows, then it's mainly my brother's problem.
BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either. Linux wouldn't be any harder for them aside from getting support from random places, or buying random bits of junk with no research expecting them to kinda work.
> BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either
That's the thing that annoys me. People say Linux is "harder", but I really don't think that's true. People seem to just ignore all the weird awful bullshit in Windows that pops up and accept it as just part of the world, and when Linux has slightly different issues, OMG WHY IS IT SO HARD I'LL STICK WITH MY ADWARE MACHINE BECAUSE I LIKE HAVING UPDATES BREAK EVERYTINGGGG.
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I have. They are convinced it will be "harder". I have tried to explain to them what seems a lot harder to me is when Windows Update decides to brick their computer [0], and they have to call me in a panic and I have to waste an entire day walking them through diagnosis stuff and eventually walk them through flashing multiple thumb drives of Linux and Windows 11 [2] and then walk them through nuking and reinstalling.
As I've said before, before I get any kind of "live and let live man if they want to run windows let them", I would like to point out that whenever their computers break, they call me to fix it, so I do not think it's unreasonable for me to want them to use an operating system that has recovery tools that actually work, with and with filesystems built after the neolithic age so that system backups are easy and cheap and actually do what they're supposed to.
[0] dig through my comment history if you details.
[1] made more annoying because, as far as I can tell, none of the Microsoft recovery tools have ever worked in any point in history.
[2] Linux because Microsoft doesn't have any kind of LiveCD/LiveUSB support anymore, so I had to boot into a live Linux so I could walk them through installing tmate and then I was able to mount the drive and rsync all the files over to my server for recovery.
The more likely option than any of these excellent free options is going to be MacOS… just because your average user with even semi-technical inclination does not want to use LibreOffice Present; they want PowerPoint.
I have just seen this first hand with my significant other: they are very technical and more than capable of it, but have zero interest in learning Linux and instead just bought a MacBook on Black Friday specials when their 5 year old HP laptop finally got too annoying to use.
I think it would be less daunting for many if there were 1 or 2 popular alternatives to rally around. Including window managers / desktop environments. (Granted, it's nice they can all coexist peacefully.)
There are a handful of popular Linux distros. Ubuntu is probably the most beginner-friendly one with the most staying power; it's the easiest place to start if you have no other ideas/requirements.
The thing is, a healthy ecosystem thrives on diversity. Rallying behind one or two tends towards a monoculture.
Linux is not a single alternative. It's hundreds if you start digging, and even if you whittle it down to noob-friendly not-completely-idiotic choices, something the proverbial noob are probably incapable of or unwilling to do, there are still like, 5+ decent options to pick from. Asking the proveribal noob to pick from Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, Bazzite, Suse, Debian, Fedora, or any other option is a big ask. There's a lot to take in, especially for someone who just want their computer to work and not dick about with silly bullshit.
It's good that there are options, but most people aren't interested in having a dozen decent choices. They want one, solid, good choice, or at least obvious and clear reasons to pick the different options, and they certainly don't have time to try out everything between heaven and earth, especially for something that needs to Just™ Work™.
It shows 24 distributions, but no newbie guidance. Maybe a wizard UI would help, vs the open-ended "Explore different Linux distributions and find the one that fits your needs"
Spring for a new hard drive, just in case you hate it with the fires of a thousand suns and need to go back. Then you just swap back to your old hard drive.
I can also recommend Kubuntu if the gnome UI of ubuntu seems too phone-like. If using a laptop where addinga 2nd drive may be too difficult, I have just shrunk the windows partition before running the ubuntu installer.
Until recently (<10 years ago) Windows and native Windows apps (like Office) were the norm in most companies. Almost all employees knew how to use Windows. Re-training all was difficult. Now, with mostly web-apps for most non-IT employees it is a realistic change, but I am still not sure corporations will want to run without Active Directory and Crowdstrike.
What a bubble you exist in. I'm self-employed and my entire suite of software is either windows or apple only and I have 'been a pc' for nearly thirty years and have pc hardware that fulfills all my requirements and can't run apple software.
I'm eyeing up a shift to apple when my current hardware fails me, but it's impossible for me to just go Linux.
I think in your situation I'd use a Mac just because they don't show you a bunch of advertising bullshit all the time, but I do understand the overall point: a lot of software simply doesn't exist on Linux.
Wine is getting better and better, but it's still not perfect yet. I am so wishing that they figure out a way to get modern MS Office working, and then I feel like a lot of people's only reasons for staying on Windows would suddenly disappear.
I don’t have a windows computer so I am going with I have seen in Youtube, but people have said that Windows 11 has been adding ads to explorer and start.
You are a digital serf, dependent on the good will and love of a lord that gives you access in exchange for a tax.
I really wish free(libre) tools existed that allowed you to do your work. Hopefully they will in the future, I am sure someone has tried/is trying to build them.
I think Haiku is in that "last 5%" phase. They have something that is 95% of the way there, it's 95% cool, but frustratingly, that last 5% is really important; there's a lot of boring, thankless work with any software that has broad reach.
Most people don't like doing it, but in order for the operating system to be "good", you really need most of this unsexy stuff to work; you need to be able to easily install WiFi drivers, you need to support most modern video cards, you need to suss out the minutia of the graphics APIs, you need to test every possible edge case in the filesystem, you need to ensure that file associations are consistent, etc.
I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I respect so much about the Wine project. It's been going on for decades, each release gets a little better, and a lot of that work is almost certainly the thankless boring stuff that is absolutely necessary to get Wine to be "production ready".
I ran Haiku a bit on an old laptop, and I do actually like it. It's ridiculously fast and snappy (even beating Linux in some cases), and I really do wish them the best, but as of right now I don't think it's viable quite yet. I'm not 100% sure how they're going to tackle GPU drivers (since GPU drivers are almost an entire OS in their own right), but I would love to have something FOSS that takes us out of the codified mediocrity of POSIX.
I literally only use Windows for games. And I guess now RealityScan which is gaming adjacent.
If I had the confidence that I could play a new release on Linux day 1 without trading an enormous amount of performance, I wouldn't need Windows at all.
Depending on your hardware and gaming needs, the current state of Linux gaming may already be enough.
I run Arch with an Nvidia GPU (which historically had poor Linux support compared to AMD), and I’ve been able to play 100% of the games that I used to play on Windows with no noticeable performance decrease.
There is one significant issue with Dx12 on nvidia, but even that has been root caused and should be fixed next year.
I have one machine that runs Windows (apart from one Windows 11 VM on my Mac laptop I use for work), all this nonsense has got me to install Fedora on a separate M2 drive on it, and I haven't booted up Windows in a few days now. Will be an interesting experiment, I've run it before but more for fun, but will try to go as full time on that computer as possible.
My boomer mother in law could handle Linux whether it be GNOME or KDE. What she cannot handle is not being able to put in a DVD of Turbo Tax 20xx and double click the install button. Nor can she handle not having the native Outlook client, or Microsoft Word.
Yes there are alternatives, and possibly even good enough web versions of these tools, but most of the world isn’t like you and me.
To be honest I think she can handle LibreOffice. Double-click to open file (can be docx), start typing and click save when done. Open any MS Office file. I really don't get the religuous attachment to MS Office.
I do worry sometimes about fonts. The default Arial replacement should be geometrically idential and thus not lead to issues. TBH I don't know if there are significant rendering issues between LO and MS Office, as I always use PDF. I sometimes upload it to Google Docs to see if it's displayed identically. So far I've never ran into an issue. TBH I think LO is better except for the performance which is okay but not great.
At this point Office programs are commodity. Apple has good options. Google has. And any Linux distro will come with LO. Really a non-issue I think. Even for older people.
The point still stands though. It's no longer a DVD, but it's still a Windows program.[1] She still needs to be able to run turbotax2025.exe and have it work without issue.
To be fair, it probably works. I doubt it's doing anything weird, so Wine should work, given a distro which will just take exes and pass them to Wine. But if it doesn't, TurboTax can't help her, where as they would have been able to help her if it was a true Windows install.
I don't know turbotax but in the 3 last countries where I lived your do your tax either through some java software whose installation on linux is also described or on a web page.
Microsoft with the push to require TPM 2.0, that isn't really required, is responsible for huge amounts of new e-waste. Any green initiative they claim is out the door.
Im not going to do the support for my kids not using windows along with the schools using O365 and such. So found a refurb business laptop for them on the one without TPM2. Popped linux on the old one and it went from slow to fast for OS related things and not a terrible machine but snappy. Like, it's a 10yr old i5 but that was enough for sims4, office, and minecraft. It's crazy how much compute performance Windows is taking from its users.
to be fair the iot edition of windows ten is also blazingly fast to the point where >10yo thinkpads are perfectly fine for everything outside of gaming ... so id blame microsoft for adding layers upon layers of shit to the os , instead of blaming the os itself
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]
"ProductVersion"="Windows 10"
"TargetReleaseVersion"=dword:00000001
"TargetReleaseVersionInfo"="22H2"
Sets the underlying Registry keys for the Group Policy "Select the target Feature Update version". It tells the Windows Update service to select updates for a specific feature update instead of offering latest.
I get what you're saying, but OS vendors could prevent themselves from running arbitrary code, even from themselves, without the user's authorization if they really wanted to. I'm not sure it is in anyone's best interest since it would affect everything from security updates to automatically installing device drivers (e.g. people would be left with insecure systems or would claim Windows is broken since most would not understand the prompts). It would also be difficult to prevent Microsoft's marketing department from sneaking a trojan horse into things like security update.
The average user is not able to understand the code that is running and the 99th percentile user does not want to spend the time to understand the code.
Make it do the security stuff out-of-the-box, allow the user to change ANYTHING they want, including turning off the security stuff. Linux! It's in everyone's best interest.
I mean.. how is this different from any OS distribution? Apple can push whatever. So can Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo. Unless im literally running Linux From Scratch im at the mercy of maintainers to do whatever they want.
I'm not sure what the current state of most distributions is, but I remember update applications providing an option to accept or reject individual packages. Even without that, you could preview the list of pending updates and delay them indefinitely, do manual updates of individual packages, or configure it to ignore particular packages during updates. Historically, I believe that you could block certain updates on Windows as well - or maybe you could just rollback and update. Of course none of this is considered user friendly so things may have changed.
But where does the original compiler come from? Reproducible builds are only as good as the compiler used to compile them. That's the point of Trusting Trust. If you build with a backdoored compiler and I reproduce your build with the same backdoored compiler, that solves nothing. This is why full-source bootstrap is important[0].
It would be very very hard to actually accomplish something like that on mainstream x86/arm compilers. And hide it from every debugger in the world. If it diminishes the value of reproducible builds, it's by something like 1%.
> Reproducible builds are only as good as the compiler used to compile them.
Which is so so so much better than "as good as nothing".
"Ubuntu will apply security updates automatically, without user interaction. This is done via the unattended-upgrades package, which is installed by default."
Right, but it's a minor annoyance, get rid of it with:
sudo apt-get remove --purge unattended-upgrades
(doesn't trigger removal of anything else, and you'll enjoy 420kb of additional disk space).
OTOH the real issue with Ubuntu is snap(d). Snap packages definitely do auto-update. You may want to uninstall the whole snap system - it's (still?) perfectly possible, if a little bit convoluted, due to some infamous snaps like firefox, thunderbird, chromium, or eg. certbot on servers
Or just use Debian or any snap-free fork for the matter.
There are a lot more distros than RH, Ubuntu, Gentoo and LFS. And none of them will show you ads except maybe Ubuntu. Plus you can also look at *BSD.
None of them comes close to what Microsoft is doing. To me, your comment looks like you do not understand the Linux eco-system. Plus IIRC, LFS can now come with compiled binaries.
> Apple can push whatever. So can Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo
In the case of Ubuntu and Debian, and to a lesser extent RedHat, I trust the developers not to do that because they have a history of not "just pushing whatever".
Also in many cases I actually know these developers, and I can go round and ask them / remonstrate with them / put a brick through their window / other response if required about it.
What are you talking about? It's my machine. I authorized the running of certain kinds of software from Microsoft. It's not supposed to be a running authorization for them to reach in and do whatever they want on it.
I run this as the first step on any new Win 11 machine, the recommended defaults remove nearly all annoyances I care about. It's a popular tool that's been around for years with a lot of users so isn't some random repo, and it's just Powershell so pretty easy to understand what it's doing if you want to audit the code yourself.
After running it once, I've seen nothing that I would consider an "ad" on Windows 11, and search looks only at the filesystem without any web/store trash. Somewhat ironically, it makes for a cleaner experience than MacOS where I regularly get spammed by Apple trying to cross-sell me something (iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, etc).
(FWIW, I have also never needed to re-run after an update or anything, based on 6+ full Win11 installs across three different devices.)
I hope you researched Linux driver support for that model first. I share the dissatisfaction with the direction of Windows -- but their driver library is unparalleled. Linux CAN run great on lots of machines, but it has nowhere near the hardware support.
My usb scanner would like to have a word with you. Its last supported driver was for windows 2000 and it still works well on Linux.
Hardware support vary between the 2 operating system and new stuff may be supported earlier on windows but I can't say that windows driver library is unparalleled, quite the opposite actually.
There are only really two big bloches when it comes to drivers these days: Wifi and Nvidia. And even Nvidia at-least works if you've got a modern card, so you won't be stuck with no output, you'll just get worse performance. Wi-fi you really should double-check though if you need that.
Some niche accessories also have issues, or at least niche features on those accessories.
That may well be the case except for my Kyocera printer. I never managed to get the device to stay online for more than 5 minutes on Windows 10. Wanting to print a letter was actually a hassle taking ~15 minutes. When I plugged it into my Nobara(Fedora) PC it just worked - I didn't even have to specify a driver or anything. It can now even print barcodes. It couldn't with Windows 10, no matter what driver I tried. Also: KB505518 from April 2025 disabled all my USB ports - there was never a fix.
I've not really seen that much of a problem with Linux drivers being available recently while the quality problem of windows drivers being unreviewed code seems like its partly addressed for central monopolies but still in the peripherals if you'll pardon the pun.
Most people with ad blockers don't realize how unusable the web is for those that don't have ad blockers. I think most would agree this is a poor state that industry incentives have landed us in, and with the web being distributed, it's hard to know how to fix.
Similarly those who use Linux probably don't realize how bad Windows has got recently.
Microsoft has managed to replicate this awful ux problem on a system that they entirely control...
Yes. It's a slow boiling frog thing. Kinda like a bad relation ship. You get used to the toxicity. But when you get out of it, it's soooo refreshing. Thank you everybody who made Linux on the desktop possible.
> Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years.
I think it's more that it was designed in the 80s-90s for hardware at the time, and hasn't added bloat or "requirements" since then. So as computers have gotten more capable Linux takes less of the overall capacity.
Well, I'd say it's almost the reverse of how it is with windows.
In windows, the bloat is built in by default. You don't get to chose how the start menu works, you get the windows default start menu and you better like the ads in it. It takes work to pull that garbage out.
In linux most stuff is opt in.
The other part of linux is most stuff isn't simply there running in the background by default. Firefox eats a decent amount of memory, but it's not doing that when I don't have my browser open.
Any Linux distribution comes with a lot of bloat, which is why it requires 30GB or so, rather than 30MB or so. Even the kernel is much bigger than it once was.
Nobody is yelling at you not to remove it, or trying to prevent you from removing it, or obscuring where it is and cross-linking everything to make it harder to remove, but it's still there and requires substantial work to remove, just like in Windows.
To be honest Linux desktop has been ready for the past 4-5 years or so. Long gone are the days where Bluetooth suddenly stopped, external monitors crashing and when closing the lid only put the laptop to sleep every fifth time. Heck, even Wayland, wireless printers and usb-c docking stations work these days, even with nvidia. You might even find some games.
It’s become a boring appliance that just works every time. Just they way I want it. I even forgot how to use grub.
Especially having ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini available nowadays. It’s a godsend when troubleshooting any Linux issues, and you can learn so much in the process.
I just upgraded my PC’s motherboard, CPU, memory, and video card and used Claude as a build buddy to help me lay out steps to follow. I also used it after installing CachyOS for the second time, but on this new hardware. It had me double checking to make sure I had all the proper drivers set up by running commands, but everything was already setup correctly by CachyOS. It even helped me figure out that I had a fan wire half plugged in, which was causing a fan not to throttle. I would alternate between Claude Sonnet 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.2. But it’s so much easier and quicker than the old days of sifting through the manuals and forums, if you could get online to a forum that is.
chatpgt has sent me wrong instructions on just as many occasions it has given the right instructions on how to fix things on linux. It's frustrating when it sends me a 'fix' on something that doesn't even need it (steps on installing a particular flavour of Proton to bypass Rockstar's launcher, when it was already done by default). And because I'm not terribly adept I only appreciate it's the wrong instructions after implementing it and it not working.
I don't know... Two people around me recently switched to Linux because they could not stand how bad Windows 11 got. I did not encourage either of them (I've got my share of frustrations after running a Linux desktop exclusively for 25 years, and will not consent to be the object of their ire when they inevitably get frustrated - I'd rather help them on neutral ground instead).
I've always dual booted windows with some Linux and used it like 90/10.
I haven't even tried windows 11 even though my PC is compatible.
Went full Linux and I'm not sure what I was missing at this point that I needed from Windows.
Ran Pop OS (cosmic) which is the new Wayland based one but unfortunately it's still buggy and then I switched to a gaming focused Linux called Bazzite which has been perfect.
Tiny learning curve because it's an "immutable" OS but have everything I need running on it plus everything gaming related works out of the box.
I’m really hoping Steam Deck keeps on pushing game makers to support Linux. It’s really gotten a lot better, except for competitive games that need most types of anti-cheat.
If Linux supported all the games I wanted to play, I would ditch Windows on my home PC.
But Firefox on Ubuntu is not very good. It can expand to fill the whole machine and get killed by the OOM killer. Sometimes during long text input it hangs and has to be killed and restarted. 8 GB isn't enough any more.
Actual control over my computer? Apple might have less ads, but they really go out of their way to make you feel uncomfortable doing anything they deem not the happy path. And they're still plenty willing to push subscriptions and their software.
IMO Mac eco is good hardware plus meh software. Some built ins are really in bad shape — but I guess people have different opinions, although I think calling Finder a beta version is an insult to “beta”.
Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled.
0 updates can be applied immediately.
108 additional security updates can be applied with ESM Apps.
Learn more about enabling ESM Apps service at https://ubuntu.com/esm
every time I log in. Or
> You do not have a valid subscription for this server. Please visit www.proxmox.com to get a list of available options.
Ubuntu broke new ground when it came out but around the time they switched to the Gnome desktop, they stopped focusing on a great desktop experience and it was surpassed by other, better distributions. I'd recommend trying Linux Mint instead as it has all the greatness of Linux without the crap from Canonical (eg. SNAPs).
I haven't recommended Ubuntu to anyone for years but there are still people recommending it because it was great years ago and they don't seem to know it's now lagging other distributions.
That’s if you run a OS version older than 5 years. You can still update to a newer Ubuntu version for free and get another 5 years if you pick an LTS version.
Ultimately, I didn't switch to Linux because I wanted to. I switched to Linux because Microsoft became so actively hostile to me I felt like I didn't have any other choice.
No Microsoft, I'm not buying new hardware just to get the new OS. No, I'm not going to let you nag me every single day until I get pissed off enough to. No, I will not tolerate all the little things in your OS that piss me off everyday. Your software sucks. Your filesystem sucks. Your constant nagging sucks. I don't want your cloud TPM security bullshit and I DEFINITELY don't want Copilot or Recall.
Seriously Microsoft: fuck you.
Giving up being able to play certain games - which require me to install malware into my computer anyway - is a small price to pay to have my sanity and freedom back. I own my computer, not you. Goodbye and good riddance.
I already used MacOS and Linux for work anyway. But don't worry Apple, you're riding that line pretty dangerously too - you're gonna be next on the chopping block if you don't get your act together. Framework Desktop is looking like a mighty capable replacement for my Mac Studio.
Very relatable. It was so scary when I jumped ship in 2021. It was simply no longer acceptable to stay on such a hostile platform. I was willing to accept a huge downgrade in terms of usability and functionality. It turned out to actually be a lot more pleasant to use. Better software, more software, better performance. Just better all around.
Use Rufus it'll disable hardware requirements, without hassle. You will need an iso. If you know someone with 11 have them download it. Otherwise download the generic.
It also lets you skip the first time install dialogue by setting defaults and add a local-only account. Rufus is the way to go about installing windows.
Had to scroll way too far down through windows gripes to find this, the real answer. Windows 11 will run just fine on your machine, OP. Just use Rufus and a USB stick to do the upgrade.
Windows 10 can still get updates, for I don't remember how many years.
It's a PITA it's not made more obvious, but there are free options, paid options (30$ a year if I remember well), all straight from Microsoft fully supported. Sailing the seven seas for a LTS if the other way.
A few days ago I started up an old Windows 10 laptop that I haven't used in a few years so my son could play a game that I haven't taken the time to set up in proton on linux. I was amazed at how much the Windows OS experience seems like an unhealthy relationship where the OS is trying to manipulate you and control you. It feels like it's not even my computer, it's a Microsoft owned kiosk that I'm allowed to partially use.
Another really remarkable thing is how cloud connected it is. For instance, the lock screen had online feeds shown. The setting to disable them is on a remote website, not in the screensaver prefs or some other local system pref. That was astonishing, and IMHO absurd. If it hadn't been clear to me before, that made it crystal clear that what MS wants the OS to be and what I want the OS of my personal computer to be are not remotely the same thing.
There must be a way to disable this thing. Maybe we can disable the service? But anyway I already switched to Linux for my daily usage. It is not smooth as Windows due to driver issues and other weird things, like Firefox crashing frequently when I’m typing in a text box like this one, but still feels better than Windows.
The Windows team and its product manager is determined to trash the product. Good work!
If you are on Nvidia hardware, make sure to use a distro that makes it easy to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers. In Ubuntu, just open the Additional Drivers tab and the rest will be self-explanatory. For other platforms, ask an AI.
yup. Fixed list of supported cpus. Well, I suppose it grows to include newer CPUs.
That said the rufus workaround can work for these - I'm writing this from a machine that's not a supported cpu that I just upgraded to Win 11 with rufus. Runs just fine. Fun fact about my cpu: no cpu with the same socket is supported, so to be officially supported I'd have to also upgrade the motherboard.
Our kids‘ school received some old surface laptops for free through some initiative. I‘ve been tasked to take care of them. And of course, WiFi mysteriously stopped working for all of them, after ca 1 week of use.
Adding to the enshittified pile of bad decissions that Windows has become, the actual requirements for Windows 11 are just a corporate caprice and not a real "requirement". I did whatever it needed to bypass the checks at install time, and W11 is now working exactly and equally as well as W10 was, on a laptop which only has TPM 1.2 and an old CPU.
Where is the requirement then in modern CPUs and TPM 2.0, Microsoft? Didn't you mean "nice to have" so additional but perfectly optional security features could be enabled?
I'm happy with Windows 11 after tweaks to fix it. I certainly sympathesize with Windows 10 users who can't upgrade. But it seems to me Windows 10 users aren't getting the message: Microsoft just isn't that into you.
Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases? I'm guessing not (I don't have the figures) and Microsoft would rather you replace your 10 year old laptop that can't run Windows 11 or run Linux on it. They really don't care which, just as long as you go away and they don't have to support you anymore.
I'm not assosciated with Microsoft, just someone who has been using their products for 40 years. I am someone who can read in between the lines, and this is my take.
How did you tweak and fix it? I suffer with Windows 11 at work and everything is just so slow. Alt+Tab often gets stuck and clicking icons on the taskbar don't register about a fifth of the time.
Take a screenshot with Shift+Win+S? That's gonna take at least 10 seconds for the snipping app to even load, after which what I wanted to screenshot is probably gone.
Open a tab in Explorer? Five seconds, during which individual parts of the UI update.
Delete 50k files from some image analysis? That's gonna crash explorer.exe and take down the whole shell.
I suppose they rewrote the Windows shell in React, and every basic interaction is a major undertaking.
At home I have a 12 year old PC, with Linux and the Gnome DE. It is absurd how much faster it is, everything is snappy and instantaneous.
To me, there is nothing to fix in Windows 11 - they have failed horribly.
From my experience, a computer running that slowly is out of memory and hitting the swap file constantly. The tweaks I did are in settings. I turned off widgets, OneDrive and Ads. Also there have been comprehensive scripts for cleaning Windows 11 shared here on Hacker News if you look for them.
It is not out of memory, with 32GB it is just slow even on a fresh start.
It all goes to say that Microsoft willingly chose to use UI kits with 100x overhead compared to real functionality and rendering. It needs to die, when FOSS can make 12 year older hardware outshine 8x more expensive hardware in every single aspect, without any tweaking.
It's the very definition of insanity.
There is no free support, e.g. call center agents for Windows 10 users. As for security vulnerabilities in Windows 10, Microsoft is going to continue fixing them until at least 2032 (probably longer with extended support) anyways, as Windows 10 1809 LTSC end-of-life is 2029 and Windows 10 21H2 IoT LTSC is supported until 2032.
Microsoft isn't that into you either. With Windows 11 you are not a customer, you and your data are the products.
Meh. I'm also a Linux destop user on a second machine. I'll completely switch when Windows 11 becomes a problem for me. Microsoft used to be a OS company, but is now a cloud company that offers Linux on it's cloud services.
> "Do you think Windows OS is a profit center...?"
The consumer editions are not all there is to Windows. Nearly every seat of Windows 11 Enterprise used in corporations is a paid license and there are a lot of corporations. Nearly every instance of Windows Server is a very expensive paid license and is required to run Active Directory, MS Exchange, SQL Server, etc.
I have no experience with Windows Server or Enterprise and don't know anyone who does. Forgive me for omitting "consumer" from my description. Yes, I mean consumer Windows.
> Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases?
They get money out of almost every computer sold all over the world. Are you saying that's not enough to keep a system that hasn't seen improvement in 2 decades and barely get bugfixes?
The author just wants Microsoft to stop harassing him. He's not asking for handouts. He's not even asking to be allowed to bypass the hardware requirements for Windows 11. He just wants to stop getting nagged by Microsoft to upgrade.
He could buy new hardware and run Windows 11. But this pattern will only continue from Microsoft. The only way out is to run a non-Microsoft OS (assuming he can).
The important point here is that data collection and telemetry is worthless and was never about improving the experience for you as a user. The coders behind the update nag had every opportunity to do a hardware check, but as I say, big data is never used to improve anything for end users.
You're not getting what I'm saying. Hassling him is the point. They want him to use Windows 11 or go away. He's a security update expense because he's too cheap to upgrade his laptop or run Linux on it.
I don't think you understand the situation. He's not getting security updates. He's not an expense. Microsoft is incurring no costs by allowing him to continue using his existing operating system without updates.
Microsoft doesn't want him to go away. They want him to buy their new product.
I disagree. I think his intention was to maximize shareholder value which he has done dramatically by making the user the product being sold. Microsoft stock has soared even at the expense of Microsoft shedding users. Satya has realized the true value of Windows as a revenue platform. It never was a competitive operating system.
From my earlier comment to another Windows post:
Windows 11 has transitioned from a standalone tool into a digital storefront that prioritizes recurring revenue through aggressive prompts for Microsoft 365 and OneDrive subscriptions. By mandating cloud-based Microsoft Accounts, the OS effectively anchors your identity to a marketing ID, allowing the company to track behavior and monetize your data. The interface now functions as an advertising platform, injecting "recommended" apps and sponsored content directly into the Start menu and search results. Ultimately, this shift means users are no longer just customers of a product, but recurring assets whose attention and telemetry are sold to sustain Microsoft’s ecosystem and maximize shareholder value.
I disagree. Satya doesn't give a crap about Windows; he's the cloud guy. Over 40% of Microsoft's revenue is cloud. Another 20% is office (which is also heading towards cloud). Windows revenue is a measly 9% -- even less than gaming.
Windows is what it is because it's really not important to Microsoft to anymore. It's effectively unmoored from the rest of organization and left to fight for some kind of financial relevance in an organization that doesn't care about it anymore.
There's something deeply wrong with Microsoft if they look at 10% of their revenue and go "meh, we don't care about that". I get that it's not the majority, but that doesn't mean it is to be scorned either. 10% is a very hefty chunk of one's income (I would be pretty upset if my salary got cut by 10%, for example), and with an organization Microsoft's size is a huge amount of money in absolute terms.
Companies care where the growth is. Azure has obviously grown tremendously over the last decade and a half from nothing to the most important part of Microsoft.
This isn't specifically or even unique to Microsoft. In fact, it perfectly explains Windows because this pattern has been repeated so often by so many other companies.
Personally, I think Microsoft's strategy when it comes to Windows is a mistake. There are so many companies that would kill to own a platform (see Meta) and Microsoft has this dominate platform. It's Windows that, I believe, is responsible for their cloud success. It also makes decent revenue. But they have a cloud CEO and they have cloud success and desktop operating systems are out of fashion.
Almost every even half decent CPU made in the last decade does have TPM 2.0, albeit for some strange reason OEMs used to ship with it disabled. You may be able to turn it on in the bios.
This is a massive pet peeve of mine as well. As far as I'm aware there's not a single consumer CPU listed in the Windows 11 compatibility list that doesn't have builtin TPM2.0.
I suspect there are cybersecurity stakes regarding win11 and win10, but I am not entirely sure.
I think that the spectre mitigation are not a problem in win11 because win11 is not supported on CPU that are vulnerable, which might be a reason they encourage people to get win11 and get a new PC, but that's an unverified guess, I am just trying to get them the benefit of the doubt.
SteamOS looks like it might take a lot of the windows cake, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to.
So far it doesn't look like SteamOS supports most of PC hardware out there, but it could be a next step for Valve.
I wonder how hard would it be to just switch back to Windows 7 for these kinds of cases? Obviously the most ideal solution is to use Linux but there's still some edge cases where Windows is needed or is just preferred. If you install Windows 7 in a VM you'll be blown away by having a simple, clean OS that just runs applications and doesn't shove ads or Bing search into the start menu. And obviously it would be vulnerable to software exploits but if the device is mostly kept offline I can't see many issues with that coming up. Something to think about...
I know people who are still on Windows 7, but application support is becoming more difficult, including mainstream web browsers. You can still disable annoyances like in TFA on Windows 10, you just have to dig a bit.
>The terms and conditions are simple. Every time you perform any network access, you have to send a copy of the payload and response back to my server. Either that, or you're in breach of my terms.
That's not how contracts work, at all. MS hasn't bought anything from him, nor was he able to require them to agree to anything in order for him to install the OS.
I had the same frustrations recently with my MacBook Pro, with macOS constantly telling me about Tahoe despite OCLP--which I used to patch my unsupported Mac to Sonoma--currently not supporting that version of macOS. These notifications aren't able to be disabled, just like in Windows--trust me, I tried to do that. They irritated me so much, that I've actually taken to installing Ubuntu on the Mac just so I can avoid seeing them.
I can only hope that this degradation of UX will make more people switch or consider switching to other distributions. It's the only thing that will make microsoft listen.
Picked up a Framework 13 for my daughter for Xmas. She’s a politics student, so she needs a solid keyboard. I hate installing Windows on this hardware, but she absolutely relies on Office and Citavi. Plus, proficiency in Windows is a standard requirement in her field. Maybe she'll discover Linux eventually!
You mean "absolutely relies on being able to work with Office formats". Which most Linux distros do well out of the box. I'm not aware of any feature that LO doesn't support, although admittedly I usually exchange PDFs.
> Citavi
According to the WineDB page for Citavi:, "native Linux alternatives include:
- BibSonomy / PUMA
- JabRef
- Mendeley
- Zotero
- Colwiz"
Of course when going through education you don't want to take risks, there is a lot on the line. But it may be worth to play with the alternatives a bit, albeit on a VM or something. Of course maybe the Citavi format needs to be exchanged; that could actually be a problem. Annoying.
Sure, it's doable, and I'm on Linux desktop as well and not missing anything. She never had a computer other than her iPad. So it's hard (for me) but for her it's the best solution right now.
Need a suggestion, and thought might as well ask here. I use a Mac now. Last windows was more than 15 years ago and now I want to try Linux. which version would you recommend? should I go with Ubuntu or Debian or Mint or something else? I am not a tinkerer. I want something that just works, on the lines of a Mac.
Ubuntu. Pay close attention; the normal Ubuntu is what I consider beta. The Long-Term-Support (LTS) variants of Ubuntu is what I consider the normal Ubuntu, which should always be used except maybe when working on Ubuntu components as a developer. This will save you a lot of pain down the road.
The single stupidest thing people new to linux do is try to install it on random hardware and expect it to just work. Mac has the hardware idea right where all of their hardware is thoroughly vetted against their OS so practically no one runs into issues. To get something similar on Linux you'd need to buy from a vendor that offers their OS preloaded with Linux. Kubuntu Focus, System76, Tuxedo, are the ones that focus on Linux and Framework, Lenovo, and Dell offer linux as an option and at least support it.
I would happily switch to Linux, problem is it doesn't support the audio hardware I have. And although I've tried to figure out how the drivers get it working on Windows, I can't separate the wheat from the chaff in the 500+ USB packet dump Wireshark gives me :-( Otherwise I'd dump Windows and throw NixOS on this thing and stripe my two NVMes.
I don't know how many years/months/days/hours the author is going to continue using Windows for, but this seems like a perfect task to be "resolved" by AHK, which is probably in the top 10 things Windows users have access to. Worth trying, at least before switching to another source of operating system.
I've been running Win11 without a TPM for 6 years. Saying you can't upgrade isn't the same thing as Windows saying you can't upgrade. Knowing your OS seems to be a lost art. I'm not dismissing the valid complaint, but the title is empirically wrong clickbait.
The only Hard requirements are a CPU with SSE 4.2 and POPCNT. Win11 will simply not install on older CPUs. The rest of the requirements can be bypassed but Microsoft will block you from the annual major feature upgrades. You will have to do those manually too. They also claim that your stability and performance on pre-8th Gen CPUs will be degraded and they will give no support, but in reality it runs just fine. Win11 is sluggish on all CPUs anyway.
looking at the author's photo in the OP, appears that they own a Surface. if that is the device referred to in the post, it is quite interesting to see that not supporting win 11.
I also have a 10 year old laptop with no TPM 2.0 module. It was pretty high end for the time too (Dell XPS). I haven't needed it for much in recent years, but it still runs perfectly fine and I'm happy to continue using it if the need arises again. Sounds like I'll have to switch that over to Linux like I have all my other PCs.
When I, as a developer, was told (essentially forced if I wanted to keep my job) to implement dark patterns, I did it knowing I made the world worse. I was fully aware of it, and my coworkers as well, we discussed it openly, and I imagine everyone implementing such tech are. Of course I and other could claim plausible deniability, ”we didn’t understand consent”.
I hope one day there will be pushback on this from people like you, but when your boss has an economical stranglehold over you, not to mention the old adage 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it', it's understandable why we're in this situation.
Blaming the sales people is correct. Technically-minded people likely do know better, they just lack the authority to override the top-down administrative decisions.
> It's one thing to be at the forefront of enshittification, but Microsoft is now actively hostile to its users.
Haven't lived under a rock until now must be relaxing.
I really hope this mess will lead to a significant uptick in Linux usage though. That would be a great effect. Unfortunately, most people will either adapt or go with macOS and be in a similar spot in a few years.
For what it's worth, a lot of the crowd who used to want to but we're hamstrung by the garbage support for games on Linux are now actually switching since Steam has essentially made it "just work" via Proton. The final real blocker for many people is finally gone this iteration of the cycle.
I myself have fully switched to Endeavor for my personal desktop, though I still use a MacBook for work (as I have for 17 years now, if you include college). It's been a surprisingly seamless experience, I highly recommend it over Ubuntu-based distributions, especially for Steam (I was a former Mint adherent but the general stability has gone way downhill).
I find macOS a pretty good compromise. I guess if it got too annoying I could go Linux. I use Word/Excel a lot but am fine with old versions - none of this 365 nonsense.
My old 6600 from 2016 is still running fine, I replaced the SSD (Intel 400GB to X25-E 64GB that will last 20 years minimum), the RAM (Micron to Samsung from aliexpress before the price hike... got 8 sticks of 16GB for $40 a pop for backup) and even the old trusty monitor (Both Eizo 5:4 matte VA; mercury tube to led, with f.lux/redshift the blue light is ok).
But with a 3050 upgrade from the 1050 and later 1030 (best GPU for eternity if you discount VR) I had in it it's good for another decade. If a game comes out that does not run on it I wont play it... simple as that... 150W is enough. So far only PUBG stutters, what a joke of bloat and poor engineering that game has become...
Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7.
Win 11 improves NOTHING over 10.
YMMV but recommendation is still: do not buy new X86 hardware; do not use new OS/languages.
Build something good with what you have right now.
Make it so good it's still in use after 100 years.
Windows 7 doesn't have compressed memory (ZRAM). Doesn't support TRIM for NVMe SSDs. Doesn't have WSL. Doesn't have ISO mounting built in. Doesn't have HDR, variable refresh rate, etc...
The better statement is 'Win 10 improved nothing directly user-facing over Win 7'. Sure, there are several technical improvements under the hood, but those are completely detached from what the user actually sees and experiences, and there's no real reason we couldn't have the Windows 10 technical improvements with a Windows 7 UI, other than Microsoft being the abusive parent that it is.
I'd still disagree but UI changes are far more subjective with approval. The start menu in 10 is a lot more customizable vs. Windows 7 which I think is a good thing. Task View (virtual desktops) were added in 10. Task Manager is so much better, that one is probably objective.
> The start menu in 10 is a lot more customizable vs. Windows 7 which I think is a good thing.
I installed Open-Shell day 1 when I got Windows 8, and continued with that on 10, since the new start menu did not convince me, so I can't really vouch for that. I don't see a need in having tiles and such in my start menu.
> Task View (virtual desktops) were added in 10.
Never used it in Windows. On my Mac I use it to put individual apps in full-screen, so they're easy to switch to with 3-finger swipe. Then again, I have three screens, so the demand for more desktop space is close to zero on what would be my Windows machine.
> Task Manager is so much better, that one is probably objective.
Technically a Windows 8 addition, but I'll give you that one. I'll have the old task manager back if I could get the old photo viewer back though. I can manage with the old task manager. I couldn't manager with the Win10 Photo app, and had to install Irfanview to get a usable picture viewer (at least before I went to Linux).
> I don't see a need in having tiles and such in my start menu.
Tiles are gone in Windows 11.
But this is exactly my point. Some people were so happy with how Windows XP worked but things are so much better now. It's repeating again where Windows 7 is the new XP.
Things are better, but it's a case of two steps forward, one step back. We got a new task manager that was actually good, and lost the photo viewer that was good. We got good taskbar search, right in the start menu, and then lost it again. We got DX12, but also got more telemetry than ever. We got an actually decent Windows update (it even grabs drivers for you and is pretty good at getting it right!), and we lose the ability to disable them (without really getting in there). We apparently lost tiles again, even though some people might still want them, and we also lost the ability to left-align our start menu, until the noise got so loud that even Microsoft couldn't ignore it.
Things may be better, but saying that Windows has gotten better, without a comma and a but, or an asterisk, is disingenuous. Much better is a matter of opinion, and one I don't share. Where things have gotten much better is Linux.
This person has said that 1gb/s ethernet is as high as networking will go because of power constraints (yes obviously 2.5gb is common and a 10gb networking card is $25).
They have said that DDR3 RAM causes mouse stuttering and that a 2011 atom is the best CPU that will ever be made. Unfortunately I think they are serious.
I have fedora xfce running beautifully on a 2011 i5 Mac mini. Replacing the hard disk with modern SSD was all it took to get it running at acceptable speeds where interacting with xfce is roughly instantaneous
> Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7. Win 11 improves NOTHING over 10.
You had me up to this point. The problem is that there are actually quite a few improvements under the hood over those upgrade paths, but they are unfortunately hidden under all of the bullshit. I was an early adopter of Windows 11 specifically because of their efficiency core support over Windows 10 when I upgraded my CPU.
You need to look at the cost of improvements, and they overshadow all progress.
I'm going linux with TWM (desktop with design look from the 70s) on ARM because M$ is clearly not thinking about the long perspective.
We need a stable platform to build quality software.
And that's saying alot seen how linux is deprecating libc after very short time and the legacy joystick API is not being compiled into modern kernels anymore.
Stability is way more important than bells and whistles.
Yep, I like TWM on design too, but both CTWM and IceWM can be equally configured.
On CTWM, you can straightly import the TWM config modulo some slight error on a single
line (if any). Once you set profer TTF fonts for it (by default they might look huge on smaller
screens), you are done. Set the sticky/persistent menus (on a laptop/netbook it's a godsend)
and you are done.
Maybe you would like to disable the startup screen (-W flag for the 'ctwm' binary) or some obvious option in the man page in order to be put at ~/.ctwmrc or ~/.twmrc.
For sticky menues you need to just put
StayUpMenus
at ~/.ctwmrc
Just copy the content from your former ~/.twmrc file and append that
on top.
The TPM 2.0 "requirement" is mostly artificial - you can bypass it with Rufus and Windows 11 runs fine on older hardware. But that misses the point.
Microsoft is using aggressive dark patterns (undismissable upgrade prompts) to force hardware obsolescence and create e-waste. This isn't about security - it's about maintaining the upgrade treadmill when performance improvements have stalled.
The real issue is consent. Users should be able to say "no" once and have that decision respected. Instead, we get daily nagging designed to exhaust users into compliance. This is the opposite of user-centric design.
Time to consider Linux seriously, or at least Windows 10 LTSC IoT which has support until 2032.
I switched to Linux about 10 years ago... I used to keep a partition on the side for Windows for dual-boot... But nowadays I just wipe my drive clean!
With my latest computer, I noticed that some kind of boot protection was added in the BIOS which made it harder to install Linux from USB... I had to disable the safety mechanism in the bios before it would let me boot... It's a shame because, at a glance, I actually thought the Windows UI had improved since the last version a few years ago which was appalling...
But yeah I hate Windows' coercive approach. This is why I was never an Apple fan. I hate how Apple keeps trying to hide the underlying hardware like the file system and external (non-Apple) devices.
These companies are basically PsyOps in my view. There are many better free (open source) alternatives available where you actually own the OS. I don't understand how people can stand renting inferior software for 10x the price as owning a better alternative.
It's like if I offered people to rent a Ford car for $20k per year or get a free Mercedes Benz, and 90% choose to rent the Ford because it feels familiar and their friends also rent a Ford... What is wrong with people?
There is something seriously wrong with people. It's like someone (or something) hypnotized them. Are we sure we don't have ASI controlling people? This is not normal.
This is like; what kinds of people are trying to accumulate fiat money nowadays? There's nothing behind it. It's just digits inside a bunch of different databases without any consensus between them and where the government can create unlimited digits for free. Something wrong with people.
In Win 11 Home, and want to add a local account and not change it to a Windows account, and not share my stuff with MS. No Cloud or "Backups", thank you.
The option to enable a local account was through the command line only. The dark patterns and persausion to convince me not to was off putting.
But every time I boot in to have to go through the nag screen is off the wall.
It is truly crazy how much I understand the dedication people have to avoid using a unfamiliar system.
I upgraded to windows 11 as soon as it was offered. Even went out and bought a tpm addon for my motherboard - not that I needed one 100% but activating the onboard one on Zen 3 at the time was thought to cause stuttering…
Anyway, why would I do that?
Well, I got windows free at some point, a lot of years ago, and I am happy enough to jump through a few hoops to keep that going. I don’t use it day to day, I’m not sure why anyone would. I use MacOS and Linux as daily drivers.
But once in a while there’s a game I want to play that’s not that Linux-friendly, and there’s windows up to date and supported, without MS getting another cent out of me since about 2009. What’s not to like?
I get the sentiment but I find it frustrating when people write complaints like this when they know Rufus boot exists which disables TPM and online only accounts during the install.
Usually, whenever there's a workaround for something with Windows, you'll never know until it happens how long it will take before a Windows update makes the workaround ineffective.
Wasnt there a Google cross app logging framework and request tracking project 15 years ago?
Did grafana die when I wasn't looking? Does datadog still make money?
What's weird about this article is that it's the same thing being said 20 years ago. Is this a sign of people not learning from the better parts of Java deployment stacks?
Yet another reason I'm more than happy I switched my personal desktop use to Linux a few years ago now... After a decade of running Insiders, literally the first time I saw an ad on the Start menu search results, I was out. MS has only been increasingly hostile to users since.
Fortunately o265 web versions are pretty capable, including Teams, and most of the development work I've done is not specifically tied to Windows, and even where it is hasn't been too bad in actual business/enterprise environments (beyond typical corporate/govt hinderances). That said, I like what WSL brings to the table.
Windows 11 came out FOUR YEARS AGO. It’s time to let this subject die.
They’re harassing you because in not too many years, connecting your computer to the internet on their OS will be dangerous. They’re trying to save you from yourself.
And, quite reasonably, they don’t want to patch an OS that debuted 10 years ago so that it supports your hardware that’s even older than 10 years old.
It’s time to get over it. You’re using a commercial OS that you likely haven’t even paid for since Windows 7 debuted 20 years ago and that vendor needs you to at least upgrade to a still-pretty-shitty-and-old used laptop to remain compatible.
You’re free to switch to something else like Linux and, frankly, if you’re at the point of writing redundant blog posts of the same subject we’ve heard all about for the last 4 years, you definitely should. I did! And pretty much all of my Windows stuff runs on Linux effortlessly including and especially games.
Or you can disconnect from the Internet and kill the nags with some group policy stuff. As a bonus, being disconnected from the internet will stop these blog posts.
I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators. I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.
On the Windows side, things started going downhill starting with the Windows XP era, and on the Mac the annoyances began sometime in the mid-2010s.
It seems Microsoft, Apple, and other companies realized that they’re leaving money on the table by not exploiting their platforms. Thus, they’re no longer selling simple tools, but rather they are selling us services.
Yes, there are good Linux distributions that don’t annoy me, and the BSDs never nag me, but the problem with switching to these platforms is that I still need Microsoft Office and other proprietary software tools that are not available outside “Big Tech.” There are other matters that make switching away from Windows and macOS challenging, such as hardware support and laptop battery life.
Easy answer to your last point: Work machine and Non-work machine. If I'm working for a company and the company needs MS Office, they will give me a machine with MS Office. I will treat that machine like a radioactive zone. Full Hazmat suit. Not a shred of personal interaction with that machine. It exists only to do work on and that's that. The company can take care of keeping it up to date, and the company's IT department can do the bending over the table on my behest as MS approaches with dildos marked "Copilot" or "Recall" or "Cortana" or "React Native Start Menu" or "OneDrive" or whatever.
Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.
This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.
Apt username, for a pragmatic strategy.
A variation I've done occasionally is to run the Microsoft Windows software in a VM on my Linux laptop.
When I last had the MS office suite inflicted upon me, a couple years ago, I was able to run it in a Web browser on Linux.
It's important to remember, though, that these measures probably won't work long-term.
Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame. (It's usually not originating bottom-up from the ICs, and I know some nice people from there, but upper corporate is totally like that, demonstrating it again and again, for decades.)
Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
> Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame.
The Windows 10 bait n switch to Windows 11.
Hundreds of millions of PC users worldwide on old hardware using old Windows OSes were offered Win10 as free upgrade, with the promise that Win10 is the final Windows edition.
Later though, M$ announced Win11 and it would work only on new hardware (BIOS TPM 2.0 constraint), and Win10 is no longer being supported for personal use (except via some complicated ways to get an extension for the Win10 updates). And not only is Win11 buggy and full of ads, its performance is also bad.
Well, the good thing is that such shenanigans are pushing PC users to migrate to Linux.
Valve saw the writing on the wall when Windows 8 was released. Their investment made Linux more feasible for the average user.
This makes me wonder how much better the world would be if corporations didn't have to answer to shareholders. Valve isn't publicly traded, Microsoft is.
> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
My current employer is so great that I have casually mentioned that I might stay until I retire a bunch of times since joining. I've never said that about any other job. We have Word because there are industry requirements that it meets in terms of formatting legal documents. Can other apps supplant it? Possibly, but no one is spending the time and money to find out and it's not my decision to make.
I understand the motivation of the statement, but it's a fallacy.
You just described an exceptionally good place to work (because, how many places would an employee casually mention a bunch of times that they might stay until retirement).
Congrats on findind that situation, but I don't think it's evidence of fallacy of my statement.
Have a new laptop arriving shortly with enough RAM and storage, that - me being a historically "Windows as primary OS" kind-of-person, with the enshitification of their adding CoPilot to everything and turning Windows 11 into an "agentic" OS, my installation will be Linux-first, and then run Windows via LKVM (hopefully with proper pass-through for TPM + GPU).
Yes - I have "noodled" with Linux in VM's and Raspberry Pi's - but it has never been my primary OS.
Thanks to Microsoft, that is about to change...
> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
This seems like an over generalization, though I agree with your other points. Microsoft is not a good company, but are any of the big tech behemoths?
I could buy an argument that requiring Windows for devs might be a red flag, unless said company is making Windows software or games, but there are plenty of valid reasons to standardize on Windows & Microsoft 365 across the office, especially in very large companies. Even if a company issues macs, they are still probably on M365 unless they are in silicon valley or a startup using Google Workspace.
Consumers aren't Microsoft's customer, and to be honest, I get the vibe that Microsoft would just prefer to stop selling to and catering to consumers/personal users entirely for Windows. Windows in an enterprise, properly reined in by a competent IT department, isn't too bad. Windows gives a lot of tools to IT and the business that you would otherwise have to build yourself, which for non-tech company or a company where software isn't their revenue generating product, has a lot of appeal.
The distaste everyone feels for it is because Windows isn't built for the end user anymore, it's built for the person signing the checks at the company, who usually has different needs. Doesn't mean it's a bad product (although, it's not great), just that you, the user, isn't who its designed for.
> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
Microsoft being shitty notwithstanding…I think you don’t really grasp just how prevalent Microsoft is in the business world - it is not the indicator you think it is.
Too true... even then, there are some MS things I actually like... VS Code and C# at the top of the list. I also like a lot of the things in MS office over alternatives in practice. LibreOffice is just annoying to me every time I use it, and I use it regularly, OnlyOffice has been less reliable still. I still don't equate any of the alternatives to Visio as close to equal despite regularly using them as well.
That said, I emphatically despise a lot of the decision making behind Windows and a lot of MS products... I really wish it was managed/governed more by technical influences than business/fincancial ones in practice. You can see where a lot of the lines are drawn and it's a bit fascinating.
some companies don't have a choice; in a previous AEC job (architecture/engineering/construction), we had to deploy windows to use Autodeck Revit.
Now servers and other backend stuff, on the other hand, linux and illumos.
This is common I'd argue in most businesses.
Despite Microsoft's behavior and all of Windows' flaws, when properly managed and controlled in an enterprise, it's not so bad, and there's still a ton of software out there that is Windows only.
Where I work now is pretty much like that. Windows on end-user endpoints, Linux everywhere else.
I like this in theory but as someone who travels often with my work laptop, it's nice to be able to use the same hardware for personal use as carrying a second computer is impractical regarding carry weight and packing.
Apple used to allow installing a second copy of MacOS without it being subject to the work profile - completely isolated from the work partition (because you could ignore the "set up work profile" prompts after installation).
I would simply restart my MacBook into the personal install after work & on weekends.
Apple have recently updated the MacOS installer to be always online so I can no longer install a seperate MacOS partition without a work profile.
I ended up buying an ROG Ally but it's honestly not that portable. The power brick is almost the same size as the handheld and it occupies about as much space as a laptop in my carry on.
When I travel for work, I take my work laptop and an iPad in a keyboard case. It’s under 2lbs (0.9kg), it can charge off the same brick as my phone or even pass through charge off my work laptop itself, and keeps me connected to my personal digital life without having to put anything personal on the work machine. It also never raises an eye with security if you have a laptop + iPad.
Usually, the iPad apps are "good enough" (in some ways, they are actually better for travel, as they are designed with features like offline downloads), but if they are not a "real" computer is only a tailscale connection to my home network away over VNC.
Edit: specifically, the iPad + Laptop combo never raises an eye at customs houses. Inside the USA, I've taken as many as 3 laptops for a work trip before, and I can not express how much the TSA does not care. On the other hand, when you go through customs in another country, they can be bit ornery (i.e. suspect you of trying to avoid import tax), so I never want to take more than one laptop through a customs barrier.
p.s. if you want to game in your downtime, such trips are an awesome time to break out the emulator and retro game, an iPad has more than enough power for this, and SNES / d-pad type games work great with a keyboard case as a controller (or, you can just bring a real controller).
All of these gaming laptops really do suck. I feel like these days your better off having a small form factor pc or just remote into your machine from far away.
I never understood the point/market for gaming laptops. They seem popular enough for OEMs to still keep them around, but in almost every way you are much better off with a desktop if you need that much compute.
They can't be used on battery; the discrete GPU will chew through your battery in minutes. They are heavy, loud, hot.
Tried one for a while a long time ago, hated it. I never wanted to bring it anywhere it was so heavy and bulky, so I figured what's the point in having a laptop if I never want to take it with me.
Got a powerful desktop for gaming now, and my portal device is either my iPad or a Macbook air, and I can just remote into my desktop anytime I need.
It’s for know-nothing assholes to buy, so they can either say “it’s fine, it’s a gaming PC”,
or not review/understand their required specs,
or both!
Very good take.
I actually ended up buying a travel router and 60% of my gaming was done by remoting into my ROG Ally from my work laptop (they didn't block Steam). The remaining 40% of gaming was done plugged into a TV + controller.
For normal browsing I would use RDP - though it would be amazing if Apple supported some kind of displayport in on the MacBook so it could be used as a screen for an external device.
I've been considering selling my Ally and buying a mini PC with a half decent APU as I seldom use it as a handheld.
I'm still using my M1 air for personal use... though I opted for 16gb and 1tb storage, I will wireguard+ssh to my desktop as needed... remote editing in VS Code is nice AF.
If you aren't into gaming at all, you might consider a smaller Macbook Air for personal use... mine is mostly relegated to occasional use unless I'm traveling, where it's mostly email/web use. Small, light, fits my needs and can charge via the same USB adapter I carry for my phone anyway. I have a rather heavy laptop bag so the difference between 1 or two laptops and the portable display isn't that big a difference.
Two laptops is easier than you’d think if you have the right bag.
My work lap is so locked down I cannot do anything personal on it, so when I go into the office I always carry two laptops, and the personal one is an old thick heavy dinosaur; it’s got to be at least five pounds. However, with a good bag that has a (non-padded) belt and sternum strap, it is not difficult. The belt carries most of the load and my shoulders don’t hurt; they hardly feel anything.
I deliberately park in the farthest spot at the other side of campus (about a half mile, and up four flights in the garage) to get in exercise steps with the heavy pack.
It’s good exercise but I absolutely need a belt and sternum pack to do it. Wouldn’t dream of trying that with only shoulder straps.
Are you me?
Heh - going on 20+ years, my "running joke" is if the only exercise I truly get is lugging my laptop(s) around (sometimes as many as 3, depending on client-load) + "kit" (Kobo eReader, cables, powerbricks (although if it is an ongoing thing, I leave those onsite or rely on docks), powerbank, and various other gear (occasionally an active "gimbal", occasionally an HT radio + it's gear) - then at least one of them might as well be extremely heavy...
Haven't seen many "laptop-focused" backpacks that have both belts and sternum straps, would love any recommendations.
Tell that to airport check-in staff haha. A laptop and charger are around 3kg and there's only so much clothing I can take out of my suitcase and wear to make it passed check-in.
But I hear you. It's annoying that I can't reuse perfectly good hardware, but it's fine - we make do.
The added scrutiny at some border crossings can be problematic too. Explaining to the inspectors at the Turkey/Bulgaria border why I had two phones and two laptops (and dissuading them of the suspicion that I was smuggling electronics to friends/family) through language barriers was a pain.
I do tell that to airport check-in staff :-) I just take both laptops out. I only do carry-ons and no checked bags and am able to stuff everything needed into one mid-sized tac pack.
> I deliberately park in the farthest spot at the other side of campus (about a half mile, and up four flights in the garage) to get in exercise steps with the heavy pack.
As a side note, this is an excellent habit, sadly I noticed people discover that avoiding effort is not always the best strategy when their muscle mass decreases, and adding elements of strength exercise to their daily routine can be more effective than going to the gym, for various reasons.
Been using this strategy since Windows XP
I can do work on the computer running BSD/Linux, save it in a text-only format, transfer it to the work computer then import into Excel, PowerPoint or Word
It's been over 20 years since I had a home computer running Windows (and well over 30 since I've used a mouse)
I think the GP comment is evidence that Microsoft can get away with what it is doing. Even people who can use Linux or BSD will not stop using Windows at home no matter how obnoxious it becomes
There is a substantial difference between complaining and actually taking action and the company seems to recognise that
No full time job, so as a freelancer those machines need to combine. And my work uses similar software that simply doesn't work well on Linux.
But yes, ideally I'd have two machines to separate my career from my personal life.
I'm using Debian an when working for a client that requires Windows, I'm working in a VirtualBox with Windows Server 2022 as my desktop OS. It works really well (running mainly Visual Studio) and licenses are pretty cheap. But the best part is, that there are no ads and other Windows 11 Copilot nonsense.
Any categories of unexpected legwork you’ve run into? (needing to install/activate features, etc)
If you’re implying separating work work on two machines; beware the corporate spyware on the windows machine will show a lot of idle time!
Same. Work provides the idiot box. I give it its own segmented network too, cause work spyware and all... then run a personal workstation with linux next door to it.
The problem with Linux is that there is no legitimate place to direct your rage at. It is free, nobody owes you anything and every installation is different. When Windows is awful, virtually everyone is being sympathetic. When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
I'm slowly moving away from the Apple ecosystem, and this is what I rather like about Linux. I find it obviates the anger — there's no specific entity making decisions that make my user experience worse. If something's annoying me, it's quite likely to be my own fault.
You could argue that, with Windows there is a legitimate place to direct your rage at, but the action of directing your rage does not actually have any effect on improving your experience. With Win and Mac, no one cares, because they already have their customers locked in and tight, they will accept any experience degradation. With Linux, you are not a customer so no customer complaints, but still arguably much better support.
Agreed. And also, if there's something you don't like or a project going in a direction you don't agree with, there is virtually guaranteed to be other people out there that feel the same that are building something different
> "Arguably much better support"
If you come at it like a sinner asking for penance, the englightened may come to guide, but that's not what I'm talking about. If you to rage, these same people will become inquistors. Rage isn't all about solving a problem, it's about catharsis. It's not so much about technical support, it's about emotional support. A bad design decision (like the GNOME desktop redesign) is not a technical problem. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
There are also people who often claim that their installation of Linux always crashes after every single update, their favourite commodity hardware that's a decade old still doesnt work out of the box on Linux etc etc.
The truth is somewhere in between and its a lot closer to the positive experience these days compared to the old days.
> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
On the one hand, yes, this is not a nice thing to have happen. The frustrations shouldn't happen to begin with, and then people shouldn't be using the reverse Uno card on you just for that.
On the other hand, Linux has a lot fewer of these frustrations (in my experience), and a lot of frustrations are being fixed with time, since you're likely not the only one who is frustrated by it.
On the third hand, the situation being shit for obvious human reasons, not enough dev time, disagreements about the way forward, as is the case with Linux development, is a much, much nicer thing to have your problems caused by, rather than the source of Windows being shit, that is, someone wasn't happy with their dashboard this morning and decided to make that your problem today.
When Windows is awful, everyone is sympathetic except for their support. They are beyond useless.
Ubuntu with support is totally a thing, not sure if it is good or not.
Windows 11 Home: $139/license Ubuntu with support: $150/yr
You can always buy someone to direct your rage at if you are a business and wanting to deploy Linux though. Red Hat, Suse, Canonical will all happily sell you support contracts and guarantees.
I installed Linux Mint Mate on my parents home computer and they have less issues than they ever had with windows 10-11
Whats to rage about w/ Linux?
Like Apple used to warrant, it just works.
A lot of rage over systemd from what I recall.
I raged a lot when my Arch machine would break after an update and I'd have to do config file surgery on a machine that no longer wanted to boot into a graphical desktop. I've never had that sort of thing happen on Mac or Windows.
Well, that's definitely on you. Arch do warn people to actually read the changelogs if you're going to update/upgrade everything. Whenever I've hit a problem with an Arch machine (I think it's only twice), it was written quite clearly in the update notes along with the fix.
It's actually surprising just how stable Arch Linux can be considering that it's typically using the newest code for everything. If you really want Arch and stability, maybe using something like SteamOS would be better - Arch, but designed to be stable.
It was on me, that's why I stopped using Arch. I wanted a computer, a tool for getting work done, not a hobby to tinker with.
Yeah, I stopped using it myself as I didn't really need a bleeding edge system. It's actually surprising just how reliable Arch is - I think if you want to run it in production system, you don't bother doing a system upgrade without testing it first.
I do like the Arch wiki though - probably the best source of information on Linux tools etc.
> Well, that's definitely on you. Arch do warn people to actually read the changelogs if you're going to update/upgrade everything.
"There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now."
Well, it is known as a bleeding edge distro
I don't know, apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at all.
> Arch do warn people to actually read the changelogs if you're going to update/upgrade everything
I used to daily Arch, and I read landers/docs/community pages as a hobby, basically.
I’ve never seen this.
I’m not doubting you, to be clear - I just really want to see it! lol
Link?
It's a while since I used Arch (apart from my Steam Deck, but that's a bit different as it's curated and has a read only root filesystem by default), so I've had a look around and I think I meant reading the "Latest News" at https://archlinux.org/
e.g.
> NVIDIA 590 driver drops Pascal and lower support; main packages switch to Open Kernel Modules
> 2025-12-20
> With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the nvidia package with nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms, and nvidia-lts with nvidia-lts-open.
> Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment. > Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:
> Uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms packages. > Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR
> Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.
Personally, I used to just run an upgrade and then go look for known problems if pacman threw an error. Of course, the recommendation is to have a good backup before running the upgrade and just roll it back if it has issues (then read the notes).
sudo pacman -Syu. -> Secure boot config broken, OS won't boot (Manjaro this summer with some Intel firmware update). No HDMI sound on nvidia for some distros until recently. Getting the Wifi to work ootb on Mint is not always easy..
> Manjaro
That's your problem right there. EndeavourOS is also a beginner-friendly Arch derivative but less breaky.
> Wifi to work ootb
I definitely feel you on that one, it's just the luck of the draw sometimes... If you haven't considered it, in some laptops the wifi module is a replacable mPCIe or m2 module and if that's the case, more compatible replacements shouldn't be hard to find for cheap or salvaged from broken laptops.
Idk. My main frustration with Linux has nothing to do with the OS itself. Linux is pretty good actually. My main frustration has to do with software that doesn't run on Linux that I have to use occasionally. So things that force me not to use Linux. But that has gotten much better over the years.
And meanwhile my Windows and MacOS experience has gotten much worse. So I feel pretty good with using Linux as my daily driver for the past 6 years.
> Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates
Even Windows 95 came bundled with MSN on the desktop which had a paid monthly fee to access. And its lack of automatic updates was a real problem, as you had to manually find the service packs and security patches. The automatic updates in Windows XP were vastly more convenient.
Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.
> Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.
That was true right up until companies started routinely pushing updates that broke things, removed useful features, added user hostile features, or even outright ads. If I have to give up automatic security updates to not have my software get worse on me over time, I will gladly do so. I would rather have security updates and not have the user-hostile stuff, but we seem to be unable to get that, so the next best thing would be no automatic updates at all.
Installing Internet Explorer 4 on Windows 95 opened up the first version of Windows Update, when it started as a web app with some custom ActiveX plugins. Windows 98 was the first time Windows Update had a bundled link in the OS, and shortly after Windows 98 introduced a "Critical Update" notification that would prompt users to open Windows Update.
Automatic updates arrived in Windows ME.
It's interesting the timeframes on Windows are often earlier than you think they are. Admittedly, a lot of users skipped Windows ME and its strange reputation, so Windows XP may have been their first time seeing automatic updates.
I know you won't believe me, and my precious karma score may suffer by stating reality: you don't NEED security updates. A properly hardened server with no patches will outlive cobbled together trash library patch over garbage code pasted from ai vibing script kiddies. Would you shake your head in disbelief if I told you 'security patches' are the fix delivered by a dealer to quell your shivers?
Give me functionality updates, cumulative service packs, and the just after BBS days when an exploit discovered in your software meant it was used by no one, anywhere, because we no longer trust your coding or your 'fix'
Nobody's talking about "properly hardened servers" here. We're talking about the OS used on desktops and laptops by everyday consumers, connecting to the Internet across a wide variety of Wi-Fi access points.
Do you not see the constant stream of zero-day exploits coming out for consumer operating systems? Do you think those don't need to be fixed?
I'm genuinely curious -- I've never come across anyone with your perspective before, so I'm struggling to understand where it's coming from.
Usually i post and forget but your reasonable reply prompted some effort on my part.
I live life so that at any moment, if modern services of society (food, internet, power, shelter, entertsinment, transport, personal defense) ended, and I was forced to use what I had access to, that my quality of life would persist. Besides physical considerations (hydroponics, solar, guns, hardened vehicles), I maintain nonvolitile backups of the same software I use daily - vanilla(unpatched) OSs from xp to 11), current and older browsers, non-ssl based content and servers, games, music, movies, hoards of older hardware in a cage that may may an emp.. never tested it. Anything computer related I have works from a bare metal install with no internet connection period.
I use the same retail desktop, laptop, wifi, cellular, and wan hardware used by most consumers but only if I can reset and inialize it offline, and can use the built in firewall to restrict outgoing connections to a single executable single port whitelist including my phone. Which means no nags, no updates, no new features, no removed features, no app stores, no federated os logins, no new terms of service, and no telemetry unless I choose to connect that program to the internet and the program is flexible enough to use a single port.
Zero day exploits won't work on my android 11 s9 with no play services, deny all firewall, and non standard chrome build. In app browser updates don't work until I manually install the binary, most AI features are broken by default even on my win11 laptop.
It's not an easy life. But if you insist that software and hardware do what you wish, your actions should back that. My actions probably more than most. I pass on a decent amount of IT gigs because they require app tracking or that I use their monitoring software, or vpn... but everything I have I KNOW I control now and until it stops working and I buy two more identical and grossly obsolete replacements.
Based on this response, this thread isn't for you nor about you. The general public needs security updates.
The internet was a big part of it. Most home users did not have internet access in the System 7 days. When it came out in 1991 no country had more than 1% of its population with internet access. By the time Windows 95 came out around 10% of US users had internet access.
It wasn't until 2001 that the US reached 50% of users having internet access.
Without internet there wasn't really a good way to distribute updates to most users.
As a developer in that era working at a company that made software for PCs and Macs it was great. It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.
We'd only make more money from someone who bought our software if that software made a good enough impression that they bought more of our software. We'd lose money if any software went out with enough bugs or a confusing enough interface or a poorly enough written manual that a lot of people made a lot of calls to our toll free tech support.
This was great because it largely aligned what developers wanted to do (write a feature complete program with a great UI and no bugs) and what management wanted (happy users who do not call tech support).
With internet giving us the ability to push updates at almost zero cost and as often as we want people who release incomplete programs early and add the missing parts in updates are going to outcompete people who don't release until the program is complete and nearly bug free.
Once you get there it is not much of a leap to decide that what you are really selling is not software to do X but rather the service of providing software to do X. Customers subscribe to that service and you continuously improve its ability to do X.
> It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.
On the topic of Windows, this is why Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility was and is such a huge deal.
It wasn't so easy to just update your software if Windows ever made breaking changes, and your users would, rightly, be pretty ticked off if suddenly what they bought no longer works because they upgraded from Win 95 to 98, or 98 to XP.
You had confidence that you could buy a program once, and it'll just happily continue to run for the foreseeable future.
This also made businesses happy. If you liked a particular version of a software product, you bought it, ran it on Windows, and could rest easy knowing it'll just continue to work through version upgrades of the OS.
I stopped using Windows over 15 years ago and moved to Ubuntu that was running all the servers. Unfortunately Ubuntu decided to do the same garbage trying to shove their pro crap down my throat, made it impossible to remove (by making a desktop requirement) and resorted to the game of trying to re-enable it during updates
I finally moved everything to just Debian itself that never nags me and just works with everything I need, including games (thanks to steam)
Only time I boot a Win10 VM is to compile apps for for windows, otherwise it has zero use or need anymore
I supported Ubuntu when they started but gave up on them after they sent people's local file searches to third parties so they could push amazon ads. They're totally corrupted as far as I can tell.
I too remember the days when every unpatched Windows PC was a member of a botnet. Perhaps less fondly than you.
And thankfully this was before a time when everyone’s computers and phones had access to their bank accounts, credit cards, and before email was the gateway to virtually your entire life.
I miss when I felt that personal computers were a new wave of democratized capital, a kind of affordable factory for individual owners to use pursuing their own autonomy and power... and not just for programmers.
I underestimated the economic forces trying to turn them into devices for enforcing the interests of a large company onto the owner and turning the owner into a renter.
Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364[1]. If we can find enough people willing to pay $364 for an OS that values privacy and doesn't push needless upgrades, that'll be a start. But XP itself was probably priced based on the belief that people would be upgrading in a few years to Windows Vista. So we might need more than that.
[1] - According to minneapolisfed.org, which uses the official economist-approved inflation rates. Not that I'm implying that there's anything wrong with that. I have all of the orthodox beliefs about inflation that a good citizen should have.
Windows 11 Pro is still $200 [1]. Of course most people don't pay anything directly as it's bundled with their PC and they won't think to question why that is.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
The cost of Windows 11 Pro is $200, plus your privacy, ownership of your computer, and your dignity. It's way too expensive.
> Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364
I assume you used the overall CPI rate rather than the software rate. but using the Software CPI its more like $58. and that seems like an easier sell (for the user, maybe not the developer).
http://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/CUUR0000SEEE0...
Software CPI-U
2001 Oct 77.0
2025 Nov 22.182
$364 when?
I am old enough to remember that when Windows 95 was released Microsoft tried to take over the Internet with Microsoft Network (MSN, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-Up_Internet_Access).
They never changed.
Can you provide some details on the reasons for needing MS Offfice? I'm genuinely curious. What does LibreOffice do differently that makes it a problem for you to use? Personally my only complaint is the performance of LO, which could be better.
I'm not GP but I do know it's rare to open an existing .docx in LibreOffice and have it look right; who knows what it looks like in Word after I've edited and saved it. It's fine creating new documents, and Excel/Calc is better than Word (inherent in being more structured I suppose), but it's not a drop-in replacement. I've used web Office365 when necessary though, not Windows.
> I do know it's rare to open an existing .docx in LibreOffice and have it look right; who knows what it looks like in Word after I've edited and saved it.
This is not true except as hyperbole. Most docx open and let themselves edit quite well in LibreOffice Writer, and they look right.
However, you still have a point. There are always some cases when the compatibility is not good, and the only way to use said docx files would be in MS Word.
Maybe you've had better luck, I'm just describing my recent experience of using Linux at an O365 org until early 2025.
For me, some complex Excel usage was not replicable in either Sheets or LibreOffice.
Excel I'd argue is the primary reason for most in the business world.
What LibreOffice misses, and sheets to a lesser extent, is that Excel isn't just a spreadsheet app. It's a general-purpose programming environment for non-devs (although, at a certain point, you could argue they are effectively programming even if they don't see it that way).
Yeah, there are better solutions. At a certain level of complexity, you probably shouldn't be using Excel and should switch to Python+some SQL database, but there's something to be said about the visual environment Excel provides.
Excel is Microsoft's killer app
It’s the world’s most popular low-code platform.
> It's a general-purpose programming environment for non-devs
Google sheets's programmability is way better (than the last time I used) Excel, with direct support for python, which Gemini can write just fine. It's a bit fiddly in places, I'll admit, but Google sheets is definitely a programming environment.
Hardware support isn't all that bad anymore. Certainly better than it was when I started using Linux.
It isn't perfect. You'll probably have a better experience with AMD than Nvidia GPUs, most fingerprint readers probably won't work, and newly released hardware might not have drivers for a few months, but most stuff just works.
Do not connect it to the internet. Problem solved.
Basically anything in a social network needs to learn to defend itself against threats. Make computer a hermit, and it can go without updates for a long time.
(Oh, but you don't like that? Well, Microsoft doesn't like getting in the news for some worldwide botnet of all Windows 10 machines. I bet they'll figure this out sooner or later.)
Microsoft Office somewhat works in the browser. Certainly good enough for me, although 99% of my actions is upload document to onedirve, open it in web MS Office version, export to pdf and then read with standard tools.
What kills me is there seems to be no option for accounting that is acceptable to CPAs besides being held captive paying whatever QuickBooks cloud demands. It's not like dual entry accounting has changed much in 500 years. There are bank integrations and service contracts (notably Apple Card wasn't willing to pay licensing fees for the quickbooks file format, so you simply couldn't syncronize your accounts with your spending, instead falling back to manual import), but they would not make investors happy by merely offering bank connection services
(God forbid banks be required by law to offer a web connector that allows you to request your own data. A workaround I've tried is to have my bank send me an email alert on every transaction over a penny, so at least I have a record, but never got around to setting up an auto import from my inbox)
I've heard that many times, but the 3 accounting firms I've worked with for my business didn't care what accounting software I used. They were all happy to work with Gnucash so long as I could provide the needed reports, all of which were pre-configured in Gnucash. Two were small firms, but one was part of a major national accounting firm/franchise.
If you a small business with retail and payroll, tax tables being up to date are worth the price.
> but the problem with switching to these platforms is that I still need Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office Online works fine on Linux. In fact, it’s superior to native MS Office in terms of stability.
> Microsoft Office Online works fine on Linux. In fact, it’s superior to native MS Office in terms of stability.
It may work for your case - good. Many companies have custom VBA macros that runs on their Excel sheets to get data or validate it. Try to use a document like this on your online Office and you will understand why most Office users can't easily migrate.
> I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.
I 'member the days of Win 98, Win ME and Win XP... made good money cleaning up malware - browser toolbars, dialers, god knows what - from computers. Some came from the hellholes that were Java, ActiveX or Flash, some came from browser drive-by exploits served from advertising networks, but others just came from computers that were attached directly to the Internet from their modems.
And I also 'member Windows being prone to crashes, particularly graphics drivers, until Windows 7 revamped the entire driver model.
Oh, and (unrelated) I also 'member websites you could use to root a fair amount of Android and Apple phones.
All of that is gone now, it has gotten so, so much better thanks to a variety of protection mechanisms.
Security and upselling are orthogonal; I can make a secure operating system that doesn’t notify the user of OneDrive, iCloud, and other services.
Things get more nuanced when we talk about other types of notifications and about whether updates should be automatic or always require a user’s explicit consent. I personally believe that a key tenet of personal computing is that the owner of the computer, not the hardware or software vendor, should have full control over the hardware and software on the computer. This control is undermined when systems are designed in ways to give users less control. There may be legitimate security benefits to mandatory automatic updates, for example, but there are risks, such as buggy updates leading to broken installations or even lost data, and there’s also having to deal with unwanted UI/UX changes.
As a power user, developer, and researcher, I want control over my computing environment. Unfortunately Windows and macOS have been trending toward more paternalism, more nagging, and more upselling. Thankfully Linux exists, but at the cost of needing to switch away from convenient proprietary software tools like Microsoft Office. I can do without Word or Excel, but PowerPoint is what keeps me on Office (I’ve tried LibreOffice and the Beamer LaTeX template). I’m also concerned about hardware getting increasingly locked down, which will hurt Linux.
I had the same reading, it sounded like Windows is worse now than Windows 95, which would be a hot take indeed. But it seems the intent was purely on these nagging aspects which have definitely gotten worse.
It might be easier to swallow the message focusing on Windows 8+ when it really jumped the shark. Windows 7 was a pretty good OS holistically I think even if there are aspects lost compared to the pure simplicity of those really old ones.
You haven't addressed OP argument.
The fact there were security concerns is unrelated with the MAIN points discussed not only in the post, but in OP's reply:
> No upselling services
> No automatic updates
> No nagging.
> No automatic updates
Without auto-updates you could take a guess how many systems wouldn't get patched in months.
I know it goes against the grain here; but so what. It's the users prerogative to do with their device, what the wish. Nag for security updates, sure. But automatic updates of anything is user hostile and should be abolished. Especially when those automatic updates remove features or introduce a shit ton of new bugs.
Problem is the history o people failing to patch causing widespread Internet outages, such as via SQL Slammer; a SQL Server patch had been available for six months to protect against the vulnerability. Microsoft learned the lesson that users, even the “professional” ones that should know better, fail to patch, which brings us to the current automated patch situation.
> It's the users prerogative to do with their device, what the wish.
The problem is, users are still part of the Internet. And historically, users haven't taken care about update nags, that's how we ended up with giant ass botnets.
It is not really gone - at all.
The size of the botnets and raw bandwidth they have access to now is staggering. (DDoS, "Residential Proxies", ”Anti-Censorship VPNs”, etc. All just compromised residential devices.
> I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators.
> System 7 and Windows 95
If Windows 95 was the complexity level of a pencil to you, Win 10/11 is merely a color pencil. You should be fine getting rid of the nagging and adapting it to your needs, it hasn't become 10x or 100x more complex, merely incrementally more.
> Microsoft [...] not exploiting their platforms.
That's a phrase I didn't expect. What part of Microsoft do you feel was leaving money on the table, as they were sued by basically the whole globefor their business practices ?
Every decade MS never finds a shortage of acolytes.
Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out? There is no price/performance improvement. Nor will there be for the next five years or so. NVidia says to expect 10% price increases each year. DRAM prices have doubled, and Samsung says not to expect price cuts. Micron just exited the retail RAM business.
Microsoft is trying to escape this trap by pivoting to Windows as a subscription service. It will get worse, not better.
Yes. So Microsoft (which manufactures hardware itself and has close ties to other hardware manufacturers) needed to find... other ways to, er, motivate people to buy new hardware anyway. Which brings us back to the blog post we are commenting on.
Not sure Windows as a subscription service is the end goal though. But maybe we should all wish for M$ to do that, maybe that would be what's needed to finally bring about the Year of The Linux Desktop™.
I don't think selling more hardware is the primary motivation. The motivation is ensuring everyone has TPM 2.0 enabled on their device.
This allows Microsoft to protect parts of their software even from the user that owns the hardware it's running on. With TPM enabled you finally give up the last bit of control you had over the software running on your hardware.
Unbreakable DRM for software, such as for your $80 billion game business or your subscription office suite.
As a bonus, it prevents those pesky Windows API compatibility tools like Wine from working if the application is designed to expect signed and trusted Windows.
The mass exodus to Linux gaming is already causing a push back against kernel level anti-cheat.
People who 5 years ago didn't give a hoot about computing outside of running steam games are now actively discussing their favorite Linux distro and giving advice to friends and family about how to make the jump.
As much as I hope it to be mass exodus, and as someone who switched over to CachyOS as my main OS in Nov 2025, I'm not sure that 3% of the steam user base really qualifies as a 'mass' exodus.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Linux-gaming-growth-SteamOS-sh...
Going back to my Windows install every now and then to do things feels uncomfortable. Almost like I'm sullying myself! The extent of Microsoft's intrusiveness kind of makes it feel like entering a poorly maintained public space...at least compared to my linux install.
I'm not sure that the majority of people feel this way about Windows 11. They just put up with it in the same way as they do YouTube ads, web browsing without ublock origin, social media dark patterns etc. But certainly, never been a better time I think to move to linux for my kind of user, i.e. the only mildly technologically adept.
Yeah but which 3%? It's important.
There are a lot of Steam gamers with 5 games in their library who log on once a month. There are a few Steam gamers with 5000 games in their library who are permanently logged in. There's folks who play one game obsessively, and folks who tinker around with many games.
I'm willing to bet that the 3% are the kind of people who buy a lot of games.
I'd love to see that "what percentage of games have been bought by people on which platform?" metric. I think it'd be a lot more than 3% on Linux, even if you count Steam Deck as a separate platform.
I agree. Would be fascinating how that 3% breaks down. Although excluding the SteamOS/steam deck users that desktop segment drops to about 2.25%, seeing how 25% of Linux installs are steamOS.
I think SteamOS being available for PC and promoted by Valve could be a game changer. It provides a trusted and familiar pathway for a different way of doing things. But while it would perhaps reduce Windows installs, I can't see it help grow a user base of DIY linux tinkerers, if that is of any importance. I can kind of see it being a bit like Android makes the majority of phone users linux users, but not entirely sure what that means for linux desktop.
Agree.
I think SteamOS's desktop mode will get used more as people discover it. I was kinda impressed that I could just switch out to a desktop on my Steam Deck, and then used it to play videos while travelling.
The whole "it's better than a console at being a PC, and better than a PC at being a console" thing. It'll be interesting to see if it takes off.
I think you'd lose that bet. The kind of people who buy a lot of games are also the people who are not going to be tolerant of game compatibility issues on Linux; they want to play the game, not futz with their OS.
2 years ago I would have agreed with you, but the game compatibility issues really aren't there any more. Proton has made huge strides, and the Steam Deck has forced a lot of game companies to make sure that there aren't any issues.
> I'm not sure that 3% of the steam user base really qualifies as a 'mass' exodus.
Major tech reviewers are talking about Bazzite. Reddit gaming forums are full of people talking about Win11 vs Linux.
Microsoft only has two strangle holds on PCs - gaming and office apps. For home users they literally have 0 lock in now days other than familiarity. No one is writing native windows apps outside of legacy productivity apps and games. Even Microsoft is writing Windows components in React now days.
I moved to Linux earlier this year and literally none of my apps were unavailable. Everything is a browser window now days.
15 years ago that would've been crazy, I had tons of native windows apps I used every day.
I know linux gaming is getting a buzz and I'm happy to see it. I'm honestly surprised it took so long for people like Gamers Nexus to review linux, but thankful that they did.
But by saying 'For home users they literally have 0 lock in now days other than familiarity.' I think you severely underestimate how powerful familiarity is in anchoring non-tech users to particular platforms. However dysfunctional they can be.
As I mentioned, I moved to linux myself earlier this year. But the first time I tried it was probably around 2004. And I've dipped in and out occasionally but not stuck with it until this year, when I've found it to be a significant improvement on the Windows alternative.
Microsofts own creation presents a real opportunity for an uptake in linux adoption. But I do think it still presents sufficient friction and unfamiliarity for average non-tech users to take on. The only significant issue I had with your initial comment was with your reference to a 'mass' exodus, even if it is confined to the gaming community.
Happy to be proven wrong of course. And perhaps to the annoyance of my friends, willing to help anyone I know interested with a linux install.
But looking forward to the Dec 2025 steam survey. Looking forward to the tiny contribution my little install will make to the linux numbers!
Distros like bazzite launch into steam upon boot. Steam is the OS, everything happens through steam.
Give people chrome and most won't be able to tell the difference from Windows.
Windows 11 was a large change to the UI, arguably just as large a change as from Windows 10 to any of the contemporary Linux DEs.
I've been playing the most recent POE2 league on my Linux desktop for the past week while my friend on windows is having random crashes.
>I think you severely underestimate how powerful familiarity is in anchoring non-tech users to particular platforms.
What familiarity? Microsoft has changed the look and feel of the OS to the point that it no longer retains that familiarity from version to version.
Unfortunately Linux requires zero effter to create cheats on, might as well run no anti cheat. And the root stuff is overblown as user space programs can already read all your files and process memory of that user. How many bother with multiple users?
Not all gamers are playing games where cheating is an issue. It's really only the MOBA Call of Battlefield AAA crowd who care about that. That's not the largest group of gamers, and certainly not the largest market for games.
Fortnite and Call of Duty are consistently the #1 and #2 games every year. The others like GTA, Battlefield, League of Legends and Valorant also have anti-cheat that blocks Linux. It's not a minor issue.
The top game tag by sales [0] is #singleplayer, which obviously doesn't care about anti-cheat.
There's a demographic of gamers who only play the one competitive multiplayer game (such as Fornite or CoD). They don't buy many games, they're not the most lucrative market for game publishers, but they do keep those titles in business. And yes, for them, anti-cheat is important and they're unlikely to move to Linux.
[0] https://games-stats.com/steam/tags/
The push back on kernel level anti-cheat on security grounds has always felt odd to me. If you don't trust them to run kernel level code why do you trust them to run usermode code as your user? A rogue anticheat software could still do enormous damage in usermode, running as your user, no kernel access required.
Being in kernel mode does give the rogue software more power, but the threat model is all wrong. If you're against kernel anti-cheat you should be against all anti-cheat. At the end of the day you have to chose to trust the software author no matter where the code runs.
it isn't about what I allow them run on my computer, it's about what they don't allow me run on my own goddamn computer. you can't run modded biıs, self compiled kernel or unsigned drivers. with secure boot enabled.
it will never be unbreakable, and only needs to be broken once
intel can't even get SGX to work
To the benefit of everyone backing up their media libraries.
Maybe instead Microsoft could allow Windows 11 to install and run on machines that are otherwise capable and just flash red screens at you all the time where otherwise ads would show up that constantly nag that "THIS COMPUTER IS FUCKING INSECURE!" or something. It would be equally as annoying but I'm sure running latest Windows 11 but with TPM 1.0 instead of TPM 2.0 will be more secure than running Windows 10 without bug fixes and security patches.
(But my understanding is there were other things like bumping minimum supported instruction sets that happened to mismatch a few CPUs that support the newer instruction sets but were shipped with chipsets using the older TPM)
We want to delete the fallback code paths... You'll just get failures from bitlocker instead of install failures, or windows hello failures, or ...
And clever people found out the way - https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-re...
Registry keys and autoattend.xml config keys are not clever people finding a way, it's people using stuff Microsoft put there to do just this for now. I.e. Windows 11 has not been strictly enforcing these yet, they are just "officially" requirements so when they eventually decide to enforce in a newer version (be it an 11 update or some other number) they'll then be able to say "well it's really been an official requirement for many years now, and over 99% of Windows 11 installs which has been the only supported OS for a while now are working that way" at that time. If they just went straight from Windows 10 to strictly enforced Windows 11 options it'd've been harder to defend.
You're missing the point, the TPM 2.0 requirement is there to drive adoption, not to actually prevent you from installing Windows 11.
Windows 12 will close the loophole: your CPU will require a signed code path from boot down to application level code. No option to disable Secure Boot or install your own keys. But there needs to be an installed base of secure hardware for this to happen, hence the TPM 2.0 requirements for Windows 11.
Since Windows 12 hasn't even been mentioned yet, I wouldn't worry about what you're describing at all.
Hardware key storage is a low level security primitive. Both Android and iOS have mandated it for far longer. It's a low level security primitive that enables a lot of scenarios, not just DRM.
For example - it's not possible to protect SSH keys from malware that achieves root without hardware storage. Only hardware storage can offer the "Unplug It" guarantee - that unplugging a compromised machine ends the compromise.
9front with factotum tells a different story.
If you want to protect keys you get a yubikey or something like that.
And if you want to play sound, you buy a sound card. Computers integrate components that approximately everybody needs. Hardware storage for keys is just the latest example
The main component of a yubikey is that it requires a human presence to hit the button and access the secret.
Do new computers have such a button? I've failed to locate it.
Ah yes Android and iOS, they have truly become bastions of user freedom since mandating secure enclaves. That really puts my worries to rest. /s
User freedom is not the only axis by which we judge operating systems.
It is not, but to me personally it is a very important one and it is not one I will give up without a fight.
> With TPM enabled you finally give up the last bit of control you had over the software running on your hardware.
The overwhelming majority of users never had any kind of control over the software running on their hardware, because they don’t know (and don’t want to know) how the magical thinking machine works. These people will benefit from a secure subsystem that the OS can entrust with private key material. I absolutely see your point, but this will improve the overall security of most people.
> The overwhelming majority of users never had any kind of control
Uninterested is vastly different than unable, especially when that majority is still latently "able" to use some software that a knowledgeable-minority creates to Help Do The Thing.
The corporate goal is to block anyone else from providing users that control if/when the situation becomes intolerable enough for the majority to desire it.
Most people don't move away from their state of residence either, but we should be very concerned if someone floats a law stating that you are not permitted to leave without prior approval.
>finally bring about the Year of The Linux Desktop™.
Do we actually want that?
If Linux ever reached mass adoption, big tech companies would inevitably find a way to ruin it
Governments around the world are finding ways of doing that well before big tech will get to it.
This big push for Age/ID verification & "trusted" operating systems is going to ruin what's left of free (as in freedom), general purpose computing. Governments are getting frothy at the mouth for every device to have remote attestation like google play protect/whatever iOS does.
> motivate people to buy new hardware
Open source drivers, and a sense that Linux support will forever be top priority, would be a motivator for me. Most of my tech spend has been with Valve in the past few years. I'd love if there was another company I actually enjoy giving my money to.
May I suggest Framework (https://frame.work/linux).
> So Microsoft which manufactures hardware itself
The only computer lineup MS ever sold directly, to my knowledge, were the Surface things - an absolute niche market.
> So Microsoft (which manufactures hardware itself and has close ties to other hardware manufacturers)
You mean the Microsoft vacuum cleaner ? /s
They mouse is actually a good piece of hardware... as long as you don't make the mistake to plug it in Windows for it to install a driver.
> Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out? There is no price/performance improvement.
Which is exactly why MS is pivoting to begging you to buy a new computer by harassing you with an apparently undismissable "upgrade" dialog.
They have to keep the upgrade treadmill running, and lacking "better performance" as the bait, they have resorted to outright harassment.
> There is no price/performance improvement.
Both performance and performance-per-watt continue to improve with each new generation of CPUs.
But that is squandered by piss-poor programming and stupid visual gimmicks.
I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.
it really depends what you are using your computer for
a 128GB SoC m4 pro max can do pretty wild data science with close to a terabyte/second speed without the latency of typical offloading/back-and-forth
I don't think many people are running Windows on that...
You're not wrong. But, I recently did the mistake of upgrading my iPad to version 26 (the liquid glass version). I had a relatively smooth experience on my 6 year old tablet which now runs painfully slowly. Even scrolling through different parts of home-screen lags.
My point being, with time performance might go up. But instead of that making my device faster/long-lasting, developers use that extra performance to cram in more stuff, at the end of which I come out only slightly better if not worse (as is in my case)
I sympathize completely. My Apple TV 4K 2nd gen is a laggy, unresponsive piece of crap after the tvOS 26 update.
You're not wrong, but I was disappointed recently by how well an eleven-year-old Macbook Air still works. I installed NixOS on it, and it's still pretty usable even on modern websites.
An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.
Progress in software is supposed to just needing more computing resources by your definition? As in, basically slowing everything down? Well, we got local AI for that I guess.
I'm not saying that things should slow down arbitrarily, but I feel like we should have progressed more to use the resources. A Windows 95 computer would not be expected to run much made in 2006, and that's because we added a lot to the experience that required more resources.
Thank the web for that. We have lost more control of our devices and our privacy; the more we depend on the web and SaaS. We need to get back to writing native software, be it for Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, or Windows. We need to make the local device the priority.
Well said. Vote with your wallet. Use software that doesn't require an internet connection, write software that doesn't use s3 or online dependencies, stop patronizing online gaming communities, no adobe, no QuickBooks cloud, , pirate apps(not because it's free, because they work offline)
I'd argue that pirating apps is actually the wrong direction for this, not for any kind of ethical objection, but since it's kind of a concession that these applications can't be replicated in a non-awful pricing model.
I think the better way is honestly just to make something competitive, preferably FOSS, and I actually do think we're getting there. Blender, for example, is an extremely decent animation tool nowadays, Krita is a very good digital art program, OpenToonz/Tahoma2D are pretty ok 2D animation programs, Godot is a decent-enough game engine, etc.
Yeah there are still gaps and I'm not claiming everything has parity with everything with awful pricing models, but I think we're getting there, and I think that's a more sustainable model than piracy.
My only complain is that nowadays laptops are usually poorly built, so unless one purchases an expensive guarantee, anything beyond the default guarantee is not guaranteed.
And the manufacturers are in a quest to remove as many keys as they can from the keyboard. Like you can hardly find any light laptop today with page up/down keys anymore. Why?.... Haven't these guys heard of keyboard shortcuts?
don't you like doing finger contortions to use all the modifier keys?
I think it is the single most convincing proof that we are being secretly replaced by lizard people with 8 fingers!
8 fingers to each of the 4 hands, to be clear :)
You probably didn't grow up with horrors like the WordPerfect function key strip or being faced with a keyboard like that on the ZX80/81/Speccy etc.
Yes, it's a miracle that after 40 years of typing every day, my fingers still work. But that may be a biased view on my part; there may be lots of programmers out there with arthritis in their fingers, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other occupational diseases.
They aren't always the same: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110809-00/?p=99...
Also, even when they are the same, on certain laptops you literally hit the key-rollover problem.
It’s been a while since I shopped for one, but a Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 13 starts at about 1 kg and has a pretty full keyboard.
I suspect it's gradual cost-cutting. At the manufacturing scales they're operating with, even one keyswitch adds up.
Worse than that, there's no consistency in Fn+key shortcuts. Recently acquired an HP Ergonomic Keyboard as a replacement for a broken Sculpt, only to find out that it literally cannot send Ctrl+Break -- there's no key for it, no Fn+key shortcut for it and the remapping software doesn't simulate it properly.
Buy the keyboard you want. There are plenty of good ones.
They're talking about laptops, rarely any choice besides ANSI/ISO; maybe a few countries' accents and layouts of the latter.
The keyboard I was mentioning isn't a laptop keyboard, actually, but laptop keyboards tend to be in a slightly better spot as the major vendors typically have Fn shortcuts for the missing keys, like Fn+B for Break, and they also document them in the user guides.
Detached keyboards seem to be more of a wild west, especially when they target multiplatform -- and it's always the stuff they don't document that screws you.
I dunno, I actually prefer Fn+Up/Dn. I just find it more logical, and it feels standard to me now. I press them surely hundreds of times a day and have no problem with it.
Nothing tops Apple's infantile refusal to put a (real) Delete key on their laptops. Instead, they have a Backspace key mislabeled "delete."
When the Eject key became obsolete, Apple had a perfect opportunity to fix this omission with essentially no effort. NOPE. Meanwhile, everybody else managed to have a proper Delete key on their laptops.
A hill that I'll die on is that Apple's terminology is more correct than PC terminology for this.
Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter.
Delete makes sense if you consider the actions from first principles.
Consider the various forms of deletion (forward, backward, word, file deletion, etc.) Each of these just has a modifier key in Apple's way of thinking. (None, Fn, Option, Cmd) which makes complete sense when viewed against how consistent it is with the whole set of interface design guidelines for Apple software.
The only reason that this doesn't make sense is that it's incompatible with your world view brought from places with different standards. They will never "fix" this as there's just nothing to fix.
> Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter.
Backspace on a typewriter only moved the position (~cursor) back one space. Hence why its symbol is the same as the left arrow key's.
Backwards Delete was a separate additional key, if the typewriter even had one, and its symbol was a cross inside an outlined left-arrow: ⌫. Current Apple keyboard has this symbol on the "Backspace" key in some regions instead of the text "delete", but older ones did have the left arrow.
Apple calling it "Delete" goes back to Apple II. Many other older computer platforms also called it "Delete". DEC used the ⌫ symbol.
At least you don't have to type the same letters while holding a thin tape over your screen to erase them!
Apple also had separate Return and Enter symbols on keyboards for a while, which also sounds like typewriter territory but their intended use was a bit different: https://creativepro.com/a-tale-of-two-enter-keys/
Nope. The problem isn't the terminology. I wouldn't even bring it up if Apple had a key to perform the function of everybody else's Delete key.
The problem is missing functionality. And hiding it behind unmarked, multi-hand hotkey combinations is neither equivalent nor discoverable.
Not many people use forward-deleting. I find it much easier to just Fn+Backspace anyways, especially when Del is usually part of the shorter function row that you really have to stretch for.
And delete is a perfectly fine name -- it deletes the character you just typed. I've always thought the supposed distinction between backspace and delete was bizarre. If anything, it's the forward-delete that needs a better term, like... well, forward-delete. Fwd-Del.
"Not many people use forward-deleting"
It's just deleting. And that's a questionable assertion for which you've provided no support. You seriously think people Backspace old E-mails away? They Backspace unwanted files away? They Backspace selected areas away in Photoshop? OK.
"I find it much easier to just Fn+Backspace"
Except most people don't find that at all, because it's not marked on the keyboard. And again, you're asserting that a secret, two-keyed, two-handed hotkey is easier than pressing a clearly marked button?
If you watch real users when they're faced with the lack of Delete, they use the arrow keys to move the cursor across the characters they want to delete, and then Backspace them away. Twice as much work. Or they reach for the mouse or trackpad and tediously highlight the characters to delete.
And there is no separate function row on Apple laptops. The Eject key was right above the Backspace key... easily reachable.
> And that's a questionable assertion for which you've provided no support.
You're the one who's provided zero evidence that the Del key is used with any appreciable frequency at all. And the fact that Apple doesn't even bother to include one strongly suggests it's rarely used. You're literally the first person I've ever heard even complain about it. Since you've started this topic, if you want evidence from someone else, you really ought to start by providing your own.
> You seriously think people Backspace old E-mails away? They Backspace unwanted files away? They Backspace selected areas away in Photoshop? OK.
Um, yes? If you insist on calling it Backspace, the key that deletes the previous character is also the key that deletes e-mails in Mail.app, that deletes files in Finder (with Cmd), and that deletes the selected area in Photoshop on a Mac. Which is why it also makes sense that it's called Delete on a Mac. It's all extremely consistent and logical.
> Except most people don't find that at all, because it's not marked on the keyboard.
And most people don't need to, because they never want to use it anyways, even when it's a dedicated key wasting spacing on the keyboard.
> And again, you're asserting that a secret, two-keyed, two-handed hotkey is easier than pressing a clearly marked button?
Yes, because the Del position on most PC laptops is awkwardly far away and smaller than Backspace. If you find two hands or two keys difficult, are capital letters with Shift hard for you?
> And there is no separate function row on Apple laptops.
I don't know what that means? Apple laptops certainly have a function row, which is where the Eject button you're talking about has always been. And where the Eject key was is where the TouchID button is now.
> ... easily reachable.
Eject/TouchID is one of the two farthest keys on the keyboard, the polar opposite of "easily reachable". There is literally no position less reachable on the keyboard. It's not ergonomic to make it something used in regular text editing, if you're one of the few people who utilize forward delete.
"You're the one who's provided zero evidence that the Del key is used with any appreciable frequency at all."
I never said it was. You're the one who pompously declared the opposite. I merely pointed out an easily-verifiable fact: Apple neglects to provide it.
But since you've exposed yourself to statistics-based ridicule now, I'll lazily rely on Google's so-called "AI"-based indictment of your absurd position:
"Apple's global PC market share generally hovers around 8% to 10%"
This indicates that 90% of the world's computer-using population apparently DOES find Delete to be a compellingly distinct function from Backspace, and sees fit to include a dedicated key for it on its keyboards.
So you can continue to protest and cry about the harmless inclusion of a useful key that doesn't impede YOUR mode of operation at all, while the vast majority of the computer-using world demonstrates its disagreement with you by including it.
Oh yeah, they sometimes put page up and down on up and down which infuriates me very much. There are other issues like less USB ports, but overall quality is poor comparing to MacBooks.
I’m actually happy about DRAM prices and hope more people share your mindset. This is the only thing that can force developers to start optimizing memory usage instead of externalizing the costs onto the poorest users.
I sincerely hope it works out this way instead of pricing out open sourced development. A couple open sourced projects changed their licensing to help mitigate the increased cost burden from skyrocketing hardware costs. It'll be a sad and potentially dangerous day if most people are permanently priced out.
the #1 computing platform is the phone, 99.99% of users experience no memory pressure on iPhones
Meanwhile Android rules the rest of the world. And current iOS is not light, ever.
Well it also means it could be a good time to buy so you won't have to pay even more overprice for the same performance years down the line. I just bought one a good month ago. My old one was over 10 years old, not worn out, but not upgradeable to Win 11. I had been thinking waiting one more year before the security updates to Win10 are out... But I bought in when the first stories hit of the DDR5 price rises - at that time there had 'only' been a doubling, now the price is a further 3x of what I paid a good month ago. I thought it might be a good time to buy given the machine was so old and component prices were going up, and might for a long time. But yeah, performance improvements aren't what they used to. Part of the reason is that normal things were already felt so fast on the old one ;-) But I did get a much better gfx cards allowing some games that were unplayable before, and I think the CPU upgrade was needed for that as well, and then you might as well overhaul the machine. I also went from 16 to 64 GB, and the 16 GB had been a bit too little for some things.
I'm getting to that point where I may need to upgrade. Now I need to delay it more because AI is gonna make electronics even more expensive than the tarriffs in 2026.
2026 seems to just be becoming the "please don't break" era unless I can find some proper work this time. Car is on its last legs, a variety of housing appliances to repair, computer I use professionally. If nothing else, I upgraded my phone this year so that should get me through 2028 at least.
I had to upgrade to get DDR5, for one.
More faster. I experienced huge performance boosts from upgrading CPU recently and GPU a bit back. (As always)
Compile times, game frame rates, computation time for simulations.
so my linux installation can be even faster
Any computer that can't run Windows 11 is almost a decade old. There has been plenty of improvement. Compare a laptop with a high end Intel i7 7920HK to even a lower end part like the Core Ultra 5 226V. Right now prices on pre-builts and laptops aren't totally reflecting the craziness at least.
A decade in computing used to mean revolutionary improvements:
- from the C64 to the Pentium
- from the Playstation 1 to the Xbox360
- from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.
Each of these in roughly a decade.
But 2015-2025 in terms of desktop PCs? Some decent (but not revolutionary) steps forward with GPUs, and much more affordable+speedy SSDs. But everything else has been pretty small and incremental.
And when enthusiasts upgrade, the old parts usually find new homes. My old 6th-gen i7 from a decade ago still has more than enough power for my Dad to use as a home PC for basic photo editing, web browsing, and spreadsheets. But Win10 end-of-life wants to turn that machine into e-waste.
I think that is normal across most technologies or fields. Progress is an S curve (or series of curves), and it's easy to be amazed when looking at the steep bit. Early on progress is slow due to not much investment and going down lots of dead ends, while later progress faces increased complexity and no low hanging fruit left.
The middle bit is where the disadvantages of the early phase has gone, but the disadvantages of late phase hasn't kicked in yet.
Cool, but my decade-old machine works perfectly well for my needs, as too I imagine a million other such machines.
I'm sure it works, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been improvements.
Which doesn't count for that much when a whole lot of stuff has also become worse.
There's a reason as to why people were reluctant to jump on win10. There's a reason people didn't want win8 at all.
Not a lot of people benefit from having 20 cores to hit.
If by improvements you mean that suspend works like shit on newer machines, yes there have been.
Not really. Improvements like what?
I have a brand-new work laptop which absolutely crawls compared to my nearly-15-year-old Thinkpad T430. Is this slowness the Windows 11 advantage? My personal laptop runs plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 perfectly, and everything works.
In my experience, i don't consider work laptops as worth anything performance wise since they're loaded up with antivirus, scanning and compulsory work sync software accessing the network for every mouse click that means it crawls and has half second latency for anything.
But somehow, apps and websites load just as fast on my decade old personal laptop as on my brand new work laptop.
The antivirus / EDR / monitoring / inventory software that most corporate IT departments installs ages computers ten years. We constantly had problems with such services slamming the disk, holding files open, breaking software, running CPUs at 100%, etc.
Crowdstrike Falcon is likely the only reason my work M1 Pro machine runs like a dog. Any time it's being a laggy piece of junk you can open Activity Monitor and see Falcon just slamming it.
Not my problem. You wouldn't need an antivirus with a properly locked browser with UBlock Origin and OFC no damn HTML email. GPO's blocking anything not being under an executable whitelist.
If any, your email client should open any attachment under a sandbox, such as Sandboxie, under a libre license:
https://github.com/sandboxie-plus/Sandboxie
Of course no Office macros would be allowed, ever.
My daily desktop is mostly 2012 vintage. This hardware is still in use and works fine.
For what it's worth, that machine is being used while I upgrade my 2001 Computer Of Theseus once more. It's now getting it's third motherboard with CPU - this one salvaged from a 2018 or 2019 gaming machine. It's on its second case, and has seen more hard drive and memory upgrades than I can count - all of them piecemeal. Other than perhaps the motherboard screws and hard drive screws, I'm not sure if anything actually purchased in 2001 still survives in there. Maybe the power cable and pc speaker. And I don't remember ever replacing the rear case fan now that I'm looking at it.
It's triggers broom :-p
Anybody who can upgrade a computer completely deserves a medal from the council.
Many budget laptops from 2020 don't support Windows 11. HP laptops with AMD A4-9125, HP notebooks with AMD A6-7310 APU, HP Envy x360 models with first-generation AMD Ryzen processors.
2020 Apple MacBook pro has an i9-9880HK, more than enough, but lacks TPM2.0. The issue is this is just a waste of resources and money for a large number of people and the TPM2.0 requirement is silly.
I have sub 1year old enterprise CPUs in my home lab. Disabling TPM is the first thing I do on bring up. Assuming that's a hard requirement, how do I install w11?
The software I use for hobbies is locked in to windows. A lot of extremely good software in the DIY world is locked to windows.
Coincidentally I can run it all on a 10 year old PC. I see no reason I need to upgrade. I’d happily pay a small yearly fee for patches.
But that’s not why Microsoft did all of this. Their goal is to Hoover all your data into their cloud and lock your PC down so you can’t do anything but use their stuff. Their profit numbers are insane despite losing marketshare. It’s working because the current CEO is a ruthless non-tech moron.
People want to hate on Microsoft. Rightfully so. Apple has done the same thing. Once you’re locked into the Apple ecosystem it’s hard to switch. They push iCloud and Siri on you at every turn. They just made a “one OS” choice so it doesn’t feel as bad.
Anyone who says Linux solves all the problems has not tried to make something like solidworks and masterCAM run on it. I love Linux, I use it on servers, but it has 3% marketshare for a reason.
Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS.
Between these and services that suddenly suffer from amnesia and spamming me with marketing notifications and emails after months or years of silence, it’s becoming more tiring to use any service that grows significantly enough where they don’t need to care about what their users actually want.
The worst is when the only 'dismiss'-option is "I will do it later"... even if you have no intention of ever doing it... essentially forcing you to lie. It has been a while since I've seen it though, so that's progress!
> Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS.
I can offer a slightly different perspective. I remember Microsoft from the 90s and early 2000s. And while technical details differ, their attitude towards users didn't change that much.
I used Rufus to make a Windows 11 installer USB drive that bypasses the TPM check and online account setup and a couple of other things. I've been using that along with O&O Shut Up 10++, and Firefox with uBlock Origin to refresh computers for local folks.
With the "requirements" check bypassed, Windows 11 actually runs on the Intel 1st gen Core i-series and newer, as well as any Ryzen CPU and, I think, a couple of earlier AMD generations. (It requires the popcount instruction, which isn't present on the Core 2 and older.)
Anything older gets Windows 10 IoT which gets updates until 2032.
One of the reasons I made the jump to Linux was the level of effort it took to disable all the shit that I don't want Windows to do. It became easier to just install Linux (Ubuntu, PopOS) and not have to futz with configuration to turn a bunch of unnecessary 'default on' stuff off - just get on and use the thing.
Yay Linux.
I switched for the same reason.
Company insisted that I upgrade to Windows 11, I decided Linux was better.
> bypasses the TPM check
The caveat with this is that it will fail the check on subsequent version upgrades too and will refuse to upgrade.
Non-Enterprise editions are only supported for 2 years so your 25H2 (or whatever it is) installation will go sour in 2027.
Perhaps, but Windows 11 has been out for 4 years and every version so far has worked without a TPM.
Wait so the TPM check is not some kind of real Windows 11 limitation? They could make an option to bypass this check (with all kind of "I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING" checkboxes I assume), they just chose not to do it? This is madness
They just really, really want to force the use of bitlocker on drives, which makes both "evil maid" attacks and data recovery harder. Coincidentally they're also trying to make everyone put everything in OneDrive.
> everything in OneDrive
Because they want to charge a monthly fee for the profit and share price.
Apple and Android are doing the same thing (using photos backup as the first step to charging monthly).
Yes. I think that initially there was even official documentation from Microsoft for how to bypass the check, although I can't find that now, just "unofficial" things like this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2121461/.... (The top two comments have two different ways of bypassing the check: a command line flag for the installer and a registry change.)
Afaik you can install Win11 without TPM but you won't get Windows updates then. If I'm okay to not get updates I might as well stay on Win10?
So far updates work fine. It may change eventually, but as I noted in another comment, it's been 4 years, and none of the updates have required a TPM yet.
Wish there was a link to this ...
Rufus: https://rufus.ie/en/
How-to guide: https://windowsforum.com/threads/how-to-install-windows-11-u...
Alternative options that don't involve any third-party software: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2121461/...
O&O ShutUp10++: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Firefox: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/
uBlock Origin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
The Rufus way will break on updates. But there is a fully supported version of Windows 11 that doesn't have those requirements. Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC
The most egregious thing in recent iterations of Win11 is that a fresh installation will basically map all of your home folder to OneDrive. My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, etc. A recent Windows update also told me that I need OneDrive now to back up my files. Yup, apparently you really, really need it.
Now Windows 11 also pops up a scary security notification saying Windows Security found a problem, then when you click on it it tells you that you're not using OneDrive and you should turn that on immediately.
They are using the same tactics as scammers: urgency and false claims. Microsoft doesn't even hide anymore.
This threw me so hard when I grabbed a cheap laptop from Costco with win11 pre installed. I was saving files to c:/users/me/desktop and then when I opened Desktop in File Explorer, my shit was gone.
My dad has been raving because he discovered that his Windows computer has been uploading all of his pictures to OneDrive. He doesn't remember an option to enable that behavior and can't find any ways to simply turn it off. This is on top of the other nags and sketchy behavior that Windows has been pushing on him normally. He's fed up with it
The silver lining is that my dad's finally getting a new Linux machine for Christmas :^)
Worse is that the notification for this “error” telling me I couldn’t back up without OneDrive was behind the little dot in the restart/logout menu in the start menu, which (until now) only showed me that updates were required. Now that they’ve infested that notification with ads there’s no reason for me to ever look at it again. Good job, Microsoft.
Just grab LTSC, it gets security updates till 2032. It's great! Also less bloat.
Linux has made an insane amount of progress in recent years. Atomic distros like Bazzite and Aurora are so polished, modern, easy to use, and virtually unbreakable. Even most Windows games work perfectly out of the box (often better than on Windows). Anyone who tried Linux in the past and wasn't happy, should take another look. These distros are so incredible it's hard to believe.
Meanwhile Windows has been getting worse and worse. Completely unreasonable and unnecessary hardware requirements, spyware, constantly running antivirus and other processes you don't want, forced updates and reboots, shoving AI down your throat. In other words, you pay money to have a worse experience and less control over your own PC.
I've been ideologically opposed to Windows for a while, but a few years ago Linux required many trade-offs and compromises, to the point I wouldn't have recommended to most people. But now things are completely different and I would happily recommend it to anyone except those who have a hard requirement for MS software (or Adobe).
Okay, I’ll bite. Tell me the linux laptop to get, and the distro to use. Cost is no issue, but suspend/hibernate has to work and so does fractional scaling. Also WiFi.
I have an Acer Predator Helios 16. I have been running Kubuntu on it for around a year with almost zero issues. The only one I had was issues with secure boot and Nvidia drivers. I play WoW, Helldivers, and a bunch of other smaller games with no issue.
For many types of users, Windows is no longer viable. I have friends who work at a .NET shop and most of that team now uses Macs. Unthinkable just a few years ago. Meanwhile, I checked ProtonDB and now 90% of my Steam library is Platinum or Native. So I finally switched my gaming PC to Linux. Microsoft's priorities are elsewhere, Windows doesn't have a bright future.
Yeah. It really does seem that Microsoft is giving up on... everything? Like Xbox is kinda out, Windows is not great, and their AI never comes up as meaningful.
I wouldn't personally work for them ever. I've only heard bad things about their codebase... and I know people like to complain, but it's usually comedy levels of bad.
My limited understanding is that they are focusing on B2B and short-term milking B2C until it lasts.
The only reason I keep my home PC with windows still is that I use it mainly to play games and some have anti-cheat systems that are not compatible with Linux. But I play those games less and less the older I get, I play mostly older games / emulators. I see it very likely that I won't install whatever comes after Windows 11 and at that point I might move over to Linux for good.
In late 2025, there are plenty of alternatives:
Linux FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD DragonflyBSD Haiku Plan9 Redox ReactOS Debian Gnu/Hurd FreeDOS Genode SculptOS
And probably some others I haven't heard of. Using Windows in 2025 AND complaining about it is complaining about a self inflicted wound.
Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use.
I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
>I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I've been using Arch for about two months now. It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction because I have two literal decades of experience using a windows machine. That experience has value and the idea of throwing it away is a barrier.
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
They don't. They switched over to iPad 10-ish years ago. Most normies I know use phones and/or tablets full-time for their personal computing. Laptops and desktops are either work machines, for games, or for work without wages (studies, excel, other things which are inconvenient or impossible on a phone).
Grandma is on Linux Mint since she still wants to do her banking on a computer and not an iPad. She'd be on Windows 11 if I weren't her tech support, since then she'd have bought whatever idiot at the local shop would have recommended, wasting a lot of money, and probably still have thrown her arms up in despair after a while due to the shit user experience. If the local shop had machines with Mint preinstalled, I'd imagine that would have gone well, if a lot slower than it would have with my help.
No Windows casual out there has ever even installed Windows, never mind another OS, on their computer, even if they theoretically want to. They can't have what they don't know about, and that barrier is probably never going to go away.
Completely agree. Modern computers are basically just web terminals for most people, so a basic Linux distro + browser is all they need.
Windows is actually terrible for non-technical users now. The constant pop-ups, nagging messages, and decision prompts create genuine anxiety. People don't know what they're clicking on half the time. Yet somehow most technical people I talk to haven't caught on to this.
Look at what younger generations are actually using: Chromebooks in schools, Google Drive instead of Microsoft Office. Even people who legitimately need Office aren't on Windows anymore, they're on Macbooks. That's the case at my company anyway.
At this point Windows is really just gamers, engineers who need CAD, and office workers stuck on it from inertia. There's nothing inherently attracting new users to the platform anymore. I honestly don't know who their primary audience even is at this point.
Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook? Also Windows is increasing in its share again. Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.
> Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook?
They're not? They're combining it with Android, which honestly seems like a decent bet for what Chromebooks are meant to be. The end result will have a different name, but it will still be a cheap laptop to do school work and simple computing, and that isn't a Windows machine.
> Also Windows is increasing in its share again.
Is it? And is that pie even getting any bigger?
> Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook?
They're not killing it, they're merging it into Android. Makes sense. Android already does everything ChromeOS does, it just needs better desktop input support. Google said this was to compete with iPads, which only reinforces my point.
> Also Windows is increasing in its share again.
Short-term fluctuations don't change the long-term trend. We're talking about where things are headed over the next decade vs where it once was
> Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.
My company went all-in on Copilot, but I'm not seeing this translate to more Windows usage. Copilot works fine on Macbooks, and that's what most people here use. When management gets excited about it, they talk about Outlook and Teams integration. Nobody cares about Windows-specific features. What does OS integration even buy you? Access to local files that are already in the cloud anyway? I'm using Copilot on my company-issued Ubuntu laptop right now. And honestly, the fact that IT at a massive, conservative corporation even started offering Ubuntu as an option says a lot about where things are headed.
Microsoft will be fine, but I'd bet on Windows declining over the next 10 years, not growing.
>Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
Because if they switch to Linux, I'll be on the hook for tech support. If they stay on windows, then it's mainly my brother's problem.
BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either. Linux wouldn't be any harder for them aside from getting support from random places, or buying random bits of junk with no research expecting them to kinda work.
> BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either
That's the thing that annoys me. People say Linux is "harder", but I really don't think that's true. People seem to just ignore all the weird awful bullshit in Windows that pops up and accept it as just part of the world, and when Linux has slightly different issues, OMG WHY IS IT SO HARD I'LL STICK WITH MY ADWARE MACHINE BECAUSE I LIKE HAVING UPDATES BREAK EVERYTINGGGG.
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I have. They are convinced it will be "harder". I have tried to explain to them what seems a lot harder to me is when Windows Update decides to brick their computer [0], and they have to call me in a panic and I have to waste an entire day walking them through diagnosis stuff and eventually walk them through flashing multiple thumb drives of Linux and Windows 11 [2] and then walk them through nuking and reinstalling.
As I've said before, before I get any kind of "live and let live man if they want to run windows let them", I would like to point out that whenever their computers break, they call me to fix it, so I do not think it's unreasonable for me to want them to use an operating system that has recovery tools that actually work, with and with filesystems built after the neolithic age so that system backups are easy and cheap and actually do what they're supposed to.
[0] dig through my comment history if you details.
[1] made more annoying because, as far as I can tell, none of the Microsoft recovery tools have ever worked in any point in history.
[2] Linux because Microsoft doesn't have any kind of LiveCD/LiveUSB support anymore, so I had to boot into a live Linux so I could walk them through installing tmate and then I was able to mount the drive and rsync all the files over to my server for recovery.
The more likely option than any of these excellent free options is going to be MacOS… just because your average user with even semi-technical inclination does not want to use LibreOffice Present; they want PowerPoint.
I have just seen this first hand with my significant other: they are very technical and more than capable of it, but have zero interest in learning Linux and instead just bought a MacBook on Black Friday specials when their 5 year old HP laptop finally got too annoying to use.
Well, I didn't mention MacOS because it is not installable on the author's win10 computer.
Also, MacOs is as difficult to learn as Linux is for someone who never used it. Resistance to change exist in all directions.
Most people are fine with the web version of Powerpoint.
I think it would be less daunting for many if there were 1 or 2 popular alternatives to rally around. Including window managers / desktop environments. (Granted, it's nice they can all coexist peacefully.)
There are a handful of popular Linux distros. Ubuntu is probably the most beginner-friendly one with the most staying power; it's the easiest place to start if you have no other ideas/requirements.
The thing is, a healthy ecosystem thrives on diversity. Rallying behind one or two tends towards a monoculture.
I think Linux is the most popular of the alternatives listed.
Linux is not a single alternative. It's hundreds if you start digging, and even if you whittle it down to noob-friendly not-completely-idiotic choices, something the proverbial noob are probably incapable of or unwilling to do, there are still like, 5+ decent options to pick from. Asking the proveribal noob to pick from Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, Bazzite, Suse, Debian, Fedora, or any other option is a big ask. There's a lot to take in, especially for someone who just want their computer to work and not dick about with silly bullshit.
It's good that there are options, but most people aren't interested in having a dozen decent choices. They want one, solid, good choice, or at least obvious and clear reasons to pick the different options, and they certainly don't have time to try out everything between heaven and earth, especially for something that needs to Just™ Work™.
How do I download linux
Yep. Top search result was this, amusing: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install
But 2nd was this: https://www.linux.org/pages/download/
It shows 24 distributions, but no newbie guidance. Maybe a wizard UI would help, vs the open-ended "Explore different Linux distributions and find the one that fits your needs"
As your first experience, I think Ubuntu is the easiest. Download it here:
https://ubuntu.com/desktop
Spring for a new hard drive, just in case you hate it with the fires of a thousand suns and need to go back. Then you just swap back to your old hard drive.
I can also recommend Kubuntu if the gnome UI of ubuntu seems too phone-like. If using a laptop where addinga 2nd drive may be too difficult, I have just shrunk the windows partition before running the ubuntu installer.
Looks like from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/archive/refs/heads/master.... but you could also try Ubuntu.
Having a job that requires Windows is not what I would call self-inflicted.
That is besides the point. In that case it is self-inflicted by the company choosing to depend on it.
Until recently (<10 years ago) Windows and native Windows apps (like Office) were the norm in most companies. Almost all employees knew how to use Windows. Re-training all was difficult. Now, with mostly web-apps for most non-IT employees it is a realistic change, but I am still not sure corporations will want to run without Active Directory and Crowdstrike.
True. It is a would inflicted by your employer in that case. Maybe you could find a different one that doesn’t inflict such wounds.
What a bubble you exist in. I'm self-employed and my entire suite of software is either windows or apple only and I have 'been a pc' for nearly thirty years and have pc hardware that fulfills all my requirements and can't run apple software.
I'm eyeing up a shift to apple when my current hardware fails me, but it's impossible for me to just go Linux.
I think in your situation I'd use a Mac just because they don't show you a bunch of advertising bullshit all the time, but I do understand the overall point: a lot of software simply doesn't exist on Linux.
Wine is getting better and better, but it's still not perfect yet. I am so wishing that they figure out a way to get modern MS Office working, and then I feel like a lot of people's only reasons for staying on Windows would suddenly disappear.
I don't get the advertising thing - I don't see any at all on Windows 10?
I don’t have a windows computer so I am going with I have seen in Youtube, but people have said that Windows 11 has been adding ads to explorer and start.
> I'm self-employed and my entire suite of software is either windows or apple only
Sounds like we're back to self-inflicted then? If you're self-employed supposedly that software suite was your decision.
I mean there are literally no good Linux alternatives, but sure?
You are a digital serf, dependent on the good will and love of a lord that gives you access in exchange for a tax.
I really wish free(libre) tools existed that allowed you to do your work. Hopefully they will in the future, I am sure someone has tried/is trying to build them.
sounds like a bubble
Perhaps, but I'm not judging other people in theirs...
The job should give you Windows Enterprise with the correct group policies that disable most of the enshittification. Otherwise it’s self-inflicted.
Haiku is very pleasing in an eyecandy sort of way, but that's sadly all it has going for it.
I personally wouldn't use it as a serious OS.
I think Haiku is in that "last 5%" phase. They have something that is 95% of the way there, it's 95% cool, but frustratingly, that last 5% is really important; there's a lot of boring, thankless work with any software that has broad reach.
Most people don't like doing it, but in order for the operating system to be "good", you really need most of this unsexy stuff to work; you need to be able to easily install WiFi drivers, you need to support most modern video cards, you need to suss out the minutia of the graphics APIs, you need to test every possible edge case in the filesystem, you need to ensure that file associations are consistent, etc.
I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I respect so much about the Wine project. It's been going on for decades, each release gets a little better, and a lot of that work is almost certainly the thankless boring stuff that is absolutely necessary to get Wine to be "production ready".
I ran Haiku a bit on an old laptop, and I do actually like it. It's ridiculously fast and snappy (even beating Linux in some cases), and I really do wish them the best, but as of right now I don't think it's viable quite yet. I'm not 100% sure how they're going to tackle GPU drivers (since GPU drivers are almost an entire OS in their own right), but I would love to have something FOSS that takes us out of the codified mediocrity of POSIX.
I literally only use Windows for games. And I guess now RealityScan which is gaming adjacent.
If I had the confidence that I could play a new release on Linux day 1 without trading an enormous amount of performance, I wouldn't need Windows at all.
Depending on your hardware and gaming needs, the current state of Linux gaming may already be enough.
I run Arch with an Nvidia GPU (which historically had poor Linux support compared to AMD), and I’ve been able to play 100% of the games that I used to play on Windows with no noticeable performance decrease.
There is one significant issue with Dx12 on nvidia, but even that has been root caused and should be fixed next year.
I have one machine that runs Windows (apart from one Windows 11 VM on my Mac laptop I use for work), all this nonsense has got me to install Fedora on a separate M2 drive on it, and I haven't booted up Windows in a few days now. Will be an interesting experiment, I've run it before but more for fun, but will try to go as full time on that computer as possible.
My boomer mother in law could handle Linux whether it be GNOME or KDE. What she cannot handle is not being able to put in a DVD of Turbo Tax 20xx and double click the install button. Nor can she handle not having the native Outlook client, or Microsoft Word.
Yes there are alternatives, and possibly even good enough web versions of these tools, but most of the world isn’t like you and me.
To be honest I think she can handle LibreOffice. Double-click to open file (can be docx), start typing and click save when done. Open any MS Office file. I really don't get the religuous attachment to MS Office.
I do worry sometimes about fonts. The default Arial replacement should be geometrically idential and thus not lead to issues. TBH I don't know if there are significant rendering issues between LO and MS Office, as I always use PDF. I sometimes upload it to Google Docs to see if it's displayed identically. So far I've never ran into an issue. TBH I think LO is better except for the performance which is okay but not great.
At this point Office programs are commodity. Apple has good options. Google has. And any Linux distro will come with LO. Really a non-issue I think. Even for older people.
Does TurboTax still distribute DVDs? I thought it was entirely online now.
The point still stands though. It's no longer a DVD, but it's still a Windows program.[1] She still needs to be able to run turbotax2025.exe and have it work without issue.
To be fair, it probably works. I doubt it's doing anything weird, so Wine should work, given a distro which will just take exes and pass them to Wine. But if it doesn't, TurboTax can't help her, where as they would have been able to help her if it was a true Windows install.
[1] https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/cd-download/insta...
I don't know turbotax but in the 3 last countries where I lived your do your tax either through some java software whose installation on linux is also described or on a web page.
Microsoft with the push to require TPM 2.0, that isn't really required, is responsible for huge amounts of new e-waste. Any green initiative they claim is out the door.
It's an eco-disaster but on the other hand there is Linux... at some point people need to take a stand, especially given how crappy W11 is...
Im not going to do the support for my kids not using windows along with the schools using O365 and such. So found a refurb business laptop for them on the one without TPM2. Popped linux on the old one and it went from slow to fast for OS related things and not a terrible machine but snappy. Like, it's a 10yr old i5 but that was enough for sims4, office, and minecraft. It's crazy how much compute performance Windows is taking from its users.
to be fair the iot edition of windows ten is also blazingly fast to the point where >10yo thinkpads are perfectly fine for everything outside of gaming ... so id blame microsoft for adding layers upon layers of shit to the os , instead of blaming the os itself
that's picking at what is the OS. Sure, but no one is generally running Windows 10 IoT
is there a single person in the world that would choose windows 11 over windows 10 iot if microsoft deigned to offer the choice ??
Surprisingly effective solution:
For reference: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/159624-how-specify-targe...
It may not work on Windows Home, however.
I have been using InControl successfully.
https://www.grc.com/incontrol.htm
Just curious what does it do?
Sets the underlying Registry keys for the Group Policy "Select the target Feature Update version". It tells the Windows Update service to select updates for a specific feature update instead of offering latest.
https://gpsearch.azurewebsites.net/Default.aspx?PolicyID=151...
Thank you!
> at this point a Windows machine only belongs to you in name. Microsoft can run arbitrary code on it.
I get what the author is trying to say, but...like... obviously?
I get what you're saying, but OS vendors could prevent themselves from running arbitrary code, even from themselves, without the user's authorization if they really wanted to. I'm not sure it is in anyone's best interest since it would affect everything from security updates to automatically installing device drivers (e.g. people would be left with insecure systems or would claim Windows is broken since most would not understand the prompts). It would also be difficult to prevent Microsoft's marketing department from sneaking a trojan horse into things like security update.
The average user is not able to understand the code that is running and the 99th percentile user does not want to spend the time to understand the code.
Make it do the security stuff out-of-the-box, allow the user to change ANYTHING they want, including turning off the security stuff. Linux! It's in everyone's best interest.
Holds for Apple devices just as well.
I mean, the free software community has been saying this for 40 years now.
And it went from unrealistic paranoia to 'like... obviously?' seamlessly.
It never was "you're paranoiac", it was "I don't care". Which still holds true when the providers don't abuse this power.
In 1985, there were no autoupdates/forced updates/or really any available updates that didn't come on physical media.
I mean.. how is this different from any OS distribution? Apple can push whatever. So can Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo. Unless im literally running Linux From Scratch im at the mercy of maintainers to do whatever they want.
I'm not sure what the current state of most distributions is, but I remember update applications providing an option to accept or reject individual packages. Even without that, you could preview the list of pending updates and delay them indefinitely, do manual updates of individual packages, or configure it to ignore particular packages during updates. Historically, I believe that you could block certain updates on Windows as well - or maybe you could just rollback and update. Of course none of this is considered user friendly so things may have changed.
Provide a way to show that your compiled code is what you say it is.
https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
But where does the original compiler come from? Reproducible builds are only as good as the compiler used to compile them. That's the point of Trusting Trust. If you build with a backdoored compiler and I reproduce your build with the same backdoored compiler, that solves nothing. This is why full-source bootstrap is important[0].
[0]: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...
It would be very very hard to actually accomplish something like that on mainstream x86/arm compilers. And hide it from every debugger in the world. If it diminishes the value of reproducible builds, it's by something like 1%.
> Reproducible builds are only as good as the compiler used to compile them.
Which is so so so much better than "as good as nothing".
Is that true? Can Ubuntu download and install and run new code without me doing anything? I am not sure that's the case.
Of course every time I run an update, they can install whatever. But that's different from what Windows is doing as I understand it...
"Ubuntu will apply security updates automatically, without user interaction. This is done via the unattended-upgrades package, which is installed by default."
https://documentation.ubuntu.com/server/how-to/software/auto...
Right, but it's a minor annoyance, get rid of it with:
(doesn't trigger removal of anything else, and you'll enjoy 420kb of additional disk space).OTOH the real issue with Ubuntu is snap(d). Snap packages definitely do auto-update. You may want to uninstall the whole snap system - it's (still?) perfectly possible, if a little bit convoluted, due to some infamous snaps like firefox, thunderbird, chromium, or eg. certbot on servers
Or just use Debian or any snap-free fork for the matter.
Edit: fixed
I mean.. how is this different from any OS distribution?
The other OS distributions let you turn it off.
There are a lot more distros than RH, Ubuntu, Gentoo and LFS. And none of them will show you ads except maybe Ubuntu. Plus you can also look at *BSD.
None of them comes close to what Microsoft is doing. To me, your comment looks like you do not understand the Linux eco-system. Plus IIRC, LFS can now come with compiled binaries.
> Apple can push whatever. So can Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo
In the case of Ubuntu and Debian, and to a lesser extent RedHat, I trust the developers not to do that because they have a history of not "just pushing whatever".
Also in many cases I actually know these developers, and I can go round and ask them / remonstrate with them / put a brick through their window / other response if required about it.
Probably influenced by the Microsoft history of sneaky things over last 45 years
What are you talking about? It's my machine. I authorized the running of certain kinds of software from Microsoft. It's not supposed to be a running authorization for them to reach in and do whatever they want on it.
Do yourself a favor and start using Linux on both machines.
I ordered a basic Windows laptop, it comes with Windows 11. It's going to be my Linux starter computer. I'm not a computer person. Wish me luck!
If you decide to dual boot:
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
I run this as the first step on any new Win 11 machine, the recommended defaults remove nearly all annoyances I care about. It's a popular tool that's been around for years with a lot of users so isn't some random repo, and it's just Powershell so pretty easy to understand what it's doing if you want to audit the code yourself.
After running it once, I've seen nothing that I would consider an "ad" on Windows 11, and search looks only at the filesystem without any web/store trash. Somewhat ironically, it makes for a cleaner experience than MacOS where I regularly get spammed by Apple trying to cross-sell me something (iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, etc).
(FWIW, I have also never needed to re-run after an update or anything, based on 6+ full Win11 installs across three different devices.)
I hope you researched Linux driver support for that model first. I share the dissatisfaction with the direction of Windows -- but their driver library is unparalleled. Linux CAN run great on lots of machines, but it has nowhere near the hardware support.
> but it has nowhere near the hardware support.
My usb scanner would like to have a word with you. Its last supported driver was for windows 2000 and it still works well on Linux.
Hardware support vary between the 2 operating system and new stuff may be supported earlier on windows but I can't say that windows driver library is unparalleled, quite the opposite actually.
There are only really two big bloches when it comes to drivers these days: Wifi and Nvidia. And even Nvidia at-least works if you've got a modern card, so you won't be stuck with no output, you'll just get worse performance. Wi-fi you really should double-check though if you need that.
Some niche accessories also have issues, or at least niche features on those accessories.
That may well be the case except for my Kyocera printer. I never managed to get the device to stay online for more than 5 minutes on Windows 10. Wanting to print a letter was actually a hassle taking ~15 minutes. When I plugged it into my Nobara(Fedora) PC it just worked - I didn't even have to specify a driver or anything. It can now even print barcodes. It couldn't with Windows 10, no matter what driver I tried. Also: KB505518 from April 2025 disabled all my USB ports - there was never a fix.
I've not really seen that much of a problem with Linux drivers being available recently while the quality problem of windows drivers being unreviewed code seems like its partly addressed for central monopolies but still in the peripherals if you'll pardon the pun.
The Penguin is calling.
Not being battered by upsells nobody asked for every time you turn the laptop on is so refreshing.
This reminds me of the situation with online ads.
Most people with ad blockers don't realize how unusable the web is for those that don't have ad blockers. I think most would agree this is a poor state that industry incentives have landed us in, and with the web being distributed, it's hard to know how to fix.
Similarly those who use Linux probably don't realize how bad Windows has got recently.
Microsoft has managed to replicate this awful ux problem on a system that they entirely control...
When your computer does what you tell it and it doesn't actively try to undermine your intentions, computing becomes fun again.
Yes. It's a slow boiling frog thing. Kinda like a bad relation ship. You get used to the toxicity. But when you get out of it, it's soooo refreshing. Thank you everybody who made Linux on the desktop possible.
The SEO/Stochastic Parrot Tag Team has entered the chat
Windows used to be like that too, when MS was more focused on being hostile to the competition than its own customers.
My 5 year old laptop runs a lot faster as well.
Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. The UX isn't terribly worse on fairly old hardware.
> Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. I think it's more that it was designed in the 80s-90s for hardware at the time, and hasn't added bloat or "requirements" since then. So as computers have gotten more capable Linux takes less of the overall capacity.
Quote: very little bloat over the years
You should try Haiku, and read about its package virtual file system, Linux in comparison will forever after that look like a bloated hog.
Linux has plenty of bloat. But it's your bloat. You get the power to slice through it how you want and nobody will stop you.
Well, I'd say it's almost the reverse of how it is with windows.
In windows, the bloat is built in by default. You don't get to chose how the start menu works, you get the windows default start menu and you better like the ads in it. It takes work to pull that garbage out.
In linux most stuff is opt in.
The other part of linux is most stuff isn't simply there running in the background by default. Firefox eats a decent amount of memory, but it's not doing that when I don't have my browser open.
Any Linux distribution comes with a lot of bloat, which is why it requires 30GB or so, rather than 30MB or so. Even the kernel is much bigger than it once was.
Nobody is yelling at you not to remove it, or trying to prevent you from removing it, or obscuring where it is and cross-linking everything to make it harder to remove, but it's still there and requires substantial work to remove, just like in Windows.
Instead, you get battered by proselytes every time you go online! :D
Exactly.
Upgrade, to Linux.
2026 year of the linux desktop
To be honest Linux desktop has been ready for the past 4-5 years or so. Long gone are the days where Bluetooth suddenly stopped, external monitors crashing and when closing the lid only put the laptop to sleep every fifth time. Heck, even Wayland, wireless printers and usb-c docking stations work these days, even with nvidia. You might even find some games.
It’s become a boring appliance that just works every time. Just they way I want it. I even forgot how to use grub.
Especially having ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini available nowadays. It’s a godsend when troubleshooting any Linux issues, and you can learn so much in the process.
I just upgraded my PC’s motherboard, CPU, memory, and video card and used Claude as a build buddy to help me lay out steps to follow. I also used it after installing CachyOS for the second time, but on this new hardware. It had me double checking to make sure I had all the proper drivers set up by running commands, but everything was already setup correctly by CachyOS. It even helped me figure out that I had a fan wire half plugged in, which was causing a fan not to throttle. I would alternate between Claude Sonnet 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.2. But it’s so much easier and quicker than the old days of sifting through the manuals and forums, if you could get online to a forum that is.
chatpgt has sent me wrong instructions on just as many occasions it has given the right instructions on how to fix things on linux. It's frustrating when it sends me a 'fix' on something that doesn't even need it (steps on installing a particular flavour of Proton to bypass Rockstar's launcher, when it was already done by default). And because I'm not terribly adept I only appreciate it's the wrong instructions after implementing it and it not working.
If you want error prone scripts and out of date instructions, LLMs are very useful.
Any year now!
I don't know... Two people around me recently switched to Linux because they could not stand how bad Windows 11 got. I did not encourage either of them (I've got my share of frustrations after running a Linux desktop exclusively for 25 years, and will not consent to be the object of their ire when they inevitably get frustrated - I'd rather help them on neutral ground instead).
I ran Linux on my laptop in college over a decade ago and it worked great.
It just depends on application compatibility and to a smaller extent driver support, though that shouldn’t be a problem for an older laptop.
I've always dual booted windows with some Linux and used it like 90/10.
I haven't even tried windows 11 even though my PC is compatible.
Went full Linux and I'm not sure what I was missing at this point that I needed from Windows.
Ran Pop OS (cosmic) which is the new Wayland based one but unfortunately it's still buggy and then I switched to a gaming focused Linux called Bazzite which has been perfect.
Tiny learning curve because it's an "immutable" OS but have everything I need running on it plus everything gaming related works out of the box.
I’m really hoping Steam Deck keeps on pushing game makers to support Linux. It’s really gotten a lot better, except for competitive games that need most types of anti-cheat.
If Linux supported all the games I wanted to play, I would ditch Windows on my home PC.
It was 2019 for me. I haven't daily-driven a Windows or Mac machine in almost 5 years now.
Me either.
But Firefox on Ubuntu is not very good. It can expand to fill the whole machine and get killed by the OOM killer. Sometimes during long text input it hangs and has to be killed and restarted. 8 GB isn't enough any more.
Yep, I use a tab suspender to keep Firefox in check, and use zram/swap on my laptop. Works like a charm for me.
Why bother with Linux when there is MacOS? You get decent hardware to go with it too
Actual control over my computer? Apple might have less ads, but they really go out of their way to make you feel uncomfortable doing anything they deem not the happy path. And they're still plenty willing to push subscriptions and their software.
Because some of us would rather not have to buy new hardware just because Apple says no more updates for your machine.
Because MacOS is just as insidious? Recent versions will bring up the iCloud pop-up on every boot. Won't go away until you comply.
Both Mac and Windows are for suckers.
You're only delaying the inevitable.
IMO Mac eco is good hardware plus meh software. Some built ins are really in bad shape — but I guess people have different opinions, although I think calling Finder a beta version is an insult to “beta”.
I sure like seeing
every time I log in. Or> You do not have a valid subscription for this server. Please visit www.proxmox.com to get a list of available options.
every time I log in.
Ubuntu broke new ground when it came out but around the time they switched to the Gnome desktop, they stopped focusing on a great desktop experience and it was surpassed by other, better distributions. I'd recommend trying Linux Mint instead as it has all the greatness of Linux without the crap from Canonical (eg. SNAPs).
I haven't recommended Ubuntu to anyone for years but there are still people recommending it because it was great years ago and they don't seem to know it's now lagging other distributions.
Believe it or not, Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution.
That’s if you run a OS version older than 5 years. You can still update to a newer Ubuntu version for free and get another 5 years if you pick an LTS version.
So disable it?
Ultimately, I didn't switch to Linux because I wanted to. I switched to Linux because Microsoft became so actively hostile to me I felt like I didn't have any other choice.
No Microsoft, I'm not buying new hardware just to get the new OS. No, I'm not going to let you nag me every single day until I get pissed off enough to. No, I will not tolerate all the little things in your OS that piss me off everyday. Your software sucks. Your filesystem sucks. Your constant nagging sucks. I don't want your cloud TPM security bullshit and I DEFINITELY don't want Copilot or Recall.
Seriously Microsoft: fuck you.
Giving up being able to play certain games - which require me to install malware into my computer anyway - is a small price to pay to have my sanity and freedom back. I own my computer, not you. Goodbye and good riddance.
I already used MacOS and Linux for work anyway. But don't worry Apple, you're riding that line pretty dangerously too - you're gonna be next on the chopping block if you don't get your act together. Framework Desktop is looking like a mighty capable replacement for my Mac Studio.
Very relatable. It was so scary when I jumped ship in 2021. It was simply no longer acceptable to stay on such a hostile platform. I was willing to accept a huge downgrade in terms of usability and functionality. It turned out to actually be a lot more pleasant to use. Better software, more software, better performance. Just better all around.
Use Rufus it'll disable hardware requirements, without hassle. You will need an iso. If you know someone with 11 have them download it. Otherwise download the generic.
It also lets you skip the first time install dialogue by setting defaults and add a local-only account. Rufus is the way to go about installing windows.
Had to scroll way too far down through windows gripes to find this, the real answer. Windows 11 will run just fine on your machine, OP. Just use Rufus and a USB stick to do the upgrade.
totally agree, but it is a bit ridiculous that this workaround is required.
Agreed.
But it will break on updates. Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC doesn't have those requirements
No, it doesn’t? Been running it for years, with updates, and never an issue.
...but then you have to use Windows 11...
Or a Windows 10 installation that won't get security updates. I don't know which is worse.
Windows 10 can still get updates, for I don't remember how many years.
It's a PITA it's not made more obvious, but there are free options, paid options (30$ a year if I remember well), all straight from Microsoft fully supported. Sailing the seven seas for a LTS if the other way.
Indeed https://endoflife.date/windows
A few days ago I started up an old Windows 10 laptop that I haven't used in a few years so my son could play a game that I haven't taken the time to set up in proton on linux. I was amazed at how much the Windows OS experience seems like an unhealthy relationship where the OS is trying to manipulate you and control you. It feels like it's not even my computer, it's a Microsoft owned kiosk that I'm allowed to partially use.
Another really remarkable thing is how cloud connected it is. For instance, the lock screen had online feeds shown. The setting to disable them is on a remote website, not in the screensaver prefs or some other local system pref. That was astonishing, and IMHO absurd. If it hadn't been clear to me before, that made it crystal clear that what MS wants the OS to be and what I want the OS of my personal computer to be are not remotely the same thing.
The "Yes or Maybe Later" dialogue boxes that festoon the internet & Windows 11 need to end - time for another law imo:
"No" must always be an option, and notices must not be shown again if this is selected.
There must be a way to disable this thing. Maybe we can disable the service? But anyway I already switched to Linux for my daily usage. It is not smooth as Windows due to driver issues and other weird things, like Firefox crashing frequently when I’m typing in a text box like this one, but still feels better than Windows.
The Windows team and its product manager is determined to trash the product. Good work!
> There must be a way to disable this thing.
If Windows had a slogan, this would be it.
If you are on Nvidia hardware, make sure to use a distro that makes it easy to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers. In Ubuntu, just open the Additional Drivers tab and the rest will be self-explanatory. For other platforms, ask an AI.
Switch to Win10 LTSC iOT if you want to keep getting security updates for many years
Bonus is it strips out all the crap and is super fast
Downside is a few specific pieces of software refuse to install (for no good technical reason). Adobe Photoshop for example
There is also win11 LTSC iOT which I believe might actually install on older hardware that normal win11 will not (don't quote me on this)
And it’s not just TPM. I have tpm module however they don’t support my Intel 7700K processor.
yup. Fixed list of supported cpus. Well, I suppose it grows to include newer CPUs.
That said the rufus workaround can work for these - I'm writing this from a machine that's not a supported cpu that I just upgraded to Win 11 with rufus. Runs just fine. Fun fact about my cpu: no cpu with the same socket is supported, so to be officially supported I'd have to also upgrade the motherboard.
Microsoft making advertisements for https://store.steampowered.com/steamos ?
Our kids‘ school received some old surface laptops for free through some initiative. I‘ve been tasked to take care of them. And of course, WiFi mysteriously stopped working for all of them, after ca 1 week of use.
It turns out that a recent Win11 update bricked the network adapter. After some digging, it is this problem: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4378104/...
I‘ve tried:
- Uninstalling the update and disabling updates for 5 weeks. But Windows just decided to reinstall the update after 2 days. Bricked again.
- Disabling fast start. This reactivated itself the next day.
- What finally worked, was disabling hibernation entirely.
Adding to the enshittified pile of bad decissions that Windows has become, the actual requirements for Windows 11 are just a corporate caprice and not a real "requirement". I did whatever it needed to bypass the checks at install time, and W11 is now working exactly and equally as well as W10 was, on a laptop which only has TPM 1.2 and an old CPU.
Where is the requirement then in modern CPUs and TPM 2.0, Microsoft? Didn't you mean "nice to have" so additional but perfectly optional security features could be enabled?
I'm guessing they'll break it later by actually using said requirement.
Then say "i told you so!"
These nags are very disrespectful indeed and widespread, Apple also sometimes has undissmissable iOS upgrade label (liquid glass, leave me alone!)
Though you can bypass tpm requirements if you want to upgrade to win11, and also can switch to ltsc Win10 version for a few more years of support
I switched to Linux (Slackware, Gentoo, Kubuntu, Arch Linux) some 22 years ago. It has been a pain and sometimes I still get issues.
But I am grateful my PC basically does whatever I ask it to.
A desktop PC lasted 10 years before dying. A laptop another 6 years. No NAGs, no service subscription.
And no ads from software (browser sometimes excluded), no nothing.
I could still install it on a very old machine, with some extra work needed, I could still use less than 1GB RAM.
So I am grateful, despite some extra work is sometimes needed. Nothing is really free. It's a matter of tradeoffs.
I'm happy with Windows 11 after tweaks to fix it. I certainly sympathesize with Windows 10 users who can't upgrade. But it seems to me Windows 10 users aren't getting the message: Microsoft just isn't that into you.
Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases? I'm guessing not (I don't have the figures) and Microsoft would rather you replace your 10 year old laptop that can't run Windows 11 or run Linux on it. They really don't care which, just as long as you go away and they don't have to support you anymore.
I'm not assosciated with Microsoft, just someone who has been using their products for 40 years. I am someone who can read in between the lines, and this is my take.
How did you tweak and fix it? I suffer with Windows 11 at work and everything is just so slow. Alt+Tab often gets stuck and clicking icons on the taskbar don't register about a fifth of the time. Take a screenshot with Shift+Win+S? That's gonna take at least 10 seconds for the snipping app to even load, after which what I wanted to screenshot is probably gone. Open a tab in Explorer? Five seconds, during which individual parts of the UI update. Delete 50k files from some image analysis? That's gonna crash explorer.exe and take down the whole shell. I suppose they rewrote the Windows shell in React, and every basic interaction is a major undertaking. At home I have a 12 year old PC, with Linux and the Gnome DE. It is absurd how much faster it is, everything is snappy and instantaneous. To me, there is nothing to fix in Windows 11 - they have failed horribly.
From my experience, a computer running that slowly is out of memory and hitting the swap file constantly. The tweaks I did are in settings. I turned off widgets, OneDrive and Ads. Also there have been comprehensive scripts for cleaning Windows 11 shared here on Hacker News if you look for them.
It is not out of memory, with 32GB it is just slow even on a fresh start. It all goes to say that Microsoft willingly chose to use UI kits with 100x overhead compared to real functionality and rendering. It needs to die, when FOSS can make 12 year older hardware outshine 8x more expensive hardware in every single aspect, without any tweaking. It's the very definition of insanity.
Windhawk, O&O ShutUp10++ and a few other manual registry tweaks
There is no free support, e.g. call center agents for Windows 10 users. As for security vulnerabilities in Windows 10, Microsoft is going to continue fixing them until at least 2032 (probably longer with extended support) anyways, as Windows 10 1809 LTSC end-of-life is 2029 and Windows 10 21H2 IoT LTSC is supported until 2032.
Microsoft isn't that into you either. With Windows 11 you are not a customer, you and your data are the products.
Meh. I'm also a Linux destop user on a second machine. I'll completely switch when Windows 11 becomes a problem for me. Microsoft used to be a OS company, but is now a cloud company that offers Linux on it's cloud services.
> "Do you think Windows OS is a profit center...?"
The consumer editions are not all there is to Windows. Nearly every seat of Windows 11 Enterprise used in corporations is a paid license and there are a lot of corporations. Nearly every instance of Windows Server is a very expensive paid license and is required to run Active Directory, MS Exchange, SQL Server, etc.
I have no experience with Windows Server or Enterprise and don't know anyone who does. Forgive me for omitting "consumer" from my description. Yes, I mean consumer Windows.
> Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases?
They get money out of almost every computer sold all over the world. Are you saying that's not enough to keep a system that hasn't seen improvement in 2 decades and barely get bugfixes?
The author just wants Microsoft to stop harassing him. He's not asking for handouts. He's not even asking to be allowed to bypass the hardware requirements for Windows 11. He just wants to stop getting nagged by Microsoft to upgrade.
He could buy new hardware and run Windows 11. But this pattern will only continue from Microsoft. The only way out is to run a non-Microsoft OS (assuming he can).
The important point here is that data collection and telemetry is worthless and was never about improving the experience for you as a user. The coders behind the update nag had every opportunity to do a hardware check, but as I say, big data is never used to improve anything for end users.
You're not getting what I'm saying. Hassling him is the point. They want him to use Windows 11 or go away. He's a security update expense because he's too cheap to upgrade his laptop or run Linux on it.
I don't think you understand the situation. He's not getting security updates. He's not an expense. Microsoft is incurring no costs by allowing him to continue using his existing operating system without updates.
Microsoft doesn't want him to go away. They want him to buy their new product.
Satya Nadella really nosedived Windows.
I disagree. I think his intention was to maximize shareholder value which he has done dramatically by making the user the product being sold. Microsoft stock has soared even at the expense of Microsoft shedding users. Satya has realized the true value of Windows as a revenue platform. It never was a competitive operating system.
From my earlier comment to another Windows post:
Windows 11 has transitioned from a standalone tool into a digital storefront that prioritizes recurring revenue through aggressive prompts for Microsoft 365 and OneDrive subscriptions. By mandating cloud-based Microsoft Accounts, the OS effectively anchors your identity to a marketing ID, allowing the company to track behavior and monetize your data. The interface now functions as an advertising platform, injecting "recommended" apps and sponsored content directly into the Start menu and search results. Ultimately, this shift means users are no longer just customers of a product, but recurring assets whose attention and telemetry are sold to sustain Microsoft’s ecosystem and maximize shareholder value.
I disagree. Satya doesn't give a crap about Windows; he's the cloud guy. Over 40% of Microsoft's revenue is cloud. Another 20% is office (which is also heading towards cloud). Windows revenue is a measly 9% -- even less than gaming.
Windows is what it is because it's really not important to Microsoft to anymore. It's effectively unmoored from the rest of organization and left to fight for some kind of financial relevance in an organization that doesn't care about it anymore.
There's something deeply wrong with Microsoft if they look at 10% of their revenue and go "meh, we don't care about that". I get that it's not the majority, but that doesn't mean it is to be scorned either. 10% is a very hefty chunk of one's income (I would be pretty upset if my salary got cut by 10%, for example), and with an organization Microsoft's size is a huge amount of money in absolute terms.
Companies care where the growth is. Azure has obviously grown tremendously over the last decade and a half from nothing to the most important part of Microsoft.
This isn't specifically or even unique to Microsoft. In fact, it perfectly explains Windows because this pattern has been repeated so often by so many other companies.
Personally, I think Microsoft's strategy when it comes to Windows is a mistake. There are so many companies that would kill to own a platform (see Meta) and Microsoft has this dominate platform. It's Windows that, I believe, is responsible for their cloud success. It also makes decent revenue. But they have a cloud CEO and they have cloud success and desktop operating systems are out of fashion.
Given the continued dominance and success of the Xbox platform /s I'm surprised the shockwave hasn't reached the top.
It's beside the point of the article but...
> The hardware limitation is specifically TPM 2.0
Almost every even half decent CPU made in the last decade does have TPM 2.0, albeit for some strange reason OEMs used to ship with it disabled. You may be able to turn it on in the bios.
My 7700k, a top of the line CPU from 2017, doesn’t support Windows 11 even though it has TPM 2.0. I had to install using rufus.
For sure, there are other hardware requirements a 2017 CPU may fail.
This is a massive pet peeve of mine as well. As far as I'm aware there's not a single consumer CPU listed in the Windows 11 compatibility list that doesn't have builtin TPM2.0.
I suspect there are cybersecurity stakes regarding win11 and win10, but I am not entirely sure.
I think that the spectre mitigation are not a problem in win11 because win11 is not supported on CPU that are vulnerable, which might be a reason they encourage people to get win11 and get a new PC, but that's an unverified guess, I am just trying to get them the benefit of the doubt.
SteamOS looks like it might take a lot of the windows cake, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to.
So far it doesn't look like SteamOS supports most of PC hardware out there, but it could be a next step for Valve.
I wonder how hard would it be to just switch back to Windows 7 for these kinds of cases? Obviously the most ideal solution is to use Linux but there's still some edge cases where Windows is needed or is just preferred. If you install Windows 7 in a VM you'll be blown away by having a simple, clean OS that just runs applications and doesn't shove ads or Bing search into the start menu. And obviously it would be vulnerable to software exploits but if the device is mostly kept offline I can't see many issues with that coming up. Something to think about...
I know people who are still on Windows 7, but application support is becoming more difficult, including mainstream web browsers. You can still disable annoyances like in TFA on Windows 10, you just have to dig a bit.
I want to experiment with windows PE for that kind of use there used to be lite windows “distro” bashed on pe I used to love playing with
At a certain point you’ll lose application support, including from the major browsers and other services like Steam
>The terms and conditions are simple. Every time you perform any network access, you have to send a copy of the payload and response back to my server. Either that, or you're in breach of my terms.
That's not how contracts work, at all. MS hasn't bought anything from him, nor was he able to require them to agree to anything in order for him to install the OS.
Microsoft users are the product being sold
I had the same frustrations recently with my MacBook Pro, with macOS constantly telling me about Tahoe despite OCLP--which I used to patch my unsupported Mac to Sonoma--currently not supporting that version of macOS. These notifications aren't able to be disabled, just like in Windows--trust me, I tried to do that. They irritated me so much, that I've actually taken to installing Ubuntu on the Mac just so I can avoid seeing them.
I can only hope that this degradation of UX will make more people switch or consider switching to other distributions. It's the only thing that will make microsoft listen.
Picked up a Framework 13 for my daughter for Xmas. She’s a politics student, so she needs a solid keyboard. I hate installing Windows on this hardware, but she absolutely relies on Office and Citavi. Plus, proficiency in Windows is a standard requirement in her field. Maybe she'll discover Linux eventually!
> absolutely relies on Office
You mean "absolutely relies on being able to work with Office formats". Which most Linux distros do well out of the box. I'm not aware of any feature that LO doesn't support, although admittedly I usually exchange PDFs.
> Citavi
According to the WineDB page for Citavi:, "native Linux alternatives include: - BibSonomy / PUMA - JabRef - Mendeley - Zotero - Colwiz"
Of course when going through education you don't want to take risks, there is a lot on the line. But it may be worth to play with the alternatives a bit, albeit on a VM or something. Of course maybe the Citavi format needs to be exchanged; that could actually be a problem. Annoying.
Sure, it's doable, and I'm on Linux desktop as well and not missing anything. She never had a computer other than her iPad. So it's hard (for me) but for her it's the best solution right now.
Need a suggestion, and thought might as well ask here. I use a Mac now. Last windows was more than 15 years ago and now I want to try Linux. which version would you recommend? should I go with Ubuntu or Debian or Mint or something else? I am not a tinkerer. I want something that just works, on the lines of a Mac.
Ubuntu. Pay close attention; the normal Ubuntu is what I consider beta. The Long-Term-Support (LTS) variants of Ubuntu is what I consider the normal Ubuntu, which should always be used except maybe when working on Ubuntu components as a developer. This will save you a lot of pain down the road.
Probably Manjaro or Ubuntu.
And in my experience, nothing “just works”.
I am okay if some edge case needs tinkering. As long as every day common use cases just works. There is no distro that even meets that?
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, PopOS and Mint for instance are all fine, stable and just work great out of the box
The single stupidest thing people new to linux do is try to install it on random hardware and expect it to just work. Mac has the hardware idea right where all of their hardware is thoroughly vetted against their OS so practically no one runs into issues. To get something similar on Linux you'd need to buy from a vendor that offers their OS preloaded with Linux. Kubuntu Focus, System76, Tuxedo, are the ones that focus on Linux and Framework, Lenovo, and Dell offer linux as an option and at least support it.
I would happily switch to Linux, problem is it doesn't support the audio hardware I have. And although I've tried to figure out how the drivers get it working on Windows, I can't separate the wheat from the chaff in the 500+ USB packet dump Wireshark gives me :-( Otherwise I'd dump Windows and throw NixOS on this thing and stripe my two NVMes.
Is it possible to switch an existing windows 10 install to the extended support version? (Can't remember the exact term).
LTSC. Technically MSFT doesn’t offer them to laymen like us but I don’t think they would care if you pirate them.
https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
This worked for me to switch to Extended Security Updates (ESU): https://github.com/abbodi1406/ConsumerESU
massgrave. Even Microsoft support uses that script
I don't know how many years/months/days/hours the author is going to continue using Windows for, but this seems like a perfect task to be "resolved" by AHK, which is probably in the top 10 things Windows users have access to. Worth trying, at least before switching to another source of operating system.
I've been running Win11 without a TPM for 6 years. Saying you can't upgrade isn't the same thing as Windows saying you can't upgrade. Knowing your OS seems to be a lost art. I'm not dismissing the valid complaint, but the title is empirically wrong clickbait.
The only Hard requirements are a CPU with SSE 4.2 and POPCNT. Win11 will simply not install on older CPUs. The rest of the requirements can be bypassed but Microsoft will block you from the annual major feature upgrades. You will have to do those manually too. They also claim that your stability and performance on pre-8th Gen CPUs will be degraded and they will give no support, but in reality it runs just fine. Win11 is sluggish on all CPUs anyway.
Win11 was released at the end of 2021. What were you running for 6?
Tried it when it was Win10 with a fancy name. Never had an issue with TPM or any other hardware requirements. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_11_build_21242_(rs_prerele...
2026 will be Year of the Linux Desktop, at least for Mr. Diallo!
Linux
looking at the author's photo in the OP, appears that they own a Surface. if that is the device referred to in the post, it is quite interesting to see that not supporting win 11.
Block updates, remove bloat via PS scripts. Done.
Just give me a side taskbar pls.
Rufus will let you install with a local account even on PCs that don't support TPM, but would you really want to?
Ten years old laptop? Pretty sure it has a TPM 2.0 on it.
I also have a 10 year old laptop with no TPM 2.0 module. It was pretty high end for the time too (Dell XPS). I haven't needed it for much in recent years, but it still runs perfectly fine and I'm happy to continue using it if the need arises again. Sounds like I'll have to switch that over to Linux like I have all my other PCs.
> I also paid for a pro version of the OS.
Yep. And you got what you've paid for.
Look at it. This is "pro" now.
I love the phrase I heard recently: “software developers don’t understand consent”
It describes so much
When I, as a developer, was told (essentially forced if I wanted to keep my job) to implement dark patterns, I did it knowing I made the world worse. I was fully aware of it, and my coworkers as well, we discussed it openly, and I imagine everyone implementing such tech are. Of course I and other could claim plausible deniability, ”we didn’t understand consent”.
I hope one day there will be pushback on this from people like you, but when your boss has an economical stranglehold over you, not to mention the old adage 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it', it's understandable why we're in this situation.
Sales people don't understand it, not software developers.
If you are a software developer and you implemented that without question, you suck.
Which one invented "ask me again later" dialogs?
Sales people, and that shit rolled downhill to the devs. The days of devs writing dialog text in something like Windows are long gone.
What is the difference between software and car sales? The car sales knows when they are lying.
See Windows and Android. Blaming only the sales people is ... not helping.
Blaming the sales people is correct. Technically-minded people likely do know better, they just lack the authority to override the top-down administrative decisions.
I’d like to think that but the AI ppl on this website are something else
These problems are rampant enough in the OSS world too, never heard of an open source salesman.
Rms?
Software developers understand consent well but they understand dollar signs even better.
> It's one thing to be at the forefront of enshittification, but Microsoft is now actively hostile to its users.
Haven't lived under a rock until now must be relaxing.
I really hope this mess will lead to a significant uptick in Linux usage though. That would be a great effect. Unfortunately, most people will either adapt or go with macOS and be in a similar spot in a few years.
For what it's worth, a lot of the crowd who used to want to but we're hamstrung by the garbage support for games on Linux are now actually switching since Steam has essentially made it "just work" via Proton. The final real blocker for many people is finally gone this iteration of the cycle.
I myself have fully switched to Endeavor for my personal desktop, though I still use a MacBook for work (as I have for 17 years now, if you include college). It's been a surprisingly seamless experience, I highly recommend it over Ubuntu-based distributions, especially for Steam (I was a former Mint adherent but the general stability has gone way downhill).
I find macOS a pretty good compromise. I guess if it got too annoying I could go Linux. I use Word/Excel a lot but am fine with old versions - none of this 365 nonsense.
My old 6600 from 2016 is still running fine, I replaced the SSD (Intel 400GB to X25-E 64GB that will last 20 years minimum), the RAM (Micron to Samsung from aliexpress before the price hike... got 8 sticks of 16GB for $40 a pop for backup) and even the old trusty monitor (Both Eizo 5:4 matte VA; mercury tube to led, with f.lux/redshift the blue light is ok).
But with a 3050 upgrade from the 1050 and later 1030 (best GPU for eternity if you discount VR) I had in it it's good for another decade. If a game comes out that does not run on it I wont play it... simple as that... 150W is enough. So far only PUBG stutters, what a joke of bloat and poor engineering that game has become...
Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7. Win 11 improves NOTHING over 10.
YMMV but recommendation is still: do not buy new X86 hardware; do not use new OS/languages.
Build something good with what you have right now.
Make it so good it's still in use after 100 years.
> Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7
Windows 7 doesn't have compressed memory (ZRAM). Doesn't support TRIM for NVMe SSDs. Doesn't have WSL. Doesn't have ISO mounting built in. Doesn't have HDR, variable refresh rate, etc...
The better statement is 'Win 10 improved nothing directly user-facing over Win 7'. Sure, there are several technical improvements under the hood, but those are completely detached from what the user actually sees and experiences, and there's no real reason we couldn't have the Windows 10 technical improvements with a Windows 7 UI, other than Microsoft being the abusive parent that it is.
I'd still disagree but UI changes are far more subjective with approval. The start menu in 10 is a lot more customizable vs. Windows 7 which I think is a good thing. Task View (virtual desktops) were added in 10. Task Manager is so much better, that one is probably objective.
> The start menu in 10 is a lot more customizable vs. Windows 7 which I think is a good thing.
I installed Open-Shell day 1 when I got Windows 8, and continued with that on 10, since the new start menu did not convince me, so I can't really vouch for that. I don't see a need in having tiles and such in my start menu.
> Task View (virtual desktops) were added in 10.
Never used it in Windows. On my Mac I use it to put individual apps in full-screen, so they're easy to switch to with 3-finger swipe. Then again, I have three screens, so the demand for more desktop space is close to zero on what would be my Windows machine.
> Task Manager is so much better, that one is probably objective.
Technically a Windows 8 addition, but I'll give you that one. I'll have the old task manager back if I could get the old photo viewer back though. I can manage with the old task manager. I couldn't manager with the Win10 Photo app, and had to install Irfanview to get a usable picture viewer (at least before I went to Linux).
> I don't see a need in having tiles and such in my start menu.
Tiles are gone in Windows 11.
But this is exactly my point. Some people were so happy with how Windows XP worked but things are so much better now. It's repeating again where Windows 7 is the new XP.
Things are better, but it's a case of two steps forward, one step back. We got a new task manager that was actually good, and lost the photo viewer that was good. We got good taskbar search, right in the start menu, and then lost it again. We got DX12, but also got more telemetry than ever. We got an actually decent Windows update (it even grabs drivers for you and is pretty good at getting it right!), and we lose the ability to disable them (without really getting in there). We apparently lost tiles again, even though some people might still want them, and we also lost the ability to left-align our start menu, until the noise got so loud that even Microsoft couldn't ignore it.
Things may be better, but saying that Windows has gotten better, without a comma and a but, or an asterisk, is disingenuous. Much better is a matter of opinion, and one I don't share. Where things have gotten much better is Linux.
Are those really improvements though.
RAM maybe wears quicker if compressed?
NVMe will break long before a good old SATA drive.
WSL... lol
ISO you can do with daemon tools for free...
Displays are good enough at 60Hz 5:4 matte.
WSL is an excellent Micro-Soft technology.
> NVMe will break long before a good old SATA drive.
What gave you that idea?
> RAM maybe wears quicker if compressed?
Is this serious? The rest of your post seems serious, but that's such a silly idea.
This person has said that 1gb/s ethernet is as high as networking will go because of power constraints (yes obviously 2.5gb is common and a 10gb networking card is $25).
They have said that DDR3 RAM causes mouse stuttering and that a 2011 atom is the best CPU that will ever be made. Unfortunately I think they are serious.
> What gave you that idea?
If you run Windows 7 on it then it sure will!
I have fedora xfce running beautifully on a 2011 i5 Mac mini. Replacing the hard disk with modern SSD was all it took to get it running at acceptable speeds where interacting with xfce is roughly instantaneous
> Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7. Win 11 improves NOTHING over 10.
You had me up to this point. The problem is that there are actually quite a few improvements under the hood over those upgrade paths, but they are unfortunately hidden under all of the bullshit. I was an early adopter of Windows 11 specifically because of their efficiency core support over Windows 10 when I upgraded my CPU.
You need to look at the cost of improvements, and they overshadow all progress.
I'm going linux with TWM (desktop with design look from the 70s) on ARM because M$ is clearly not thinking about the long perspective.
We need a stable platform to build quality software.
And that's saying alot seen how linux is deprecating libc after very short time and the legacy joystick API is not being compiled into modern kernels anymore.
Stability is way more important than bells and whistles.
You can use IceWM instead of TWM; it's almost as lightweight and much more stable.
Also, if any, CTWM (with the welcome screen disabled) can be as good as TWM but with better features (sticky menus and the like).
I don't like the look of IceWM but I will check out CTWM!
Edit: TWM is less cluttered and less features is actually more here...
Yep, I like TWM on design too, but both CTWM and IceWM can be equally configured.
On CTWM, you can straightly import the TWM config modulo some slight error on a single line (if any). Once you set profer TTF fonts for it (by default they might look huge on smaller screens), you are done. Set the sticky/persistent menus (on a laptop/netbook it's a godsend) and you are done.
Maybe you would like to disable the startup screen (-W flag for the 'ctwm' binary) or some obvious option in the man page in order to be put at ~/.ctwmrc or ~/.twmrc.
For sticky menues you need to just put
at ~/.ctwmrcJust copy the content from your former ~/.twmrc file and append that on top.
well and clearly written, and I feel the same about windows. to the author: maybe it is us that should leave windows alone.
The TPM 2.0 "requirement" is mostly artificial - you can bypass it with Rufus and Windows 11 runs fine on older hardware. But that misses the point.
Microsoft is using aggressive dark patterns (undismissable upgrade prompts) to force hardware obsolescence and create e-waste. This isn't about security - it's about maintaining the upgrade treadmill when performance improvements have stalled.
The real issue is consent. Users should be able to say "no" once and have that decision respected. Instead, we get daily nagging designed to exhaust users into compliance. This is the opposite of user-centric design.
Time to consider Linux seriously, or at least Windows 10 LTSC IoT which has support until 2032.
I switched to Linux about 10 years ago... I used to keep a partition on the side for Windows for dual-boot... But nowadays I just wipe my drive clean!
With my latest computer, I noticed that some kind of boot protection was added in the BIOS which made it harder to install Linux from USB... I had to disable the safety mechanism in the bios before it would let me boot... It's a shame because, at a glance, I actually thought the Windows UI had improved since the last version a few years ago which was appalling...
But yeah I hate Windows' coercive approach. This is why I was never an Apple fan. I hate how Apple keeps trying to hide the underlying hardware like the file system and external (non-Apple) devices.
These companies are basically PsyOps in my view. There are many better free (open source) alternatives available where you actually own the OS. I don't understand how people can stand renting inferior software for 10x the price as owning a better alternative.
It's like if I offered people to rent a Ford car for $20k per year or get a free Mercedes Benz, and 90% choose to rent the Ford because it feels familiar and their friends also rent a Ford... What is wrong with people?
There is something seriously wrong with people. It's like someone (or something) hypnotized them. Are we sure we don't have ASI controlling people? This is not normal.
This is like; what kinds of people are trying to accumulate fiat money nowadays? There's nothing behind it. It's just digits inside a bunch of different databases without any consensus between them and where the government can create unlimited digits for free. Something wrong with people.
In Win 11 Home, and want to add a local account and not change it to a Windows account, and not share my stuff with MS. No Cloud or "Backups", thank you.
The option to enable a local account was through the command line only. The dark patterns and persausion to convince me not to was off putting.
But every time I boot in to have to go through the nag screen is off the wall.
It is truly crazy how much I understand the dedication people have to avoid using a unfamiliar system.
Use Linux hehehehe
Just go with LTSC
I been using windows 11 Enterprise for home use. No bloatware.
I upgraded to windows 11 as soon as it was offered. Even went out and bought a tpm addon for my motherboard - not that I needed one 100% but activating the onboard one on Zen 3 at the time was thought to cause stuttering…
Anyway, why would I do that?
Well, I got windows free at some point, a lot of years ago, and I am happy enough to jump through a few hoops to keep that going. I don’t use it day to day, I’m not sure why anyone would. I use MacOS and Linux as daily drivers.
But once in a while there’s a game I want to play that’s not that Linux-friendly, and there’s windows up to date and supported, without MS getting another cent out of me since about 2009. What’s not to like?
I have this problem too, Microsoft is a terrible corrupt organization now without Bill Gates.
Excuse me, but what? Do you not know of the reputation Microsoft had with Bill Gates? Embrace, extend, extinguish?
I get the sentiment but I find it frustrating when people write complaints like this when they know Rufus boot exists which disables TPM and online only accounts during the install.
Usually, whenever there's a workaround for something with Windows, you'll never know until it happens how long it will take before a Windows update makes the workaround ineffective.
Is Rufus any different?
Just use something else and stop whining.
Wasnt there a Google cross app logging framework and request tracking project 15 years ago?
Did grafana die when I wasn't looking? Does datadog still make money?
What's weird about this article is that it's the same thing being said 20 years ago. Is this a sign of people not learning from the better parts of Java deployment stacks?
Were you intending to respond in this thread instead?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346796
Use Linux
That's what you get for running Microsloth Windoze
Seriously though, don't get why anyone would voluntarily use, let alone purchase, any windows distro.
disable tpm in the bios
What would that accomplish?
it doesnt install windows 11...
The person who wrote this article doesn't even have a TPM, his point is that it keeps nagging him to upgrade even though he can't upgrade.
This popup just tells you to switch to another OS, more respective of you as an user...
The fucking hide of Microsoft, we need a class action to sue them for harassment.
Fucking hide of Microsoft, we need a class action to sue them for harassment.
Yet another reason I'm more than happy I switched my personal desktop use to Linux a few years ago now... After a decade of running Insiders, literally the first time I saw an ad on the Start menu search results, I was out. MS has only been increasingly hostile to users since.
Fortunately o265 web versions are pretty capable, including Teams, and most of the development work I've done is not specifically tied to Windows, and even where it is hasn't been too bad in actual business/enterprise environments (beyond typical corporate/govt hinderances). That said, I like what WSL brings to the table.
Windows 11 came out FOUR YEARS AGO. It’s time to let this subject die.
They’re harassing you because in not too many years, connecting your computer to the internet on their OS will be dangerous. They’re trying to save you from yourself.
And, quite reasonably, they don’t want to patch an OS that debuted 10 years ago so that it supports your hardware that’s even older than 10 years old.
It’s time to get over it. You’re using a commercial OS that you likely haven’t even paid for since Windows 7 debuted 20 years ago and that vendor needs you to at least upgrade to a still-pretty-shitty-and-old used laptop to remain compatible.
You’re free to switch to something else like Linux and, frankly, if you’re at the point of writing redundant blog posts of the same subject we’ve heard all about for the last 4 years, you definitely should. I did! And pretty much all of my Windows stuff runs on Linux effortlessly including and especially games.
Or you can disconnect from the Internet and kill the nags with some group policy stuff. As a bonus, being disconnected from the internet will stop these blog posts.