Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
Execs: what can we do?!
Jim from marketing: We could throw ads into windows 11… That’ll get em flocking! People love ads!
More AI in the start menu!
Execs: Holy shit. Give him a raise.
Lay off everyone else while you’re at it.
Hang on a sec, this isn’t Google!
Speaking of, let’s see if we can get that Prabhakar Raghavan guy, he seems to know what he’s doing.
In my company they legitimately try to convince us that our users love ads.
I conducted user research on one of our websites, which showed complaints about the amount of ad placements we have been throwing at them. The execs responded by telling me “but we are actually HELPING them, we’re showing them products that will improve their productivity and processes”. Then, they came up with ideas for new ways we can place MORE ads on top of the ones already there. I’m sure our users are loving it!
Where is the research part of “marketing research”? lol
Good god that’s actually insane. Corpos have completely lost it.
It’s more like the execs know that ad revenue is a significant chunk of the revenue stream and cost very little to implement so they’ll keep growing that until it starts measurably impacting other revenue centers in the org
That’s it, they need to roll out ads in BIOS
Want to change your boot order?
You’ll need to watch a 30 second ad, or subscribe for ad free BIOS for just 1.99/month
Sponsored product recommendations cannot be loaded without an internet connection. Please configure a wireless/ethernet adapter and connect to the internet to continue.
If they are gonna put advertisements in the bios then ill flash my pc with libreboot
Don’t give them any ideas. They are watching the forums 😂
BaaS??! Oh FFS. It’s too real.
Would technically be doable in UEFI… But I’m not mad enough to bring this shit to the world
Anyone who does should be trialed for crimes against humanity.
don’t give them ideas, lol
Call down Satan.
*edit: Calm. but you know what? Call the man in red. He prolly should be taking notes.
Considering they allow to install application on the bios command (Armory Crate, that kind of shit), consider it already done.
Sounds like what happened when Windows 8 came out. Oops I meant Windows Vista. My bad, I’m thinking of Windows Me. Sorry, I might have it confused with NT 3. Everyone loved Windows 2.0 right?
Every other version of Windows. It’s practically a law of nature at this point.
Exception: 95 and 98
98 Second Edition was 'da bomb at the time :) Much more stable than Win95, and not yet phoning home like XP. I get nostalgic seeing the splash screen.
After that, I switched to Win2K, as the last windows that did not phone home - and then straight to Linux, a decision I have never regretted and will never regret.
I agree, but we can’t leave out Windows 7
Seems like they’re on track to break the streak with Windows 12.
XP was terrible until sp2 and in fact so insecure that people all over the world got infected by all kinds of shit.
People forgot or are too young to remember, but XP needed several “service packs” before it was good.
8/8.1 were better than 7/10
If you had a touchscreen, 8 was great. I ran 8 on my Yoga and enjoyed it. But I must admit 8.1 was significantly better than 8.
And 10 was better than 8.1, so I mostly disagree with you.
But yeah, I really didn’t mind 8/8.1.
10 didn’t have metro so it was a downgrade for kb + mouse
Even used this on browser
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/new-metrotab/oogmkbpkoblajkomflhkkdmbfggdmefd
I recently moved my media PC to Linux Mint. I had Bluetooth issues with windows despite my hardware not that old and ‘Windows 11 ready’. Zero problems on Linux. I play the same games thanks to Steam Proton library. I use Mac for work. So I finally did it. No more Windows. I tried to switch 5 years ago. But today Linux is polished. And mostly works as expected. You still need to open terminal a few times to change some settings. I’m happy. Highly recommended.
I may yet try it in the next few years. I think one large frustration I anticipate (among others) is keyboard shortcuts. I’ve become very experienced with those on Windows, and my brief efforts at Linux (eg, on my Steam Deck’s monitor hookup) have not come across enough matches for them.
I can absolutely see value in enduring the pain of a large switch though.
Linux mint keyboard shortcuts mimic those of windows tho, Linux mint is the best choice for windows refugees, this is one of the things majority of Linux community is agree about. Edit: in Linux mint you also can change keyboard shortcuts with gui tools already pre installed
Funny, one of my longstanding frustrations with windows was that I didn’t get a say in my keyboard shortcuts. Namely the fact that the shortcut to swap keyboard layouts has historically been very easy to accidentally hit.
If you ever do switch I suggest something with KDE, I love keyboard shortcuts and I find anything other(Windows the most) extremely lacking in that field.
Whenever I try switching to Linux, there is always something that doesn’t work right and takes forever to finagle with to fix if it’s even possible. I’m primarily a Linux Mint fan (daily drove it on my aging desktop until it died of old age a few years back), but I’ve also dabbled in a few other noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu (was really into it when everything was still orange and brown lol) and Pop OS.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love using Linux to breathe new life into older systems, but it just isn’t a good option for me personally if my device hasn’t gotten sluggish yet.
As an example, I have an aging laptop that started blue screening a bunch. It doesn’t support the Win 11 upgrade due to it’s processor not meeting minimum specs. So I thought it was finally time to see if Linux would improve it.
First of all, I had a hell of a time installing various distros without having them boot to a black screen after installation completes. Took absolutely forever to finally sus this out on the various distros I tried. Then I find that the couple extra buttons on my basic Logitech mouse don’t work. These are essential buttons for me that I use constantly. I go through a million troubleshooting steps before finding out that it’s a Wayland issue, so I switch back to Xorg and everything is cool. But then I start running into lag issues which never occurred on my Windows install. I also tried playing some games I had in my Epic Games library. I could not for the life of me get it to work, no matter which platform I tried. I get that Steam has better Linux compatibility, but not all of us have all of our games on Steam.
Finally got tired of the whole ordeal and switched back to Windows. Did a bit more troubleshooting and seemed to have resolved the blue screen issues and now it seems to work perfectly and much better out of the box than Linux. It’s not an old enough device a Linux refresh to be worth it yet.
I get that Lemmings are die hard Linux fans, and I think Linux has some fantastic use cases…but for many users it actually isn’t a good alternative. I find it works best when you want to breathe new life into older hardware or if you have every component specifically built to work for a particular Linux distro. But when basic features don’t work properly without hours of troubleshooting (if you can ever get them to work at all), it’s a little hard to just recommend it to your average Joe whose Windows/Mac computer works just fine.
This “everything just works” Linux experience a lot of people talk about on Lemmy/Reddit has absolutely never been my experience, even though I’ve been a casual Linux fan for over a decade now. Meanwhile, I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows (unless you’re talking really old Windows versions like Win XP and older).
This. I have dabbled with various Linux distros over the past 15+ years out of curiosity. I have, without fail, had to spend days troubleshooting and fixing various problems of all kinds. Sometimes it was WiFi drivers, sometimes it was GPU drivers, sometimes it was power management issues, and most recently it’s soundcard drivers and poor audio control/quality issues. I always installed Linux as dual-boot so I had my normal Windows install to fall back on but I just couldn’t see myself able to fully switch primary OS over.
Nowadays I couldn’t switch over even if I wanted to because numerous programs I use for my work are not supported properly or at all. Linux has indeed come a long way over the years in terms of UX and software compatibility, but not everyone uses their computer just for games. There is a lot of creative and productivity software (and devices!) that have limited or zero Linux support and many FOSS alternatives are not sufficient. I hate Adobe as much as the next person and Photoshop is a bloated pile of trash, but part of my soul dies whenever a Linux fan tells me I can just replace Photoshop with GIMP. GIMP is clownware.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I’ve had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I “should have known better” or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that “maybe Linux isn’t for you”.
You know what? Maybe it isn’t. It sure isn’t for most people and I can’t see that changing soon.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I’ve had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I “should have known better” or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that “maybe Linux isn’t for you”.
I had almost exactly this same issue years ago when I tried Mint. I was trying to get something to work (I think install games on Steam? Something like that) and it would just do nothing, no message, etc. When I asked for help, I was told “This is super obvious” and after trying their suggestions and having them all fail, was told “just go back to windows.”
Ok, done?
(It also doesn’t help that there is a huge difference between ‘you can use the terminal’ and ‘you have to use the terminal.’ I’m an 80’s kid, I grew up with DOS, so I understand how to navigate terminals, I just don’t want to constantly.)
I’ve had similar experiences. Never posted questions myself, but I’ll be Googling for help and find forum posts that are as toxic as you describe.
It’s been bad enough that the Linux elitism on Lemmy leaves a bad taste, even if I haven’t seen as much of the toxic parts here. I know I’m not the only person of my friends group that feels this way about Lemmy’s Linux crowd.
To comment on the first paragraph, that is just a skill issue. Before I switched to Linux I was pretty adept at Windows, but some things are hard to figure out because it’s hidden behind layers of bullshit. Running commands that obscure what exactly they’re doing, just because some guy on some forum said it worked for him, is how you get around on Windows and that knowledge is something you build over many years. Knowing where specific settings are or what values to use takes time. The same counts for Linux. If you stick to it, that knowledge will come with experience.
Just remember the dism and sfc scannows, registry hacks etc the average Joe doesn’t know about. Your learnt it, you didn’t start using Windows with that knowledge. The same will happen with Linux.
I’ve been exclusively Linux for years, and all the crap now going on with AI and ads being shoved into literally everything makes me happier than ever with that decision.
But you’re absolutely right. Linux is “it just works” in a relatively narrow use-case.
Just going on the internet to browse and play some Facebook games (my parents). It’ll absolutely work out of the box.
Doing some light creative work (design, writing, etc…) No tinkering needed.
But from there it becomes a scale from “probably work fine” to “hours of work and extra repositories needed”.
Video editing or 3D modelling with an NVIDIA card because CUDA, it SHOULD be easy to install, but there’s a chance it won’t be. You take your chances.
Gaming through proton? Single player games, yeah. I’ve literally had 95% work out of the box because Valve is awesome. But I don’t play online multiplayer. If you need to play nice with anticheat software, good luck.
I too get frustrated with the fundamentalist Linux base who think its the right fit for everyone. Because it absolutely is not, and its okay to admit that because admitting that drives the motivation to improve it.
I don’t think Linux is for aging hardware. It just depends of your needs. Linux support all mainstream hardware, I guess. Never had any problems with something not working on Linux. I remember many years ago I had a scanner, which used to work only with Win XP or Vista because of outdated drivers. Windows 7 was too modern for it. I tried it with Linux and it worked. Now I have some random-hardware PC, everything works. It’s Intel Core 11400 hardware, AMD RX-GPU, quite modern. I think problems could be on laptops with display backlight, sleep mode or something else. Desktop PC’s should be good. Even if you have last-gen hardware, just use the latest kernel. I haven’t heard about Linux build hardware. It used to be a thing for Hackintosh builds.
My previous company HP laptop worked better on Linux, it wasn’t that hot all the time. Because Linux was consuming less system resources. My work: Browser + IDE. I had dual-boot Win10 and Ubuntu. Ended up with Windows because of Pulse Secure crap and some specific network restrictions. It was years back.
I remember I gave up with Ubuntu 5 years ago at home because after system update It just failed to boot. I didn’t touch anything. I don’t know if it’s possible today. And Proton wasn’t here and I wanted to play games. I remember I was using Lightroom, but for my very basic photographer needs Darktable works perfectly. And it’s free!
All you need is basic troubleshooting skills. You need to google sometimes. I know that it could be an issue. Linux not for everyone. And it’s fine. It’s good to have a chose. Linux gives that choice.
Yeah, on Windows Heroes of the Storm was using 10gb on my gpu and stuttering massively
On Linux (Lutris) it just works
Hey fellow HoTS Linuxer!
I switched recently to Nobara after having a great experience with my steam deck. However, I’ll probably add windows as a dual boot option since CS2 doesn’t run properly (like 16fps…).
CS2 linux version has some issues. Sometimes forcing steam to install the windows version and to run it via proton makes things better.
I dont have CS2 because, well, the obvious reasons. But I do have the original Skylines, and its linux version is also a festering pile of rancid dogshit.
Running the windows version via proton made it run smooth, stable (well, as stable as can be expected with a few hundred mods…lol), and without headache.
so yeah, install windows version and use proton. Overall better experience probably.
Honestly, i think thats my advice about gaming on linux in general, to generally avoid the native version. Personally, I’ve only run into two games that the native version wasnt shit, and that was Stardew Valley and Rimworld.
CS2 is Counter Strike 2. Cities: Skylines 2 is C:S2
Thanks for the tip. I’ll definitely try that.
Yeah in college I tried to switch for nerd cred and it sucked, but over the past year I switched and while I’ve had some hiccups, I honestly think it’s more a result of me going with an arch based distro than a Debian one. I’m thinking I may hop soon, but I assume it’ll be a massive pain
deleted by creator
I work with Windows as a requirement of my job, I’m in IT and I’m constantly in and out of the bowels of the operating system. I have a lot of thoughts on this stuff.
My first thought is, stop moving everything around. Even in Windows 10, if you’re using an older version, say 1804, and you switch to a newer version, say 22H2, stuff is moved all over the place. It makes it super hard to direct someone blindly to the control they need to click to get something done. You’re making my job much harder than it needs to be. Stop it. There’s no reason to move this crap around.
To bring out my grumpy old man routine: back in my day, if you wanted to do anything, you went to the control panel. Everything you needed was there. Now it’s in settings, no wait, clicking on this settings option for that thing now launches an appx thing that, surprisingly (/s) is broken.
Too many damn times have I tried to open their damned settings app or the new defender security appx dialog simply crashes. The solution is almost always dkim online repair. Well, if it needs repair so damn much, how about you just repair it for me as part of system maintenance? The fuck.
Windows 11 is a special form of suffering. Right clicking on a file and… What the fuck is this? I basically click on “more settings” every time I right click. And the changes to the settings application… Don’t get me started.
Also, why in the fuck do we have copilot installed by default now? You’re an operating system, stay in your goddamned lane.
The only good thing I can say about Windows 11 is that it has really good security. So good that I frequently have trouble doing routine things. Today, I was trying to run a PowerShell script and it told me some bullshit error, which is pretty common for PowerShell. After googling the error, the recommendation was to change the execution policy. I went to do that at an administrative PowerShell prompt and it told me that I didn’t have access to change it. While running as the administrator. Yay. Shit is broken again. Fuck me I guess. I’m off to unfuck my less than five month old new work system because Microsoft can’t get their shit straight.
Customization options do not and cannot help me. 90% of the time I’m working on someone else’s computer, so I have to fucking deal with the default behavior because I’m not going to change it for 500+ users whom I support. I’m pretty sure I’d get more than a few complaints. So I have to fucking deal with whatever hairbrained decision Microsoft made about what should be default.
Windows 10 had its own share of bullshit. One of my most common annoyances was the way the OS decided to install fucking candy crush, every fucking time a new user logged into the goddamned computer. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, but not fun and filled with uninstalls. I hope Microsoft made some good money on that brand deal, because I sure paid for it with my frustration.
After all of this, I keep finding myself in the fucking registry, and thank God that’s one thing that hasn’t been fucked over by their new UI team. I keep having to fix dumb issues by injecting registry keys so I can not deal with the stupid UI all the goddamned time. It’s hacky, and I’m happier for it.
I could keep going. Pretty much every decision they’ve made in the past 5 years has been some measure of bad. The only thing I’ve agreed with them doing is finally ending internet explorer. Begrudgingly, edge is better, but not by a lot, IMO.
The last thing I’ll say is that the tpm bullshit is going to give me an aneurysm. Having a TPM at Windows install usually prompts the system to activate bitlocker. Bitlocker itself isn’t bad, but it’s fucking terrible when windows does this shit and doesn’t really inform the user about it. Nobody knows that they need to back up their goddamned bitlocker recovery keys, so inevitably, when something goes wrong (we’re talking about Windows here, something will go wrong) and the system stops booting, you need the fucking bitlocker recovery key to do anything. Your option, if you can call it that, if you can’t get the recovery key, is to format all of your shit, and reinstall from scratch. I know several people who have lost a lot of work and irreplaceable files, like pictures, because bitlocker fucked them over and they had no idea it was even running.
Sorry about your loss, but all those family photos you saved that don’t exist anywhere else are locked behind basically uncrackable encryption, get fucked, I guess.
I’m going to cut this rant off. Needless to say I’m pretty tired of Microsoft’s bullshit. Make an operating system. That’s what people want. That’s it. We shouldn’t need “debloat” scripts to fix your nonsense. Gah.
I very much enjoyed your rant. Would subscribe.
I recently had to reinstall windows on a coworker’s laptop because it wouldn’t boot (hard drive is probably failing). I couldn’t even format the drive because bitlocker was bit locking and the only way to turn it off is through the control panel (again, PC would not boot). I ended up having to delete the entire partition so I could reformat and install.
I usually do that anyways. As soon as it’s like, “which partition do you want to install to?” I’m like, nope! And delete all the partitions. Just install to the drive.
The windows installer is so retarded with this kind of thing that I make it basically impossible to do wrong. If I have another drive in the system, I unplug it before I install windows, then plug it back in after windows is installed. I want it to see one drive and only one drive and I want it to install to that drive and nothing else. Not a partition, not a specific location, just the drive.
I’m gonna upgrade my setup at some point, so thanks for this. I didn’t realize they had some bullshit like bitlocker in there, definitely going to disable that because I cannot lose some files.
I try to speak the gospel of backing up your bitlocker recovery key to anyone who will listen without their eyes glazing over.
You can turn it off, if you’re okay with going without encryption; if it’s a mobile computer, like a laptop or something, encryption is a good idea, so just back up the key in a safe place, even just emailing it to yourself and you’re all set.
The bullshit is that the bitlocker dialog won’t save a file that contains your recovery key, to the drive that’s encrypted; my recommendation is to “print” it to a PDF, which you can save anywhere you want. Once you have it, attach it to an email and send it to yourself, or toss it in your Google drive or whatever.
Full disk encryption is, IMO, a great thing to have, but to rugpull people by just enabling it and not giving them the information to secure access to their data, or even really inform them that it’s on, is complete fucking horse shit.
I don’t know how much I’ll need it on a desktop that’s strictly used by me, but I see your point nevertheless. The fact that its turned on by default without user knowledge and that the key is not automatically safely accessible is… That is a whole other level of dogshit, that’s just insane honestly. I’d definitely save it to drive and a stick to be sure, that’s a good one.
I agree, there’s pretty limited usefulness to keep it enabled on a desktop. Unless you’re at risk of someone walking off with it, like your desktop is in a fairly public area, or you live in an area where robberies/burglaries are not rare, I don’t know that there’s much value in it. You also have to think about what data you’re realistically keeping on your PC. Is it something that if that were to become public information, would that be a problem?
Like, if you have pictures of yourself in blackface or nudes or something, maybe think about it… But if you’re just using your PC to play games and browse the web, it’s probably not very important to encrypt it. Even if someone takes it and looks through all your data, they probably won’t find anything of value (to someone else) beyond whatever money they can get for the hardware.
It’s a very personal choice, and with higher risk devices like laptops, I would say, just turn on the FDE, back up the recovery keys and forget about it. Desktops, meh. Up to you.
I went back from Windows 11 to Windows 10 as 11 was too buggy on my system (maybe because I bypassed some checks for TPM because my motherboard was too old).
I cannot understand at all this move from control panel to settings thats half baked in 10 and presumably even worse in 11. It’s not an improvement and makes things difficult to find
The only improvement I can find with the windows 11 settings is account administration. Linking to a Microsoft account or adding authentication methods or something, is pretty decent. Everything else, just makes me want to tear my head off of my body and throw it across the room.
Windows 10 is pretty crappy but tolerable, everything I’ve seen about 11 suggests it’s a utter shit show.
I’m from Eastern EU but work in Germany in English. As I grew up with my native language’s keyboard, I always set that up, but turn the display language to English.
Worked fine in 10, but with the new 11 work laptops most things are indeed English, some apps are in my native language, and some in German. And a few days ago, lock screen stock photos started appearing (instead of the company’s logo as before), with quotes in my native language. All because I want to use a specific keyboard.
Based on searching, this is a known problem, win 11 languages are a mess, and no way to fix without resetting settings and reinstalling some things, for which I would need to leave my computer with corpo IT.
American software is terrible at handling multi lingual users, aka people outside the US. Web browsers and Google services suffer from similar problems, but the random quotes in the lock screen are certainly something new to me.
I have windows 11, and with startallback and directory opus both of which I had on 10) it’s indistinguishable from 10. No benefits, no drawbacks. Honestly should have saved the trouble and not installed.
Starting to think MSFT are no longer targeting users that care about that stuff. They’re going after the ignorant/complacent/corporate. I think they realized the rest of us were a lost cause as soon as Linux was remotely an option.
I switched from 10 to 11 about a year or two ago and haven’t really had much issue with it. It was mostly a seamless switch, much less trouble than any other Windows transition, apart from something with the taskbar I remember being stupid, but I found some third party software that fixed it. I’d love to hate on MS, but I’m just sort of mildly ok with it. Even Copilot being added in to the sidebar is whatever, I’ve found some random needs for it here and there. As long as it doesn’t go snooping through my computer and report my mountain of illicit mighty morphin power ranger hentai, I should be ok.
Inb4 microsoft is forced to bring back support for windows 10. Seems nobody believes in innovation anymore since all it means now is AI „helping” you with tasks you could do yourself or ads everywhere you look.
Same shit going on everywhere. I recently fixed my iphone 12 pro because upgrading by three generations literally would get me a usb-c port and an additional fucking button.
I genuinely think Microsoft won’t extend anything for Win10 unfortunately, no matter how many users cling to it. I’d love to be eating my words here, but I think Microsoft would rather pull all the marketing tricks out the book to force everyone into Win11.
I don’t think they’ll extend it, but I’m predicting that there will be some massive bug or security issue found in Windows 10 after its support has ended, and Microsoft will be forced to create an update for it since Windows 10 will retain such high market share.
Not sure why so many companies are so focused on making a miserable user experience these days. I know it’s mainly about appeasing shareholders, but it feels like there should be a few more long-sighted people in the mix who can see this backfire in the end.
Not sure why so many companies are so focused on making a miserable user experience these days.
Being annoying boosts short term sales and that’s all anyone cares about
I’d love to be eating my words here, but I think Microsoft would rather pull all the marketing tricks out the book to force everyone into Win11.
What confuses me is their weird TPM and whatever else requirements. I have a decent system, but it doesn’t support Windows 11 (thank the gods), so what is their plan for people like me exactly? Like I’m going to replace my motherboard and CPU just to use windows 11? This feels like multiple parts of Microsoft fighting each other.
Speculation on my part (so was my parent comment to be fair), prior to Windows 11 and even the later major updates to Windows 10, Windows had a horrible rep for physical security. It was well known that if someone stole your computer, all your data is compromised and whoever stole it just needed a YouTube video on various lock screen bypasses.
Microsoft wanted to do something about this, so Windows 11 relies on the TPM so that BitLocker can be enabled, and having the TPM makes it entirely transparent to the user. Enforcing the Microsoft account requirement gives a recovery avenue should something go wrong like the TPM changes.
Unfortunately, they would rather that the image of Win11 is this really secure OS, rather than let users who don’t have a TPM upgrade anyway, which really will just leave more users insecure on Win10 and overall in a much worse spot from a security perspective.
Unfortunately, they would rather that the image of Win11 is this really secure OS
(This is in no way an indictment of what you’ve said here, it is entirely directed at MS.) If that’s their objective, they’ve done an absolutely horrific job of making that clear. I guess part of that is they claim everything they do is for security, so no-one believes them.
Not to mention, I’m pretty sure the vast, vast, vast majority of Windows users aren’t concerned that if their PC gets stolen people can get into it. They’re much more concerned with the lost PC itself.
Either way, they look, frankly, incompetent. The OS is maligned by users, and they’ve stuffed so many embarrassing things like ads in the search bar or whatever, that any illusion of its benefits are lost behind a wall of garbage.
You will simply have an OS that is no longer supported and will be vulnerable against attacks that hackers withheld until then.
It’s your choice to stay with Microsoft either by accepting an insecure OS or upgrading your hardware, or jump ship to something that isn’t Microsoft (Apple, Linux, ChromeOS, …) depending on your needs and expectations.
However, if they say ‘okay guys, we heard you, one more year of support!’. This way they could farm so much PR points its insane.
Cant guess which one they will choose tbh.
They’d get a bunch of support, but I think they know that people would just continue to ride Win10 even longer, than actually spend the extra time upgrading.
I’d love to be eating my words here, but I think Microsoft would rather pull all the marketing tricks out the book to force everyone into Win11
Windows is not what Microsoft gains profit from, they clearly say that in their yearly reports for like a decade. They don’t want you to upgrade to Win11, that’s why they set the upgrade requirements. They don’t want to make Windows, they want to sell cloud Linux and other opensource because it brings money and raises stock value. They want you to drop Windows without any lawsuits against them. Preferably gaining some ads money before you do.
Microsloth doesnt care though. They will continue ramming 11 down your throats
I remember i had to go from xp to 7 back in the day because of their Frameworks such as directx and .net because new games/apps just didn’t launched without new versions of them, i bet they’ll repeat this once more to push everyone. edit: to Linux
Looks like Microsoft needs to further enhance the consumer experience by adding more personalized product recommendations, that’ll fix it right up!
You mean ads. Just call em ads
Whatever happened to windows 10 being the last windows? Like windows was moving to the os as a service model.
It did though, you aren’t paying for 11.
Just paying for a whole new computer required for compability with 11.
Fair enough. It just was funny to me that they were so adamant about it when windows 10 launched.
Apple moved from X to 11 and onwards
deleted by creator
So for all people that are on the fence about switching to Linux: Here’s a sort of review and starter guide from a guy who switched to Mint about 4 weeks ago.
Are you someone who mostly plays non-competetive games (games without anticheat) and browse the web? You’ll probably have a hassle free life on Linux. Steam’s Proton layer does a lot of heavily lifting. Even if games are not officially supported. Turn the compatability on in the steam settings.
If you play VR or competetive games, it’s a different story. VR is dependant on the headset. I unfortunately have all Oculus Headsets, which there is no good controller support for right now from the open source community. Anticheat simply doesnt work on Linux.
Design software From what I’ve read, the affinity suite now can be used through Wine (a program that lets you use windows apps on Linux) However, from my time with Wine, it is hit and miss. One update from either the application or Wine can break everything. So it is not reliable, unless you freeze all updates from both the application and Wine. Wine can be great (working out of the box) but also the biggest pain in the ass with hours of debugging. Stay away if you dislike troubleshooting.
Inkscape can be an alternative to Illustrator if you don’t do heavy design work.
I haven’t touched Gimp for about 6 years (used to be my main editor) but when I switched to photoshop it qas no competition. Don’t know what the state of Gimp is now, will try it over the coming year.
music software Cubase or any of steinbergs plugins outright will not work on Linux (unfortunately my main DAW) However, I will probably switch to Bitwig (native Linux), which looks really promising. I got some VSTs working through Wine (all arturia stuff works great) but have had hours of troubleshooting without luck with others. Use Yabridge as a vstlink for windows VSTs. If you’re a professional musician with thousands of dollars in plugins, I’d be hestitant to switch to Linux. You’ll be dependant on Wine a lot, which is kind of a pain to rely on for professional use.
overall tips Might be a bit controversial, but if you’re a novice: don’t dump all the solutions you find online in your terminal. Actually, try to use the machine as much as possible like you normally would on Windows, unless you want to do Terminal stuff. If you dislike terminals, you’ll only be frustrated by all the terminal advice people give you, which might even break stuff on your machine.
Try to download .deb packages from the official sources.++ Software center on Mint is great, but will moatly be outdated or flatpacks. Flatpacks can work, but I’ve had many issues with permissions and flatpacks (like an arduino flatpack that didn’t give permission to use the USB port…)
Welp, I’m out of time, so I’ll just randomly stop my reviewish/comment here
Losing Ableton and all my VSTs are dealbreakers with Linux for me. Would be fine with the games I play, being all mostly single player indies. I could relearn a new video editing software, and I assume Citrix will work fine for all my work programs, but maaaan I’m not losing my favorite VSTs.
Lack of Ableton Live support is also why I probably won’t switch to Linux. Even though years ago I used to dual boot Ubuntu and quite liked it as an OS, the lack of DAW support is the real deal breaker for me too. Ableton Live is just too good and I know it too well to switch away from it.
I feel you man. I’ve finally used Cubase enough to get proficiently fast at editing stuff, and I can’t get it to work on Mint. It is quite the dilemma. From what I’ve seen from Bitwig, I still might switch though. It looks a lot like Ableton, but I much prefer Bitwig’s UI. And my most used plugins (arturia stuff) happens to run without any hassle on Wine (for now).
Still, I’ll probably keep dual booting for a while. I have so many Cubase projects backed up that I don’t feel like converting all to Bitwig projects.
About anticheat: it depends which games you’re playing. If they use Valve’s EasyAnti Cheat you should have no problem (been playing dota2, cs2, csgo… without trouble for some time now). If they use
malwarekernel-level anticheat (iirc helldivers 2, valorant, league of legends) you won’t be able to run them in linux and should keep a windows dual boot.Some kernel anticheats work too, I had no issues playing Helldivers and Hell Let Loose, both of which use EAC. Developers have to enable Linux support, which AFAIK is just one checkbox, so you still get games that don’t allow it (like EVE Vanguard), but most of them are OK.
League and Valorant is a different story, those don’t work.
Oh thanks for the correction, I was mistaken. I’m happy I was wrong :)
Good to know!
Never rely on Wine, both in Linux, and in the real world.
Haha agreed.
Also in terms of games…I know Steam compatibility is supposed to be great, but if you use other platforms, you might run into some issues. Most of my library is in the Epic Games store (I know, terrible to admit this online…but they give you a lot of free shit), and I just could not get it to work at all the last time I tried Linux (maybe 6ish months ago).
I think for that usecase, Lutris might help. It is basically Wine for games, where it tries to find the right settings for your specific games. If the Epic store installs at all, that is.
But I’ve commented this a few times now: Wine is… very hit and miss and might not be worth your time.
Affinity Suite through Wine would be pretty big. Do you know if it’s only the newest version that’s “working”?
I got my info from the Affinity Forum
No first hand experience. However, with my short time with Wine, I’m hestitant to rely on it. Any update from either Wine or the software it’s running could break things. Cool if it works, but not something I’d want to bet my work on.
Thanks for the link. And yeah, maybe not something you’d want to rely on. But it’s worth a try as a compliment to running Windows in a VM to run Affinity.
I would highly advice against using Wine. It requires constant root access, just like virus scanners, making your system vulnerable.EDIT: I was wrong :)I want to make the switch as win10 moved to 11 without asking and 11 sucks donkey balls. It even has ads as notifications, soon it will have ads in the start menu (not that I use it, but wtf Microsoft!). The games are no issue anymore now a days, so that’s fine with me. I just don’t want to switch DAW. I just got a work flow using ableton for recording, editing and mastering my dawless setup. Kind of same story with photoshop, used to the work flow and don’t want to switch. Other than that, I don’t see a reason why not. So maybe it’s going to be a multiboot. I’m definitely going back to win10 but support will stop next year or so, so I have to use Linux by than anyway.
I would highly advice against using Wine. It requires constant root access, just like virus scanners, making your system vulnerable.
This can’t be right. Was it maybe a particular workflow you used that required root access? I know I’ve used wine as part of Steam’s Proton as well as via Lutris and neither app has ever requested privilege escalation. I’ve also run
winemanually from the terminal also without being root.Maybe it changed recently, but this is what I know about wine. Many Linux friends of mine all advice against it.
I think you’re mistaken there.
Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That’s possible because Wine doesn’t do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e.
LoadLibrary()(the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine’s reimplementation of said DLL as needed.Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as):
Also, some advice from WineHQ:
I guess I’m wrong than :)
I’m just saying what my experience was with Wine a while ago and what all my Linux friends tell me. But I guess things changed! Awesome!
I would say: don’t rely on Wine if you’re dependent on the programs it runs somehow. If you don’t want to spend hours troubleshooting programs, then accept your losses.
After days of messing about getting music VSTs to work, I decided to stop troubleshooting any error I have within Wine. If a program works with Wine straight away: lucky me! If something doesn’t work: I count my loss and accept I won’t be able to use that program on Linux for now.
And obviously, don’t install and run andom programs that you wouldn’t install on Windows either. But that’s just common sense.
deleted by creator
Win 11 has a bunch of new small frustrations without anything crazy good that makes me want to recommend it over 10. It’s… Just really unclear what benefits I’m actually getting from 11.
Just really unclear what benefits I’m actually getting from 11.
Better access to ads and improved data gathering!
Oh wait, you’re looking for benefits for the user? Umm… Security updates that will protect you from the vulnerability in Windows 10 that will get leaked as soon as it is no longer supported.
I’ve got Windows 11 on my work laptop and the only 2 benefits I’ve seen are notepad now has tabs and auto save, and snipping tool can now record videos. On the downsides the new start menu is so shit I only ever use it for search now, which is also shit (it frequently misses the first few letters when I press the windows key and start typing), and the new right click menu is annoying.
If you have an HDR monitor, then 11 is worth upgrading to. AutoHDR makes things so easy; it just works. No need to even bother with calibrating anything; no need to worry about switching it off when going back to SDR content, either. All you gotta do is flip the “Use HDR” switch, set HDR tone mapping to “Auto” on your monitor, and then forget about it. That’s it, couldn’t be easier.
Meanwhile in 10, I have to turn off HDR every time I go back to SDR content, and in KDE, HDR doesn’t even work properly yet on my LG C1. Neither issue exists in 11. HDR just works.
I honestly have zero problems with W11.
This being said I only run it on my gaming PC. My laptop runs Linux and I like that better. Honestly most people can switch their gaming rigs to Linux as well. I’ve tried it, it’s very good. I’ve got some elgato products which I wanna keep alive, fuck with VR a little, and freetrack is not available yet which is the real deal-breaker for me.
I played most games on Linux no problem though and it was great.
I think I’ve had just one issue with Linux gaming, and it was made worse by me trying to troubleshoot the error, when restarting the game for the first launch solved it out right. It was a, “have you turned it off and on again?” situations. Otherwise, everything has ran well, installed well, and was pretty seamless. All of that while running Nvidia, which is the biggest surprise.
Yep. That’s been my experience too. 9/10 times it runs flawlessly, and when it doesn’t it’s usually easy to solve. I’m running Nvidia hardware too, and it’s been no issue. I do older games on my ThinkPad sometimes too. Zero problems.
I can’t run Wayland, which I think I’ve determined is an Nvidia thing, but that’s it. I do wish there were more and better options for some softwares, but that’s just the nature of the game. Specifically audio recording and CAD leave something to be desired, but there are at least some options.
Yeah I’m patiently waiting for Wayland too
My office is currently forcing us on to Win 11.
Feels bad man.
Does your office have a choice or have they been caught in the permanent obsolescence game? Often one single professional app that provides new versions only for W11 does the trick.
We’re a Microsoft shop, so we’ve been flies caught in the ointment since day one. I wish it was one app. We’re all in - Teams, Office, Visual Studio, Outlook, the works.
I’d say I don’t really understand the rush, but we were supposed to be live with Win11 last year. I guess in this particular case, my office’s dysfunction has worked in my favor.
Hope you enjoy combined tasks in your taskbar…
My work laptop recently updated to Windows 11 and man, what a pile of garbage. If I could downgrade, I definitely would
