The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is Windows 11, with perfect timing too as modern Linux has a great/fluid UX that's been a joy to use as my daily driver.
Normally I'd be unhappy when a sleazy corp forces me to give up on 25 years of muscle memory of using my preferred OS, but I'm thankful they gave me the push I needed to rip off the ad/spyware laced Windows Band-Aid that I only need to do once in my life.
It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.
Best of all I'm not reminded daily that I'm using an OS that works against my best interests, I can actually use an App Store again that's been designed for the benefit of its Users, imagine that.
windows2020 5 hours ago [-]
Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand. My first experience with Windows 11 was figuring out some dumb workaround to use a local account.
When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows.
Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.
snovymgodym 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not convinced Microsoft cares about the Windows market share in consumer PCs or the small amount of money they make from selling Windows licenses to regular consumers.
If they did, Windows wouldn't be so usable unactivated and the MassGravel activation stuff would have been patched already.
They built up their almost-monopoly when it mattered in the 90s and the 2000s, and now their market position is basically secured.
For Microsoft's purposes the main way of making money from Windows is from business and enterprise sales, and those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
The reason they don't meaningfully enforce their copyright on consumer PCs is precisely because they do care about their market share. If you buy a computer with Windows (or get it installed) in what I suspect is the overwhelming majority of the world, it's an 'illegitimate' copy and it works 100% fine, including operating with Microsoft's servers.
As you mentioned, they could trivially stop this if they wanted to, but they don't. Because if this were not possible, there'd be billions of more PCs out there running instead what would most likely be Linux. Enabling people to use Windows without paying is a key component of their strategy of maintaining market dominance, especially on a global level.
hattmall 4 hours ago [-]
>those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.
To an extent sure, but when people that grew up as home consumers not using Windows become business leaders they won't have the brand loyalty to Microsoft that the current aging out generation does.
If Google doesn't characteristically fumble the bag their dominance with ChromeOS in schools has potential pay major dividends in 10-15 years.
Windows centric software development is pretty much completely driven by business leaders 50+ years old on the young end.
snovymgodym 3 hours ago [-]
A striking amount of business software runs on Windows because Microsoft was dominant during the peak PC era (e.g. 1990-2010). The companies running that stuff aren't doing so because old guys think Windows is good, they're running it because it's been built already and there's no real reason to change.
The next generation of business leaders already didn't build their companies on Windows or any other PC operating system because web apps replaced desktop apps and mobile devices overtook PCs in market share.
But it doesn't really matter to Microsoft. Microsoft isn't really the "Windows Company" anymore and hasn't been for some time. Azure, Office365, Sharepoint, etc. revenue dwarfs what Windows brings in and wouldn't be affected by Windows losing market share because everything is a web/electron client for a cloud service now.
In some ways, I suspect Microsoft views the Windows market share as more of a liability than an asset these days, because it makes them responsible for bad press events like BlueKeep and WannaCry. Business customers frequently buy support contracts with their licenses, whereas private consumers expect indefinite updates for a one time $120 fee. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if they were intentionally letting consumer Windows slowly fade away.
binary132 31 minutes ago [-]
What percentage of new computers are sold running windows again? I suspect the reports of their demise have been greatly exaggerated.
pjmlp 20 minutes ago [-]
Even OEMs that have the option to select Linux, e.g. Dell, Lenovo, have "works best with Windows" all over the place, one needs to be rather persistent to track down the Linux as pre-installed OS options.
lenkite 2 hours ago [-]
> If Google doesn't characteristically fumble the bag their dominance with ChromeOS in schools has potential pay major dividends in 10-15 years.
There will be no ChromeOS anymore - just Android - and it will soon be locked down hard so that you need to pay Google or host ads/harvest data for every app.
You just need to make your choice of Tyrant landlord.
makeitdouble 1 hours ago [-]
The crucial part: these business leaders won't see the ugly consumer side.
Enterprise windows is completely different, in that most of the crap we complain about will either be disable at the MDM level, or from the start depending on the license. A CEO being issued a windows laptop isn't barraged with ads, nor do they care if their account is local or not. It will "just work".
bigmattystyles 17 minutes ago [-]
I don’t know, I work for a massive (benevolent of course) corporation and it’s still pushy with Lock Screen ads, copilot, etc… and it definitely doesn’t just work. Maybe for the CEO it does though…
pjmlp 22 minutes ago [-]
That is mostly a thing on US school system.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
Do we believe that we’ll be using anything like today’s PCs and operating systems in 10-15 years time? I mean, that’s been the case since the 1980s, but now we have usable (if imperfect) AI.
dmantis 32 minutes ago [-]
Two reasons why so at least professionaly:
- Reliability. For anything that needs deterministic result and not even 99.9% of chance that it's generated correctly and not hallucinated. E.g. health, finance, military, etc. There is no room for "you're absolutely right". For the same input an algo must give the same output.
- Privacy. Until we have powerful local models (we might have though in 10 years, I don't know), sending everything to some cloud companies, which are already obliged by court to save data and have spy and ex-military generals in their boardrooms, sounds a bit crazy if it's not about an apple pie recipe. Web chat interface isolates important data from non-important, but we can't integrate it fully in our lifes.
setopt 3 hours ago [-]
Personally: Yes, I do. Likely, voice assistants and other AI tools will have a bigger market share in a decade, sure. But I doubt an interface like Alexa can replace a PC-like setup for most of the «real work». Instead, I imagine we’ll just continue the trend of laptops and tablets with AI assistants integrated in better ways, and perhaps a wider adoption of AR/VR in some sectors.
Tre
The tech that could replace today’s PC setup is a neural interface, but I doubt that NeuraLink et al will be anywhere near mainstream in a decade.
toast0 48 minutes ago [-]
> But I doubt an interface like Alexa can replace a PC-like setup for most of the «real work».
Most people, and most workers simply don't do what you call real work that needs a big screen and a keyboard. I think most of the kids at my child's school don't have a computer at home (other than the district issued chromebook) and likely won't ever own a personal computer.
People do everything on their phones. Google recently said Chrome OS is going to end next year... I don't know what schools are going to do.
getnormality 4 hours ago [-]
If something displaces Windows in the consumer PC market, I wonder how long it is before those new OS consumers start to want to use what they're comfortable with in the business as well. Windows will start to feel like some weird legacy system. By the time business starts moving away, it will be too late for Microsoft to save.
morkalork 4 hours ago [-]
This already sort of happened with kids using chrome books and android phones getting their first office job and having no clue about windows.
Root_Denied 2 hours ago [-]
I think you're right that they don't care about the money from Windows licenses, but they seem to be pivoting to trying to pull data from consumer desktops for AI training. That's arguably way more valuable and no one besides Apple (or potentially Google) gets that kind of data.
As more and more public accessible areas start becoming so inundated with AI generated material, that makes the walled gardens where generated content is not AI generated that much more valuable for training.
42 minutes ago [-]
ChrisArchitect 3 hours ago [-]
Whether they care about consumer market or not, they know that most of the consumers aren't going to care about this problem. Hardly anyone would bat an eye at using their already existing Microsoft account/email address and internet connection to log on to their PC. They're almost 100% headed to get on the internet to do whatever anyways. These people are connected to the cloud 24/7. In the same way hardly any Apple user cares that they need an Apple account to get into a bunch of things/phone/whatever. This is a nerd/tech-niche problem.
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
It being the year of Linux is definitely a meme at this point, but Microsoft's trying their hardest to make it a thing.
Steam's latest survey [1] shows Windows losing 0.19% marketshare. 3/4 of it went to Mac, 1/4 to Linux. 0.19% over a single month is a fairly significant shift, especially because the Steam survey is biased towards Windows gamers to begin with (Windows has 95.4% marketshare on the Steam survey), so it's probably understating the shift.
I’ve had multiple friends who are not tech savvy ask me about steam os. Because they basically only use their gaming PC for gaming, and they are frustrated with windows.
None have actually switched yet, but also 10 is still supported, and steam os isnt quite ready from what i understand; (nvidia driver issues?) although I assume that’s changing quite quickly. I haven’t looked super recently.
Personally I run bazzite on a machine I’ve got hooked to a tv. It’s basically steamOS
and works great for gaming. I can’t speak to the desktop mode, but as long as it’s passable, windows sets the bar pretty low. Main issue is that some multiplayer games intentionally don’t support Linux for anti-cheat reasons. :(
philistine 2 hours ago [-]
PC ownership is NOT a zero-sum game. You assume that lost marketshare must be replaced by something else. I'm confident this is not people replacing their PC for a Mac, this is people who stopped using a PC completely.
Microsoft, by ruining Windows, is not leaving the field open for a replacement OS; they're slowly killing the PC itself.
somenameforme 1 hours ago [-]
I think you can approach this 3 different ways:
Mathematical: If this were the case then all competitors would have seen an increase in marketshare proportional to their existing marketshare. This isn't what happened - Mac saw 3x the increase of Linux, even though Linux has greater marketshare on the survey.
Statistical: It's often said that the PC is dead or dying, but that's a misrepresentation of the issue. 25 years ago, a new computer was dated in 3 months and obsolete in a year, so PC sales were huge. Now a days, a ten year old PC is still fine for just about everything, even including relatively high end gaming. So sales have plummeted, but ownership rates are around historic highs. [1] The main limiting factor is money. More than 96% of households earning $150k+ have a desktop/laptop, while only 56% with income less than $25,000 do. The overall average is 81%.
Pragmatic: PCs are still necessary for many types of games as well as content creation. Mobile devices and tablets (to a lesser degree) are limited by their input mechanisms to a subset of all experiences, and there's a pretty big chunk of people that utilize experiences outside that subset.
There is no Microsoft in this story. There is the structure of the company which roll up to the CEO. And they have 1 priority: make the shareholders happy.
This has caused incentives to shift thought the company. No more long-term work. Only short term stuff, where each change needs to make impact somewhere.
This is why you see CoPilot in 20 places in Edge. This is why OneDrive shows you nagging screens to upload your data there.
And this is why the OOBE now makes it harder. That change is used by a PM / Developer to justify their existence in the company at review time.
userbinator 43 minutes ago [-]
Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs.
That's either Linux with WINE, or a "custom distro" of Windows from the remaining neighbourly hackers in the modding scene (they can't embed the hostility everywhere and as deep as the kernel, although they are most likely trying.)
soraminazuki 13 minutes ago [-]
WINE it is. I can't see any point in playing cat and mouse with an actively hostile OS. When a new Windows update starts stealing IMAP credentials[1] before the modding community catches on, it's game over for the user. Better to not use anything based on Windows.
It seems with each passing year this becomes less important, as more and more apps are either web based or cross platform.
gjsman-1000 4 hours ago [-]
To the average consumer, Windows doesn't matter much anymore.
To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365, basically forever. LibreOffice is nowhere near a replacement for Excel in an enterprise setting.
stackskipton 4 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't say it's Office365 as much as "What are my other options?"
MacOS is good option BUT cheapest laptop option is 1000 bucks. Dell has 16 inch with 16GB of RAM for 600.
There is Linux but Linux Desktop still is not ready and mass management of it is very painful.
So you default to Windows. It works-ish, won't break the bank and just about every piece of software you need works with it.
philistine 2 hours ago [-]
Office 365 is absolutely not what you seem to describe. I run a small non-profit and I am banking hard on Office 365 while I use a Mac.
O365 is the Office suite of apps, an Exchange server, OneDrive with a ton of storage, access to unlimited Teams meetings, and tons of doodads and doohickeys we don't need. That my Windows using colleagues could potentially install Enterprise Windows on their own laptops (we're a BYOD employer), is irrelevant for us. Any fleet of trashy PC we need for frontline staff already comes with a Windows license.
coin 2 hours ago [-]
Mac costs more but are easier to support from an IT perspective, at least that's what many say.
800xl 3 hours ago [-]
I agree with your overall point but I'm starting to regularly see older M series MacBooks on sale for around 600 or 700 dollars brand new. Maybe they are using the strategy of selling older hardware for less like they did with the iPhone SE.
stackskipton 2 hours ago [-]
Cheapest 16GB of RAM (Minimum I think for most workers) is 759 for 13 inch M3 Macbook Air. 15 Inch is 929.
That's getting affordable but still does not beat 600-700 decent Dell machines you can get.
philistine 2 hours ago [-]
Apple is still selling the M1 Macbook Air for 600$ at Walmart (only in the US).
A $600 - $700 Dell laptop's CPU does not come anywhere close to an M4 Macbook Air, which you can get right now at Best Buy in a 15" version for $999.
The Mac will also have a faster SSD and (not sure about this) a faster memory bus architecture. And a better GPU and better ability to use Thunderbolt docks / have 3 external 4K displays.
al_borland 4 hours ago [-]
I work in a large enterprise and I see more and more people move to macOS every year. We use Office 365. I run the Office apps on my Mac. We backup with OneDrive. We collaborate with SharePoint. We use our AD accounts to login on macOS, use InTune to manage endpoints. My Mac even has Defender on it now.
Microsoft is still getting their money, just slightly less from Windows itself.
diego_sandoval 1 hours ago [-]
LibreOffice is not a real contender to replace MS Office. The real alternatives are:
- OnlyOffice
- WPS Office
- Google Docs.
comte7092 3 hours ago [-]
Most of the office apps sans excel are basically just the web apps though, office 365 for the most part is cross platform.
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
Large enterprises are switching to Google Sheets. The largest private employer in Australia, for example, pretty much has switched to Sheets now.
WarOnPrivacy 3 hours ago [-]
> To the average consumer, Windows doesn't matter much anymore.
> To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365
In between are a bazillion businesses who depend on couple of apps and/or devices that are Windows only or near enough.
halJordan 4 hours ago [-]
Ah, young people. This is the company that innovated a brand new style of monopolization and then lost a monopoly case about it.
dehrmann 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if Microsoft knows it, but it doesn't care about or need Windows anymore. Office has native apps and is on the web, Xbox is doing its own things, dotnet has been freed from Windows, and Azure doesn't need Windows. Computing is generally moving away from the personal computing model, so Windows is just less relevant.
mh- 4 hours ago [-]
I was with you until you listed Xbox - their consoles are dying in the market.
They've adopted a strategy of calling everything "gaming" Xbox, and seem to be going all-in on Gamepass subscription revenue along with making their first-party games available on other platforms. I'll be surprised if there is another flagship console following the Series X.
We'll see how that works out for them.
aeon_ai 4 hours ago [-]
They also just botched a price increase.
Microsoft is floundering right now.
doodlebugging 39 minutes ago [-]
XBox Game Pass looks a lot like the last straw to me. Looks like a(nother) cash grab.
RedShift1 3 hours ago [-]
Office on the web sucks though. Slow AF and can't handle large documents.
pjmlp 23 minutes ago [-]
Not really, the same people are doing their best to kill XBox brand as well.
By the way they also already did enough damage to those of us that were keen into doing Windows development, due to how WinRT has been managed.
Now only game developers, and big names with existing native applications are left.
ainar-g 4 hours ago [-]
There's always ReactOS[1], a project for a bug-for-bug compatible Windows clone. It used to mostly aim at Windows 9x compatibility the last time I'd checked, though, but that could probably change. And if anyone wants to create a Win7 clone, at least some of the groundwork has already been made.
Sorry, but ReactOS is not seriously usable. Not to insult the work done on it but it is an experimental OS.
blasphemers 3 hours ago [-]
Part of Satya reorg in 2018 moved windows into a weird leadership structure where it was part of bing iirc. I think they recently finally fixed that org mistake and hopefully they quickly push an improved windows 12.
jauntywundrkind 2 hours ago [-]
I remembered something weird like this, & went looking for coverage last week. I thought it'd maybe gotten divied up between Azure Services and like some ads or online experience thing? I ended up giving up, so much noise and I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I'd love to see some coverage. Incredible seeing Windows broken up like that & internally sold for parts, just total throwing it to the MBA wolves to milk some money out of, it felt like & seems like.
octo888 1 hours ago [-]
> Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand
Well their stock certainly isn't tanking. Do they care about anything else?
Developing a new consumer-grade OS is literally not possible. I don't mean it would take a herculean effort like the software ecosystem issue takes to address, I mean actually not possible regardless of how much effort any development team put in. Virtually all hardware on the open market is made for Windows, largely powered by proprietary, closed-source drivers. Linux gets some afterthought from a percentage of vendors, but even for it, hardware support is in an absolutely atrocious state. Hardware vendors will obviously not give the time of day to any uppity new OS. This relegates any attempt to a hobbyist project targeting virtual machines or obsolete hardware. The only way a new player could enter the game is by using Apple-level money to develop their hardware in-house, but any kind of corporation fronting Apple money to do that would certainly not be aiming to produce a user-driven experience.
toast0 31 minutes ago [-]
Drivers are a lot of work. IMHO, do some core stuff, and then build in driver adapters. NDIS wrapper, linuxkpi, etc.
If you want to work hard to make things easy, I bet you could build a hypervisor that does pci passthrough for each device to a guest that runs a different OS driver and rexports the device as a virtio device, and then the main OS guest can just have virtio drivers for everything. It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in.
That indirection will cost performance and latency, but windows 11 feels like more latency than windows 10 too, so eh. You can also build native drivers for important stuff as needed / over time.
GiorgioG 4 hours ago [-]
As a .NET developer for 20+ years I’m down to my last Windows box - a gaming rig I pretend I have time to play on. Everything else is a Mac.
hu3 4 hours ago [-]
mac window management is borderline unusable and I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it.
Looking at Tahoe, seems things are getting worse.
philistine 1 hours ago [-]
> I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it
Are you installing those tools regularly? I have a couple of invisible helper apps but Time Machine backups and Mac-to-Mac Migration Assistant has made those apps transparent. They're always there.
But you know what, I think I know where you are mentally. I was there 2 years after I first bought a Mac. I wanted a clean Mac. Nothing untoward, nothing that wasn't Apple. I got rid of that feeling and learned to love the Mac as a platform, to love the Mac because of its vibrant third-party developers. That's why I use a Mac even though Apple is often a bad steward of this wonderful bicycle for the mind.
GeekyBear 2 hours ago [-]
Mac window management using gestures has been miles ahead of anything available in Windows for over a decade.
gjsman-1000 5 hours ago [-]
> Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand.
Microsoft realized after Windows 8 and Windows 10 that literally nobody, outside of niche tech circles, has positive associations with the Windows brand, or views "Windows" as a selling point beyond "runs my old software." As such, it doesn't matter to them anymore.
It's like being the PR department at your local electricity provider or oil refinery. Keep the politicians happy, but people on the ground is a pointless endeavor.
diego_sandoval 48 minutes ago [-]
Pretty much.
I remember when new Windows versions were still an event: you could read about it on the magazines, people would get excited to try them, people would debate about how pretty/ugly the new UI was, etc.
Nowadays new Windows versions are like some unwanted background noise. I don't even know at what point Windows 10 stopped being the new version and 11 came out, but it went totally unnoticed to me until I heard that Windows 10 was close to EOL a couple of months ago. And then you start dreading the moment that you'll have to migrate and uninstall all the Xbox crap again that they force on you, etc.
hshdhdhj4444 4 hours ago [-]
I liked Windows 7. I also liked Windows XP SP2 before that.
But you’re right that since Windows 8, Windows is just something I’ve tolerated.
That being said, Windows 11 seems nice, but it looks like Microsoft is pulling the same stuff again.
fortran77 4 hours ago [-]
Not true. I like Windows 11, and I think it's the best desktop OS out there.
wslh 4 hours ago [-]
Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels.
I understand that the Windows kernel is pretty advanced but I find difficult to find that it ends up in a good desktop OS (e.g. UX)
Marsymars 3 hours ago [-]
> Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels.
Hey, so I'm a different user, and I wouldn't claim it's the best desktop OS, but split between macOS/Windows for desktop use, there are definitely things about Windows I appreciate. Off the top of my head:
* It has pretty approachable "config as code" built-in - with "winget configure" and some yaml files, you can define the apps you want, the Windows config, the registry settings, etc. without the overhead of MDM or something like Ansible.
* UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)
icameron 1 hours ago [-]
I like windows 11 family settings. I can let my kids play Minecraft on old corporate castaway Dells, which I setup from bios/pe to do a clean reinstall. Then I can manage screen time limits and content restrictions from an app on my phone. All free.
eimrine 24 minutes ago [-]
And your proprietary vendors manage privacy limits for both of you.
mastazi 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not parent and Windows 11 is my least favourite desktop OS, but there are some things where I prefer Windows to Mac OS, for example multi monitor user experience, or the way full screen windows work (F11) and the ease of maximising windows without having to double click on the title bar. Also I like the way home/end/pgup/pgdown keys work. I much prefer how it renders text on non hidpi screeens. Finally I like how there is only one taskbar and no top bar, which results in more real estate on small displays.
Some Linux DEs also do these things well BTW. In fact I use Linux for most things at home. (I use Mac at work and my only Win device left is used exclusively for gaming).
rowanG077 5 hours ago [-]
> Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs.
Nothing as user focused as linux, and it's mostly compatible with windows programs with wine. Important to note though that user focused is not the same thing as easy to use.
r00t- 5 hours ago [-]
I'm a linux fan but calling linux user-focused is insane.
hamandcheese 4 hours ago [-]
I think perhaps you are conflating user-friendly and user-focused.
Linux, and open source in general, is infinitely more user-focused than anything from Microsoft, since open source is often built for users and by users.
But if you don't have great computer skills already, Linux can be extremely un-friendly the moment you step off the beaten path.
secstate 3 hours ago [-]
I mean, unless you know the various arcane aspects of Windows, it's pretty hilariously un-friendly when you step off the path, too. After a decade of using Gnome exclusively, whenever a friend asks for help with Windows, all I can do is shrug and suggest reinstalling and/or living with the pain.
john01dav 5 hours ago [-]
It's user-focused in the sense that the user's goals drive the design. The good non-profit distributions, such as Debian and Arch, would never even try to require or push an online account, since that is contrary to the user's interests.
opan 4 hours ago [-]
Not disagreeing with you, but your comment brought back memories of Ubuntu One, and the amazon spyware(?) search thing. Ubuntu is kind of the Windows of the GNU/Linux world in that they repeatedly do user-hostile things that test everyone's limits.
john01dav 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I would not use Ubuntu if I can help it. I'd still rather use it over Windows. This is why I specifically said "The good non-profit distributions," and not "Linux distributions" or some other broader phrase.
ekianjo 30 minutes ago [-]
Nobody forces you to use Ubuntu. Thats the thing. If Ubuntu fucks up, I can switch to another distro at the blink of an eye and nothing of value was lost.
thaumasiotes 4 hours ago [-]
I'm sure that's why they weren't included in the examples of "the good non-profit distributions". It's not like Ubuntu is going to be overlooked. But they are malicious.
avhception 1 hours ago [-]
The snap disaster really was the final nail in the coffin for me.
That bug report about ~/snap has to be the hottest bug in their bugtracker, and they simply don't seem to give a shit and pretend it's fine.
All the while naive users like my father or colleagues at my workplace shoot themselves in the foot by thinking "what's that folder doing in my home directory? Delete."
I'm not sure if that's still the case, but there was a time when that simply hosed your whole snap installation.
It's also completely ridiculous when you run "docker run ubuntu; apt install whatever" only to find out that "whatever" is now a snap and won't run w/o getting into nested containerization.
For packages that got the snap treatment, window tracking for the Gnome dash was broken for ages if, god forbid, you wanted to create a custom .desktop file to add some parameters. Completely broke the custom launchers I created.
I created bug reports, I tried to work with them. Others did, too. Some of these reports approach 10 years now.
I am purging Ubuntu from all of my employers systems, replacing it with RockyLinux.
Only one major application still to go.
Friends and family get Debian, that transition is already completed.
sugarpimpdorsey 4 hours ago [-]
Developer goals drive the design, not users. It's how we ended up with such navel-gazing insanity as GNOME 3.
lostmsu 5 hours ago [-]
I think in Linux developers drive the design more than users.
estimator7292 4 hours ago [-]
Linux developers are the primary users of Linux if you think about it
esseph 3 hours ago [-]
Lot of network admins, sysadmins, security -types.
wildzzz 4 hours ago [-]
Linux is user focused but not user friendly. Of course there are exceptions, anyone can use a steamdeck without ever having to leave the steam app.
jackyinger 5 hours ago [-]
I beg to differ. There is less corporate BS on Linux than any mainstream OS.
The software if largely by users for users.
Obviously it caters to the power user, but it also works well for extremely novice users. It’s those savvy with Win/Mac that get screwed switching. I’d encourage them to put a bit more into trying.
4 hours ago [-]
userbinator 30 minutes ago [-]
How likely is it that this is a coincidence with all the pervasive "digital ID" (read: mass surveillance and control at an unprecedented scale) schemes also being discussed recently?
As long as WinPE and the core of Windows exists in its current form, there will always be a way to use Windows entirely offline. The modding scene also still exists, and although it's a fraction of what it used to be (the peak of Windows-modding was probably in the 98/2K/XP era), some extremely talented individuals remain and fight. (One might ask why they haven't moved to Linux; the answer is usually "because Windows is still more familiar, and it's more fun to hack and rebel". To them, to migrate to a different OS is to surrender.)
browningstreet 5 hours ago [-]
Two weeks ago, after Microsoft reset my default apps twice in a week, I bought an external drive, backed up all my stuff and wiped Windows.
I’ve got Linux all over the place, in many cloud envs, and on older hardware. But I finally committed to it on my big, meaty, main desktop. The one I use for coding and banking and accounting.
I’m running a Linux distro full-time. I had to hack a few minor hardware things. Nothing ChatGPT couldn’t solve.
I’ll never do Microsoft again. I will prob add Apple MacBooks to my life, but my main grunt machine is likely to stay Linux. I’m fully vested.
I know I’ll never engage with Microsoft shenanigans in my home environment ever again.
mixmastamyk 5 hours ago [-]
That's an interesting point. To what extent does AI support make Linux on the desktop more viable? Reminds me of a discussion recently that said something similar, that developing in Rust is easier now that you can have another machine do battle with the borrow checker, haha.
To extend, maybe someone could build a "SysAd AI" distribution that administers itself given natural language directions? Let me know if anyone wants to invest. ;-)
gessha 4 hours ago [-]
LLMs have probably trawled through ArchWiki+StackOverflow and can enough content to help you debug your system. That plus a few “are you sure” responses to LLM hallucinations have gotten me far.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
So much Linux advice on the web is woefully outdated. Like answers for Ubuntu 8 still sometimes come up high in my search results. True that some things are still the same, but not many, especially pre-systemd.
papichulo2023 19 minutes ago [-]
I write in the prompt the distro and its version and so far no much problem with old answers. If anything, it made me realise that some knowledge I had is outdated.
mac-attack 2 hours ago [-]
There's a catch-22 in that the average Linux user is pretty loudly opposed to AI and so it appears hard for pro-AI software to gain footing in the space. Granted, most AI tools are Linux-friendly ATM, but my uneducated guess is that a larger % of Apple/Windows users use AI daily than Linux users
AJ007 4 hours ago [-]
I had a similar issue, after cleaning up a Windows machine for someone else, making sure Firefox with uBlock was running. I took a look at it a few weeks later and there was some bullshit Microsoft Bing search bar or AI thing on the toolbar. Wiped, installed Linux.
Microsoft is setting fire to the bridges and those will be users which they will never be able to get back again.
Linux works great for gaming except some anti-cheat stuff which probably won't be legal anymore anyways in Europe under the PLD.
adham-omran 2 hours ago [-]
> Linux works great for gaming except some anti-cheat stuff which probably won't be legal anymore anyways in Europe under the PLD.
I tried to have a gaming setup with Linux (SteamOS and Bazzite) but both failed when I tried to connect more than one Bluetooth controller and they'd be unable to distinguish them or disconnect everything after a few minutes, it was a frustrating experience.
kmoser 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't care about the occasional admin who manages to uninstall Windows in favor of Linux. Since Windows is the default OS on most machines, Microsoft is already making it up in volume.
SeanAnderson 3 hours ago [-]
What flavor of Linux did you end up going with? Why?
Fischgericht 5 hours ago [-]
I do remember to have read a couple of years ago that the Windows Ui team got replaced and now only consists of Mac users, never having used Windows themselves.
If that is true, it's now wonder that they do not understand all the value that Windows NT has brought, why having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc made sense. And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios. Taking away options will ALWAYS hit some of your customers. And there are a gigantic amount of applications where you want local system accounts only. Yes, Dear Microsoft, computers without an Internet connection do exist and are a common thing.
For us it's Win10 IoT LTSC so we have updates for a couple of more years, and by then hopefully the last remaining software and hardware we have will be usable with Linux.
wmf 4 hours ago [-]
I think this change (and everything in Windows 11) is being driven by the MS Account PM watching telemetry and making number go up.
Aerroon 4 hours ago [-]
Their telemetry data didn't seem to help them figure out how important the start menu is for users. I doubt it's going to help them really do anything else either. They might have the data, but they're not using it.
Fischgericht 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure. If they would actively read that telemetry data they would notice that the market share of Win11 due to their actions is shrinking, not rising.
But maybe they are holding the telemetry graphs upside down? ;)
And, obviously, a Windows system not connected to the Internet will not give you Telemetry, so this part of your customer base is invisible to you. As a PM, you would have to actually talk with your actual customers to learn about it.
Or they could have just done a survey where customers can vote on what they want. I assume that "Half of the OS settings dialogues now apply changes the moment you klick a checkbox, without a OK / Cancel button; and the other half of the OS allows you to review your changes and revert them in one go if you want."
It's just said seeing this great NT system getting crippled and ruined by actively making it harder to use and limiting choices.
hhh 5 minutes ago [-]
The W11 market share isn't shrinking though. A few statistics tracking of websites shows that, but there are plenty of reasons that would go down for w11. Nobody (<0.05%) are buying machines and installing W10.
eclipticplane 2 hours ago [-]
Engagement numbers went up and to the right because it requires multiple infuriating clicks and keystrokes to do basic things. Start menu randomly resorted your apps? 2 more clicks to find the app you wanted!
gloosx 14 minutes ago [-]
Im genuinely curious, what is the issue if you keep using windows 10?
I have a 10 year old macbook pro with a bootstrapped windows 10 for testing various things, and it looks like everything is kind of working the same way? Steam hardware survey shows that 32% of people are still using windows 10.
Besides "security updates", there is nothing to loose?
y-c-o-m-b 1 minutes ago [-]
If you don't care that a random person can get remote access to it, then no, I don't think you're "losing" anything. The biggest issue is no protection from 0-day security vulnerabilities, which Microsoft patched a lot of in 2025.
Havoc 6 hours ago [-]
Had to edit a .docx today to refresh my CV today...and realised oh...I don't have any more windows machines on hand anymore. Interesting how smoothly that faded away psychologically after 20+ years of windows use without me even overtly noticing.
Think MS is in for a rough ride on Windows. Short of corporate world - Excel/Sharpoint/AD - there is just no moat. Browsers work fine on all platforms, dev work is better on linux anyway and gaming on linux is rapidly becoming usable. And mac side is obviously competitive on various fronts too.
wyldberry 6 hours ago [-]
It will depend on if gaming studios continue to invest in a Linux Desktop experience. It's common to run your game server on Linux, but MS, partially through DRM support to the big media companies, creates an environment very strongly suited towards shipping your game binary to a hostile environment.
This is partially why major (effective) anti-cheats have migrated to the Kernel. Windows allows the big-budget games, which are often competitive games, to operate with a higher level of game integrity, which leads to more revenue generation.
MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series or similar quality device which prices a large part of the current windows gaming audience out.
As an example: it's not too expensive to buy a laptop that runs valorant, and then be funneled into the skin shop. You can get a lot more sales that way than you can through the crowd of people who are on MBP, though perhaps the MBP crew is more likely to be a whale.
note: Valorant is not supported on MacOS due to the anticheat requirement, but the hypothetical still stands.
rft 6 hours ago [-]
IMO the rise of handhelds like the Steam Deck has a decent chance of pushing big publishers to consider releasing for Linux/Proton. These handhelds fit the niche between smart phone and console gamers [1] that might have some potential growth left in it. Even the availability of Windows first handhelds was not as bad for Linux gaming as SteamOS and other gaming handheld focused Linux distros have been ported to them.
On the other hand the anti cheat side has been really ratcheting up with newer releases requiring Win 11 and Secure Boot. I somewhat hope and fear we might get a blessed version of SteamOS for the Deck that is heavily locked down and has kernel/hypervisor level anti cheat functions added to it. Essentially allowing for a boot mode similar to current consoles. While it goes against the open spirit of SteamOS, it might serve as an argument to invest a bit more into the Linux side, potentially improving the ecosystem as a whole.
Or all of it might be the usual "year of the Linux desktop" pipe dream.
[1] leaving out the Switch which is heavily focused on Nintendo IP and has comparatively weak hardware
nathan_compton 6 hours ago [-]
I have a Steam Deck and run Linux on all my machines and I am a pretty big Gamer. Typically I have no problems.
rft 5 hours ago [-]
Same, but I mostly play indie, older and/or singleplayer games. I now often don't even check ProtonDB when buying games, it has gotten that good. Anything AAA, multiplayer and new tends to cause problems due to anti cheats though.
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
Proton already runs the vast majority of games just fine. Gamers should categorically refuse rootkits and give the cold shoulder to studios that release games that require them. Anyone with a bit of maturity can do that, and nowadays there are thousands of other games to choose from.
p0w3n3d 55 minutes ago [-]
The gaming is the only reason that keeps me buying computer with windows
Regarding this article here, when you said about competitive gaming, I imagined a competition of that sort. I wonder how does a windows installation look in a big gaming competition that many players attend. It's never "BYOD" rather they get the windows preinstalled onto great gaming PC.
Do the players need to login to their Microsoft account? And Download their cloud cotents to someone else's computer? Or maybe there is a loophole for gaming contests that allow installation without cloud login?
GeekyBear 6 hours ago [-]
> MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series
The M5's GPU cores are expected to pick up the same 40% performance boost we just saw in the newly released iPhones.
AAA games written for the M4 already work just fine, the extra performance is needed when you are also emulating other graphics APIs and CPU instruction sets to run Windows games.
Windows on ARM has the same issues, but Prism isn't as good at x86 emulation.
wyldberry 5 hours ago [-]
Attainable isn't about benchmarks and performance, it's ecosystem such as supported kernel hooks for AAA games to invest the time in maintaining their anti-cheats and other parts of the game-as-a-service platform.
It's also about the market accessibility and penetration. When the base level MBA at it's lowest RAM settings is reliably running AAA games is when you might see more interest in the platform from those studios because much like the iOS market, people running Mac tend to be more readily monetized, especially through things like in-game cosmetics.
GeekyBear 5 hours ago [-]
The cheapest base M4 Mac Mini has 16 Gigs of RAM and plays AAA games written for Mac today.
The performance boost is needed when you are running Windows games under emulation.
Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux or Windows on ARM.
pjerem 4 hours ago [-]
> Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux
Nope because Proton is based on WINE, which stands for Wine Is Not An Emulator. Windows executables on Linux are running natively at full speed like any other Linux program.
Wine implements the Windows ABI and is just here to answer the system calls those executables are making.
In fact, most Windows games are running faster under Linux.
hu3 4 hours ago [-]
I remember running warcraft 3 under Wine in a Lan party.
At one point, during a Dota match, every single Windows machine crashed. And my Linux machine was the only one left in the server.
So not only does it run faster but it's more stable too.
GeekyBear 4 hours ago [-]
Sorry, but DirectX games don't work on top of the Vulkan graphics API used by Linux without an emulation layer provided by the Proton fork of Wine.
Wine may not be an emulator, but Proton includes a completely necessary translation layer if you intend to play DirectX games on Linux.
On Mac, Apple provides an open source emulation layer, D3DMetal, to translate from DirectX to Metal which is used by Wine.
Arcterus 3 hours ago [-]
DXVK, VKD3D, D3DMetal, etc. are translation layers. You're implying they're far more heavyweight than they actually are. The real reason Windows games don't run as well on Macs is that they're usually built for x86_64 instead of ARM.
As someone who has used both Windows and Linux to game on the same x86_64 device, the performance hit with Proton is pretty much negligible (and sometimes games actually run faster on Linux).
incompatible 6 hours ago [-]
If you have to play games, just have a separate Windows computer for that, and do everything else on a Linux box.
wyldberry 6 hours ago [-]
It's really easy for people who work in tech, or tech adjacent to recommend this, but in my experience, getting anyone to try nearly anything on Linux is very rough. Friends who wanted to "take control of privacy in their life" never made it beyond a week of trying to use a Linux distribution.
We have decades of training in the consumer market for very simple install patterns using UIs, and minimal messing with configurations. The people in gaming who overclock and tweak their settings are a huge minority in gaming. Those people are the ones most likely to be able to grok switching to Linux, but when they get there and find that most of their favorite apps don't work like they are used to, they go back to Windows or Mac.
My hypothesis is that for Linux Gaming to truly take off, you'll need a true desktop (not steamdeck which i use weekly) that makes it a handful of "clicks" to get whatever they want installed working. That means you'll need a commercially backed OS where developers maintain all the things needed to support near infinite peripheral connections for a variety of use cases, clear anti-cheat interfaces, and likely clear DRM hooks as well.
drnick1 1 hours ago [-]
> Friends who wanted to "take control of privacy in their life" never made it beyond a week of trying to use a Linux distribution.
I wonder why. Something like Linux Mint isn't materially different from Windows in terms of UI. Any peripheral sold as "Linux compatible" that you plug in will just work, and Steams allows to play practically any game that does not require an invasive rootkit (aka kernel-level anticheat).
I think a good first step would be to start using common FOSS programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, LibreOffice on Windows during a transition period.
upboundspiral 4 hours ago [-]
For myself personally the moment I stopped tweaking linux endlessly was when I installed the universalblue images (bazzite/aurora/bluefin). They made upgrading / using software so painless by providing sane defaults that I no longer feel the need to time my upgrades after the bugs have been patched out, or look up random commands to fix something. They are reliable enough that I feel comfortable recommending / installing them for family members, something which I would not have done before.
bil7 6 hours ago [-]
Dual boot seems like a more obvious recommendation? Or better still, play games on linux, except those that require kernel AC?
sbrother 2 hours ago [-]
Some forms of kernel anticheat make dual booting harder, too. I can’t play valorant since that version of Vanguard requires secure boot, which doesn’t seem to work with my dual boot setup unless I invest more time fiddling than I care to. Easier just not to play that game.
lucb1e 6 hours ago [-]
I find it annoying not to be able to run things at the same time. I've used dual boot many years ago but ran into the issue that one thing required one OS, another thing another OS. Kept having to close things down and reboot, reboot reboot. Nah, thanks. I'll use Linux with an offline Windows XP VM for Age of Empires and call it a day. One day, maybe I'll use a Windows 10 VM without Microsoft account to run modern software if the need arises
incompatible 6 hours ago [-]
If you can make it work, sure, but somebody will probably complain that it's too hard for the general population.
bbkane 6 hours ago [-]
I agree, but I'm not sure that's acceptable to the general population
incompatible 6 hours ago [-]
Fine, but the general population will have to accept whatever fate Microsoft has in mind for them.
Edit: I'd guess a lot of them just follow whatever instructions they are given, and create the online account. If Microsoft thought there was a chance of serious rebellion, they wouldn't be doing it.
RestartKernel 6 hours ago [-]
> And mac side is obviously competitive on various fronts too.
After a lifetime of Windows use, I'd even say MacOS is almost on par with Linux for development, while Windows' best feature on this front is WSL so you don't have to use Windows.
lynndotpy 6 hours ago [-]
I agree with you here, as someone who uses all three (mostly Linux).
IMO the two biggest pains with MacOS is (1) brew is not as good as any other package manager in my experience (mostly in bugs that need manual fixing) and (2) Docker naturally is much worse (not just for performance, but for requiring 'Docker desktop'.) All the other pains are just the myriad niceities I miss from a lifetime of mostly Linux that MacOS just can never have.
hamandcheese 4 hours ago [-]
> IMO the two biggest pains with MacOS is (1) brew is not as good as any other package manager in my experience (mostly in bugs that need manual fixing)
I've been happily not using brew for a couple years now. Nix can function as a brew replacement without much fuss. However it lacks a simple alternative to brew services (for that you have to enter the rabbit hole which is home-manager).
denkmoon 3 hours ago [-]
I like devbox (jetlify), you get nix with its packages but also integrates process compose for running services.
pjerem 4 hours ago [-]
Also macOS UI is stuck in the past but not in a good way : they never fixed their windows management which is still stuck on the old paradigm that the user is using an application and not only a window of an application.
The Dock is the biggest illustration of this : good luck if you have opened more than two windows of the same app.
Marsymars 3 hours ago [-]
The command + ~ shortuct is one of my favourite things about macOS; I wish Windows had that too.
jazzyjackson 6 hours ago [-]
You're forgetting business critical software outside of office that's windows only or windows/macos.
Stuff like Quickbooks, AutoCAD/Autodesk, off the top of my head
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
QuickBooks Desktop only exists in an Enterprise edition anymore (which is expensive), if you want to run still-supported versions of it. Intuit is pushing everyone hard to QuickBooks Online.
ecshafer 6 hours ago [-]
I've never worked at Autodesk, and I don't use CAD. But I see they have a Web version of AutoCAD. I assume there are a bunch of Autodesk employees on Hackernews who can correct me, and I know there's probably a boat load of issue for a huge legacy project like that. But how long until AutoCAD web is just AutoCAD? Or some competitor a'la Figma is in the web?
pathartl 5 hours ago [-]
It will _never_ get to that point unless they port the original codebase to WASM or something. Or another product comes around that's so market upsetting that it takes the crown. The same can be said for Adobe products.
mixmastamyk 6 hours ago [-]
Moving to cloud, or very rare for the general public to be aware of them.
jazzyjackson 5 hours ago [-]
Well, I wasn't trying to dispute that general home uses can get by on Linux, just that industry is a large user base that isn't going to switch because the software they depend on is tied to an OS. QuickBooks is used by a lot of people, and their web product is not an alternative to the desktop app
mixmastamyk 5 hours ago [-]
If it isn't it will be, as non-subscription software is phased out by big companies.
gerdesj 5 hours ago [-]
All of which are very easily replaceable. That list is laughable for an example of lock in.
I used to run AutoCAD on a 80286 with a maths co-pro with 1 MB RAM. It has changed somewhat since!
Who gives a shit about QB? - you could just run it in a VM and it probably runs under Wine. You can also just switch accounting vendor - there are quite a few. Double book keeping is a good 600 years old and can be considered pretty open source these days.
You may even do some real good to your business (if you think you need QB) by going old school and really getting to grips with the numbers. Buy three huge ledgers and label them: "Sales" "Purchase" and "Nominal" or "General". Also grab an exercise book to act as a cash book and a couple of notebooks to document the system. Now, you will need to do docs too so you will need a drawing board to design your forms ...
Now CAD is not the most common business software in use by anyone which is probably why you went for AutoCAD (which you have heard of), rather than, say, Solidworks or Catia. Autodesk is a vendor and not a stuff.
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
QB Desktop doesn't run reliably under WINE; it doesn't run reliably under Windows 11 for Arm, either.
fragmede 58 minutes ago [-]
Fascinating. I believe you, but what sort of stuff doesn't work? Video games and their graphics manage to work under Wine/forks and those are quite complicated APIs to not-emulate.
typpilol 6 hours ago [-]
They've been saying this for years now.
The problem is there's no real alternative.
Your grandma is not going to use Linux. So the choice is between windows and mac.. and the truth is a lot of apps people use are windows only.
I don't see windows losing desktop share anytime soon.
0xTJ 6 hours ago [-]
The average grandparent isn't installing an OS, they're using whatever comes on the device. If you had Ubuntu pre-installed and automatically updating, there isn't going to be that much of a difference for how many less-tech-savy people use the computer.
Microsoft has a strong cycle of "applications run on Windows" -> "device vendors choose to bundle Windows" -> "people use applications on Windows", but that has been eroded, in part thanks to Wine and the work put in by people at Valve.
If someone who uses their computer to browse the web and check the email picked up a laptop pre-installed with Ubuntu, they'd likely be perfectly fine with it.
fuzzfactor 5 hours ago [-]
>a strong cycle of "applications run on Windows" -> "device vendors choose to bundle Windows" -> "people use applications on Windows",
>but that has been eroded, in part thanks to Wine and the work put in by people at Valve.
Eroded even more so by the user-hostile approach of Microsoft itself.
Exactly with things like being a complete failure to recognize a strong valid need for general users to only opt-in to an account according to their own personal needs alone. Not with Microsoft or Google or anybody else known to be a source of unwanted ads or anti-professional annoyances.
Why abandon a remaining security element that can protect against PII compromise like no other?
It's just sad to lose an essential feature that has always been built-in to Windows since the beginning, which helped make Windows into a far better business machine than would have been otherwise possible.
And why now when security is more important than ever?
lucb1e 6 hours ago [-]
Have you tried it? I see where you're coming from but don't think it would work out that 'no grandma can use it'
My plan for years has been to install Linux Mint + Cinnamon for my grandma when she next needs a new laptop... but she still hasn't needed one :(. And she's slowly getting too old for any new computer
Every Windows upgrade was a big change again. The UI would change each time, Windows Live Mail got discontinued, Office got ribbons, etc. Why reinvent the wheel each time? I've replaced:
- Windows Live Mail with Thunderbird, that has been stable.
- Microsoft Office with Libreoffice, that has been stable.
- The next item on the list was going to be Windows itself, since Cinnamon hasn't significantly changed since I started using Linux over ten years ago. It still has a start menu, system tray, window list at the bottom (without the windows collapsing and hiding!), everything made for usability and working as you expect.
The only exception is (grand)parents that need custom software. E.g. my mom has custom software (from Hema I think? Or Bruna maybe?) for editing photo albums to then send it to a print shop and get a real photo album. That will be web based nowadays I imagine. I should ask her but that could still be a barrier to switching
Edit: Similar issue on Android btw. There isn't one function that my (grand)parents use, that Android 16 has that Android 4 did not. The only thing that keeps changing under them is UI. Sure, developer APIs got nicer, support for dual-frequency GNSS is there, screens got taller... none of that needed to touch the UI. Sadly Google does a phenomenal job of obsoleting old OS versions quickly so you need to keep buying new. EU law for longer device support doesn't even help because you still need to upgrade that OS and can't simply use an LTS with security updates
avhception 52 minutes ago [-]
The last Windows versions my parents actually used was Windows XP, maybe they encountered Vista somewhere for a brief moment. In my capacity as the family sysadmin, I've switched them to Linux around this time. Ubuntu first, now Debian. XFCE back in the day, Gnome3 since a few years. I think they'd hardly recognize a modern windows installation any more. Gnome3 has it's warts, but I really hope it's here to stay, at least in the broad strokes of the UI paradigm.
linguae 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t know…for people who can do their computing on a Chromebook, a Linux distribution would be suitable.
The people who will have the hardest time switching to Linux are those who need proprietary software products that are unavailable for Linux and whose needs are not met by open-source alternatives. Microsoft Office is still the standard for office software, and the Adobe Creative Cloud is still the standard for many creatives.
If LibreOffice ever reached 100% compatibility and feature parity with Microsoft Office, and if the Adobe Creative Cloud ever got ported to Linux, then this could spell trouble for Windows.
lucb1e 5 hours ago [-]
> for people who can do their computing on a Chromebook, a Linux distribution would be suitable
That sounds reasonable, given that
> ChromeOS is built on top of the Linux kernel. Originally based on Ubuntu, its base was changed to Gentoo Linux in February 2010 (--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS)
avazhi 5 hours ago [-]
> and gaming on linux is rapidly becoming usable.
I hate Microsoft and Windows just as much as the next self-respecting nerd, but this is no less a lol right now than it was 20 years ago. It’s like Linux users all play the same 15 titles that have Linux support and think those 15 games reflect broad ecosystem support.
scheeseman486 3 hours ago [-]
It's incredible to see people still confidently say this, to be so sure about something that would take only like a minute of research to find out they are completely wrong.
hollandheese 5 hours ago [-]
You clearly haven't been paying attention or are being disingenuous. Most games released now just work on Linux thanks to Proton. There's a reason the Steam Deck is blowing away any other PC gaming handhelds.
pjerem 4 hours ago [-]
Except for games with anti cheats, can you quote from your head three games the last 10-15 years that aren’t running perfectly on Linux ?
Because from my ~1 500 titles steam library, I can think of one game that I had issues with. And even this particular game (which is Tomb Raider 2013, btw) worked perfectly fine after a little hack. And ironically the "hack" was checking a checkbox in Steam to force using the Windows version of the game instead of the official Linux port.
87967646537543 5 hours ago [-]
Your delusions are pathological.
presto8 4 hours ago [-]
Discovered Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC edition recently. It's great! It is supposed to get security updates through 2032. It doesn't have Cortana, OneDrive, CoPilot, Edge, etc. (Which is a good thing IMO.) Nor does it require a cloud account to use.
pier25 1 hours ago [-]
Does steam work on that version?
That's pretty much the only reason I use Windows these days.
xvv 1 minutes ago [-]
Steam works, and so do very competitive games with picky anti-cheats!
SeanAnderson 3 hours ago [-]
Are there any limitations with this to be aware of? Are Hypervisor/Docker/WSL2 all supported?
I'm trying to decide if I want to transition my work computer to Linux or Windows 10 LTSC. Most of my day is spent working inside of WSL2. So, it kind of seems like I should just get on with using Linux native, but several decades of sunken cost have kept me on Windows. I don't think I have a desire to 'upgrade' to Windows 11 and Windows 10 Pro is just about EOL.
nwellinghoff 21 minutes ago [-]
Wsl2 features like nested virtualization only work in the win11 version. The ltsc releases seem like the only viable option at this point.
trolan 2 hours ago [-]
The only mid level hurdle you'll encounter is no Microsoft store. It was only an issue for me when gaming, but steam was fully supported. Same for Win 11 LTSC.
xvv 2 minutes ago [-]
I am on an LTSC install. Installing the Microsoft store is as easy as typing `wsreset -i` into an admin powershell.
winkelmann 28 minutes ago [-]
Not sure if this still works, but you used to be able to run "wsreset.exe -i" to install the Microsoft Store. The command kicks off the process in the background, so there's no progress indicator, but the Store app just appeared after a few minutes.
3 hours ago [-]
sbrother 2 hours ago [-]
Wait, is that a product that one can buy? It sounds like it would solve most of my issues with Windows.
how do you buy windows 10 LTSC without being an enterprise?
EvanAnderson 1 hours ago [-]
Unless it has changed recently you need to have a minimum qty. license purchase. Any good reseller will sell you the one license of LTSC and pad the rest of the order with the cheapest qualifying license in the catalog. (In the past it was DVD playback licenses at a couple of bucks apiece, for example.) I was able to get licensing for my father's sole proprietorship DBA from a big name reseller w/o furnishing any kind of business-related docs and paying with his personal credit card. (In his case it was Windows Server and CALs, but the premise is the same for LTSC.) You'll probably have to talk to a sales gerbil but it's imminently feasible.
how does that download get me an activation key for it? As far as i know, you cannot just pay for one license of LTSC
HaZeust 37 minutes ago [-]
I'm going to keep it real with you bro, I don't remember how it works, but the video below has been saved in my YouTube watch later for a few months and I think it's what I followed when I tried (I eventually moved onto Linux anyway):
I'm not a Windows person at all and only follow developments in Windows drama sporadically. Is it even an option to first install an old build of Windows 11 (21H2, 22H2, 23H2, ...) and hope that an update will bring the system up to a secure state? Or will it feel like installing Windows XP in 2008?
lax4ever 6 hours ago [-]
Autounattend files are about to become far more popular...
All the lamentations of having to tinker with Linux to get it to work properly are rapidly approaching a nuclear level irony bomb...
lax4ever 6 hours ago [-]
I understand the desire to get out from under the MS umbrella, as there are definitely legitimate gripes. But I also see the irony that if you have the technical ability to install a Linux distro, you definitely have the technical ability to use an autounattend XML.
rolph 5 hours ago [-]
you would also be perceptive enough to realise, you are resisting an openly hostile actor, and the apron strings should be cut.
lax4ever 5 hours ago [-]
I don't know about openly hostile. Definitely making moves that the user base openly disagree with and think are, at best, very bad decisions, but I don't think they have crossed the "hostile" line. And MS is not alone with those kinds of decisions.
Apple may not "force" you to use an iCloud account for their devices, but they sure push it hard.
As far as Linux communities go, Red Hat, Arch, Cisco, and even Ubuntu have also done their fair share of "bad decisions".
rolph 5 hours ago [-]
everybody else is doing it doesnt excuse the issue.
when users make a technical effort to workaround these bad decisions, and you keep chasing after them, subverting said technical measures, in order to enforce said bad decisions, this has gone far beyond being bad decisions; it is being done on purpose to prevent users from opting out of a Hostile ecosystem.
lax4ever 4 hours ago [-]
It doesn't excuse the issue, but it certainly makes it harder to step away from them solely on that argument.
MaximilianEmel 5 hours ago [-]
Search for "Local-only commands removal" on the page for the relevant section:
Local-only commands removal: We are removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE). While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use. Users will need to complete OOBE with internet and a Microsoft account, to ensure device is setup correctly.
kace91 5 hours ago [-]
>While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens
Poor people. Surely Microsoft is fixing this by giving them a proper local skip that doesn’t bypass the other critical setup?
altairprime 5 hours ago [-]
Presumably the business/enterprise editions still do?
jwitthuhn 2 hours ago [-]
Enterprise might but Professional sure doesn't.
kirenida 38 minutes ago [-]
I just installed a copy of 25H2 on a laptop with a previously saved Professional licence.
You can just choose to create a "work or school account" and then leave the domain name empty.
jwitthuhn 8 minutes ago [-]
Interesting, will give that a try next time. I guess I never looked because I had assumed that option made you connect to an existing domain.
Marsymars 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe not for the long term; business/enterprise are mostly using domain accounts for non-server systems.
packetlost 5 hours ago [-]
The requiring internet part is particularly egregious, wow.
major505 5 hours ago [-]
Because it seems that microsoft could not shitify windows experience anymore.
I like windows, Its a great system specially for being productive, but the godamn start menu using react and edge and the online requirements are a pain in the ass.
Sometimes it just hangs while you click the windows key. All I want is to open notepad++...
Marsymars 3 hours ago [-]
I've found the start menu is perfectly responsive if you disable its internet results.
Sounds like more lies: you can still use autounattend.xml as far as I know. If they broke this it would break almost all the top corporate enterprise stuff
(same reason they still have network printer driver vulnerabilities because they refuse to fix old shit in the name of backward compatibility)
lanfeust6 5 hours ago [-]
"critical"
ferguess_k 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder which teams are working on these features. I'd like to meet with them in person. There are a lot to discuss.
maltalex 4 hours ago [-]
They probably know exactly what your thoughts are about this change.
zuminator 36 minutes ago [-]
I'm more curious about what their thoughts are. They have to know what the community thinks about these moves. What do they intend to accomplish? I'd like to hear the roadmap from the lion's mouth, so to speak, if they have some kind of justification that would make sense to the skeptical observer.
EdwardDiego 2 hours ago [-]
I'm assuming you can identify by the heavy drinking to drown feelings of self-loathing.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4 hours ago [-]
You could discuss how huge their salaries are.
da_chicken 5 hours ago [-]
They've been marching towards this since Windows 8. Sysadmins have said this was coming since then. As soon as they added Microsoft account login integration this is what we all knew they were going to do.
wewewedxfgdf 2 hours ago [-]
If I was Microsoft I would want the latest version of Windows running on every machine there is - old/new/slow/fast.
It's a platform which means you need it everywhere.
Microsoft Windows has really lost its way.
throwaway106382 6 hours ago [-]
Bit the bullet and deleted the Windows partition from my Fedora dual boot. Good riddance. Will never give Microsoft another dime as long as I live
jasoneckert 4 hours ago [-]
Even though the article says that Microsoft removed the “bypassnro” workaround earlier this year, I just used it earlier this evening to set up a new Win11 PC for a neighbour successfully (she didn't have a Microsoft account on her previous Win10 laptop, and wanted it the same way).
At the part of the initial setup where it asks to connect to a network, press Shift + F10 to open the Command Prompt. Then, type oobe\bypassnro and press Enter. The system will reboot and start the initial setup again in a non-network mode that allows you to create a local user account.
EvanAnderson 4 hours ago [-]
The new HP PCs I've deployed recently did not have current Windows 11 builds installed. I tend to think OEMs are being slow to update their master images.
mwpmaybe 3 hours ago [-]
I did the "start ms-cxh:localonly" trick yesterday on a fresh install of Windows 11 25H2 and it worked fine, so...?
celeritascelery 2 hours ago [-]
I have been holding off upgrading to windows 11, but it sounds like I should do it before I lose the ability to upgrade without an account.
llmthrow0827 3 hours ago [-]
I recently bought a Windows laptop, and the first thing I did was figure out how to not create a MS account, and next was to remove all the spyware/bloatware, and then after that configure WSL.
When you get past all the garbage, it's a fine OS to work in. Then again, so is MacOS, many flavors of Linux, etc. As the importance of the OS itself becomes less and less important for general consumers when most people live in the browser for their day-to-day job, Microsoft will find it harder to sell licenses (maybe they already are?), and they will resort to more ways to extract money from users, driving more of them away.
fwiw, I prefer the ergonomics of Windows to any other OS for daily activities and non-dev work, but it's such a weak preference that I wouldn't hesitate to switch if they ever actually force any of this MS account or always-online spyware without recourse.
jrnng 5 hours ago [-]
Time for me to go all in on Linux. Ubuntu has been my daily driver on dual boot with windows since MS started using dark patterns to opt in to OneDrive.
My next build will be solo boot!
My work machine is a Mac though I don't get any say in that.
MathMonkeyMan 8 minutes ago [-]
I just upgraded my recently bought X1 Carbon Gen 12 from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. And now the sound stutters occasionally :( My guess is it's something with Pipewire replacing PulseAudio, where some apps now use a PulseAudio shim on top of Pipewire. Or maybe drivers I dunno.
But the fingerprint scanner works. The fingerprint scanner works!
Everything else has been fine.
acidburnNSA 5 hours ago [-]
Good choice! I've been solo boot Linux for years and absolutely love it.
lanfeust6 5 hours ago [-]
I recently tried out Kubuntu and am pleased. It's as Windows-like as I want it to be. The extra work to deal with drivers so far has been minor.
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
Surely, at the lowest level, there needs to be some kind of a local account. I would imagine ripping out the very concept of a local account to be totally infeasible. As long as that's true, I'd expect there to be a way to create one, even if that way ultimately no longer comes from Microsoft.
Marsymars 3 hours ago [-]
AFAIK you can easily create a local account after initial setup and use that for whatever you want. As you allude to, there's a whole bunch of Windows functionality that relies on (or allows) local accounts.
pjerem 5 hours ago [-]
And what’s your point ? Surely the users can continue to be treated like that ?
Continuing to use an operating system, the only software that have full control over your digital life, from a company that have so much disrespect for their users and that is actively hostile against your choices, at one point that’s Stockholm Syndrome.
t0bia_s 38 minutes ago [-]
Creating bootable USB disc of LTSC Enterprise IoT version of Windows by Rufus let you set up local account and skip it during installation.
LTSC is basically debloated version of Win with options to turn of updates or get just security ones.
eadmund 3 hours ago [-]
If customers keep trying to do something … let them do it? Charge them to do it?
It’s crazy to me: folks quite clearly want to run Windows 11 without an account. What is it worth to Microsoft let someone do that? $12? $144? $1,728?
avhception 43 minutes ago [-]
That's a bit like asking to get a "smart" TV without the spyware / adware. Sure, you could pay more! But they can also just take both your money and that other money. What are you gonna do, buy a non-"smart" TV? :)
CamperBob2 2 hours ago [-]
The problem is, the more you're willing to pay, the more you're worth to them.
(Which is also why so many services don't let you pay to get rid of ads.)
waterheater 5 hours ago [-]
This is a bad idea. Now, with that established...
Microsoft has many intelligent people who work there and certainly do many risk vs. reward calculations for each modification to Windows. From Microsoft's perspective, they have much more control over the OS when everyone's linked to a cloud account. I morally disagree with that approach, but the security issues with Windows come from unpatched systems. They tried to win over software developers by creating WSL, but the privacy- and security-minded software developers never really bit.
Also, consider that Microsoft's future is obviously pivoted toward cloud infrastructure. Yes, they smartly have other ventures, but all those ventures will rely on Microsoft cloud infrastructure in some way. Server farms are a much better business model, from Microsoft's perpective, especially because it pulls Microsoft into the domains of true wealth: land acquisition, energy production, and data mining.
barrkel 6 hours ago [-]
I've switched to Linux. It's easier at this point. It's less slick, but I absolutely do not trust MS any more.
scrps 2 hours ago [-]
Anyone still using windows should plug that hole and switch to linux or apple.
If you are trapped on windows due to a specific piece of software running a virtual machine on linux is your friend. Boot up windows only when you need it and the only thing MS gets is one datastream of your single use of their product and not your entire digital existence. Same also applies for Apple + vm.
Either choice on its worst day is better than what windows has become on it's best.
eimrine 16 minutes ago [-]
Is it possible to run anything from apple without any accounts?
patates 1 hours ago [-]
I remember the first time I clicked the Start button on Windows 95 and the sheer excitement I felt seeing all those software categories. My dislike for how the newest versions of the operating system work is on a similar magnitude to that initial thrill.
vivzkestrel 25 minutes ago [-]
I have said this before and I'll say it again. I am happy to pay 3x prices for a "Windows Optimal" version. 0 telemetry, 0 unwanted apps, 0 bloatware, 0 shady tactics for privacy bypass or making things intentionally hard to tweak, 2x the performance of Windows 7 as promise. If the hardware has gotten better since the era of windows 7 , why do I feel the software is going backwards. If I had a million dollars, I would advertise my request for such a windows version everywhere on the planet from Madison square to NYtimes and even write letters to Satya Nadella
eimrine 18 minutes ago [-]
They use to get their 3 prices per every week of your telemetry, even snoop-TV gives vendors more than a dollar per average day of owning.
vpShane 6 hours ago [-]
'We'll never require you to need an online account to log in to your system'
Look how that changed.
Windows Recall 'We'll never use this in any bad way whatsoever'
Sure thing.
Windows 10 goes EOL in 8 days, with the EU forcing Microsoft to give their customer bases security patches. Not anywhere else though, and not in the U.S.
What was the end goal with that? Move everybody over to Windows 11; on their EOL page it lists places you can donate your old non-working hardware to. Forcing users to do what? Buy new overpriced hardware when what they have is fine?
People jumped to Windows 7 out of spite; with Linux Desktop marketshare still slowly, steadily rising over the last 10 months. Windows 7 is EOL and no longer receives security patches, so security wise people are a lot worse off than what was anticipated.
Here's the thing, I started up an old iPad last night and the e-mail no longer exists nor can be created, so I can't do a lost password, I can't log in, so I can't install apps, or even format the device without some 'Account Lock'
I own this iPad, as in: it's mine. Why should I, and why would I want to put MY device's access and security on the whims of company?
They want to own our hardware, and our software.
I for one preach Linux Desktop, Manjaro XFCE for me. I think people are sticking with Windows 7 despite it being EOL because games and their software will for the most part not run in to issues linux gaming may be facing.
That ain't the way. Your computer. Your choice. No cloud accounts/everything being logged on the desktop that people do, no 'requirements' to utilize the new software, and no 'requirements' to connect people to cloud backup systems to later coerce and push people to buy.
brian-armstrong 6 hours ago [-]
> People jumped to Windows 7 out of spite; with Linux Desktop marketshare still slowly, steadily rising over the last 10 months. Windows 7 is EOL and no longer receives security patches, so security wise people are a lot worse off than what was anticipated.
If you saw the same report of that, it turned out to be a UA anomaly. Most likely very few people actually went back to Win 7, which now has quite bad compatibility with newer hardware and software.
richardfey 6 hours ago [-]
> with Linux Desktop marketshare still slowly, steadily rising over the last 10 months.
Where do you get these figures from? Is there a sensible % increase?
I've been using Linux desktop for a decade now and I am certain it still used by few, and nothing has changed recently. Or you're telling me 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop?
fao_ 6 hours ago [-]
Probably not 2026, but sure, by 2030. A fair chunk of the younger generation do give a shit about privacy (see also: torrenting on the rise again), Linux is mostly unattended with respect to configuring things these days, and things like "sound" and "games" are for the most part a thing of the past outside of 4 or 5 specific games that require kernel-level anticheat.
rolph 5 hours ago [-]
yes torrenting is on the rise, and a lot more people seem to be aware of private torrents.
typpilol 6 hours ago [-]
2025 is surly the year of Linux desktop this time!
badc0ffee 6 hours ago [-]
> Here's the thing, I started up an old iPad last night and the e-mail no longer exists nor can be created, so I can't do a lost password, I can't log in, so I can't install apps, or even format the device without some 'Account Lock'
If it has a passcode and you remember the passcode, you should still be able to wipe the device with Apple Configurator?
If the situation is that you don't have a passcode, but you do have an iCloud account where you don't remember the password and can't access the email address, and either don't have access to the recovery phone number or never specified one, then yeah. You might need to find your receipt and bring it to an Apple store to be reset.
AJ007 4 hours ago [-]
This should have been the EU approach to Apple. Instead we got third party "App Stores" to install software Apple still approves and controls. It could have been a three paragraph law.
astafrig 5 hours ago [-]
> I own this iPad, as in: it's mine. Why should I, and why would I want to put MY device's access and security on the whims of company?
Great question! You did configure it that way, so it might be worth asking yourself.
john01dav 4 hours ago [-]
It is impossible to configure recent ipads in any other way. There are no established 3rd party OSes that you can install, even with great effort. IOS does not respect user freedom. As an example, see the restrictions on running code that Apple didn't approve of (directly, or, in the EU, indirectly).
pessimizer 6 hours ago [-]
Last time I saw stats Linux desktop marketshare, somebody said it was up to 6%. That's astonishing. Imagine it getting to 15-20%. Imagine that many people owning their own computers again. Then all that's left is keeping IBM/Redhat's grubby hands off it.
leoapagano 6 hours ago [-]
> Last time I saw stats Linux desktop marketshare, somebody said it was up to 6%. That's astonishing.
I wouldn't get too excited about that. That might just be because people are moving off of desktops entirely and now only own mobile devices, a market where Linux may as well not exist (excluding Android). The number goes up, because at large, the portion of people who run Linux desktops are less likely to pivot to using only a mobile phone as they tend to be hobbyists/enthusiasts.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 6 hours ago [-]
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, personally it is astonishing to me that is only 6%. I do buy the corporates explanation. I even buy the gaming explanation ( despite only heavily online games being 'better' on Windows -- from developer's perspective ). But everyone else? I can only assume it has to do with how little personal computing is done today not on smartphones.
typpilol 6 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing that's 6% increase in users not 6% market share
protocolture 6 hours ago [-]
>on their EOL page it lists places you can donate your old non-working hardware to. Forcing users to do what? Buy new overpriced hardware when what they have is fine?
Devils advocate. Everyone really should be on Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0 in the Windows space. Windows 11 is really there as a checkpoint to force people to upgrade to more secure hardware. If you dont care about security, you probably dont care about security updates, you can remain with Windows 10.
Thats not to say that they went about this in a pro consumer way. Its been bungled. But specifically on the point of hardware upgrades, for your average windows user the hardware isnt really "fine" as you put it.
>Here's the thing, I started up an old iPad last night and the e-mail no longer exists nor can be created, so I can't do a lost password, I can't log in, so I can't install apps, or even format the device without some 'Account Lock'
On the apple front, they get 10x the amount of flak for "enabling" stolen hardware to be reformatted and reused, than they get for bricking people who lose access to an account.
Recovery is expendable in Apple town. Recovery of iCloud accounts enabled identity theft and personal photos of celebs to be released. Recovery of hardware enables theft. Its a losing proposition.
>That ain't the way. Your computer. Your choice.
We really need a hardware path without conflicting priorities.
weikju 5 hours ago [-]
The problem is the protection against malware is rolled in with protection against the end user. This leads down a dark path and it seems we collectively have decided end users are less important than the corporate profits and protection against malware.
protocolture 5 hours ago [-]
Microsoft wants you to have a laptop with the goal that you will use it to log on to work services or play games.
Apple wants you to have a tablet to spend money on apps.
You need hardware built outside of that paradigm to have a hope of avoiding a mess of locked down anti consumer nonsense.
Xelbair 6 hours ago [-]
>Devils advocate. Everyone really should be on Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0 in the Windows space.
nope. only useful for corporate setting. We should be able to run anything we want, however we want, without any arbitrary requirements by MS. Especially if it was proven already that it isn't a hard requirement to run the OS - just an arbitrary setting.
It just paves road for more invasive DRM and even more locked down systems.
If they have issue with crashes, and taking blame for corporate AV failures - don't give out kernel level access to them.
>Recovery is expendable in Apple town. Recovery of iCloud accounts enabled identity theft and personal photos of celebs to be released. Recovery of hardware enables theft. Its a losing proposition.
I don't care as a customer. I want my data, I don't care about corporate profit margins - and I shouldn't need to. Data theft is pure service issue of them not vetting recovery enough - due to cutting costs on it.
p_ing 5 hours ago [-]
They're not "arbitrary requirements". They're requirements to enable VBS, one of the largest leaps in kernel security history.
protocolture 6 hours ago [-]
>nope. only useful for corporate setting. We should be able to run anything we want, however we want, without any arbitrary requirements by MS. Especially if it was proven already that it isn't a hard requirement to run the OS - just an arbitrary setting.
Right, crazy I swear I hung a lantern on that, implying you could just keep using Windows 10.
>I don't care as a customer. I want my data, I don't care about corporate profit margins - and I shouldn't need to. Data theft is pure service issue of them not vetting recovery enough - due to cutting costs on it.
Right, crazy again I swear I thought I wrapped up by saying we needed a hardware path without conflicting priorities.
Lammy 6 hours ago [-]
> If you dont care about security
Microsoft's idea of Security is security from me, not security for me. They use this overloaded language because it's so hard to argue against. It's a thought-terminating cliché. Oh you must not care about being secure huh???
protocolture 6 hours ago [-]
Microsofts idea of security is security from being blamed for large scale breaches. I dont think they think about you or me at all tbh.
My point was, if you dont care about Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0, then you probably dont also care about security updates. Not whatever insult you thought I was making.
If your thoughts were terminated, that was entirely self inflicted.
john01dav 4 hours ago [-]
These so-called security features have wildly different threat models than other security features.
Secure Boot and TPM are ways to attest that what is running is what Microsoft signed. This is only useful if I think that non-nation-state attackers will have physical access to my hardware. Nation-state attackers can probably get something signed with the public secure boot keys. TPM is just more of the same — it lets the software running on a computer verify that it has not been changed from what Microsoft signed. If I controlled the signing key (perhaps every manufactured device has its own key that is sold with the device, which I can then sign whatever OS I want with), then I could gain some security without this control loss, and that would be useful.
Regarding bitlocker, I can encrypt my drive just fine with no TPM as long as I do not expect my OS to be tampered with (which requires physical access or running something untrusted as root). I can simply use a long password with many hash cycles, so if someone stole my drive they could not decrypt it without the password. But, if the key were in the TPM, then nation-state actors could probably get it back out, depending on exact implementation (for example for biometric unlock). So, in this way, using a TPM is less secure.
We should also do away with TPMs in most cases, since all that they serve to do is attest that the corporation with the keys to the TPM decided what was running and that no one interfered with that. It's DRM, plain and simple.
There are other security updates that I may want, however, even if I am not concerned about giving an attacker root of physical access. For example, Windows has had vulnerabilities which can be exploited over a network.
josephcsible 5 hours ago [-]
> if you dont care about Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0, then you probably dont also care about security updates
Huh? I certainly care about the latter but not the former, and I doubt I'm in the minority.
protocolture 5 hours ago [-]
Why, if you dont mind my asking?
And how long would you expect Microsoft to write updates for computers with insecure boot chains, and secure boot chains? How much should they spend on mitigations for classes of attack that you can shut down just by updating? Why would they risk being seen to support a platform, that they consider a potential vector of incredibly bad PR, just for end user convenience? They have been browbeaten into being extremely security conscious, especially after the SMB stuff.
Personally, my Win 10 laptops are becoming Debian laptops as god intended.
josephcsible 4 hours ago [-]
> Why, if you dont mind my asking?
Because I care that I'm secure, but I don't care that my computer isn't secure from me.
> how long would you expect Microsoft to write updates for computers with insecure boot chains, and secure boot chains?
Forever, because the same code works for both unless they go out of their way to do extra work for it not to.
> How much should they spend on mitigations for classes of attack that you can shut down just by updating?
There are basically zero attacks against ordinary consumers that SB/TPM protect from. The kinds of attacks regular people need to worry about are resolved through regular updates that don't need those things.
> Why would they risk being seen to support a platform, that they consider a potential vector of incredibly bad PR, just for end user convenience?
What are you talking about? There's no bad PR in allowing SB/TPM to be off. The bad PR comes from requiring them to be on.
> They have been browbeaten into being extremely security conscious, especially after the SMB stuff.
SB/TPM aren't actual security. They're DRM masquerading as security.
> Personally, my Win 10 laptops are becoming Debian laptops as god intended.
That's good, but it doesn't invalidate any of the above.
Dylan16807 4 hours ago [-]
For secure boot and TPM, I'm not worried about someone breaking into my house and hacking my bios. I'm worried about getting a virus. Secure boot is useless but updates are important.
For bitlocker, I like it. But I use the password version that doesn't need any particular hardware.
How long do I expect updates? Well for starters, not even ten years of support for processors that were state of the art in 2018 is very bad. And windows 10 stopped being the newest option in 2021, so would ten years from that be so burdensome for security updates?
And no it's not a PR risk to release updates for windows 10. You don't need to stretch that hard, please.
jazzyjackson 5 hours ago [-]
Are we sure this is the case for all Win11 builds? Or does this change only apply to users in the insiders program on the Dev channel (I presume you just be logged in with your Microsoft account to configure a machine with an insider build of Windows)
I recently was able to purchase a Win11 pro license from Newegg to upgrade a Win11 home machine without creating a MS account, that's probably an easier hole to patch if they truly want to prevent offline use entirely.
exabrial 5 hours ago [-]
Why is _anyone_ still using Windows?
mattmaroon 57 minutes ago [-]
I prefer it. Always have. Don’t have any objection to logging in with my online account, in fact I would even if I didn’t have to so all my stuff just syncs. Getting a new PC is now finally as easy as getting a new phone, just sign in and let it sync. Anyone who owns a cell phone and is worried about the privacy issues here is being ridiculous.
Mac users fellate themselves over Mac usability. But if I click a file in Windows and hit the delete key you know what it does? It deletes the file. You know what Mac does? It makes the “bonk” sound and nothing happens. (Or at least it did, been years since I used it.)
I tried to like Mac for years, even using it as my daily driver for two straight, because their hardware is so good, but I just never could because of 100 little things like that. MacOS sucks.
The concerns of the people who inhabit this tiny little enclave of the internet are alien to 99% of the population at least.
acidburnNSA 5 hours ago [-]
A lot of the corporate IT workforce is heavily invested in Microsoft systems. It creates somewhat of a co-dependency.
I only run Linux at home. My mom also runs Linux, though she doesn't really know a lot about it. If I could I would have run only Linux at my previous corporate jobs. But the IT people balk: how will windows defender work in Linux? At one point they did install windows defender on Linux and it ground a fine machine basically to a halt.
da_chicken 4 hours ago [-]
> But the IT people balk: how will windows defender work in Linux?
They don't think that at all. They probably know more about Linux than you do because I guarantee half the systems they manage are already running it.
What they think about are the applications that the people who actually make the decisions at your companies refuse to migrate away from. They know the cost of hiring Linux sysadmins vs Windows sysadmins. They think about everyone in every other company and how much harder they are to hire when suddenly none of them know how to use their office computer when they're hired. They think about the half dozen or so business critical applications which genuinely don't have Linux equivalents. None of the executives, nobody in HR, nobody in accounting or business. Nobody in sales. Let alone... nobody in the actual non-tech industry that most businesses operate in.
And it's not the college graduates they're worried about. It's the people with 5, 10, or 15 years experience who will just not want to work at a company where they have to compromise and use non-standard software.
It's still not economically viable for any corporation outside of exactly a small tech industry start-up to switch away from Microsoft, and it has nothing to do with the cost of operating system licenses or support.
acidburnNSA 4 hours ago [-]
In my example they literally demanded to run Windows Defender on a Linux server that I requested. There was no Linux experience on the IT team whatsoever.
magicalhippo 2 hours ago [-]
RDP. Simply nothing in the same league on Linux.
I prefer having a beefy workstation at home and connect to it remotely from a cheaper laptop, as I find laptops are noisy and weak unless you spend a sizable fortune.
drabbiticus 2 hours ago [-]
What are you comparing it to or what do you feel is missing? Remote desktop has gotten way better on Linux since the days of only X-Forwarding or VNC, at least from a performance perspective.
magicalhippo 1 hours ago [-]
I tried just about everything a couple of years ago. Various VNC variants, X2Go etc.
They all sucked in terms of speed/performance compared to Windows-to-Windows RDP, and none allowed for starting a new desktop session if user wasn't already logged in, or resuming existing session if present. Both essential to me.
Many lacked some features like clipboard, file transfer, sound. First two are hard requirements as well.
I see things have been moving, so I'm hoping things become viable in a year or three.
zvrba 25 minutes ago [-]
It just works without any tweaks. Also, Visual Studio, One Drive, One Note, (office apps in general).
alexchantavy 5 hours ago [-]
Can't make a custom gaming rig with Mac. Linux gaming isn't quite there yet too.
baby_souffle 4 hours ago [-]
> Linux gaming isn't quite there yet too.
The game industry uses the same argument that other industries use as well; tiny user base and the distribution is a mess.
I understand those arguments; they are valid, to a point... but if Autodesk uses mostly NodeJS and Python and OpenGL for Fusion360, why can't they ship a linux version, too?!?
ProllyInfamous 2 hours ago [-]
Serious question: why not just use a stand-alone gaming system (e.g. PlayStation, xBox)?
Don't really game much, but I did buy a PS4 just for the therapy of offline GTA5 beatdowns.
----
The only Microsoft in my house is a twenty year old Windows 7 Pro machine — it always just works.
rkomorn 3 minutes ago [-]
In addition to what sibling comment wrote well, there are also a bunch of games that aren't "couch-friendly" and not even available on console.
I like consoles (borderline prefer them to PCs) but there are some experiences I can only have on PC.
Another aspect is that sticking a console onto my desk and plugging it to my PC monitor wouldn't be very practical, and I don't want to commit my living room to my gaming whims, and even less want to get another TV+couch-like setup in my office.
vasama 10 minutes ago [-]
That's sort of like asking a motorbike enthusiast why they don't just drive a car instead.
There's a big difference in the input scheme between PC and consoles. Playing with a controller might not be satisfying for someone used to keyboard and mouse. The latter also provides a higher skill ceiling for competitive play.
The lower end hardware used in consoles also does not allow for high framerates and high resolution monitors, while with PC gaming one can get as much performance as they're willing to pay for.
john01dav 5 hours ago [-]
The biggest category of games that don't work on Linux are those that demand a root kit (where they attempt to justify it as anti-cheat), and not letting a root kit on one's computer is desirable for many reasons.
sersi 5 hours ago [-]
At this point, there are very few games where I've personally had to switch back to windows. I don't play online though so not impacted by Anti-cheat systems
49531 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah it really comes down to online gameplay. The _only_ thing keeping me in microsoft's orbit is online gaming.
cyberax 4 hours ago [-]
I'm eagerly awaiting for: "Windows Gamer Edition, get drops for your favorite games by using it!"
phainopepla2 5 hours ago [-]
Because my job makes me
vanc_cefepime 5 hours ago [-]
Same. But at home, I have a desktop (Linux Mint), a NUC server (Proxmox w various VMs/containers) and a MacBook Air M2/iPad that wife/kids use. I am starting to see them use the Linux Mint desktop more and more (main web browsing, word processing, etc) since I dropped Windows about 4 years ago. I did maintain a separate Win10 install for games but SteamDeck (and Win10 becoming EOL) made that obsolete but I am starting to get my feet wet in Linux gaming with my nvidia GPU but haven't really tried all the distros to pick one yet.
Is this the year of the Linux desktop? Unlikely, but I've started to donate more regularly to the Linux Mint team and same with any OSS that helps me maintain our privacy which I suspect is driving more and more to look into options instead of accepting the status quo.
5 hours ago [-]
SapporoChris 5 hours ago [-]
There are a few applications that simply do not run well enough on Linux. It's easy enough to find a list with an internet search. Mostly graphics and video editing packages, and DRM protection. However I think for a majority of people Linux should work just fine.
digitalPhonix 5 hours ago [-]
Games with anti cheat :(
baobun 4 hours ago [-]
Well at least you should then have that on a dedicated gaming machine - treat it like a console. Not the same box you do your surfing, socials, banking and coding etc on. I think the intersection of people who can afford a rig for competitive online gaming but can't afford to keep it separate should be very small. Or at least put the gaming in an isolated Windows VM with GPU passthrough (fun times with anticheat). Git gud.
estimator7292 4 hours ago [-]
Altium and other dinosaurs that are still getting used to this newfangled "Windows" fad.
xdennis 53 minutes ago [-]
For me, I (very rarely) boot into Windows for gaming. And I sometimes use a Windows 10 mini PC for Fusion 360 and Lightroom (because emulation is too slow).
stronglikedan 3 hours ago [-]
some of us need to be productive at work
bsder 4 hours ago [-]
Device drivers.
A lot of industrial/embedded hardware only ships with Windows drivers. It's super annoying.
rolph 5 hours ago [-]
ive had two people ask me today, for "that linux thing"; "the one that lets you use your computer for free"
that is visceraly hilarious.
golden-face 2 hours ago [-]
I haven't dug into this too much but the last time I set up a Windows 11 PC, I created a junk MS account, moved through the setup flow, created a local admin account once Windows 11 was configured and then delinked the aforementioned junk MS account.
What are the downsides to this approach or does it not work as I think? I have noticed things occasionally run slow and then it seems like the fan is blowing constantly when TaskManager says CPU is at like 30% utilization.
neilv 5 hours ago [-]
I only need Microsoft to run airgapped TurboTax, which for 2025 will require Windows 11.
Maybe it's time to switch tax return software.
billfor 5 hours ago [-]
FreeTaxUSA is great and web based.
neilv 5 hours ago [-]
Web-based isn't airgapped? Working in tech, I know what absolute slimeballs pretty much any tech company is about privacy and user data today.
estimator7292 4 hours ago [-]
So out of all options you use turbo tax?
neilv 4 hours ago [-]
Airgapped thus far. If that's not possible for 2025 tax year, I'll have to look at other options. (Maybe some saintly patriots will get the canceled IRS project into viable self-hosted PDF-generating form in time.)
captainregex 4 hours ago [-]
ahhh yes the noted privacy respect of…checks notes…Intuit
mindslight 4 hours ago [-]
I know your stance on piracy. But I will bet that whatever check for Windows 11 they add will be completely superfluous, and that the crack for TT2025 will patch it right out. Just sayin'.
jcalvinowens 5 hours ago [-]
With Proton in Steam, my last need for windows is gone, couldn't have happened soon enough.
aceazzameen 4 hours ago [-]
And here I am leaning towards upgrading my Windows 10 local account PC to Windows 11. I guess MS is making it easy for me on that decision. They can get bent.
billfor 5 hours ago [-]
How will this work for government clients that need a secure environment?
john01dav 4 hours ago [-]
They will probably charge extra for it. I asked a public school IT person how he was handling FERPA with the new privacy violations on windows 10, and the answer was paying exorbitant fees.
estimator7292 4 hours ago [-]
There's actually a group policy to disable Microsoft accounts. No idea how well it works, but it's there
doubled112 5 hours ago [-]
They will likely log into a domain. If they need something offline/air gapped, I'm not sure either.
LTSC is another option.
cyberax 4 hours ago [-]
The LTSC edition is unaffected.
You _can_ buy it, but it's a bit of a quest. You need to register as a company and buy at least five Windows licenses (you don't have to use them), and after that you can get a license for an LTSC version.
It works out to about $700, if you want to go down this route.
xeonmc 3 hours ago [-]
mas
CaptainBanger 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hiisukun 3 hours ago [-]
I view this a little like those Nigerian prince email scams. True or not, once upon a time I heard that they deliberately did not fix the obvious spelling and grammatical errors in the scam emails -- they acted as an excellent first pass filter to exclude scam effort against targets who wouldn't fall for it anyway.
When Microsoft allows local accounts via more complicated loopholes, or activation via massgrave, or the removal of bloat/ad components via scripts or cmdline processes -- they lose little. But what they can gain by having an account for all the 'regular' users is a share of that giant ad revenue pie mostly dominated by google (and more recently a few other companies) in the last 20 years. And if you bypass those processes anyway? Probably worth being filtered out to Microsoft: you likely install an ad blocker later, change your search engine, browser, et al.
Knowing what their users do, being their search gateway, their default AI system (eventually..) and generally having an eye on their whole user experience gives Microsoft a formidable profit line in the future. And maybe the present too, I don't know.
It is a distasteful feeling to have installed windows 95 (or win7 or whatever your favourite flavour) and then try and install windows 11. But for the majority of their customer base (corporate and residential) this isn't relevant.
N=1, but this week my family member asked for advice on a new laptop and their only specification was that it could not have windows on it. They don't have any Apple products but are happy to shift, or use Linux.
leodip 5 hours ago [-]
Proud Linux user here.
9cb14c1ec0 5 hours ago [-]
Hey Microsoft, are you trying to force me to NOT use Windows? Because that is what this feels like.
ronbenton 3 hours ago [-]
Has any positive news come out of Microsoft recently? Copilot is junk, entra ID gets hacked constantly, employees resigning in protest. Yet, the stock skyrockets
drnick1 5 hours ago [-]
Laughing in Arch Linux.
drnick1 5 hours ago [-]
Seriously, though, now that Win10 is being phased out, it’s time for people to wake up and join us in the free world. M$ wants you to throw away your hardware and buy a new computer with Win11. Give them the middle finger, format and install Linux instead.
ragequittah 4 hours ago [-]
If you like playing video games with your friends and working in a normal job you'll likely be using Windows 90% of the time even if you loathe it.
estimator7292 4 hours ago [-]
You're right. Wow, what a unique and novel opinion that no linux user has ever heard before. You know what, you've changed my mind, I'm installing windows now
hu3 4 hours ago [-]
It's just the reality. No one is asking you to do anything.
drnick1 3 hours ago [-]
Most games run on Linux nowadays thanks to Proton. The blame for the ones that do not squarely falls on publishers like EA who despise the freedom of Linux. They would rather infect Windows computers with rootkits that do little against cheating than allow the community to run their own servers.
billfor 4 hours ago [-]
All I need is to (easily) enable hibernate to work on Linux when booted with secure-boot, and to be able to set the scroll speed of my touchpad!
sleepyguy 4 hours ago [-]
Rufus and or Massgrave. It's all you need.
nobodyandproud 6 hours ago [-]
Windows for work. Linux and Mac at home.
The kids only get chromebook and Macs.
john01dav 4 hours ago [-]
I use Linux at work and at home. I give Linux running Cinnamon to non-technical family members. I would not give a Chromebook. They're extremely locked down, and I don't want such things to have market share since that forces others to engage with such locked down nonsense.
atulvi 6 hours ago [-]
Switched to Linux for gaming. Getting more FPS on Linux too.
mapontosevenths 6 hours ago [-]
This is anti-consumer.
nathan_compton 6 hours ago [-]
I am glad I have habituated myself to the pains of using Linux on the Desktop for the last 20 years.
codedokode 4 hours ago [-]
Nice. Make an online account so that your data are uploaded to a different country, and they can ban you from your own computer at any moment for any reason or without one (for example, President woke up in a bad mood).
I am surprised that somebody agrees to that terms.
nacozarina 4 hours ago [-]
good, the more they drive off Windows the better
ahmeni 6 hours ago [-]
MS owes people a working basic Windows ecosystem. We need to find the Middle Manager Driven Development that's responsible for this nonsense and put an end to it.
tracerbulletx 5 hours ago [-]
You think a shift like this is coming from middle management? Feels like an executive driven strategy shift towards recurring revenue, subscriptions, advertising, data collection, app stores, and away from the old OS licensing business model to me.
ahmeni 3 hours ago [-]
middle management driven development is the mindset, not the people. it is the core of number go up at all cost
zer0zzz 2 hours ago [-]
It’s always the system where you don’t want the live account that they force you to use it.
zb3 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks Microsoft!
Without your help I'd inadvertently skip some critical setup screens and potentially exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use and that would be a huge disaster. You literally saved my device!
fortran77 4 hours ago [-]
Can you use a Macintosh without an Apple account?
Sort of, but with similar limitations: The App Store, iCloud syncing, iMessage, FaceTime, and other Apple online services are unavailable unless an Apple ID is used.
What's the difference here?
Marsymars 3 hours ago [-]
> Sort of, but with similar limitations: The App Store, iCloud syncing, iMessage, FaceTime, and other Apple online services are unavailable unless an Apple ID is used.
And you get an impossible-to-remove notification from the Settings app.
seshagiric 4 hours ago [-]
IIRC:
What you can do:
1. At setup time, you are not forced to provide any apple ID.
2. You can login to your notebook without needing Apple ID
3. Install apps directly (i.e not from app store)
What you cannot
1. Install apps from App Store
2. Get Apple care etc.
estimator7292 4 hours ago [-]
Fewer people use Macs and those that do are disproportionately more likely to think privacy and freedom are unimportant
3 hours ago [-]
tamrix 4 hours ago [-]
I wish people had this same enthusiasm for ios and andriod.
jacquesm 6 hours ago [-]
At this point if you are still willingly part of the MS ecosystem I'd say that's a case of Stockholm Syndrome. At the time of the SCO lawsuit I decided enough is enough and I haven't looked back. Software development is actually easier on Linux, there are good enough alternatives for most applications so unless your job demands that you use a particular package you might as well bite the bullet.
Microsoft will never change its ways, no matter how much windowdressing they use underneath it is the same evil empire that it always was.
wilsonnb3 5 hours ago [-]
shrug life as a developer in Microsoft-land is pretty nice these days. I quite like Azure Functions and Azure SQL Server, C# is great, Visual Studio is kind of slow but better than anything not made by JetBrains.
Really my only complaint is the lack of a nice, modern desktop UI framework but you can’t win them all.
jacquesm 5 hours ago [-]
I don't care about convenience, I care about the ethics of the companies that I work with. Convenience is what got us in this mess in the first place, it certainly isn't going to get us out of it. And if you don't want to implicitly support Microsoft Windows V 267 (now with more advertising, DNA samples for access and a free psych evaluation), then 11 is as good a time to break with them as any.
dartharva 4 hours ago [-]
So many threads but all missing the point.
Windows is not a consumer brand - at least anymore, if it ever was. It is predominantly a business product for enterprises. And their current service model to their clients requires interoperability with cloud services and user profiling for easy authentication and telemetry, which is what they are getting by enforcing Microsoft accounts. That is why there is no contradiction in their POV with this.
Does it suck for you retail "Home" users? Yes, but you were never the target customer base; at best you are a marketing platform. There is a reason why Microsoft has been giving away the product virtually for free has been turning a blind eye to its piracy (heck, MS's own Github hosts multiple cracking tools for it) when it comes to retail customers. They have abandoned you as a serious market segment.
Switch to Linux.
saltyoldman 6 hours ago [-]
At some point we can use the Konami code to break out of the requirement right?
6 hours ago [-]
Simulacra 5 hours ago [-]
I hate to say it, but the vast majority of users are going to just adapt and keep going. Probably north of 70% of computer users see these and just automatically accept, sign up, all of that. It's not that they don't care, they just don't understand.
hedora 5 hours ago [-]
Well, Windows desktop/laptop market share is down to 70.2%, so it’s possible you’re correct.
In other news, Linux is over 5 now.
marak830 6 hours ago [-]
I am getting so tired of this MS push to have me use their systems. I already purchased windows, if I wanted to use their other stuff - I would buy it.
Seriously considering the move to Linux - I've heard it's getting better, but it would cost me a bit of time getting used to it. The pain is really starting to seem like a lower cost every day.
Modified3019 6 hours ago [-]
These days I find Linux and windows have a roughly equal amount of issues to deal with, and because I have decades of experience learning how to work through those issues, they are equally painful so I can happily choose Linux over windows.
What makes Linux especially painful to windows users is they basically need to relearn how to solve the same sort of problems they’ve forgotten they’ve been solving all the time in windows, but in Linux. Which makes the effort novel and thus especially noticeable.
Basically it takes accepting one is going to get smacked with fractal side quests of searching how to fix problems for a bit, but it does get better fairly quickly.
marak830 3 hours ago [-]
That's what I have been hearing. My biggest issue is, unlike most of you guys, I'm self taught and only program when I need to (so mostly c#, python, ruby on rails). C# isn't going to be much use to me on Linux.
But as long as I can continue my local hosted llm and playing around with that, and my son can play his games, I'll probably bite the bullet in a few weeks.
bigger_cheese 4 hours ago [-]
Yes I am sick of constantly getting Copilot and One Drive shoved down my throat.
mindslight 6 hours ago [-]
Is there a worry that torrent packagers won't be able to work around these, or what's the actual concern here? I mean if you're using Windows for anything beyond a VM binary compatibility layer for some software you must use, aren't you kind of asking to be abused at this point?
lax4ever 6 hours ago [-]
If you are getting your OS from some third party torrent packager you are doing it wrong. There are far easier ways to get around this without trusting that some mysterious third party hasn't embedded some malware in their custom Windows deployment.
qu4z-2 6 hours ago [-]
You're already putting your trust in some mysterious first party to not embed malware...
lax4ever 6 hours ago [-]
You're doing that pretty much regardless of what OS you use. Yes, I agree MS has issues, but legitimate malware has not yet been a line they have crossed.
john01dav 4 hours ago [-]
If I created a program that took screenshots and keylogged everything that you did, and then put it in your computer, you'd rightly call it malware. But, when Microsoft does this, it isn't? They aren't exactly trustworthy (as you said, it has issues).
lucb1e 6 hours ago [-]
With Microsoft allegedly trying to close down all those ways, it sure sounds like OS modification (or not using Windows) is the reasonable endgame here? I'm not sure how this comment, saying to not use modified OSes but use the "far easier ways", fits with the submitted article. Not everyone has the skills to modify the compiled code files that make Windows require a Microsoft account
If it's so easy, which are these ways, then? Do you think they'll remain available indefinitely?
Not that I don't underwrite the risks involved in getting your OS from untrusted or unreputable sources
lax4ever 6 hours ago [-]
The simplest remaining way that I am aware of is actually an autounattend file. This is a Microsoft supplied method that has been around for a long time and something that I truly believe will stick around untouched because it is pretty much a requirement of any enterprise Windows deployment.
Not only does it allow you to create a local admin account, but you can also skip all the other setup screens that you want by pre-supplying values. Throw this file into your Windows boot media, do a fresh install (which you should be doing when you get a new machine regardless), and away you go. I use this both personally and my work environment. Not only are you then not relying on modifying OS ISO's or compilations, but an XML file is relatively easy to verify that only the settings you have set are the ones being input into the system if you utilize a third party tool like the one available at schneegeas.de
mindslight 5 hours ago [-]
I know there are more direct sources. But for the amount of mental energy I want to invest into Windows, discovery through torrents is far easier. My workflow consists of creating a VM, installing / updating everything, taking a snapshot, then removing network access before it gets access to Samba shares with any private information.
I suppose I might still be worried about targeted offline-acting malware if I were using Windows to control some enrichment centrifuges or something. But apart from that, I'm fine with whatever inhabitants it may have frolicking in their isolated jungle.
Normally I'd be unhappy when a sleazy corp forces me to give up on 25 years of muscle memory of using my preferred OS, but I'm thankful they gave me the push I needed to rip off the ad/spyware laced Windows Band-Aid that I only need to do once in my life.
It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.
Best of all I'm not reminded daily that I'm using an OS that works against my best interests, I can actually use an App Store again that's been designed for the benefit of its Users, imagine that.
When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows.
Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.
If they did, Windows wouldn't be so usable unactivated and the MassGravel activation stuff would have been patched already.
They built up their almost-monopoly when it mattered in the 90s and the 2000s, and now their market position is basically secured.
For Microsoft's purposes the main way of making money from Windows is from business and enterprise sales, and those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.
As you mentioned, they could trivially stop this if they wanted to, but they don't. Because if this were not possible, there'd be billions of more PCs out there running instead what would most likely be Linux. Enabling people to use Windows without paying is a key component of their strategy of maintaining market dominance, especially on a global level.
To an extent sure, but when people that grew up as home consumers not using Windows become business leaders they won't have the brand loyalty to Microsoft that the current aging out generation does.
If Google doesn't characteristically fumble the bag their dominance with ChromeOS in schools has potential pay major dividends in 10-15 years.
Windows centric software development is pretty much completely driven by business leaders 50+ years old on the young end.
The next generation of business leaders already didn't build their companies on Windows or any other PC operating system because web apps replaced desktop apps and mobile devices overtook PCs in market share.
But it doesn't really matter to Microsoft. Microsoft isn't really the "Windows Company" anymore and hasn't been for some time. Azure, Office365, Sharepoint, etc. revenue dwarfs what Windows brings in and wouldn't be affected by Windows losing market share because everything is a web/electron client for a cloud service now.
In some ways, I suspect Microsoft views the Windows market share as more of a liability than an asset these days, because it makes them responsible for bad press events like BlueKeep and WannaCry. Business customers frequently buy support contracts with their licenses, whereas private consumers expect indefinite updates for a one time $120 fee. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if they were intentionally letting consumer Windows slowly fade away.
There will be no ChromeOS anymore - just Android - and it will soon be locked down hard so that you need to pay Google or host ads/harvest data for every app.
You just need to make your choice of Tyrant landlord.
Enterprise windows is completely different, in that most of the crap we complain about will either be disable at the MDM level, or from the start depending on the license. A CEO being issued a windows laptop isn't barraged with ads, nor do they care if their account is local or not. It will "just work".
- Reliability. For anything that needs deterministic result and not even 99.9% of chance that it's generated correctly and not hallucinated. E.g. health, finance, military, etc. There is no room for "you're absolutely right". For the same input an algo must give the same output.
- Privacy. Until we have powerful local models (we might have though in 10 years, I don't know), sending everything to some cloud companies, which are already obliged by court to save data and have spy and ex-military generals in their boardrooms, sounds a bit crazy if it's not about an apple pie recipe. Web chat interface isolates important data from non-important, but we can't integrate it fully in our lifes.
Most people, and most workers simply don't do what you call real work that needs a big screen and a keyboard. I think most of the kids at my child's school don't have a computer at home (other than the district issued chromebook) and likely won't ever own a personal computer.
People do everything on their phones. Google recently said Chrome OS is going to end next year... I don't know what schools are going to do.
As more and more public accessible areas start becoming so inundated with AI generated material, that makes the walled gardens where generated content is not AI generated that much more valuable for training.
Steam's latest survey [1] shows Windows losing 0.19% marketshare. 3/4 of it went to Mac, 1/4 to Linux. 0.19% over a single month is a fairly significant shift, especially because the Steam survey is biased towards Windows gamers to begin with (Windows has 95.4% marketshare on the Steam survey), so it's probably understating the shift.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
None have actually switched yet, but also 10 is still supported, and steam os isnt quite ready from what i understand; (nvidia driver issues?) although I assume that’s changing quite quickly. I haven’t looked super recently.
Personally I run bazzite on a machine I’ve got hooked to a tv. It’s basically steamOS and works great for gaming. I can’t speak to the desktop mode, but as long as it’s passable, windows sets the bar pretty low. Main issue is that some multiplayer games intentionally don’t support Linux for anti-cheat reasons. :(
Microsoft, by ruining Windows, is not leaving the field open for a replacement OS; they're slowly killing the PC itself.
Mathematical: If this were the case then all competitors would have seen an increase in marketshare proportional to their existing marketshare. This isn't what happened - Mac saw 3x the increase of Linux, even though Linux has greater marketshare on the survey.
Statistical: It's often said that the PC is dead or dying, but that's a misrepresentation of the issue. 25 years ago, a new computer was dated in 3 months and obsolete in a year, so PC sales were huge. Now a days, a ten year old PC is still fine for just about everything, even including relatively high end gaming. So sales have plummeted, but ownership rates are around historic highs. [1] The main limiting factor is money. More than 96% of households earning $150k+ have a desktop/laptop, while only 56% with income less than $25,000 do. The overall average is 81%.
Pragmatic: PCs are still necessary for many types of games as well as content creation. Mobile devices and tablets (to a lesser degree) are limited by their input mechanisms to a subset of all experiences, and there's a pretty big chunk of people that utilize experiences outside that subset.
[1] - https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-5...
This has caused incentives to shift thought the company. No more long-term work. Only short term stuff, where each change needs to make impact somewhere.
This is why you see CoPilot in 20 places in Edge. This is why OneDrive shows you nagging screens to upload your data there.
And this is why the OOBE now makes it harder. That change is used by a PM / Developer to justify their existence in the company at review time.
That's either Linux with WINE, or a "custom distro" of Windows from the remaining neighbourly hackers in the modding scene (they can't embed the hostility everywhere and as deep as the kernel, although they are most likely trying.)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453
It seems with each passing year this becomes less important, as more and more apps are either web based or cross platform.
To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365, basically forever. LibreOffice is nowhere near a replacement for Excel in an enterprise setting.
MacOS is good option BUT cheapest laptop option is 1000 bucks. Dell has 16 inch with 16GB of RAM for 600.
There is Linux but Linux Desktop still is not ready and mass management of it is very painful.
So you default to Windows. It works-ish, won't break the bank and just about every piece of software you need works with it.
O365 is the Office suite of apps, an Exchange server, OneDrive with a ton of storage, access to unlimited Teams meetings, and tons of doodads and doohickeys we don't need. That my Windows using colleagues could potentially install Enterprise Windows on their own laptops (we're a BYOD employer), is irrelevant for us. Any fleet of trashy PC we need for frontline staff already comes with a Windows license.
That's getting affordable but still does not beat 600-700 decent Dell machines you can get.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-MacBook-Air-13-3-inch-Lapto...
The Mac will also have a faster SSD and (not sure about this) a faster memory bus architecture. And a better GPU and better ability to use Thunderbolt docks / have 3 external 4K displays.
Microsoft is still getting their money, just slightly less from Windows itself.
- OnlyOffice - WPS Office - Google Docs.
> To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365
In between are a bazillion businesses who depend on couple of apps and/or devices that are Windows only or near enough.
They've adopted a strategy of calling everything "gaming" Xbox, and seem to be going all-in on Gamepass subscription revenue along with making their first-party games available on other platforms. I'll be surprised if there is another flagship console following the Series X.
We'll see how that works out for them.
Microsoft is floundering right now.
By the way they also already did enough damage to those of us that were keen into doing Windows development, due to how WinRT has been managed.
Now only game developers, and big names with existing native applications are left.
[1]: https://reactos.org/
Well their stock certainly isn't tanking. Do they care about anything else?
If you want to work hard to make things easy, I bet you could build a hypervisor that does pci passthrough for each device to a guest that runs a different OS driver and rexports the device as a virtio device, and then the main OS guest can just have virtio drivers for everything. It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in.
That indirection will cost performance and latency, but windows 11 feels like more latency than windows 10 too, so eh. You can also build native drivers for important stuff as needed / over time.
Looking at Tahoe, seems things are getting worse.
Are you installing those tools regularly? I have a couple of invisible helper apps but Time Machine backups and Mac-to-Mac Migration Assistant has made those apps transparent. They're always there.
But you know what, I think I know where you are mentally. I was there 2 years after I first bought a Mac. I wanted a clean Mac. Nothing untoward, nothing that wasn't Apple. I got rid of that feeling and learned to love the Mac as a platform, to love the Mac because of its vibrant third-party developers. That's why I use a Mac even though Apple is often a bad steward of this wonderful bicycle for the mind.
Microsoft realized after Windows 8 and Windows 10 that literally nobody, outside of niche tech circles, has positive associations with the Windows brand, or views "Windows" as a selling point beyond "runs my old software." As such, it doesn't matter to them anymore.
It's like being the PR department at your local electricity provider or oil refinery. Keep the politicians happy, but people on the ground is a pointless endeavor.
I remember when new Windows versions were still an event: you could read about it on the magazines, people would get excited to try them, people would debate about how pretty/ugly the new UI was, etc.
Nowadays new Windows versions are like some unwanted background noise. I don't even know at what point Windows 10 stopped being the new version and 11 came out, but it went totally unnoticed to me until I heard that Windows 10 was close to EOL a couple of months ago. And then you start dreading the moment that you'll have to migrate and uninstall all the Xbox crap again that they force on you, etc.
But you’re right that since Windows 8, Windows is just something I’ve tolerated.
That being said, Windows 11 seems nice, but it looks like Microsoft is pulling the same stuff again.
I understand that the Windows kernel is pretty advanced but I find difficult to find that it ends up in a good desktop OS (e.g. UX)
Hey, so I'm a different user, and I wouldn't claim it's the best desktop OS, but split between macOS/Windows for desktop use, there are definitely things about Windows I appreciate. Off the top of my head:
* It has pretty approachable "config as code" built-in - with "winget configure" and some yaml files, you can define the apps you want, the Windows config, the registry settings, etc. without the overhead of MDM or something like Ansible.
* UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)
Some Linux DEs also do these things well BTW. In fact I use Linux for most things at home. (I use Mac at work and my only Win device left is used exclusively for gaming).
Nothing as user focused as linux, and it's mostly compatible with windows programs with wine. Important to note though that user focused is not the same thing as easy to use.
Linux, and open source in general, is infinitely more user-focused than anything from Microsoft, since open source is often built for users and by users.
But if you don't have great computer skills already, Linux can be extremely un-friendly the moment you step off the beaten path.
It's also completely ridiculous when you run "docker run ubuntu; apt install whatever" only to find out that "whatever" is now a snap and won't run w/o getting into nested containerization. For packages that got the snap treatment, window tracking for the Gnome dash was broken for ages if, god forbid, you wanted to create a custom .desktop file to add some parameters. Completely broke the custom launchers I created.
I created bug reports, I tried to work with them. Others did, too. Some of these reports approach 10 years now.
I am purging Ubuntu from all of my employers systems, replacing it with RockyLinux. Only one major application still to go. Friends and family get Debian, that transition is already completed.
The software if largely by users for users.
Obviously it caters to the power user, but it also works well for extremely novice users. It’s those savvy with Win/Mac that get screwed switching. I’d encourage them to put a bit more into trying.
As long as WinPE and the core of Windows exists in its current form, there will always be a way to use Windows entirely offline. The modding scene also still exists, and although it's a fraction of what it used to be (the peak of Windows-modding was probably in the 98/2K/XP era), some extremely talented individuals remain and fight. (One might ask why they haven't moved to Linux; the answer is usually "because Windows is still more familiar, and it's more fun to hack and rebel". To them, to migrate to a different OS is to surrender.)
I’ve got Linux all over the place, in many cloud envs, and on older hardware. But I finally committed to it on my big, meaty, main desktop. The one I use for coding and banking and accounting.
I’m running a Linux distro full-time. I had to hack a few minor hardware things. Nothing ChatGPT couldn’t solve.
I’ll never do Microsoft again. I will prob add Apple MacBooks to my life, but my main grunt machine is likely to stay Linux. I’m fully vested.
I know I’ll never engage with Microsoft shenanigans in my home environment ever again.
To extend, maybe someone could build a "SysAd AI" distribution that administers itself given natural language directions? Let me know if anyone wants to invest. ;-)
Microsoft is setting fire to the bridges and those will be users which they will never be able to get back again.
Linux works great for gaming except some anti-cheat stuff which probably won't be legal anymore anyways in Europe under the PLD.
I tried to have a gaming setup with Linux (SteamOS and Bazzite) but both failed when I tried to connect more than one Bluetooth controller and they'd be unable to distinguish them or disconnect everything after a few minutes, it was a frustrating experience.
If that is true, it's now wonder that they do not understand all the value that Windows NT has brought, why having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc made sense. And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios. Taking away options will ALWAYS hit some of your customers. And there are a gigantic amount of applications where you want local system accounts only. Yes, Dear Microsoft, computers without an Internet connection do exist and are a common thing.
For us it's Win10 IoT LTSC so we have updates for a couple of more years, and by then hopefully the last remaining software and hardware we have will be usable with Linux.
But maybe they are holding the telemetry graphs upside down? ;)
And, obviously, a Windows system not connected to the Internet will not give you Telemetry, so this part of your customer base is invisible to you. As a PM, you would have to actually talk with your actual customers to learn about it.
Or they could have just done a survey where customers can vote on what they want. I assume that "Half of the OS settings dialogues now apply changes the moment you klick a checkbox, without a OK / Cancel button; and the other half of the OS allows you to review your changes and revert them in one go if you want."
It's just said seeing this great NT system getting crippled and ruined by actively making it harder to use and limiting choices.
I have a 10 year old macbook pro with a bootstrapped windows 10 for testing various things, and it looks like everything is kind of working the same way? Steam hardware survey shows that 32% of people are still using windows 10.
Besides "security updates", there is nothing to loose?
Think MS is in for a rough ride on Windows. Short of corporate world - Excel/Sharpoint/AD - there is just no moat. Browsers work fine on all platforms, dev work is better on linux anyway and gaming on linux is rapidly becoming usable. And mac side is obviously competitive on various fronts too.
This is partially why major (effective) anti-cheats have migrated to the Kernel. Windows allows the big-budget games, which are often competitive games, to operate with a higher level of game integrity, which leads to more revenue generation.
MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series or similar quality device which prices a large part of the current windows gaming audience out.
As an example: it's not too expensive to buy a laptop that runs valorant, and then be funneled into the skin shop. You can get a lot more sales that way than you can through the crowd of people who are on MBP, though perhaps the MBP crew is more likely to be a whale.
note: Valorant is not supported on MacOS due to the anticheat requirement, but the hypothetical still stands.
On the other hand the anti cheat side has been really ratcheting up with newer releases requiring Win 11 and Secure Boot. I somewhat hope and fear we might get a blessed version of SteamOS for the Deck that is heavily locked down and has kernel/hypervisor level anti cheat functions added to it. Essentially allowing for a boot mode similar to current consoles. While it goes against the open spirit of SteamOS, it might serve as an argument to invest a bit more into the Linux side, potentially improving the ecosystem as a whole.
Or all of it might be the usual "year of the Linux desktop" pipe dream.
[1] leaving out the Switch which is heavily focused on Nintendo IP and has comparatively weak hardware
Regarding this article here, when you said about competitive gaming, I imagined a competition of that sort. I wonder how does a windows installation look in a big gaming competition that many players attend. It's never "BYOD" rather they get the windows preinstalled onto great gaming PC.
Do the players need to login to their Microsoft account? And Download their cloud cotents to someone else's computer? Or maybe there is a loophole for gaming contests that allow installation without cloud login?
The M5's GPU cores are expected to pick up the same 40% performance boost we just saw in the newly released iPhones.
AAA games written for the M4 already work just fine, the extra performance is needed when you are also emulating other graphics APIs and CPU instruction sets to run Windows games.
Windows on ARM has the same issues, but Prism isn't as good at x86 emulation.
It's also about the market accessibility and penetration. When the base level MBA at it's lowest RAM settings is reliably running AAA games is when you might see more interest in the platform from those studios because much like the iOS market, people running Mac tend to be more readily monetized, especially through things like in-game cosmetics.
The performance boost is needed when you are running Windows games under emulation.
Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux or Windows on ARM.
Nope because Proton is based on WINE, which stands for Wine Is Not An Emulator. Windows executables on Linux are running natively at full speed like any other Linux program.
Wine implements the Windows ABI and is just here to answer the system calls those executables are making.
In fact, most Windows games are running faster under Linux.
At one point, during a Dota match, every single Windows machine crashed. And my Linux machine was the only one left in the server.
So not only does it run faster but it's more stable too.
Wine may not be an emulator, but Proton includes a completely necessary translation layer if you intend to play DirectX games on Linux.
On Mac, Apple provides an open source emulation layer, D3DMetal, to translate from DirectX to Metal which is used by Wine.
As someone who has used both Windows and Linux to game on the same x86_64 device, the performance hit with Proton is pretty much negligible (and sometimes games actually run faster on Linux).
We have decades of training in the consumer market for very simple install patterns using UIs, and minimal messing with configurations. The people in gaming who overclock and tweak their settings are a huge minority in gaming. Those people are the ones most likely to be able to grok switching to Linux, but when they get there and find that most of their favorite apps don't work like they are used to, they go back to Windows or Mac.
My hypothesis is that for Linux Gaming to truly take off, you'll need a true desktop (not steamdeck which i use weekly) that makes it a handful of "clicks" to get whatever they want installed working. That means you'll need a commercially backed OS where developers maintain all the things needed to support near infinite peripheral connections for a variety of use cases, clear anti-cheat interfaces, and likely clear DRM hooks as well.
I wonder why. Something like Linux Mint isn't materially different from Windows in terms of UI. Any peripheral sold as "Linux compatible" that you plug in will just work, and Steams allows to play practically any game that does not require an invasive rootkit (aka kernel-level anticheat).
I think a good first step would be to start using common FOSS programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, LibreOffice on Windows during a transition period.
Edit: I'd guess a lot of them just follow whatever instructions they are given, and create the online account. If Microsoft thought there was a chance of serious rebellion, they wouldn't be doing it.
After a lifetime of Windows use, I'd even say MacOS is almost on par with Linux for development, while Windows' best feature on this front is WSL so you don't have to use Windows.
IMO the two biggest pains with MacOS is (1) brew is not as good as any other package manager in my experience (mostly in bugs that need manual fixing) and (2) Docker naturally is much worse (not just for performance, but for requiring 'Docker desktop'.) All the other pains are just the myriad niceities I miss from a lifetime of mostly Linux that MacOS just can never have.
I've been happily not using brew for a couple years now. Nix can function as a brew replacement without much fuss. However it lacks a simple alternative to brew services (for that you have to enter the rabbit hole which is home-manager).
The Dock is the biggest illustration of this : good luck if you have opened more than two windows of the same app.
Stuff like Quickbooks, AutoCAD/Autodesk, off the top of my head
I used to run AutoCAD on a 80286 with a maths co-pro with 1 MB RAM. It has changed somewhat since!
Who gives a shit about QB? - you could just run it in a VM and it probably runs under Wine. You can also just switch accounting vendor - there are quite a few. Double book keeping is a good 600 years old and can be considered pretty open source these days.
You may even do some real good to your business (if you think you need QB) by going old school and really getting to grips with the numbers. Buy three huge ledgers and label them: "Sales" "Purchase" and "Nominal" or "General". Also grab an exercise book to act as a cash book and a couple of notebooks to document the system. Now, you will need to do docs too so you will need a drawing board to design your forms ...
Now CAD is not the most common business software in use by anyone which is probably why you went for AutoCAD (which you have heard of), rather than, say, Solidworks or Catia. Autodesk is a vendor and not a stuff.
The problem is there's no real alternative.
Your grandma is not going to use Linux. So the choice is between windows and mac.. and the truth is a lot of apps people use are windows only.
I don't see windows losing desktop share anytime soon.
Microsoft has a strong cycle of "applications run on Windows" -> "device vendors choose to bundle Windows" -> "people use applications on Windows", but that has been eroded, in part thanks to Wine and the work put in by people at Valve.
If someone who uses their computer to browse the web and check the email picked up a laptop pre-installed with Ubuntu, they'd likely be perfectly fine with it.
>but that has been eroded, in part thanks to Wine and the work put in by people at Valve.
Eroded even more so by the user-hostile approach of Microsoft itself.
Exactly with things like being a complete failure to recognize a strong valid need for general users to only opt-in to an account according to their own personal needs alone. Not with Microsoft or Google or anybody else known to be a source of unwanted ads or anti-professional annoyances.
Why abandon a remaining security element that can protect against PII compromise like no other?
It's just sad to lose an essential feature that has always been built-in to Windows since the beginning, which helped make Windows into a far better business machine than would have been otherwise possible.
And why now when security is more important than ever?
My plan for years has been to install Linux Mint + Cinnamon for my grandma when she next needs a new laptop... but she still hasn't needed one :(. And she's slowly getting too old for any new computer
Every Windows upgrade was a big change again. The UI would change each time, Windows Live Mail got discontinued, Office got ribbons, etc. Why reinvent the wheel each time? I've replaced:
- Windows Live Mail with Thunderbird, that has been stable.
- Microsoft Office with Libreoffice, that has been stable.
- The next item on the list was going to be Windows itself, since Cinnamon hasn't significantly changed since I started using Linux over ten years ago. It still has a start menu, system tray, window list at the bottom (without the windows collapsing and hiding!), everything made for usability and working as you expect.
The only exception is (grand)parents that need custom software. E.g. my mom has custom software (from Hema I think? Or Bruna maybe?) for editing photo albums to then send it to a print shop and get a real photo album. That will be web based nowadays I imagine. I should ask her but that could still be a barrier to switching
Edit: Similar issue on Android btw. There isn't one function that my (grand)parents use, that Android 16 has that Android 4 did not. The only thing that keeps changing under them is UI. Sure, developer APIs got nicer, support for dual-frequency GNSS is there, screens got taller... none of that needed to touch the UI. Sadly Google does a phenomenal job of obsoleting old OS versions quickly so you need to keep buying new. EU law for longer device support doesn't even help because you still need to upgrade that OS and can't simply use an LTS with security updates
The people who will have the hardest time switching to Linux are those who need proprietary software products that are unavailable for Linux and whose needs are not met by open-source alternatives. Microsoft Office is still the standard for office software, and the Adobe Creative Cloud is still the standard for many creatives.
If LibreOffice ever reached 100% compatibility and feature parity with Microsoft Office, and if the Adobe Creative Cloud ever got ported to Linux, then this could spell trouble for Windows.
That sounds reasonable, given that
> ChromeOS is built on top of the Linux kernel. Originally based on Ubuntu, its base was changed to Gentoo Linux in February 2010 (--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS)
I hate Microsoft and Windows just as much as the next self-respecting nerd, but this is no less a lol right now than it was 20 years ago. It’s like Linux users all play the same 15 titles that have Linux support and think those 15 games reflect broad ecosystem support.
Because from my ~1 500 titles steam library, I can think of one game that I had issues with. And even this particular game (which is Tomb Raider 2013, btw) worked perfectly fine after a little hack. And ironically the "hack" was checking a checkbox in Steam to force using the Windows version of the game instead of the official Linux port.
That's pretty much the only reason I use Windows these days.
I'm trying to decide if I want to transition my work computer to Linux or Windows 10 LTSC. Most of my day is spent working inside of WSL2. So, it kind of seems like I should just get on with using Linux native, but several decades of sunken cost have kept me on Windows. I don't think I have a desire to 'upgrade' to Windows 11 and Windows 10 Pro is just about EOL.
https://youtu.be/s9dYV75sY3s?si=iIlg_0JDDMe8GWqI
And on that note, have to recommend this tool for them: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
Apple may not "force" you to use an iCloud account for their devices, but they sure push it hard.
As far as Linux communities go, Red Hat, Arch, Cisco, and even Ubuntu have also done their fair share of "bad decisions".
when users make a technical effort to workaround these bad decisions, and you keep chasing after them, subverting said technical measures, in order to enforce said bad decisions, this has gone far beyond being bad decisions; it is being done on purpose to prevent users from opting out of a Hostile ecosystem.
Poor people. Surely Microsoft is fixing this by giving them a proper local skip that doesn’t bypass the other critical setup?
You can just choose to create a "work or school account" and then leave the domain name empty.
I like windows, Its a great system specially for being productive, but the godamn start menu using react and edge and the online requirements are a pain in the ass.
Sometimes it just hangs while you click the windows key. All I want is to open notepad++...
(same reason they still have network printer driver vulnerabilities because they refuse to fix old shit in the name of backward compatibility)
It's a platform which means you need it everywhere.
Microsoft Windows has really lost its way.
At the part of the initial setup where it asks to connect to a network, press Shift + F10 to open the Command Prompt. Then, type oobe\bypassnro and press Enter. The system will reboot and start the initial setup again in a non-network mode that allows you to create a local user account.
When you get past all the garbage, it's a fine OS to work in. Then again, so is MacOS, many flavors of Linux, etc. As the importance of the OS itself becomes less and less important for general consumers when most people live in the browser for their day-to-day job, Microsoft will find it harder to sell licenses (maybe they already are?), and they will resort to more ways to extract money from users, driving more of them away.
fwiw, I prefer the ergonomics of Windows to any other OS for daily activities and non-dev work, but it's such a weak preference that I wouldn't hesitate to switch if they ever actually force any of this MS account or always-online spyware without recourse.
My next build will be solo boot!
My work machine is a Mac though I don't get any say in that.
But the fingerprint scanner works. The fingerprint scanner works!
Everything else has been fine.
Continuing to use an operating system, the only software that have full control over your digital life, from a company that have so much disrespect for their users and that is actively hostile against your choices, at one point that’s Stockholm Syndrome.
LTSC is basically debloated version of Win with options to turn of updates or get just security ones.
It’s crazy to me: folks quite clearly want to run Windows 11 without an account. What is it worth to Microsoft let someone do that? $12? $144? $1,728?
(Which is also why so many services don't let you pay to get rid of ads.)
Microsoft has many intelligent people who work there and certainly do many risk vs. reward calculations for each modification to Windows. From Microsoft's perspective, they have much more control over the OS when everyone's linked to a cloud account. I morally disagree with that approach, but the security issues with Windows come from unpatched systems. They tried to win over software developers by creating WSL, but the privacy- and security-minded software developers never really bit.
Also, consider that Microsoft's future is obviously pivoted toward cloud infrastructure. Yes, they smartly have other ventures, but all those ventures will rely on Microsoft cloud infrastructure in some way. Server farms are a much better business model, from Microsoft's perpective, especially because it pulls Microsoft into the domains of true wealth: land acquisition, energy production, and data mining.
If you are trapped on windows due to a specific piece of software running a virtual machine on linux is your friend. Boot up windows only when you need it and the only thing MS gets is one datastream of your single use of their product and not your entire digital existence. Same also applies for Apple + vm.
Either choice on its worst day is better than what windows has become on it's best.
Look how that changed.
Windows Recall 'We'll never use this in any bad way whatsoever' Sure thing.
Windows 10 goes EOL in 8 days, with the EU forcing Microsoft to give their customer bases security patches. Not anywhere else though, and not in the U.S.
What was the end goal with that? Move everybody over to Windows 11; on their EOL page it lists places you can donate your old non-working hardware to. Forcing users to do what? Buy new overpriced hardware when what they have is fine?
People jumped to Windows 7 out of spite; with Linux Desktop marketshare still slowly, steadily rising over the last 10 months. Windows 7 is EOL and no longer receives security patches, so security wise people are a lot worse off than what was anticipated.
Here's the thing, I started up an old iPad last night and the e-mail no longer exists nor can be created, so I can't do a lost password, I can't log in, so I can't install apps, or even format the device without some 'Account Lock'
I own this iPad, as in: it's mine. Why should I, and why would I want to put MY device's access and security on the whims of company?
They want to own our hardware, and our software.
I for one preach Linux Desktop, Manjaro XFCE for me. I think people are sticking with Windows 7 despite it being EOL because games and their software will for the most part not run in to issues linux gaming may be facing.
That ain't the way. Your computer. Your choice. No cloud accounts/everything being logged on the desktop that people do, no 'requirements' to utilize the new software, and no 'requirements' to connect people to cloud backup systems to later coerce and push people to buy.
If you saw the same report of that, it turned out to be a UA anomaly. Most likely very few people actually went back to Win 7, which now has quite bad compatibility with newer hardware and software.
Where do you get these figures from? Is there a sensible % increase?
I've been using Linux desktop for a decade now and I am certain it still used by few, and nothing has changed recently. Or you're telling me 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop?
If it has a passcode and you remember the passcode, you should still be able to wipe the device with Apple Configurator?
If the situation is that you don't have a passcode, but you do have an iCloud account where you don't remember the password and can't access the email address, and either don't have access to the recovery phone number or never specified one, then yeah. You might need to find your receipt and bring it to an Apple store to be reset.
Great question! You did configure it that way, so it might be worth asking yourself.
I wouldn't get too excited about that. That might just be because people are moving off of desktops entirely and now only own mobile devices, a market where Linux may as well not exist (excluding Android). The number goes up, because at large, the portion of people who run Linux desktops are less likely to pivot to using only a mobile phone as they tend to be hobbyists/enthusiasts.
Devils advocate. Everyone really should be on Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0 in the Windows space. Windows 11 is really there as a checkpoint to force people to upgrade to more secure hardware. If you dont care about security, you probably dont care about security updates, you can remain with Windows 10.
Thats not to say that they went about this in a pro consumer way. Its been bungled. But specifically on the point of hardware upgrades, for your average windows user the hardware isnt really "fine" as you put it.
>Here's the thing, I started up an old iPad last night and the e-mail no longer exists nor can be created, so I can't do a lost password, I can't log in, so I can't install apps, or even format the device without some 'Account Lock'
On the apple front, they get 10x the amount of flak for "enabling" stolen hardware to be reformatted and reused, than they get for bricking people who lose access to an account.
Recovery is expendable in Apple town. Recovery of iCloud accounts enabled identity theft and personal photos of celebs to be released. Recovery of hardware enables theft. Its a losing proposition.
>That ain't the way. Your computer. Your choice.
We really need a hardware path without conflicting priorities.
Apple wants you to have a tablet to spend money on apps.
You need hardware built outside of that paradigm to have a hope of avoiding a mess of locked down anti consumer nonsense.
nope. only useful for corporate setting. We should be able to run anything we want, however we want, without any arbitrary requirements by MS. Especially if it was proven already that it isn't a hard requirement to run the OS - just an arbitrary setting.
It just paves road for more invasive DRM and even more locked down systems.
If they have issue with crashes, and taking blame for corporate AV failures - don't give out kernel level access to them.
>Recovery is expendable in Apple town. Recovery of iCloud accounts enabled identity theft and personal photos of celebs to be released. Recovery of hardware enables theft. Its a losing proposition.
I don't care as a customer. I want my data, I don't care about corporate profit margins - and I shouldn't need to. Data theft is pure service issue of them not vetting recovery enough - due to cutting costs on it.
Right, crazy I swear I hung a lantern on that, implying you could just keep using Windows 10.
>I don't care as a customer. I want my data, I don't care about corporate profit margins - and I shouldn't need to. Data theft is pure service issue of them not vetting recovery enough - due to cutting costs on it.
Right, crazy again I swear I thought I wrapped up by saying we needed a hardware path without conflicting priorities.
Microsoft's idea of Security is security from me, not security for me. They use this overloaded language because it's so hard to argue against. It's a thought-terminating cliché. Oh you must not care about being secure huh???
My point was, if you dont care about Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0, then you probably dont also care about security updates. Not whatever insult you thought I was making.
If your thoughts were terminated, that was entirely self inflicted.
Secure Boot and TPM are ways to attest that what is running is what Microsoft signed. This is only useful if I think that non-nation-state attackers will have physical access to my hardware. Nation-state attackers can probably get something signed with the public secure boot keys. TPM is just more of the same — it lets the software running on a computer verify that it has not been changed from what Microsoft signed. If I controlled the signing key (perhaps every manufactured device has its own key that is sold with the device, which I can then sign whatever OS I want with), then I could gain some security without this control loss, and that would be useful.
Regarding bitlocker, I can encrypt my drive just fine with no TPM as long as I do not expect my OS to be tampered with (which requires physical access or running something untrusted as root). I can simply use a long password with many hash cycles, so if someone stole my drive they could not decrypt it without the password. But, if the key were in the TPM, then nation-state actors could probably get it back out, depending on exact implementation (for example for biometric unlock). So, in this way, using a TPM is less secure.
We should also do away with TPMs in most cases, since all that they serve to do is attest that the corporation with the keys to the TPM decided what was running and that no one interfered with that. It's DRM, plain and simple.
There are other security updates that I may want, however, even if I am not concerned about giving an attacker root of physical access. For example, Windows has had vulnerabilities which can be exploited over a network.
Huh? I certainly care about the latter but not the former, and I doubt I'm in the minority.
And how long would you expect Microsoft to write updates for computers with insecure boot chains, and secure boot chains? How much should they spend on mitigations for classes of attack that you can shut down just by updating? Why would they risk being seen to support a platform, that they consider a potential vector of incredibly bad PR, just for end user convenience? They have been browbeaten into being extremely security conscious, especially after the SMB stuff.
Personally, my Win 10 laptops are becoming Debian laptops as god intended.
Because I care that I'm secure, but I don't care that my computer isn't secure from me.
> how long would you expect Microsoft to write updates for computers with insecure boot chains, and secure boot chains?
Forever, because the same code works for both unless they go out of their way to do extra work for it not to.
> How much should they spend on mitigations for classes of attack that you can shut down just by updating?
There are basically zero attacks against ordinary consumers that SB/TPM protect from. The kinds of attacks regular people need to worry about are resolved through regular updates that don't need those things.
> Why would they risk being seen to support a platform, that they consider a potential vector of incredibly bad PR, just for end user convenience?
What are you talking about? There's no bad PR in allowing SB/TPM to be off. The bad PR comes from requiring them to be on.
> They have been browbeaten into being extremely security conscious, especially after the SMB stuff.
SB/TPM aren't actual security. They're DRM masquerading as security.
> Personally, my Win 10 laptops are becoming Debian laptops as god intended.
That's good, but it doesn't invalidate any of the above.
For bitlocker, I like it. But I use the password version that doesn't need any particular hardware.
How long do I expect updates? Well for starters, not even ten years of support for processors that were state of the art in 2018 is very bad. And windows 10 stopped being the newest option in 2021, so would ten years from that be so burdensome for security updates?
And no it's not a PR risk to release updates for windows 10. You don't need to stretch that hard, please.
I recently was able to purchase a Win11 pro license from Newegg to upgrade a Win11 home machine without creating a MS account, that's probably an easier hole to patch if they truly want to prevent offline use entirely.
Mac users fellate themselves over Mac usability. But if I click a file in Windows and hit the delete key you know what it does? It deletes the file. You know what Mac does? It makes the “bonk” sound and nothing happens. (Or at least it did, been years since I used it.)
I tried to like Mac for years, even using it as my daily driver for two straight, because their hardware is so good, but I just never could because of 100 little things like that. MacOS sucks.
The concerns of the people who inhabit this tiny little enclave of the internet are alien to 99% of the population at least.
I only run Linux at home. My mom also runs Linux, though she doesn't really know a lot about it. If I could I would have run only Linux at my previous corporate jobs. But the IT people balk: how will windows defender work in Linux? At one point they did install windows defender on Linux and it ground a fine machine basically to a halt.
They don't think that at all. They probably know more about Linux than you do because I guarantee half the systems they manage are already running it.
What they think about are the applications that the people who actually make the decisions at your companies refuse to migrate away from. They know the cost of hiring Linux sysadmins vs Windows sysadmins. They think about everyone in every other company and how much harder they are to hire when suddenly none of them know how to use their office computer when they're hired. They think about the half dozen or so business critical applications which genuinely don't have Linux equivalents. None of the executives, nobody in HR, nobody in accounting or business. Nobody in sales. Let alone... nobody in the actual non-tech industry that most businesses operate in.
And it's not the college graduates they're worried about. It's the people with 5, 10, or 15 years experience who will just not want to work at a company where they have to compromise and use non-standard software.
It's still not economically viable for any corporation outside of exactly a small tech industry start-up to switch away from Microsoft, and it has nothing to do with the cost of operating system licenses or support.
I prefer having a beefy workstation at home and connect to it remotely from a cheaper laptop, as I find laptops are noisy and weak unless you spend a sizable fortune.
They all sucked in terms of speed/performance compared to Windows-to-Windows RDP, and none allowed for starting a new desktop session if user wasn't already logged in, or resuming existing session if present. Both essential to me.
Many lacked some features like clipboard, file transfer, sound. First two are hard requirements as well.
I see things have been moving, so I'm hoping things become viable in a year or three.
The game industry uses the same argument that other industries use as well; tiny user base and the distribution is a mess.
I understand those arguments; they are valid, to a point... but if Autodesk uses mostly NodeJS and Python and OpenGL for Fusion360, why can't they ship a linux version, too?!?
Don't really game much, but I did buy a PS4 just for the therapy of offline GTA5 beatdowns.
----
The only Microsoft in my house is a twenty year old Windows 7 Pro machine — it always just works.
I like consoles (borderline prefer them to PCs) but there are some experiences I can only have on PC.
Another aspect is that sticking a console onto my desk and plugging it to my PC monitor wouldn't be very practical, and I don't want to commit my living room to my gaming whims, and even less want to get another TV+couch-like setup in my office.
There's a big difference in the input scheme between PC and consoles. Playing with a controller might not be satisfying for someone used to keyboard and mouse. The latter also provides a higher skill ceiling for competitive play.
The lower end hardware used in consoles also does not allow for high framerates and high resolution monitors, while with PC gaming one can get as much performance as they're willing to pay for.
Is this the year of the Linux desktop? Unlikely, but I've started to donate more regularly to the Linux Mint team and same with any OSS that helps me maintain our privacy which I suspect is driving more and more to look into options instead of accepting the status quo.
A lot of industrial/embedded hardware only ships with Windows drivers. It's super annoying.
that is visceraly hilarious.
What are the downsides to this approach or does it not work as I think? I have noticed things occasionally run slow and then it seems like the fan is blowing constantly when TaskManager says CPU is at like 30% utilization.
Maybe it's time to switch tax return software.
LTSC is another option.
You _can_ buy it, but it's a bit of a quest. You need to register as a company and buy at least five Windows licenses (you don't have to use them), and after that you can get a license for an LTSC version.
It works out to about $700, if you want to go down this route.
When Microsoft allows local accounts via more complicated loopholes, or activation via massgrave, or the removal of bloat/ad components via scripts or cmdline processes -- they lose little. But what they can gain by having an account for all the 'regular' users is a share of that giant ad revenue pie mostly dominated by google (and more recently a few other companies) in the last 20 years. And if you bypass those processes anyway? Probably worth being filtered out to Microsoft: you likely install an ad blocker later, change your search engine, browser, et al.
Knowing what their users do, being their search gateway, their default AI system (eventually..) and generally having an eye on their whole user experience gives Microsoft a formidable profit line in the future. And maybe the present too, I don't know.
It is a distasteful feeling to have installed windows 95 (or win7 or whatever your favourite flavour) and then try and install windows 11. But for the majority of their customer base (corporate and residential) this isn't relevant.
N=1, but this week my family member asked for advice on a new laptop and their only specification was that it could not have windows on it. They don't have any Apple products but are happy to shift, or use Linux.
The kids only get chromebook and Macs.
I am surprised that somebody agrees to that terms.
Without your help I'd inadvertently skip some critical setup screens and potentially exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use and that would be a huge disaster. You literally saved my device!
Sort of, but with similar limitations: The App Store, iCloud syncing, iMessage, FaceTime, and other Apple online services are unavailable unless an Apple ID is used.
What's the difference here?
And you get an impossible-to-remove notification from the Settings app.
What you can do:
1. At setup time, you are not forced to provide any apple ID.
2. You can login to your notebook without needing Apple ID
3. Install apps directly (i.e not from app store)
What you cannot
1. Install apps from App Store
2. Get Apple care etc.
Microsoft will never change its ways, no matter how much windowdressing they use underneath it is the same evil empire that it always was.
Really my only complaint is the lack of a nice, modern desktop UI framework but you can’t win them all.
Windows is not a consumer brand - at least anymore, if it ever was. It is predominantly a business product for enterprises. And their current service model to their clients requires interoperability with cloud services and user profiling for easy authentication and telemetry, which is what they are getting by enforcing Microsoft accounts. That is why there is no contradiction in their POV with this.
Does it suck for you retail "Home" users? Yes, but you were never the target customer base; at best you are a marketing platform. There is a reason why Microsoft has been giving away the product virtually for free has been turning a blind eye to its piracy (heck, MS's own Github hosts multiple cracking tools for it) when it comes to retail customers. They have abandoned you as a serious market segment.
Switch to Linux.
In other news, Linux is over 5 now.
Seriously considering the move to Linux - I've heard it's getting better, but it would cost me a bit of time getting used to it. The pain is really starting to seem like a lower cost every day.
What makes Linux especially painful to windows users is they basically need to relearn how to solve the same sort of problems they’ve forgotten they’ve been solving all the time in windows, but in Linux. Which makes the effort novel and thus especially noticeable.
Basically it takes accepting one is going to get smacked with fractal side quests of searching how to fix problems for a bit, but it does get better fairly quickly.
But as long as I can continue my local hosted llm and playing around with that, and my son can play his games, I'll probably bite the bullet in a few weeks.
If it's so easy, which are these ways, then? Do you think they'll remain available indefinitely?
Not that I don't underwrite the risks involved in getting your OS from untrusted or unreputable sources
Not only does it allow you to create a local admin account, but you can also skip all the other setup screens that you want by pre-supplying values. Throw this file into your Windows boot media, do a fresh install (which you should be doing when you get a new machine regardless), and away you go. I use this both personally and my work environment. Not only are you then not relying on modifying OS ISO's or compilations, but an XML file is relatively easy to verify that only the settings you have set are the ones being input into the system if you utilize a third party tool like the one available at schneegeas.de
I suppose I might still be worried about targeted offline-acting malware if I were using Windows to control some enrichment centrifuges or something. But apart from that, I'm fine with whatever inhabitants it may have frolicking in their isolated jungle.