This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
new versions of windows just kind of feel like new phones now. It's good but.. who cares?
I can remember as a teen and upgrading from windows 98 to XP felt like jumping into the future.
Or, more recently, getting the first samsung galaxy after having a basic candybar phone.
Just seems like more of the same all while charging an arm and a leg for it.
Then xp to vista happened and it looked pretty but was unusable. Then 7 came out and it solved all the BS and was a relief. Then 8 came out and it looked pretty but was unusable. Nobody is quite sure what happened with 9 but 10 was ok I guess, better than 8. Then I started using Linux because I was sick of the bullshit.
9 was skipped because there was concern with old/lazily coded programs running in compatibility mode for Windows 9x versions.
Basically, when the windows versions went from Win95/98/ME to 2000 and XP, some lazy programmers went “well by the time Windows 2090 rolls around I’ll be dead” and just had their programs check the windows version for a 9 when deciding whether or not to run in compatibility mode. If it detected a 9, then it would run in compatibility for 95/98/ME.
Microsoft wanted to avoid this potential issue, so they just skipped version 9 altogether and jumped straight to 10.
Unrelated but didn't a lot of things about that time skip a few versions to land at 10? Like I don't think there was an iPhone 9 and so on.
Regarding why they just jumped to 10, I subscribe to the theory that enough software that required XP or greater checked for OS compatibility by looking for the string "Windows 9*" to catch both 95 and 98
Funny thing. The reputation of Vista is universal, so I don't doubt it at all. However, I ran Vista starting from beta and never had a problem with it. I must have had the magic hardware combination that worked. My least favourite Windows release was 8.
As someone who was stuck on vista as a teen towards the end of its life is wasn't a bad OS, but it did deserve the hate early on for being a buggy OS that was poorly optimised for the average hardware of the time. But then I moved to 7 and fell in love with it( or at least I thought it was great).
Then I upgraded to 10 and hated it. I switched to Mac for a couple of years and started liking unix but missed the hardware of PCs and didn't like the 10.15+ direction of MacOS.
So I switched to Linux( which I had messed with on an old laptop on and off as a teen, but at the time liked all my proprietary crap I was used too) and have never looked back.
The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn't truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been "fixed." Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.
Vista's issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista's reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.
W7 was really just a vista service pack, but they had to rebrand it to make people want it.
As long as 10 is supported, I'm not updating. At least I'm not hammered with ads like on 11.
If 10 is sunset, I'll probably switch back to Linux. I rarely game on my laptop anyway.
Out of like 1000 games I can play about 997 on linux, you'll probably be fine on linux even gaming now
I don't understand Linux, but gaming on my steam deck is amazing and occasionally runs games better than my much more powerful windows computer.
Certain things do run better on Linux. So if a game heavily relies on one of those things, it’ll run better. But there’s still a lot of game engine stuff that is experimental or just plain non-functional on Linux, so the games that utilize those are basically unplayable.
Until fairly recently, things like Ray tracing and DLSS were windows-only, because they almost universally used DirectX, which is a windows API.
If you game via Steam, there's a good chance you can use their Proton layer to play Windows games on Linux.
I see no compelling reason to accept this "upgrade."
That's why it'll end up beig forced on people. Just like what's happened with 11. And 10 before it. Didn't happen to everyone, but there were lots of complaints about it happening.
If it's forced and also needs a subscription, quite a lot of people will leave for the alternatives.
There are more sinister ways to force people to do something than just outright requiring. People seem to have forgotten, or never knew, that time when new DirectX was supported only on Win7 and didn't work on previous versions mysteriously, but all new games required it. WIndows 7 didn't see such a huge adoption naturally. Same thing when new Office is released file format changes just enough so that old Office doesn't support new files, but new Office supports all the formats, so people would end up upgrading. Otherwise majority of people don't need more than configuring margins, fond sizes and bold.
Fucking fix your bloated background service's, every update they add more and more services and background applications that serve little purpose, like the touch screen service that's running on my fucking desktop that only has a mouse and keyboard
another thing that annoyed me was the useless setting page, when control panel worked fine.
especially since you end up needing to get to control panel to do anything anyway
Don't worry! Control panel is being slowly phased out in favor of the settings.
"slowly"
Just like that one Windows setting with UI elements from Windows 3.1 . Control panel will probably be phased out in 20-30 years
A new version of windows coming next year isn’t really shocking news.
But Windows 10 was supposed to be the last version, they said so. 🙄
It was for me.
I use Arch btw.
Love Arch Linux! Been running it for over a decade now.
I don’t use Arch, I only said that because “I use Fedora on my laptop and Pop!_OS on my desktop btw” doesn’t really roll off the tongue
I wonder if they will provide a "Windows 13" after that.
And another thing in Windows I am waiting for is the moment when they encrypt all your data "for security", then blackmail you into a subscription service where you can only access your files while you pay your monthly dues. And how long it will take for this being hacked in a way that hackers, microsoft, and the relevant government agencies can all read your data, and you can not.
Any bets on this Refresh not supporting 8th-gen and below Intel chips except the Surface Studio for “reasons”?
Still peeved my 5930K isn't supported, despite still being petty capable.
~~windows refresh~~ cash grab
Thank god my PC doesn't have a TPM.
Otherwise, I am just waiting for some industrial software to be usable on Linux (they're migrating now!) so I can finally drop Windows for good.
I have been using Linux since the windows 8 days, and still see no reason to return.
How do you recognise a Linux user ?
No need to do anything they will tell you immediately
So you got Windows, Mac, and Linux. Which of the three options would you like suggested to you as an alternative to Windows? Lol. I guess I'll suggest Windows so you can just continue dealing with whatever Microsoft decides to subject you to. Or an Apple computer which people will berate me for because of the cost and the closed garden ecosystem. Or Linux and then get this comment again. Why am I even commenting lawl
If not 12, an incremental patch release to 11 as a "revamp" version they've done with all the others, but no significant changes. Meh.
Maybe they'll move to the MacOSX model with friendly-named feature updates, but otherwise I don't see Windows 12 coming out next year.
