Technology

I don't even understand why they make that distinction. I recently bought a used notebook with Windows 10 preinstalled that can't be upgraded. But if you just boot up the Windows 11 ISO it works fine without issues from there.

Granted I don't know why someone would want this; I was genuinely surprised when I noticed installation without a Microsoft account isn't supposed to be possible. Then you get that system that just feels sketchy to use, Teams in autostart, online services in your menus and all that. And that's just the stuff you can see. It's a total disaster in my opinion. But it went downhill ever after Windows 7 as far as I can tell.

That is mentioned in the article.

It seems like they are going out of their way to remove good features. Like they removed the option to right click the taskbar and open task manager. They since added it back, but only because of user demand.

They have removed quick access to disabling the network, seeing and changing ip settings.

I can't remember all the annoying issues, but there's a lot.

I hate that it has become a general thing to ruin user experience and possibilities of customization. Google is doing the same with android.

Because eventually you won't have a choice. That's how Microsoft works. Newer versions of Office come with slightly different file formats so people using older version have to upgrade. There's no plugin for new format or just degradation of the document when opening. They outright refuse.

Microsoft pushed Windows7 in similar way. New version of DirectX supported only Win7 and not older versions, even though there's no reason not to from a technical point of view. But new games supported new DirectX only and if you wanted to play better shell out those bucks.

In the end, biggest enemy to any paid software is not open source competitors, it's previous versions of their own software for the very same reason you mentioned. Why would anyone upgrade if all they need is already there. Most people don't need all the features of Office apart from different fonts and sizes, perhaps occasional table.

Honestly, I think, like the article says, the hardware issue is the biggest hurdle. People use Facebook, after all, and it is full of ads and its UI is also a complete mess.

Switching to Linux is a pain, but its a pain once, staying on windows is the pain that keeps on giving

It really depends on the games you play. The thing is, you need to be really honest with yourself in regards to what you play and how far you're willing to go for the ease of use. Most, if not all games that don't require invasive anti cheat will just work,there are outliers like media foundations cinematics that just don't work without protonGE, but even that's not really a problem and getting smaller and smaller with every proton update. Are you comfortable installing the heroic games launcher from a terminal if it's not available in your software center? If so, then that opens up a whole new library of games to play from Epic and GoG, if not then use a distro that has it preinstalled.

The Linux community will make you think it's an easy transition, and for the most part it is, but as someone who moved to Linux full-time and has been running only Linux for about 6 months, there are still hurdles to jump over, it was about 80% click install and play, and the other 20% was troubleshooting and trying different versions of proton. I'm willing to live with those odds if it means complete freedom of my computer and cutting all ties to Windows. If I want to play games that have anti cheat though, I either have to use GeForce now or use my consoles. However, increasing support for crossplay makes this a non-issue in most cases.

I do hope you make the jump, it's pretty clear the path Microsoft wants to follow and I don't want any part of it, neither should anyone else. We're in sort of a golden age of Linux gaming right now thanks to Valve, and the momentum doesn't seem to be slowing down thanks to the steam deck.

The steam deck being on a Linux architecture really pushed this forward. Go Linux! And go ARM!

I actually disabled tpm in the bios so windows 11 wouldn't be installed....

Windows 11 is also much better at collecting personal data with improved analytics and Microsoft spyware running under the hood. Not to mention it's superiority at serving advertisements and embedding them in nearly every aspect of the UI.

It's doubtful that Microsoft shareholders have meetings about how to improve the user experience of their OS. I think they are more concerned with extracting every penny they can designing the most efficient backend to harvest data and push ads, kinda like our friends at Alphabet, Microsoft is trying so desperately to emulate.

The new start menu sucked, and is one of the main reasons I won't switch.

I doubt I'll switch any time soon, I use Linux for work and have a dislike for how small issues turn into hours of troubleshooting, but anyway, not the point. I think something that deters a lot of people are the really vocal people who shove it down others throats and treat people who don't want to switch like idiots.

We all have our reasons, I'll keep using Win10 until it becomes too much of a security risk and then reevaluate my options. For now I enjoy having shit that just works, for example, I use Cura, it hasn't had a working Linux release in years, there's a lot of deterrents for the layperson or those who have to troubleshoot and struggle to get shit working for a job and couldn't be arsed to do it in their personal time.

Ah, also, some things I see in these comments I don't really deal with because I use enterprise edition. MS I believe is smart enough to not fuck with their enterprise customers as that's where their profits are, so I guess my experience is slightly different (I was also an MS SysEng for ~12 years)

My "fuck this" moment came about 7y ago when Microsoft started forcing reboots that couldn't be disabled even with group policy. I think I lost work 2 or 3 times because I'd stayed up late working and eventually just fell into bed without saving everything and shutting the machine down. I woke up to a login screen the next morning and said "oh fuck this" the second or third time it happened.

For that to happen they'd have to drop the TPM requirement.

Pretty sure my CPU (i5-8400) has it, but for some reason it doesn't show up. Probably disabled in the BIOS, although I've no idea why.

In any case I don't care until I have a good reason to upgrade. Direct Storage was threatening to be Win 11 only, but I've honestly never heard of any games requiring it yet. And the still fucked GPU prices mean I'm more likely to play those on my PS5 than upgrade my PC for it.