0x4E4F

Now, it's unusable with a HDD. LTSC is barely usable with a HDD. Win11 on a HDD, no way. Have tried it, it boots for like an eternity.

I've installed it for my mom. She mostly just checks mail, writes some documents and browses the web. She said she didn't notice a difference, everything worked as it should.

Utilize what. They're most probably Win7 Home licenses that could be exchanged for a Win10 Home license at a certain point in time, but not any more... and I wouldn't use a Home license anyway, it's crippled AF.

No, I actually haven't bought a single laptop in my entire life. All my laptops are give/throw aways. The newest I have is a 3rd gen i7.

Did someone actually pay for a Windows license when he/she bought the laptop? Can't say for sure, but yes, most probably. For a Win7 license most likely since that was what was sood back then. Now I have LTSC and Linux on all of my PCs.

But me personally? No, I have never paid for a Windows license. All of the installs I have ever done for myself were pirated. From Win98 and XP onward.

Why use debloat anything... scripts or apps, regardless. Why not just use LTSC? It's debloated by default. No MS Store, no Metro Apps, just the Settings one (it has to have that), everything else is pretty much standard for Windows.

Yeah, I'm surprised as well. Not enough research I guess... MS is very clear about what LTSC is and what it's not, as well as what it can do and what not.

Oh well, I spread the word when and where I can, will keep doing so. I hope dual booters catch on the LTSC installs and have less problems with GRUB.

I do believe that... I have seen threads where people just gave up on trying to get the max refresh rate from the hardware they paid for, because confining that setup is just way too complicated or still not supported.

Or switched back to Windows 🤷.

I would say the chances of the Linux desktop taking off are slim to none. Sure, people that like playing old games will just use Linux with Steam, but let's face it, those are very few... and they will only do it because Windows is just moving on from DX and all that and has no support for it any more. But, most gamers that like playing new games will just stick to Windows. One, it has support, two installing the game is 3 clicks away. And let's face it, those are the majority when it comes to gaming.

And, even if they'd like to switch to Linux and there are, generally, no problems with their game running on Linux (it might even be supported by the developer natively), guess what... Linux doesn't like your nVidia card 🤦. Or you'd have to configure the shit out of your card to make it run that game... or you have a multi monitor setup with monitors with different resolutions and refresh rates and all hell breaks loose.

Personally, I don't have a problem with Linux. I don't game at all, I have a single monitor setup and I'm fine with that, I don't need anything else. But, I'm also aware that I'm not the majority of PC/laptop users. People usually want more than just one monitor these days and they like to be able to just click and play their games or their software to just work without major problems, like not being able to run because libfoo is not installed or a wrong version of it is installed and that just doesn't work with what they wanna run. Sure, Flatpack has somewhat solved this problem, but let's face it, it has it's own problems (everything runs sandboxed).

And then, on top of all this, you put the companies with proprietary software that mainly don't give AF about FOSS and generally (there are exceptions, but very few) just put out the Linux version of their software for the heck of it. It gets updated far lesser than their mainstream Windows/MacOS versions and it's full of bugs that are not present in the Windows/MacOS versions.

And this is why Linux desktop will never take off IMO... at least not with this economic and social structure in place.

Yes, disable Windows search indexing as well. No point in having that on an SSD, it's pointless, it just wastes disk space.

Prefetch and superfecth are just obnoxious services that waste disk space. You can safely disable them, there is no downside to not using prefetch or superfect on modern SSDs. On regular spinning drives, yes, they did make loading programs a bit faster.

I have also mentioned this on more than a few occasions. I dual boot (very rarely to Windows nowadays) and I always use LTSC installs on all my dual boot setups. 0 problems thus far regarding GRUB and other Windows update related issues.

I still don't know why people use Pro... maybe LTSC is more niche than I thought and MS is not pushing ads for that one out there.

That will probably never happen.

You have to understand that, one, Linux and the devs that do work on FOSS software, do so in their free time. Two, the devs that develop anything FOSS related usually develop things to fix/overcome personal problems they might be having in their own setup or workflow. If someone else happens to like using that, great, if not, hey, I just put it out there 🤷. Three, there is no guarantee that a particular piece of software that you like and is something niche, will be supported in the future. There are hundreds of examples like this in Linux and FOSS history in general. There isn't enough interest for it, the main dev drops development, so the project dies 🤷. Another project might take it's place, it might get forker, but if it's niche enough, you probably won't see that happen. So, the only other alternative you have is to get your hands dirty and keep patching the software to work on your particular setup, or in case of closed source software, patch your setup to make it work with that piece of software for the foreseeable future, until another piece of similar software pops up on the radar and then you can switch.

I'm sorry, it's just how things are. Linux and any other non-commercial OS project is basically a community effort thing. If everyone in the world knew how to code or patch, or at least 80% of people, then these projects would thrive, no doubt there, cuz the workload would be balanced between the users. That is not the case, so 10% of the people that use FOSS software are basically the maintainers of what is out there. That is just not enough 🤷.