Technology

I sidestepped to Mint. Sorry, Microsoft, your shit’s untenable and disappointing.

My elderly parents got the "your computer cannot be upgraded" and my somewhat tech-litterate mom asked me to move them to Linux.

Microsoft should've realised at some point that the only thing most people need today is a computer that can run a web browser and connect to a printer.

I'm upgrading to Debian 13 instead, since 13 is bigger number than 11 so obviously it's better

The risk for both general and corporate business users far outweighs any minor inconveniences of moving to a new OS version.

Minor inconveniences like HAVING TO BUY A WHOLE NEW FUCKING COMPUTER.

These people live in a fantasy world.

They're not trying to get me to upgrade my OS, they're trying to get me to buy a whole new fucking system for no good reason. Every last one of them can die in a fire.

And that's before we consider that Windows 11 is actually a downgrade.

Looking at it from a perspective other than "Windows shit, use Linux", MS' biggest issue here is that the vast majority have no compelling reason to upgrade. Currently.

To the average punter, W11 offers nothing that W10 doesn't already have. There's no new technologies that they care about, no new tentpole software that they're dying to try. Nothing. It has copilot running rampant through it, but most people don't know what that is or don't give a shit.

Give Apple their due, when they announce an OS update, they focus hard on the ways it improves over the current offering. Ways it can interact with your other devices, for example. Or even just a whole new design.

But MS advertise nothing beyond "This is new, come get it!", then wonder why no one cares.

How much of this is people not wanting to upgrade vs not being able to upgrade because their PC isn't supported?

Have they tried not being spyware?

Microsoft was successful in convincing me to upgrade to Mint however.

I successfully upgraded from Windows 10 to Linux Mint.

Help! Our unsustainable behavior of screwing over customers in the name of quarterly profits has finally caught up to us! Turns out there are long term consequences of our behavior, and now Linux can truly go toe-to-toe with Windows on a home desktop!

Stop forcing shit no one wants on your users then!

Every fucking update... Hey let's backup your stuff. Hey wanna backup your stuff? Let's backup your stuff! We totally won't hold it hostage if you stop paying us lol!

🤬

It convinced me to ditch dual booting and to go full Linux

• Worse drivers.
• More bloat.
• More "telemetry" (spyware and adware).
• It breaks a ton of the systems I've had to implement by sheer force.

Why the FUCK would I do that? Just to give microsoft more money? Go and FUCK yourself.

Microsoft has given users fair warning, and said that users can get a year of updates for free but eventually the company will have to face facts and extended support beyond October.

We can’t recall a time where Microsoft has done such a thing but these are extenuating circumstances given that most users just aren’t budging.

WTF is this guy talking about? Far as I can tell this is the Win7 playbook all over again. Looking it up, this was the timeline:

Jan. 13, 2015: Microsoft ended Mainstream Support for Windows 7.

Sept. 6, 2018: Microsoft announced the ESUs for Windows 7. The ESU program is a paid service that provides critical security updates for legacy products for up to three years after Extended Support ends.

August 2019: Microsoft announced a year of free ESUs, but only for select users, including customers with an Enterprise Agreement or Enterprise Agreement Subscription with active Windows 10 Enterprise E5, Microsoft 365 E5, or Microsoft 365 E5 Security subscriptions. This was limited to only Government E5 stock keeping units.

Jan. 14, 2020: Microsoft ended Extended Support for Windows 7.

Jan. 10, 2023: The ESUs reached their end of life on the first Patch Tuesday of 2023.

That's almost a decade of post-end of support updates. If anything, MS confirmed ESU before trying to shut down home user patches this time, so it looks less like terrified backpedalling. And as the linked article itself admits, the data they're reporting on shows a significant number of users still on Win7. The article waves it away as just "too many", but the original report says 8.5%.

Because, as it turns out, the kind of people using Kapersky antivirus software and the number of people who would not upgrade from a 16 year old OS that has lost support half a dozen times over the past half a decade show significant overlap. In the Steam survey right now Win 7 is only 0.07%, for reference.

While we're at it Win 11 is 60% vs 35% for Win 10. For all the headlines when Steam shows Linux growth you don't often hear over here that Win 11 went up by 0.5% and Windows overall went up by 0.36%, although it's worth noting that Windows has been pretty stable between 94 and 96% since the survey started.

I've said it before and I'll keep reality checking it: the Win 10 end of support process has been wildly overhyped, particularly among Linux-friendly circles. It is not meaningfully different to moves out of other "good" versions of Windows and it's not a catastrophic crisis point for MS, for better and worse. They'll keep support up for the people who need it for as long as they're willing to pay and most legacy home users won't even know their old Win10 is unsupported because it'll just keep happily chugging along with all the same malware it already has until something breaks and they have to buy a new laptop with a preinstalled Win11 or 12 or whatever.

The most the Win10 death hype is doing to hurt MS is create a flurry of social media posts that can convince tech savvy, Linux-curious users who were previously held back by lack of gaming support to give user friendly distros a try.

I'm talking out of my ass, but I believe they couldn't really convince the non-techies to upgrade from 7 & 8 to 10 either.
The average Joe doesn't give a shit. They simply booted their computer one day and oops, it had upgraded itself to 10.
Microsoft could have almost this entire userbase on 11 by now without them even knowing thanks to 10's automatic updating, but nooooooo they just had to require TPM or some shit.

Wait...
Excluding half of the active PCs or so from upgrade due to arbitrary hardware constraints didn't push upgrading?
How can this be??? 😯🫢

I mean, it's windows 10, but worse

• If you have 8gb or less of RAM, it's constantly swapping and trash your SSD

• It always needs to automatically install the fucking updates in the background hogging the CPU and SSD time when you actually need to work/play

• When they introduce bugs, they take years to fix them. The taskbar took 3 years to be restored to features that were present since windows 95. One year ago they introduced a new bug that with some display port monitors, when it goes in standby, the resolution switches for a second to 640*480, trashing all windows and desktop layout, super infuriating. Probably this will be fixed in windows 12

Plus with all their decision to force people to trash millions of perfectly working computers... I know many they just give up on personal computers and just use phones/tablet as it's enough for them

I upgraded from Windows 11 to EndeavourOS. No regrets, it’s a huge improvement.

It was so unconvincing I switched to Linux

Read the room, Microsoft.

Yeah, because if I did then in another 5 years it would be the same thing with Windows 12. Then 13. And so on. So I'm ditching Microsoft entirely in October and moving onto Mint.

they did convince me to upgrade to linux mint 22 tho

What?! Are they not emphasizing that the start menu has moved from the left of the screen to the middle of the screen? Really seems like that alone should hook people.

Time to upgrade to Linux.

https://endof10.org/

The virtual machine I installed windows on to play games with kernel-level anticheat and other such spyware apparently isn't compatible with windows 11. That's a positive for 2 reasons, which are:

1. It can't run Windows 11, so no risk of a forced upgrade
2. Windows won't constantly harass me to upgrade.

10/10 experience, would not give give Windows access to bare metal again.

Had to use Rufus to even install it on a ThinkPad which works perfectly. Drivers and all.

Maybe they should stop trying to be like Apple. You can’t limit upgrades then complain about no one upgrading.

I use Win11 on my main computer for work and school reasons. I need maximum compatibility and reliability and it has met those goals. Back in the day, I used to use Linux on my old laptops and I dual-booted it on my main PC. It has been awesome seeing how far it has come and I would like to get back into it some day.

That being said, a huge barrier for Linux and prospective new users is the community. The Linux community is highly combative and toxic and it absolutely sours what should (and could!) be a great experience. Almost every interaction I had while troubleshooting had some level of condescending attitude or outright hostility and there were numerous times I was directly insulted for asking for help - the most recent being a couple years ago when I was trying out a distro and had sound driver issues.