Technology

It was possible to skip Vista and go straight from XP to 7. You could even use the same PC.

It was possible to skip 8 and go straight from 7 to 10. You could even use the same PC.

This time around, Microsoft is forcing Windows 11 as the only option, forcing people to throw away their machines, and it is backfiring on them. People are rejecting it and the competition (Linux) has never been as good as it is today.

The executive also noted that 500 million PCs don't meet Windows 11's system requirements

So much unnecessary e-waste. I never want to hear about how 'green' or 'sustainable' Microsoft is again.

Gee, I can't imagine why that could be.

I want to qualify this comment with the fact that I am not a super gamer. Most my games are older. The newest and most demanding game I play is Cyberpunk 2077. Most my other games are multiple years older and less demanding.

I finally switched full time to a Linux desktop OS. I have used Linux more or less daily for decades, the first distro I ever installed was Slackware what feels forever ago. But until Valve put the work into running games on linux for their Steam deck I felt I was trapped needing to have Windows to play games. I have even spent the last decade forcing myself to rely more and more on cross platform available FOSS dreaming of some day making a permanent switch. Honestly it was so easy for me to switch at this point, most games pretty much just ran. My biggest problem took a bit to grok and it was just because some games do not like running in proton from an NTFS partition. I have NVME and SATA SSDs separate from my boot drive that I used to install games on and it was trivial to reformat the NVME drive to a more Linux friendly filesystem and I have not had an issue since. Eventually I'll do the SATA drive but I'm lazy and those games are working fine so far. You will absolutely have problems with some games, especially some that have overbearing anti-cheat systems, but man this has been so easy I couldn't really have imagined. The only non-gaming problem was a document scanner we own that is not supported by SANE. I could not find a solution to run it on Linux so I just spun up a Tiny 11 copy of Windows in a VM and passed it through. We only use it a couple times a year so this is an acceptable compromise to me. The VM doesn't have Internet access, it just sees a local drive as a network share. All it can do is scan something and save it to the shared drive so I can access it in Linux.

I chose Linux Mint because I am well versed with Debian and Ubuntu. But I suggest anyone new to Linux give Bazzite a shot. It's designed to be a lot harder for you to break. It's also more optimized for gaming if that's your focus. For me gaming is a requirement but I've never felt the need for top tier performance.

The path from 3.1 to 11 has been such a sour one and the last thing I am willing to put up with is being the product in the eyes of my desktop OS. My computer is mine and it will do what I want it to do or it will do nothing at all.

I would imagine a big reason being that windows 11 doesnt work on a ton of older systems which meant nobody upgraded to it and instead lived out the life of the hardware until they actually needed to buy something new. The crazy part to me is older systems wasnt even that long ago. I remember when 11 came out and saw a bunch of systems only 2 years old that weren't compatible. I said screw it and just forced it on them and honestly I have had no issues on about 3 different systems so whatever I guess.

Obviously. There is no particular reason to switch from old 7th or older gen intel CPUs since with 16GB (or even with 8) of RAM one can browse internet and use OFFICE 365 with no issues. And what most of people do with their computers at work?

Unless PC is used to render 3D/Video/DAW Audio/heavy VMs - there is no fucking need to buy new PC just to upgrade to win11. MS shot themselves in a foot with this one.

It's a mystery

At some point, I need to get around to installing Mint on my desktop. Maybe this weekend, but probably not.

Ah, it may be the decreased quality and increased openly aggressive data collection

I use windows 10 at home while I use windows 11 at work. The only thing I like about windows 11 is tabs in the file explorer. Besides that I've had to deal with Windows Explorer crashing on a daily basis, task bar freezing completely multiple times a week, certain software straight up not working that I need to get work done, programs crashing that work perfectly fine on 10, internet connectivity issues (usually DNS for some fucking reason), periodically hearing the disconnect sound for a device even when everything is still working, awful drop down menus, needing to change the registry just to get basic features that 10 has, and the list goes on and on. At home everything just works. I've been testing Linux and have been getting better stability than Windows 11 and I feel like every week there's a new problem.

My 78 year old mother bought a new laptop, windows 11.

Immediately I had to remote in because of some S mode BS which just put you in the MS only application environment.

3 months later and somehow she fubarred her login and can't use her new laptop. There's probably an easy fix, but since she hates windows 11 and wants to go back to 10, I suggested Linux.

So it will be a Merry Christmas for my mom when I visit and install IDK? Some version that's super simple. Anything is better than what she currently has

It's almost like "you have to buy a new laptop to install it and help train our AI on your private documents" is somehow not convincing enough. Maybe if they also removed local accounts and forced you to have an online MS account? Nah scratch that, it would be stupid

Because 8 was garbage and people got rid of it as soon as possible. 10 was actually good, and 11 was barely a change functionally until they started messing with the ads push, and now they're shoving LLM bullshit in to justify their exorbitant expenditures on the half functional tech.

The executive also noted that 500 million PCs don't meet Windows 11's system requirements while the others don't need a hardware upgrade to run the OS. Although this would indicate that 500 million PCs would potentially be replaced with newer alternatives capable of running Windows 11 at some point, Clarke hinted at "roughly flat" sales for Dell PCs would moving forward . Clarke didn't explain the reasoning behind this statement , but it could mean that people are just not that interested in upgrading to Windows 11 PCs.

It's a simple reason. Everybody is abandoning dell in droves for lenovo in enterprise environments.

I used to buy dell exclusively for laptops across over a decade at multiple organizations where I determined hardware standards and purchasing. Everyone always wanted a x1 carbon or thinkpad but the prices were too high. This is no longer the case. Now everyone gets a thinkpad or x1 carbon where I work at least, and statistics for market share are heavily on the lenovo side now.

That's how I see it anyway. This has nothing to do with windows 11, it's just another service pack when you're managing everything via GPO/intune/sccm/whatever.

Windows 11 brings change but no significant features. The general population hates change.

Even slower than Windows 10? That's impressive...

Blows my mind seeing people look on windows 10 as some kind of last bastion, apparently not realizing that was Windows 7 at best.

10 is the one where they fucked up the UX beyond repair, made everything slow and added insane amounts of spying. If you willingly switched to 10 then don't pretend like 11 is a bridge too far now.

10 had at least SOME good in it, at first i didnt want to move on from 7 but when i finally did it was okay. Everything i have heard about 11 is awful, and i wasnt very pleased with it myself either when i tried it at work, though i was able to mostly ignore it since it was just my work pc.

And now after switching to mint, idea of using 11 is preposterous.

This article is trash, it mentions existing windows 10 features in windows 11 like it's a groundbreaking new technology.

Virtual desktops and clipboard manager? Cmon man we've been having that for years now

I couldn't be happier, ditching Windows for Linux.