My biggest annoyance is that I specifically bought a Windows 11 license, from the MS store, using my MS account. I did this because I assumed that if something went wrong, I would always be able to recover it. I could never 'lose' the key if it was tied to my account.
Well unfortunately, MS screwed me. When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.
Despite having one license, one account, and one PC registered, MS refused to help. I tried to call support, but there are NO on-call support anymore. Only automated online support. No chat. Nothing. I tried over and over for a couple days and got nowhere.
Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
If Microsoft can't do it, if Apple, Google, Facebook, X , OpenAI can't do it, then maybe we shouldn't allow companies to operate at scales which inevitably lead to widespread consumer harm.
They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle.
This is a legislation and regulation issue - the data barons are exploiting the effective absence of any accountability for harms they casually inflict on the public, ranging from gotcha situations like the OP to viral self harm trends among kids to mass surveillance and commercial invasion of privacy.
Pirate everything, support open source, pay content creators directly.
If they want to have billions of users, they damn well better be able to handle each and every one of those users in a commercially responsible fashion, or they have no business operating at that scale. We should be done with the "oops, we're too big and we make too much money to care that we just casually wrecked your life, oh well!" If the solution is to force users to have to buy a new PC, or a new phone, or create a new account, or anything in that vein, it's almost intentional, and casually malicious.
It's not like these companies don't know what they're doing, they can simply afford not to care. Until there's regulation and accountability that's more expensive than ignoring the consumer casualties, things will continue to get worse.
> Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
The best way to do that would be for all the governments and large corporations that buy Windows machines for their employees to switch to Linux. That would probably end up cheaper in the long run. But nobody wants to sign up to be the one driving the switch.
Unless and until that happens, the unfortunate fact for individual Windows users is that you're rounding error in MS's numbers anyway. You're not the one they're making all the money from. The large government and corporate accounts are. And as long as people have to use Windows at work, they're going to use Windows at home because it's familiar to them. (Except for outliers like me who run Linux at home even though we have to use Windows at work. But those outliers are rounding error to the rounding error.)
> That would probably end up cheaper in the long run. But nobody wants to sign up to be the one driving the switch.
If memory serves, the French government (and various French municipalities) have been actively moving to Linux since the early 2000s. The French police even have their own Linux distribution, GendBuntu [1].
And yes, the reported cost savings are around 40% [2].
That just ends with everyone back in the same boat. Serious enterprises will still need OS support and no one is anywhere near prepared to challenge Microsoft for OS support contracts whether they be Linux, Windows, or otherwise.
> no one is anywhere near prepared to challenge Microsoft for OS support contracts
I don't think governments and large corporations are getting OS support from Microsoft. Certainly none of those I have worked for did so. The support people have to use MS tools, at least to some extent, but they're not MS employees and they have no inside connections with MS.
It's true that what "OS Support", or more generally "Supporting workstations for employees", would amount to would be different for a large organization that uses Linux, compared to what it is for a large organization that uses Windows. But "different" does not mean "worse". I would expect the quality of such support to be better once it sinks in that the organization means what it says about using open source solutions. And there are plenty of open source software projects that would love a huge influx of customers willing to pay for features (LibreOffice comes to mind, for example).
> I don't think governments and large corporations are getting OS support from Microsoft. Certainly none of those I have worked for did so
I’ve received excellent powershell-based support for their cloud services. I can’t imagine what I’d ask of them for OS support. If we can’t solve the issue in a timely fashion, we just reimage the device.
No, really. They're not perfect, and as time goes on I keep agonizing more and more about whether they're worth the money. But also, I've had some amazing customer support from Apple employees over the years, and I at least have to concede that the money for those people's salaries has to come from somewhere.
Also, divide the cost of the product by the replacement interval.
I have some landfill android tablets that are too slow to run the moral equivalent of flash games. The iPad’s I have (all low end models) are older than the androids (in one case, 2x older) and still work much better.
Retail price / years supported is pretty comparable for Apple and Android. On top of that, you can get deals on “discontinued” newly manufactured apple devices, and used ones as well.
I have many complaints about Apple, but value for money isn’t one of them.
You should qualify that with “in your chosen location.” And there is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing to live where housing happens to be expensive.
I had the iPhone 3G back in 2008 and only had Android phones after that. Until 2020. But when trying to log into my old Apple account, it was asking for answers to security questions I’ve never setup because they weren’t a thing in 2008. After calling Apple support, my problem went up the ladder until someone called me and told me the way to do it. Try that with Google.
It was a long time ago but more than once I had troubles with a Windows license and it was known that if you talked to somebody at Microsoft on the phone long enough they'd take pity on you and give you a new license key.
They're not really afraid that individuals are going to rip off Windows, they are afraid that system builders are going to rip off 20 copies of Windows for machines that they build. In fact, given that they are so into Azure and GAME PASS and all sorts of thing you've never heard of, Windows might just be a loss leader.
It's not the computer that Microsoft is selling, it's Windows. It's apples and oranges (no pun intended). Apple doesn't charge for its software and Microsoft has many other products. It's just about how you distribute your costs.
FWIW, Microsoft has a much higher profit margin than Apple.
Id argue that at this point, Microsoft isn't selling Windows. They're selling everything/anything touching their platform.
Copilot, Office, Azure, gamepass. Almost all of these have a yearly subscription price that exceeds or is close to that of a Windows license. Windows just happens to be the platform they use to get you in.
Every time I call Apple customer service, they tell me to box up my device and send it in to be replaced. The human element is nice but it's hardly a panacea - you need trained customer support.
>Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
> The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
The key words are monopoly and lock-in. Those things can really scramble the bad vs good equation.
> Does Microsoft actually have a monopoly on anything these days? Maybe gaming? I saw its like 95% windows on Steam.
Monopoly doesn't always mean 100% of the market. They're still the leader by far in desktop operating systems, and pretty much everyone who has a computer as work has an Office license allocated to them.
No, that's not the reality of the situation. You are theorizing a perfect market with no costs of entry or exit. Customer demand for critical systems is inelastic to start with due to technical burden (ie most people are not good enough with computers to casually switch OS), and large vendors work hard to maximize that inelasticity.
> If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
The problem is that while this is true, in practice it's more like the mandate of heaven than laissez-faire economics. When political power structures are involved, and thus the status quo itself is reliant on the omnipresence of certain economic forces, there can never be a drawdown under normal market forces. There is an intentional, exerted force which unbalances the equation in favor of the monoliths. "Enough of a problem" ends up becoming violent social upheaval. In effect, you advocate for normalizing the driver to aim our societal bus off the cliff because "somebody hasn't grabbed the steering wheel yet, so it's clearly an acceptable course." Discounting the fact that the co-driver is pointing a machine gun at the back of the bus.
Adam Smith would be absolutely apalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.
If you care about high quality products we can start with the OP article and how this system, which is most definitely not capitalism as intended, has directly entailed this nosedive of enshittification for absolutely superfluous and nonsensical reasons. The Soviets succumbed to the exact same mistake, I'm not sure why you would bring them up.
I presume you live in a capitalist society. That means you are free to start your own business and avoid enshittification and nonsense.
Me, I started a game business because nobody else made the game I wanted to play. I started a compiler business because I didn't like the available compilers. I designed a new programming language because the existing languages were not good enough.
I think perhaps it's my fault for how I worded that reply, but to clarify it has scarcely little to do with products at all. They don't matter. I sure hope you still can make your own tools to your hearts desire, but that's not going to fix anything and it never will. I'll emphasize I'm still confused at your first reply, which reads like a non-sequitur to me, and this second reply makes me think we're having wildly different conversations, so I think I'll just leave it at that.
> Adam Smith would be absolutely appalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.
One problem is that the ambient propaganda has changed the definition of capitalism to exactly the problematic one you describe, so that arguing for a more sensible balance of the kind that Smith and others described is taken as an attack on capitalism itself.
These days I'm reminded more and more often of Wimp Lo from Kung Pow! Enter the Fist: "We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke." Except people have been trained wrong to make them better targets for farming their capital.
If customers just start bugging Microsoft devs directly as though they are customer support (which…technically they should be since they built the product) then maybe productivity would grind to a halt. When all the MBAs running the show start seeing all their JIRA dashboards full bad news then perhaps they’ll think twice?
Heck if the McDonald’s CEO and family were required by law to eat their own McDonald’s product for 80%+ of daily caloric/macro intake, then we would probably see things change quickly.
Companies that can’t run at a particular scale should definitely not be enabled to do so. But sadly, we seem to not hold them accountable, directly.
>>>Heck if the McDonald’s CEO and family were required by law to eat their own McDonald’s product for 80%+ of daily caloric/macro intake, then we would probably see things change quickly.
Hamurabbi's code: An architect, or equivalent next of kin, was put to death , if the building he had built killed the owner, or a kin of the owner.
How about giving less profit to the shareholders? How about making customer support legally mandated so companies don't have the "greedy shareholder" excuse?
There is a range between less profit and no profit. As a shareholder, I'd rather have a functional society for all at the cost of a bit less profit, rather than being the richest in a world of ashes.
Have computer prices gotten considerably cheaper since the days when companies had human support employees? Some components have gotten considerably more expensive, so it seems like they haven't, at least on average.
Relatively speaking yes. My Macintosh Quadra 605 was around $1000 in 1994 and was a low end model at the time. Today that $1000 would be around $2100 or so. I can get an entry level MacMini for $499.
Yeah; a better comparison would be with a current generation AI workstation. I’ll randomly go with Razer, since they look pretty and are shipping 5090’s with high-end AMD processors.
With many products, every contact a customer makes with customer service is an opportunity to profit. However, it requires quite a mindset to appreciate this.
You can rig your product reviews by providing above and beyond customer service, for example, warranty claims dealt with in a day with a replacement in the post arriving as if by magic to surprise the customer. Hit them up for a review and they will write a review with meaning, explaining how you fixed their problem, exceeding all expectations. Unless you have done this then you would never know. Although most companies do collect reviews, they don't know the way to do it is to get reviews from the customers that complained rather than the ones that didn't. It is very counterintuitive.
You can always upsell. If the customer has problems with the product then maybe they need a different product or a whole suite of stuff. With software you can always give trials too. Complaining about what comes with Windows? Maybe you need Office. Here you go, a three month trial to tide you over.
Customer service should also be the eyes and ears of the company, to alert product and sales teams to any problems with new products so corrections can be made very quickly.
It is also about having customers for life. It is more cost effective to retain the customers you have rather than churn them.
All of this applies regardless of the company size. There are some caveats though. Nothing can be queued unduly, queues don't save time for anyone and you still have to get all of that queued work done. This means you need team members that work from both the front and the back of the queue, to have a clean queue by the end of day.
If you get it right then customer service is not a cost, it is the exact opposite, at the heart of marketing due to word of mouth goodness that can't be bought so easily. If you can get the upsells to work too, then a customer service department can pay its own way, to profit even.
You also have to recruit people that will go above and beyond. Lots of people have hectic lives with kids and other obligations that make their lives unpredictable. They will need days off, special working hours and other niceties, however, give them a job that they can fit around their life and they will show gratitude with loyalty and hard work.
There are cultural problems why this 'bring it on' approach is not so common. Usually customer service are down there with the pigeons in corporate pecking order. In reality, customer service needs to be at the heart of the company with more than lip service given to the 'customer first' idea.
With companies giving customer service over to AI chatbots, there is plenty of opportunity for companies of all sizes, including Microsoft, to resist the AI temptation and get serious about customer service.
This is why we have courts and judges, to hear complaints and issue remedies when the defendants are unwilling to do so. A better solution would be to reign in arbitration agreements, which are horribly inefficient. Arbitration purports to be lest costly, but it encourages unnecessary litigation by preventing the operation of res judicata, it increases the costs of litigation by preventing class actions, etc. It increases injuries by keeping wrongdoers conduct confidential.
For the most part customer service is excellent from Swedish government agencies. There are exceptions with either poorly run or intentionally refunded agencies where it is not the case but usually the quality of customer service is excellent.
What you do is have a real capitalist system with decent antitrust protections and real market competition instead a crony capitalist system where oligopolies can easily push regulators and legislators around.
And then, once you have enabled consumers to vote with their money, they will.
You've got the sheep and the wolf in sheep's clothing mixed up.
This kind of oligopolism, rent-seeking behavior, and general corruption are some of the problems capitalism was invented to fix. And the further societies stray away from actively defending a strong market economy, the more those problems start to come back.
Now come on. A basic level of support would not cost Microsoft $9900 - that's absurd to suggest. It may reduce their profit margins a bit, or they may have to increase the price, but it's not like Microsoft has earning problems.
> When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.
This happened to me too! It's absolutely insane that a license I bought through my account can't be transferred somehow...
My newest NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy, and I can reinstall on it repeatedly while keeping the activation, so at least we've got that going for us.
But after Proton, all the machines in my house exclusively run Linux. I sincerely hope I never touch a windows machine again for the rest of my life :)
I so wish I could move to Linux, but I extensively use Windows computers via RDP and the Linux RDP clients are just so bad on my eyes. I tried Remmina, rdesktop and FreeRDP. Maybe NX would be a good option but I can't install NX on all of the computers I use. I guess I should shut-up and try to contribute to those projects to make them better.
When did you last try Remmina (which uses FreeRDP as the backend btw)? Ever since FreeRDP got updated to V3, the RDP experience improved significantly. I use it every day for work stuff and it's been great - folder sharing works, clipboard works, so does audio forwarding and DPI scaling. Oh and RemoteApps too. Honestly I've got zero complaints with it.
A couple of weeks ago. My employer provided a new computer which I loaded with Fedora. I found the colors on Remmina really saturated and harsh. I loaded Win11 because I really disliked it. But, I will try Fedora again since I need to reinstall Win11 due to an account problem I can’t resolve.
Have you looked into Rustdesk? The setup isn't complicated, it's basically TeamViewer but local. It provided me with a way better quality than anything VNC based on linux.
I use Remmina all the time. It did take some tinkering but if you play with compression and bit depth settings, you should be able to get it working better. I think even cuddling with the encryption settings helped as well.
> NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy
There's some form of "BIOS-attached license". Don't really know how it works, but I've seen this for many years. Basically all PCs that have the Windows logo have that, and you can install windows on them as many times as you like, without ever having to enter a license key (I suppose this is limited to the same edition level - I've only ever tried this on "enterprise-level" machines that came with windows pro).
This even works for machines that originally came with windows 8 to install 10, and 10 -> 11. I've never tried "forcing" a win11 install on any machine that came with win8.
Yep, device activated vs user activated. It makes sense to have the option in large environments but they really screw end users on this stuff. MS licensing is insane, I have to deal with it at work, and it's unbelievably complicated. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I run Linux at home too. Its annoying, but I sometimes need to run Windows in a WM for Word, as the online version is crap on large complex documents where formatting matters, and interoperability with colleagues keeps me from using LibreOffice Write.
Have you checked out OnlyOffice (not to be confused with OpenOffice)? It's MSO file format compatibility is vastly superior to LibreOffice, I use it work on files shared by colleagues using MSO and it works fine for the most part.
The only issue I faced is with embedded ActiveX/VBA, like forms in a Word doc that might use radio buttons will get converted to static images. If you don't have weird stuff like that in your docs then you should be fine.
I was in this same situation earlier this year with one machine that was using a license attached to my Microsoft account. From what I read online, I thought I was freeing up the license by running "slmgr /upk" and "slmgr /cpky" on the old machine, but I guess not. I was eventually able to get the license transferred to the new machine, but only after a very painful morning of working with an MS support person.
I learned that there are two ways of buying a Windows 11 license. One way results in getting a traditional license key that can be reliably transferred, and the other way (tying the license to your Microsoft account) risks losing your license. :( I'm very careful to only buy licenses the former way, now.
It's just a matter of buying from the right web page at Microsoft's web site. At least as of June, I was able to buy a license with a traditional license key here:
Last I ever bothered to buy a CD key I got it off one of those gaming key sites. I have since moved on to Linux, but you can get a Pro key really cheap on those sites. I refuse to overspend to upgrade what should have been a computer with Windows Pro OOTB. If you spend over 2 grand on any computer you should not be getting Windows Home edition.
I guess if things get ugly they have some (terrible) plausible deniability? “What do you mean my $10 Windows Enterprise key is stolen? I thought that was the going rate. Linux is free”
Both. Microsoft would probably never go after the buyer, but I just wondered the justification people buying from the grey market are - legally speaking in many places, you're just paying money to pirate it - it's not a valid license.
I have two Minecraft accounts, several Live.com accounts accrued over the years, and a smattering of Github accounts for various reasons (professional, self-employed, personal),
Logging into Minecraft java a week ago took me 7 logins across various different accounts -- and then it ALSO uses Xbox for auth, which I never set up. And then, the endpoint is blocked for my ISPs IP range so I had to use a VPN and try from a few locations. Bless you, Ohio.
I had a similar issue recently and was able to convince the AI agent to give me a phone number to talk to a support representative. They manually fixed my accout and key and gtg in a few minutes.
Join the club.
They 'stole' three Minecraft accounts from me.
I tried their migration tool separately and all they were able to tell me was that old chestnut, "something happened".
Wow, this must be a recent change. My license somehow was disassociated from my machine. I was able to get someone to fix it over the phone after some basic troubleshooting. It was a little annoying it happened at all, but at least they fixed it.
I wish it worked like that! Sadly, it does not. That's why I was using a MS account login instead of a local username/password - I thought that it would be 'automatic'. No such luck.
This seems like a situation where you could run a pirate kms server and license yourself. I imagine you would gave a strong case should it come to trial.
Oddly, I have never bothered to buy a Windows 11 license and somehow do not have any issues with using Windows 11 on any of my computers. Some upgraded, some built from scratch.
So the problem is that MS isn't even consistent about how it enforces licenses.
Somehow my decade plus expired MSDN licensed Windows keys are still working like champs across multiple machine activations. I think at this point if they stopped working I'd just drop Windows altogether.
I could, and maybe I should, but it's just too much effort, time, and money. It's not worth what I paid for the license. If the license was $10k that would be different.
The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is Windows 11, with perfect timing too as modern Linux has been a joy to use as a daily driver.
Normally I'd be unhappy when a sleazy corp forces me to give up on 25 years of muscle memory of using my preferred OS, but I'm thankful they gave me the push I needed to rip off the ad/spyware laced Windows Band-Aid that I only need to do once in my life.
It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.
Best of all I'm not reminded daily that I'm using an OS that works against my best interests, I can actually use an App Store again that's been designed for the benefit of its Users, imagine that.
I supported enterprise Windows systems for a decade, although I had Unix and Linux experience as well and liked all of them.
I skipped Windows 8 entirely. For the 10 era, I had at least one Linux VM on each of my systems, and migrated to open-source where possible even on the host OS (Blender, Inkscape, etc.).
Windows 11 pushed me to flip things around - Linux as the host OS, and a Windows VM or dual-boot if I absolutely need to do something with that system that only runs well on Windows. These days, that list is very short.
All of the many frustrations of 11 become much less pressing when it's just throwing a temper tantrum in its playpen instead of interrupting serious work; the effect is magnified by rarely needing to interact with it at all anymore on my personal devices.
Linux still has a few quirks, but IMO there are fewer and fewer of those every year, while they seem to be increasing on Windows. The most recent 11 update has made Windows Explorer unreliable for me. I'm still stunned. The last time I saw stability issues with Explorer was on 98 SE.
Regards " stability issues with Explorer", I doubt it is Explorer itself.
2 thoughts:
1. Possibly something hooked into Explorer. Not necessarily malicious but could be like an acrobat extension or image editor extension or similar that helps to make thumbnails/previews. Or a context menu hook in.
Use Sysinternals Autoruns [0] to have a look. It is a free diagnostics tool from MS that shows everything that loads on startup. It looks at Start menu Startup folder, registry run and runonce keys and a bunch more places where things are hooked in. No restarts or anything required simply to look. It will show plugins/addons to Explorer too. Easy disable/re-enable process allows for somewhat easy troubleshooting. You'll have to restart Explorer after a "disable" step to see the results though.
Be sure to use the "hide microsoft entries" option if you want to narrow it down some.
2. Filesystem filters - things like antivirus "scan on read". If a "scan on read" goes to an antivirus that is not playing ball it will halt the "file open" request for example.
The command "fltmc" will list filesystem filter drivers. But making sense of which one belongs to what software is a further exercise. Which is why I suggest this investigative path as number 2...
I switched to Ubuntu on my main machine this year and even as a heavy 365 user it's better. Battery life is massively improved. I even still run the odd game on cs2. 11 feels like toy town in comparison.
Speak for yourself, I tried again to switch to Linux last year with standard Ubuntu and had multiple issues, the machine wouldn’t wake from sleep, would lock up with a grey graphics glitched login screen when locked, I tried to upgrade the OS and it broke all my graphics drivers, after I spent another few hours trying to fix it (and seeing a lot of very unfriendly and unwelcoming “help” from the Linux community), and running into other issues I didn’t list here, I gave up and switched back.
I’ve been a multi-os user for years, tried Linux on and off, but for now I have a windows machine I just use for gaming and a mac that I use for development and everything else. The truth if I struggled as much as I did and I’m a software developer with years of experience with this stuff, the dream of the general public using Linux is doomed. Every few years I hope Linux has gotten its act together so that it can actually grow again, but it’s still behind the times.
But my experiences aside, the truth is 99% of people would rather just make a Microsoft account than have to learn and switch to a whole new OS. It might be the breaking point for you, but that doesn’t mean it’s the breaking point for many. If the Linux community continues to stay blind about this and about the very real problems people experience that they insist aren’t problems, then they’ll continue to have a tiny market share, that’s all there is to it.
Ok and I had the opposite issue of installing windows and not being able to get a lot of drivers work. Also getting issues with Bluetooth all the time that had me install and uninstall drivers. With linux I had no issues.
Unfortunately you tried the worst possible distro out of them all - Ubuntu is infamous for being the Windows of the Linux world (for all the wrong reasons), and Canonical is getting worse every year. Still nowhere as bad as Microsoft, but they're getting there.
I would highly recommend using a sane newbie-friendly distro which bundles all relevant drivers, like Aurora[1]- they even have a developer edition which may be of interest to you. If you're a gamer though, Bazzite[2] may be a better option - comes with drivers for all popular game controllers and hardware and includes Steam and other stuff so you can get gaming in no time at all.
My 70yr old mum uses Aurora and she has zero issues. She surfs the web, edits documents, prints and scans, backs up and organised photos etc. Pretty much all your basic PC user stuff. If my mum can use Linux, so can anyone else.
“Ubuntu” is the largest and most popular distro. Saying it’s the worst one I could use is ridiculous. If your community’s biggest distro is “the worst one you can use” then that is actually a bigger problem than everything else.
How much care did you take in getting a machine for running Linux? Did you get one specifically with that in mind? Or did you slap it on the machine you already had?
I used my perfectly normal PC that has absolutely bog standard components that any decent OS should run on. I’m not about to throw my whole computer out just to switch.
Endless raving about how painless and troubleshoot-free Linux is and then you try installing it on your very standard-built PC and face major glaring issues and then get told you're the idiot for not junking your perfectly good GPU from the most popular GPU maker and most valuable company on the planet.
I'm sure it's Nvidia's fault for whatever reason but Linux proselytizers need to stop being so dishonest about how pain-free switching is.
If you have all kinds of issues when installing Linux, “oh Linux bad”, “Linux not ready” etc. If you have the same with windows, it is normal, sometimes happens with certain hardware, it is manufacturer’s fault etc.
It is painless on hardware that's compatible. Nvidia issues are well known too.
It's like you running Windows 7 on a PC designed with Windows 11 in mind and expecting a good time. If you wanted a good Windows 7 experience you'd want a PC with parts that are actually compatible and have good drivers. Linux is the same.
Linux is generally a rock solid delight on any AMD desktop, but insists on being at least an occasional pain in the ass on basically every laptop in the world and anything with Nvidia.
Perhaps, but I also have been told that nvidia should work now and works for many people yet I keep running into issues. Also, many of my issues were unrelated to the graphics card.
Full Intel or full AMD laptops are usually fine in my experience. It's when you have both an integrated and a discrete GPU, especially Nvidia, that things start to fall apart.
Yep I only buy laptops/computers that are known to be compatible with linux or outright allow it as an option. Drivers are the biggest issue by far, especially video and power suspend modes. Life gets a bit easier when you get windows off the brain
Getting a 5090 and 5k2k monitor is what forced me back off of Linux last time I switched. I'm used to crappy "cutting edge" hardware support in Linux and routinely bounce back and forth between Windows and Linux as the different annoyances build up. Yes, I know Linux has issues with NVidia. But AMD doesn't make a comparable card period.
Which distros have you tried? The new nVidia open drivers work so much more better in Linux these days than the fully proprietary ones (still not as good as AMD, but it's pretty decent).
Also there are distros which handle cutting edge hardware much better than others (like Fedora/based or Arch/based), and some are infamous for always lagging behind (Ubuntu/Debian based). Choosing the right distro can make a huge difference to your Linux experience.
“You used the wrong distro” is literally the GO TO answer and to be honest I’m sick of hearing it. You get it from the Linux community no matter how major or popular a distro you use.
This was literally about three months ago on NixOS. The upgrade also toasted the boot from USB linux distros that have smaller and older kernels to reduce file size.
NixOS is pretty niche and getting nVidia to work properly on it is a PITA. I would recommend using CachyOS instead (since you sound like an advanced user), it has excellent nVidia support - you don't need to do anything special to get it going.
The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is not that it has improved but that its biggest competitor has dropped the ball? That’s not really praising it.
Linux is the better OS. Windows 11 just forces people to evaluate other OS's to experience the latest Linux for themselves.
I didn't have the time as a working Adult for distro hopping and Gentoo compiles, but the thought of having to live with Windows 11 made me try out modern linux again, glad I did.
Linux is now the better OS, after the other one got significantly worse than it used to be, and even that is close call depending on what you need Linux to do.
IMO, it was definitely the better OS even going back to 15 years ago. People use Windows only because of the network effect of people being school-taught how to use computers on Windows, which leads to a positive feedback loop of more software being made for it which locks-in people further.
I remember after learning Linux, how much of a toy Windows felt, with my needing to grab windows by the bar to move them around (instead of grabbing from anywhere), and trying to resize them by the thin corner (instead of resizing from anywhere), having no concept of workspaces, having no choice of window manager while Linux could engulf windows in flames and render them in a cube, only being able to backspace single characters at a time, no choice of file manager, files having weird limitations on their names, having nothing like bash (pre-powershell) while Linux had multiple shells, no block devices (this could be expanded into a lot of points), no simple way to work the partition tables, not being able to mount things wherever, not being able to treat a regular file like a disk, no real choices of filesystems, poor network utilities, ping only pings an arbitrary 3 times by default instead of just going on indefinitely, no package managers and repos, etc. I could go on a lot more probably, but this is enough. Windows XP was a toy compared to Linux.
Also not to forget the 260 character file path limitation, which still haunts Windows till date! You can lift the limits via a registry key, but programs still need support for it. Forget third-party programs, even many first-party Microsoft apps like Explorer itself still can't handle long paths.
But my biggest pet peeve with Windows is updates. Updates, updates, updates, it's such an underrated thing that Linux does so much better, I wish more folks would speak about this:
1. You only really need to reboot for kernel updates
2. Updates aren't forced upon you
3. You're in full control of the whole process - you can even decide to hold back certain packages, , or choose a different flavour that suits your needs better
4. Update everything - including thirdparty apps - from either the CLI or GUI (KDE Discover or Gnome Software etc)
5. Unlike Windows, updates rarely slow down your system, and if anything, they tend to make your system faster and better.
6. Most Linux users actually look forward to updates, whereas Windows users groan and swear at them, praying and hoping they MS doesn't break anything or add more crap/anti-features
7. When you reboot after updates, it's instant - no annoying "configuring... please don't turn of your computer" message that hijack your system when you need it the most.
8. If you've got an immutable distro, updates are atomic and can't break your system.
9. Many decent mutable distros also have the option to instantly snapshot the OS before an update, and allow you to rollback right from the boot menu.
Honestly, updates for me is easily the top reason why I feel Linux is a superior experience to Windows, I could write a whole essay on this.
No it doesn't. You can navigate to long paths, but try doing any file operations (like renaming a file) and you'll see it doesn't work.
Also, the rest of my points are end user impacting. Updates impact everyone and is a very important part of an OS experience. I used to work on a helpdesk for an MSP, and you've no idea the number calls we used to get from users frustrated about updates for various reasons. Hell, we use Windows at work and I still get annoyed as a user.
Just to clarify, this was actually like most of Windows. You could (in XP at least via Disk Manager), but they made it harder than it needed to be.
Multiple workspaces was a thing as well that came with XP Power Toys and was a feature in later versions, but not simple to access, and mostly broken because they never test it.
I made my final transition during Vista. Touching 7, 10 and 11 for work purposes means I can see that I don't miss any of it.
Windows is awful, and has terrible discovery for features, and anything off the main "happy path" is usually broken. This isn't a new thing since they fired their QA folks, it's always been bad.
It is just the "Windows can't do this" statements, when it can.
As someone who was burned by it during the 2010s, this is no longer the case. My Bazzite install worked out-of-the-box with no tweaking whatsoever. I've been on this install since April 2024.
Better hardware support, more funding and development on the desktops, Flatpak, more apps being web apps, Proton, everything converged finally.
What's odd is this machine does not work seamlessly under Windows, it doesn't support the wifi or ethernet driver out of the box and refuses to load it during Windows setup, and that of course requires an internet connection to complete now. This works fine under Linux.
I'm afraid you are not going to convince anyone like that who was not already convinced.
I've been using both Windows and Linux for the past decade, and I think we have to acknowledge that both have their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, there is no doubt that the Linux UX is less polished or that Windows makes UI customization more difficult (it is possible but you have to write dlls instead of css).
But the points you make do not really touch the core of the difference. The ability to drag windows from any point? That's horrible for people who like to click on stuff without intention to drag a window. It's like the shitty toolbars in Office 95 that were not 'locked' by default so you would accidentally move them around all the time.
Backspace only single characters? Windows 2000 already supported ctrl+bs/del, so not sure where this is going. Same for block devices, those were supported for an eternity, and were contributing to make Windows more prone to rootkits. And so on for most of the points you made - they are simply not true, perhaps because you are not familiar with Windows :(
I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers. So let's get the facts straight and leave out controversial and opinionated topics that only let Windows fanboys go "Akshually".
> I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers.
As someone who's used a variety of OSes (ranging from FreeBSD to Windows and macOS) on desktops and laptops, including trying out 6 Linux distros in the past couple of years (Arch, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Bluefin, and currently NixOS), I honestly don't understand how you end up with "Linux is the best choice for people who are just starting out".
I'm experienced and I prefer Linux, but the amount of time investment I've needed to put into troubleshooting and customizing any of these distros (from Mint having the least to NixOS having the most) has been higher than either Windows (10 or 11) or macOS.
Depends on what you’re customizing them toward. If you want to make it act exactly like macOS, that’s going to be a lifelong struggle. (The opposite is also true: I hated my Mac until I stopped trying to make it work like my Linux desktop and started doing things its way.)
> The ability to drag windows from any point? That's horrible for people who like to click on stuff without intention to drag a window.
Not OP, but that's not the way it works - you'll need to press a modifier key (typically Alt or Win/Meta) along with the drag operation, so you can't do it accidentally. And you can always turn it off from the settings if you don't like this behaviour.
> I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers
Why just single out newbies? Even old fogies can switch to Windows. My 70yr old mum used all versions of Windows from 3.1 - 7, and she switched to Linux about a decade ago, starting with Mint, and now on Aurora. She does all the basic tasks most PC users do (surfing the web, editing docs, printing/scanning, backing up photos etc) and has zero issues. If my mum - and old school Windows user - can use Linux, so can anyone else.
Just use a sensible distro with sane defaults (like Aurora), or a DE with a sane GUI (KDE or XFCE) and you'll be fine. The core UI /UX paradigms is the same as Windows, you just need to have an open mind and take your time getting used to the differences.
Naturally there are some people who can't deal with change, so Linux may never be an option for them, but for other folks, unless the have a legit reason to stick to Windows (like dependency on some proprietary app/workflow), Linux is a pretty viable option these days.
That's uncharitable: Stability matters, and Linux just doesn't give a fuck about breaking the environment since software is of course FOSS and can just be recompiled from sauce, right?
Meanwhile try to launch a proprietary app and have it work after some years? Lol, good luck unless you constantly update it. Windows, you can still run ancient apps because key parts of the system are stable.
The average windows users wants it to run the software they want and not completely fucking shit the bed. Windows is allowed to be designed poorly, and it is.
But, shockingly, despite Windows goals being so small and easily achievable, Microsoft still fucks it up.
Wine is a better Win32 implementation than Win32. And Microsoft just can't help making the OS worse. Every new feature is basically strictly worse than the stuff before.
All they have to do is do nothing and continue making the same things work. But no.
Though you might not notice the last result ever if you always run it from the GUI run box instead of a console, as the resulting console in that instance closes pretty instantly after the fourth result is displayed.
Very subjective. I made the switch to Linux from Windows 7 over 10 years ago and even at that time I found Linux to be orders of magnitude better in almost every aspect, and those few areas where it was worse (which, aside from games, I'm struggling to even think of any now) were well worth the trade-off.
People use Windows because of the software, not because of the operating system itself. The best thing windows can do is not assert itself and hide as much as possible. As soon as you have to start interacting with any windows systems, it becomes clear how hacky and poorly conceptualized the OS is.
The best versions of Windows were the least annoying.
Windows wasn’t fully usable until the terminal and WSL shipped. And now isn’t due to adverts and loss of local accounts, and other hostile anti-features.
Windows 7 was the first version that gave me stability that made Linux feel like less of a must-have / only option.
Windows 11 largely gives me no problems and has worked perfectly fine with the hardware I've thrown at it, with no effort on my part. WSL is definitely a bonus.
The same just has not been true of Linux for me during the same time period with the same pieces of hardware.
I still happen to run NixOS on my laptop (the most recent of 6 distros, and Windows, I've tried over the past couple of years). It's not been entirely trouble-free but (thanks to the Arch wiki, mostly), it's in a decent state now.
And you are right about the hostile anti-features, though, and that promises to only get worse.
My windows PC has been relegated to games and will likely get whatever first stable, headache free SteamOS+NVIDIA incarnation turns up.
I've got no more affection for Windows than for Linux. There are just cases where the former has given me fewer headaches than the latter.
Sounds like a hardware issue on the Linux side. Been using Dell developers for decades and recently Frameworks and had only temporary issues with brand-new chipsets. Star labs tablet is great as well.
On the Windows side NT 3.5 was rock solid with limited software selection, 4 was decent, XP was fine for me behind a firewall but not everyone was so lucky on the security angle. No one liked Vista but I don't remember it being due to crashing.
Sounds like the wireless card issue of a few years back. Believe it was fixed by replacing the cheaper module with an Intel wireless card. Never affected me.
I agree, but that's possibly because my experience with Linux in the age of 95 and 98 was Dragon Linux, which was adapted to sitting next to a Windows installation on a FAT partition and had some limitations and instabilities.
Once I got my first consumer high end PC that was really my own and payed for with my own money, with one of the early hyperthreading CPU:s, it didn't take long until I made the move from Windows to Slackware and never looked back. I've used later Windows versions quite a lot, but spent more time in Putty sessions against Linux and BSD boxes than anything else on them.
My first attempt at Linux was installing Mandrake sometime circa 2002. I was only a kid that liked computers back then, not really an advanced user. I could not make the mouse work, and gave up. Probably for a more advanced user that was not an issue, and Linux was better already.
Many years later, around 2015, I had the option to work from a Linux environment at my workplace, and went for it. Ubuntu this time around, during Windows 7 days. Many consider Windows 7 to be peak Windows, and I found Ubuntu to be much, much better. At least for regular use and Dev work. The only thing that kept me from using it on my own PC was that running my game library was not possible back then. I did keep it on dual boot for a few years though.
What allowed me to move for good was Proton. In some ways, that is the point where I can say, without any caveats or asterisks, that Linux is definitely better.
My experience is kinsa similar to yours, started around 98/99 with Red Hat and Mandrake. Linux was just so clunky at the time. I could never take it seriously, having to compile the kernel for getting something basic going was not very fun. Although it was pretty fun trying out all the various distros that would come on free CDs bundled with computer magazines (remember those?!).
I was in fact playing around with several alternate OSes at the time, and the ones which really impressed me the most were QNX and BeOS. I absolutely loved QNX for being so performant - especially at multitasking, was smooth as butter my humble 450MHz PIII. QNX solved the desktop interactivity problem more than two *decades* before Linux did, and I think that's pretty damn impressive. And BeOS blew me away with its multimedia performance.
It wasn't until Windows 7 came out, that I decided to switch to Linux full time (started with SuSE, then Fedora and switched to Arch a few years later). Basically my reason for switching was because I wasn't eligible for Microsoft's student discount and I couldn't afford to pay the full price for 7, and I was actually really looking forward to it and really wanted to buy it instead of pirating it, thinking I could get the student discount... but no. I got really ticked off at Microsoft and decided to just format my PC and switch to Linux for good.
Linux is now the better OS on the desktop for many more people after the other one got significantly¹ worse than it used to be.
It has been the better OS server-side and for appliance applications (routers, media players, …) for a long time, Windows may be drawing equal but does that count if some of it is due to WSL?
It has been the better OS, or often just the equal OS for a lot of desktop users for a fair while also, particularly non-gamers who don't need other specific tools that don't have a sufficiently compatible Linux offering/alternative. Many use it because the cost is hidden and might use something else given a properly informed choice.
I wouldn't put it in front of my Dad, even though pretty much all he does is no different on Windows than Linux and has been for years, because of compatibility concerns with printers/scanners and because there are others in the family able+willing to support Windows so he isn't stuck waiting for me if he ever has trouble while I'm difficult to contact.
I don't run Linux on my main desktop due to inertia (games are largely what kept me with Windows long enough to have to make the 8->10 transition) but that is not enough any more, partly because it just isn't really there (lack of things keeping me on Windows because they don't work well easily elsewhere, and irritations with Win11 applying a noticeable retrograde force) and partly because my use patterns have changed (modern games are not a thing in my life ATM, my hobbies have changed considerably in the last decade). That machine will be switching over to Linux when I get around to it, or it might just be shut off (almost all data is on Linux on the little house server, and off-site copies, already anyway) in which case the laptop will just gain a dock so it can better use the big screens & whatnot.
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[1] I might also take issue with significantly, as that might imply the change is sudden and due specifically to the Win10 EOL. Windows, both 11 & 10 and 8 before them, has been going downhill slowly enough that each extra irritation has faded into something that people put up with before the next one comes along. Recent changes (more ads etc) are generally small² but are the final straw.
[2] Recall (and the justified consternation it creates) is the one recent change that I would call significant in its own right. As irritating as the other AI stuff nagging us to give it something to do is to those of use that don't want it, in many places it just feels like an evolution of Cortana's presence from a UX PoV more than a revolution in its own right, and doesn't feel nearly as invasive overall as the Recall subset does on its own.
it was the better os for me in 2005 because it allowed me to do everything I needed for class on the only laptop I could afford at the time. windows mistake edition just didn't work at all beyond booting and running a browser and even that caused it to crash several times per hour.
Linux has remained the best operating system for me since that time despite multiple upgrades to more powerful machines. everything I needed was available in the package manager. when I turned it on to work, it turned on and I worked. when I turned it off, it turned off. it didn't start upgrading and then hang, like my friends computers.
In fact I kept supporting friends on windows for a few more years, but after that I just told them I didn't know how it worked, because windows was just such mess to support.
Modern Ubuntu, for me, is akin to Windows 7 (peak Windows), but with some added benefits like real package management and mnemonics (the underlined letters in menus you can access with alt+underlined letter), and other cool things like middle-click anywhere on the window to resize.
Even Mac is pretty bad by comparison.
Again, this is just me, but I wonder if people saying Linux is bad are really just complaining it's different? It does help that I only buy hardware I know works.
I think the better way to look at is that no matter how good Linux gets, if MS didn't shoot themselves in the foot it would always struggle to make headway. Even the modest headway it's made over the last couple years.
It's not about quality, it's about market dominance. Walk into any major retailer, 95% of the computers they sell have Windows on them (100% if they don't sell Apple). Go to any company and see what they run on almost all their computers, Windows. Go to any school, probably the same thing (though years ago Apple would have had a strong presence too).
And that's not even talking about business software like Office. MS built that dominance back when Linux was almost entirely focused on the server space. What Desktops did exist where mostly hobby projects or relatively small companies. Shit Linux itself was a hobby project lol.
MS has had that position for over 20 years. Windows is the Xerox of computers. A lot of people don't even realize there are options out there. In that environment, even if the Linux Desktops got better than Windows, it should have taken an absolute killer app or some big evolution in the space to get people switching. All MS had to do was keeping offering a competent product. Or even a kind of shitty one that didn't actively give people a reason to switch.
But they can't help themselves. Most of the money isn't enough, they need all the money. And they've degraded their product to the point where it is actively driving people away. And even now it'll probably take another decade for Linux Desktops to break the 10% mark.
Linux desktop has improved a lot, but the huge momentum of the competitor has prevented many people (including OP) from switching or even remotely considering it. Anything that decreases the momentum of Windows lets the improvements of Linux show.
I think it has improved significantly. For the last few years KDE has been great and getting more polished.
The pain points are nothing worse than the crap Windows 11 throws at you. The only difference for the average person is that their go to tech support person might not know Linux. And paid support options like the India call centre stuff that gets thrown in with a laptop purchase for a month or so doesn't exist for Linux.
Yes, of course? Linux could be immaculate, but having less than 5% user share is a bigger issue that is best solved by the current market leader cratering.
As with anything, there are transition costs. If your current solution becomes worse, those transition costs become relatively lower. So it says a lot more an issue of moving over than anything about linux
Linux being the best OS didn't just "happen". It was a long process in many fronts (usability, devices, drivers, games, etc). But despite that, people are still reluctant to even try Linux, so Windows screwing around is the best thing that can happen to Linux.
I think it counts. If the most popular airline in the world suddenly started forcing you to commit to a subscription model to travel, one would consider less popular airlines going forward. Sometimes consistency of doing the job without adding hassle is more important than arriving at every destination under the sun. The problem with the Linux Desktop is it that it has a reputation as a scrappy alternative until it hits that random problem that grounds it. It will never replace Windows but it can take bigger and bigger chunks of users out of it.
The argunent is that it forced people to break their habit. Which is always the main hurdle for adoption. There is nothing innovative about Linux 2025 compared to 2024 or 2023, Windows just got worse. I say this as a 12+ years linux user. The biggest shift for the normies was Proton, and we got steam to thank for that. But Linux is more secure, reliable and hard tested as ever.
I think you missed the point. Linux was already good: it didn't become good because its competitor became worse. Rather, the competitor becoming worse gives some people the push they finally needed to make the switch.
I daily drive Ubuntu, the user experience is comparable (in many cases better) to Windows 11. The only sticking point for me is display drivers. HDR on Wayland is barely functional (in my experience), and getting things like hardware accelerated AV1 encoding, full Vulkan API support etc to work has been extremely difficult. Every time I login using a Wayland desktop, only my main monitor is detected and it defaults to 60hz. I have to go through a whole process of unplugging the "undetected" monitors and plugging them back in. X11 doesn't suffer from this, but of course does not support HDR.
Yes, this is almost entirely Nvidia's fault, and yes I should know better than to use NV graphics cards on Linux distros; but frankly, the barrier to entry should not be having to replace an expensive piece of hardware to achieve feature parity. (Obligatory "Nvidia, f*k you!")
> Every time I login using a Wayland desktop, only my main monitor is detected and it defaults to 60hz. I have to go through a whole process of unplugging the "undetected" monitors and plugging them back in.
Are you using GNOME? mutter has this problem where it does not retry commit on the next CRTC: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3833. If this is actually what's happening on your system, switching to KDE should solve it.
> HDR on Wayland is barely functional (in my experience)
This also sounds specific to GNOME, as mutter still doesn't have color management. You'll get a better HDR experience with KDE.
GNOME is typically the worst of all the options if you need feature support. They aggressively nack wayland proposals, and subsequently don't implement those proposals - while almost the entirety of the ecosystem does.
No, having the bare minimum "HDR support" does not mean it works fine. I have a 27-inch 4K 144Hz monitor with P3 wide color gamut and HDR600. This monitor is connected to 2 PCs, one running Arch Linux with GNOME as the DE and one with Windows 11.
Since Windows 11 24H2, with the new color management feature turned on, I can get correct colors on the monitor in both SDR and HDR modes. So it ends up with HDR on at all times, and mpv can play HDR videos with no color or brightness issues.
GNOME, on the other hand, is stuck with sRGB output in SDR mode, so you get oversaturated colors. With HDR on, SDR content will no longer be oversaturated, but if you play HDR videos with mpv, the image looks darkened and wrong. I've tried setting target-peak and target-contrast to match the auto-detected values on Windows, but the video still looks off.
All of my problem was solved by disabling hybrid graphics and use the dedicated card only. I had not a single bug since then on X11 (I didn’t try Wayland yet, because it was almost completely unusable with hybrid config). The only drawback is battery life, but that wasn’t great even before. I could never reach the ~4 hours, which was possible with Windows. Even with the dedicated card disabled. So, I’m not entirely sure that it’s entirely on Nvidia.
Same, on my laptop. Hybrid graphics destabilised both Debian (with Nvidia drivers installed) and the Windows 11 installation I have on there for SharpCap. Switching to Nvidia GPU only made everything rock solid.
This was my first experience with hybrid graphics, and so far I'm not impressed.
Hybrid graphics had troubles last spring, but in my case it was fixed around late July. I still launch steam with weird env variables (i don't often change my shortcuts), but i'm not sure it's needed.
HDR is unusable on Windows too. I finally decided to sell my HDR monitor after like a year because it was a massive pain in the ass from the moment I bought it. One of my biggest wastes of money ever.
Are you using a ThinkPad? My work laptop has this issue too, on windows 11. 75% of the time I have to unplug the monitor after waking up the laptop. 20% of the time it works. 5% of the time it has 640x480 resolution, and I have to unplug it again.
In my experience, hardware support with drivers is far better with Ubuntu than with any of the 'consumer operating systems'. Display drivers, Nvidia in particular, have been a problem though, which I avoid by just going for integrated graphics (Intel). This worked well since I don't play games, however, then I got into Blender, which really needs a proper GPU (with drivers).
This summer I tried to interest a relative in using a Wacom tablet on their Apple computer. In linux-world you just plug the thing in and the job is done. Yet on the Apple computer I was having to hunt down drivers and install stuff, taking me out of my comfort zone. We didn't get the Wacom tablet to work (it is a decade old) and gave up.
All operating systems will inevitably force their ways of working on you to some extent and it is 'better the devil you know' for most people, myself included. My first OS that 'didn't get in the way' of what I wanted to do was SGI Irix. I think Ubuntu has that aspect of not getting in the way, however, I am confidently able to use the command line to type in installation instructions. Text instructions for installing stuff is brilliant since you can reproduce results consistently with not much more than 'cut and paste' needed. As soon as you move to a consumer OS then this becomes murkier, particularly if you have to use things like 'Homebrew'. An Apple user will quibble with me that this is difficult, but each to their own.
Along the way I have invariably kept the standard Windows installation, to never use it, ever. I thought I would need dual boot to hop into Photoshop, Word or some other Windows application, however, this has proven to not be the case.
The time has come for me to delete those Windows partitions and get my disk space back. In so doing I will also be excluding myself from any of those AI integrations that must be polluting Windows these days.
Is Linux gaming on Steam actually competitive in performance and availability to what you'll get on Windows? I'm looking into building a gaming computer I'm surprised to hear I could roll with Linux for it.
Essentially, the only games that doesn't work nowadays are the ones that intentionally break it by adding Linux-incompatible anti-cheat. This is common among the big AAA-games that are multiplayer (think Fortnite).
Riot games did this on purpose too. League worked perfectly fine on Linux for years until they decided that kernel level spying on users was absolutely necessary to play a moba. For some reason my one friend thinks I'll run windows just for one game.
I'd sooner get a console, personally. The only legitimate use case I have for a console (nintendo notwithstanding) is to sandbox invasive anticheat in multiplayer games. I don't really have a ton of free time or friend group into multiplayer video games, so it's not happening for me. Smart console makers would lean into this.
Yup, I've also gone with a console for all my gaming needs, and keep my computer as just a productivity machine. As a result I don't need nearly as beefy machine and don't need to grind my teeth in bitterness using Windows.
> ones that intentionally break it by adding Linux-incompatible anti-cheat.
That's an interesting way to phrase it. It's like you're implying the company intentionally did not want to run it on anything but Windows (aka software is incompatible with non-Windows OSes) rather than trying to implement an effective anti-cheat (arguable) that works for their customers.
Pre-Wine, would you have argued that a software vendor is intentionally preventing their software from running on any non-Windows OS?
Or was it just that their audience wasn't on said non-Windows OS?
> That's an interesting way to phrase it. It's like you're implying the company intentionally did not want to run it on anything but Windows (aka software is incompatible with non-Windows OSes) rather than trying to implement an effective anti-cheat (arguable) that works for their customers.
Not OP, but this is true depending on the game. For instance, when Rockstar added BattlEye to GTA V Online, they broke Linux support, and blatantly lied about Linux not supporting BattleEye, when that's just not true - they just needed to enable that option, but they just straight up lied saying BattlEye doesn't support Linux.
> BattlEye on Proton integration has reached a point where all a developer needs to do is reach out BattlEye to enable it for their title. No additional work is required by the developer besides that communication.
So all Rockstar had to do was reach out to BattlEye to enable it, but they couldn't be bothered to do so. Their anti-Linux stance here is pretty obvious.
Rockstar aside, there are other studios/publishers that have been openly hostile against Linux, like Epic for instance - Tim Sweeny has made scathing remarks against Linux, so it's clear where he/Epic stands on that front.
I’m using Bazzite now for about 8 months, and I have a dual boot Windows drive. I haven’t used the Windows drive once. Windows was my daily driver for 3 decades.
Performance wise, there’s no degradation. I can run games at 4k or bonkers FPS just like I did on Windows, no input lag, etc.
Bazzite also has a very active discord for support with issues. I highly recommend.
> Bazzite originally was developed for the Steam Deck targeting users who used their Steam Deck as their primary PC. Bazzite is a collection of custom Fedora Atomic Desktop images built with Universal Blue's tooling (with the power of OCI) as opposed to using an Arch Linux base with A/B updates utilizing RAUC. The main advantages of Bazzite versus SteamOS is receiving system packages in updates at a much faster rate and a choice of an alternative desktop environment.
It is a Linux distribution, that aims to compete with Valve's SteamOS Linux distribution supplied with the Steam Deck (which itself is based on Arch Linux). Like SteamOS, it can be used on a regular desktop PC as well... but they are mainly aiming to run on the Steam Deck:
> The purpose of Bazzite is to be Fedora Linux, but provide a great gaming experience out of the box while also being an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck and other handheld devices.
Effectively they have taken Fedora Linux, and added to it the same sort of setup and programs that you get out-of-the-box with SteamOS as well.
For the most part, it is not the people offering Bazzite that are doing the hard job of providing security updates, etc., they are hoping that being based on Fedora will provide that assurance. They merely supply and configure some extras on top (e.g. the Steam client software)
What I meant is not "I can't find what it is", but that the landing page of Bazzite says this:
"The next generation of Linux gaming - Bazzite makes gaming and everyday use smoother and simpler across desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs.
Play your favorite games - Bazzite is designed for Linux newcomers and enthusiasts alike with Steam pre-installed, HDR & VRR support, improved CPU schedulers for responsive gameplay, and numerous community-developed tools and tweaks to streamline your gaming and streaming experience."
In the first 5 words after the 1st title there should be mentioned "Linux distribution". It's not even in the 2nd paragraph, now.
If this is the clarity of the landing page, I suspect documentation is equally user-hostile/inaccessible, which is why 2025 is still not the year of the Linux desktop... in the Linux world there's still an abundance of great developers, and a terrible lack of HCI/UX expertise.
Basically the only games that don't work are those which include anticheat which intentionally borks Linux. Check https://www.protondb.com/ for any game you're interested in to see if it'll run or not.
>Anything that has a kernel level anti check (Valorant) will always be a resounding No.
Please stop repeating this long outdated information. The two most widely used kernel anti cheat provider easyanticheat and battle eye support linux with a user space component which needs to be enabled by the developer and has been in many games.
Tools like Battle eye and EAC are not just one tool that gives a binary answer, they are tools that detect a huge range of heuristics about the device and how easy it is to interfere with the memory.
While they have been ported to Linux, an awful lot of those bits of telemetry simply don't give the desired answer, or even any answer at all, because that is very hard to so when there aren't proprietary drivers signed down to the hardware root of trust by a third party (and certainly the average Linux user on HN wouldn't want there to be!).
It's really not a matter of "enabled by the developer", it's entirely dependent on what your threat model is.
None of this is relevant to the original point of "kernel anti cheats don't work" when yes the two most widely used ACs do work despite being kernel level.
>It's really not a matter of "enabled by the developer", it's entirely dependent on what your threat model is.
Depends on what you like to play. Some games are heavily encumbered with either copy protection like denuvo or anti-cheat and those either don't support linux or flat out try to sniff out linux and refuse to run on anything but windows. Otherwise its great, you can check protondb and winehq for reports of compatibilty.
I should have added “sometimes”. It worked fine that way with most games (I have the same CPU), but Cyberpunk 2099 in particular really doesn’t like that configuration.
Dogs will always bark. I daily drive linux, and I am happy with it. Majority will not make the switch because they either are dependent on the office, adobe, or video editing software.
Linux user base grows. One tiny percent of percent every year. Too little to make a dent.
It's been two to three years now for me. I'm never going back. The only time I use Windows is on employer provided hardware. If given the choice I'd rather get a Mac or be allowed to smash over Windows with Linux (which most employers wont allow anyway).
Indeed. I always dabbled with Linux here and there. W11 was the final straw for me as well. I feel like LLMs help a ton too, not only do they make initial troubleshooting much easier, they also are pretty great at generating simple scripts that enhance the system.
I'm so happy to have made the swap, using my system is now much more enjoyable and if I don't like some aspect of it I can change it up with MUCH less effort than in Windows.
Also I'm positively surprised how good gaming on Linux is now. It was always a big blocker to full commitment to Linux.
Congrats.
I had the same thought when Windows XP came out in 2001. I triple booted OS/2 Warp with Win98 and Linux for a couple years. Linux only since 2003, I guess I missed a lot of MS fun.
I made the jump to Linux 3 years ago, when I learned that Windows 10 support was coming to an end, and I really didn't like what Windows 11 looked like.
3 years, and not a single time I had any regrets. Not a single time I thought about moving back.
I went for Mint because I am a filthy casual, and as you put it, that system is a joy to use. On Windows I needed to do yearly fresh installs as I could feel performance degrading as time went on, On Linux the laptop is performing as well if not better than when I freshly installed it.
It's so good that I even donate 20 bucks to the project every year. It has no right of being that good and also free.
About games - not only I can play basically everything in my Steam library, but even installing things from other sources is very easy with minor tinkering. At least to me, Windows became nearly superfluous nowadays.
I used Windows since always and switched to Linux two months ago. On one hand I still run into lots of Linuxisms on daily basis and I cannot recommend the system to a non-IT personn - bluetooth crashes, GPU driver crashes, applications crash, devices crash, all that stuff that's always been there. At the same time I have to say that the switch was easier than expected, and last weekend I removed Windows from my drive. I thought I'd keep dual-booting for a while, but no. Wine and Proton are marvelous pieces of software, pure magic. Moreover, I cannot recommend Linux to my parents until it gets MS Office. My parents specifically need MS Office.
I personally migrated to seniors (70+) to Linux. They both enjoyed it for years. One even found and installed a new driver for their printer when he switched. Plus most ChromeOS users can easily migrate to Linux. For Office I recommend ONLYOFFICE as that looks and behaves mostly the same as Microsoft Office. I haven't experience any issues with drivers but then again I never use NVIDEA, I used AMD and currently an Intel ARC.
When I put my computer to sleep and then wake it up, sometimes there's no video output until I switch to a different terminal and then back to GUI. How on Earth is a non-IT person supposed to figure this out.
Also, my parents bring home documents from work, and they often get documents from different institutions, which means they already hit edge cases of compatibility issues between different office suites, and telling them "this one sometimes reads docx correctly" is hard sell.
The issue is that it costs money while pirated offline installation only costs you your morality. Which is not a lot, considering that it's Microsoft we're talking about.
Well I never had any issue as I never put my machine to sleep. I actually turn my machine off and on. Yes that includes my laptops, sbc's and desktops. I also advise everyone (even Microsoft users) to never use hibernation. It's not that faster than a full reboot cycle and can cause issues you really do not want. Sorry I am old-fashioned.
What? Zero crashes here, for decades. Maybe I bought specific hardware, dell and framework. Normies tend to use the web version of office these days don’t they?
> It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.
I moved back to Linux Mint with Cinnamon yesterday, because my boot drive with Windows got fried and the replacement will only be here on Thursday. It doesn't feel like the OS is trying to make my life worse, it just sucks sometimes.
Note: this ended up being a bit long, there's a summary at the bottom. Apologies.
It doesn't save window positions after boot properly (I'd probably have to look in the direction of devilspie2 for that, admittedly I was using FancyZones on Windows as well). The grouped window list Applet in the panel doesn't show windows on the correct screen even if I move them from one monitor to the other and then back. This is really annoying because I have 4 monitors and want each of them have a panel and half of those being wrong about what is where sucks, admittedly Windows sometimes had a similar issue with its taskbar, BUT it resolved itself by just dragging the windows across monitors, instead of needing to refresh the entire applet.
The sound output default is something called Line Out Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller which works fine, but there's no obvious way for me to disable HDMI/DisplayPort output devices so programs can't pick those by accident. Whereas for input I have Rear Microphone Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller but that one makes the sound horrible, so I instead need to switch over to Microphone USB PnP Audio Device and hope that will be fine. Better than the issues with audio on Fedora years ago, still not great.
Software availability varies - some stuff is in the regular repositories, some software needs PPAs, some comes in Flatpaks, other software needs AppImages. I still appreciate that I can get most stuff running, but there's occasional weirdness, like KeePassXC starting up with the wrong theme, for example, the light mode kinda burns my eyes. Speaking of which, I no longer need Redshift because Mint comes with a built in Night Light, except that when it toggles on and fades the screen color, it makes the CPU usage spike (Ryzen 7 5800X) and renders the whole system unusable. Oh and speaking of which there is something weird with the CPU scheduler or something, because when I launch some intensive task, it makes even the desktop environment freeze entirely (and voice calls stall) for seconds at a time. Windows wasn't amazing at this, but could definitely be made even better with Process Lasso.
Oh and I tried some gaming with Steam: out of 20 games I tried only 6 worked. Turns out that if I mount my NTFS drives then Wine will get confused and claim I don't own the directory (which I only figured out by enabling Proton logging), which is funny for something that's supposed to provide Windows compatibility and could probably be resolved by UID/GID in the drive mount config... but even so some games like Mashinky just crash the desktop - I get a screen with the OS desktop background and a pointer, much like the login screen, but nothing reacts to input, no ability to close the game or switch to other windows. At the end of it, to even get some games running, I have to put them on the only ext4 drive that I have... which is also only 256 GB and the reason for me picking Linux in the first place until the 1 TB replacement drive arrives. And other games just don't launch no matter how much you babysit them, for example, I couldn't get Motor Town: Behind the Wheel working at all, but maybe because I don't have a lot of time to tinker.
I also miss software like SourceTree (used to pay for GitKraken, cool software, now just have Git Cola), MobaXTerm (way better than Remmina), SteelSeries Sonar, GlassWire and some other packages that don't have direct equivalents. I really like the more consistent approach to theming and fonts, though. Also, way nicer that I don't have to jump through hoops with setting up dev tools and now what's running locally can be closer to what's either on the server or inside of the containers I build. Oddly enough, I didn't find a way to change the default width of the Cinnamon terminal to 120 characters instead of 80. Also I still like how nice updates generally are and how the system seems to have less bitrot and uses less space and resources, even with a midweight DE like Cinnamon (would have gone for XFCE otherwise). Maybe KDE some day.
Summary:
This isn't really meant to be a hit piece or condemnation, but there's plenty of real problems that I still very much encounter for my preferences and desires of using an OS, there are probably solutions and to someone else these might not be problems. The difference is that Windows feels purposefully enshittified and works against me even when the software ecosystem (and stuff like support for games) is good. If they didn't try to make the OS bad with their bullshit and incentives, it would blow the Linux experience out of the water in quite a few regards.
At the same time, Linux distros feel like they're trying to be good and the OS generally respects you as the user... but there's a lot of moving pieces and lots of stuff breaks and some things (like anti-cheat support for games) won't be fixed because that's out of the control of the community and depends on corpos. Same for running Windows software, if Wine has issues you're often on your own, or just have to get used to the closest Linux software equivalent if you want fewer issues. I will say that it constantly feels like it's getting better, though.
In the limited subset of things that "just work" (generally webdev and DevOps stuff, without venturing too far off the beaten path), I have to say that I prefer Linux distros to both Windows and macOS though.
What do you mean? My Intel MacBook Pro works better on Linux than it works on the latest supported macOS (Big Sur in my case). It works longer, and fans almost always stay silent. I have a fairly minimal sway setup, however.
I did it 15 years ago and never looked back. Vista was enough to give me the nudge. On the occasion I've had to use Windoze over the years I've laughed harder and harder each time. It's hard to explain to people who only know Windoze, but it's just really nice to use software made by people who don't hate you.
While I don't disagree with you at all, I'd advise against calling the OS “Windoze” (or “Winblows”, or the company “Micro$oft”). This gives off a very “From my parent's basement, I stab at thee!” impression and reduces how seriously a lot of people will take you and what you are saying, and those people could apply the same impression to the rest of us too. I used to do the same thing, about 1½-to-2 decades ago.
I'm not talking about “the suits” and what they think.
I'm talking about the people, the home users nominally in control of their own machines, who are on the edge of considering Linux, or something else non-MS, who might be put off if they see something that reinforces a negative stereotype that they've been fed elsewhere (for instance, that the surrounding community is mostly a bunch of undeservedly cocksure 14-year-olds or practically indistinguishable from the same).
You might consider it childish but it's the way I am and it's not just me. I've been masking it for decades but I'm sick of it. I won't use their carefully crafted marketing language. The internet was more fun when people could just be themselves and not try to be beige for fear of scaring people away. We need more variety in the world, not less.
Mother of god the levels of condescension know no bounds with you lot. Did you stop to consider perhaps we never did? You get flamed the moment you ask a single question? Get told off the moment you make a single mistake no matter how polite you are upon entry?
I didn’t say anything to you before my previous comment, but I saw how you’d already treated others, in that exact way I’ve unfortunately come to expect from the Linux community. Grow up or stay < 1% market share, it’s up to you tbh.
Sadly, as a developer there is no beating Visual Studio. Microsoft still makes the best developer IDE that unfortunately only runs on their worst OS. But as a C++ developer there is just no substitute(imho). Not to mention some development toolchains only work on windows(for playstation/xbox/switch) so if you work in games there is very little choice.
I left Visual Studio for Rider long before I gave up Windows, IMO it's far superior to VS for everything other than GUI Apps or Blazor hot reloading (which is basically broken in both).
JetBrains seem to have the best IDE for every language I've tried: Rider / IntelliJ / Android Studio / PyCharm / PhpStorm / RubyMine. Never tried CLion though, but given they all share the same base I'd thought it would be of a equally high standard?
My bad. I naively assumed the successful developer-focued tools company with 25 years experience in parsing programming languages and building IDEs with advanced AST/refactoring tooling, that I've been happily using for 8 years had a great C/C++ story based on my experience of having used 7 of their other IDEs (built from the same platform base), were all best-in-class.
Maybe that's why I ended my thought with a question mark? i.e. So C/C++ developers with experience in both can clarify what makes VS so much better than CLion. Or if they haven't tried CLion that it would be a good alternative on Linux to try given all JetBrains other IDEs are of high quality.
Visual Studio is nice for C++ if you target Windows and CLR languages but for the rest it’s pretty abysmal. I personally generally prefer IntelliJ and used to find CLion nicer for C++ but that was a long time ago.
Anyway, Windows has become a pain for normal user but remains fine if you are a company user. The management tools will strip away most if not all the annoyance people are complaining about here. I think Microsoft knows where the money comes from.
You know, I think that's the key - I'm on Windows Enterprise and it just works. I start my PC, I code for 8 hours a day, I switch it off - it just works.
If your target platform is MS Windows only or only supported by MS Windows like with your examples, by all means, use Visual Studio. If Visual Studio is dictating your choice of platform, I'd consider the tradeoffs.
I use Emacs. It does need some fine tuning, tree-sitter installation, etc. but after that, I cannot understand colleges using VS. I have seen no feature in VS not available in Emacs.
Some colleges have switched from years VS to Emacs and after a week won’t look back.
Can you share what the experience is like debugging with gdb directly?
I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.
I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.
(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)
Some emacs-fans really like emacs and will invent any justification for its shortcomings. You are 100% right it has a subpar debugging experience. There were better debuggers 20 years ago than emacs has now.
Stallman himself wrote it so it lies at the intersection of that camp and the lisp cultists (though Ig they are mostly extinct post-LLM), but they used to have a really strong belief that lisp was the path to AI because of it's homoiconicity.
What should be said in it's favor is that due to its architecture it is crazy extensible and hackable. And the fact that the line between configuration and code is very blurry really encourages you to dive into that.
The choice of lisp also helps ensure user freedom as it's a quite simple language - ensuring that compilers and interpreters are a commodity. You don't like one, pick another. Contrast that with say Rust where if you don't like the official Rust you are shit out of luck. It's also a rolling release deal so you can't even easily stay on an old version.
Maybe is personal preference? I like better gdb directly to VC.
I’ve tried to debug with VC, but I felt slow working with it. After several tries, I gave up.
Most of my colleagues never use a debugger even though they use vscode. I (the weird emacs user) actually had to show them how to use one, but they still don't.
Are they actually programmers? Or just people who pretend to know how to code? How can you be a professional programmer and not use a debugger? Also not sure what VS Code has to do with it, it's not Visual Studio proper.
I know plenty of professional programmers (job title states so) that not even they do not use a debugger, many don’t even know how to install/use one or even the very concept of “execute step by step”. Plenty of python users don’t know what pdb is (as matter of fact, have never met one that does know it!). Also plenty of embedded developers writing C or C++ or Java
They go all the time adding hundreds of print(f) of log_* function calls. Often they don’t care to remove them after the fact, as I ask them to, often comes “can/will be useful to detect future bugs”
I’m in the automotive industry, where is known to be a disaster in topic SW. but I think it is also common in other industries. I have seen it in telco already.
While I agree that knowing a debugger is important, and as a leader won’t hire somebody who do not use it, is a fact that many people don’t use it, and are doing ok.
Last but not least, it must be said sometimes you have to go to prints: in fact yesterday I had to, as I was debugging a library with sockets, which would timeout pretty quickly. I used dprintf in gdb, but the advantage to simple prints was not huge.
>>Last but not least, it must be said sometimes you have to go to prints
Well yes, obviously - it's an indespensible tool in any arsenal, I just cannot fathom(as a C++ low level engineer) how someone can be a professional programmer where they are paid for their job and they don't know to use a debugger even to just do a basic pause and step through flow. But then again I don't work with any python programmers, so maybe that's why.
They managed to grow a career out of a minimum set of skills, printf was enough I guess. Also they leverage stupid IT shops where squeaky wheel gets the grease.. being efficient at debugging would almost prove harmful in their world.
Just wait for it, from what I know Sony uses clang for it toolchain, don't know about the others so if enough studios start to switch they will start to offer the tools.
Side note: I have been using msvc in wine for almost 5 years now, so if that works I don't know why the Sony/Nintendo/Xbox toolchain wouldn't.
Have you tried the intellij IDEs? I thought that they were pretty similar in terms of experience, although I have used them for java/dotnet primarily.
I guess downvotes come from people that believe vim + grep + printf debugging is peak development environment. Quite amazing that they even go for something such advanced as vim, instead of sticking with ed, for I believe there exists some Linux user claiming that ed doesn't lack anything that VS has.
No you’re just completely ignorant. You can trivially set breakpoints, use conditional breakpoints, watch variables, step over, through, and into in exactly the same way.
Hell, even raw-dogging lldb directly on the CLI is incredibly user friendly, fast, and has a ton features you wish were more exposed by common IDEs. Don’t feel like debugging right now? Take a heap snapshot and do it later! Don’t even need to launch the process.
Visual Studio is ridiculously overrated, and this is coming from someone that works at Microsoft and forced to use it every day. What really kills me are the insanely complicated and unmodifiable shortcut keys for common tasks. Killing the process is like some finger breaking ctrl+alt+function key nonsense? Seriously wtf? Oh to debug multiple binaries simultaneously in the same solution requires launching multiple instances of the entire IDE? Why??
Can you share what the experience is like debugging with gdb directly?
I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.
I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.
(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)
I much prefer lldb over gdb, but why don’t you just try it and see for yourself?
Of course setting a gutter breakpoint is easier in an IDE, and that’s irrelevant to my point. OP made this aabout vim/emacs versus VisualStudio as if the former doesn’t have gutter-clicking capabilities. Which is ridiculous
The keyboard layout change is not on my version (dogfood) for some reason, maybe because I have to use Remote Desktop and it doesn’t detect a physical keyboard. But fine, I’ll take that back. I even asked AssPilot for help and it was predictably useless.
And cmon modify the registry to debug multiple processes? People work together in teams and share a common tooling that ideally tries to minimize the friction required to get work done. Think about that while contrasting the steps required in that article with the alternative of“launch the app a couple more times, then…”
* "Sometimes, you might need to debug the startup code for an app that is launched by another process. Examples include services and custom setup actions"
Starting multiple copies of the IDE wouldn't handle these scenarios either
As a long term Linux desktoppy, I find this a mixed blessing.
I fear Linux will get ruined by the influx of windows runaways. Enterprise managers will start enforcing their braindead ideas. Group policies, DRM, security scanner slowness, ads, they will all start to appear. Banks will start to 'secure' yoyr desktop. Then politicians will come in and require the KDEs of this world to implement chat control-like things. Eternal september awaits.
Linux is still reasonably controlled by the end user. The powers that be only allow that if we are a fringe group. The golden cage to lock down Linux is already built or being built, and letting us keep the key to it is not something that will be tolerated.
They'd have to outlaw compilers to make that work.
Say (hypothetically) they forced KDE and Gnome to do that - they are open source, you can't hide that it was done, someone will rip out that part and either compile and release a new distro or post the git somewhere outside that jurisdiction and someone else will do it.
This isn't a new thing even - we've had free/non-free/rpmfusion and the like for decades - hell back in the day I had to pull and compile freetype because of the patent on subpixel hinting that was valid in the US and not in the EU.
The one that does worry me more is that they straight up just start locking down the hardware more strictly - a mobile phone style attestation/locked bootloaders would be a major challenge to open computing.
I am confused. What "Linux"? There are many distributions. There is the kernel (many versions). Maybe even today they are some distributions that are as you described, used in certain companies or states or whatever. But you can choose another one and you will still be fine.
Yes and no. There are many distros, but they all use the same components. If outside entities only allow you to run specific distros or configs, you're done. Some examples:
* My jobs VPN only runs on Ubuntu. There is code in there that checks your OS.
* My bank wants the chrome browser. Messing with headers makes it work on firefox. But that's for now and needs me spending time fighting them.
* sssd is starting some light GPO enforcement on my laptop.
* systemd slowly moves towards encrypted home dirs and a fully validated boot chain. That's a golden cage with a lock to which we have the key. Microsoft can take the key away, and governements can make them do this.
* Android is also theoretically multi distro, but Google is the only one that matters. And they just decided they want developers identity.
* Most if the big sites make you jump trough hoops for non-chrome browsers. Facebook, cloudflare, Teams...
Computers are now part of networks, a bit like their own societies. These will force you to use their rules or isolate you. And that's assuming you can keep buying machines that are open or legally jailbreakable.
Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand. My first experience with Windows 11 was figuring out some dumb workaround to use a local account.
When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows.
Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.
I'm not convinced Microsoft cares about the Windows market share in consumer PCs or the small amount of money they make from selling Windows licenses to regular consumers.
If they did, Windows wouldn't be so usable unactivated and the MassGravel activation stuff would have been patched already.
They built up their almost-monopoly when it mattered in the 90s and the 2000s, and now their market position is basically secured.
For Microsoft's purposes the main way of making money from Windows is from business and enterprise sales, and those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.
The reason they don't meaningfully enforce their copyright on consumer PCs is precisely because they do care about their market share. If you buy a computer with Windows (or get it installed) in what I suspect is the overwhelming majority of the world, it's an 'illegitimate' copy and it works 100% fine, including operating with Microsoft's servers.
As you mentioned, they could trivially stop this if they wanted to, but they don't. Because if this were not possible, there'd be billions of more PCs out there running instead what would most likely be Linux. Enabling people to use Windows without paying is a key component of their strategy of maintaining market dominance, especially on a global level.
I think the biggest 'threat' to windows for general users has been mobile, besides that it seems like it's mostly running on momentum from the ecosystem of decades ago. The challenge is that most migrations for established users of any system take effort, and right now the effort of running activation/account requirement bypasses is low effort compared to changing to and learning a new OS.
The way of framing it which works for me is that there doesn't seem to be much reason to move to windows, if you were starting computing with a blank slate and could pick anything, why would someone want to pick windows? Most people need a mobile anyway which serves a lot of consumer needs. Gaming is a big one if you're not happy with mobile/console, but there's the wine/proton on linux route although there's a subset that won't work or has compatibility issues (from minor paper-cuts to major). And then there's those that need specific windows-only software with no alternative elsewhere.
Also note this strategy is in its fourth (or fifth?) decade and is also very successfully deployed by adobe et al. It’s also why Linux won on the headless server, though why FreeBSD didn’t I’m not sure; GPL marketing at the right time, perhaps.
The same reason why Ubuntu won the server market (for a while): by capturing the home-desktop/laptop market first, and then worming its way to employer environments by way of familiarity. Linux had broader driver coverage for consumer hardware; there was a time when running *BSD on fragmented consumer hardware was a crapshot.
I said Linux won for the same reason as Ubuntu (winning the distro wars), I did not say Linux won because of Ubuntu. Ubuntu:Linux Distros::Linux:server OSes
To an extent sure, but when people that grew up as home consumers not using Windows become business leaders they won't have the brand loyalty to Microsoft that the current aging out generation does.
If Google doesn't characteristically fumble the bag their dominance with ChromeOS in schools has potential pay major dividends in 10-15 years.
Windows centric software development is pretty much completely driven by business leaders 50+ years old on the young end.
A striking amount of business software runs on Windows because Microsoft was dominant during the peak PC era (e.g. 1990-2010). The companies running that stuff aren't doing so because old guys think Windows is good, they're running it because it's been built already and there's no real reason to change.
The next generation of business leaders already didn't build their companies on Windows or any other PC operating system because web apps replaced desktop apps and mobile devices overtook PCs in market share.
But it doesn't really matter to Microsoft. Microsoft isn't really the "Windows Company" anymore and hasn't been for some time. Azure, Office365, Sharepoint, etc. revenue dwarfs what Windows brings in and wouldn't be affected by Windows losing market share because everything is a web/electron client for a cloud service now.
In some ways, I suspect Microsoft views the Windows market share as more of a liability than an asset these days, because it makes them responsible for bad press events like BlueKeep and WannaCry. Business customers frequently buy support contracts with their licenses, whereas private consumers expect indefinite updates for a one time $120 fee. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if they were intentionally letting consumer Windows slowly fade away.
Hum, how much of the success of azure is due to enterprise customers being in the windows ecosystem already? And what happens when the next enterprises are not?
Around 60% of Azure VMs are Linux. Between that and WSL it sometimes seems like Microsoft is putting more effort into being a Linux company than a Windows one.
Who could have predicted that back in the Slashdot days!
I realise that a good portion of the references to the product on that page is just "Microsoft 365", but other parts seem to include "Copilot" in the product name for Microsoft's office suite.
Macs were at a bit over 10% market share in q4 2024[1], but it's also worth noting that the PC market is shrinking as a whole. Windows still has most of the pie, but the pie itself is getting smaller, since many find phones to be a better (and cheaper) experience than Windows, and I can't say that I blame them.
I'm curious how inflated the numbers are from business sales, since the default option there is still Windows, even if you don't actually use any software that needs it (i.e. you just need a web browser). Consumer sales of PCs is probably only going to trend downwards, and it only got a small spike from people buying PCs for COVID.
>many find phones to be a better (and cheaper) experience than Windows, and I can't say that I blame them.
With that said at least using native apps on phones is becoming more and more of a risk. If you can get away with a browser that's fine. But if you need native phone features you are at the risk of Apple/Google cutting off your entire business for some hidden reason and nearly zero recourse. On that note people have been getting more worried about Apple starting to treat their desktop OS like a phone and locking it down more.
The risk of that happening, while real and problematic, is not a real concern for most people, as the liklyhood of anything happening is really low. Same goes for the OS being more closed of. The normies, to out it that way, are happy with the normal app store experience and won't notice the difference before and after a complete lockdown, since they've never gone outside the normal bounds to begin with.
Even OEMs that have the option to select Linux, e.g. Dell, Lenovo, have "works best with Windows" all over the place, one needs to be rather persistent to track down the Linux as pre-installed OS options.
> If Google doesn't characteristically fumble the bag their dominance with ChromeOS in schools has potential pay major dividends in 10-15 years.
There will be no ChromeOS anymore - just Android - and it will soon be locked down hard so that you need to pay Google or host ads/harvest data for every app.
You just need to make your choice of Tyrant landlord.
The crucial part: these business leaders won't see the ugly consumer side.
Enterprise windows is completely different, in that most of the crap we complain about will either be disable at the MDM level, or from the start depending on the license. A CEO being issued a windows laptop isn't barraged with ads, nor do they care if their account is local or not. It will "just work".
I don’t know, I work for a massive (benevolent of course) corporation and it’s still pushy with Lock Screen ads, copilot, etc… and it definitely doesn’t just work. Maybe for the CEO it does though…
It might depend on how much your IT departements cares about customizing your setups. The efforts described in TFA for instance don't cover auto install scripts which are still free to create whatever local account is needed, provided it's done through the fleet management mechanisms.
Much of the scripts to "debloat" windows also rely on MDM entry points and overriding user preferences with higher privilege.
As you point out it's still a cat and mouse game but I assume they work OK. I tend to go the painful way and do most of it myself following instructions, as I'm not comfortable having these tools run as admin on a system. It's not that bad either.
Do we believe that we’ll be using anything like today’s PCs and operating systems in 10-15 years time? I mean, that’s been the case since the 1980s, but now we have usable (if imperfect) AI.
- Reliability. For anything that needs deterministic result and not even 99.9% of chance that it's generated correctly and not hallucinated. E.g. health, finance, military, etc. There is no room for "you're absolutely right". For the same input an algo must give the same output.
- Privacy. Until we have powerful local models (we might have though in 10 years, I don't know), sending everything to some cloud companies, which are already obliged by court to save data and have spy and ex-military generals in their boardrooms, sounds a bit crazy if it's not about an apple pie recipe. Web chat interface isolates important data from non-important, but we can't integrate it fully in our lifes.
Personally: Yes, I do. Likely, voice assistants and other AI tools will have a bigger market share in a decade, sure. But I doubt an interface like Alexa can replace a PC-like setup for most of the «real work». Instead, I imagine we’ll just continue the trend of laptops and tablets with AI assistants integrated in better ways, and perhaps a wider adoption of AR/VR in some sectors.
Tre
The tech that could replace today’s PC setup is a neural interface, but I doubt that NeuraLink et al will be anywhere near mainstream in a decade.
> But I doubt an interface like Alexa can replace a PC-like setup for most of the «real work».
Most people, and most workers simply don't do what you call real work that needs a big screen and a keyboard. I think most of the kids at my child's school don't have a computer at home (other than the district issued chromebook) and likely won't ever own a personal computer.
People do everything on their phones. Google recently said Chrome OS is going to end next year... I don't know what schools are going to do.
I don’t doubt that a conventional laptop or desktop will be far less common in a decade.
But both iPads and Android tablets have keyboard cases. Even many phones can these days be plugged into USB-C docking stations that enable the use of a big screen and keyboard when needed. I agree that most non-programmers will probably end up using phones or tablets with an external keyboard, and even for programming it is kinda usable.
Those schools will probably just switch to Android netbooks or Android tablets with keyboard cases.
Still, I think that’s very different from AI technologies killing the PC form factor. The hardware and software might change, but I personally think the «screen and keyboard» form factor will remain the default for «work» for the next decade.
> I personally think the «screen and keyboard» form factor will remain the default for «work» for the next decade.
I'm not so sure. What was the interface pre-computer: voice and secretaries. Except the secretaries are now AI, and there is an unlimited supply of them and they don't need a salary or health insurance. Instead of "Ms. Wilson, come here and take a letter" it would be "Hey Google, take a letter"
We're already well on the way. Writing emails with AI is done today. Using AI to take notes in a meeting is possible today. OCR and cameras can handle a lot of "transcribe this printed form to that online form" input tasks today. And it will all be vastly better in 10 years.
I'm sure there will still be a place for screens. We are visually oriented and using paper would be wasteful. I'm not sure the screen + keyboard "workstation" of today will be common in 10 years.
I think mobile tech will be closer to a Star Trek TNG commnicator. A small device perhaps worn as jewelry with an earpiece and some kind of retinal projector for heads-up usage, and less like a rectangular slab of glass in your pocket. Current smart watches are a start, they only need a better way to show more information and they would replace phones for many people.
And of course this all presumes that "office work" as we know it is even a thing. If AI becomes AGI or close to it, what would we need people in offices to even do?
Alternatively it could be people working from home.
Though, with the state of "prompt engineering", I'm now imagining legions wandering down the street, speaking into Bluetooth headsets, desperately entreating an AI to do the task they've been assigned...
(you get better results if you sound like you're about to cry)
If something displaces Windows in the consumer PC market, I wonder how long it is before those new OS consumers start to want to use what they're comfortable with in the business as well. Windows will start to feel like some weird legacy system. By the time business starts moving away, it will be too late for Microsoft to save.
I think you're right that they don't care about the money from Windows licenses, but they seem to be pivoting to trying to pull data from consumer desktops for AI training. That's arguably way more valuable and no one besides Apple (or potentially Google) gets that kind of data.
As more and more public accessible areas start becoming so inundated with AI generated material, that makes the walled gardens where generated content is not AI generated that much more valuable for training.
> For Microsoft's purposes the main way of making money from Windows is from business and enterprise sales, and those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.
Yes, and making corporations and smaller businesses donate their stuff via official spyware os, clouded "services" and "agents" is perfect opportunity for spyware creator :) It is hard to blame them for wanting this :) Except that, probably, will explode in their faces...
Small businesses don't like creating Microsoft accounts either. Limit 30 software activations per email address or something like that. And retail Office stops working after 365 days offline.
Whether they care about consumer market or not, they know that most of the consumers aren't going to care about this problem. Hardly anyone would bat an eye at using their already existing Microsoft account/email address and internet connection to log on to their PC. They're almost 100% headed to get on the internet to do whatever anyways. These people are connected to the cloud 24/7. In the same way hardly any Apple user cares that they need an Apple account to get into a bunch of things/phone/whatever. This is a nerd/tech-niche problem.
It being the year of Linux is definitely a meme at this point, but Microsoft's trying their hardest to make it a thing.
Steam's latest survey [1] shows Windows losing 0.19% marketshare. 3/4 of it went to Mac, 1/4 to Linux. 0.19% over a single month is a fairly significant shift, especially because the Steam survey is biased towards Windows gamers to begin with (Windows has 95.4% marketshare on the Steam survey), so it's probably understating the shift.
I’ve had multiple friends who are not tech savvy ask me about steam os. Because they basically only use their gaming PC for gaming, and they are frustrated with windows.
None have actually switched yet, but also 10 is still supported, and steam os isnt quite ready from what i understand; (nvidia driver issues?) although I assume that’s changing quite quickly. I haven’t looked super recently.
Personally I run bazzite on a machine I’ve got hooked to a tv. It’s basically steamOS
and works great for gaming. I can’t speak to the desktop mode, but as long as it’s passable, windows sets the bar pretty low. Main issue is that some multiplayer games intentionally don’t support Linux for anti-cheat reasons. :(
PC ownership is NOT a zero-sum game. You assume that lost marketshare must be replaced by something else. I'm confident this is not people replacing their PC for a Mac, this is people who stopped using a PC completely.
Microsoft, by ruining Windows, is not leaving the field open for a replacement OS; they're slowly killing the PC itself.
Mathematical: If this were the case then all competitors would have seen an increase in marketshare proportional to their existing marketshare. This isn't what happened - Mac saw 3x the increase of Linux, even though Linux has greater marketshare on the survey.
Statistical: It's often said that the PC is dead or dying, but that's a misrepresentation of the issue. 25 years ago, a new computer was dated in 3 months and obsolete in a year, so PC sales were huge. Now a days, a ten year old PC is still fine for just about everything, even including relatively high end gaming. So sales have plummeted, but ownership rates are around historic highs. [1] The main limiting factor is money. More than 96% of households earning $150k+ have a desktop/laptop, while only 56% with income less than $25,000 do. The overall average is 81%.
Pragmatic: PCs are still necessary for many types of games as well as content creation. Mobile devices and tablets (to a lesser degree) are limited by their input mechanisms to a subset of all experiences, and there's a pretty big chunk of people that utilize experiences outside that subset.
I don't worry much about that. I has been often said that PCs would be dying. Seems it was mostly marketing. It survived consoles and Xbox is probably dead. I have no illusions that Microsoft has the same mismanagement in store for Windows, it didn't have sensible patronage for years.
I don't think it's dying, what I think has been happening and will continue to happen is that unless you're an enthusiast the PC presence is gradually being shrunk and tidied away in a corner and forgotten by many. For many having a 'home PC' would be a relic, similar to how they don't have anything like a dedicated stereo system for playing audio which might have taken up a significant amount of space (possibly more than a PC) years ago.
This is definitely not the case. PC ownership is near record highs right now. I cited the stats in a peer comment. [1] The only real hurdle is perceived cost. More than 96% of households earning $150k+ have a desktop/laptop, while only 56% with income less than $25,000 do. The overall average is 81%.
Mobile, and to some degree tablets, just offer a generally poor interface for many aspects of computing from gaming to content creation, and I think that's mostly intractable.
Sure, but I guess this depends on what model you have of someone doing media consumption, are they going to fire up their PC to watch/listen to media, or their phone, or (smart) TV, or a smart speaker?
There is no Microsoft in this story. There is the structure of the company which roll up to the CEO. And they have 1 priority: make the shareholders happy.
This has caused incentives to shift thought the company. No more long-term work. Only short term stuff, where each change needs to make impact somewhere.
This is why you see CoPilot in 20 places in Edge. This is why OneDrive shows you nagging screens to upload your data there.
And this is why the OOBE now makes it harder. That change is used by a PM / Developer to justify their existence in the company at review time.
The thing is, Microsoft did plenty of user-hostile stuff back then. Games for Windows Live with its weird DRM and making games unplayable after shutting down, for instance. And the push for using all kinds of "Live" services. Something called a .NET Passport also comes to mind during the mid-XP days. .NET framework applications had their own special kinds of installers, Microsoft Silverlight thrived for a short moment, and the introduction of their (initially mediocre) antivirus program also wasn't well-received by the industry.
They just never shoveled their crap into the OS itself. It was always recommended addons, recommended freebies, and recommended optional features that came along with other products.
When MS started unifying everything into Just Windows, all of the crap they pulled with separate software packages merged into one digital blob, Windows 8/8.1/10/11.
With Windows 8, I can at least appreciate the attempt to unify things so they are easier to use for consumers (if only they hadn't bunged up Windows Phone, repeatedly). I wonder what Windows would be like if they hadn't tried to the Windows 8 experiment.
> Something called a .NET Passport also comes to mind during the mid-XP days
That's essentially Microsoft Account nowadays, which went thru few rebrandings on the way. In XP it was promoted via Windows Messenger with popup message which for less experienced people would suggest that in order to access the Internet they need this "passport".
Considering how many sites now offer (still optional) logins with apple/meta/microsoft accounts I wonder if the goal here is to be the provider of identity for sites and services and at the same future-proofing for any digital ID checks govt's may introduce
There was for a few years a South Korean national identity scheme which linked your national ID card to .. an ActiveX control. Making it not only IE-only but effectively tying it to IE6.
To the average consumer, Windows doesn't matter much anymore.
To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365, basically forever. LibreOffice is nowhere near a replacement for Excel in an enterprise setting.
Office 365 is absolutely not what you seem to describe. I run a small non-profit and I am banking hard on Office 365 while I use a Mac.
O365 is the Office suite of apps, an Exchange server, OneDrive with a ton of storage, access to unlimited Teams meetings, and tons of doodads and doohickeys we don't need. That my Windows using colleagues could potentially install Enterprise Windows on their own laptops (we're a BYOD employer), is irrelevant for us. Any fleet of trashy PC we need for frontline staff already comes with a Windows license.
I agree with your overall point but I'm starting to regularly see older M series MacBooks on sale for around 600 or 700 dollars brand new. Maybe they are using the strategy of selling older hardware for less like they did with the iPhone SE.
A $600 - $700 Dell laptop's CPU does not come anywhere close to an M4 Macbook Air, which you can get right now at Best Buy in a 15" version for $999.
The Mac will also have a faster SSD and (not sure about this) a faster memory bus architecture. And a better GPU and better ability to use Thunderbolt docks / have 3 external 4K displays.
CPU is almost never a limiting factor for workers. RAM is since they generally need a keep a bunch of browser tabs open to memory hogging things like Outlook/Teams/JIRA but RAM speed they probably won't notice.
If they have 3 external 4k displays, their company will probably shell out for Macbook.
The thing is, the storage on Apple devices is so unbelievably fast, you can get by on 8GB just fine. Even with clogging up hundreds of Chrome tabs. Swap is barely noticeable.
Memory management on Windows devices in contrast is utterly painful. The RAM itself is already slower simply due to physics (can't beat the SoC proximity with anything socketed), storage I/O usually has to cross through a lot of chips (same thing, Apple attaches storage directly to the SoC), and then the storage itself that you find on cheap devices is actually SATA under the hood or bottom of the barrel NVMe, no competition at all to Apple. Oh and the storage and RAM are both adequately cooled on Apple devices, so Apple can drive them much much harder unlike the Windows world where often enough the only thing that gets cooled is the CPU and GPU.
Yes, I do think Apple wants far too much money for RAM and SSD storage upgrades, but it's undeniable that even the more expensive ends pack a lot of punch.
I work in a large enterprise and I see more and more people move to macOS every year. We use Office 365. I run the Office apps on my Mac. We backup with OneDrive. We collaborate with SharePoint. We use our AD accounts to login on macOS, use InTune to manage endpoints. My Mac even has Defender on it now.
Microsoft is still getting their money, just slightly less from Windows itself.
I’m willing to bet it’s about the hardware. Windows laptops almost all universally suck in at least a few areas: display, touchpad and wake from sleep at the most inconvenient times. Give me a MacBook which natively boots Windows and I’ll use it, if only because it has WSL2. If it boots Linux, even better. (Naturally, those three usually broken things must work on either.)
It depends on the industry... go to any (non-ms based) tech company and every developer will want a mac. Nobody will chose windows if asked.
Other less developer related companies are moving more towards mac as well.
This is just my anecdote between being in/out of tech for the last 25 years and have gone from: "Here is your windows laptop" to "Do you want windows or macos" to "here is your macbook"
I've got the same experience, just saying that if I was offered 'here's a mac, we can put windows on it' I'd actually pick that option, because I love the hardware, but I'm very not impressed with macos.
Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs.
That's either Linux with WINE, or a "custom distro" of Windows from the remaining neighbourly hackers in the modding scene (they can't embed the hostility everywhere and as deep as the kernel, although they are most likely trying.)
WINE it is. I can't see any point in playing cat and mouse with an actively hostile OS. When a new Windows update starts stealing IMAP credentials[1] before the modding community catches on, it's game over for the user. Better to not use anything based on Windows.
I'm not sure if Microsoft knows it, but it doesn't care about or need Windows anymore. Office has native apps and is on the web, Xbox is doing its own things, dotnet has been freed from Windows, and Azure doesn't need Windows. Computing is generally moving away from the personal computing model, so Windows is just less relevant.
I was with you until you listed Xbox - their consoles are dying in the market.
They've adopted a strategy of calling everything "gaming" Xbox, and seem to be going all-in on Gamepass subscription revenue along with making their first-party games available on other platforms. I'll be surprised if there is another flagship console following the Series X.
There's always ReactOS[1], a project for a bug-for-bug compatible Windows clone. It used to mostly aim at Windows 9x compatibility the last time I'd checked, though, but that could probably change. And if anyone wants to create a Win7 clone, at least some of the groundwork has already been made.
"Compatibility with Windows programs" is a massive undertaking in the first place, as evidenced by the huge amount of development effort that has gone into Wine without quite reaching 100% bug-for-bug compatibility. (The level of compatibility they've achieved is truly impressive but it's really difficult to get to 100% for a large existing base of arbitrary applications.)
Reliable real-world compatibility requires not only implementing Windows APIs as documented (or reverse-engineered) but also discovering and conforming to quirks, undocumented features, and permissive interpretations of the specs or even outright bugs in Windows that some applications have either intentionally or unintentionally ended up relying on over the years.
I don't know if modern apps would tend to be better engineered to actually follow the spec and to only build on features as documented but for example older Windows games were sometimes notorious for being quite finicky.
And of course if the goal is a full-scale independent OS rather than a compatibility layer on top of an existing one, there's the whole "operating system" part to implement as well.
> Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.
Microsoft have done 180's in the past. I still hope that at some point they'll see the light and what you say here above will suddenly click and become evident to them.
Windows, and DOS before that, did not succeed by holding customers as hostages.
Part of Satya reorg in 2018 moved windows into a weird leadership structure where it was part of bing iirc. I think they recently finally fixed that org mistake and hopefully they quickly push an improved windows 12.
I remembered something weird like this, & went looking for coverage last week. I thought it'd maybe gotten divied up between Azure Services and like some ads or online experience thing? I ended up giving up, so much noise and I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I'd love to see some coverage. Incredible seeing Windows broken up like that & internally sold for parts, just total throwing it to the MBA wolves to milk some money out of, it felt like & seems like.
I remember listening it from Paul Thurrott in a podcast, and it wasn't only 2018, it was reorganized several times during Satya's lead. no wonder it sucks
Their reputation is irrelevant, at least whilst they maintain an OS monopoly. Enterprise customers don't care because all the issues you described are not present on Enterprise editions. The vast majority of users want a machine that "just works".
I would never use a machine running Windows 11 S mode whilst a good chunk of the home PC market would likely not notice a difference.
Enterprise edition is as much of a clownshow as the others. I actually run one such edition at work and since a few weeks ago I've noticed in the "home" screen of the settings a new tile, inviting me to add my microsoft account to benefit from something or other.
Now, this is a machine I mostly use for goofing out, so it actually has my microsoft account connected to it. It's fully entra id joined: I log into my windows session with my office 365 account, which has a full license (p2 or whatever it's called), I can see the bitlocker key in entra id, the works.
Now, curiosity got the best of me the other day, and I figured I might just as well click that button. Guess what? It didn't work! It apparently doesn't support business accounts!
On my home pc (pro edition, which I use for photoshop and the occasional game), which does have a consumer microsoft account, that tile doesn't show up.
> When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows.
I think Windows 98 was the last user-focused Windows. At least then all the useful settings were a single right-click away, and it just worked without invading your privacy.
(WinME never worked and WinXP was the first in a long series of shareholder-focused Windows.)
- remove all this Games & XBox related stuff?
- remove everything pre-installed but not used stuff? (Internet Explorer legacy?)
- remove all this "fancy" Icons & links: Video/Music etc. in Explorer
- deselect to install most of all these Background Services?
And: Does it work for the Windows Server versions as well?
I don’t even mind logging in on a personal laptop but we have shared computers at work to operate machines. It does not make any sense to login with your account in one of those.
Developing a new consumer-grade OS is literally not possible. I don't mean it would take a herculean effort like the software ecosystem issue takes to address, I mean actually not possible regardless of how much effort any development team put in. Virtually all hardware on the open market is made for Windows, largely powered by proprietary, closed-source drivers. Linux gets some afterthought from a percentage of vendors, but even for it, hardware support is in an absolutely atrocious state. Hardware vendors will obviously not give the time of day to any uppity new OS. This relegates any attempt to a hobbyist project targeting virtual machines or obsolete hardware. The only way a new player could enter the game is by using Apple-level money to develop their hardware in-house, but any kind of corporation fronting Apple money to do that would certainly not be aiming to produce a user-driven experience.
Drivers are a lot of work. IMHO, do some core stuff, and then build in driver adapters. NDIS wrapper, linuxkpi, etc.
If you want to work hard to make things easy, I bet you could build a hypervisor that does pci passthrough for each device to a guest that runs a different OS driver and rexports the device as a virtio device, and then the main OS guest can just have virtio drivers for everything. It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in.
That indirection will cost performance and latency, but windows 11 feels like more latency than windows 10 too, so eh. You can also build native drivers for important stuff as needed / over time.
Are you installing those tools regularly? I have a couple of invisible helper apps but Time Machine backups and Mac-to-Mac Migration Assistant has made those apps transparent. They're always there.
But you know what, I think I know where you are mentally. I was there 2 years after I first bought a Mac. I wanted a clean Mac. Nothing untoward, nothing that wasn't Apple. I got rid of that feeling and learned to love the Mac as a platform, to love the Mac because of its vibrant third-party developers. That's why I use a Mac even though Apple is often a bad steward of this wonderful bicycle for the mind.
> mac window management is borderline unusable and I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it.
There's exactly two you need to get macOS eye-on-eye with Windows: Hyperswitch for an alt-tab that actually works and SizeUp to get a "window arrangement like Windows with Win+arrow keys".
Further migration pains can be eased with a Windows keyboard layout bringing special characters to where they belong in muscle memory (that however can and will bring pains with anything Adobe, their apps absolutely do not like non-Apple keyboard layouts and will refuse to load keyboard command presets) and Karabiner to map Ctrl+C/V to reduce hand strain.
> Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand.
Microsoft realized after Windows 8 and Windows 10 that literally nobody, outside of niche tech circles, has positive associations with the Windows brand, or views "Windows" as a selling point beyond "runs my old software." As such, it doesn't matter to them anymore.
It's like being the PR department at your local electricity provider or oil refinery. Keep the politicians happy, but people on the ground is a pointless endeavor.
I remember when new Windows versions were still an event: you could read about it on the magazines, people would get excited to try them, people would debate about how pretty/ugly the new UI was, etc.
Nowadays new Windows versions are like some unwanted background noise. I don't even know at what point Windows 10 stopped being the new version and 11 came out, but it went totally unnoticed to me until I heard that Windows 10 was close to EOL a couple of months ago. And then you start dreading the moment that you'll have to migrate and uninstall all the Xbox crap again that they force on you, etc.
>I remember when new Windows versions were still an event: you could read about it on the magazines, people would get excited to try them, people would debate about how pretty/ugly the new UI was, etc.
Lol. You can verify your claims in 1 minute just by simply googling
I'm not parent and Windows 11 is my least favourite desktop OS, but there are some things where I prefer Windows to Mac OS, for example multi monitor user experience, or the way full screen windows work (F11) and the ease of maximising windows without having to double click on the title bar. Also I like the way home/end/pgup/pgdown keys work. I much prefer how it renders text on non hidpi screeens. Finally I like how there is only one taskbar and no top bar, which results in more real estate on small displays.
Some Linux DEs also do these things well BTW. In fact I use Linux for most things at home. (I use Mac at work and my only Win device left is used exclusively for gaming).
> Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels.
Hey, so I'm a different user, and I wouldn't claim it's the best desktop OS, but split between macOS/Windows for desktop use, there are definitely things about Windows I appreciate. Off the top of my head:
* It has pretty approachable "config as code" built-in - with "winget configure" and some yaml files, you can define the apps you want, the Windows config, the registry settings, etc. without the overhead of MDM or something like Ansible.
* UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)
> UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)
We can't be using the same windows. At work we have 27" 5k displays which I use at 200%, so a perfect multiple of the usual 100% I use everywhere else. The screen is blurry 99% of the time. The only reliable way to get it sharp is to boot the PC with the screen attached. Of course, if I go to the toilet and the screen turns off, when I come back it's just like hot-plugging it: a blurry mess.
Apparently, updating the graphics driver also works, so I suppose it's enough to restart just that instead of the whole OS. Don't know how to do that, though. The resolution is reported as the correct one, changing scaling options doesn't help. 100% looks sharp enough, but it's unusable for me.
And I don't use any old app, it's mostly new outlook and edge. But even the start menu is blurry! There's also the fact that afterwards, tray icons' menus tend to appear in random places, but I understand that apps draw those, so I guess this isn't completely windows' fault.
My work machine dual-boots Linux, which is what I actually daily drive, and these screens have pushed me to switch to Wayland. Now there are some rough edges there, but the high-dpi is handled perfectly (same setup as windows: everything 100% except for that one screen at 200%). This is using Sway and mainly Firefox, Chromium and Alacaritty. Native GTK apps seem to work fine, too, but I don't use many of those.
edit: not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.
> edit: not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.
200% scaling works if you only want "looks like 1920x1080", but if you have a 27" 4K display, I'd typically want "looks like 2560x1440" or 150% scaling - if you do that on macOS, the desktop is rendered at 5120x2880 and then downscaled to 3840x2160. So you're getting both higher resource draw from rendering the desktop at a higher resolution and losing pixel-perfect rendering.
It won't be a problem for most people, but it's enough of a problem for me that I won't use macOS with scaled displays.
>The screen is blurry 99% of the time. The only reliable way to get it sharp is to boot the PC with the screen attached.
That sounds like a (graphics driver) bug. It's not something I ever experienced on Windows 10, even when occasionally connecting an additional display set to 150% scaling. I believe you, though, bugs do happen.
>not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.
I think his point is that on macOS you pretty much have to use 200%, whereas on Windows it can be any value (though multiples of 25% are recommended).
It wouldn't surprise me, although this is a bog-standard-fare enterprise laptop, a 5 year-old full Intel affair. No dedicated GPU or anything fancy.
But, for a long time, I had weird issues with display output on Windows. It would refuse to output 4k@60Hz without doing a stupid plug-unplug-replug-just-at-the-right-time dance, even though it worked on Linux. It took a good 3 years for that to work reliably.
And, in the beginning, those 5k screens only worked at 4k for some reason. Again, no issue on Linux.
But when any of the above situations happened, the state was actually correctly reported, as in 4k@30 Hz, or the 5k screen running at 4k. That's not the case now, everything says what it should, but the image is not sharp.
That's the only situation where I use Windows with scaling, so don't have any easy way of figuring which component is broken. All I can say is that the hardware itself seems to work fine.
I like windows 11 family settings. I can let my kids play Minecraft on old corporate castaway Dells, which I setup from bios/pe to do a clean reinstall. Then I can manage screen time limits and content restrictions from an app on my phone. All free.
> Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs.
Nothing as user focused as linux, and it's mostly compatible with windows programs with wine. Important to note though that user focused is not the same thing as easy to use.
I think perhaps you are conflating user-friendly and user-focused.
Linux, and open source in general, is infinitely more user-focused than anything from Microsoft, since open source is often built for users and by users.
But if you don't have great computer skills already, Linux can be extremely un-friendly the moment you step off the beaten path.
I mean, unless you know the various arcane aspects of Windows, it's pretty hilariously un-friendly when you step off the path, too. After a decade of using Gnome exclusively, whenever a friend asks for help with Windows, all I can do is shrug and suggest reinstalling and/or living with the pain.
It's user-focused in the sense that the user's goals drive the design. The good non-profit distributions, such as Debian and Arch, would never even try to require or push an online account, since that is contrary to the user's interests.
Not disagreeing with you, but your comment brought back memories of Ubuntu One, and the amazon spyware(?) search thing. Ubuntu is kind of the Windows of the GNU/Linux world in that they repeatedly do user-hostile things that test everyone's limits.
Yeah, I would not use Ubuntu if I can help it. I'd still rather use it over Windows. This is why I specifically said "The good non-profit distributions," and not "Linux distributions" or some other broader phrase.
I'm sure that's why they weren't included in the examples of "the good non-profit distributions". It's not like Ubuntu is going to be overlooked. But they are malicious.
The snap disaster really was the final nail in the coffin for me.
That bug report about ~/snap has to be the hottest bug in their bugtracker, and they simply don't seem to give a shit and pretend it's fine.
All the while naive users like my father or colleagues at my workplace shoot themselves in the foot by thinking "what's that folder doing in my home directory? Delete."
I'm not sure if that's still the case, but there was a time when that simply hosed your whole snap installation.
It's also completely ridiculous when you run "docker run ubuntu; apt install whatever" only to find out that "whatever" is now a snap and won't run w/o getting into nested containerization.
For packages that got the snap treatment, window tracking for the Gnome dash was broken for ages if, god forbid, you wanted to create a custom .desktop file to add some parameters. Completely broke the custom launchers I created.
I created bug reports, I tried to work with them. Others did, too. Some of these reports approach 10 years now.
I am purging Ubuntu from all of my employers systems, replacing it with RockyLinux.
Only one major application still to go.
Friends and family get Debian, that transition is already completed.
Nobody forces you to use Ubuntu. Thats the thing. If Ubuntu fucks up, I can switch to another distro at the blink of an eye and nothing of value was lost.
If user is linux nerd well yes. For more casual users there is way too many weird annoyances and problems. Maybe not with single version, but migrating between or at end of LTS support...
I beg to differ. There is less corporate BS on Linux than any mainstream OS.
The software if largely by users for users.
Obviously it caters to the power user, but it also works well for extremely novice users. It’s those savvy with Win/Mac that get screwed switching. I’d encourage them to put a bit more into trying.
I doubt it’s going to happen, but a part of me prays that people will eventually get sick Microsoft’s increasing bullshit and it really can become the Year of the Linux Desktop. Gnome has genuinely gotten pretty great in the last couple years, and I think a lot of former Windows would genuinely like it if they gave it a chance, and virtually any Linux you install will have less tracking bullshit than Windows.
I suspect, though, people will realistically just migrate to Chromebooks, which I suppose are “Linux”, but not what I would consider the “Linux Desktop”
I think people will sooner just start hard breaking Windows ISOs just to get rid of MS's garbage (arguably already the case if you use Rufus, which customizes the OOBE setup to already reject checks and tracking if you tick the boxes. They also have a checkbox to iirc disable the TPM check that's killing a lot of older device support because there's nothing in W11 that actually relies on a TPM, it's just an artificial restriction from Microsoft to kill old hardware), which will just lead to people doing what they've already been doing with Microsoft's stuff: pass it around like arcane knowledge that becomes increasingly difficult to find as it gets ingested by dodgy spam sites to the point where you're entering registry keys that either fix your problem or send everything to a third party.
Microsoft is a level of entrenched that Linux practically won't be able to beat for reasons that have little to do with technical viability and everything to do with legacy tools, having software that works with business formats (Office; any other office equivalent on Linux will still have compat issues and as long as those exist, they won't be a valid replacement - for much the same reason, although not fully locked to their platform, Adobe is a permanent barrier to Linux adoption) and video game DRM on popular titles keeping them basically in that position forever.
I tried their online versions of Lightroom and Photoshop in Firefox on Linux, and I am quite happy to continue paying the subscription. It definitely takes less clicking there to remove an unwanted bird from the sky in a photo than it would take in GIMP or RawTherapee.
Maybe it's time for the Linux version of WSL. Wine is already that for some subset of things - maybe the best way to run Win32 software in 2030 could be on Linux...
> I think people will sooner just start hard breaking Windows ISOs
Hasn't it always been the case? Nobody buy licenses besides companies right?
My uncle taught me how to torrent ~20 years ago, he was already cracking stuff for the whole family, he passed away but his legacy lives through me, I have never seen or heard about anyone buying a windows license in my entire life
You understand the situation better than most do here. The anti-cheat technologies built into competitive games is huge for me. I don’t enjoy gaming without it. That’s a big statement. When you simply don’t enjoy competitive gaming unless it’s on Windows.
Is not supporting TPM an issue in terms of some app compability though? I was investigating whether to upgrade an old computer from windows 10 to 11 and that was said somewhere online. I don't know if its true or fearmongering.
Office and some other “modern auth” apps can store MFA-equivalent tokens in the TPM to minimise the number of “tap the thing on the phone” prompts during single sign on.
I discovered this when I recovered a dead laptop’s disk image to a VM and the sudden absence of a TPM killed all of my cached Office credentials.
>I doubt it’s going to happen, but a part of me prays that people will eventually get sick Microsoft’s increasing bullshit and it really can become the Year of the Linux Desktop. [...] I suspect, though, people will realistically just migrate to Chromebooks,
Most people will stay on Windows... even with all the increasing annoyances from Microsoft... because there's too much important software that runs only on Windows.
And workarounds such as Linux Wine emulator or QEMU virtual machines are still not enough because lots of Windows software won't run in those environments for various compatibility reasons.
E.g. I can't migrate a friend to Linux because her embroidery software for her sewing machine has a USB hardware dongle for DRM. It doesn't work by passing it through as a USB device to a "Windows virtual machine" under Linux.
Other examples are Adobe Photoshop, CAD software like SolidWorks, etc. Too much inertia out there with Windows-only software.
If one does everything in a web browser (e.g. Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc), that's the type of usage profile where switching to Linux desktop is an easy no-brainer.
I disagree with the reasoning "Because there's too much important software that runs only on windows."
My disagreement isn't because wine or proton exist, it's because most people only use a web browser. They check their email, watch tiktok and netflix, and write documents. 90% of people would have all their computing needs met by a basic chromebook.
> embroidery software for her sewing machine has a USB hardware dongle for DRM
While I don't have any sort of built up library of work or experience with a specific propriatary software, consider reccomending Inkscape + the Ink/Stitch extension to do embroidery designs.
I bought a Husqvarna Designer Jade, and the included windows-only software was a 'Lite' version, with an upsell for more advanced features (and pricing that was an additional 25-50% of the embroidery machine itself!), and I suspect a hardware dongle since I spotted references to it. I've been able to get by Ink/Stitch for the simple hobbyist jobs we've needed to do. The machine's USB port just expects a usb storage device, and the ink/stitch software can write the .vp3 files it needed to run a job.
I've been using Ink/Stitch for awhile, and it has an extraordinarily steep learning curve compared to manufacturer specific software. Most of the information you need to run it safely without getting tangles or breaking needles is not published by sewing machine vendors, and you have to trial+error it with ink/stitch. You can get there eventually, but it'll take a lot of frustration.
> If one does everything in a web browser (e.g. Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc), that's the type of usage profile where switching to Linux desktop is an easy no-brainer.
Some streaming services don't work on Linux, the ones that do have degraded video quality, and it generally feels like streaming services are deliberately trying to break the Linux experience because it's associated with piracy.
It was enough to get me to try Linux again, and it was pretty eye opening for me. My work laptop is a $3,200 USD Dell 5570 from 2023. I bought a Beelink SER5 on amazon on discount because it was an older model around $300. I installed Ubuntu on the SER5. I've used gentoo and other distros, I wanted to use the computer, not configure it, that's why I went with Ubuntu. That little Beelink box runs circles over the Dell, it's embarrassing. Granted, the Dell has a bunch of corporate stuff that kills the performance, but I'm just happier using the Linux box. Luckily JetBrains tools, VSCode, Obsidian work just fine, which is what I use it for most of the time. I did install a steam game for giggles and it works. Like Dr. Seuss says in Green Eggs and Ham "Try them! Try them! And you may. Try them and you may, I say."
I still have a Windows tower though...
I did consider that. I've had more than one experience of screwing things up. The $300 investment was an insurance policy against me doing that again :) . With how happy I am with a cheap box it might be something to consider when I have a free weekend to mess with it... Or when a Windows Update installs more stuff that I don't want.
I really like stuff to work. My tinkering days are limited.
I think linux should be on a dedicated drive. Theoretically Windows should coexist with other operating systems. Realistically it nukes dual-boot setups with great regularity. It is called "win" after all...
Might happen. I told my entire family I would not support their windows installs past 10 and 11 is full of spyware. Half bought a mac and half opted to install Linux. IF all you want to do is a browser. Linux is honestly very easy to use.
I got frustrated dealing with my brother's laptop, threw Ubuntu on it, and never had to touch it again. Like, he got 4 or 5 extra years out of that clunker due to that switch.
He's really not a computer guy, and he picked it up no problem.
With Windows 10 going out of support soon, I suspect there will be an increase in Linux adoption. After all, why throw out perfectly good hardware because of an arbitrary rule that Microsoft made? For me, I know that I'll install Linux for some relatives.
I have been a Linux desktop user for 20+ years. It is incredible how far it has come. There is nothing Microsoft can do that will drive the normies away though. Microsoft knows this and that is why we are where we are.
I have been running Linux since 2011, and so much more stuff is in the “Just Works” category, especially if you have AMD graphics. When I installed NixOS on my Thinkpad about a year ago, it was almost comical how easy it was for me; I had gotten used to having to waste an entire day messing with drivers and fixing issues in 2012-2015, so it felt kind of weird for stuff to work as expected immediately.
I am trying very hard to get my parents to use something like Linux Mint because the Windows 11 auto-update on my mom’s computer actually prevented it from booting (making me waste an entire day remotely having them flash a live USB so I could rsync over her files to me…thanks MS!), so this might be enough of a final straw for them.
I have tried switching family members over after malware incidents. The most success was setting my 80 year old grandmother up with Lubuntu. She had no issue picking it up. I don’t think she even really noticed vs Windows. Lasted a few years until she went to an iPad for accessibility reasons.
FWIW: I'm moving from my current win10 desktop to linux of some kind. I've been running mint on my laptop, in preparation, and I think I'm pretty comfortable with it (really hoping that the slowness that builds up over time has something to do with old laptop components, rather than the OS).
For me, it's always been the local account and network services. So long as I can run the thing with only a monitor and keyboard, I'm happy. The second I am required to have a net connection, or even a mouse, I will be looking for alternatives. It's 100% that simple.
I installed linux mint xfce edition on a laptop with only 8 gb of ram, and while there were a few hiccups where I had to adjust, it's a breath of fresh air. Super low memory usage, no wayland nonsense, it. just. works.
I still have fond memory of my brother upgrading his windows XP desktop to 1 GB RAM to play BF2142 and I was like "school hasn't even taught me that number yet".
What the hell happened to software development when "only 8 gb of ram" is used sincerely?
Oh man, don't even get me started. My first computer had a whopping 24 mb of memory. That computer browsed the web, with javascript. Now just my browser winds up eating ~ 3 gb of ram on a regular basis, with just youtube easily eating 600 mb of ram. That's more ram than I put in my first gaming pc back in 2003!
I built a AI / ML / gaming desktop last year, and I just said 'to heck with it, 64gb of ram!' Hopefully that'll hold me for a while
Everyone says that it’s a step backwards, and even I did for awhile until I, you know, actually used it.
I don’t mean “install it and run it for an hour and declare it sucks”, but actually try and learn the way that the devs wanted you to use it, and stick with it for a week or two. When I did that, I actually found myself really liking it.
One of my biggest pet peeves in tech, and I am guilty of this myself, is when people make no effort to actually understand a product, and then declare it as “worse”. I feel like Gnome 3 was a victim of this; it was different than Gnome 2, different enough to where it arguably should have had a different name, but people just universally declared it as shit because it wasn’t exactly the same as Gnome 2.
Regardless, my overall point stands, replace desktop environment with any of the ones listed (though TBH I never have given KDE a fair shake so I can’t speak to it).
Agreed. Gnome shell is actually super keyboard driven. But the KDE folks point out the fact that there isn’t a start menu to click and declare it bad UX. It’s just sad.
It may be keyboard driven, but especially under Wayland (see Talon [0]), it's almost unusable for disabled users. The situation was better a few years ago.
Agreed. Using Gnome at work for a few weeks convinced me to ditch my custom twm setup and move all my personal machines to Gnome as well. It is different, but once giving it time and a honest try I found its a far better experience than any other desktop environment I've worked with.
I know quite a few longtime Windows users who are interested in moving to Linux today because of what Microsoft has done to Windows 10/11. But I'm not too optimistic that they'll last long. Things still break a lot on my Linux devices (laptops mostly). I can't boot from a suspended state, I've been locked out of my system after an upgrade, and I've been tortured by cyclical dependency package conflicts. Getting a few pages out of my printer with the Linux drivers sometimes takes several attempts because it just locks up at random. KDE keeps breaking my two-monitor layout for some reason I haven't bothered investigating. I can get around those problems, but Windows, with all its problems, is more stable and hands-off. I use the Enterprise version and turn off as much garbage as possible, but that's a one-time annoyance.
I moved my parents from Windows 10, MS Office, Edge, Starpage.com to Kubuntu, ONLYOFFICE, Thunderbird, Firefox, qwant.com.
Most questions came because of the Outlook to Thunderbird switch. I can attribute zero questions to KDE. Though I said the new System is called Linux, they refer to it as Windows 11. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
At least on the gaming side, this is happening verrrrry slowly. It's almost entirely driven by the Steam Deck, which has around a 30% market share for linux users running steam. Since last year linux usage is up a solid percentile, and windows is down a similar amount. OSX and Linux both are making slow but steady progress against Windows' market share.
I don't think there will ever be a year of the linux desktop, but there might be a decade of slow transition towards it.
I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility.
Take a look at Bitwig. Developed by a team of ex-Ableton devs, it is the DAW-Live-should-have-become even at version 5.3, and version 6, which is in beta right now, will blow Ableton out of water. As soon as they add a microtonally aware piano roll like in Live 12, I'll have no reason to fire up Live other than to revisit old projects.
And yes it runs on Linux.
(Although truth be told, the CPU usage is somewhat higher on Linux than on Windows, even with low-latency kernel. Multimedia just doesn't quite shine on Linux yet.)
I'm keeping my eyes peeled. Proton has made a LOT of progress, and most of what I do could be done on Linux these days. I think things are moving foward.
Proton and flatpak. The latter still has a lot of issues, but I recently come across a $200+ piece of commercial software (Bitwig Studio) that distributes as a flatpak, and it works great. And so is 99% of the desktop apps I'm using, Steam included.
Flathub is the best app store around. Can't wait until they allow selling paid apps (they had a few contractors working on it last I checked)
I don’t do anything with audio more advanced than what FFmpeg can handle, but I do edit video on occasion and I think Lightworks on Linux is actually pretty solid.
There’s a free version of Lightworks as well actually. I ended up paying for the permanent license for the pro version when it was on sale a few years ago and it’s been pretty ok.
I would love for it to happen. I really like my Mint/XFCE install, but more people migrating to Linux should probably mean better support from hardware and software.
A huge problem is driver support, especially for gaming. Yes, it's significantly better than it used to be, but it's still a problem and it's not something the average user is going to want or know how to deal with.
I feel like your knowledge is a little out of date. Drivers on Linux are generally pretty decent now, especially if you use AMD or Intel graphics.
I had to do some recovery stuff on my mom’s laptop recently, which has an Intel GPU, and I just had it boot off an Ubuntu flash drive into Ubuntu desktop, and it worked fine, including WiFi.
On my main “game console”, I have an Nvidia card running in an eGPU case, and that was a pain in the ass to set up, so fair enough I suppose.
I made the move two years ago and it's going great. Currently running Debian 13. Gaming was the last thing for me but in my case, that's no longer an issue thanks to the Steam Deck.
I think we'll see a small uptick in Linux desktop usage, but nothing massive. Gamers are one of the biggest windows holdouts, and Linux is much better for that now (outside of kernel-level anti-cheat games, which we should be pushing back on anyway even on Windows - no game should require that level of rootkit to play).
More likely though, it's going to be "Eh, do I really need a laptop?" and we'll see even more people than we do already just using their phones and maybe an iPad.
I already see it with the non-tech employees at my work. Very few even have laptops at home. They have an iPad, maybe, a gaming console, and their phone. Sooo many people do almost all of their computing from their phones now.
As someone who's used Linux on the desktop (mostly Ubuntu) daily for about 15 years, I still couldn't conscientiously recommend it except to tech hobbyists or for limited use cases. It's shinier than ever but still a mess.
I think it’s generally pretty ok for people who primarily just browse the web.
My grandmother, who doesn’t know anything about computers at all, runs Linux Mint. She primarily uses Chrome, and someone set her up with Thunderbird and LibreOffice and she’s been totally fine with that. Keep in mind, this computer is old. When she bought it, it had Windows Vista installed and she’s still getting some life out of it.
I think Linux is in a weird place, where it’s great for people who know a lot about computers or nothing about computers. If all you do is browse the web and write email, Linux is perfectly capable for pretty much anyone. If you’re a software engineer, Linux has a lot of useful utilities and is perfectly ok to debug and fix.
The worst case is someone like my dad, who is kind of in the “prosumer Windows” camp. He doesn’t know a lot about computers but he knows enough to where he would want to dig down and change stuff, and doing that he would have to relearn everything from scratch if he moved to Linux.
Since the advent of Chromebook, it's my recommendation for the "elderly user who just needs email"-type use cases. Linux has so much that can go wrong.
The snags arise when playing games that use specific anti-cheat measures. Which is particularly annoying these days because developers are forcing them to be active when you're playing single player.
Microsoft will eventually be able to build attestation services into the kernel that will allow third-party software assurance that no unauthorized software is also running on the same machine, obviating the need for third-party kernel-level anticheat. For security, of course.
I love when companies institute a policy that is super beneficial to them for a dozen reasons and is plainly anticompetitive and claim it’s “for security”.
Why stop there then? I could pound a nail through my SSD and now it’s even more secure…it won’t even have the opportunity to write compromising data!
For that matter, instead of wasting all this money on transistors and metal and whatnot, why not just have a piece of paper that has the word “computer” written on it? Don’t get much more secure than something that doesn’t even execute code.
The shortsightedness of this comment makes me think that there are hundreds of comments, exactly like yours that talked about dedicated GPU’s or direct X or any other technology that was dismissed as Dan don’t worry it’s only the big guys using it.
Do you know how valve used to make games and now it makes money? What happens when EA comes up with an amazing amazingly effective and cheap anti-cheat solution? And they offer it effectively for free to all indie developers, and it just works?
I don’t care, because I switched over to console for effectively this and other reasons. But Colonel level anti-sheet absolutely must be rejected.
What exactly do you want people to do? I already don't buy the games that require kernel anti-cheat, which is the only power I have over the situation. I don't like that it exists either, but the reality is that unless someone reading here is a bigwig at a game publisher (unlikely), they can't reject these methods any more than they already are.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, and why you're criticising my comment as short-sighted. The hegemony of Valve isn't eternal? What's that got to do with gaming on Linux today?
The whole windows game mod scene shows just how much of a toy operating system windows is. Game mods are changing memory values on the fly on running programs and the OS allows it. These mods can just as easily read/modify Excel spreadsheets to get business health data. This is why corporate windows machines lock everything down. Crazy.
Originally anti-cheat was to detect the running of the mods but of course now are phoning home every thing you are doing on your computer.
When the next window image manager claims windows is secure ask them to turn off the virus scanner. They will look at you like your nuts.
And mods. Yes there are work arounds to get various mod managers working on linux, but they're honestly jank. Also any mods that are windows executables (version downgraders, engine optimizers, etc) don't work, even trying to run them through wine / proton.
So now my annoyance at windows does battle with my love of mods. I know the nexus folks are working on a new cross platform mod manager, but they have yet to support bethesda games (I suspect for some of the same reasons I had issues).
The only games I have modded significantly are Minecraft and Lethal Company, neither of which gave me much issue on Linux. Haven’t tried modding any Bethesda games though.
Yeah, I don’t really play any multiplayer games outside of Minecraft and OG Doom on my own server, so it’s never been an issue for me but I realize I am a weird case.
Always-online single-player is supremely bullshit though.
While anti cheats have obvious benefits and are a dealbreaker for some, be careful what you wish for. It's a slippery slope. One chess streamer famously had to set up multiple cameras pointing at him from different angles to combat cheating accusations.
I play a lot of sports games and they rarely work with Linux. A ton of my other multiplayer games I play also don’t work. Anti-cheat stuff often requires Windows.
This is kinda on the game developer. There are anti-cheat systems which work fine on Steam Deck already, as long as the developer checks the box to allow it (as I understand it, it is just about that simple for EAC, one of the bigger anti-cheat options). But if the dev doesn't care, or actively doesn't want to support Linux like in the case of Epic, then Valve can't really patch around that.
Sadly, there is a fundamental incompatibility between successful anti-cheat systems and Linux, mainly that the user is fully in charge of their computer. Anti-cheats work by ensuring certain modifications aren’t made to the system the game is running on, and this relies on the operating system being trusted by the anti-cheat software. With Linux, a user is in full control and can just tell the kernel to lie to the anti-cheat system, completely bypassing it. In windows, there are things the user is not in control of and the anti cheat can be sure are correct.
Until anti cheat design changes entirely (and it may not be fully possible), the freedom and control Linux provides simply doesn’t work with them.
They could conceivably just restrict it to certain kernels and checksum stuff couldn’t they? Like restrict it to the last three Ubuntu LTS releases and the last N updates of the mainline kernel?
What I don’t know about this is a lot, so I will admit I am speaking out of my ass here.
Sure, but those specific kernels would require some sort of verification method to make sure they are actually the kernel it says it is (and not a modified version pretending to not be modified) which would require code signing by a trusted third pasty, use of Trusted Platform Modules, and restrictions on what modifications a user can make to their kernel.
All of these things are pretty much non-starters for Linux users. You might as well just use windows if you are going to go that route.
Unfortunately some devs have added anti-cheat solutions that check and enable game launch for Deck’s hardware specifically, while blocking desktop Linux. Which is arguably even worse
I would assume the most likely solution would be that the game can only run in its own highly specialized virtual environment with its own suite of checks and memory verification.
This is just a cat and mouse game with cheat developers. You can’t design software that is perfectly able to determine that is only running in an unmodified environment. This is a form of the halting problem; any software check you do could be faked.
Windows anti cheat gets around this by using code signing and Trusted Platform Modules, which Linux would never be able to support without Linux users giving up control of their own operating system, which is not something a Linux user would do.
The future of desktop Linux is in a Windows-hosted VM, and some configurations (Home) might not allow even that.
We're a few years out from machines that, by law, cannot run an alternative OS on bare metal. As it is, Linux only runs on bare metal because Microsoft, the sole Secure Boot key authority for almost all OEMs, deigns to allow it.
I would think it’s in Microsoft’s best interest to keep it technically possible to install Linux on bare metal, if only to stave off potential anti-trust lawsuits. They would likely just make it very difficult.
Maybe, but the permissible versions of Linux will be certain specific allowlisted distro images from major vendors.
I'm basing this on Brazil's "Felca law", that contains stipulations similar to the UK's age-verification act, but extends to end-user operating systems, which must also implement auditable and secure age checks and access controls for minors. Presumably only operating systems that tie user accounts to online accounts for which a government ID is required, much like Windows 11, would be allowed.
Anyway, Microsoft is still trying to make ARM-based "PCs" happen, like "fetch". Per Microsoft's guidelines, ARM-based Windows "PCs" cannot disable Secure Boot and cannot allow addition of user-supplied signing keys, unlike x86-based systems which must allow these things; in short, the ARM systems boot Windows and only Windows. Microsoft gonna Microsoft, and if their Microsofting on this leads anywhere, it's toward a PC ecosystem locked down in its entirety.
> in short, the ARM systems boot Windows and only Windows.
I’ve not tried it myself, but a quick google seems to indicate people are running Linux on existing ARM64 laptops and there’s active development to try to achieve full support. For example, Ubuntu is installable on a number of off the shelf laptops, including one of Microsoft’s own Surface devices [0].
I was wrong about booting only Windows, but this is because Microsoft still allows Ubuntu images to be signed with their master key. These machines are locked down to run only those systems Microsoft explicitly permits.
> it really can become the Year of the Linux Desktop. Gnome has genuinely gotten pretty great in the last couple years, and I think a lot of former Windows would genuinely like it if they gave it a chance
This comment could have been written at any point in the past 20 years.
I ran Enlightement + GNOME at work... on OS/2... circa 1999/2000. Wasn't even that bad. Also on linux of course.
Since then it comes down to someone wanting to go deeper than the surface and that's not for everyone, particularily if they are busy.
Pain can get the attention of even the busiest people so I really hope they keep making user suffer like this because that is the best driver away from windows and off the plantation.
I wouldn’t say 20 years, I think the tides turned somewhat when AMD opened up their drivers around ~10 years ago and really turned when Valve released Proton in 2018. Prior to that it was still kind of hard for me to recommend Linux to people.
Windows dominates the market because it dominates the enterprise segment. Enterprises demand accountability and servicing, things that philanthropic community projects that are mainstream Linux distros cannot provide, at least at the scale that Microsoft does.
I could maybe convince my wife to move to Linux, but she's a full-time student and some of the EDU spyware for remote learning won't run on Linux. Most of it supports Mac, but she's not a Mac person either and I don't really see much advantage in trying to get her to be one. For at least the near term, we need to have a Windows PC somewhere in the house so she can get her work done.
Much has been said about this before, but much as I would like to see a year of the Linux desktop, what I think we're going to see is a situation where other software vendors will increasingly hook into these bullshit "features" and people will continue to use what is pushed out to them even as it gets worse and worse out of necessity. Companies see Microsoft squeezing as much value out of a customer as possible, and they want in; that means less control, more tracking, more ads, online activation, centralized accounts, etc.
Yeah, I am a bit concerned about that too. I just started a second masters and I think at least at one point I need to use that bullshit Guardian Browser spyware to do exams.
I might need to keep some piece of shit Windows computer around just to satisfy that because I think VMs are explicitly not allowed.
Rufus and Massgravel still function as a pressure release valve to prevent too much outrage from building up, but Microsoft is working hard to direct more and more of the flow into the channels that get them the most revenue. If HN readers want to set up a machine without any of the bloatware, with all the "developer-mode" switches turned on, without a Microsoft account, there are still ways to get it done.
I actually just set up a new laptop this morning with Windows 11 LTSC 24H2. I'm an engineer, I can edit config files and burn bootable USB drives and install Intel storage drivers in the setup environment and validate sketchy batch files and compare ISO hashes. Now that I'm done, it's got a pair of fully-offline user accounts, it stays out of the way, it boots in seconds, the Windows-only software I have to use for work is no longer nagging me about being out of support, I'm quite happy with it.
But it was not trivial. Had I not known what I was doing, there were a dozen ways it could have gone wrong. I suppose it's nice that I'm not vulnerable to Mossad surreptitiously installing a MITM-patched OS while I sleep, but secure boot makes it scary simple to turn your new laptop into a $1800 brick. And I have a good sense for which links are the tools I actually want to download and run, and which links are scams.
But it's nowhere near smooth enough for me to point a non-technical peer at it and say "Oh yeah, if you don't want your OS to do that, just install LTSC."
I'd like to. If you have contacts at Autodesk, Siemens, Fanuc, and Rockwell who can port their software to Linux, would you suggest that to them for me? Thanks!
I've been using Win10 LTSC since it first shipped, but the pain of it just keeps on increasing (not being able to load the latest .Net; Teams and more and more other apps refuse to run despite the OS still being "in support" now and for many years to come).
Any tips for moving to Win11 LTSC? (I've been avoiding Win11 for as long as I can...)
We're so screwed. Tahoe sucks so my Sonoma days are numbered. Win11 sucks and win10 days are numbered. On the other hand the rails guy released Omarchy linux which is pretty great but it will take months to make it usable.
I'm getting used to Linux again after 20+ years of Mac OS.
First, just using more cross-platform software on my Mac. Ditched Safari for Firefox; replaced my MacOS-only password manager; using iMessage less.
Bought the cheapest Framework 13 laptop, running stock Fedora. Omarchy is interesting but too weird for me. Gnome, is still familiar enough.
Using the Linux machine more and more, feels very fresh. To be honest not feeling this excited in a long time. Perhaps the year of Linux on the desktop is indeed coming.
I may get there at some point -- I actually ran Linux on a PowerBook for a while during the dot-com boom -- but Mac OS X was Unix with tastefully-done office software, and Gnome/KDE were tasteless kludges. Now it seems all software is converging on the same bubbly, mediocre slop. Sadly, Apple still makes the best laptops by far, and trying to run Linux on them takes me to the bad old days of editing XF86Config files and failing to sleep when the lid closes.
But back to the article on hand... Windows has been shoddy since forever, and Windows-compatible laptops are mostly mediocre things that can also run Linux. I could absolutely see a lot of casual Windows users switching to Linux for email, web, and office tasks.
If we ignore relevance, you missed a comment above 1.
If we don't, you missed an explanation how 1. is relevant when I wasn't discussing logifail's pain with Win10, but marcel's lamentation that the better version will soon be gone before a replacement is viable
Marcel laments that Windows 10's days are numbered
As I understand it, you seem to respond that actually Windows 10 has a long life ahead (its "days are numbered in years"). Yet just above that--the comment causing Marcel's lamentations--is evidence that Windows 10 is already on its way out now.
How would that evidence--that Windows 10 is already a problem--not be relevant to your assertion that Windows 10's days will be numbered in years?
How will its days be numbered in years if there are problems with ecosystem support for it today?
For the record, I detest Windows 11 and intend to stay on Windows 10 until I'm forced off of it
What do you think that means for the second person? EOL or Teams? Compare it to Sonoma vs Tahoe.
> Yet just above that is evidence that Windows 10 is already on its way out now.
For a different person for a different reason! which you keep conflating.
If it's already out, why would you complain that its days are numbered compared to an OS that "sucks"???
> How will its days be numbered in years if there are problems with ecosystem support for it today?
Again, if you conflate different arguments into one, how are the days numbered instead of 0 if you believe these problems mean you have no days left / can't measure them in years?
> For the record, I...intend to stay on Windows 10 until I'm forced off of it
Exactly, you see, a different person has a different perspective on whether 10 is expired.
> secure boot makes it scary simple to turn your new laptop into a $1800 brick
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how secure boot works, but why would it prevent you from using the hardware? At worst I'd think you'd just need to reinstall your OS. That's not a brick.
Setting up secure boot on newer motherboards usually involves some resetting of the hardware security keys related to the TPM chip and other modules. Which if not done correctly, can 'soft-brick' the motherboard requiring a BIOS reflash.
Two weeks ago, after Microsoft reset my default apps twice in a week, I bought an external drive, backed up all my stuff and wiped Windows.
I’ve got Linux all over the place, in many cloud envs, and on older hardware. But I finally committed to it on my big, meaty, main desktop. The one I use for coding and banking and accounting.
I’m running a Linux distro full-time. I had to hack a few minor hardware things. Nothing ChatGPT couldn’t solve.
I’ll never do Microsoft again. I will prob add Apple MacBooks to my life, but my main grunt machine is likely to stay Linux. I’m fully vested.
I know I’ll never engage with Microsoft shenanigans in my home environment ever again.
That's an interesting point. To what extent does AI support make Linux on the desktop more viable? Reminds me of a discussion recently that said something similar, that developing in Rust is easier now that you can have another machine do battle with the borrow checker, haha.
To extend, maybe someone could build a "SysAd AI" distribution that administers itself given natural language directions? Let me know if anyone wants to invest. ;-)
My example: I installed Debian 13 recently. I installed on the second SSD of my laptop, so I can dual boot and keep working with Debian 11 on the first SSD.
I encrypt my disks. Debian 13 can use the hardware encryption of my Samsung SSD, 11 didn't. The installer offered me the option and I accepted it. That nearly bricked the SSD because of (I'm not totally sure) a mismatch between the block size of the file system and the block size required by the SSD encryption. The installer should have made a check and at least warned me. It did nothing of that and the laptop didn't boot. I couldn't even change the partitions on that disk. It enforced its encryption and refused to do anything. I appreciate that but it left me without my disk. I asked questions to either chatgtp or Claude, found the problem and after a few attempts I got the right sequence of commands to unblock the SSD and get an empty one. I reverted to the standard OS based encryption and all is well now. I would have had to dig deeply into forums and learn the meaning of those commands. AI saved me a lot of time. Is this a Linux only thing or a Windows installer would have made the same mistake? No idea.
LLMs have probably trawled through ArchWiki+StackOverflow and can enough content to help you debug your system. That plus a few “are you sure” responses to LLM hallucinations have gotten me far.
So much Linux advice on the web is woefully outdated. Like answers for Ubuntu 8 still sometimes come up high in my search results. True that some things are still the same, but not many, especially pre-systemd.
I write in the prompt the distro and its version and so far no much problem with old answers. If anything, it made me realise that some knowledge I had is outdated.
I made a Gemini Gem with some of my preferences (vi not nano, Ubuntu LTS, my hardware) and it's been quite efficient and on-point. A few times it forgets to check ancillary contexts and I have to feather things back on course.
Enough things have changed in Linuxland in recent years that some of those diversions, as you pointed out, helped me work from old knowledge to new knowledge.
I had to fix a kiosk style linux desktop that had suddenly changed its touch input behaviour from touch to cursor today. ChatGPT gave me the steps immediately for troubleshooting, wrote me a udev rule and explained the potential reasons it could have happened and offered to walk me through the process of isolation. I suspect 99% of user problems in Linux can be solved this way.
There's a catch-22 in that the average Linux user is pretty loudly opposed to AI and so it appears hard for pro-AI software to gain footing in the space. Granted, most AI tools are Linux-friendly ATM, but my uneducated guess is that a larger % of Apple/Windows users use AI daily than Linux users
Agreed. We, the Linux crowd, are pretty big on understanding what our machines are doing, which is hard with LLMs. But I'd wager that a distribution that brings a local open source LLM for system administration tasks would find interest. Train it on man-pages and off you go ;)
I had a similar issue, after cleaning up a Windows machine for someone else, making sure Firefox with uBlock was running. I took a look at it a few weeks later and there was some bullshit Microsoft Bing search bar or AI thing on the toolbar. Wiped, installed Linux.
Microsoft is setting fire to the bridges and those will be users which they will never be able to get back again.
Linux works great for gaming except some anti-cheat stuff which probably won't be legal anymore anyways in Europe under the PLD.
> Linux works great for gaming except some anti-cheat stuff which probably won't be legal anymore anyways in Europe under the PLD.
I tried to have a gaming setup with Linux (SteamOS and Bazzite) but both failed when I tried to connect more than one Bluetooth controller and they'd be unable to distinguish them or disconnect everything after a few minutes, it was a frustrating experience.
Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't care about the occasional admin who manages to uninstall Windows in favor of Linux. Since Windows is the default OS on most machines, Microsoft is already making it up in volume.
Some years ago when an older Macbook Air of mine need a bit of Linux upgrade TLC I cycled through a bunch of linux distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc) and found that Ubuntu had more automatic built-in support for the hardware and had no 1st hour niggles. So I kept it.
When I decided to wipe Windows off my desktop, I started with Fedora because I wanted more container/package consistency with some of the other environments I interact with, and I thought I wanted some of the bare-bones Gnome stuff. But Fedora just didn't feel right.. it was uglier than Ubuntu, the Super-key action was a bit jankier, I missed the menu, I had to manually configure the NVIDIA drivers, and the flatpaks didn't really seem like a huge improvement to me.
Anyway, I wiped Fedora and went again with Ubuntu. I feel like that last round of polish they add to it, and some of their device driver defaults, just work better for me. I have had no issues with snaps though I had to learn to mount external directories over symlinks for things like Thunderbird's snap security for relocated profile stores (moved my profile off the SSD and over to the internal spinning disc). But that was easy.
I tried Linux Mint before and thought about Pop_OS but decided to stick with one of the major distros. Ubuntu has won two of my recent "let's try a bunch of distros" so I think that itch has been quieted for a while.
I will say, for Linux in general, after configuring all the apps I use on the daily (browsers, Obsidian, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, etc) my Linux storage on / takes up all of 35GB of storage on a 256GB SSD. I am unreasonably pleased by that.
I recently bought a big new desktop and before putting Windows 11 on it I decided to check out Linux (Mint, can't even remember why that one). The experience was amazing, everything worked out of the box and every Windows game I tried ran perfectly thanks to Steam's Proton.
I still went ahead and reinstalled Windows 11 on it. Suffice to say if I knew what it was going to be like, I'd have stayed on Linux.
I've been a windows user at home and professionally since 2.0 (as a bit of a toy) and 3.0+, never felt comfortable on macos, etc, so as close to a fanboy as it gets. But the love story is over.
> While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use.
If they're only worried that their users may end up with an incomplete Windows install, surely the solution is to provide a better way to set up Windows with a local account? It's not like people are digging around in CMD and RegEdit during the install for the fun of it, they could immediately stop everyone from using these workarounds by adding back the "set up with a local account" button
They're not worried about that, they're worried about users not creating and using microsoft accounts. The stated reason could be a paragraph of lorem ipsum and it wouldn't make the press release any less obtuse.
"Fully configured for use" in Microsoft's eyes means that you've turned on all the extra crap they nag you about in the setup screen, which 99% of users who are skipping the account setup also don't want.
Because they are in the second stage of enshittification. You as a user of their products are not their primary customer - they want to sell your data. Companies buying that data are now their primary customer, so they will prioritize them over you.
They mention in the article: there is a way to use bypass Microsoft account setup, but you need to use an unattended setup file. And these tools didn't want to use that.
I do remember to have read a couple of years ago that the Windows Ui team got replaced and now only consists of Mac users, never having used Windows themselves.
If that is true, it's now wonder that they do not understand all the value that Windows NT has brought, why having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc made sense. And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios. Taking away options will ALWAYS hit some of your customers. And there are a gigantic amount of applications where you want local system accounts only. Yes, Dear Microsoft, computers without an Internet connection do exist and are a common thing.
For us it's Win10 IoT LTSC so we have updates for a couple of more years, and by then hopefully the last remaining software and hardware we have will be usable with Linux.
Their telemetry data didn't seem to help them figure out how important the start menu is for users. I doubt it's going to help them really do anything else either. They might have the data, but they're not using it.
I was at Microsoft during Windows 8 and the decision to remove the start menu was made with telemery data first and foremost.
"Only 3% of users regularly use the start menu." was the justification.
Then they did a bunch of research with eye tracking software to justify the new 'start screen' saying that it was actually better for users who do use the start menu because they were able to locate an item on the full sceeen overlay faster than the traditional start menu.
I think they forgot what people actually use the start menu for: accessing things not immediately available on desktop/taskbar. People don't use it to explore/play around. They're looking for something.
So of course they figure they can insert ads for their own shit, make it a Bing website search, whatever. People don't want fucking an internet search. They're looking for things on their computer.
I feel like these people have a fundamental misunderstanding of how human memory works. We have way better spatial memory than for words. The start menu is one of the better tools for that, because it can contain a lot of information (applications) based on where the user puts them and it's easily accessible. You don't have to minimize other applications, like you do if you want to access the desktop, and the start menu loads instantly (well, it did until Windows 11/before ads).
You're not supposed to "look" for where something is, you're supposed to know. Just like you're not supposed to look for the X in the top right corner of an application. You know it's there and you know that if you move the mouse into the corner you can click it (which is very infuriating when some UI design decides that the top right corner pixel does not count for pressing the X button). The start menu in the bottom left worked in a similar way.
I would wager that most users that left telemetry on are fine with whatever changes Microsoft makes to the operating system and user interface, and that most people that turned telemetry off are the ones which want and need a good start menu and did not want those changes.
Not sure. If they would actively read that telemetry data they would notice that the market share of Win11 due to their actions is shrinking, not rising.
But maybe they are holding the telemetry graphs upside down? ;)
And, obviously, a Windows system not connected to the Internet will not give you Telemetry, so this part of your customer base is invisible to you. As a PM, you would have to actually talk with your actual customers to learn about it.
Or they could have just done a survey where customers can vote on what they want. I assume that "Half of the OS settings dialogues now apply changes the moment you klick a checkbox, without a OK / Cancel button; and the other half of the OS allows you to review your changes and revert them in one go if you want."
It's just said seeing this great NT system getting crippled and ruined by actively making it harder to use and limiting choices.
The W11 market share isn't shrinking though. A few statistics tracking of websites shows that, but there are plenty of reasons that would go down for w11. Nobody (<0.05%) are buying machines and installing W10.
[For those who are not into the LTSC IoT stuff: Basically it's a decrapified Win10 with support and security updates until January 13 2032. Yes, 2032.]
I am seeing the exact opposite. It's not just that my tiny company has completely moved to Win10 Enterprise LTSC IoT, but every newly bought computer gets Win11 nuked and that installed. In Germany (shady) resellers of Win10 LTSCblabla licenses are popping up.
Pretty much everyone in the embedded electronics industry that has to use Windows is doing ass covering right now by buying the LTSC licenses while you still can.
The departures time table on your airport or train station is not going to be replaced because M$ claims that Win11 is incompatible with it. It will be moved to LTSC if it's not already on that for long. Same for ATMs, the strange machine my dentist uses together with her drills etc.
Of course I have no clue how/if Win10 LTSC market share is or can be detected at all. But from inside the embedded electronics industry I can say: Panic buying of Win10 LTSC licenses going on.
Not a contradiction to what you wrote, by the way: "Nobody" ) is buying Win10 Pro or Ent anymore. But they are buying LTSC in heaps according to sadly only anecdotical evidence.
) Well, not in their online shop, but if you ask, you very well can still buy new Thinkpads with Win10 installed from Lenovo, for example.
One of the screens on the Vancouver SkyTrain platform crashed once and displayed the xfce logo, which made me feel a bit of excitement in wondering how it was implemented.
Engagement numbers went up and to the right because it requires multiple infuriating clicks and keystrokes to do basic things. Start menu randomly resorted your apps? 2 more clicks to find the app you wanted!
> And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios.
You're conflating the vertical integration of hardware and software (Apple's walled garden) with Microsoft's current direction (you can't use Windows without MS online services).
Microsoft has never given a damn about customers being free to use the software the way they want to. In light of how the company is behaving today, the "openness" of Windows WRT to hardware was clearly only about market share.
In what way do you think that's relevant? Large portions of that standard had already been abandoned in the Windows 95 era. Nowadays, approximately nobody uses Shift-Insert for Paste, and most laptop users wouldn't even know where to find an Insert key without hunting for it.
> The detailed CUA specification, published in December 1987, is 328 pages long. It has similarities to Apple Computer's detailed human interface guidelines (139 pages). The Apple HIG is a detailed book specifying how software for the 1984 Apple Macintosh computer should look and function. When it was first written, the Mac was new, and graphical user interface (GUI) software was a novelty, so Apple took great pains to ensure that programs would conform to a single shared look and feel.
There's never been a better time to switch to Linux. For the longest time I was using Windows on my personal machine (for gaming), and MacOS for work. Not sure why, but one day I decided to try out dual booting Kubuntu (KDE Plasma + Ubuntu), and haven't touched a Windows machine since. Using MacOS feels bad now. I don't see myself ever willingly installing Windows again. MacOS is unfortunately something I still have to use.
Notice all the potential revenue operations for Windows: exfil your data, show you ads, sell your data, sell you cloud services. All these things require you to have an identity. Windows is not the product any more.
sure and premium games that cost $90 don’t have any micro transactions in them.
Unfortunately, many MBAs will see it as leaving money on the table.
So yes, the product might cost some money, but that doesn’t mean it’s meeting financial targets, since they grow year on year.. but PCs as a market are not growing at the same rate.
Had to edit a .docx today to refresh my CV today...and realised oh...I don't have any more windows machines on hand anymore. Interesting how smoothly that faded away psychologically after 20+ years of windows use without me even overtly noticing.
Think MS is in for a rough ride on Windows. Short of corporate world - Excel/Sharpoint/AD - there is just no moat. Browsers work fine on all platforms, dev work is better on linux anyway and gaming on linux is rapidly becoming usable. And mac side is obviously competitive on various fronts too.
It will depend on if gaming studios continue to invest in a Linux Desktop experience. It's common to run your game server on Linux, but MS, partially through DRM support to the big media companies, creates an environment very strongly suited towards shipping your game binary to a hostile environment.
This is partially why major (effective) anti-cheats have migrated to the Kernel. Windows allows the big-budget games, which are often competitive games, to operate with a higher level of game integrity, which leads to more revenue generation.
MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series or similar quality device which prices a large part of the current windows gaming audience out.
As an example: it's not too expensive to buy a laptop that runs valorant, and then be funneled into the skin shop. You can get a lot more sales that way than you can through the crowd of people who are on MBP, though perhaps the MBP crew is more likely to be a whale.
note: Valorant is not supported on MacOS due to the anticheat requirement, but the hypothetical still stands.
IMO the rise of handhelds like the Steam Deck has a decent chance of pushing big publishers to consider releasing for Linux/Proton. These handhelds fit the niche between smart phone and console gamers [1] that might have some potential growth left in it. Even the availability of Windows first handhelds was not as bad for Linux gaming as SteamOS and other gaming handheld focused Linux distros have been ported to them.
On the other hand the anti cheat side has been really ratcheting up with newer releases requiring Win 11 and Secure Boot. I somewhat hope and fear we might get a blessed version of SteamOS for the Deck that is heavily locked down and has kernel/hypervisor level anti cheat functions added to it. Essentially allowing for a boot mode similar to current consoles. While it goes against the open spirit of SteamOS, it might serve as an argument to invest a bit more into the Linux side, potentially improving the ecosystem as a whole.
Or all of it might be the usual "year of the Linux desktop" pipe dream.
[1] leaving out the Switch which is heavily focused on Nintendo IP and has comparatively weak hardware
Proton already runs the vast majority of games just fine. Gamers should categorically refuse rootkits and give the cold shoulder to studios that release games that require them. Anyone with a bit of maturity can do that, and nowadays there are thousands of other games to choose from.
> Gamers should categorically refuse rootkits and give the cold shoulder to studios that release games that require them. Anyone with a bit of maturity can do that, and nowadays there are thousands of other games to choose from.
the problem is, the wide masses still keep buying the latest AAA game thanks to literally sometimes hundreds of millions of euros worth of marketing (GTA V already had 150 M$ marketing budget well over a decade ago), and the free-to-play "whale hunter" games are even worse.
With ye olde purchased online games, like UT2004, you'd think twice before cheating, otherwise you'd get your serial number banned (sometimes not just on one server, but on an entire fleet of servers run by the same op) and you'd have to buy a new license. That alone put a base floor on cheater costs.
In contrast, Fortnite or other f2p games? These are overrun by cheaters, there is no cost attached at all, so it's obvious that the only solution is to ratchet up the anti-cheat measures.
All hail capitalism and the quest for f2p developers to lure in the 1-5% of utter whales that actually bring in the money.
Same, but I mostly play indie, older and/or singleplayer games. I now often don't even check ProtonDB when buying games, it has gotten that good. Anything AAA, multiplayer and new tends to cause problems due to anti cheats though.
> MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series
The M5's GPU cores are expected to pick up the same 40% performance boost we just saw in the newly released iPhones.
AAA games written for the M4 already work just fine, the extra performance is needed when you are also emulating other graphics APIs and CPU instruction sets to run Windows games.
Windows on ARM has the same issues, but Prism isn't as good at x86 emulation.
Attainable isn't about benchmarks and performance, it's ecosystem such as supported kernel hooks for AAA games to invest the time in maintaining their anti-cheats and other parts of the game-as-a-service platform.
It's also about the market accessibility and penetration. When the base level MBA at it's lowest RAM settings is reliably running AAA games is when you might see more interest in the platform from those studios because much like the iOS market, people running Mac tend to be more readily monetized, especially through things like in-game cosmetics.
> Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux
Nope because Proton is based on WINE, which stands for Wine Is Not An Emulator. Windows executables on Linux are running natively at full speed like any other Linux program.
Wine implements the Windows ABI and is just here to answer the system calls those executables are making.
In fact, most Windows games are running faster under Linux.
DXVK, VKD3D, D3DMetal, etc. are translation layers. You're implying they're far more heavyweight than they actually are. The real reason Windows games don't run as well on Macs is that they're usually built for x86_64 instead of ARM.
As someone who has used both Windows and Linux to game on the same x86_64 device, the performance hit with Proton is pretty much negligible (and sometimes games actually run faster on Linux).
> DXVK, VKD3D, D3DMetal, etc. are translation layers.
Rosetta is a translation layer that only operates the first time you run a given x86 app on Mac, and creates an ARM translation that is written to disk and used in the future.
Not very much at runtime. The main problem with metal is that it's not really compatible with DX12 or vulkan. DX12 and Vulkan are very similar, metal is not. I'm sure the conversion isn't as 1-1 and you lose some performance by doing stuff esoterically.
The gaming is the only reason that keeps me buying computer with windows
Regarding this article here, when you said about competitive gaming, I imagined a competition of that sort. I wonder how does a windows installation look in a big gaming competition that many players attend. It's never "BYOD" rather they get the windows preinstalled onto great gaming PC.
Do the players need to login to their Microsoft account? And Download their cloud cotents to someone else's computer? Or maybe there is a loophole for gaming contests that allow installation without cloud login?
It's really easy for people who work in tech, or tech adjacent to recommend this, but in my experience, getting anyone to try nearly anything on Linux is very rough. Friends who wanted to "take control of privacy in their life" never made it beyond a week of trying to use a Linux distribution.
We have decades of training in the consumer market for very simple install patterns using UIs, and minimal messing with configurations. The people in gaming who overclock and tweak their settings are a huge minority in gaming. Those people are the ones most likely to be able to grok switching to Linux, but when they get there and find that most of their favorite apps don't work like they are used to, they go back to Windows or Mac.
My hypothesis is that for Linux Gaming to truly take off, you'll need a true desktop (not steamdeck which i use weekly) that makes it a handful of "clicks" to get whatever they want installed working. That means you'll need a commercially backed OS where developers maintain all the things needed to support near infinite peripheral connections for a variety of use cases, clear anti-cheat interfaces, and likely clear DRM hooks as well.
> Friends who wanted to "take control of privacy in their life" never made it beyond a week of trying to use a Linux distribution.
I wonder why. Something like Linux Mint isn't materially different from Windows in terms of UI. Any peripheral sold as "Linux compatible" that you plug in will just work, and Steams allows to play practically any game that does not require an invasive rootkit (aka kernel-level anticheat).
I think a good first step would be to start using common FOSS programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, LibreOffice on Windows during a transition period.
People probably feel less in control in an unfamiliar environment even if the superficial functionality is similar. I suspect this might be a greater factor for those who are somewhat tech-savvy and used to knowing their way around their computer to some degree. Once you go a bit beyond launching apps and using their UIs, the differences become apparent, bringing about a sense of unfamiliarity and a loss of a sense of control and competence.
People for whom the computer is just an appliance with limited applications (and who recognise their relationship to the computer as such) might even be better able to switch, provided that everything is set up for them. My elderly parents used a Linux box I set up for them for years at some point.
For myself personally the moment I stopped tweaking linux endlessly was when I installed the universalblue images (bazzite/aurora/bluefin). They made upgrading / using software so painless by providing sane defaults that I no longer feel the need to time my upgrades after the bugs have been patched out, or look up random commands to fix something. They are reliable enough that I feel comfortable recommending / installing them for family members, something which I would not have done before.
I find it annoying not to be able to run things at the same time. I've used dual boot many years ago but ran into the issue that one thing required one OS, another thing another OS. Kept having to close things down and reboot, reboot reboot. Nah, thanks. I'll use Linux with an offline Windows XP VM for Age of Empires and call it a day. One day, maybe I'll use a Windows 10 VM without Microsoft account to run modern software if the need arises
Some forms of kernel anticheat make dual booting harder, too. I can’t play valorant since that version of Vanguard requires secure boot, which doesn’t seem to work with my dual boot setup unless I invest more time fiddling than I care to. Easier just not to play that game.
Fine, but the general population will have to accept whatever fate Microsoft has in mind for them.
Edit: I'd guess a lot of them just follow whatever instructions they are given, and create the online account. If Microsoft thought there was a chance of serious rebellion, they wouldn't be doing it.
These types of games are only a small part of gaming, I use a macbook for my main machine and I play games on my console. The majority of gaming has nothing to do with buying skins and we should all be rejecting this nonsense anyway.
> And mac side is obviously competitive on various fronts too.
After a lifetime of Windows use, I'd even say MacOS is almost on par with Linux for development, while Windows' best feature on this front is WSL so you don't have to use Windows.
I agree with you here, as someone who uses all three (mostly Linux).
IMO the two biggest pains with MacOS is (1) brew is not as good as any other package manager in my experience (mostly in bugs that need manual fixing) and (2) Docker naturally is much worse (not just for performance, but for requiring 'Docker desktop'.) All the other pains are just the myriad niceities I miss from a lifetime of mostly Linux that MacOS just can never have.
> IMO the two biggest pains with MacOS is (1) brew is not as good as any other package manager in my experience (mostly in bugs that need manual fixing)
I've been happily not using brew for a couple years now. Nix can function as a brew replacement without much fuss. However it lacks a simple alternative to brew services (for that you have to enter the rabbit hole which is home-manager).
Also macOS UI is stuck in the past but not in a good way : they never fixed their windows management which is still stuck on the old paradigm that the user is using an application and not only a window of an application.
The Dock is the biggest illustration of this : good luck if you have opened more than two windows of the same app.
I have to use MacOS for work, and I find the experience of using MacOS to be atrocious. As hostile as Windows, with the added caveat that some things just doesn't work. I honestly would rather use Windows than that crap.
That's a big market to just handwave away. Manufacturers have been pretty scared off from shipping Linux by default on consumer PCs, so the only way to affect Windows sales is to impact the corporate world.
I've never worked at Autodesk, and I don't use CAD. But I see they have a Web version of AutoCAD. I assume there are a bunch of Autodesk employees on Hackernews who can correct me, and I know there's probably a boat load of issue for a huge legacy project like that. But how long until AutoCAD web is just AutoCAD? Or some competitor a'la Figma is in the web?
It will _never_ get to that point unless they port the original codebase to WASM or something. Or another product comes around that's so market upsetting that it takes the crown. The same can be said for Adobe products.
QuickBooks Desktop only exists in an Enterprise edition anymore (which is expensive), if you want to run still-supported versions of it. Intuit is pushing everyone hard to QuickBooks Online.
Well, I wasn't trying to dispute that general home uses can get by on Linux, just that industry is a large user base that isn't going to switch because the software they depend on is tied to an OS. QuickBooks is used by a lot of people, and their web product is not an alternative to the desktop app
All of which are very easily replaceable. That list is laughable for an example of lock in.
I used to run AutoCAD on a 80286 with a maths co-pro with 1 MB RAM. It has changed somewhat since!
Who gives a shit about QB? - you could just run it in a VM and it probably runs under Wine. You can also just switch accounting vendor - there are quite a few. Double book keeping is a good 600 years old and can be considered pretty open source these days.
You may even do some real good to your business (if you think you need QB) by going old school and really getting to grips with the numbers. Buy three huge ledgers and label them: "Sales" "Purchase" and "Nominal" or "General". Also grab an exercise book to act as a cash book and a couple of notebooks to document the system. Now, you will need to do docs too so you will need a drawing board to design your forms ...
Now CAD is not the most common business software in use by anyone which is probably why you went for AutoCAD (which you have heard of), rather than, say, Solidworks or Catia. Autodesk is a vendor and not a stuff.
I love how you suggested I go back to bookkeeping by hand if I want to buck the Microsoft/Intuit monopoly. I'm talking about tracking accounts receivable on thousands of invoices with individual parts that ship separately. There's very few options out there, and if I want it to "just work" with live account balances of my bank forget about it
Fascinating. I believe you, but what sort of stuff doesn't work? Video games and their graphics manage to work under Wine/forks and those are quite complicated APIs to not-emulate.
The average grandparent isn't installing an OS, they're using whatever comes on the device. If you had Ubuntu pre-installed and automatically updating, there isn't going to be that much of a difference for how many less-tech-savy people use the computer.
Microsoft has a strong cycle of "applications run on Windows" -> "device vendors choose to bundle Windows" -> "people use applications on Windows", but that has been eroded, in part thanks to Wine and the work put in by people at Valve.
If someone who uses their computer to browse the web and check the email picked up a laptop pre-installed with Ubuntu, they'd likely be perfectly fine with it.
>a strong cycle of "applications run on Windows" -> "device vendors choose to bundle Windows" -> "people use applications on Windows",
>but that has been eroded, in part thanks to Wine and the work put in by people at Valve.
Eroded even more so by the user-hostile approach of Microsoft itself.
Exactly with things like being a complete failure to recognize a strong valid need for general users to only opt-in to an account according to their own personal needs alone. Not with Microsoft or Google or anybody else known to be a source of unwanted ads or anti-professional annoyances.
Why abandon a remaining security element that can protect against PII compromise like no other?
It's just sad to lose an essential feature that has always been built-in to Windows since the beginning, which helped make Windows into a far better business machine than would have been otherwise possible.
And why now when security is more important than ever?
Have you tried it? I see where you're coming from but don't think it would work out that 'no grandma can use it'
My plan for years has been to install Linux Mint + Cinnamon for my grandma when she next needs a new laptop... but she still hasn't needed one :(. And she's slowly getting too old for any new computer
Every Windows upgrade was a big change again. The UI would change each time, Windows Live Mail got discontinued, Office got ribbons, etc. Why reinvent the wheel each time? I've replaced:
- Windows Live Mail with Thunderbird, that has been stable.
- Microsoft Office with Libreoffice, that has been stable.
- The next item on the list was going to be Windows itself, since Cinnamon hasn't significantly changed since I started using Linux over ten years ago. It still has a start menu, system tray, window list at the bottom (without the windows collapsing and hiding!), everything made for usability and working as you expect.
The only exception is (grand)parents that need custom software. E.g. my mom has custom software (from Hema I think? Or Bruna maybe?) for editing photo albums to then send it to a print shop and get a real photo album. That will be web based nowadays I imagine. I should ask her but that could still be a barrier to switching
Edit: Similar issue on Android btw. There isn't one function that my (grand)parents use, that Android 16 has that Android 4 did not. The only thing that keeps changing under them is UI. Sure, developer APIs got nicer, support for dual-frequency GNSS is there, screens got taller... none of that needed to touch the UI. Sadly Google does a phenomenal job of obsoleting old OS versions quickly so you need to keep buying new. EU law for longer device support doesn't even help because you still need to upgrade that OS and can't simply use an LTS with security updates
The last Windows versions my parents actually used was Windows XP, maybe they encountered Vista somewhere for a brief moment. In my capacity as the family sysadmin, I've switched them to Linux around this time. Ubuntu first, now Debian. XFCE back in the day, Gnome3 since a few years. I think they'd hardly recognize a modern windows installation any more. Gnome3 has it's warts, but I really hope it's here to stay, at least in the broad strokes of the UI paradigm.
I don’t know…for people who can do their computing on a Chromebook, a Linux distribution would be suitable.
The people who will have the hardest time switching to Linux are those who need proprietary software products that are unavailable for Linux and whose needs are not met by open-source alternatives. Microsoft Office is still the standard for office software, and the Adobe Creative Cloud is still the standard for many creatives.
If LibreOffice ever reached 100% compatibility and feature parity with Microsoft Office, and if the Adobe Creative Cloud ever got ported to Linux, then this could spell trouble for Windows.
> for people who can do their computing on a Chromebook, a Linux distribution would be suitable
That sounds reasonable, given that
> ChromeOS is built on top of the Linux kernel. Originally based on Ubuntu, its base was changed to Gentoo Linux in February 2010 (--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS)
I hate Microsoft and Windows just as much as the next self-respecting nerd, but this is no less a lol right now than it was 20 years ago. It’s like Linux users all play the same 15 titles that have Linux support and think those 15 games reflect broad ecosystem support.
It's incredible to see people still confidently say this, to be so sure about something that would take only like a minute of research to find out they are completely wrong.
No, you are the one perpetrating old crap from 15 years ago.
Most games that come out today, in 2025, are playable on day 1. I'm not just talking about games that are less graphically demanding (eg. Silksong), but games like Silent Hill f. It just works out of the box.
You clearly haven't been paying attention or are being disingenuous. Most games released now just work on Linux thanks to Proton. There's a reason the Steam Deck is blowing away any other PC gaming handhelds.
Except for games with anti cheats, can you quote from your head three games the last 10-15 years that aren’t running perfectly on Linux ?
Because from my ~1 500 titles steam library, I can think of one game that I had issues with. And even this particular game (which is Tomb Raider 2013, btw) worked perfectly fine after a little hack. And ironically the "hack" was checking a checkbox in Steam to force using the Windows version of the game instead of the official Linux port.
Do you have anything more tangible than "lol"? Looking at the most played steam charts, there is about 10% that has anticheat that does not work on linux.
In the top 10 I see only 3: pubg, apex, and rust (no idea about delta force) but unplayable on the steam deck and whether the anticheat filters out linux are not the same.
This is connected with windows 11 requiring a TPM. If all their users have a Microsoft account and that Microsoft account is needed to access all their passkeys, then they end up with a privileged position where they can aggregate info about user behavior based on their logins which, thanks to the TPM, the user is cryptographically locked out of interfering with, and their competitors are locked out of participating in by the fact that Microsoft controls the client.
As always, it's about controlling users via high switching costs. I hope we come up with an improved webauthn spec which ruins this for them.
I know that there are enterprises and individuals who need Windows. I also know that I had been on Windows my whole computing life and made the switch late in 2023 and there's never been a better time to switch to Linux. I could have switched much sooner!
I have found my Windows apps for everything work (or have equivalent or better Linux versions) and will soon be switching my non-technical wife over to Linux to avoid Windows 10.
For her, I've looked at her workflows and setup a configuration that I can use on her new machine that will setup all of her apps and menu settings so it's as seamless a transition as possible. She rarely needs to update her computer or apps, the latest Debian 13 "Trixie" release is what I'm going to try for her.
For majority that want to switch but can’t yet, gaming is the biggest pillar still very far behind. Many popular games (and game related apps) don’t work on Linux, sadly. I don’t know if it’s ever going to change either because of it being a chicken or egg scenario where they don’t want to spend the time supporting it cause it’s not enough users, but it’s also not enough users cause it’s not supported.
> I don’t know if it’s ever going to change either because of it being a chicken or egg scenario
We don't even need native games. Proton, when it works, is amazing. Win32 is effectively now the stable ABI that Linux always needed but never had.
The real problem is kernel level anti-cheat, which will never happen on Linux, but more importantly, gamers should be pushing back against it even on Windows. It's invasive. The latest of which you can't even enable virtualization support in Windows if you want the anti-cheat to run, which also means you lose virtualization based security, no WSL, etc. It's completely obnoxious and I hope Microsoft cracks down on it, because if they do then more games will run on Proton.
> It's completely obnoxious and I hope Microsoft cracks down on it
I hope they don't. Competitive gaming has been begging to stop cheaters for a long time. Ring 0 anti cheat has shown to be very effective against the vast majority of cheaters. Compare CSGO with something like Valorant. It's clear it's effective. Is it invasive? Sure. Is it mandatory? No (sorry you just cant play the game).
Bring back private lobbies/private servers then. Make the anti-cheat optional. Those that want to play in public lobbies have to rootkit their PC or play on console, those that don't still get to play the game without it but not in public lobbies.
If anything, gaming is the pillar that is furthest ahead, thanks to SteamOS and Proton and everything else surrounding it.
The main issue is that a lot of people I know need things like Photoshop or propriety CAD apps or video editing software where the alternatives are simply not acceptable - sure I can mention some OSS alternatives but it's not really my field; this is their job and they can't really take the velocity hit, or waste time finding out mid-project that it can't do what they need it to do.
Depends a lot on what kinds of games you play, I think—I built a PC in 2020 and originally set it up to dual boot Linux and Windows, but over time I used the Windows partition less and less and wound up deleting it last year.
I realized recently that at some point I stopped even checking ProtonDB before buying games on Steam, I guess because its been so long since I've run into one that didn't work. I play a pretty wide variety of games, but not so much the type of competitive multiplayer FPS that seems to have the worst Linux compatibility due to anti-cheat.
The biggest problem is probably work-related apps not working. Adobe products, MS Office, and certain niches like the music industry just aren't supported on Linux.
Many ultra-popular games don't work due to anticheat, but some do. Dota 2, Counter-strike, Marvel Rivals, Overwatch 2, among others work perfectly fine. We've also reached a point where virtually every offline game will work too.
Also, I have found for tweaking and customizing my own Linux machine, tools like Claude Code allowed me to be much more adventurous and fast at making my machine exactly how I want it to be. I don't bork my machine because I have my machine's configuration (I'm on NixOS, but this could apply on Arch or elsewhere) versioned in git and things tend to build correctly or they don't.
Discovered Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC edition recently. It's great! It is supposed to get security updates through 2032. It doesn't have Cortana, OneDrive, CoPilot, Edge, etc. (Which is a good thing IMO.) Nor does it require a cloud account to use.
Are there any limitations with this to be aware of? Are Hypervisor/Docker/WSL2 all supported?
I'm trying to decide if I want to transition my work computer to Linux or Windows 10 LTSC. Most of my day is spent working inside of WSL2. So, it kind of seems like I should just get on with using Linux native, but several decades of sunken cost have kept me on Windows. I don't think I have a desire to 'upgrade' to Windows 11 and Windows 10 Pro is just about EOL.
The only mid level hurdle you'll encounter is no Microsoft store. It was only an issue for me when gaming, but steam was fully supported. Same for Win 11 LTSC.
Not sure if this still works, but you used to be able to run "wsreset.exe -i" to install the Microsoft Store. The command kicks off the process in the background, so there's no progress indicator, but the Store app just appeared after a few minutes.
Yes, LTSC is literally missing parts that are standard on a Windows install - it's an operating system designed for ATMs and kiosks that run exactly one tested application, it is not a general-purpose operating system.
If you happen to not need those pieces, and you don't care about running super out-of-date software? Sure it might work. But it's not a Good Idea in general.
That's not a fair take. The only things I noticed that were missing out of the box are the MS Store and some Dolby codecs. Both of those can be installed easily.
I estimate that 95% of people would be fine with Windows 10 21H2 LTSC. The 5% might miss some 3rd party software that requires version 22H2 to run (just because it's the latest, not for any technical reasons).
Thanks for mentioning WMR. I was genuinely struggling to remember why I didn't install LTSC previously and that reminded me. Half the reason I'm stuck on 10 even if I wanted to go to 11 is WMR. LTSC would be perfect for me if it wasn't for that little caveat (and a few more if my memory serves correct).
Awesome that they created and then gutted a standard that just bricks my $400 device that they barely even seem to care to support on launch. There's patches that exist for 11 but they're just that, patches, and my WMR experience is already very jank. Nvidia also seems to be the target for most development so I'm not sure where I'll go once this all settles as I have my gaming PC in a nice position where I can just hop on after work and everything just works with no interruptions or issues currently.
11 is a hot mess and I already know that linux/proton simply won't work for the games I tend to quickly hop onto with friends.
Other limitations are that modern Adobe products will no longer install on Windows 10 LTSC as it is based on a too old version (but there are workarounds).
WMR situation isn't great but there are ways out. If you have a NVIDIA GPU then you can use Oasis on Windows 10 LTSC (AMD GPUs require Windows 11 24H2 for Oasis). Also on Linux, support for WMR devices has improved markedly via Envision / Monado, but some tinkering is required and it is still behind Windows.
Nested virtualization is a problem for systems with AMD CPUs I think, Windows 10 Hyper-V supported nested virtualization on Intel only. Since Windows 11 it is supported on AMD too.
It is purchasable only if you have access to business sales for Microsoft. You need to buy at least 5 normal licenses before being offered the LTSC upgrade option. It is quite pricey.
Unless it has changed recently you need to have a minimum qty. license purchase. Any good reseller will sell you the one license of LTSC and pad the rest of the order with the cheapest qualifying license in the catalog. (In the past it was DVD playback licenses at a couple of bucks apiece, for example.) I was able to get licensing for my father's sole proprietorship DBA from a big name reseller w/o furnishing any kind of business-related docs and paying with his personal credit card. (In his case it was Windows Server and CALs, but the premise is the same for LTSC.) You'll probably have to talk to a sales gerbil but it's imminently feasible.
I'm going to keep it real with you bro, I don't remember how it works, but the video below has been saved in my YouTube watch later for a few months and I think it's what I followed when I tried (I eventually moved onto Linux anyway):
There is no comparison. Linux suffers from "not my department" syndrome. If some component in the stack borks the install you are in hell trying to fix it and risk breaking something else.
Windows for all its faults still has some semblance of the majority of the OS being developed under one roof so things actually work together.
> There is no comparison. Linux suffers from "not my department" syndrome. If some component in the stack borks the install you are in hell trying to fix it and risk breaking something else.
>
> Windows for all its faults still has some semblance of the majority of the OS being developed under one roof so things actually work together.
My favourite part of Windows is how opening the start menu causes CPU usage to spike because the start menu is made using React, versus using native UI components for it. Is... that the kind of "working together" that you mean?
I've been running Linux since 2009 and these complaints are fine to pull out when levelled at contemporary Linux, but it's grown up hugely since Valve started throwing money at it. I haven't had to do any major config on a Linux distro outside of "things I wanted to do with it, just because" since around 2021 (this includes games via Steam or Lutris). Meanwhile I very, very regularly have to hear stories from people about how much work they're putting into their Windows setup just to have a remotely functional OS, including replacing the entire start menu component with a random hack made by a private non-Microsoft sanctioned group.
It's honestly very funny, and it's going to get funnier as the trend keeps continuing.
Post like this mystify me. I’ve been on Ubuntu since 2008 and I’ve never once had a failed install. Now installing redhat from floppies in 1998? Yes that sucked. But it’s been a good experience for a really long time.
I ran into a bug about a year ago with the Ubuntu installer that caused it to crash on me when I was trying to install it on my Framework laptop. I had to try multiple times before the install finally went through.
It takes a good six months before Linux supports new hardware well. Usually LTS (or even other) Ubuntu is not recent enough. I recommend Fedora on such machines, and later on Mint (no snap).
Ubuntu used to be "hot shit", but I don't think I'd recommend it for any reason these days, especially since it doesn't support Flatpaks.
Pop_OS!, Fedora, etc. are all better and much more stable, and I can't see this changing given Shuttleworth's weird, bizzare, misogynistic, and ableist hiring practices.
I understand the desire to get out from under the MS umbrella, as there are definitely legitimate gripes. But I also see the irony that if you have the technical ability to install a Linux distro, you definitely have the technical ability to use an autounattend XML.
I don't know about openly hostile. Definitely making moves that the user base openly disagree with and think are, at best, very bad decisions, but I don't think they have crossed the "hostile" line. And MS is not alone with those kinds of decisions.
Apple may not "force" you to use an iCloud account for their devices, but they sure push it hard.
As far as Linux communities go, Red Hat, Arch, Cisco, and even Ubuntu have also done their fair share of "bad decisions".
everybody else is doing it doesnt excuse the issue.
when users make a technical effort to workaround these bad decisions, and you keep chasing after them, subverting said technical measures, in order to enforce said bad decisions, this has gone far beyond being bad decisions; it is being done on purpose to prevent users from opting out of a Hostile ecosystem.
I'm currently trying to set one up. What do I have to put in there so the OOBE is skipped, or at least skip the online account part? My goal is to install a Windows 11 in a VM with zero user interaction.
Edit: Actually, currently the whole thing is failing after the second reboot for other reasons. I get an error that says there is some malformed command in the unattend.xml or something. Couldn't fully debug it yet - it's possible the setup succeeds after I figure this one out.
There was a great expression I read in relation to Microsoft's Xbox division, they recently increased their prices in some cases by 100% but one commentor said "They're too big to care".
I think this applies now also with their complete disregard for the windows 10 EOL. Exposing, if I remember correct : ~40% of the windows market [0]. This seems to me as negligence in their duty to ensure a level of security and quality.
The people who've made these decisions don't seem to realize that there are more options than ever to replace them. It's almost as if they're actively pushing people to find them. Their Azure offering is making ground though [1] and maybe that's where they want to put their efforts in. If that's the case, good riddance.
> “While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use.”
Imagine being able to use your device however you wanted to. Apperantly that luxury is no longer yours. I've had to setup windows 11 on machines with no wifi drivers from w11 and without the oobe overwrite I would not be able to complete the installation. What possible reason could they have for that.
> 2. Force release of source code if not providing LTS. You don't want to support it fine. But don't block people from what they bought.
Tangentially there is a movement happening in this regard for video games for studios to provide EOL options instead of bricking the game you bought. For software I haven't seen an example of local installations that get bricked after remote services go offline. Maybe for example if Jetbrains closed shop tomorrow and basically said to all users, your license wont be validated, too bad.
> Exposing, if I remember correct : ~40% of the windows market [0]. This seems to me as negligence in their duty to ensure a level of security and quality.
Make no mistake - this is yet another way they just squeeze more out of users and play innocent when they don't cough up cash or switch to 11 to sell them more things/more of their data instead. ESU is available even to consumers for the next year, for a per-pc-fee, and corporate users for at least the next 3.
Search for "Local-only commands removal" on the page for the relevant section:
Local-only commands removal: We are removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE). While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use. Users will need to complete OOBE with internet and a Microsoft account, to ensure device is setup correctly.
I wonder how much of this is Microsoft trying to create recurring profits from the base (Home) sku, rather than that they care about local-user installations in any other circumstance.
Because it seems that microsoft could not shitify windows experience anymore.
I like windows, Its a great system specially for being productive, but the godamn start menu using react and edge and the online requirements are a pain in the ass.
Sometimes it just hangs while you click the windows key. All I want is to open notepad++...
This is the story of Windows since 7 (and even earlier if you used the crappified Windows typically included with hardware): "The default experience is dogshit, but with enough work you can fix it." With every release the work required to make Windows bearable increases.
Microsoft to push pwa outlook as the default client also is terrible. Why would I want a e-amil client that occupies 3 times the memory of the default outlook client?
Sounds like more lies: you can still use autounattend.xml as far as I know. If they broke this it would break almost all the top corporate enterprise stuff
(same reason they still have network printer driver vulnerabilities because they refuse to fix old shit in the name of backward compatibility)
How likely is it that this is a coincidence with all the pervasive "digital ID" (read: mass surveillance and control at an unprecedented scale) schemes also being discussed recently?
As long as WinPE and the core of Windows exists in its current form, there will always be a way to use Windows entirely offline. The modding scene also still exists, and although it's a fraction of what it used to be (the peak of Windows-modding was probably in the 98/2K/XP era), some extremely talented individuals remain and fight. (One might ask why they haven't moved to Linux; the answer is usually "because Windows is still more familiar, and it's more fun to hack and rebel". To them, to migrate to a different OS is to surrender.)
As someone who also was a bit of a modder during my young years (exactly that 98/2K/XP and even 7 era), I gave up circa time the 7 was released, and moved to Linux, then macOS, and now (last few years, up to 6, depends on what’s the starting point) back to Linux. First, I think ricing is much more enjoyable, you don’t fight the system for no reason, at least. And second, you still continue contributing to this weird hostile pathetic toxic system, instead of helping others seeking open system embrace Linux. Linux on desktop is the new Windows (meaning both good and bad, but I mean it mostly works for regular people). We just need momentum, and only M$ is to lose here. So what are you waiting for, Windows people? And especially Windows modders. Let that system to be a deserted land, why won’t we?
Microsoft doing this with Windows, Google doing that with sideloading...
It's a horrible situation. Specially what Google is doing, as there is no real alternative, like Linux is for the desktop.
We grew up with computers where you could install anything, code programs to run them for yourself on your machine. This was also valid for smartphones to some degree, and it's terrible to see that you're now in a position that you can't "just code an app" for your phone, everything has to be vetted by the big ones.
Once Recall spreads across Windows installs, let's say this takes 5 years, then all of the devices are no longer your devices, but just surveillance machines for those companies and their governments, granting you permission to use certain apps.
Maybe the biggest problem are companies like Qualcomm because it feels like they only grant companies like Google the permission to use their tech, and not us, even if we own the boards they sell.
After my recent (and dismayingly poor) experience with a new PC on Windows 11, I wonder: Windows 11 installer did not recognize my wifi card (integrated in asus motherboard), so my installation was purely offline. I had to install manufacturer's drivers via usb key to get the PC online.
How is this possible in a world where MS wants installations to be online?
Meanwhile, Linux installer recognized the wifi right away and worked perfectly fine at full speed.
For me it's been on and off, sometimes a windows installer manages to detect network cards and sometimes it doesn't.
I think I've been blocked from continuing an installation once, so I assume you'll just have to plug something in that it can detect or grab an install image which has the drivers.
I swapped over to primarily use linux a while ago, but was surprised that they've made windows 10 look like (what I think is) windows 11. When did that happen?
I had this happen in both of the past two machines I have built but both were installing windows 10 so I was ultimately able to just finish offline and then grab the drivers on a usb stick to get the internet up and running. The Intel NICs are notorious for not working without the intel drivers.
I still think Rufus is perfectly sufficient for avoiding these issues and/or using autounattend. Ultimately you just need to get past first install and nothing else will be an issue using a local account on Windows 11.
I guess I'll be the contrarian in the thread: My main machine is Windows 11. I recently bought a refurbished laptop to make it a Linux torrenting machine with ProtonVPN. I first installed Fedora, which I hated. Where's the mininmize window button? Why are scrollbars practically invisible? What's with the hideous cartoonish desktop? I switched to Ubuntu, which I'm more familiar with. Installing ProtonVPN was an absolute nightmare. If I hadn't had so much experience with computers and if I didn't have AI helping me I would have given up. Windows 11 is a pleasure to use. I can't say the same about Linux desktop.
Story of the last 20 years. Linux desktop isn't made for day-to-day use precisely because it's been built by nerds, for nerds. Way too much "well if it makes sense to me, it should make sense to everybody" logic in its design decisions, and ultimately you need to be able to drop into the Bash terminal and screw around to even get to 80 percent of the functionality a Windows machine will give you dropped-in.
Linux is for servers and dev work, not day-to-day use.
I've stopped recommending Linux to other people. I use Linux every day as my main OS. I haven't used windows in over 5 years and I'm happier for it. But there is a learning curve no doubt. I happen to love what Gnome does, but it's definitely unlike any other desktop environment. If you're up for learning something new, and/or software freedom is important to you, I think Linux is definitely worth it. If you just want "Windows without Microsoft" you're in for a bad time.
Honestly KDE probably gets close enough to windows. I have only used it on top of arch, which was a decision knowing that I'll be messing about more with the system, but if you installed KDE over something like Debian, it may be very close to the Windows experience. It certainly feels like Windows 10, and KDE's settings page has most of the important configuration in it.
Fedora is not tied to a desktop. Though I recommend Mint/cinnamon for sanity. You may have to reach into the control panel to augment the scroll bars, that is sadly a sickness endemic to the whole industry.
I've read comments like yours in the past few days about Fedora. It seems strange to me that Fedora defaults to a lousy desktop when everyone says there are better available. I can't think of any other software that has the same philosophy "We know we ship something terrible but all you have to do is install this other thing to fix it."
It's because Gnome is not "lousy" it's just not what you like. I love it, but you're free to use something else if you don't like it. They even have an official Fedora edition with a more traditional desktop installed.
The idea is to have programs grouped into workspaces. e.g. You can have a browser on workspace 2, email on workspace 3, editor on workspace 1, etc. Instead of minimizing, you swap to the workspace you want with a hotkey. Gnome is designed for a keyboard driven workflow you can drive the whole thing without touching the mouse if you want. For me, it's an amazing way to work.
That's a problem for people like me who came up on the Mac and switched to Windows. I like a mouse. I'm good at using a mouse. It feels like keyboard people are saying "we're going to take away your familiar mouse options because you'll learn to love the keyboard like us." I know how to use a keyboard obviously. However I'd rather not memorize key combinations to get my work done. There's a kind of arrogance in the Linux desktop community that in my opinion mirrors the arrogance of Microsoft who says "we're going to shove CoPilot on you whether you like it or not."
Unfortunately us folks who grew up on sane, usability tested interfaces are not in charge anymore. A disease that has spread across all OSs. Recommend Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE in order of least traditional to most traditional window controls.
Also there is a dconf setting to configure titlebar buttons for GTK/gnome decedents. KDE has a GUI.
The difference between the Linux community and Microsoft is on Linux you are free to use whatever you want. There are a ton of distros (even Fedora/Ubuntu versions) that have KDE out of the box. If you don't like Gnome, you don't have to use it.
I'm happy Gnome exists, but you do you.
People like to rage, and rage about how Gnome killed their father or whatever and I just get tired of the constant hate towards a workflow that I actually like.
Yosemite looked sleek and professional, Catalina looked sleek and professional. Big Sur and Liquid Glass look like Windows 8 design rejects. If you can't see the writing on the wall... good luck.
They literally look 95% the same. Most people looking at Tahoe probably barely notice anything has changed. Hell, it looks not that different from what it did 10 years+ ago. You’re massively overstating the change.
The saddest part is, Windows 11's MS account lock-in feels like the logical next step for an OS designed by committees and PMs playing metrics games. The user-hostile design isn't isolated––it's just another symptom of a company where stock price and engagement numbers trump every other concern. What I miss is the era when engineers seemed to have more say, and features existed because they were actually useful. At this point, moves like this are basically an advertisement for Linux and Mac. Every time MS doubles-down, the free and open alternatives get that much more appealing.
> At this point, moves like this are basically an advertisement for Linux and Mac.
I don't think it's the decisions themselves, but the (inevitable?) consequence in the coming months and years. The biggest example would be WannaCry attacking winxp in 2017, except it's not just individuals/companies who haven't got around to updating but additional hurdles added by MS.
>moves like this are basically an advertisement for Linux and Mac. Every time MS doubles-down, the free and open alternatives get that much more appealing
I'm more curious about what their thoughts are. They have to know what the community thinks about these moves. What do they intend to accomplish? I'd like to hear the roadmap from the lion's mouth, so to speak, if they have some kind of justification that would make sense to the skeptical observer.
It is a command from the top, possibly very top aka CEO. What the community thinks doesn't matter. What matters is how much ad money they earn and how much of your private information they can track.
They used to get money from selling products, like Windows. That we are in this situation where they choose to give the OS away for free but then have to scramble to find money in obnoxious ways afterward is bizarre to me. It's not like they started this process with zero market share.
They have a total monopoly on OSes able to run Windows software; this is their strong point: write some random software in 1996, still works today. As a result they can quadruple-dip by having users pay for the OS, show them ads, inflict them unwanted products, and (maybe? if they don't now they surely could without repercussions) sell their data. This is what monopolies do.
The versions that are respectful of users are gated behind "being a company" requirement.
(exception of Windows Server but it's kinda messy to setup for gaming. Though it kinda shows that when they have actual competition on a market they do nice things)
Home users generally don't pay for Windows. It comes with their computers and the major version upgrades are free and have been for quite some time; 7→8 (2012) was the last time it wasn't free but 7→10 (2015) was a valid, free upgrade path so most just bypassed 8 entirely (and they were better off for it because 8 sucked). Since Windows 7 was itself released in 2009, most home users haven't paid for Windows upgrades in 16 years.
Yes, having to maintain an OS over multiple years without recurring revenue might be an issue indeed. On my side I wouldn't mind paying a subscription if the OS could respect my choices. But I guess it does not really make sense to provide a subscription that only a very small handful of people would pay.
(I wonder how subscriptions could handle multiple machines; today it often happens that people have multiple computers but subscription cost would quickly add up; I guess they could have different tiers with different allowed concurrent use count)
They've been marching towards this since Windows 8. Sysadmins have said this was coming since then. As soon as they added Microsoft account login integration this is what we all knew they were going to do.
- I wanted to install minecraft for my boy. I couldn't just start a game. It required me to tie in account to the system. First I don't like that. Second is that we have lost pin, and could not remember password or something, so we have gone through maze of xbox, microsoft online settings and whatnots. On Linux? Pass account, and password, we are set to go
- The second encounter was with playing a older FIFA game. After launching it complained about some dll file. Turned out it was missing VC redistributable. You had to manually find, and visit, Microsoft page, download old type installer, which my kid was not familiar with (Next, Next, C: program files, I accept).
After so many occasions I see that linux is even easier than Windows. I use bottles to play Warhammer Boltgun. Sure it stutters some times, but not that much. The pros and cons of having Linux looks better every day.
I had the same experience, except I DID remember my password, but it wanted me to merge my Mojang and Microsoft account, and I went thru some broken login loop for like 20 minutes before I had appeased the gods...
The biggest issue I have with Windows insisting that I use a Microsoft Account to log in is that I have a long and complex password set up for the account which is stored in a password manager. I don't want to dumb down that password, I don't want to use biometrics, I don't want to use a passcode or pin to log in as that is arguably less secure. I just want a local account which I can set up a convenient password for.
I'm fine with using online services, I just don't want my online services account being the thing that controls access to my local computers. Especially when it can be locked or deleted by Microsoft for whatever reason.
I’ll be honest I really don’t understand the desperation to avoid it. It works fine, you barely ever have to interact with it or use it, you use a pin to log in, it’s not like you can’t log in if you’re offline or something, it’s just to tie your settings to an online account like anything else. I use windows, Linux and Macos on different machines - until I read this thread I had no idea people cared at all about the Microsoft account thing. Using it is fine. It’s not lovely, but it’s just… fine. Not a big deal at all.
I was the same as you, believing that using a passcode/pin as Microsoft is pushing is less secure.
So I digged into it, and changed my opinion - Microsoft is right, for the Microsoft Account, using a password locally instead of a PIN is LESS secure.
TL;DR: if you want to allow offline login, you need to keep the hash/token to the Microsoft Account locally, and this is dangerous, some malware could steal that, and impersonate you to login to your Microsoft Account. Using a TPM PIN removes this threat - the hash/token is never kept locally, so there is nothing to steal, and Microsoft could still ask for the account password from time to time when they need to refresh the token, and you can't brute force the short PIN (yes, this requires trusting the TPM)
> I just don't want my online services account being the thing that controls access to my local computers. Especially when it can be locked or deleted by Microsoft for whatever reason.
That never happens. You can boot from an Windows install ISO and reset the credentials if you really need to get in. True, might be difficult for your average user.
Or you know, just use a local account for logging into your local machines which are physically present in your home. No need to require an active Internet connection, no danger of your online account being unavailable and thus preventing access to your own computer.
This is really going to screw over small places that still do manual setups on their PC/Laptops because they don't have the resources for a full automated setup.
They gotta make back those hundreds of billions they lit on fire to chase the dream of eliminating all their employees with AI. This will force a lot of places to pay for Azure Endpoint to setup their stuff if you really can no longer sign in without an online account.
Time for me to go all in on Linux. Ubuntu has been my daily driver on dual boot with windows since MS started using dark patterns to opt in to OneDrive.
My next build will be solo boot!
My work machine is a Mac though I don't get any say in that.
I just upgraded my recently bought X1 Carbon Gen 12 from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. And now the sound stutters occasionally :( My guess is it's something with Pipewire replacing PulseAudio, where some apps now use a PulseAudio shim on top of Pipewire. Or maybe drivers I dunno.
But the fingerprint scanner works. The fingerprint scanner works!
At this point, I’d just be happy they’re switching off windows out of spite.
I’ve never been a Windows hater like some people in the industry, and have actually enjoyed and appreciated some of the weirdness and quirks from an OS perspective. I’ve also known
But man this Win11 stuff feels so fucking extreme it’s ridiculous. No I won’t use your MS account. I’d have switched over to Linux or BSD if it wasn’t for games/niche hardware (yes, I know of proton, but this is an HN thread so my personal anecdotes override your evidence)
I was using Win 11 for a year or so until recently but I'd had enough. It was laggy and I was scared to download updates as they break things way too often.
I understand the complexity with the Windows codebase... it's fkn massive! However, to be able to push out a Windows update and break something literally every single time is something for the history books!
Anyway, I need Windows for some of my software, like my VST's (Roland Earth Piano, XLN Audio) so Linux isn't an option unless there is something I'm missing!
I use Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC with the Massgrave activation... that's me until I retire hopefully. I'd encourage everyone to do the same.
Latency. It's everywhere. Open file Explorer and it lags. Change the volume and the slider lags with the example sound and just a general sluggishness compared to Windows 10.
Also updates have broken my printer 3 times (that I can remember). At least once my network connection failed due to updates.
Even though the article says that Microsoft removed the “bypassnro” workaround earlier this year, I just used it earlier this evening to set up a new Win11 PC for a neighbour successfully (she didn't have a Microsoft account on her previous Win10 laptop, and wanted it the same way).
At the part of the initial setup where it asks to connect to a network, press Shift + F10 to open the Command Prompt. Then, type oobe\bypassnro and press Enter. The system will reboot and start the initial setup again in a non-network mode that allows you to create a local user account.
The new HP PCs I've deployed recently did not have current Windows 11 builds installed. I tend to think OEMs are being slow to update their master images.
I recently bought a Windows laptop, and the first thing I did was figure out how to not create a MS account, and next was to remove all the spyware/bloatware, and then after that configure WSL.
When you get past all the garbage, it's a fine OS to work in. Then again, so is MacOS, many flavors of Linux, etc. As the importance of the OS itself becomes less and less important for general consumers when most people live in the browser for their day-to-day job, Microsoft will find it harder to sell licenses (maybe they already are?), and they will resort to more ways to extract money from users, driving more of them away.
fwiw, I prefer the ergonomics of Windows to any other OS for daily activities and non-dev work, but it's such a weak preference that I wouldn't hesitate to switch if they ever actually force any of this MS account or always-online spyware without recourse.
Windows as a platform lost the war many years ago when the web (and then mobile) took over, and is no longer a key part of Microsoft’s business since the CEO switch in 2014.
Microsoft’s current strategy is to 1) keep a stranglehold on enterprise (so, Office and 365 subscriptions) and 2) make money on workloads regardless of platform (with Azure).
What new software, besides games, targets windows anymore? If you wanted to target windows, what SDK and language would you build on, and how many times will it be replaced with $new_hotness in the next 10 years?
Surely, at the lowest level, there needs to be some kind of a local account. I would imagine ripping out the very concept of a local account to be totally infeasible. As long as that's true, I'd expect there to be a way to create one, even if that way ultimately no longer comes from Microsoft.
AFAIK you can easily create a local account after initial setup and use that for whatever you want. As you allude to, there's a whole bunch of Windows functionality that relies on (or allows) local accounts.
Yeah this is how I did it the last time I setup a Windows machine, I set it up with my Microsoft account initially, created a new local account which was admin, logged in as that and then deleted the Microsoft account.
I'm glad I barely have to touch Windows anymore, it really has gone to shit
And what’s your point ? Surely the users can continue to be treated like that ?
Continuing to use an operating system, the only software that have full control over your digital life, from a company that have so much disrespect for their users and that is actively hostile against your choices, at one point that’s Stockholm Syndrome.
I've been running Linux on my main desktop for decades (from when VMware workstation gave me access to windows on the same PC without rebooting). A couple of years ago VMware became worse and worse and KVM/virt manager is still missing critical features (gui performance is horrible on Nvidia unless you want to dedicate entire card and monitor to windows).
I'd love to have a nice solution to run run old windows XP and 10 on modern Linux with even 50% native performance (on Nvidia) but it's not looking like my wish I'd getting closer to being fulfilled.
So perhaps it is better Microsoft is actively trying to kill windows. Once it is dead it will be less of a moving target. We have amazing ways to run DOS. I hope one day the same can be said for windows. I have decades and decades of software I like to fire up once every few months to use (ham radio antenna simulation, PCB design, etc. Software I own actually own fully paid licenses for that becomes a pain to run). Currently I use kvm/virt manager and I'm suffering the bad GPU performance and crashes if I try to standby the PC.
'We'll never require you to need an online account to log in to your system'
Look how that changed.
Windows Recall 'We'll never use this in any bad way whatsoever'
Sure thing.
Windows 10 goes EOL in 8 days, with the EU forcing Microsoft to give their customer bases security patches. Not anywhere else though, and not in the U.S.
What was the end goal with that? Move everybody over to Windows 11; on their EOL page it lists places you can donate your old non-working hardware to. Forcing users to do what? Buy new overpriced hardware when what they have is fine?
People jumped to Windows 7 out of spite; with Linux Desktop marketshare still slowly, steadily rising over the last 10 months. Windows 7 is EOL and no longer receives security patches, so security wise people are a lot worse off than what was anticipated.
Here's the thing, I started up an old iPad last night and the e-mail no longer exists nor can be created, so I can't do a lost password, I can't log in, so I can't install apps, or even format the device without some 'Account Lock'
I own this iPad, as in: it's mine. Why should I, and why would I want to put MY device's access and security on the whims of company?
They want to own our hardware, and our software.
I for one preach Linux Desktop, Manjaro XFCE for me. I think people are sticking with Windows 7 despite it being EOL because games and their software will for the most part not run in to issues linux gaming may be facing.
That ain't the way. Your computer. Your choice. No cloud accounts/everything being logged on the desktop that people do, no 'requirements' to utilize the new software, and no 'requirements' to connect people to cloud backup systems to later coerce and push people to buy.
> People jumped to Windows 7 out of spite; with Linux Desktop marketshare still slowly, steadily rising over the last 10 months. Windows 7 is EOL and no longer receives security patches, so security wise people are a lot worse off than what was anticipated.
If you saw the same report of that, it turned out to be a UA anomaly. Most likely very few people actually went back to Win 7, which now has quite bad compatibility with newer hardware and software.
This should have been the EU approach to Apple. Instead we got third party "App Stores" to install software Apple still approves and controls. It could have been a three paragraph law.
I (quite honestly, not being snarky) think the whole reason for that was the EC were trying to target Apple (and some other US tech companies) while pretending to not specifically target them, and in this case wanted Apple to do certain specific actions but couldn't be that prescriptive for the aforementioned reasons, so Apple was able to take advantage of that wiggle-room to take a different tack.
If they'd just been upfront that they were directly targeting a few US companies and prescribed exactly what to do, then the DMA wouldn't be a mess that made some things worse, and they could have made Apple to do what they wanted.
> with Linux Desktop marketshare still slowly, steadily rising over the last 10 months.
Where do you get these figures from? Is there a sensible % increase?
I've been using Linux desktop for a decade now and I am certain it still used by few, and nothing has changed recently. Or you're telling me 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop?
Probably not 2026, but sure, by 2030. A fair chunk of the younger generation do give a shit about privacy (see also: torrenting on the rise again), Linux is mostly unattended with respect to configuring things these days, and things like "sound" and "games" are for the most part a thing of the past outside of 4 or 5 specific games that require kernel-level anticheat.
> Here's the thing, I started up an old iPad last night and the e-mail no longer exists nor can be created, so I can't do a lost password, I can't log in, so I can't install apps, or even format the device without some 'Account Lock'
If it has a passcode and you remember the passcode, you should still be able to wipe the device with Apple Configurator?
If the situation is that you don't have a passcode, but you do have an iCloud account where you don't remember the password and can't access the email address, and either don't have access to the recovery phone number or never specified one, then yeah. You might need to find your receipt and bring it to an Apple store to be reset.
It is impossible to configure recent ipads in any other way. There are no established 3rd party OSes that you can install, even with great effort. IOS does not respect user freedom. As an example, see the restrictions on running code that Apple didn't approve of (directly, or, in the EU, indirectly).
Last time I saw stats Linux desktop marketshare, somebody said it was up to 6%. That's astonishing. Imagine it getting to 15-20%. Imagine that many people owning their own computers again. Then all that's left is keeping IBM/Redhat's grubby hands off it.
> Last time I saw stats Linux desktop marketshare, somebody said it was up to 6%. That's astonishing.
I wouldn't get too excited about that. That might just be because people are moving off of desktops entirely and now only own mobile devices, a market where Linux may as well not exist (excluding Android). The number goes up, because at large, the portion of people who run Linux desktops are less likely to pivot to using only a mobile phone as they tend to be hobbyists/enthusiasts.
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, personally it is astonishing to me that is only 6%. I do buy the corporates explanation. I even buy the gaming explanation ( despite only heavily online games being 'better' on Windows -- from developer's perspective ). But everyone else? I can only assume it has to do with how little personal computing is done today not on smartphones.
>on their EOL page it lists places you can donate your old non-working hardware to. Forcing users to do what? Buy new overpriced hardware when what they have is fine?
Devils advocate. Everyone really should be on Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0 in the Windows space. Windows 11 is really there as a checkpoint to force people to upgrade to more secure hardware. If you dont care about security, you probably dont care about security updates, you can remain with Windows 10.
Thats not to say that they went about this in a pro consumer way. Its been bungled. But specifically on the point of hardware upgrades, for your average windows user the hardware isnt really "fine" as you put it.
>Here's the thing, I started up an old iPad last night and the e-mail no longer exists nor can be created, so I can't do a lost password, I can't log in, so I can't install apps, or even format the device without some 'Account Lock'
On the apple front, they get 10x the amount of flak for "enabling" stolen hardware to be reformatted and reused, than they get for bricking people who lose access to an account.
Recovery is expendable in Apple town. Recovery of iCloud accounts enabled identity theft and personal photos of celebs to be released. Recovery of hardware enables theft. Its a losing proposition.
>That ain't the way. Your computer. Your choice.
We really need a hardware path without conflicting priorities.
The problem is the protection against malware is rolled in with protection against the end user. This leads down a dark path and it seems we collectively have decided end users are less important than the corporate profits and protection against malware.
>Devils advocate. Everyone really should be on Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0 in the Windows space.
nope. only useful for corporate setting. We should be able to run anything we want, however we want, without any arbitrary requirements by MS. Especially if it was proven already that it isn't a hard requirement to run the OS - just an arbitrary setting.
It just paves road for more invasive DRM and even more locked down systems.
If they have issue with crashes, and taking blame for corporate AV failures - don't give out kernel level access to them.
>Recovery is expendable in Apple town. Recovery of iCloud accounts enabled identity theft and personal photos of celebs to be released. Recovery of hardware enables theft. Its a losing proposition.
I don't care as a customer. I want my data, I don't care about corporate profit margins - and I shouldn't need to. Data theft is pure service issue of them not vetting recovery enough - due to cutting costs on it.
>nope. only useful for corporate setting. We should be able to run anything we want, however we want, without any arbitrary requirements by MS. Especially if it was proven already that it isn't a hard requirement to run the OS - just an arbitrary setting.
Right, crazy I swear I hung a lantern on that, implying you could just keep using Windows 10.
>I don't care as a customer. I want my data, I don't care about corporate profit margins - and I shouldn't need to. Data theft is pure service issue of them not vetting recovery enough - due to cutting costs on it.
Right, crazy again I swear I thought I wrapped up by saying we needed a hardware path without conflicting priorities.
Microsoft's idea of Security is security from me, not security for me. They use this overloaded language because it's so hard to argue against. It's a thought-terminating cliché. Oh you must not care about being secure huh???
Microsofts idea of security is security from being blamed for large scale breaches. I dont think they think about you or me at all tbh.
My point was, if you dont care about Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0, then you probably dont also care about security updates. Not whatever insult you thought I was making.
If your thoughts were terminated, that was entirely self inflicted.
These so-called security features have wildly different threat models than other security features.
Secure Boot and TPM are ways to attest that what is running is what Microsoft signed. This is only useful if I think that non-nation-state attackers will have physical access to my hardware. Nation-state attackers can probably get something signed with the public secure boot keys. TPM is just more of the same — it lets the software running on a computer verify that it has not been changed from what Microsoft signed. If I controlled the signing key (perhaps every manufactured device has its own key that is sold with the device, which I can then sign whatever OS I want with), then I could gain some security without this control loss, and that would be useful.
Regarding bitlocker, I can encrypt my drive just fine with no TPM as long as I do not expect my OS to be tampered with (which requires physical access or running something untrusted as root). I can simply use a long password with many hash cycles, so if someone stole my drive they could not decrypt it without the password. But, if the key were in the TPM, then nation-state actors could probably get it back out, depending on exact implementation (for example for biometric unlock). So, in this way, using a TPM is less secure.
We should also do away with TPMs in most cases, since all that they serve to do is attest that the corporation with the keys to the TPM decided what was running and that no one interfered with that. It's DRM, plain and simple.
There are other security updates that I may want, however, even if I am not concerned about giving an attacker root of physical access. For example, Windows has had vulnerabilities which can be exploited over a network.
And how long would you expect Microsoft to write updates for computers with insecure boot chains, and secure boot chains? How much should they spend on mitigations for classes of attack that you can shut down just by updating? Why would they risk being seen to support a platform, that they consider a potential vector of incredibly bad PR, just for end user convenience? They have been browbeaten into being extremely security conscious, especially after the SMB stuff.
Personally, my Win 10 laptops are becoming Debian laptops as god intended.
Because I care that I'm secure, but I don't care that my computer isn't secure from me.
> how long would you expect Microsoft to write updates for computers with insecure boot chains, and secure boot chains?
Forever, because the same code works for both unless they go out of their way to do extra work for it not to.
> How much should they spend on mitigations for classes of attack that you can shut down just by updating?
There are basically zero attacks against ordinary consumers that SB/TPM protect from. The kinds of attacks regular people need to worry about are resolved through regular updates that don't need those things.
> Why would they risk being seen to support a platform, that they consider a potential vector of incredibly bad PR, just for end user convenience?
What are you talking about? There's no bad PR in allowing SB/TPM to be off. The bad PR comes from requiring them to be on.
> They have been browbeaten into being extremely security conscious, especially after the SMB stuff.
SB/TPM aren't actual security. They're DRM masquerading as security.
> Personally, my Win 10 laptops are becoming Debian laptops as god intended.
That's good, but it doesn't invalidate any of the above.
For secure boot and TPM, I'm not worried about someone breaking into my house and hacking my bios. I'm worried about getting a virus. Secure boot is useless but updates are important.
For bitlocker, I like it. But I use the password version that doesn't need any particular hardware.
How long do I expect updates? Well for starters, not even ten years of support for processors that were state of the art in 2018 is very bad. And windows 10 stopped being the newest option in 2021, so would ten years from that be so burdensome for security updates?
And no it's not a PR risk to release updates for windows 10. You don't need to stretch that hard, please.
Anyone still using windows should plug that hole and switch to linux or apple.
If you are trapped on windows due to a specific piece of software running a virtual machine on linux is your friend. Boot up windows only when you need it and the only thing MS gets is one datastream of your single use of their product and not your entire digital existence. Same also applies for Apple + vm.
Either choice on its worst day is better than what windows has become on it's best.
I've used Win 11 for years and never had an MS account. If you just get the right European/enterprise/education image the first time you don't even have to do anything to skip OOBE. But it feels like the walls are closing in, and the day I finally can't do anything without an MS account, I'll finally daily drive Linux. Hopefully the part of my Steam library that will still need Proton will run smoothly--that's the main thing I'm scared of.
Proton runs like a dream these days. I can't think of a game that I couldn't run under it that I really wanted to. The biggest incompatibility seems to be caused by multiplayer games or live service games with hyper aggressive DRM or anti-cheat measures (Destiny, PUBG, etc). If you typically avoid these kinds of games I think you'll be alright.
It's crazy how quickly most of this ramped up. Not that Microsoft hasn't been trying to push abusive but money-making "requirements" down users' throats for decades, but there have always been paths around them for people in the know. Now, they've changed course and are trying to clamp down hard on every little thing that's like this, make their software watertight. It would almost seem desperate if one didn't see how dominant of a position they're in.
I'm tired of micromanaging all this, it's getting way too cumbersome even for someone who's grown up with Windows. I've stopped applying all feature updates to my Windows install because I know their current goal is to make your life worse (and more profitable) every single time. Once that install becomes too outdated, I'll move to Linux full-time - I've enjoyed it as a dual-boot experience, but games are still holding me back. Having to constantly tinker with my Linux install was another thing, but at this point Microsoft is making their software so annoying to use that it will soon outpace all the Linux hitches I've had.
Its kind of funny that either this change effects a really small group of people, and its just MS being weirdly vindictive about nerds not wanting to use a Microsoft account OR they have such a problem with people avoiding MS account sign on that they feel the need to do it.
As someone who manages 1000s of windows devices.... Do the damn upgrades. That is why your device has issues. You can have all the moral complaints you want, I get it, but you're just making things more difficult for yourself. Either follow their patching cadence or switch to Linux. You're putting yourself into a purgatory zone that is only making things more janky.
I mentioned feature upgrades specifically. Why is it so imperative to apply them immediately, especially since the older major releases receive updates for quite a while after it stops being the most recent version? I'm talking about updates like 25H2, 24H2 etc that supply new features, not the "cumulative" stability/security updates that broadly don't change anything in terms of UX. I don't remember these major releases ever fixing any problems I had, besides adding something I wanted to have that wasn't in an older release.
Microsoft has many intelligent people who work there and certainly do many risk vs. reward calculations for each modification to Windows. From Microsoft's perspective, they have much more control over the OS when everyone's linked to a cloud account. I morally disagree with that approach, but the security issues with Windows come from unpatched systems. They tried to win over software developers by creating WSL, but the privacy- and security-minded software developers never really bit.
Also, consider that Microsoft's future is obviously pivoted toward cloud infrastructure. Yes, they smartly have other ventures, but all those ventures will rely on Microsoft cloud infrastructure in some way. Server farms are a much better business model, from Microsoft's perpective, especially because it pulls Microsoft into the domains of true wealth: land acquisition, energy production, and data mining.
While my D2D is MacOS and Windows 10, I’m not a newcomer to Linux and I WISH I could just move myself and my wife to Linux instead of waiting until W10 kicks the bucket.
But until the experience and process are seamless (or at least much more simplified), I honestly cannot see people “just switching”.
I had to jump through SO MANY hoops to stop my case fans from automatically spinning at 100% and getting CoolerControl to work (see it87 and Gigabyte), and it’s still happening, that it’s not even remotely amusing anymore.
I have a similar experience with my GPU. Got a 3090 and found that nvidia’s linux driver enforces a minimum GPU fan speed of 30% regardless of temperature. That’s unacceptably loud if you’re in the same room. After hours of searching online, flashing the GPU’s bios is apparently the only solution, so I bought a bunch of acoustic foam instead.
I’m still 100% Linux on all devices, but this bit really sucks.
As a relatively long-time desktop Linux user, now I approach all hardware makers as ‘oh, loser I’d never buy from’ including NVidia (which support is better on Linux, last time I’ve heard of them). I understand that’s a bit of a bubble, as I was sure Microsoft is irrelevant for many years, and I’m quite surprised each time I hear they’re not bankrupt.
But still, it’s not very difficult mindset that you have to choose from ‘responsible’ (for the lack of a better word) hardware developers. Oftentimes it’s ‘just buy another piece of hardware’ thing. As a grand example, it looks like current M-generation Macs are all awesome and all, but I value Linux so much more that I’d rather have an obviously worse hardware than deal with Windows or even modern-day macOS.
Apart from that, I see zero issues with Linux, it just works. And is very efficient, aesthetically pleasing (mostly), and has not-so-bad UX.
Bye Microsoft - I'm already on Linux on all my desktop and workstation machines and working on migrating off of the MacBook Pro.
It's only going to get more and more unpleasant in the commercial desktop OS landscape - need to start contributing money and effort to few OSS projects to keep the dream alive.
A lot of the corporate IT workforce is heavily invested in Microsoft systems. It creates somewhat of a co-dependency.
I only run Linux at home. My mom also runs Linux, though she doesn't really know a lot about it. If I could I would have run only Linux at my previous corporate jobs. But the IT people balk: how will windows defender work in Linux? At one point they did install windows defender on Linux and it ground a fine machine basically to a halt.
> But the IT people balk: how will windows defender work in Linux?
They don't think that at all. They probably know more about Linux than you do because I guarantee half the systems they manage are already running it.
What they think about are the applications that the people who actually make the decisions at your companies refuse to migrate away from. They know the cost of hiring Linux sysadmins vs Windows sysadmins. They think about everyone in every other company and how much harder they are to hire when suddenly none of them know how to use their office computer when they're hired. They think about the half dozen or so business critical applications which genuinely don't have Linux equivalents. None of the executives, nobody in HR, nobody in accounting or business. Nobody in sales. Let alone... nobody in the actual non-tech industry that most businesses operate in.
And it's not the college graduates they're worried about. It's the people with 5, 10, or 15 years experience who will just not want to work at a company where they have to compromise and use non-standard software.
It's still not economically viable for any corporation outside of exactly a small tech industry start-up to switch away from Microsoft, and it has nothing to do with the cost of operating system licenses or support.
In my example they literally demanded to run Windows Defender on a Linux server that I requested. There was no Linux experience on the IT team whatsoever.
Well, that's the thing. That's not as stupid as you're trying to make it sound.
There IS Microsoft Defender on Linux because there's multiple products that Microsoft calls Defender. There's the product that ships in Windows for the consumer market, which is just the basic antivirus product that you probably think they're talking about. However, Microsoft's full endpoint protection software is also branded Defender, and there is a Linux version.
And while you might think that it's silly to run that on Linux, (a) your business is probably already licensed for it so will be cheap to add a client, (b) it's what their infrastructure is already using so it's minimal setup, and (c) having security software everywhere is critical simply for saving thousands of dollars in insurance costs. The software nearly pays for itself in reduced premiums at any company of any size even if it does nothing. With how catastrophic ransomware attacks and data breaches are, insurance companies now require annual environmental surveys for evaluating risks.
So you're trying to make this IT team sound stupid, but as someone in the industry I can't even tell from what you said if they are.
I'm not trying to say they were stupid. I'm explaining my lived experience where I needed a lightweight linux server for an internal app and it worked great until a 100% Windows-based IT team policy required that Defender be installed on it, after which it became extremely slow and crashed regularly due to Defender-related issues in the logs.
I prefer having a beefy workstation at home and connect to it remotely from a cheaper laptop, as I find laptops are noisy and weak unless you spend a sizable fortune.
why not just use sunshine/moonlight? RDP (and the other junk like X11 forwarding/VNC) has always been too slow for my use-cases. Movies or gaming would bring it to a halt. Meanwhile Moonlight gives me a clean 4k60fps with only ~25ms latency across the country.
Too specific to gaming, and AFAIK NVIDIA-specific. Plus, RDP disconnects the physical console, so the screen stays off and keyboard/mouse can't interfere. There is some software like NX that can blank the screen (actually, make it black or show some silly gradient animation) and inhibit the keyboard/mouse, but the screen stays on; and it's not even by default. Does anybody here know an open-source business-grade remote desktop software for Linux? I'd be really interested to deploy it.
RDP uses h.264 for rapidly updating regions. I've played near-fullscreen YouTube videos over RDP via the internet without realizing I was doing so remotely.
I've also gamed over RDP. It wasn't the best experience, though to be fair I was on an island literally on the opposite side of the globe, and ran the game fullscreen. But I'm sure a dedicated solution like Steam or Sunshine/Moonlight would fare better for such.
Though at least with Steam the console has to be unlocked, which is a problem if I'm away.
What are you comparing it to or what do you feel is missing? Remote desktop has gotten way better on Linux since the days of only X-Forwarding or VNC, at least from a performance perspective.
I tried just about everything a couple of years ago. Various VNC variants, X2Go etc.
They all sucked in terms of speed/performance compared to Windows-to-Windows RDP, and none allowed for starting a new desktop session if user wasn't already logged in, or resuming existing session if present. Both essential to me.
Many lacked some features like clipboard, file transfer, sound. First two are hard requirements as well.
I see things have been moving, so I'm hoping things become viable in a year or three.
I prefer it. Always have. Don’t have any objection to logging in with my online account, in fact I would even if I didn’t have to so all my stuff just syncs. Getting a new PC is now finally as easy as getting a new phone, just sign in and let it sync. Anyone who owns a cell phone and is worried about the privacy issues here is being ridiculous.
Mac users fellate themselves over Mac usability. But if I click a file in Windows and hit the delete key you know what it does? It deletes the file. You know what Mac does? It makes the “bonk” sound and nothing happens. (Or at least it did, been years since I used it.)
I tried to like Mac for years, even using it as my daily driver for two straight, because their hardware is so good, but I just never could because of 100 little things like that. MacOS sucks.
The concerns of the people who inhabit this tiny little enclave of the internet are alien to 99% of the population at least.
The game industry uses the same argument that other industries use as well; tiny user base and the distribution is a mess.
I understand those arguments; they are valid, to a point... but if Autodesk uses mostly NodeJS and Python and OpenGL for Fusion360, why can't they ship a linux version, too?!?
The biggest category of games that don't work on Linux are those that demand a root kit (where they attempt to justify it as anti-cheat), and not letting a root kit on one's computer is desirable for many reasons.
At this point, there are very few games where I've personally had to switch back to windows. I don't play online though so not impacted by Anti-cheat systems
That's sort of like asking a motorbike enthusiast why they don't just drive a car instead.
There's a big difference in the input scheme between PC and consoles. Playing with a controller might not be satisfying for someone used to keyboard and mouse. The latter also provides a higher skill ceiling for competitive play.
The lower end hardware used in consoles also does not allow for high framerates and high resolution monitors, while with PC gaming one can get as much performance as they're willing to pay for.
In addition to what sibling comment wrote well, there are also a bunch of games that aren't "couch-friendly" and not even available on console.
I like consoles (borderline prefer them to PCs) but there are some experiences I can only have on PC.
Another aspect is that sticking a console onto my desk and plugging it to my PC monitor wouldn't be very practical, and I don't want to commit my living room to my gaming whims, and even less want to get another TV+couch-like setup in my office.
I would buy a PS5 if I didn't already have a gaming rig tbh. For PC I enjoy the tinkering and the ability to basically do anything with it, but nowadays the cost compared to console is stupid and after a long day's work the last thing I want to do is see another desktop UI. Different toys for different purposes.
Last time I saw them they were having alien input controls. I used to press M for portable Medkit. And J for Jetpack. And all keyboard is meaningful. Stand-alone gaming systems are having limited amount of buttons on their alien input controls and packing diverse actions into disgusting combos. This could probably be solved by Cronus Zen.
The only good thing about alien input control was smooth movement. Wooting Two emulates this by pretenting to be both human and alien input controls. Would be nice if such keyboards would be more widespread.
This made me realize that even though my PS4 has USB ports, I've never really enjoyed playing first-person shooters on consoles — would rather use a mouse.
There are a few applications that simply do not run well enough on Linux. It's easy enough to find a list with an internet search. Mostly graphics and video editing packages, and DRM protection. However I think for a majority of people Linux should work just fine.
Several reasons: RDP (found nothing that works as well as the integrated one of Windows), software (Altium, Adobe Illustrator). Regarding Illustrator, I might switch to Inkscape the day it fully supports CMYK color, spot colors, overprinting, and such things... for now I just feel it's not ready yet every time I try it.
And server-side: specific software I need to run for my team, like Autodesk Vault. For the rest, 95% of our servers run Linux.
Same. But at home, I have a desktop (Linux Mint), a NUC server (Proxmox w various VMs/containers) and a MacBook Air M2/iPad that wife/kids use. I am starting to see them use the Linux Mint desktop more and more (main web browsing, word processing, etc) since I dropped Windows about 4 years ago. I did maintain a separate Win10 install for games but SteamDeck (and Win10 becoming EOL) made that obsolete but I am starting to get my feet wet in Linux gaming with my nvidia GPU but haven't really tried all the distros to pick one yet.
Is this the year of the Linux desktop? Unlikely, but I've started to donate more regularly to the Linux Mint team and same with any OSS that helps me maintain our privacy which I suspect is driving more and more to look into options instead of accepting the status quo.
Well at least you should then have that on a dedicated gaming machine - treat it like a console. Not the same box you do your surfing, socials, banking and coding etc on. I think the intersection of people who can afford a rig for competitive online gaming but can't afford to keep it separate should be very small. Or at least put the gaming in an isolated Windows VM with GPU passthrough (fun times with anticheat). Git gud.
I wish I was good enough for competitive gaming. It’s just where my friends hang out - I shouldn’t need a separate machine/boot just to play games with friends
> Or at least put the gaming in an isolated Windows VM with GPU passthrough
> I shouldn’t need a separate machine/boot just to play games with friends
Yet here we are... It's not safe to trust a modern rootkitted Windows gaming setup with sensitive personal stuff and will become less so moving forward.
Your best bet is treating it like a console and do your real computing elsewhere.
For me, I (very rarely) boot into Windows for gaming. And I sometimes use a Windows 10 mini PC for Fusion 360 and Lightroom (because emulation is too slow).
I still can't change display brightness on Linux Mint on my 2 year old ASUS Zephyrus G14 with 4090 because ASUS used some microLED panel and Linux has no drivers for it. The combination of AMDGPU and Nvidia drivers also leads to situations where Nvidia GPU is not switched on for ML workloads. The only choice is still to run W10 on it.
I just always try to create a MS account with example@example.com or example@example.org, then you just get kicked over the MS account creation and it prompts you for local account creation.
This has worked always after they started pushing creation of online accounts.
That's a bit like asking to get a "smart" TV without the spyware / adware. Sure, you could pay more! But they can also just take both your money and that other money. What are you gonna do, buy a non-"smart" TV? :)
I recently bought a Samsung television, which came with a bunch of the smart nonsense. During the whole setup process I was thinking "I have made a mistake, I need to return this ASAP" but forced myself to continue clicking "no" through the setup screens.
After about 5 minutes of setting up (never once connected to Internet), it's pretty much exactly what I wanted: a display for broadcast TV and for HDMI inputs. A pretty good one, too. The only "tricky" part was getting it to remember the last channel/input at power-on instead of going to it's "home" screen, but that was just a setting in a menu somewhere, not particularly hard to find (though I'm the kind of person that does a depth-first-search through the entire menu tree just to see what all is there).
I think the key is never letting it get a taste of internet. No internet, no ads :) The internet-related things I do want to watch (like youtube, etc) are easily accomplished through the Linux PC I have connected.
These exist and are called "digital signage" - usually these things got far brighter and more durable panels, downside is they usually hover around 2x the price of an ad delivery device.
Plug in your old Chromecast 4k or Apple TV, that's it.
>folks quite clearly want to run Windows 11 without an account.
Do they significantly impact the bottom line though - especially compared to what possibly they gain by these actions? Corporations can tolerate a bit of grumbling on some tech forums.
I've been thinking to fully switching to Linux for a while now. But there was just not enough pressure for me to switch over, I think this might do it. I think the universe is done whispering in to my ear and is finally shouting from the rooftops.
Yeah, it takes some work. I did that about a year ago. Super happy. All games through Steam work, for gog some require some tinkering but it's not too bad.
Do note what others have said about mods and some publishers' multiplayer games and music software. I am not affected but it's best to keep in mind.
1. My Microsoft account is still @msn.com, which I don't trust in any way to be secure, since it's not an email account I ever use
2. I have lots of Samba and other shares that know my local login
3. If my router goes down, I'm probably going to log into this machine to fix it, and it won't be connected to the internet
So of course I used one of the local account tricks when I installed Windows 11, and I hope they don't break it. Apple's solution of letting you have BOTH a local login and an iCloud account is much better.
Many of these comments are pretty funny. Only on HN would people think the public cares about avoiding having a MS account. Sure, many here may care, but I’m not silly enough to think most people do, or that this has any chance of “killing” the OS like many here seem to claim it will. Just a crazy thing to say.
Sure, I’d love it if one day Linux got proper support and started to become widespread and Microsoft’s bloatware was impacted. But a lot more has to change before this can actually happen, obviously.
I've always set up with a local account as long as it's been possible. Not because I don't want a Microsoft account linked (I always end up linking one after installation) but because they don't let me choose my god damned username! I want my user folder to be C:\Users\[FirstName] but for some stupid reason they don't give me the option to do that! It just creates a name automatically based on the account email address.
If they're going to completely remove the option to create a local account, could they at least let me override the local username for the account?
It's in the article. Microsoft has apparently added customization of the account name and is working on doing that in a more user-friendly way.
As soon as they do that, I frankly don't care whether my account is online or not. I'm using Windows Store, Edge and PIN login; I don't remove auto-updates. Sure, there's some crap to remove, but it's a matter of right-clicking on a few icons and choosing "Uninstall". And no, I don't mind clicking "no" about 5 extra times when Windows asks whether I want some garbage on my PC.
I'll spend more time tinkering with Windhawk and PowerToys than dealing with MS being greedy.
I've been using Windows since Win98. I know what for worse or better. I'm not switching now, because Windows is still the only viable option for what I need.
I've got an Ideapad that had Win11 on - completely removed it and installed Ubuntu. I've primarily used a Mac over the last decade, but it's insane how close the Ubuntu/Gnome experience comes - really have been super impressed. There are actually a few things I prefer on it too - the only (rather big) downside is that the web runs visually worse on it. I don't know how, but painting and font rendering feels suboptimal (compared to Windows and MacOS).
Are we sure this is the case for all Win11 builds? Or does this change only apply to users in the insiders program on the Dev channel (I presume you just be logged in with your Microsoft account to configure a machine with an insider build of Windows)
I recently was able to purchase a Win11 pro license from Newegg to upgrade a Win11 home machine without creating a MS account, that's probably an easier hole to patch if they truly want to prevent offline use entirely.
Im genuinely curious, what is the issue if you keep using windows 10?
I have a 10 year old macbook pro with a bootstrapped windows 10 for testing various things, and it looks like everything is kind of working the same way? Steam hardware survey shows that 32% of people are still using windows 10.
Besides "security updates", there is nothing to loose?
If you don't care that a random person can get remote access to it, then no, I don't think you're "losing" anything. The biggest issue is no protection from 0-day security vulnerabilities, which Microsoft patched a lot of in 2025.
So if you run as a standard (non-admin) user, don't expose network services, don't insert random USB devices, and never run untrusted executables or installers, can a random person really get remote access to it?
I mean, even if you patch constantly, you are only safe from yesterday exploits — not from the next 0-day, and those keep coming super-often. It seems smarter to focus on hardening the system itself rather than relying on Microsoft to patch things fast enough and hoping you are safe in the gap between discovery and fix.
Safety is not binary. One of the most common attacks is an automated probe for vulnerability, whereupon a successful discovery, the machine gets backdoored and joined into a network, awaiting instructions. These botnets, or services built on them are then rented out on the black or grey market. Patching regularly practically prevents this.
The smart thing to do is patching regularly AND having a good security posture. Neither can be given up, really.
Also, even risky things can work for a long time. An individual can go a lifetime of speeding, doing drugs, things like that, and not be majorly impacted. And on the flip side, another individual can have a stroke of bad luck despite their good posture.
Keep it offline and in particular avoid surfing the web or opening untrusted files (images, photos, documents etc included) and it's probably low-risk.
I think the chances of a vulnerability being leveraged in your scenario is extremely low. For a machine connected to the network, the longer it goes without patching, the higher the chances of a security incident
How can I prevent Windows 10 from upgrading to 11? I have a gaming pc that's basically just for VR, and is ~5 years old. I play non-VR on my SteamDeck, so really I just want to keep my old pc gaming box running on 10 for (occasional) VR gaming at this point... also, pretty heavily invested in Steam (VR and non-VR) so I really prefer not to switch to something like Meta Quest, etc.
Amazing how many people in here don’t understand how the non-tech section of the business world works. Windows is in no danger of being replaced and age of the decision makers has nothing to do with it.
You use Windows because you live in Teams and Outlook. You use Windows because you, your suppliers, and your customers are all using CRMs that don’t run on Mac and your employees of any age sure as hell don’t know how or want to run Linux desktops. You use Windows because you paid Deloitte consulting a trillion dollars to give you your whole tech stack and they can’t even spell Linux.
I could go on and on but no, the corporate world doesn’t care that you have to have an online account (they prefer it), privacy is something you don’t even expect and is managed by IT anyway, etc.
I’ve been hearing how home users are going to switch to Linux for 25 years with no change in marketshare. They’re not. Nobody cares anymore, it’s like saying that HD-DVD is going to win the format war over Bluray now. It’s yesterday’s battle and the victory already divvied up the spoils.
Also from corporate perspective Entra, AD and Identity Platform is very good thing. Single sing on linked to laptop or desktop to every single service. In best case it is automatic. Ensure whatever you want on OS level.
Centralised management and control. Exactly what enterprises want. Local accounts is more what they do not want.
Airgapped thus far. If that's not possible for 2025 tax year, I'll have to look at other options. (Maybe some saintly patriots will get the canceled IRS project into viable self-hosted PDF-generating form in time.)
I know your stance on piracy. But I will bet that whatever check for Windows 11 they add will be completely superfluous, and that the crack for TT2025 will patch it right out. Just sayin'.
Every Windows-shipping laptop I review, the very first thing I type up is the process for setting up Windows without setting up a cloud account. It's already a 7-10 step process on existing laptops. If they want to make that a 20-30 step process, I'm A-OK scaring off potential customers writing out a weekend project for them; I don't make money on sales, and people seem to appreciate me taking the time to write this process out.
I don't like these schemes. But is there anything preventing me from creating a whatever@live.com account and use that for my non-personal machines? I see this as one more annoyance rather than a true impediment.
I have been very impressed with the Steam Deck and if I ever build another gaming PC, I would be very tempted to skip windows and install SteamOS. But then I have a PS5 for the online/AAA/games with company specific launchers...
This could have been excusable if Microsoft was handing out the licenses for free, but the fact that you have to pay $140 (more than the price of some entire computers) and then deal with this bullshit is a slap in the face.
Finally caved and bought a Mac this year. Never used one before in my life - I've used Windows / Linux / Chrome OS as my primary computing environments at various times over the years.
Windows makes the most money in enterprise, where you already have domain logins. For normal consumers, Microsoft just wants to extract as much data (i.e. money) out of you.
I haven't dug into this too much but the last time I set up a Windows 11 PC, I created a junk MS account, moved through the setup flow, created a local admin account once Windows 11 was configured and then delinked the aforementioned junk MS account.
What are the downsides to this approach or does it not work as I think? I have noticed things occasionally run slow and then it seems like the fan is blowing constantly when TaskManager says CPU is at like 30% utilization.
They will probably charge extra for it. I asked a public school IT person how he was handling FERPA with the new privacy violations on windows 10, and the answer was paying exorbitant fees.
You _can_ buy it, but it's a bit of a quest. You need to register as a company and buy at least five Windows licenses (you don't have to use them), and after that you can get a license for an LTSC version.
It works out to about $700, if you want to go down this route.
>There remain a number of ways to avoid the Microsoft account requirement during setup, including setting up an unattended installation, but these are more complicated.
Apparently checking a checkbox in rufus is more complicated.
Our small business needs to use Windows (at this time) for some Windows-only software. We work to configure each box as bare and simple as possible for all the normal reasons. I can’t imagine this will make our work simpler while maintaining our data security.
Has any positive news come out of Microsoft recently? Copilot is junk, entra ID gets hacked constantly, employees resigning in protest. Yet, the stock skyrockets
It used to be one of the distinctions that made ChromeOS worse was that it required a Google account to use while a Windows device something you had more agency with.
And here I am leaning towards upgrading my Windows 10 local account PC to Windows 11. I guess MS is making it easy for me on that decision. They can get bent.
Yes. As you transition to using Windows less and less, you'll get reminded more and more about how much of a pain it is to use, and how much of a Stockholm Syndrome you've developed over years of abuse.
To the point that you'll be avoid Windows as much as you can. You'll be booting your system infrequently enough, that, at every boot, Windows will be unresponsively slow, hogging your CPU and your bandwidth to forcefully update whatever bloatware is in need of an update. It will nag you about needing to restart, it will stand in you way, it will make your experience even more miserable. From time to time it will simply announce that the system will be rebooting in two minutes, without any recourse possible, your work be damned. Because, why not? Who the f*k cares about your work?
Be warned, you might reach a point of no return where you'll be avoiding this abusive piece of bloatware like the plague. You might discover light and happiness at the end of this dark, damp tunnel. You might free yourself from the PTSD you didn't know you were suffering of at the slightest mention of the word "Update".
It will be a liberating experience. Come and join us on the other side.
I have a "media notebook" with Ubuntu 10(?).x.. LTS:
One thing I always see when using this machine - this version at least has some problem with the memory manager: Very often the system comes up from hibernation mode and does not stop swapping whatever stuff to disk, making it unusable until I reboot completely - this at least works on Windows :-D
Can confirm. Daily drive Linux for software development, and have a Linux on a laptop for gaming (Silksong anyone? :D). I keep a Windows 10 partition around on the laptop for Fortnite with friends, but that's about it.
I was actually pleasantly surprised the other day, I booted into Windows for the first time in several months and it was surprisingly quiet. No nags, no bs. Just "normal" stuff like Epic Games forgetting my account again and Windows updates going on in the background.
My friend whose laptop has Windows 11, on the other hand, that was a WILD experience. Similar situation, he mostly only brings it out for gaming with friends. He also had gone several months without booting, and the system was borderline unusable. Like, the battery settings page would refuse to open until he waited for the updates to finish and rebooted. No error, just an infinite loading spinner. Windows 11 also seemed much more aggressive about hogging the laptop's Internet connection -- our laptops were both downloading Windows updates and Fortnite updates at the same time, and my Fortnite update was literally progressing at twice the speed (~200mb/sec vs his ~90mb/sec).
Anyway, all that to say, I don't miss Windows, and anytime I'm exposed to it, that attitude is constantly re-affirmed.
Windows can live in a VM no problem. But, depends on your use case. For GPU heavy usage, you can do GPU passthrough, and that needs a dedicated video card exclusive for the VM. If you only have light usage, like office tools, you can get by the mostly default settings.
I suggest that you just try - it's a couple of hours to install Linux and install Windows in a VM. You can try Linux dual-booting, so, no need to impact your existing system. If you end up not liking the out of the box Win VM performance, there are a couple of tricks that you can try to get substantial improvements.
OK, in my case its just boring business & CRUD apps, no GPU stuff nor gaming (btw: I find most business apps, esp. payment & accounting systems, everything else than boring - feel free to flame me for that :-D )
And can I also use MSSQL server?
(which I could ditch anyway then, I guess, since we are using mainly ORM and no database-specific features)
If your CRUD apps are Winforms I had success with Wine, but you might want to try something else. I've heard good things about avaloniaui.net but never liked XAML so I haven't tried it.
I think you in this case, you should definitely try the VM route. Non-3d user interfaces, networking, etc should all work with no problems, MSSQL included. Do a prototype as soon as you're able, because that will answer most of your questions, and raise new ones as well.
To your second point, yes, I imagine that MSSQL could be exchanged to something else like Postgres, MariaDB or MySQL. Although, maybe you can get away with SQLite too, depending heavily on the use case of course.
I'm not a Windows person at all and only follow developments in Windows drama sporadically. Is it even an option to first install an old build of Windows 11 (21H2, 22H2, 23H2, ...) and hope that an update will bring the system up to a secure state? Or will it feel like installing Windows XP in 2008?
For those who don't know, there's an open-source script that automatically enrolls your Windows 10 copy for Extended Service Updates, which increases its life by another three years: https://github.com/abbodi1406/ConsumerESU
Yes, this is one of the reasons why modern Windows is so good compared to older versions. The ability of them to continually make the operating system better and have the telemtry to back that up along with internet updates being a thing allows iteration to improve things much more rapidly.
I remember the first time I clicked the Start button on Windows 95 and the sheer excitement I felt seeing all those software categories. My dislike for how the newest versions of the operating system work is on a similar magnitude to that initial thrill.
Lately, what I've been asking people is: what do you use Windows for, exactly?
When the overwhelming majority of their stuff is in a browser, Steam, or Office, it's pretty easy to lay out Linux as an alternative. Nobody actually _uses_ windows itself, unless you're running some specialized software that requires it.
Also, a lot of people treat computers as appliances: boxes of fixed capability that ship from a factory as-is. Basically, a very complicated toaster. Windows machines run windows, Apples run MacOS, and so on. The idea that you can deviate from factory spec is, frankly, not even a thought most carry around. One must take the time to be kind and show the path through this wilderness of choices and technology decisions.
As for the MS Office thing, O365 and LibreOffice are the Linux-compatible choices I recommend. Depending on their use-cases, the latter is usually enough. I'll give O365 credit for multi-user Office and 1:1 capability with the current desktop option. That said, those aren't always compelling uses for the home-gamer.
Multiplayer games with anti-cheat. Only works on Windows, or of course, I can risk my account banned.
Heavy MS Office usage. MS Office is preferred for compatibility (toward other people's MS Office documents), and heavy usage means that the web variant are struggling.
Windows-only apps like Photoshop, audio software etc.
I just want to set my username so it's not the first five letters of my name, that's the only reason I do the local account first before signing in with my MS account
I view this a little like those Nigerian prince email scams. True or not, once upon a time I heard that they deliberately did not fix the obvious spelling and grammatical errors in the scam emails -- they acted as an excellent first pass filter to exclude scam effort against targets who wouldn't fall for it anyway.
When Microsoft allows local accounts via more complicated loopholes, or activation via massgrave, or the removal of bloat/ad components via scripts or cmdline processes -- they lose little. But what they can gain by having an account for all the 'regular' users is a share of that giant ad revenue pie mostly dominated by google (and more recently a few other companies) in the last 20 years. And if you bypass those processes anyway? Probably worth being filtered out to Microsoft: you likely install an ad blocker later, change your search engine, browser, et al.
Knowing what their users do, being their search gateway, their default AI system (eventually..) and generally having an eye on their whole user experience gives Microsoft a formidable profit line in the future. And maybe the present too, I don't know.
It is a distasteful feeling to have installed windows 95 (or win7 or whatever your favourite flavour) and then try and install windows 11. But for the majority of their customer base (corporate and residential) this isn't relevant.
N=1, but this week my family member asked for advice on a new laptop and their only specification was that it could not have windows on it. They don't have any Apple products but are happy to shift, or use Linux.
Anticheats makes multiplayer games hard to run on Linux (still sad that Apex walked back on Linux), and hardware may have sometime random issues on Linux (for some reason my mic was not working well on Discord (did not investigate, suspecting something on the software side since I could hear myself well when testing but my friends couldn't); I cannot use multiple screens with my current video card without my text editor dropping to 10FPS for some reason).
Plus Microsoft Office for people that prefer the ribbon over menus (but the browser version probably works well enough).
Though I feel that sleep is more reliable on Linux than on Windows today with "modern" sleep.
I would imagine that their home users are a tiny percentage of their market share; I'd wager that most people using Windows aren't the ones who purchased it, but are using company-provided hardware and software.
Goes to show that they don't sell to their users directly. They sell to governments and vendors, and do every trick in the book and invent some more, in order to keep Windows the de facto default PC platform. And have been doing that successfully since their beginnings.
Electronic Health Record software is a similar story. Doctors outright hate these. Yet, prevalent.
Making sure people's operating systems are properly setup is not being hostile. In fact it is the opposite, it should result in a better user experience.
It's because Microsoft is not a consumer company, it's a B2B service provider. They couldn't care less about retail users in general, to the point that it's been their policy to turn a blind eye or even tacitly support the blatant piracy of Windows among Home users across generations.
Seriously, though, now that Win10 is being phased out, it’s time for people to wake up and join us in the free world. M$ wants you to throw away your hardware and buy a new computer with Win11. Give them the middle finger, format and install Linux instead.
You're right. Wow, what a unique and novel opinion that no linux user has ever heard before. You know what, you've changed my mind, I'm installing windows now
Most games run on Linux nowadays thanks to Proton. The blame for the ones that do not squarely falls on publishers like EA who despise the freedom of Linux. They would rather infect Windows computers with rootkits that do little against cheating than allow the community to run their own servers.
I use Linux at work and at home. I give Linux running Cinnamon to non-technical family members. I would not give a Chromebook. They're extremely locked down, and I don't want such things to have market share since that forces others to engage with such locked down nonsense.
And yet still happens along with rest of dark patterns, data hoarding. Somehow no consumer protecting organizations were interested in this aspect of Microsoft practices.
It's one thing to try to steer basic, non-technical users toward an MS account by default. Fine; I may not like that, but I get it. But at this point, anyone left who's still using these methods to create a local account is likely to be a technical user who's deliberately and intentionally wanting a stay on local account for whatever their own reasons.
I suspect that's a rather small group, which leaves me puzzled: (1) is the juice really worth the squeeze, and (2) is it really worth being so hostile to your power users?
Sort of, but with similar limitations: The App Store, iCloud syncing, iMessage, FaceTime, and other Apple online services are unavailable unless an Apple ID is used.
The difference is that you need a Microsoft account to login in your computer. On macOS an Apple account is require for some services, not to manage the computer user login.
> Sort of, but with similar limitations: The App Store, iCloud syncing, iMessage, FaceTime, and other Apple online services are unavailable unless an Apple ID is used.
And you get an impossible-to-remove notification from the Settings app.
I gave up trying to keep from using a microsoft account to login to Windows 11. Instead, I installed linux and created a Win 11 virtual machine. Fortunately, I only rarely boot the Windows VM. Now I have:
1. no more random reboots
2. fast updates
3. much lower idle cpu use
4. cleaner operation with fewer crashes
5. no ad garbage from the OS to worry about
6. much much faster linux environment (WSL2 is atrocious).
It was 600% worth switching. Caveat -- I used linux as a daily driver in the late 90s early 2000s, and went back to Microsoft for work compatibility. Linux is much better now, but I still wouldn't try to get my parents to run it.
Anecdotally, my dad is pretty tech illiterate but he's been using Ubuntu for over 5 years. I got fed up playing tech support for Windows and had him try it out. He's been much happier with it. His workflow and UI stays the same, no forced changes. I just login every once in a while to run updates.
I finally switched my desktop this year and I wish I had done it sooner but gaming held me back. Now any games that intentionally won't run under Linux are games I'm not interested in playing.
Nice. Make an online account so that your data are uploaded to a different country, and they can ban you from your own computer at any moment for any reason or without one (for example, President woke up in a bad mood).
I am surprised that somebody agrees to that terms.
I work in a company full of Graphics and Multimedia Designers and as we were discussing our impending needs to "upgrade" to Windows 11, the lament, "If only Adobe Animate ran on Linux," was uttered more than once.
I’d love to be able to move to Linux as Microsoft continue to find yet more ways to enshittify, but sadly there are some software areas that just aren’t ready yet.
* Professional MS Office / Sharepoint use - if you need the installed apps, there’s just no alternative. Amusingly MS have helped the Linux migration with their browser alternative/lite versions, but IMO they’re only suitable for smaller and less involved documents.
* CAD - aside from Freecad (def. not for me) most top established CAD packages are Windows-only (with a subset also working on Mac).
* Desktop publishing - there’s nothing I’ve found to rival even old PagePlus, let alone InDesign or QuarkXpress. (I may give Scribus another try at some stage; I auditioned it as a possibility for an elderly relative a while ago and it was no-go then.)
I have said this before and I'll say it again. I am happy to pay 3x prices for a "Windows Optimal" version. 0 telemetry, 0 unwanted apps, 0 bloatware, 0 shady tactics for privacy bypass or making things intentionally hard to tweak, 2x the performance of Windows 7 as promise. If the hardware has gotten better since the era of windows 7 , why do I feel the software is going backwards. If I had a million dollars, I would advertise my request for such a windows version everywhere on the planet from Madison square to NYtimes and even write letters to Satya Nadella
Each commercial OS during OOBE phase should come with two choices paths: express settings for majority and experienced for advanced users, professionals where you can tweak everything before system is ready to use, incl. telemetry and any sort of privacy settings, additional software and "recommendations" in whatever form.
Both paths should be industry standardized with UI as much as possible so no cat-and-mouse play with hidden settings would happen, and both should be configurable at any part so even inexperienced user could benefit from disabling "recommendations" or bundled software. Such OOBE configuration should be also persistent - once the choice is done it stays and doesn't require "additional steps" hijacks every other large update. And at any points given user can re-run the OOBE if for whatever reasons changed mind about e.g. sharing data.
This might be relatively simple to implement as a standard but would require actual commitment from consumer protection organizations, regulators that would push on companies. But somehow seems no organization care about these pushes - Microsoft goes each year further in limiting what uses can do on Windows. Perhaps as I said here already, there's some agenda of becoming the identity provider and going ahead with govt's ideas for online identification. Or perhaps it's just a plain greed for data.
Does the Common [Wo]Man have any control over any of our own shit anymore?
I just got an iPhone 17. I travel often and have a bunch of SIMs and eSIMs from various countries, with varying periods of validity.
With the physical SIMs, I can just pop them into the new phone and still use them for a month or two more just fine. (I specifically got a Singapore region variant with a SIM tray AND eSIM support just for this)
But with the eSIMs, it goes for "approval" through the carriers, some of whom demand me to update my ID with them before they can allow an eSIM to be used on a new phone.
When Apple announced going eSIM only in the US and other draconian countries, I thought nothing of it. Now I see how bad it can be...
I just got so tired of Microsoft BS like this I abandoned windows alltogether... after Windows 98 -- what a PoS release that was. Some nix or other as daily driver since then.
Without your help I'd inadvertently skip some critical setup screens and potentially exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use and that would be a huge disaster. You literally saved my device!
That's a pretty uncharitable take. Parent wasn't defending Microsoft and it's worth recognizing that this move is part of a general pattern on the part of "big tech".
As always with such threads I can see people commenting that Windows is dead and Linux is all that you need, heck, is straight up better.
Of course HN is a bubble, like every other place like this, but sadly, I would argue that this is the mindset that pretty common among Linux users and holds Linux-native alternatives back. For those saying that Linux is already better than Windows in everything, there is no incentive to work towards actually making it better. When emacs is equally good for those people as VS, when Linux gaming still depending on Windows APIs is considered a great success, when FreeCAD or OpenSCAD in their eyes do not lack anything when compared with professional CAD software etc, then you know you are seeing a bubble that will burst, sooner or later.
I suspect in 2025 even project like FreeCAD would not happen, because today people for some reason believe it is fine to go away from OS that do not respect user agency and their privacy, and use web-based apps that do... exactly the same, but they are not from MS so that's fine I guess. For some reason Windows requiring internet connection is a bad thing, but driving Linux and relying on bunch of web apps that also require internet connection is good.
Celebrating WINE, Proton and Steam OS as victories still baffles me, because the fact that FOSS and Linux world couldn't create real alternatives and had to become good at pretending to be Windows instead is simply a failure.
An intern of mine recently took the jump from Windows to Linux Mint. She managed to figure out the installation and configuration, and now she's very, very pleased with having passed that hurdle.
Everything feels faster, and to her it was a wow-experience to have office software without the hassle of payments. According to her the only drawback is that some games and gaming clients don't work, notably the Riot client, but enough do work that she's satisfied anyway. She found she prefers Thunderbird to Outlook and the package catalog is much nicer than both the MICROS~1 application store and ye olde 'download and double click this binary, hope you won't forget to uncheck the spyware checkbox!' style of program management.
MS owes people a working basic Windows ecosystem. We need to find the Middle Manager Driven Development that's responsible for this nonsense and put an end to it.
You think a shift like this is coming from middle management? Feels like an executive driven strategy shift towards recurring revenue, subscriptions, advertising, data collection, app stores, and away from the old OS licensing business model to me.
I don't really agree with that. The infinite growth mindset is just capitalism and the current market realities being executed by the board and the C-Suite.
Dysfunctional middle management is motivated more by protecting their job, kingdom building, and promotions.
At this point if you are still willingly part of the MS ecosystem I'd say that's a case of Stockholm Syndrome. At the time of the SCO lawsuit I decided enough is enough and I haven't looked back. Software development is actually easier on Linux, there are good enough alternatives for most applications so unless your job demands that you use a particular package you might as well bite the bullet.
Microsoft will never change its ways, no matter how much windowdressing they use underneath it is the same evil empire that it always was.
shrug life as a developer in Microsoft-land is pretty nice these days. I quite like Azure Functions and Azure SQL Server, C# is great, Visual Studio is kind of slow but better than anything not made by JetBrains.
Really my only complaint is the lack of a nice, modern desktop UI framework but you can’t win them all.
I don't care about convenience, I care about the ethics of the companies that I work with. Convenience is what got us in this mess in the first place, it certainly isn't going to get us out of it. And if you don't want to implicitly support Microsoft Windows V 267 (now with more advertising, DNA samples for access and a free psych evaluation), then 11 is as good a time to break with them as any.
I'm getting so tired of Microsoft's shit, but gaming and Adobe just aren't workable on Linux to the extent that i need. Plus Linux likes at act up on my laptop. Mainstream tech scene just gets more and more bleak
I don't care about a Microsoft account as long as they don't force me to log in, remember some kind of password,or use some Microsoft email. If they locked me out of my machine or transmitted data to their servers violating the GDPR, then that would be a problem. Windows 11 is a paid product, it's quite expensive, and that alone means Microsoft is fully liable for damages from negligence and failure.
There should be some kind of requirement to prominently state that a purchase does not imply ownership of any kind, right on the "box." The entire thing is quite deceptive. I am not singling out Microsoft here. Apple's AppStore and other digital purchasing methods are the same.
In my opinion anything like this is just failing to address the real problem, which can only be addressed by legislation. Having someone put a label that says "this is poison" on it does not improve the consumer situation when your choices are between different flavors of poison.
Windows is not a consumer brand - at least anymore, if it ever was. It is predominantly a business product for enterprises. And their current service model to their clients requires interoperability with cloud services and user profiling for easy authentication and telemetry, which is what they are getting by enforcing Microsoft accounts. That is why there is no contradiction in their POV with this.
Does it suck for you retail "Home" users? Yes, but you were never the target customer base; at best you are a marketing platform. There is a reason why Microsoft has been giving away the product virtually for free has been turning a blind eye to its piracy (heck, MS's own Github hosts multiple cracking tools for it) when it comes to retail customers. They have abandoned you as a serious market segment.
Unfortunately, there are two things keeping me on Windows:
1) Office (libreoffice is a steaming pile)
2) Fortnite
If those can be solved, I'm done with Windows. I've been a windows fanboi since 3.11. But I'm finally ready to move to Debian desktop (even Ubuntu has gotten crappy lately).
I am getting so tired of this MS push to have me use their systems. I already purchased windows, if I wanted to use their other stuff - I would buy it.
Seriously considering the move to Linux - I've heard it's getting better, but it would cost me a bit of time getting used to it. The pain is really starting to seem like a lower cost every day.
These days I find Linux and windows have a roughly equal amount of issues to deal with, and because I have decades of experience learning how to work through those issues, they are equally painful so I can happily choose Linux over windows.
What makes Linux especially painful to windows users is they basically need to relearn how to solve the same sort of problems they’ve forgotten they’ve been solving all the time in windows, but in Linux. Which makes the effort novel and thus especially noticeable.
Basically it takes accepting one is going to get smacked with fractal side quests of searching how to fix problems for a bit, but it does get better fairly quickly.
That's what I have been hearing. My biggest issue is, unlike most of you guys, I'm self taught and only program when I need to (so mostly c#, python, ruby on rails). C# isn't going to be much use to me on Linux.
But as long as I can continue my local hosted llm and playing around with that, and my son can play his games, I'll probably bite the bullet in a few weeks.
FYI I'm a C# dev and .NET works flawlessly on Linux (Fedora). Since I only used Rider/VS Code for my .NET Apps on Windows it works as just as good on Linux, albeit even better given access to better command-line tooling.
I don't run any legacy .NET Framework Apps on Linux (which require Mono) but I'm still able to build our software for all our supported platforms: .NET Framework v4.7.2, .NET Standard 2.0, .NET 6.0, .NET 8.0 both locally and on our Ubuntu GitHub Actions Runner.
Best advice I can give, is every time you have to stop and solve some problem, make a .txt/.md file with your solution/links, and name the file with a bunch of keywords that let you use fsearch to look it up when you eventually need to solve that problem again. Future you will thank you.
Here’s some projects you may find useful
For playing around with dev projects, “Distrobox” is an easy way to manage mostly isolated environments, to keep your main system clean: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox
I use Nobara as my Desktop OS, which is a fedora/KDE based distribution by GloriousEggroll that’s a desktop first and foremost (unlike a console UI oriented distro like Bazzite). It includes a bunch of nice things and cutting edge (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom) stuff out of the box so there’s less for me to set up with. Steam, and the few games I play on it just work like normal.
For games from places Like GOG, Lutris works far more often than not. If I recall correctly, it’s literally just a matter of running the .exe
Most of my other programs are installed as flatpacks, which I would recommend.
Note that Nobara is not currently an immutable distro (like Bazzite). Like windows, you’ll likely want to reinstall it in a few years (or after some failed project) to start “fresh”.
For my NAS boxes, I use Proxmox, which I guess is mostly Debian with a Ubuntu kernel and select packages kept more up to date and a built in web UI. Proxmox is nice because its kernel (even the opt in newer kernels that can be offered on the forums) is kept in sync with ZFS which I use for my archives. I disable High Availability, among other things. Useful links:
Biggest gotcha with proxmox is if it seems to have lost internet access (like the webUI suddenly not working), your network device got changed/renamed due to a kernel update. You’ll need physical/KVM access to update the entry in /etc/network/interfaces with the new active network device name. Also if you install on a ZFS root, proxmox uses system-boot and silently ignores classic grub settings.
Distrobox is great until you decide that you want to access a flash drive or other local resources, and find out that you have to reinstall to add mounts to it. Not really suitable for long-term use (I was hoping to use it to replace chroots to run different OS)
You can tell this was a good idea because you can see a sudden surge in people reinstalling windows 7 a version that lacks significant performance and security updates but also predates the aggressively idiotic measures by Microsoft.
I hate to say it, but the vast majority of users are going to just adapt and keep going. Probably north of 70% of computer users see these and just automatically accept, sign up, all of that. It's not that they don't care, they just don't understand.
Is there a worry that torrent packagers won't be able to work around these, or what's the actual concern here? I mean if you're using Windows for anything beyond a VM binary compatibility layer for some software you must use, aren't you kind of asking to be abused at this point?
If you are getting your OS from some third party torrent packager you are doing it wrong. There are far easier ways to get around this without trusting that some mysterious third party hasn't embedded some malware in their custom Windows deployment.
You're doing that pretty much regardless of what OS you use. Yes, I agree MS has issues, but legitimate malware has not yet been a line they have crossed.
If I created a program that took screenshots and keylogged everything that you did, and then put it in your computer, you'd rightly call it malware. But, when Microsoft does this, it isn't? They aren't exactly trustworthy (as you said, it has issues).
Companies keep generating this proliferation of xyz-ware names to distract from the fact that anything that works against the user's interest is fundamentally malware.
With Microsoft allegedly trying to close down all those ways, it sure sounds like OS modification (or not using Windows) is the reasonable endgame here? I'm not sure how this comment, saying to not use modified OSes but use the "far easier ways", fits with the submitted article. Not everyone has the skills to modify the compiled code files that make Windows require a Microsoft account
If it's so easy, which are these ways, then? Do you think they'll remain available indefinitely?
Not that I don't underwrite the risks involved in getting your OS from untrusted or unreputable sources
The simplest remaining way that I am aware of is actually an autounattend file. This is a Microsoft supplied method that has been around for a long time and something that I truly believe will stick around untouched because it is pretty much a requirement of any enterprise Windows deployment.
Not only does it allow you to create a local admin account, but you can also skip all the other setup screens that you want by pre-supplying values. Throw this file into your Windows boot media, do a fresh install (which you should be doing when you get a new machine regardless), and away you go. I use this both personally and my work environment. Not only are you then not relying on modifying OS ISO's or compilations, but an XML file is relatively easy to verify that only the settings you have set are the ones being input into the system if you utilize a third party tool like the one available at schneegeas.de
I know there are more direct sources. But for the amount of mental energy I want to invest into Windows, discovery through torrents is far easier. My workflow consists of creating a VM, installing / updating everything, taking a snapshot, then removing network access before it gets access to Samba shares with any private information.
I suppose I might still be worried about targeted offline-acting malware if I were using Windows to control some enrichment centrifuges or something. But apart from that, I'm fine with whatever inhabitants it may have frolicking in their isolated jungle.
I don't get why you'd want to get your OS images over torrents. You can download Windows for free from Microsoft's website. You don't even need to buy a key if you know how to set up a KMS server on a pihole or something.
There are trusted tools out there, like Rufus, that will enable workarounds for you if you tell them to create bootable media. Tools with developers you can look up, rather than anonymous pirates.
My only point of installing Windows is to run some other proprietary software, right? So even if I trust Microsoft (which seems like a poor idea given their arc), then I still have to trust all the dodgy software I'm needing to use. So the only real solution is to cut the whole system off from any Internet access before it touches personal data, regardless of how it's installed.
As far as installation process:
If I go to the site of any libre project that doesn't install through nix/apt/etc, it will have a focused list of directions that I need to do to install it.
If I go to Microsoft's site and search for how to install Windows, I will be greeted with a deluge of articles I need to read and understand all of the various different methods and scenarios (after avoiding the links to BUY BUY BUY. I already have plenty of Windows licenses that were anticompetitively bundled with every old laptop I have sitting around, thank you). And then since I want to avoid their consumer install methods that insist on holding victims' wrists, I will likely need to go an eNtErPrIsE route - meaning even more reading between the lines of overwrought bullshit.
Whereas if I download a torrent of Windows, it will come with a focused list of directions that I need to do to install it.
BTW doesn't Rufus only run on Windows? That's kind of pointless for me. My workflow is virt-install --cdrom /path/to.iso
Perhaps I will look into setting up a "KMS server" next time I need to reinstall, but I would guess it's a bunch of admin tinkering for not much gain. The kind of admin work that will have fallen apart in the few years before I need it again.
... doing a quick look it seems like "KMS server" only runs on Windows itself? And there is a libre reimplementation for Linux, but it doesn't seem to be in nixpkgs, and requires setting up a heavyweight "Domain" with Samba? A few lines in smb.conf or nixos config and I'd be game, but no, it looks just as bad as I thought it would be. Please correct me if I'm missing some way that is actually straightforward and simple, but this doesn't seem to be the case!
Answering this question seriously, I'm a programmer / IT know-it-all, and I did it under two hours, which included firing up my own activation emulator, toward which I point my Windows. Now that I have the process down, it's taking seconds for each new Windows.
From what I can remember, there are like 10 various routines for different ways to activate different products and most of the code is just boilerplate, no? You definitely can trace the hwid codepath in a reasonable time.
if anything bad ever happened after using MAS there would be piles of evidence because MAS is brought up every time people discuss Windows license price. Equating piracy to malware is disingenuous and malware is not the only bad factor. If you consider all of them it turns out that there is a lesser chance you'll get screwed if you pirate be it music, movies or operating systems
I gotta be honest man, I do not understand someone who pirates executable code. I (and I assume most of the hn audience) am not some starving student with nothing to lose. I would much rather run linux than pirate windows.
The OS installation images come from Microsoft. They're the same amount of malware as the OS that comes preinstalled on your laptop. Probably a tad less, depending on the brand.
So instead of downloading the OS, you're downloading a patching executable? How do you trust this? Is it open source and auditable? Otherwise you're opening yourself up to the same concerns.
Probably that one of the original comments on this thread suggested using another free and open source thing instead of using this free and open source thing? Why is linux exempt from "it comes with free malware" and not this other widely trusted and used tool?
I assume you haven’t checked on this since the Windows 7 days, but Massgrave is open source, and the activation logic boils down to about five lines of PowerShell, using only native Windows utilities. I think they even have a tutorial on their website that explains how to perform the activation manually if you want to avoid running their scripts.
Most of those 19861 lines allow it to be an all in one script for multiple activation methods and products. And, if you're still skeptical, then you are free to audit all 19861 lines yourself.
Maybe at the very least educate yourself before acting so smug.
Why would I look at the tutorial for a no script activation when I was, you know, commenting on a point about a script? Did to you forget to educate yourself to notice the difference?
> And, if you're still skeptical, then you are free to audit all 19861 lines yourself.
That's nonsense, of course, how would it help other users? Also, do you expect every single user of the crack to have the capabilities and time to do that?
If you are worried about malware from your pirated content you are going to the wrong websites. The good ones are hard to get on and have severe consequences for the uploader and whoever invited them.
However severe those consequences are, I'm sure it's not 'cryptolocker hard drive' or worse 'lose hundreds of thousands from my brokerage account' severe. I am happy to pay for my bits. It's wild to me this is somehow a controversial opinion on a board supposedly populated with well paid software engineers.
Agree with you but not every answer is move to Linux. A lot of us help family member with IT stuff. People I help use excel, quicken, and one drive to run their businesses and finances. I could see myself running into GPs license issue with my father in law.
I tried to get a few of them to use chromebooks but the need for quicken or another app they used for decade(s) keeps them windows based.
I agree. Some people don't really think about licences, they buy a PC with Windows and only buy another when that one stops being usable. Even this forced upgrade to 11 is still the path of least resistance.
My TL;DR: a. Get a Microsoft 365 subscription, so you can set up Entra ID and avoid the 'consumer' account nonsense; b. It would sure be nice if the EU DMA would also be applied to this obviously monopolistic situation; c. Do, however, note that there are exactly zero Linux distros that even come close to offering comparable functionality...
Yeah, sure. I'm getting heavily downvoted here, and that's fine, but truth of the matter is that nothing gets even close to Windows 11 when it comes to Enterprise-ish deployments, and failure to acknowledge that is why possibly-better alternatives are losing.
Source: I'm sort-of the IT manager for several around-50-employees businesses. All of these offer a choice of Windows, Mac or Linux laptops, because that's what needed to attract quality employees these days.
For Windows, it's really simple. Order HP or Lenovo without an OS, put on the Windows 11 Enterprise image, and send it on along with the Entra credentials. User powers the machine up, selects 'for work', enters the AD credentials and gets a working desktop with AV, firewalling, Office and so on.
MacOS? Slightly more involved story: we need to provide instructions on how to successfully navigate the forced Apple sign-in story, then download some dependencies to get to the point where the Windows users already were.
Linux? Oh, boy... Even when standardizing on something like Ubuntu LTS, basic compliance and policy enforcement is a huge pain. As in: hours and hours of support. I've evaluated several supposedly-solutions for this, and, ehm, no...
And: to be perfectly clear: I'm wide-open to suggestions for something better! If you can offer Ubuntu LTS, (or, well, anything) but with AV, firewalling and basic policy enforcement that can be remotely attested, I'm all ears!
There will be many people "stuck" with Windows for work (or even choosing it for some particular piece of software). For me, work is MacOS and Apple hardware, and home is Linux on the desktop and my NAS.
For work, I don't choose, it's chosen for me. My company oriented to "zero-trust" remote work even before the pandemic. That means that transition away from being a Microsoft shop was easier (they were Windows / .Net before 2017, but cloud-everything changed that).
For personal use I will 100% advocate Linux over Windows. You're advocating Windows because it's easier for you to ship boxes to employees. Not because it's better for the employees.
So I just figured out a workaround that actually works! At least until Microsoft puts out a new Windows installer that fixes this,
here's what you can do:
First, make sure you unplug your ethernet cable or turn off WiFi before you start installing Windows. This way your computer isn't connected to the internet during setup.
When you get to that screen where it's asking you to sign in with a Microsoft account (you know, the annoying one from the post), here's the trick: press SHIFT and F10 at the same time. This opens up a command prompt window.
Then just type this command: start ms-cxh:localonly and press Enter. It should bring up an option to make a local account instead! Just fill in a username and password like the old days.
After you finish the setup and get to your desktop, you can connect back to the internet and download all the updates.
> booting into Windows Recovery and disabling driver signature reinforcement (Option 7 in Startup Settings after going to troubleshoot and advanced options) makes OOBE\BYPASSNRO work again
Well unfortunately, MS screwed me. When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.
Despite having one license, one account, and one PC registered, MS refused to help. I tried to call support, but there are NO on-call support anymore. Only automated online support. No chat. Nothing. I tried over and over for a couple days and got nowhere.
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