The herd keeps me secure
Still cheaper than my Arch Premium membership
Thank you for your service to Linux adoption o7
Wait. They want me to pay for something I already paid for?
Well guess my $2.5k new windowless machine is looking better everyday.
You actually paid for Windows?
Oh yeah. Windows XP Professional 64 bit. Each “upgrade” used the same license and never really got screwy until 10. Won’t go to 11.
Edit: Actually I don’t think I even paid for that, I think it was an OEM license my dad got from his work.
This is like people complaining about how Ubuntu 16.04 LTS support ended not long ago (2021-04-29)
Or macOS 10.9 Mavericks (2016-12-01)
Or Android 6.0 (2018-08-01)
Or Debian 8 “Jessie” (2018-06-17)
Or Linux Mint 17 (2019-07-01)
Or Fedora 23 (2016-12-20)
Or Slackware 14.1 (2024-01-01)
Of all of these, not even Slackware comes close to how long Microsoft has supported Windows 10 post release (2015)
To my knowledge upgrading to the newer release of any of those linux distros was not blocked by having only slightly old and perfectly serviceable hardware.
I migrated someone running mission critical software off of CentOS 6 this year.
People hate upgrades.
Windows XP. 2001–2019. If 10 beats that I’ll be impressed
Yes, but you don’t migrate to Windows 11 from those.
You do migrate to newer versions of those ossses with new de and backend lib versions, and all the breaking changes that entails which means spending another week chasing down broken stuff and learning how different things work now.
Which is about the same
windows 11 is not only about irreversible breaking changes
Considering that when people paid $100 for that OS they were told that it would be the “last Windows to be released”, shouldn’t there be a class action lawsuit?
They weren’t told that, that was an off-hand comment by an employee (not even a spokesperson) that the media took and ran with. Source:
Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10.
I think they meant “latest” not “last.”
For what it’s worth
“Recent comments at Ignite about Windows 10 are reflective of the way Windows will be delivered as a service bringing new innovations and updates in an ongoing manner, with continuous value for our consumer and business customers,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “We aren’t speaking to future branding at this time, but customers can be confident Windows 10 will remain up-to-date and power a variety of devices from PCs to phones to Surface Hub to HoloLens and Xbox. We look forward to a long future of Windows innovations.”
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-version-of-windows
Windows will be delivered as a service
Which is largely true, there have been a number of “service packs” that were released as regular updates throughout the Windows 10 lifespan. So it definitely seems they want people to not think about the specific Windows version they’re on. From that article:
Microsoft could opt for Windows 11 or Windows 12 in future, but if people upgrade to Windows 10 and the regular updates do the trick then everyone will just settle for just “Windows” without even worrying about the version number.
Windows 7, for example, had one major service pack, with a few isolated updates, whereas Windows 10 had a major update about every 6 months, and each one of those checkpoints was supported for about a year and a half. The final update was at the end of 2022, and it’s support runs 3 years.
So yeah, I think they met what they said, but the messaging wasn’t particularly clear how long that support would be provided for.
I like all the comments ready to take a fisting in the ass from Microsoft just to keep Windows 10.
If you raised a fucking stink instead of taking this shitty deal, they may be forced to keep supporting it for free anyway like they did with Windows 7.
They’ve really got you guys cowed into paying for the convenience of getting fucked, don’t they?
This is a company with a market cap of $3.04 trillion and you guys are just gonna bend over and take it for $30 bucks? Wew lad. They don’t need your fucking thirty dollars, and you fucking know it. It’s a god damned shakedown.
Microsoft: Wouldn’t it be a shame if your computer was somehow insecure and got hacked?
Sounds like a Mafioso showing up for protection money to me.
EDIT: There’s still about 700 million Windows 10 PC’s still on the market. If every single existing Windows 10 machine paid for this service, Microsoft would make $21 billion dollars next year off this alone. It’s a shakedown, do the fucking math. (700,000,000 x $30 = $21,000,000,000) Even if only half do it, it’s still a cool $10.5 billion.
EDIT II: This also normalizes the practice of paying for security updates for consumers. You really want to take us down that path where every security update is paid?
It would make sense if Microsoft was liable for any security faults. I’d actually pay for something like that but of course you’re probably paying for some nebulous promise of something between security at best effort basis and whatever they feel like.
Microsoft: heh heh heh, looks like you’ll be paying me $30 for that windows 10 installation.
Me: Bitch, I’m on Windows 7, and keep ignoring the OS bitching at me to turn the firewall on!
if that is connected to the internet, its probably infested
It’s fiiiiiiine! What’s the worst that could happen?
Why l would pay 30$ to dumpester fire OS to use it securely for another year when l could install Linux for free with more than 7 year security?
And consumers can only pay for single year.
It just shows how M$ doesn’t care about their costumers treating them like lab rats.
I switched to Linux myself but can we please stop lying about Linux being a drop-in replacement? There is enough sofware that does not work.
A lot of Linux users here think the conversation begins and ends with game support. A lot of us use our computers for work and there is a lot of productivity and creative software that does not play nice with Linux. I’ve probably said this a dozen times here before but I’ll say it again: Not all of us use our computers solely for gaming.
theres also a lot of productivity and creative software that does. linux for work is way better than linux for gaming and id bet 80%+ of people can work off it much better.
This exactly. I’m an engineer but day-to-day I’m mainly using the Office shite (I tried for suite but ended up with former and happy to run with it) to do my job. The amount of extraneous effort I have to make to do tasks that would have been simple in 2005 is completely ridiculous. Yet on my home computer running Arch BTW, I can do everything instantaneously, the only downside is that some supplier I don’t really care for wants my presentation in pptx. If it wasn’t for work data security requirements, I’d just use my personal equipment for everything because I’d be able to work so much faster.
Edit: not to mention a lot of FOSS software is better than the professional bullshit (AutoCAD needs to die), it’s just a lot more effort to get up to speed with because colleagues around you don’t know it (yet)
AutoCAD does need to die, but there absolutely is no real substitute for MasterCAM. I have a windows PC just for running that software, because nothing comes even kinda close. That license is expensive though, holy shit.
Whats the best replacement for Excel? LibreCalc is ok but it lags really far behind Excel in intermediate features. My close friend in analytics switched back to Excel recently because he got so tired of dealing with LibreCalc.
Also do you know if the Affinity suite works well in Wine? Ive messed with a lot of software paid and libre for its purposes but just vibe with Affinity best
Im not asking to sound rude im asking because im genuinely looking down the barrel of this OS change and I do a lot of computer based hobbies and work that are going to be uprooted by this
both affinity and photoshop run well on wine for me. there are native tools like krita that work well for less complex use cases.
as for office i use some basic macros and calculations and libreoffice works for me, but there are many choices that may or may not work for your friend.
admittedly, software discovery on linux is awful. the app store isnt that good on some distros and theres basically no promotion.
Best replacement for excel is: anything that doesn’t rape your data whilst pouring sugar in you gas tank. /s
TLDR - R, Python, mariaDB, for real data analysis stuff + minor role for whatever spreadsheet package.
For hobbies / analysis / data manipulation , storage , graphs and general stats fuckery here’s my advice; as someone who does this stuff - “badly I might add” - for a shitty public sector organisation that just can’t decide whether to bend over M$ barrel or Oracle’s barrel:
-
use R (via R-studio if you need an “environment”) for more statsy stuff and easier graphs.
-
Python for more general mathsy / programmy / web scrapy stuff - can do decent graphs with libraries like plotly and matplotlib stuff like that, scipy, numpy, and pandas are the other basic libraries for analysis and maths and large datasets. peopl like using ‘jupyter notebooks’ - I don’t get it personally - but 50 Phil Ochs fans cant be that wrong.
-
Set up a mariadb or something if you need databasey stuff, I doubt you need to look at more hardcore stuff like postgresql for “hobbying” ; my personal (1 user) databases were built several years ago and mariadb is just fine for that. but some of the high vol transactional DB at work do use postgresql.
These are all good to learn in my experience, even if you think they’re harder than excel; ( are they tho’? array formlae!?). They’re sort of interoperable - subject to learning. They - naturally - have their open-source annoyances.: a million ways to do everything, and versioning issues. (Excel still has fucking vlookup() tho’ - talk abut legacy baggage - but no it’s not as bad as the open souce maelstroms).
You can still ouput data into a spreadsheet for viewing formatting and messing with stuff - but there are other ways.
Footnote: Yes I do still use excel, but normally mostly for final formatted report for customer who wants it. Having R/python directly write data into excel is so much better than letting excel open anything. Excel just can’t let an innocent SNOMED code go unmolested; you have to be on high alert if you let excel actually do anything.
Also spreadsheet for messy data cleansing - for looking at mess, to help refine the R/python cleansing script. I’d happily use libre/ods for any of these but I don’t fancy putting the request in to IT and . . . having to speak to IT about it.
-
Office 365. I hate it, but I don’t need a windows PC to use it.
I’m a Linux user and I think the conversation should be:
More than half (over 60% ackshually) of Windows PCs in service are still Windows 10. Windows 11 barely cracks 34%.
People should boycott this and demand that Microsoft offer long-term support for Windows 10 like they did Windows 7 and stop trying to force Windows 11 on consumers through dark patterns like this. We have a year to make a huge about this deal in public spaces. This is the kind of thing the reddit userbase used to excel at getting word out about.
They made their own bed with the arbitrary TPM 2.0 requirement. They can drop that and they’d probably have more adoption of 11 overnight. These are business choices Microsoft is making, while ignoring the reality on the ground for a lot of people who never upgraded to something with a TPM 2.0 chip. It’s a choice to and a dark pattern to push them to upgrade.
I am kind of sick of the Linux users acting superior instead of being helpful to people stuck with Windows due to work environments, too.
I’m a Linux User (fuck windows) but I’m stuck with the wife wanting to use windows. So yeah I’ll always be on the lookout for helpful ways to keep that shit software from causing security problems in my home network.
Have you tried Bottles and/or Wine?
I’ve never had a problem running anything from the Adobe or Microsoft Suite for example, in fact I think they run waaay smoother on linux
But yea I get it, a lot of people associate compatibility with gaming only.
Really? So I could use my Wacom Cintique and my 2024 versions of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Animator on Linux then? Because I use them to make a living and if I cannot use them on Linux easily then there is no point.
As a former Linux user from the early 00’s the biggest hurdle was art software and convincing Linux users that Adobe software means more than just Photoshop……
Absolutely. Especially software that has to interface with specific hardware, which often times can have issues working properly with Windows VMs.
I can just dedicate some old hardware for baremetal Win10, but not everyone has that luxury.
It comes with a free frozen yogurt. That Microsoft calls frogurt.
His name is Neil!
…you sob, I’m in.
Fuck me harder, Daddy Microsoft.
“Enrolled PCs will continue to receive Critical and Important security updates for Windows 10; however, new features, bug fixes, and technical support will no longer be available from Microsoft,” explains Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
Anyone who’s had to open a Microsoft support ticket can assure you technical support is already not available from Microsoft.
You have to be a really, really big company with an established connection with Microsoft to actually talk to the real engineers. Any tier of regular support only gets you the “sfc and clean boot” garbage.
Duh, they want the money
$30 to not have to deal with Windows 11 for another year feels like the deal of the century.
I love how they’re like ‘but you won’t get new features!’. They may have still not figured out that nobody cares about ‘new features’ being stuffed into the OS, but I guess you can’t have everything.
Consider that Microsoft will have supported Windows 10 for 10 years as of next year, I will say it had a good run. Considering the longest support cycle for an OS I can find that is even remotely usable as a daily is Slackware 14.1, at 9 years, and support ended for that almost a year ago.
I just want all windows games to run on linux with equivalent performance and without anticheat hurdles. After that happens i’m done with windows.
Honestly, i’m really not that far off as-is. Steam Deck already runs most of my library, it’s just the games that don’t work with a controller that are a problem.
This is already true for the vast majority of games. 🤷♂️
Except for more and more multiplayer games unfortunately. If you only play single player games, Linux gaming is awesome. If you play with your friends, the shitty anticheat situation means you may need to keep Windows around. I have Windows 10 just for Fortnite because my friends play. GTA Online just killed Linux play by adding BattlEye. Just today, one of the biggest online games that did work on Linux including its anticheat dropped support (Apex Legends). We desperately need a way to fight back against this bullshit, because it’s undoing all the incredible progress we’ve made. Valve needs to start banning games from their store for retroactively breaking Linux support.
Valve needs to start banning games from their store for retroactively breaking Linux support.
Valve did recently mandate games will have to share if they use Kernel Level Anti-Cheat. If nothing else it allows people to better see what games want to own their systems.
If you play with your friends, the shitty anticheat situation means you may need to keep Windows around.
Highly suggest the new Factorio expansion with friends. Game is a shitload of fun and there is no anti-cheat BS.
The way you fight is by using Linux and contributing to the percentage of Linux users on the steam hardware survey. Developers pay attention to that. More Linux users means more support in the future.
Everyone wants to switch to Linux but nobody wants to make the sacrifice of being one of the early adopters to help turn the tide away from windows.
I’m personally gonna do a dual boot with windows as a backup.
I guess you could play Roblox instead and deal with child labor 🫠
Roblox also doesn’t work on Linux IIRC. I don’t play it but it was in the Linux gaming news cycle a while ago that they broke Wine compatibility, not sure if it was anticheat related or not.
yeah it was their own anticheat. you can play it perfectly fine (except scrollbars are a bit fast) with Sober though.
Could you just spin up WIndows VM if you have decent computer like 16GB RAM and somewhat powerful GPU?
Yeah, I made the switch to Mint recently and have been pleasantly surprised with how much of a non-issue it is. Open steam, hit install, hit play. Game runs.
Only thing I had to do was enable a single checkbox in steam to enable Proton for Windows games: “Enable Steam Play for all titles”
A handful of games need slight nudges one way or another but overwhelmingly it just works. Way better than it was just a few years ago.
As do I buddy, as do I.
But unfortunately, we only get “most” games running on Linux w/ similar if not equivalent performance. Unfortunately, game devs for some reason refuse to support Linux w/ their anti-cheat implementations (even if the anti-cheat solution works fine on Linux), so getting to 100% is going to take some time and a lot of people shifting to Linux despite not every game working perfectly. Most do though.
Linux will get multiplayer game support from those straggler game companies when people show the userbase is there. They will always follow the money. So if you stay with Windows the devs won’t support Linux. So saying “I’ll move to Linux once they support it”, will ensure they will never support it.
My suggestion is to dual-boot for now and keep putting pressure on the game devs to support Linux. It’s important to dual boot and run as many games on Linux as possible for now to show in the steam metrics that more people are leaving Windows.
I just want all windows games to run on linux with equivalent performance and without anticheat hurdles. After that happens i’m done with windows.
That’s one strategy. Mine is to just say “fuck it” until the devs and studios make their games more playable on Linux. I can deal with not playing some games to make that happen. That’s not for everyone though.
Switching to a better non-mainstream alternative to anything always brings some compatibility pains until enough are doing it to where the tide shifts. I accept this.
You can get a dock and plug in a mouse and keyboard, a monitor, etc…
I would just use my desktop for that use case. There’s still a small minority of games that just don’t work via proton but it’s really a minority.
I’ve also seen a handful of games with linux builds that just don’t run properly because they update the game but don’t do enough QA to the linux build or simply don’t put resources towards linux issues to the same degree that windows gets.
I ran PopOS on linux for years, every game I had worked, and actually performed better than on Windows, once Proton got to version 7.
- with the exception of games that run multiplayer kernel level anti cheat.
** oh and almost all of those games use anti cheats that are compatible with linux/proton, and have been for 3 years, but the game devs/management just refuse to enable that support, even though its already included in their contracts with AC providers for no extra cost.
Totally thought for a split second that the white thing on the bottom right was the apple logo
Windows hasn’t added any features of value since Windows 7.
I mean, the HDR support and multi window snapping, as well as remembering window positions on multiple displays.
Counterpoint, if you have two monitors with different DPI scaling, window dimensions get butchered when moving between them
This annoys the shit out of me on a daily basis
Powertoys and fancyzones in particular has been amazing with the proliferation of large monitors. Saves so much time and effort to configure windows. Don’t understand why it is an optional utility and not built into the OS.
I have never found HDR to be helpful. Every time I turn it on it seems to think what I want was not better colors, but for all my colors to be extremely washed out on every screen.
Without the right monitor or setup, HDR can look not great.
Windows hasn’t added any features of value since Windows
7XPUhh, driver support and networking have vastly improved since Windows XP.
If you had ever done a clean reinstall of XP, you’d know what a pain it was to make sure you had your NIC drivers on a floppy or USB drive before you started.
I was going to say XP, but 7 is so much better an experience than XP.
If you think that’s a good deal, I have some NFTs to sell you.
feels like the deal of the century.
For Microsoft, sure. If they capture all Windows 10 machines, they’re in for a $21 billion payday. If they get half of them, $10 billion. A quarter, $5 billion. An eighth, $2.5 billion.
Your $30 in aggregate is only a deal for Microsoft. They’ll ask for another $30 a year after that and now you’ve normalized paying for security updates.
literally feeding the troll.
A subscription for continued support seems fair. (If there are no ads).
Are you serious? It’s Microsoft.
And at this point I don’t trust Microsoft to not stuff them in there as a “last update for Windows 10”
No it doesn’t. We have any number of free and open source operating systems to choose from that are already more secure. The number of people in a situation where they absolutely need to run Windows specifically is small.
Someone has to pay for that work. Either volunteers are donating their time, corporations “donate” work of their employees or hire it out because use of the project generates profits for them and they recognize not everyone can be a parasite (The FOSS model)
The other alternative is users paying directly.
If you want to use a closed source os, then pay for updates or you will be monetized on other ways. (In the case of MS that would be ads or the OS is just an incidental product used to drive sales of software or cloud computing)
If you’re somewhat tech savvy, don’t have anything against the high seas and absolutely need Windows, look into Windows 10 LTSC.
Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC specifically
Microsoft got the grift of a century. Make Win11 so bad that people will literally pay you NOT to force them onto it! /s
Seriously though, fuck Microsoft - $30 per year to roll out the occasional security update is obscene! They can go stuff themselves with their $3 trillion market cap
Anyone still defending Microsoft at this point has cognitive dissonance and deserves what they get. Seriously people - just use Linux. And for the 1% of you that can’t get that 1% of your programs working in Linux - just dual boot.
It’s like people forgot how to use computers.
What am I dual booting if I can’t use win10 because it’s not secure, and I’m not paying for win11?
You can download the Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft for free. There’s a gajillon different ways to activate it for free, too. Most likely it will just activate itself, unless you built the PC.
But if you only need it to run some software, you don’t even need to activate it.
Most people who are fed up with Microsofts crap simply don’t buy a new computer anymore. They just do everything on an iPad (maybe pro) or similar without Windows. Gamers switch over to consoles, with Nintendo and Steam deck being preferred. Those things may run Linux like the Steam deck or another non Windows OS, but the user won’t notice or care since they don’t interact with it.
The time of the desktop and to a lesser extent the laptop has come and gone. It’s only for enthusiasts and people at work. At work people probably just use the same couple of apps or even just a browser with a webapp and never really interact with the OS. If it’s even a full computer and not a thin client connecting to a virtual desktop environment. People don’t know or care about OSes. Maybe they’ll bitch about Windows at times, but they bitch about a lot of things at work and they have no influence over any of it.
I think your right about waning support for desktop for general use, as in the “home” computer but saying gamers will switch to Nintendo or Steam Deck, not a chance in my opinion…the whole reason people game on PC is a varied story, for me personally I wanted to experience the best graphics at the time, what made me stick around is the realization that I can play any game I want from any console in history with any controller I want, I dont have to pay for internet, I don’t have to worry about backwards compatiilty and I’m free to shop around for amazing deals on games.
Your right about the average family home not buying in but your wrong about “gamers” or more accurately any tech person just switching or dropping windows
This is on anticheat software at this point. “1%” of us can’t play many of our favorite games without dual boot and there are nitpicks with that that suck ass too. VFIO only brings you so far.
Fuck that. I already paid for the Pro edition of 10 specifically for features Windows 11 doesn’t have in any version. IDGAF if it’s free; it’s not an upgrade. It’s a downgrade.
I’m a windows user (on my game computers) and have never paid for windows lawl. I’m not about to start now.
