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 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.
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.
> This also sounds specific to GNOME, as mutter still doesn't have color management.
Gnome 49 should've solved that. [0]
[0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/4102
I don't think so. I'm on GNOME 49 and nothing has changed compared to 48.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> not being able to mount things wherever
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.
I’m not sure any of what you wrote is an endorsement of the grandparents comment about Windows being a superior OS 15 years ago.
> no simple way to work the partition tables
yeah, that's exactly what your average Windows user wants from an OS
you managed to pick on the one thing you don't know how to do.
I know very well how to use diskpart, thank you
Average users don't care that ping only pings 3 times by default either, you know.
Pedant point: 4 times.
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.
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.
Linux distros became much better than Windows during Win 10 times.
I love how people confidently claim something like this.
FWIW, for me Linux became better in the times of Windows XP.
I also love how people confidently claim something like this.
FWIW, for me Linux stopped being better than Windows around Windows 7 and still isn't back.
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.
Both can be true, depending on a few factors.
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.
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 bet you're a blast at parties.
"You say meeting them was the best thing that happened to you? What does that say about your achievements?"
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.
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
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.
The point of the comment is that without Microsoft misbehaving, many people wouldn't have discovered/would not discover how good Linux is now.
Also, the new look and feel is kinda botched. Win10 was sharp and sleek. Really a bad turn imo.
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.
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.
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.
It's unbelievable just how unclear Bazzite's website is.
They don't spell out clearly what Bazzite is. Is it a distro? A layer on top of Steam? Something else? No idea from the first page.
Still on par with Linux UX, I'm afraid :(
Bazzite -> Community & Docs -> FAQ
https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/FAQ/#what-is-the-difference-...
> 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:
https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/FAQ/#is-this-another-fringe-...
> 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)
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.
Yes. Nearly every game is compatible. Checkout protondb.com and check the games you play.
Anything that has a kernel level anti check (Valorant) will always be a resounding No. But besides from that, everything is pretty damn nice.
>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.
That is... a bit of an oversimplifciation.
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.
Again irrelevant to the original point
Pretty much none of the kernel level features work.
Irrelevant. They work so you can play a game and it's supported by the devs despite it using kernel level anti cheat.
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.
Yes, it works great, actually. But you have to have specific hardware, for example AMD gpu instead of Nvidia.
Also, nearly anything with anti-cheat (many online games, esp shooters) won't work.
Nvidia works great, and has since this summer. So long as you’re on a recent release you shouldn’t have issues.
Nvidia on a machine with an AMD iGPU requires you to blacklist the amdgpu module.
I swear I saw these exact same comments when Windows 8 released.
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.
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.
Is office 365 an option? What are the issues there? I thought web based office would solve this problem?
For me it's been the opposite experience. I used to regularly get BSOD on windows, but ubuntu has been rock solid for me.
Developing for linux servers using a linux workstation can be so unbelievably smooth.
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 am looking forward for a good energy management on Linux notebooks. I think it is currently one of Linux blind spots.
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?
>but given they all share the same base I'd thought it would be of a equally high standard?
Such a naive assumption
Parsing cpp fast and reliably may be significant differentiator between languages
> Such a naive assumption
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.
Cpp compiler writers have even more experience yet here we are with those insane compilation times
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.
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.
Have you tried out CLion (https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/)? AFAIK the JetBrains IDEs work pretty well on Linux.
I've found Visual Studio fairly helpful wirh debugging, but for general code editing it is unusably slow.
I generally use Sublime Text (+ various plugins) for code editing and leave Visual Studio for dwbugging the code or editing GUIs.
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.
> I have seen no feature in VS not available in Emacs.
Guys, please. I am all for FOSS, but such delusions can only be harmful, for they prevent from actually improving stuff.
Did you sir ever use debugger in your life?
Almost every day. I use gdb both for JTAG targets in embedded systems, as in a programs running in my host.
Emacs has a front end for gdb. Some colleges use other front ends.
What I’m preventing to improve, in your opinion?
To improve GDB and its frontends so they match VC++ debugger experience.
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.
What is so superior about Visual Studios debugging experience that you're sure it can't be replicated anywhere else? I've never used it.
The UI is great but could be matched by other tools, what's superior are advanced features like the remote debugger.
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.
printf will get you far.
In C etc. printf calls also make all intermediate variables observable in the debugger. You can debug programs where you can't pause it. Etc.
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.
Is running windows inside a VM a possibility for you?
Or maybe even WSL?
No, but also.....why would you do that? If you're going to do 99% of your work inside a Windows VM, just.....run Windows?
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??
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.
> My jobs VPN only runs on Ubuntu. There is code in there that checks your OS.
You can fake the data via eBPF.
> But that's for now and needs me spending time fighting them.
As with anything else.
> sssd is starting some light GPO enforcement on my laptop.
Could be avoided via namespaces.
> systemd slowly moves ...
Could be thrown out of the system, unless you're happy RH user.
> Android is also theoretically multi distro
That is out of scope because I'm fine without it's HAL and other parts.
Sad state of affairs, their mobile version worked fine even in lynx.
> 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.
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.
> though why FreeBSD didn’t I’m not sure
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.
Linux was already dominant long before Ubuntu.
the answer is because of the AT&T lawsuit against university of California in the 90s that dragged and tainted the BSD code base.
>those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.
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!
They're putting effort into being a cloud corporate software provider.
Entra, outlook365, and cloud hosted solutions. VMs in the cloud are niche.
>outlook365
You probably meant office365, but it's been renamed to Microsoft365 :)
Do you mean Microsoft 365 Copilot[0]? : )
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.
What percentage of new computers are sold running windows again? I suspect the reports of their demise have been greatly exaggerated.
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.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/26/mac-market-share-growing-fast...
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.
I remember in the early win7 days when I built computers there were many powertools to debloat the install, I had fun running them.
Doesn't this exist today for W11 that makes most of the complaints mute? Or is MS getting better at the cat/mouse game?
That is mostly a thing on US school system.
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.
Two reasons why so at least professionaly:
- 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.
How will we interact with this AI?
Talking to machines is a horrible experience, especially if you’ve got loads of people all trying to do it in an open-plan office.
Operating systems and CPUs may come and go, but there’s plenty of life left in the mouse and keyboard yet.
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.
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.
This already sort of happened with kids using chrome books and android phones getting their first office job and having no clue about windows.
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...
"How did Microsoft go bankrupt?"
Two ways: slowly then all at once.
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.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
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. :(
I don't run Windows at home. My gaming PC is running Ubuntu. Very rarely do games not work perfectly. It's also usually underfunded indie games.
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.
I think you can approach this 3 different ways:
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.
[1] - https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-5...
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.
Compared to most people that don't have a dedicated PC it is certainly true. But for media consumption in general PC is quite fine.
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.
Oh yes I remember reading news about that and being dumbfounded how's that actually possible
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.
New Outlook is exactly the sort of thing that the modders would not want you to use anyway.
> compatible with Windows programs
It seems with each passing year this becomes less important, as more and more apps are either web based or cross platform.
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.
I wouldn't say it's Office365 as much as "What are my other options?"
MacOS is good option BUT cheapest laptop option is 1000 bucks. Dell has 16 inch with 16GB of RAM for 600.
There is Linux but Linux Desktop still is not ready and mass management of it is very painful.
So you default to Windows. It works-ish, won't break the bank and just about every piece of software you need works with it.
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.
Cheapest 16GB of RAM (Minimum I think for most workers) is 759 for 13 inch M3 Macbook Air. 15 Inch is 929.
That's getting affordable but still does not beat 600-700 decent Dell machines you can get.
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 $999.
The Mac will also have a faster SSD and (not sure about this) a faster memory bus architecture. And a better GPU and better ability to use Thunderbolt docks / have 3 external 4K displays.
Apple is still selling the M1 Macbook Air for 600$ at Walmart (only in the US).
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-MacBook-Air-13-3-inch-Lapto...
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.
Mac costs more but are easier to support from an IT perspective, at least that's what many say.
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"
Now, if they would just give us the Max.
LibreOffice is not a real contender to replace MS Office. The real alternatives are:
- OnlyOffice - WPS Office - Google Docs.
Most of the office apps sans excel are basically just the web apps though, office 365 for the most part is cross platform.
> To the average consumer, Windows doesn't matter much anymore.
> To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365
In between are a bazillion businesses who depend on couple of apps and/or devices that are Windows only or near enough.
Large enterprises are switching to Google Sheets. The largest private employer in Australia, for example, pretty much has switched to Sheets now.
Ah, young people. This is the company that innovated a brand new style of monopolization and then lost a monopoly case about it.
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.
We'll see how that works out for them.
They also just botched a price increase.
Microsoft is floundering right now.
XBox Game Pass looks a lot like the last straw to me. Looks like a(nother) cash grab.
"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." - Don Mattrick
Office on the web sucks though. Slow AF and can't handle large documents.
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.
[1]: https://reactos.org/
Sorry, but ReactOS is not seriously usable. Not to insult the work done on it but it is an experimental OS.
"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.
Who needs a brand when you have a monopoly?
> maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.
What made Windows great were the contracts with hardware manufacturers to have it installed by default on every single PC ever sold.
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
> Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand
Well their stock certainly isn't tanking. Do they care about anything else?
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.
If you _have_ to use Windows 11, check out this useful tool called Win11Debloat: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
Does this allow to:
- 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?
This is another good one: https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
Damage has been done, Windows has become synonymous with user-hostile ad/spyware OS. Everything under the "Windows" brand is meaningless to me now.
Can't think of a single feature Windows could add to get me to switch back from Linux.
> 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.
Pretty much.
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
It is still huge topic
I liked Windows 7. I also liked Windows XP SP2 before that.
But you’re right that since Windows 8, Windows is just something I’ve tolerated.
That being said, Windows 11 seems nice, but it looks like Microsoft is pulling the same stuff again.
Not true. I like Windows 11, and I think it's the best desktop OS out there.
Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels.
I understand that the Windows kernel is pretty advanced but I find difficult to find that it ends up in a good desktop OS (e.g. UX)
> 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.
>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).
> that sounds like a (graphics driver) bug.
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'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).
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.
And your proprietary vendors manage privacy limits for both of you.
As a .NET developer for 20+ years I’m down to my last Windows box - a gaming rig I pretend I have time to play on. Everything else is a Mac.
mac window management is borderline unusable and I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it.
Looking at Tahoe, seems things are getting worse.
Mac window management using gestures has been miles ahead of anything available in Windows for over a decade.
> I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it
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.
Raycast is all I need. AeroSpace if tiling windows is your thing.
> 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 really, the same people are doing their best to kill XBox brand as well.
By the way they also already did enough damage to those of us that were keen into doing Windows development, due to how WinRT has been managed.
Now only game developers, and big names with existing native applications are left.
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.
> 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.
ReactOS has been working on that for like, what, the last 20 years and still is far from generally usable.
> 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'm a linux fan but calling linux user-focused is insane.
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.
Developer goals drive the design, not users. It's how we ended up with such navel-gazing insanity as GNOME 3.
I think in Linux developers drive the design more than users.
Linux developers are the primary users of Linux if you think about it
There are no primary users. And no, Linux developers are a minority.
Lot of network admins, sysadmins, security -types.
Only for given value of user...
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...
Linux is user focused but not user friendly. Of course there are exceptions, anyone can use a steamdeck without ever having to leave the steam app.
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.
The stated "reason" makes no sense:
> 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.
The user isn't in focus here, it is about placing their often quite defunct products and to make people dependent.
These are probably the typical fail-upwards product manager decisions. Maybe Windows will sooner than later go the way of the Xbox.
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.
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.
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 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.
This depends on the bluetooth chip and its driver. It works better on some than others.
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.
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.
What flavor of Linux did you end up going with? Why?
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.
I think this change (and everything in Windows 11) is being driven by the MS Account PM watching telemetry and making number go up.
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 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.
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!
That was impressively delusional.
> having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc You mean all the stuff apple brought to personal computers?
By the way, you can use a Mac (and iPhone) without an Apple ID and there's no sign that this is changing.
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.
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.
> Short of corporate world - Excel/Sharpoint/AD
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.
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.
I have a Steam Deck and run Linux on all my machines and I am a pretty big Gamer. Typically I have no problems.
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.
The cheapest base M4 Mac Mini has 16 Gigs of RAM and plays AAA games written for Mac today.
The performance boost is needed when you are running Windows games under emulation.
Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux or Windows on ARM.
> 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.
I remember running warcraft 3 under Wine in a Lan party.
At one point, during a Dota match, every single Windows machine crashed. And my Linux machine was the only one left in the server.
So not only does it run faster but it's more stable too.
Back in 2005 or so I was playing WoW under Wine, and surprisingly it was faster on my crappy PC at that time, because it used less RAM!
Sorry, but DirectX games don't work on top of the Vulkan graphics API used by Linux without an emulation layer provided by the Proton fork of Wine.
Wine may not be an emulator, but Proton includes a completely necessary translation layer if you intend to play DirectX games on Linux.
On Mac, Apple provides an open source emulation layer, D3DMetal, to translate from DirectX to Metal which is used by Wine.
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).
>The cheapest base M4 Mac Mini has 16 Gigs of RAM and plays AAA games written for Mac today.
The frame rates are quite low on the base M4. Cyberpunk 2077 test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gID9S2hwJpU
I think you need an M4 Pro or a Max for a good gaming experience with AAA games.
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?
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.
If you have to play games, just have a separate Windows computer for that, and do everything else on a Linux box.
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.
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.
Dual boot seems like a more obvious recommendation? Or better still, play games on linux, except those that require kernel AC?
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.
If you can make it work, sure, but somebody will probably complain that it's too hard for the general population.
I agree, but I'm not sure that's acceptable to the general population
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.
> 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).
I like devbox (jetlify), you get nix with its packages but also integrates process compose for running services.
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.
The command + ~ shortuct is one of my favourite things about macOS; I wish Windows had that too.
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.
Time to get a LaTeX/Typst resume ;)
This is the way. Don't forget to include vectorized logos of your employers and use pdfsizeopt for the sub 100 KB flex.
You're forgetting business critical software outside of office that's windows only or windows/macos.
Stuff like Quickbooks, AutoCAD/Autodesk, off the top of my head
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.
Moving to cloud, or very rare for the general public to be aware of them.
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
If it isn't it will be, as non-subscription software is phased out by big companies.
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.
QB Desktop doesn't run reliably under WINE; it doesn't run reliably under Windows 11 for Arm, either.
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.
They've been saying this for years now.
The problem is there's no real alternative.
Your grandma is not going to use Linux. So the choice is between windows and mac.. and the truth is a lot of apps people use are windows only.
I don't see windows losing desktop share anytime soon.
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)
Hey, but Linux is just ideal for grandma! Its only competitor is Chrome OS. Well, and iPad OS for obvious reasons.
> and gaming on linux is rapidly becoming usable.
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.
My home PC runs OpenSuse Tumbleweed. A couple of days ago I bought Doom: The Dark Ages on Steam and guess what? It runs perfectly.
So yeah, even the most recent, graphically-intense AAA games run on Linux thanks to Proton.
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.
Yes, here are 3 PC games which don't run at all on Linux:
Halo Wars 2
Crackdown 3
Gears of War 4
The reason is that these are UWP-only games which are only available through the Microsoft store. Which means they will likely never run on Linux.
Overwatch, Guild Wars 2, Valorant.
???
Oh right. ‘Except for games with anti cheats’ - so like, at least half the market lol, and more than 90% of games by game time.
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.
From the top 100 most played Steam games I count 26 (including 5 of the top 10) which are unplayable on Steam Deck for one reason or another.
But not all popular games are available on Steam, Fortnite or Rocket League are examples.
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.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk... [1] https://turbo360.com/blog/azure-market-share
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?
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.
Yes, limitations are that some services do not come preinstalled by default.
Some like the Microsoft Store can be installed afterwards.
Some like Windows Mixed Reality cannot be installed afterwards.
So check carefully what you actually need and decide based on that.
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.
I am on an LTSC install. Installing the Microsoft store is as easy as typing `wsreset -i` into an admin powershell.
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).
Not everything can be installed easily, or at all. WMR is one example which cannot be installed.
> it is not a general-purpose operating system
Name a single missing part that destroys the "generalpurposeness" of the OS?
Wsl2 features like nested virtualization only work in the win11 version. The ltsc releases seem like the only viable option at this point.
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.
Does steam work on that version?
That's pretty much the only reason I use Windows these days.
Steam works, and so do very competitive games with picky anti-cheats!
Wait, is that a product that one can buy? It sounds like it would solve most of my issues with Windows.
You download directly from microsoft, here is a useful guide: https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
Did you find a good guide for setting it up?
how do you buy windows 10 LTSC without being an enterprise?
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.
how does that download get me an activation key for it? As far as i know, you cannot just pay for one license of LTSC
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):
and that video conveniently advertises an OEM key reseller as a sponsor.
G2A legit, Massgrave otherwise
Windows 11 Pro is similar in not-including all the MS junk. The updates are another thing.
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 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.
> if you want to allow offline login, you need to keep the hash/token to the Microsoft Account locally,
I'm not following. I thought the whole issue is that users _do not_ want to use microsoft account locally and that microsoft fights that.
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.
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.
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
Apple: free as in speech, not free as in Porsche.
Autounattend files are about to become far more popular...
And on that note, have to recommend this tool for them: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
All the lamentations of having to tinker with Linux to get it to work properly are rapidly approaching a nuclear level irony bomb...
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.
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.
you would also be perceptive enough to realise, you are resisting an openly hostile actor, and the apron strings should be cut.
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.
It doesn't excuse the issue, but it certainly makes it harder to step away from them solely on that argument.
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.
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.>While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens
Poor people. Surely Microsoft is fixing this by giving them a proper local skip that doesn’t bypass the other critical setup?
Presumably the business/enterprise editions still do?
Enterprise might but Professional sure doesn't.
I just installed a copy of 25H2 on a laptop with a previously saved Professional licence.
You can just choose to create a "work or school account" and then leave the domain name empty.
Interesting, will give that a try next time. I guess I never looked because I had assumed that option made you connect to an existing domain.
I've used that workaround on literally dozens of installations in the last few years :)
Maybe not for the long term; business/enterprise are mostly using domain accounts for non-server systems.
The requiring internet part is particularly egregious, wow.
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++...
I've found the start menu is perfectly responsive if you disable its internet results.
NOTE: I originally left this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45497893
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)
"critical"
Two things:
- 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...
I wonder which teams are working on these features. I'd like to meet with them in person. There are a lot to discuss.
They probably know exactly what your thoughts are about this change.
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.
The justification is money. Microsoft doesn't make any money off of offline accounts.
This sounds like you'd like to beat them up. What is what you'd like to know?
I'm assuming you can identify by the heavy drinking to drown feelings of self-loathing.
Their bank accounts are probably happy though..
Microsoft is not known for high compensation. Stable job and good WLB that is. Although that becomes a question as well with the recent layoffs.
You could discuss how huge their salaries are.
Bit the bullet and deleted the Windows partition from my Fedora dual boot. Good riddance. Will never give Microsoft another dime as long as I live
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 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.
If I was Microsoft I would want the latest version of Windows running on every machine there is - old/new/slow/fast.
It's a platform which means you need it everywhere.
Microsoft Windows has really lost its way.
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?
Been using kubuntu for 3 years. Will never use windows again. Win10 still there for once a year legacy app
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.
Its a hw lottery. I got random cheap lenovo yoga and never had issue. I run Bazzite dx.
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.
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!
Everything else has been fine.
Are you using FDE? Check your caching settings.
Good choice! I've been solo boot Linux for years and absolutely love it.
I recently tried out Kubuntu and am pleased. It's as Windows-like as I want it to be. The extra work to deal with drivers so far has been minor.
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.
I've used w11 on both private and work PC and had 0 issues except sound UI being not resizable sometimes and requiring restart
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.
This only affects the Dev Channel for now, Insider Preview Build 26220.6772. It needs this new ISO of course.
I did the "start ms-cxh:localonly" trick yesterday on a fresh install of Windows 11 25H2 and it worked fine, so...?
I have been holding off upgrading to windows 11, but it sounds like I should do it before I lose the ability to upgrade without an account.
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.
This is a bad idea. Now, with that established...
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.
They're really doing their best to make sure that people upgrade from Windows 10 to a Linux distro rather than Windows 11.
'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.
> 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.
yes torrenting is on the rise, and a lot more people seem to be aware of private torrents.
The year of the Linux Desktop was like 3 years ago with Proton becoming good and the kernel getting a ton of improvements.
2025 is surly the year of Linux desktop this time!
> 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.
Just contacting Apple support could maybe solve this.
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.
> 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?
Great question! You did configure it that way, so it might be worth asking yourself.
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).
Cool, great. That’s got nothing to do with Activation Lock.
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.
I'm guessing that's 6% increase in users not 6% market share
>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.
Microsoft wants you to have a laptop with the goal that you will use it to log on to work services or play games.
Apple wants you to have a tablet to spend money on apps.
You need hardware built outside of that paradigm to have a hope of avoiding a mess of locked down anti consumer nonsense.
>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.
They're not "arbitrary requirements". They're requirements to enable VBS, one of the largest leaps in kernel security history.
arbitrary requirements as in they could be disabled quite easily in early w11 builds by flipping a flag.
There's nothing depending on it that prevents OS to run.
>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.
> If you dont care about security
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.
> if you dont care about Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0, then you probably dont also care about security updates
Huh? I certainly care about the latter but not the former, and I doubt I'm in the minority.
Why, if you dont mind my asking?
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.
> Why, if you dont mind my asking?
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.
I've switched to Linux. It's easier at this point. It's less slick, but I absolutely do not trust MS any more.
If customers keep trying to do something … let them do it? Charge them to do it?
It’s crazy to me: folks quite clearly want to run Windows 11 without an account. What is it worth to Microsoft let someone do that? $12? $144? $1,728?
>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.
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? :)
> What are you gonna do, buy a non-"smart" TV? :)
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.
The problem is, the more you're willing to pay, the more you're worth to them.
(Which is also why so many services don't let you pay to get rid of ads.)
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.
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.
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.
Is it possible to run anything from apple without any accounts?
Both possible and trivially easy. Just don’t sign into an Apple account.
Works fine for macOS, not so much on iOS where you need one for the App Store
Question out of curiosity:
On todays hardware, it should be possible to run Windows in a VirtualBox on a Linux System, or am I wrong?
Thinking about this to be my next setup for the next machine (in 1 or 2 years)
Im mainly using corp & office software and MS dev tools - those should be useable in a virtualized Windows?
Any experience?
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)
> Any experience?
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
You can also check out quickemu. Uses qemu rather than virtualbox.
Why is _anyone_ still using Windows?
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.
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.
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.
You don't have any objection to the idea of being forced to use an online account? What if you lose access to your online account?
My multiplayer game has anti-cheat that needs it, Photoshop needs it, MS Office power user usage needs it.
RDP. Simply nothing in the same league on Linux.
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.
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.
Can't make a custom gaming rig with Mac. Linux gaming isn't quite there yet too.
> Linux gaming isn't quite there yet too.
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
Yeah it really comes down to online gameplay. The _only_ thing keeping me in microsoft's orbit is online gaming.
I'm eagerly awaiting for: "Windows Gamer Edition, get drops for your favorite games by using it!"
Serious question: why not just use a stand-alone gaming system (e.g. PlayStation, xBox)?
Don't really game much, but I did buy a PS4 just for the therapy of offline GTA5 beatdowns.
----
The only Microsoft in my house is a twenty year old Windows 7 Pro machine — it always just works.
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.
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.
where do you plug in the 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.
Because my job makes me
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.
Visual Studio Pro is my only reason
It just works without any tweaks. Also, Visual Studio, One Drive, One Note, (office apps in general).
Games with anti cheat :(
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.
some of us need to be productive at work
Altium and other dinosaurs that are still getting used to this newfangled "Windows" fad.
I have a whole Windows VM on my Mac for running Altium - would be amazing if they released a Mac and Linux version
Device drivers.
A lot of industrial/embedded hardware only ships with Windows drivers. It's super annoying.
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).
Hey Microsoft, are you trying to force me to NOT use Windows? Because that is what this feels like.
I think we can safely conclude that they decided to not care about this.
ive had two people ask me today, for "that linux thing"; "the one that lets you use your computer for free"
that is visceraly hilarious.
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.
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 only need Microsoft to run airgapped TurboTax, which for 2025 will require Windows 11.
Maybe it's time to switch tax return software.
FreeTaxUSA is great and web based.
Web-based isn't airgapped? Working in tech, I know what absolute slimeballs pretty much any tech company is about privacy and user data today.
So out of all options you use turbo tax?
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.)
ahhh yes the noted privacy respect of…checks notes…Intuit
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'.
With Proton in Steam, my last need for windows is gone, couldn't have happened soon enough.
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?
Nobody wants this. The "Stop! You're using it wrong" OOBE continues for profit reasons and profit reasons only.
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
How will this work for government clients that need a secure environment?
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.
There's actually a group policy to disable Microsoft accounts. No idea how well it works, but it's there
They will likely log into a domain. If they need something offline/air gapped, I'm not sure either.
LTSC is another option.
The LTSC edition is unaffected.
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.
mas
I really don't get this move.
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?
Would it kill them to let me specify my own username, as it appears in `c:\users\$username` ?
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
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.
Creating bootable USB disc of LTSC Enterprise IoT version of Windows by Rufus let you set up local account and skip it during installation.
LTSC is basically debloated version of Win with options to turn of updates or get just security ones.
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.
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.
Stop complaining about Windows and just use Linux. It's easy these days.
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.
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.
They are making it really hard for me to not just go Steam Deck and Linux.
Good for them. This and Copilot are the reasons I use linux full time now, after.. 30 years of being a Windows user?
Seriously you could install a modern distro with KDE on any computer and the average user would get by fine.
And more enterprises are starting to enable macOS and Linux as browser based tooling becomes the norm.
Why would anyone start with Windows at this point? And if I were Microsoft, why would I spend money to make life worse for the incumbent users?
All I need is to (easily) enable hibernate to work on Linux when booted with secure-boot, and to be able to set the scroll speed of my touchpad!
Windows for work. Linux and Mac at home.
The kids only get chromebook and Macs.
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.
Isn't Mac just as terrible? I use Windows and Mac for work and find both a terrible experience
Mavericks forever
Switched to Linux for gaming. Getting more FPS on Linux too.
Rufus and or Massgrave. It's all you need.
This is anti-consumer.
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.
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.
But hey, I know I am crying in the wilderness.
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 am glad I have habituated myself to the pains of using Linux on the Desktop for the last 20 years.
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.
They use to get their 3 prices per every week of your telemetry, even snoop-TV gives vendors more than a dollar per average day of owning.
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.
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.
middle management driven development is the mindset, not the people. it is the core of number go up at all cost
Laughing in Arch Linux.
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.
If you like playing video games with your friends and working in a normal job you'll likely be using Windows 90% of the time even if you loathe it.
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
It's just the reality. No one is asking you to do anything.
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.
Proud Linux user here.
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.
Next project is to get my CEO to make the switch.
good, the more they drive off Windows the better
Sure, Evil Microsoft.
But Apple is the one that normalized this.
...Like the developer account for mobile
...Like "sideloading"
And this is why this things should have been fought much harder from the beginning.
These companies are merely copying what the other is getting away with.
This is false, I use one of my Macs without logging in to Apple. Getting Xcode is the only culprit.
can you please stop your whataboutism
I wish people had this same enthusiasm for ios and andriod.
Thanks Microsoft!
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!
Can you use a Macintosh without an Apple account?
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.
What's the difference here?
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.
IIRC:
What you can do:
1. At setup time, you are not forced to provide any apple ID.
2. You can login to your notebook without needing Apple ID
3. Install apps directly (i.e not from app store)
What you cannot
1. Install apps from App Store
2. Get Apple care etc.
Fewer people use Macs and those that do are disproportionately more likely to think privacy and freedom are unimportant
> 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.
Use the last version of Win 10 LTSC iot or Win 11 LTSC
Security updates for years and no BS
It’s always the system where you don’t want the live account that they force you to use it.
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 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.
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:
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/
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.
> C# isn't going to be much use to me on Linux.
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.
Yes I am sick of constantly getting Copilot and One Drive shoved down my throat.
At some point we can use the Konami code to break out of the requirement right?
So many threads but all missing the point.
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.
Switch to Linux.
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 already putting your trust in some mysterious first party to not embed malware...
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).
Malware, maybe not. But adware...?
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.
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.
Well, Windows desktop/laptop market share is down to 70.2%, so it’s possible you’re correct.
In other news, Linux is over 5 now.