I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators. I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.
On the Windows side, things started going downhill starting with the Windows XP era, and on the Mac the annoyances began sometime in the mid-2010s.
It seems Microsoft, Apple, and other companies realized that they’re leaving money on the table by not exploiting their platforms. Thus, they’re no longer selling simple tools, but rather they are selling us services.
Yes, there are good Linux distributions that don’t annoy me, and the BSDs never nag me, but the problem with switching to these platforms is that I still need Microsoft Office and other proprietary software tools that are not available outside “Big Tech.” There are other matters that make switching away from Windows and macOS challenging, such as hardware support and laptop battery life.
Easy answer to your last point: Work machine and Non-work machine. If I'm working for a company and the company needs MS Office, they will give me a machine with MS Office. I will treat that machine like a radioactive zone. Full Hazmat suit. Not a shred of personal interaction with that machine. It exists only to do work on and that's that. The company can take care of keeping it up to date, and the company's IT department can do the bending over the table on my behest as MS approaches with dildos marked "Copilot" or "Recall" or "Cortana" or "React Native Start Menu" or "OneDrive" or whatever.
Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.
This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.
A variation I've done occasionally is to run the Microsoft Windows software in a VM on my Linux laptop.
When I last had the MS office suite inflicted upon me, a couple years ago, I was able to run it in a Web browser on Linux.
It's important to remember, though, that these measures probably won't work long-term.
Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame. (It's usually not originating bottom-up from the ICs, and I know some nice people from there, but upper corporate is totally like that, demonstrating it again and again, for decades.)
Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
I like this in theory but as someone who travels often with my work laptop, it's nice to be able to use the same hardware for personal use as carrying a second computer is impractical regarding carry weight and packing.
Apple used to allow installing a second copy of MacOS without it being subject to the work profile - completely isolated from the work partition (because you could ignore the "set up work profile" prompts after installation).
I would simply restart my MacBook into the personal install after work & on weekends.
Apple have recently updated the MacOS installer to be always online so I can no longer install a seperate MacOS partition without a work profile.
I ended up buying an ROG Ally but it's honestly not that portable. The power brick is almost the same size as the handheld and it occupies about as much space as a laptop in my carry on.
I can do work on the computer running BSD/Linux, save it in a text-only format, transfer it to the work computer then import into Excel, PowerPoint or Word
It's been over 20 years since I had a home computer running Windows (and well over 30 since I've used a mouse)
I think the GP comment is evidence that Microsoft can get away with what it is doing. Even people who can use Linux or BSD will not stop using Windows at home no matter how obnoxious it becomes
There is a substantial difference between complaining and actually taking action and the company seems to recognise that
Same. Work provides the idiot box. I give it its own segmented network too, cause work spyware and all... then run a personal workstation with linux next door to it.
The problem with Linux is that there is no legitimate place to direct your rage at. It is free, nobody owes you anything and every installation is different. When Windows is awful, virtually everyone is being sympathetic. When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
> Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates
Even Windows 95 came bundled with MSN on the desktop which had a paid monthly fee to access. And its lack of automatic updates was a real problem, as you had to manually find the service packs and security patches. The automatic updates in Windows XP were vastly more convenient.
Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.
> Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.
That was true right up until companies started routinely pushing updates that broke things, removed useful features, added user hostile features, or even outright ads. If I have to give up automatic security updates to not have my software get worse on me over time, I will gladly do so. I would rather have security updates and not have the user-hostile stuff, but we seem to be unable to get that, so the next best thing would be no automatic updates at all.
Installing Internet Explorer 4 on Windows 95 opened up the first version of Windows Update, when it started as a web app with some custom ActiveX plugins. Windows 98 was the first time Windows Update had a bundled link in the OS, and shortly after Windows 98 introduced a "Critical Update" notification that would prompt users to open Windows Update.
Automatic updates arrived in Windows ME.
It's interesting the timeframes on Windows are often earlier than you think they are. Admittedly, a lot of users skipped Windows ME and its strange reputation, so Windows XP may have been their first time seeing automatic updates.
I know you won't believe me, and my precious karma score may suffer by stating reality: you don't NEED security updates. A properly hardened server with no patches will outlive cobbled together trash library patch over garbage code pasted from ai vibing script kiddies. Would you shake your head in disbelief if I told you 'security patches' are the fix delivered by a dealer to quell your shivers?
Give me functionality updates, cumulative service packs, and the just after BBS days when an exploit discovered in your software meant it was used by no one, anywhere, because we no longer trust your coding or your 'fix'
The internet was a big part of it. Most home users did not have internet access in the System 7 days. When it came out in 1991 no country had more than 1% of its population with internet access. By the time Windows 95 came out around 10% of US users had internet access.
It wasn't until 2001 that the US reached 50% of users having internet access.
Without internet there wasn't really a good way to distribute updates to most users.
As a developer in that era working at a company that made software for PCs and Macs it was great. It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.
We'd only make more money from someone who bought our software if that software made a good enough impression that they bought more of our software. We'd lose money if any software went out with enough bugs or a confusing enough interface or a poorly enough written manual that a lot of people made a lot of calls to our toll free tech support.
This was great because it largely aligned what developers wanted to do (write a feature complete program with a great UI and no bugs) and what management wanted (happy users who do not call tech support).
With internet giving us the ability to push updates at almost zero cost and as often as we want people who release incomplete programs early and add the missing parts in updates are going to outcompete people who don't release until the program is complete and nearly bug free.
Once you get there it is not much of a leap to decide that what you are really selling is not software to do X but rather the service of providing software to do X. Customers subscribe to that service and you continuously improve its ability to do X.
> It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.
On the topic of Windows, this is why Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility was and is such a huge deal.
It wasn't so easy to just update your software if Windows ever made breaking changes, and your users would, rightly, be pretty ticked off if suddenly what they bought no longer works because they upgraded from Win 95 to 98, or 98 to XP.
You had confidence that you could buy a program once, and it'll just happily continue to run for the foreseeable future.
This also made businesses happy. If you liked a particular version of a software product, you bought it, ran it on Windows, and could rest easy knowing it'll just continue to work through version upgrades of the OS.
I stopped using Windows over 15 years ago and moved to Ubuntu that was running all the servers. Unfortunately Ubuntu decided to do the same garbage trying to shove their pro crap down my throat, made it impossible to remove (by making a desktop requirement) and resorted to the game of trying to re-enable it during updates
I finally moved everything to just Debian itself that never nags me and just works with everything I need, including games (thanks to steam)
Only time I boot a Win10 VM is to compile apps for for windows, otherwise it has zero use or need anymore
I supported Ubuntu when they started but gave up on them after they sent people's local file searches to third parties so they could push amazon ads. They're totally corrupted as far as I can tell.
I too remember the days when every unpatched Windows PC was a member of a botnet. Perhaps less fondly than you.
And thankfully this was before a time when everyone’s computers and phones had access to their bank accounts, credit cards, and before email was the gateway to virtually your entire life.
I miss when I felt that personal computers were a new wave of democratized capital, a kind of affordable factory for individual owners to use pursuing their own autonomy and power... and not just for programmers.
I underestimated the economic forces trying to turn them into devices for enforcing the interests of a large company onto the owner and turning the owner into a renter.
Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364[1]. If we can find enough people willing to pay $364 for an OS that values privacy and doesn't push needless upgrades, that'll be a start. But XP itself was probably priced based on the belief that people would be upgrading in a few years to Windows Vista. So we might need more than that.
[1] - According to minneapolisfed.org, which uses the official economist-approved inflation rates. Not that I'm implying that there's anything wrong with that. I have all of the orthodox beliefs about inflation that a good citizen should have.
Windows 11 Pro is still $200 [1]. Of course most people don't pay anything directly as it's bundled with their PC and they won't think to question why that is.
> Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364
I assume you used the overall CPI rate rather than the software rate. but using the Software CPI its more like $58. and that seems like an easier sell (for the user, maybe not the developer).
Hardware support isn't all that bad anymore. Certainly better than it was when I started using Linux.
It isn't perfect. You'll probably have a better experience with AMD than Nvidia GPUs, most fingerprint readers probably won't work, and newly released hardware might not have drivers for a few months, but most stuff just works.
> I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.
I 'member the days of Win 98, Win ME and Win XP... made good money cleaning up malware - browser toolbars, dialers, god knows what - from computers. Some came from the hellholes that were Java, ActiveX or Flash, some came from browser drive-by exploits served from advertising networks, but others just came from computers that were attached directly to the Internet from their modems.
And I also 'member Windows being prone to crashes, particularly graphics drivers, until Windows 7 revamped the entire driver model.
Oh, and (unrelated) I also 'member websites you could use to root a fair amount of Android and Apple phones.
All of that is gone now, it has gotten so, so much better thanks to a variety of protection mechanisms.
Security and upselling are orthogonal; I can make a secure operating system that doesn’t notify the user of OneDrive, iCloud, and other services.
Things get more nuanced when we talk about other types of notifications and about whether updates should be automatic or always require a user’s explicit consent. I personally believe that a key tenet of personal computing is that the owner of the computer, not the hardware or software vendor, should have full control over the hardware and software on the computer. This control is undermined when systems are designed in ways to give users less control. There may be legitimate security benefits to mandatory automatic updates, for example, but there are risks, such as buggy updates leading to broken installations or even lost data, and there’s also having to deal with unwanted UI/UX changes.
As a power user, developer, and researcher, I want control over my computing environment. Unfortunately Windows and macOS have been trending toward more paternalism, more nagging, and more upselling. Thankfully Linux exists, but at the cost of needing to switch away from convenient proprietary software tools like Microsoft Office. I can do without Word or Excel, but PowerPoint is what keeps me on Office (I’ve tried LibreOffice and the Beamer LaTeX template). I’m also concerned about hardware getting increasingly locked down, which will hurt Linux.
The size of the botnets and raw bandwidth they have access to now is staggering. (DDoS, "Residential Proxies", ”Anti-Censorship VPNs”, etc. All just compromised residential devices.
Can you provide some details on the reasons for needing MS Offfice? I'm genuinely curious. What does LibreOffice do differently that makes it a problem for you to use? Personally my only complaint is the performance of LO, which could be better.
I'm not GP but I do know it's rare to open an existing .docx in LibreOffice and have it look right; who knows what it looks like in Word after I've edited and saved it. It's fine creating new documents, and Excel/Calc is better than Word (inherent in being more structured I suppose), but it's not a drop-in replacement. I've used web Office365 when necessary though, not Windows.
Do not connect it to the internet. Problem solved.
Basically anything in a social network needs to learn to defend itself against threats. Make computer a hermit, and it can go without updates for a long time.
(Oh, but you don't like that? Well, Microsoft doesn't like getting in the news for some worldwide botnet of all Windows 10 machines. I bet they'll figure this out sooner or later.)
Microsoft Office somewhat works in the browser. Certainly good enough for me, although 99% of my actions is upload document to onedirve, open it in web MS Office version, export to pdf and then read with standard tools.
> Microsoft Office Online works fine on Linux. In fact, it’s superior to native MS Office in terms of stability.
It may work for your case - good. Many companies have custom VBA macros that runs on their Excel sheets to get data or validate it. Try to use a document like this on your online Office and you will understand why most Office users can't easily migrate.
What kills me is there seems to be no option for accounting that is acceptable to CPAs besides being held captive paying whatever QuickBooks cloud demands. It's not like dual entry accounting has changed much in 500 years. There are bank integrations and service contracts (notably Apple Card wasn't willing to pay licensing fees for the quickbooks file format, so you simply couldn't syncronize your accounts with your spending, instead falling back to manual import), but they would not make investors happy by merely offering bank connection services
(God forbid banks be required by law to offer a web connector that allows you to request your own data. A workaround I've tried is to have my bank send me an email alert on every transaction over a penny, so at least I have a record, but never got around to setting up an auto import from my inbox)
I've heard that many times, but the 3 accounting firms I've worked with for my business didn't care what accounting software I used. They were all happy to work with Gnucash so long as I could provide the needed reports, all of which were pre-configured in Gnucash. Two were small firms, but one was part of a major national accounting firm/franchise.
> I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators.
> System 7 and Windows 95
If Windows 95 was the complexity level of a pencil to you, Win 10/11 is merely a color pencil. You should be fine getting rid of the nagging and adapting it to your needs, it hasn't become 10x or 100x more complex, merely incrementally more.
> Microsoft [...] not exploiting their platforms.
That's a phrase I didn't expect. What part of Microsoft do you feel was leaving money on the table, as they were sued by basically the whole globefor their business practices ?
Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out?
There is no price/performance improvement. Nor will there be for the next five years or so. NVidia says to expect 10% price increases each year. DRAM prices have doubled, and Samsung says not to expect price cuts. Micron just exited the retail RAM business.
Microsoft is trying to escape this trap by pivoting to Windows as a subscription service. It will get worse, not better.
Yes. So Microsoft (which manufactures hardware itself and has close ties to other hardware manufacturers) needed to find... other ways to, er, motivate people to buy new hardware anyway. Which brings us back to the blog post we are commenting on.
Not sure Windows as a subscription service is the end goal though. But maybe we should all wish for M$ to do that, maybe that would be what's needed to finally bring about the Year of The Linux Desktop™.
I don't think selling more hardware is the primary motivation. The motivation is ensuring everyone has TPM 2.0 enabled on their device.
This allows Microsoft to protect parts of their software even from the user that owns the hardware it's running on. With TPM enabled you finally give up the last bit of control you had over the software running on your hardware.
Open source drivers, and a sense that Linux support will forever be top priority, would be a motivator for me. Most of my tech spend has been with Valve in the past few years. I'd love if there was another company I actually enjoy giving my money to.
But that is squandered by piss-poor programming and stupid visual gimmicks.
I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.
You're not wrong. But, I recently did the mistake of upgrading my iPad to version 26 (the liquid glass version). I had a relatively smooth experience on my 6 year old tablet which now runs painfully slowly. Even scrolling through different parts of home-screen lags.
My point being, with time performance might go up. But instead of that making my device faster/long-lasting, developers use that extra performance to cram in more stuff, at the end of which I come out only slightly better if not worse (as is in my case)
You're not wrong, but I was disappointed recently by how well an eleven-year-old Macbook Air still works. I installed NixOS on it, and it's still pretty usable even on modern websites.
An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.
My only complain is that nowadays laptops are usually poorly built, so unless one purchases an expensive guarantee, anything beyond the default guarantee is not guaranteed.
And the manufacturers are in a quest to remove as many keys as they can from the keyboard. Like you can hardly find any light laptop today with page up/down keys anymore. Why?.... Haven't these guys heard of keyboard shortcuts?
I’m actually happy about DRAM prices and hope more people share your mindset. This is the only thing that can force developers to start optimizing memory usage instead of externalizing the costs onto the poorest users.
I sincerely hope it works out this way instead of pricing out open sourced development. A couple open sourced projects changed their licensing to help mitigate the increased cost burden from skyrocketing hardware costs. It'll be a sad and potentially dangerous day if most people are permanently priced out.
I'm getting to that point where I may need to upgrade. Now I need to delay it more because AI is gonna make electronics even more expensive than the tarriffs in 2026.
2026 seems to just be becoming the "please don't break" era unless I can find some proper work this time. Car is on its last legs, a variety of housing appliances to repair, computer I use professionally. If nothing else, I upgraded my phone this year so that should get me through 2028 at least.
Well it also means it could be a good time to buy so you won't have to pay even more overprice for the same performance years down the line.
I just bought one a good month ago. My old one was over 10 years old, not worn out, but not upgradeable to Win 11. I had been thinking waiting one more year before the security updates to Win10 are out... But I bought in when the first stories hit of the DDR5 price rises - at that time there had 'only' been a doubling, now the price is a further 3x of what I paid a good month ago. I thought it might be a good time to buy given the machine was so old and component prices were going up, and might for a long time.
But yeah, performance improvements aren't what they used to. Part of the reason is that normal things were already felt so fast on the old one ;-) But I did get a much better gfx cards allowing some games that were unplayable before, and I think the CPU upgrade was needed for that as well, and then you might as well overhaul the machine. I also went from 16 to 64 GB, and the 16 GB had been a bit too little for some things.
Any computer that can't run Windows 11 is almost a decade old. There has been plenty of improvement. Compare a laptop with a high end Intel i7 7920HK to even a lower end part like the Core Ultra 5 226V. Right now prices on pre-builts and laptops aren't totally reflecting the craziness at least.
A decade in computing used to mean revolutionary improvements:
- from the C64 to the Pentium
- from the Playstation 1 to the Xbox360
- from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.
Each of these in roughly a decade.
But 2015-2025 in terms of desktop PCs? Some decent (but not revolutionary) steps forward with GPUs, and much more affordable+speedy SSDs. But everything else has been pretty small and incremental.
And when enthusiasts upgrade, the old parts usually find new homes. My old 6th-gen i7 from a decade ago still has more than enough power for my Dad to use as a home PC for basic photo editing, web browsing, and spreadsheets. But Win10 end-of-life wants to turn that machine into e-waste.
My daily desktop is mostly 2012 vintage. This hardware is still in use and works fine.
For what it's worth, that machine is being used while I upgrade my 2001 Computer Of Theseus once more. It's now getting it's third motherboard with CPU - this one salvaged from a 2018 or 2019 gaming machine. It's on its second case, and has seen more hard drive and memory upgrades than I can count - all of them piecemeal. Other than perhaps the motherboard screws and hard drive screws, I'm not sure if anything actually purchased in 2001 still survives in there. Maybe the power cable and pc speaker. And I don't remember ever replacing the rear case fan now that I'm looking at it.
Many budget laptops from 2020 don't support Windows 11. HP laptops with AMD A4-9125, HP notebooks with AMD A6-7310 APU, HP Envy x360 models with first-generation AMD Ryzen processors.
The software I use for hobbies is locked in to windows. A lot of extremely good software in the DIY world is locked to windows.
Coincidentally I can run it all on a 10 year old PC. I see no reason I need to upgrade. I’d happily pay a small yearly fee for patches.
But that’s not why Microsoft did all of this. Their goal is to Hoover all your data into their cloud and lock your PC down so you can’t do anything but use their stuff. Their profit numbers are insane despite losing marketshare. It’s working because the current CEO is a ruthless non-tech moron.
People want to hate on Microsoft. Rightfully so. Apple has done the same thing. Once you’re locked into the Apple ecosystem it’s hard to switch. They push iCloud and Siri on you at every turn. They just made a “one OS” choice so it doesn’t feel as bad.
Anyone who says Linux solves all the problems has not tried to make something like solidworks and masterCAM run on it. I love Linux, I use it on servers, but it has 3% marketshare for a reason.
I have sub 1year old enterprise CPUs in my home lab. Disabling TPM is the first thing I do on bring up. Assuming that's a hard requirement, how do I install w11?
2020 Apple MacBook pro has an i9-9880HK, more than enough, but lacks TPM2.0. The issue is this is just a waste of resources and money for a large number of people and the TPM2.0 requirement is silly.
Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS.
Between these and services that suddenly suffer from amnesia and spamming me with marketing notifications and emails after months or years of silence, it’s becoming more tiring to use any service that grows significantly enough where they don’t need to care about what their users actually want.
The worst is when the only 'dismiss'-option is "I will do it later"... even if you have no intention of ever doing it... essentially forcing you to lie. It has been a while since I've seen it though, so that's progress!
> Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS.
I can offer a slightly different perspective. I remember Microsoft from the 90s and early 2000s. And while technical details differ, their attitude towards users didn't change that much.
I used Rufus to make a Windows 11 installer USB drive that bypasses the TPM check and online account setup and a couple of other things. I've been using that along with O&O Shut Up 10++, and Firefox with uBlock Origin to refresh computers for local folks.
With the "requirements" check bypassed, Windows 11 actually runs on the Intel 1st gen Core i-series and newer, as well as any Ryzen CPU and, I think, a couple of earlier AMD generations. (It requires the popcount instruction, which isn't present on the Core 2 and older.)
Anything older gets Windows 10 IoT which gets updates until 2032.
One of the reasons I made the jump to Linux was the level of effort it took to disable all the shit that I don't want Windows to do. It became easier to just install Linux (Ubuntu, PopOS) and not have to futz with configuration to turn a bunch of unnecessary 'default on' stuff off - just get on and use the thing.
Wait so the TPM check is not some kind of real Windows 11 limitation? They could make an option to bypass this check (with all kind of "I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING" checkboxes I assume), they just chose not to do it? This is madness
They just really, really want to force the use of bitlocker on drives, which makes both "evil maid" attacks and data recovery harder. Coincidentally they're also trying to make everyone put everything in OneDrive.
Yes. I think that initially there was even official documentation from Microsoft for how to bypass the check, although I can't find that now, just "unofficial" things like this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2121461/.... (The top two comments have two different ways of bypassing the check: a command line flag for the installer and a registry change.)
The Rufus way will break on updates. But there is a fully supported version of Windows 11 that doesn't have those requirements. Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC
So far updates work fine. It may change eventually, but as I noted in another comment, it's been 4 years, and none of the updates have required a TPM yet.
The most egregious thing in recent iterations of Win11 is that a fresh installation will basically map all of your home folder to OneDrive. My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, etc. A recent Windows update also told me that I need OneDrive now to back up my files. Yup, apparently you really, really need it.
Now Windows 11 also pops up a scary security notification saying Windows Security found a problem, then when you click on it it tells you that you're not using OneDrive and you should turn that on immediately.
This threw me so hard when I grabbed a cheap laptop from Costco with win11 pre installed. I was saving files to c:/users/me/desktop and then when I opened Desktop in File Explorer, my shit was gone.
Worse is that the notification for this “error” telling me I couldn’t back up without OneDrive was behind the little dot in the restart/logout menu in the start menu, which (until now) only showed me that updates were required. Now that they’ve infested that notification with ads there’s no reason for me to ever look at it again. Good job, Microsoft.
My dad has been raving because he discovered that his Windows computer has been uploading all of his pictures to OneDrive. He doesn't remember an option to enable that behavior and can't find any ways to simply turn it off. This is on top of the other nags and sketchy behavior that Windows has been pushing on him normally. He's fed up with it
The silver lining is that my dad's finally getting a new Linux machine for Christmas :^)
Windows 11 not only reinstalls OneDrive and Teams with every major upgrade, but also peppers the task scheduler with numerous runners to make changes to your system for things like OneDrive, Teams, and Edge.
Linux has made an insane amount of progress in recent years. Atomic distros like Bazzite and Aurora are so polished, modern, easy to use, and virtually unbreakable. Even most Windows games work perfectly out of the box (often better than on Windows). Anyone who tried Linux in the past and wasn't happy, should take another look. These distros are so incredible it's hard to believe.
Meanwhile Windows has been getting worse and worse. Completely unreasonable and unnecessary hardware requirements, spyware, constantly running antivirus and other processes you don't want, forced updates and reboots, shoving AI down your throat. In other words, you pay money to have a worse experience and less control over your own PC.
I've been ideologically opposed to Windows for a while, but a few years ago Linux required many trade-offs and compromises, to the point I wouldn't have recommended to most people. But now things are completely different and I would happily recommend it to anyone except those who have a hard requirement for MS software (or Adobe).
Okay, I’ll bite. Tell me the linux laptop to get, and the distro to use. Cost is no issue, but suspend/hibernate has to work and so does fractional scaling. Also WiFi.
I have an Acer Predator Helios 16. I have been running Kubuntu on it for around a year with almost zero issues. The only one I had was issues with secure boot and Nvidia drivers. I play WoW, Helldivers, and a bunch of other smaller games with no issue.
For many types of users, Windows is no longer viable. I have friends who work at a .NET shop and most of that team now uses Macs. Unthinkable just a few years ago. Meanwhile, I checked ProtonDB and now 90% of my Steam library is Platinum or Native. So I finally switched my gaming PC to Linux. Microsoft's priorities are elsewhere, Windows doesn't have a bright future.
Yeah. It really does seem that Microsoft is giving up on... everything? Like Xbox is kinda out, Windows is not great, and their AI never comes up as meaningful.
I wouldn't personally work for them ever. I've only heard bad things about their codebase... and I know people like to complain, but it's usually comedy levels of bad.
Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use.
I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
>I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I've been using Arch for about two months now. It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction because I have two literal decades of experience using a windows machine. That experience has value and the idea of throwing it away is a barrier.
The more likely option than any of these excellent free options is going to be MacOS… just because your average user with even semi-technical inclination does not want to use LibreOffice Present; they want PowerPoint.
I have just seen this first hand with my significant other: they are very technical and more than capable of it, but have zero interest in learning Linux and instead just bought a MacBook on Black Friday specials when their 5 year old HP laptop finally got too annoying to use.
I literally only use Windows for games. And I guess now RealityScan which is gaming adjacent.
If I had the confidence that I could play a new release on Linux day 1 without trading an enormous amount of performance, I wouldn't need Windows at all.
Depending on your hardware and gaming needs, the current state of Linux gaming may already be enough.
I run Arch with an Nvidia GPU (which historically had poor Linux support compared to AMD), and I’ve been able to play 100% of the games that I used to play on Windows with no noticeable performance decrease.
There is one significant issue with Dx12 on nvidia, but even that has been root caused and should be fixed next year.
I think it would be less daunting for many if there were 1 or 2 popular alternatives to rally around. Including window managers / desktop environments. (Granted, it's nice they can all coexist peacefully.)
There are a handful of popular Linux distros. Ubuntu is probably the most beginner-friendly one with the most staying power; it's the easiest place to start if you have no other ideas/requirements.
The thing is, a healthy ecosystem thrives on diversity. Rallying behind one or two tends towards a monoculture.
I think Haiku is in that "last 5%" phase. They have something that is 95% of the way there, it's 95% cool, but frustratingly, that last 5% is really important; there's a lot of boring, thankless work with any software that has broad reach.
Most people don't like doing it, but in order for the operating system to be "good", you really need most of this unsexy stuff to work; you need to be able to easily install WiFi drivers, you need to support most modern video cards, you need to suss out the minutia of the graphics APIs, you need to test every possible edge case in the filesystem, you need to ensure that file associations are consistent, etc.
I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I respect so much about the Wine project. It's been going on for decades, each release gets a little better, and a lot of that work is almost certainly the thankless boring stuff that is absolutely necessary to get Wine to be "production ready".
I ran Haiku a bit on an old laptop, and I do actually like it. It's ridiculously fast and snappy (even beating Linux in some cases), and I really do wish them the best, but as of right now I don't think it's viable quite yet. I'm not 100% sure how they're going to tackle GPU drivers (since GPU drivers are almost an entire OS in their own right), but I would love to have something FOSS that takes us out of the codified mediocrity of POSIX.
I have one machine that runs Windows (apart from one Windows 11 VM on my Mac laptop I use for work), all this nonsense has got me to install Fedora on a separate M2 drive on it, and I haven't booted up Windows in a few days now. Will be an interesting experiment, I've run it before but more for fun, but will try to go as full time on that computer as possible.
My boomer mother in law could handle Linux whether it be GNOME or KDE. What she cannot handle is not being able to put in a DVD of Turbo Tax 20xx and double click the install button. Nor can she handle not having the native Outlook client, or Microsoft Word.
Yes there are alternatives, and possibly even good enough web versions of these tools, but most of the world isn’t like you and me.
To be honest I think she can handle LibreOffice. Double-click to open file (can be docx), start typing and click save when done. Open any MS Office file. I really don't get the religuous attachment to MS Office.
I do worry sometimes about fonts. The default Arial replacement should be geometrically idential and thus not lead to issues. TBH I don't know if there are significant rendering issues between LO and MS Office, as I always use PDF. I sometimes upload it to Google Docs to see if it's displayed identically. So far I've never ran into an issue. TBH I think LO is better except for the performance which is okay but not great.
At this point Office programs are commodity. Apple has good options. Google has. And any Linux distro will come with LO. Really a non-issue I think. Even for older people.
Microsoft with the push to require TPM 2.0, that isn't really required, is responsible for huge amounts of new e-waste. Any green initiative they claim is out the door.
Im not going to do the support for my kids not using windows along with the schools using O365 and such. So found a refurb business laptop for them on the one without TPM2. Popped linux on the old one and it went from slow to fast for OS related things and not a terrible machine but snappy. Like, it's a 10yr old i5 but that was enough for sims4, office, and minecraft. It's crazy how much compute performance Windows is taking from its users.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]
"ProductVersion"="Windows 10"
"TargetReleaseVersion"=dword:00000001
"TargetReleaseVersionInfo"="22H2"
Sets the underlying Registry keys for the Group Policy "Select the target Feature Update version". It tells the Windows Update service to select updates for a specific feature update instead of offering latest.
I get what you're saying, but OS vendors could prevent themselves from running arbitrary code, even from themselves, without the user's authorization if they really wanted to. I'm not sure it is in anyone's best interest since it would affect everything from security updates to automatically installing device drivers (e.g. people would be left with insecure systems or would claim Windows is broken since most would not understand the prompts). It would also be difficult to prevent Microsoft's marketing department from sneaking a trojan horse into things like security update.
Make it do the security stuff out-of-the-box, allow the user to change ANYTHING they want, including turning off the security stuff. Linux! It's in everyone's best interest.
The average user is not able to understand the code that is running and the 99th percentile user does not want to spend the time to understand the code.
I mean.. how is this different from any OS distribution? Apple can push whatever. So can Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo. Unless im literally running Linux From Scratch im at the mercy of maintainers to do whatever they want.
What are you talking about? It's my machine. I authorized the running of certain kinds of software from Microsoft. It's not supposed to be a running authorization for them to reach in and do whatever they want on it.
I run this as the first step on any new Win 11 machine, the recommended defaults remove nearly all annoyances I care about. It's a popular tool that's been around for years with a lot of users so isn't some random repo, and it's just Powershell so pretty easy to understand what it's doing if you want to audit the code yourself.
After running it once, I've seen nothing that I would consider an "ad" on Windows 11, and search looks only at the filesystem without any web/store trash. Somewhat ironically, it makes for a cleaner experience than MacOS where I regularly get spammed by Apple trying to cross-sell me something (iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, etc).
(FWIW, I have also never needed to re-run after an update or anything, based on 6+ full Win11 installs across three different devices.)
I hope you researched Linux driver support for that model first. I share the dissatisfaction with the direction of Windows -- but their driver library is unparalleled. Linux CAN run great on lots of machines, but it has nowhere near the hardware support.
My usb scanner would like to have a word with you. Its last supported driver was for windows 2000 and it still works well on Linux.
Hardware support vary between the 2 operating system and new stuff may be supported earlier on windows but I can't say that windows driver library is unparalleled, quite the opposite actually.
There are only really two big bloches when it comes to drivers these days: Wifi and Nvidia. And even Nvidia at-least works if you've got a modern card, so you won't be stuck with no output, you'll just get worse performance. Wi-fi you really should double-check though if you need that.
Some niche accessories also have issues, or at least niche features on those accessories.
I've not really seen that much of a problem with Linux drivers being available recently while the quality problem of windows drivers being unreviewed code seems like its partly addressed for central monopolies but still in the peripherals if you'll pardon the pun.
That may well be the case except for my Kyocera printer. I never managed to get the device to stay online for more than 5 minutes on Windows 10. Wanting to print a letter was actually a hassle taking ~15 minutes. When I plugged it into my Nobara(Fedora) PC it just worked - I didn't even have to specify a driver or anything. It can now even print barcodes. It couldn't with Windows 10, no matter what driver I tried. Also: KB505518 from April 2025 disabled all my USB ports - there was never a fix.
Most people with ad blockers don't realize how unusable the web is for those that don't have ad blockers. I think most would agree this is a poor state that industry incentives have landed us in, and with the web being distributed, it's hard to know how to fix.
Similarly those who use Linux probably don't realize how bad Windows has got recently.
Microsoft has managed to replicate this awful ux problem on a system that they entirely control...
Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled.
0 updates can be applied immediately.
108 additional security updates can be applied with ESM Apps.
Learn more about enabling ESM Apps service at https://ubuntu.com/esm
every time I log in. Or
> You do not have a valid subscription for this server. Please visit www.proxmox.com to get a list of available options.
Ubuntu broke new ground when it came out but around the time they switched to the Gnome desktop, they stopped focusing on a great desktop experience and it was surpassed by other, better distributions. I'd recommend trying Linux Mint instead as it has all the greatness of Linux without the crap from Canonical (eg. SNAPs).
I haven't recommended Ubuntu to anyone for years but there are still people recommending it because it was great years ago and they don't seem to know it's now lagging other distributions.
That’s if you run a OS version older than 5 years. You can still update to a newer Ubuntu version for free and get another 5 years if you pick an LTS version.
Ultimately, I didn't switch to Linux because I wanted to. I switched to Linux because Microsoft became so actively hostile to me I felt like I didn't have any other choice.
No Microsoft, I'm not buying new hardware just to get the new OS. No, I'm not going to let you nag me every single day until I get pissed off enough to. No, I will not tolerate all the little things in your OS that piss me off everyday. Your software sucks. Your filesystem sucks. Your constant nagging sucks. I don't want your cloud TPM security bullshit and I DEFINITELY don't want Copilot or Recall.
Seriously Microsoft: fuck you.
Giving up being able to play certain games - which require me to install malware into my computer anyway - is a small price to pay to have my sanity and freedom back. I own my computer, not you. Goodbye and good riddance.
I already used MacOS and Linux for work anyway. But don't worry Apple, you're riding that line pretty dangerously too - you're gonna be next on the chopping block if you don't get your act together. Framework Desktop is looking like a mighty capable replacement for my Mac Studio.
Very relatable. It was so scary when I jumped ship in 2021. It was simply no longer acceptable to stay on such a hostile platform. I was willing to accept a huge downgrade in terms of usability and functionality. It turned out to actually be a lot more pleasant to use. Better software, more software, better performance. Just better all around.
Use Rufus it'll disable hardware requirements, without hassle. You will need an iso. If you know someone with 11 have them download it. Otherwise download the generic.
It also lets you skip the first time install dialogue by setting defaults and add a local-only account. Rufus is the way to go about installing windows.
Had to scroll way too far down through windows gripes to find this, the real answer. Windows 11 will run just fine on your machine, OP. Just use Rufus and a USB stick to do the upgrade.
I switched to Linux about 10 years ago... I used to keep a partition on the side for Windows for dual-boot... But nowadays I just wipe my drive clean!
With my latest computer, I noticed that some kind of boot protection was added in the BIOS which made it harder to install Linux from USB... I had to disable the safety mechanism in the bios before it would let me boot... It's a shame because, at a glance, I actually thought the Windows UI had improved since the last version a few years ago which was appalling...
But yeah I hate Windows' coercive approach. This is why I was never an Apple fan. I hate how Apple keeps trying to hide the underlying hardware like the file system and external (non-Apple) devices.
These companies are basically PsyOps in my view. There are many better free (open source) alternatives available where you actually own the OS. I don't understand how people can stand renting inferior software for 10x the price as owning a better alternative.
It's like if I offered people to rent a Ford car for $20k per year or get a free Mercedes Benz, and 90% choose to rent the Ford because it feels familiar and their friends also rent a Ford... What is wrong with people?
There is something seriously wrong with people. It's like someone (or something) hypnotized them. Are we sure we don't have ASI controlling people? This is not normal.
This is like; what kinds of people are trying to accumulate fiat money nowadays? There's nothing behind it. It's just digits inside a bunch of different databases without any consensus between them and where the government can create unlimited digits for free. Something wrong with people.
A few days ago I started up an old Windows 10 laptop that I haven't used in a few years so my son could play a game that I haven't taken the time to set up in proton on linux. I was amazed at how much the Windows OS experience seems like an unhealthy relationship where the OS is trying to manipulate you and control you. It feels like it's not even my computer, it's a Microsoft owned kiosk that I'm allowed to partially use.
Another really remarkable thing is how cloud connected it is. For instance, the lock screen had online feeds shown. The setting to disable them is on a remote website, not in the screensaver prefs or some other local system pref. That was astonishing, and IMHO absurd. If it hadn't been clear to me before, that made it crystal clear that what MS wants the OS to be and what I want the OS of my personal computer to be are not remotely the same thing.
There must be a way to disable this thing. Maybe we can disable the service? But anyway I already switched to Linux for my daily usage. It is not smooth as Windows due to driver issues and other weird things, like Firefox crashing frequently when I’m typing in a text box like this one, but still feels better than Windows.
The Windows team and its product manager is determined to trash the product. Good work!
If you are on Nvidia hardware, make sure to use a distro that makes it easy to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers. In Ubuntu, just open the Additional Drivers tab and the rest will be self-explanatory. For other platforms, ask an AI.
I disagree. I think his intention was to maximize shareholder value which he has done dramatically by making the user the product being sold. Microsoft stock has soared even at the expense of Microsoft shedding users. Satya has realized the true value of Windows as a revenue platform. It never was a competitive operating system.
From my earlier comment to another Windows post:
Windows 11 has transitioned from a standalone tool into a digital storefront that prioritizes recurring revenue through aggressive prompts for Microsoft 365 and OneDrive subscriptions. By mandating cloud-based Microsoft Accounts, the OS effectively anchors your identity to a marketing ID, allowing the company to track behavior and monetize your data. The interface now functions as an advertising platform, injecting "recommended" apps and sponsored content directly into the Start menu and search results. Ultimately, this shift means users are no longer just customers of a product, but recurring assets whose attention and telemetry are sold to sustain Microsoft’s ecosystem and maximize shareholder value.
I disagree. Satya doesn't give a crap about Windows; he's the cloud guy. Over 40% of Microsoft's revenue is cloud. Another 20% is office (which is also heading towards cloud). Windows revenue is a measly 9% -- even less than gaming.
Windows is what it is because it's really not important to Microsoft to anymore. It's effectively unmoored from the rest of organization and left to fight for some kind of financial relevance in an organization that doesn't care about it anymore.
Our kids‘ school received some old surface laptops for free through some initiative. I‘ve been tasked to take care of them. And of course, WiFi mysteriously stopped working for all of them, after ca 1 week of use.
yup. Fixed list of supported cpus. Well, I suppose it grows to include newer CPUs.
That said the rufus workaround can work for these - I'm writing this from a machine that's not a supported cpu that I just upgraded to Win 11 with rufus. Runs just fine. Fun fact about my cpu: no cpu with the same socket is supported, so to be officially supported I'd have to also upgrade the motherboard.
Adding to the enshittified pile of bad decissions that Windows has become, the actual requirements for Windows 11 are just a corporate caprice and not a real "requirement". I did whatever it needed to bypass the checks at install time, and W11 is now working exactly and equally as well as W10 was, on a laptop which only has TPM 1.2 and an old CPU.
Where is the requirement then in modern CPUs and TPM 2.0, Microsoft? Didn't you mean "nice to have" so additional but perfectly optional security features could be enabled?
In Win 11 Home, and want to add a local account and not change it to a Windows account, and not share my stuff with MS. No Cloud or "Backups", thank you.
The option to enable a local account was through the command line only. The dark patterns and persausion to convince me not to was off putting.
But every time I boot in to have to go through the nag screen is off the wall.
It is truly crazy how much I understand the dedication people have to avoid using a unfamiliar system.
The only reason I keep my home PC with windows still is that I use it mainly to play games and some have anti-cheat systems that are not compatible with Linux. But I play those games less and less the older I get, I play mostly older games / emulators. I see it very likely that I won't install whatever comes after Windows 11 and at that point I might move over to Linux for good.
I'm happy with Windows 11 after tweaks to fix it. I certainly sympathesize with Windows 10 users who can't upgrade. But it seems to me Windows 10 users aren't getting the message: Microsoft just isn't that into you.
Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases? I'm guessing not (I don't have the figures) and Microsoft would rather you replace your 10 year old laptop that can't run Windows 11 or run Linux on it. They really don't care which, just as long as you go away and they don't have to support you anymore.
I'm not assosciated with Microsoft, just someone who has been using their products for 40 years. I am someone who can read in between the lines, and this is my take.
The author just wants Microsoft to stop harassing him. He's not asking for handouts. He's not even asking to be allowed to bypass the hardware requirements for Windows 11. He just wants to stop getting nagged by Microsoft to upgrade.
He could buy new hardware and run Windows 11. But this pattern will only continue from Microsoft. The only way out is to run a non-Microsoft OS (assuming he can).
The important point here is that data collection and telemetry is worthless and was never about improving the experience for you as a user. The coders behind the update nag had every opportunity to do a hardware check, but as I say, big data is never used to improve anything for end users.
You're not getting what I'm saying. Hassling him is the point. They want him to use Windows 11 or go away. He's a security update expense because he's too cheap to upgrade his laptop or run Linux on it.
How did you tweak and fix it? I suffer with Windows 11 at work and everything is just so slow. Alt+Tab often gets stuck and clicking icons on the taskbar don't register about a fifth of the time.
Take a screenshot with Shift+Win+S? That's gonna take at least 10 seconds for the snipping app to even load, after which what I wanted to screenshot is probably gone.
Open a tab in Explorer? Five seconds, during which individual parts of the UI update.
Delete 50k files from some image analysis? That's gonna crash explorer.exe and take down the whole shell.
I suppose they rewrote the Windows shell in React, and every basic interaction is a major undertaking.
At home I have a 12 year old PC, with Linux and the Gnome DE. It is absurd how much faster it is, everything is snappy and instantaneous.
To me, there is nothing to fix in Windows 11 - they have failed horribly.
From my experience, a computer running that slowly is out of memory and hitting the swap file constantly. The tweaks I did are in settings. I turned off widgets, OneDrive and Ads. Also there have been comprehensive scripts for cleaning Windows 11 shared here on Hacker News if you look for them.
There is no free support, e.g. call center agents for Windows 10 users. As for security vulnerabilities in Windows 10, Microsoft is going to continue fixing them until at least 2032 (probably longer with extended support) anyways, as Windows 10 1809 LTSC end-of-life is 2029 and Windows 10 21H2 IoT LTSC is supported until 2032.
Microsoft isn't that into you either. With Windows 11 you are not a customer, you and your data are the products.
Meh. I'm also a Linux destop user on a second machine. I'll completely switch when Windows 11 becomes a problem for me. Microsoft used to be a OS company, but is now a cloud company that offers Linux on it's cloud services.
> "Do you think Windows OS is a profit center...?"
The consumer editions are not all there is to Windows. Nearly every seat of Windows 11 Enterprise used in corporations is a paid license and there are a lot of corporations. Nearly every instance of Windows Server is a very expensive paid license and is required to run Active Directory, MS Exchange, SQL Server, etc.
I have no experience with Windows Server or Enterprise and don't know anyone who does. Forgive me for omitting "consumer" from my description. Yes, I mean consumer Windows.
> Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases?
They get money out of almost every computer sold all over the world. Are you saying that's not enough to keep a system that hasn't seen improvement in 2 decades and barely get bugfixes?
I upgraded to windows 11 as soon as it was offered. Even went out and bought a tpm addon for my motherboard - not that I needed one 100% but activating the onboard one on Zen 3 at the time was thought to cause stuttering…
Anyway, why would I do that?
Well, I got windows free at some point, a lot of years ago, and I am happy enough to jump through a few hoops to keep that going. I don’t use it day to day, I’m not sure why anyone would. I use MacOS and Linux as daily drivers.
But once in a while there’s a game I want to play that’s not that Linux-friendly, and there’s windows up to date and supported, without MS getting another cent out of me since about 2009. What’s not to like?
Almost every even half decent CPU made in the last decade does have TPM 2.0, albeit for some strange reason OEMs used to ship with it disabled. You may be able to turn it on in the bios.
This is a massive pet peeve of mine as well. As far as I'm aware there's not a single consumer CPU listed in the Windows 11 compatibility list that doesn't have builtin TPM2.0.
When I, as a developer, was told (essentially forced if I wanted to keep my job) to implement dark patterns, I did it knowing I made the world worse. I was fully aware of it, and my coworkers as well, we discussed it openly, and I imagine everyone implementing such tech are. Of course I and other could claim plausible deniability, ”we didn’t understand consent”.
I hope one day there will be pushback on this from people like you, but when your boss has an economical stranglehold over you, not to mention the old adage 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it', it's understandable why we're in this situation.
I wonder how hard would it be to just switch back to Windows 7 for these kinds of cases? Obviously the most ideal solution is to use Linux but there's still some edge cases where Windows is needed or is just preferred. If you install Windows 7 in a VM you'll be blown away by having a simple, clean OS that just runs applications and doesn't shove ads or Bing search into the start menu. And obviously it would be vulnerable to software exploits but if the device is mostly kept offline I can't see many issues with that coming up. Something to think about...
I know people who are still on Windows 7, but application support is becoming more difficult, including mainstream web browsers. You can still disable annoyances like in TFA on Windows 10, you just have to dig a bit.
I suspect there are cybersecurity stakes regarding win11 and win10, but I am not entirely sure.
I think that the spectre mitigation are not a problem in win11 because win11 is not supported on CPU that are vulnerable, which might be a reason they encourage people to get win11 and get a new PC, but that's an unverified guess, I am just trying to get them the benefit of the doubt.
SteamOS looks like it might take a lot of the windows cake, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to.
So far it doesn't look like SteamOS supports most of PC hardware out there, but it could be a next step for Valve.
I had the same frustrations recently with my MacBook Pro, with macOS constantly telling me about Tahoe despite OCLP--which I used to patch my unsupported Mac to Sonoma--currently not supporting that version of macOS. These notifications aren't able to be disabled, just like in Windows--trust me, I tried to do that. They irritated me so much, that I've actually taken to installing Ubuntu on the Mac just so I can avoid seeing them.
I can only hope that this degradation of UX will make more people switch or consider switching to other distributions. It's the only thing that will make microsoft listen.
>The terms and conditions are simple. Every time you perform any network access, you have to send a copy of the payload and response back to my server. Either that, or you're in breach of my terms.
That's not how contracts work, at all. MS hasn't bought anything from him, nor was he able to require them to agree to anything in order for him to install the OS.
Picked up a Framework 13 for my daughter for Xmas. She’s a politics student, so she needs a solid keyboard. I hate installing Windows on this hardware, but she absolutely relies on Office and Citavi. Plus, proficiency in Windows is a standard requirement in her field. Maybe she'll discover Linux eventually!
You mean "absolutely relies on being able to work with Office formats". Which most Linux distros do well out of the box. I'm not aware of any feature that LO doesn't support, although admittedly I usually exchange PDFs.
> Citavi
According to the WineDB page for Citavi:, "native Linux alternatives include:
- BibSonomy / PUMA
- JabRef
- Mendeley
- Zotero
- Colwiz"
Of course when going through education you don't want to take risks, there is a lot on the line. But it may be worth to play with the alternatives a bit, albeit on a VM or something. Of course maybe the Citavi format needs to be exchanged; that could actually be a problem. Annoying.
Sure, it's doable, and I'm on Linux desktop as well and not missing anything. She never had a computer other than her iPad. So it's hard (for me) but for her it's the best solution right now.
Need a suggestion, and thought might as well ask here. I use a Mac now. Last windows was more than 15 years ago and now I want to try Linux. which version would you recommend? should I go with Ubuntu or Debian or Mint or something else? I am not a tinkerer. I want something that just works, on the lines of a Mac.
Ubuntu. Pay close attention; the normal Ubuntu is what I consider beta. The Long-Term-Support (LTS) variants of Ubuntu is what I consider the normal Ubuntu, which should always be used except maybe when working on Ubuntu components as a developer. This will save you a lot of pain down the road.
The single stupidest thing people new to linux do is try to install it on random hardware and expect it to just work. Mac has the hardware idea right where all of their hardware is thoroughly vetted against their OS so practically no one runs into issues. To get something similar on Linux you'd need to buy from a vendor that offers their OS preloaded with Linux. Kubuntu Focus, System76, Tuxedo, are the ones that focus on Linux and Framework, Lenovo, and Dell offer linux as an option and at least support it.
I would happily switch to Linux, problem is it doesn't support the audio hardware I have. And although I've tried to figure out how the drivers get it working on Windows, I can't separate the wheat from the chaff in the 500+ USB packet dump Wireshark gives me :-( Otherwise I'd dump Windows and throw NixOS on this thing and stripe my two NVMes.
I don't know how many years/months/days/hours the author is going to continue using Windows for, but this seems like a perfect task to be "resolved" by AHK, which is probably in the top 10 things Windows users have access to. Worth trying, at least before switching to another source of operating system.
Wasnt there a Google cross app logging framework and request tracking project 15 years ago?
Did grafana die when I wasn't looking? Does datadog still make money?
What's weird about this article is that it's the same thing being said 20 years ago. Is this a sign of people not learning from the better parts of Java deployment stacks?
I've been running Win11 without a TPM for 6 years. Saying you can't upgrade isn't the same thing as Windows saying you can't upgrade. Knowing your OS seems to be a lost art. I'm not dismissing the valid complaint, but the title is empirically wrong clickbait.
The only Hard requirements are a CPU with SSE 4.2 and POPCNT. Win11 will simply not install on older CPUs. The rest of the requirements can be bypassed but Microsoft will block you from the annual major feature upgrades. You will have to do those manually too. They also claim that your stability and performance on pre-8th Gen CPUs will be degraded and they will give no support, but in reality it runs just fine. Win11 is sluggish on all CPUs anyway.
They keep reminding you so you end up buying a new PC with Windows 11.
That's all it is. No extra code logic is needed. Just keep pestering the end user with a popup. They don't care for any variations.
The goal is to get everyone on Windows 11.
This is not 1998 or even 2008. Times have slowly and "progressively" moved on. Truth is you NEVER OWNED a copy of Windows. You always purchased the rights to USE it. Now that technology has improved especially the internet Microsoft have tried to gain more control over YOUR computer.
Look at Nintendo and their Switch 2. In their world you do not own it. If they think you are doing something "you shouldn't" they will brick it! Sure, I am not suggesting Microsoft does this with Windows but I am 100% certain this type of tactics has been discussed in high-end meetings. The key here is CONTROL.
Today - if Microsoft want to push a program and "encourage" you to use it.. they will install it without any form of consent. Sorry, but if I OWN a computer then I want control with the software installed, including an Operating System. Microsoft has always been a huge '??' in this field and, to me, it is getting worse. I am not even talking about government involvement with the big techs, either.
Copilot -- I dont care.
This rumour (is it a rumour) that Windows takes photos of your screen every so oftern... NO THANK YOU!
I might have to continue using Windows (11) in my job, being given a work laptop, etc. At the end of the day I do not care as its not my laptop and decisions are taken outside my control by specific IT departments. Whatever. At home I am 100% GNU/Linux. It is sooo much faster and programs loads in <1.5 seconds compared to 5-20 seconds on Windows 11.
My biggest concern is the future of GNU and Linux. Well, the Linux kernel more so especially when Linus hangs up his keyboard. Hopefully the next guy in charge cares about our Freedoms. Honestly I imagine an alternative world where a corporations takes control. The beauty, thanks to the GPL, is people can branch off an continue their own. Sadly... GNU/Linux MIGHT get infiltrated one day and most of that will be people NOT caring about our FREEDOM. This, in my opinion, is all dependent on the future generations.
I get the sentiment but I find it frustrating when people write complaints like this when they know Rufus boot exists which disables TPM and online only accounts during the install.
Usually, whenever there's a workaround for something with Windows, you'll never know until it happens how long it will take before a Windows update makes the workaround ineffective.
looking at the author's photo in the OP, appears that they own a Surface. if that is the device referred to in the post, it is quite interesting to see that not supporting win 11.
I also have a 10 year old laptop with no TPM 2.0 module. It was pretty high end for the time too (Dell XPS). I haven't needed it for much in recent years, but it still runs perfectly fine and I'm happy to continue using it if the need arises again. Sounds like I'll have to switch that over to Linux like I have all my other PCs.
> It's one thing to be at the forefront of enshittification, but Microsoft is now actively hostile to its users.
Haven't lived under a rock until now must be relaxing.
I really hope this mess will lead to a significant uptick in Linux usage though. That would be a great effect. Unfortunately, most people will either adapt or go with macOS and be in a similar spot in a few years.
For what it's worth, a lot of the crowd who used to want to but we're hamstrung by the garbage support for games on Linux are now actually switching since Steam has essentially made it "just work" via Proton. The final real blocker for many people is finally gone this iteration of the cycle.
I myself have fully switched to Endeavor for my personal desktop, though I still use a MacBook for work (as I have for 17 years now, if you include college). It's been a surprisingly seamless experience, I highly recommend it over Ubuntu-based distributions, especially for Steam (I was a former Mint adherent but the general stability has gone way downhill).
I find macOS a pretty good compromise. I guess if it got too annoying I could go Linux. I use Word/Excel a lot but am fine with old versions - none of this 365 nonsense.
My old 6600 from 2016 is still running fine, I replaced the SSD (Intel 400GB to X25-E 64GB that will last 20 years minimum), the RAM (Micron to Samsung from aliexpress before the price hike... got 8 sticks of 16GB for $40 a pop for backup) and even the old trusty monitor (Both Eizo 5:4 matte VA; mercury tube to led, with f.lux/redshift the blue light is ok).
But with a 3050 upgrade from the 1050 and later 1030 (best GPU for eternity if you discount VR) I had in it it's good for another decade. If a game comes out that does not run on it I wont play it... simple as that... 150W is enough. So far only PUBG stutters, what a joke of bloat and poor engineering that game has become...
Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7.
Win 11 improves NOTHING over 10.
YMMV but recommendation is still: do not buy new X86 hardware; do not use new OS/languages.
Build something good with what you have right now.
Make it so good it's still in use after 100 years.
Windows 7 doesn't have compressed memory (ZRAM). Doesn't support TRIM for NVMe SSDs. Doesn't have WSL. Doesn't have ISO mounting built in. Doesn't have HDR, variable refresh rate, etc...
The better statement is 'Win 10 improved nothing directly user-facing over Win 7'. Sure, there are several technical improvements under the hood, but those are completely detached from what the user actually sees and experiences, and there's no real reason we couldn't have the Windows 10 technical improvements with a Windows 7 UI, other than Microsoft being the abusive parent that it is.
I have fedora xfce running beautifully on a 2011 i5 Mac mini. Replacing the hard disk with modern SSD was all it took to get it running at acceptable speeds where interacting with xfce is roughly instantaneous
> Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7. Win 11 improves NOTHING over 10.
You had me up to this point. The problem is that there are actually quite a few improvements under the hood over those upgrade paths, but they are unfortunately hidden under all of the bullshit. I was an early adopter of Windows 11 specifically because of their efficiency core support over Windows 10 when I upgraded my CPU.
You need to look at the cost of improvements, and they overshadow all progress.
I'm going linux with TWM (desktop with design look from the 70s) on ARM because M$ is clearly not thinking about the long perspective.
We need a stable platform to build quality software.
And that's saying alot seen how linux is deprecating libc after very short time and the legacy joystick API is not being compiled into modern kernels anymore.
Stability is way more important than bells and whistles.
The TPM 2.0 "requirement" is mostly artificial - you can bypass it with Rufus and Windows 11 runs fine on older hardware. But that misses the point.
Microsoft is using aggressive dark patterns (undismissable upgrade prompts) to force hardware obsolescence and create e-waste. This isn't about security - it's about maintaining the upgrade treadmill when performance improvements have stalled.
The real issue is consent. Users should be able to say "no" once and have that decision respected. Instead, we get daily nagging designed to exhaust users into compliance. This is the opposite of user-centric design.
Time to consider Linux seriously, or at least Windows 10 LTSC IoT which has support until 2032.
Windows 11 came out FOUR YEARS AGO. It’s time to let this subject die.
They’re harassing you because in not too many years, connecting your computer to the internet on their OS will be dangerous. They’re trying to save you from yourself.
And, quite reasonably, they don’t want to patch an OS that debuted 10 years ago so that it supports your hardware that’s even older than 10 years old.
It’s time to get over it. You’re using a commercial OS that you likely haven’t even paid for since Windows 7 debuted 20 years ago and that vendor needs you to at least upgrade to a still-pretty-shitty-and-old used laptop to remain compatible.
You’re free to switch to something else like Linux and, frankly, if you’re at the point of writing redundant blog posts of the same subject we’ve heard all about for the last 4 years, you definitely should. I did! And pretty much all of my Windows stuff runs on Linux effortlessly including and especially games.
Or you can disconnect from the Internet and kill the nags with some group policy stuff. As a bonus, being disconnected from the internet will stop these blog posts.
Yet another reason I'm more than happy I switched my personal desktop use to Linux a few years ago now... After a decade of running Insiders, literally the first time I saw an ad on the Start menu search results, I was out. MS has only been increasingly hostile to users since.
Fortunately o265 web versions are pretty capable, including Teams, and most of the development work I've done is not specifically tied to Windows, and even where it is hasn't been too bad in actual business/enterprise environments (beyond typical corporate/govt hinderances). That said, I like what WSL brings to the table.
I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators. I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.
On the Windows side, things started going downhill starting with the Windows XP era, and on the Mac the annoyances began sometime in the mid-2010s.
It seems Microsoft, Apple, and other companies realized that they’re leaving money on the table by not exploiting their platforms. Thus, they’re no longer selling simple tools, but rather they are selling us services.
Yes, there are good Linux distributions that don’t annoy me, and the BSDs never nag me, but the problem with switching to these platforms is that I still need Microsoft Office and other proprietary software tools that are not available outside “Big Tech.” There are other matters that make switching away from Windows and macOS challenging, such as hardware support and laptop battery life.
Easy answer to your last point: Work machine and Non-work machine. If I'm working for a company and the company needs MS Office, they will give me a machine with MS Office. I will treat that machine like a radioactive zone. Full Hazmat suit. Not a shred of personal interaction with that machine. It exists only to do work on and that's that. The company can take care of keeping it up to date, and the company's IT department can do the bending over the table on my behest as MS approaches with dildos marked "Copilot" or "Recall" or "Cortana" or "React Native Start Menu" or "OneDrive" or whatever.
Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.
This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.
Apt username, for a pragmatic strategy.
A variation I've done occasionally is to run the Microsoft Windows software in a VM on my Linux laptop.
When I last had the MS office suite inflicted upon me, a couple years ago, I was able to run it in a Web browser on Linux.
It's important to remember, though, that these measures probably won't work long-term.
Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame. (It's usually not originating bottom-up from the ICs, and I know some nice people from there, but upper corporate is totally like that, demonstrating it again and again, for decades.)
Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
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I like this in theory but as someone who travels often with my work laptop, it's nice to be able to use the same hardware for personal use as carrying a second computer is impractical regarding carry weight and packing.
Apple used to allow installing a second copy of MacOS without it being subject to the work profile - completely isolated from the work partition (because you could ignore the "set up work profile" prompts after installation).
I would simply restart my MacBook into the personal install after work & on weekends.
Apple have recently updated the MacOS installer to be always online so I can no longer install a seperate MacOS partition without a work profile.
I ended up buying an ROG Ally but it's honestly not that portable. The power brick is almost the same size as the handheld and it occupies about as much space as a laptop in my carry on.
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Been using this strategy since Windows XP
I can do work on the computer running BSD/Linux, save it in a text-only format, transfer it to the work computer then import into Excel, PowerPoint or Word
It's been over 20 years since I had a home computer running Windows (and well over 30 since I've used a mouse)
I think the GP comment is evidence that Microsoft can get away with what it is doing. Even people who can use Linux or BSD will not stop using Windows at home no matter how obnoxious it becomes
There is a substantial difference between complaining and actually taking action and the company seems to recognise that
Same. Work provides the idiot box. I give it its own segmented network too, cause work spyware and all... then run a personal workstation with linux next door to it.
The problem with Linux is that there is no legitimate place to direct your rage at. It is free, nobody owes you anything and every installation is different. When Windows is awful, virtually everyone is being sympathetic. When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
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No full time job, so as a freelancer those machines need to combine. And my work uses similar software that simply doesn't work well on Linux.
But yes, ideally I'd have two machines to separate my career from my personal life.
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If you’re implying separating work work on two machines; beware the corporate spyware on the windows machine will show a lot of idle time!
> Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates
Even Windows 95 came bundled with MSN on the desktop which had a paid monthly fee to access. And its lack of automatic updates was a real problem, as you had to manually find the service packs and security patches. The automatic updates in Windows XP were vastly more convenient.
Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.
> Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.
That was true right up until companies started routinely pushing updates that broke things, removed useful features, added user hostile features, or even outright ads. If I have to give up automatic security updates to not have my software get worse on me over time, I will gladly do so. I would rather have security updates and not have the user-hostile stuff, but we seem to be unable to get that, so the next best thing would be no automatic updates at all.
Installing Internet Explorer 4 on Windows 95 opened up the first version of Windows Update, when it started as a web app with some custom ActiveX plugins. Windows 98 was the first time Windows Update had a bundled link in the OS, and shortly after Windows 98 introduced a "Critical Update" notification that would prompt users to open Windows Update.
Automatic updates arrived in Windows ME.
It's interesting the timeframes on Windows are often earlier than you think they are. Admittedly, a lot of users skipped Windows ME and its strange reputation, so Windows XP may have been their first time seeing automatic updates.
I know you won't believe me, and my precious karma score may suffer by stating reality: you don't NEED security updates. A properly hardened server with no patches will outlive cobbled together trash library patch over garbage code pasted from ai vibing script kiddies. Would you shake your head in disbelief if I told you 'security patches' are the fix delivered by a dealer to quell your shivers?
Give me functionality updates, cumulative service packs, and the just after BBS days when an exploit discovered in your software meant it was used by no one, anywhere, because we no longer trust your coding or your 'fix'
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The internet was a big part of it. Most home users did not have internet access in the System 7 days. When it came out in 1991 no country had more than 1% of its population with internet access. By the time Windows 95 came out around 10% of US users had internet access.
It wasn't until 2001 that the US reached 50% of users having internet access.
Without internet there wasn't really a good way to distribute updates to most users.
As a developer in that era working at a company that made software for PCs and Macs it was great. It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.
We'd only make more money from someone who bought our software if that software made a good enough impression that they bought more of our software. We'd lose money if any software went out with enough bugs or a confusing enough interface or a poorly enough written manual that a lot of people made a lot of calls to our toll free tech support.
This was great because it largely aligned what developers wanted to do (write a feature complete program with a great UI and no bugs) and what management wanted (happy users who do not call tech support).
With internet giving us the ability to push updates at almost zero cost and as often as we want people who release incomplete programs early and add the missing parts in updates are going to outcompete people who don't release until the program is complete and nearly bug free.
Once you get there it is not much of a leap to decide that what you are really selling is not software to do X but rather the service of providing software to do X. Customers subscribe to that service and you continuously improve its ability to do X.
> It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.
On the topic of Windows, this is why Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility was and is such a huge deal.
It wasn't so easy to just update your software if Windows ever made breaking changes, and your users would, rightly, be pretty ticked off if suddenly what they bought no longer works because they upgraded from Win 95 to 98, or 98 to XP.
You had confidence that you could buy a program once, and it'll just happily continue to run for the foreseeable future.
This also made businesses happy. If you liked a particular version of a software product, you bought it, ran it on Windows, and could rest easy knowing it'll just continue to work through version upgrades of the OS.
I stopped using Windows over 15 years ago and moved to Ubuntu that was running all the servers. Unfortunately Ubuntu decided to do the same garbage trying to shove their pro crap down my throat, made it impossible to remove (by making a desktop requirement) and resorted to the game of trying to re-enable it during updates
I finally moved everything to just Debian itself that never nags me and just works with everything I need, including games (thanks to steam)
Only time I boot a Win10 VM is to compile apps for for windows, otherwise it has zero use or need anymore
I supported Ubuntu when they started but gave up on them after they sent people's local file searches to third parties so they could push amazon ads. They're totally corrupted as far as I can tell.
I too remember the days when every unpatched Windows PC was a member of a botnet. Perhaps less fondly than you.
And thankfully this was before a time when everyone’s computers and phones had access to their bank accounts, credit cards, and before email was the gateway to virtually your entire life.
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I miss when I felt that personal computers were a new wave of democratized capital, a kind of affordable factory for individual owners to use pursuing their own autonomy and power... and not just for programmers.
I underestimated the economic forces trying to turn them into devices for enforcing the interests of a large company onto the owner and turning the owner into a renter.
Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364[1]. If we can find enough people willing to pay $364 for an OS that values privacy and doesn't push needless upgrades, that'll be a start. But XP itself was probably priced based on the belief that people would be upgrading in a few years to Windows Vista. So we might need more than that.
[1] - According to minneapolisfed.org, which uses the official economist-approved inflation rates. Not that I'm implying that there's anything wrong with that. I have all of the orthodox beliefs about inflation that a good citizen should have.
Windows 11 Pro is still $200 [1]. Of course most people don't pay anything directly as it's bundled with their PC and they won't think to question why that is.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
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> Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364
I assume you used the overall CPI rate rather than the software rate. but using the Software CPI its more like $58. and that seems like an easier sell (for the user, maybe not the developer).
http://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/CUUR0000SEEE0...
Software CPI-U
2001 Oct 77.0
2025 Nov 22.182
$364 when?
I am old enough to remember that when Windows 95 was released Microsoft tried to take over the Internet with Microsoft Network (MSN, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-Up_Internet_Access).
They never changed.
Hardware support isn't all that bad anymore. Certainly better than it was when I started using Linux.
It isn't perfect. You'll probably have a better experience with AMD than Nvidia GPUs, most fingerprint readers probably won't work, and newly released hardware might not have drivers for a few months, but most stuff just works.
> I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.
I 'member the days of Win 98, Win ME and Win XP... made good money cleaning up malware - browser toolbars, dialers, god knows what - from computers. Some came from the hellholes that were Java, ActiveX or Flash, some came from browser drive-by exploits served from advertising networks, but others just came from computers that were attached directly to the Internet from their modems.
And I also 'member Windows being prone to crashes, particularly graphics drivers, until Windows 7 revamped the entire driver model.
Oh, and (unrelated) I also 'member websites you could use to root a fair amount of Android and Apple phones.
All of that is gone now, it has gotten so, so much better thanks to a variety of protection mechanisms.
Security and upselling are orthogonal; I can make a secure operating system that doesn’t notify the user of OneDrive, iCloud, and other services.
Things get more nuanced when we talk about other types of notifications and about whether updates should be automatic or always require a user’s explicit consent. I personally believe that a key tenet of personal computing is that the owner of the computer, not the hardware or software vendor, should have full control over the hardware and software on the computer. This control is undermined when systems are designed in ways to give users less control. There may be legitimate security benefits to mandatory automatic updates, for example, but there are risks, such as buggy updates leading to broken installations or even lost data, and there’s also having to deal with unwanted UI/UX changes.
As a power user, developer, and researcher, I want control over my computing environment. Unfortunately Windows and macOS have been trending toward more paternalism, more nagging, and more upselling. Thankfully Linux exists, but at the cost of needing to switch away from convenient proprietary software tools like Microsoft Office. I can do without Word or Excel, but PowerPoint is what keeps me on Office (I’ve tried LibreOffice and the Beamer LaTeX template). I’m also concerned about hardware getting increasingly locked down, which will hurt Linux.
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You haven't addressed OP argument.
The fact there were security concerns is unrelated with the MAIN points discussed not only in the post, but in OP's reply:
> No upselling services
> No automatic updates
> No nagging.
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It is not really gone - at all.
The size of the botnets and raw bandwidth they have access to now is staggering. (DDoS, "Residential Proxies", ”Anti-Censorship VPNs”, etc. All just compromised residential devices.
Can you provide some details on the reasons for needing MS Offfice? I'm genuinely curious. What does LibreOffice do differently that makes it a problem for you to use? Personally my only complaint is the performance of LO, which could be better.
I'm not GP but I do know it's rare to open an existing .docx in LibreOffice and have it look right; who knows what it looks like in Word after I've edited and saved it. It's fine creating new documents, and Excel/Calc is better than Word (inherent in being more structured I suppose), but it's not a drop-in replacement. I've used web Office365 when necessary though, not Windows.
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For me, some complex Excel usage was not replicable in either Sheets or LibreOffice.
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Do not connect it to the internet. Problem solved.
Basically anything in a social network needs to learn to defend itself against threats. Make computer a hermit, and it can go without updates for a long time.
(Oh, but you don't like that? Well, Microsoft doesn't like getting in the news for some worldwide botnet of all Windows 10 machines. I bet they'll figure this out sooner or later.)
Microsoft Office somewhat works in the browser. Certainly good enough for me, although 99% of my actions is upload document to onedirve, open it in web MS Office version, export to pdf and then read with standard tools.
> but the problem with switching to these platforms is that I still need Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office Online works fine on Linux. In fact, it’s superior to native MS Office in terms of stability.
> Microsoft Office Online works fine on Linux. In fact, it’s superior to native MS Office in terms of stability.
It may work for your case - good. Many companies have custom VBA macros that runs on their Excel sheets to get data or validate it. Try to use a document like this on your online Office and you will understand why most Office users can't easily migrate.
What kills me is there seems to be no option for accounting that is acceptable to CPAs besides being held captive paying whatever QuickBooks cloud demands. It's not like dual entry accounting has changed much in 500 years. There are bank integrations and service contracts (notably Apple Card wasn't willing to pay licensing fees for the quickbooks file format, so you simply couldn't syncronize your accounts with your spending, instead falling back to manual import), but they would not make investors happy by merely offering bank connection services
(God forbid banks be required by law to offer a web connector that allows you to request your own data. A workaround I've tried is to have my bank send me an email alert on every transaction over a penny, so at least I have a record, but never got around to setting up an auto import from my inbox)
I've heard that many times, but the 3 accounting firms I've worked with for my business didn't care what accounting software I used. They were all happy to work with Gnucash so long as I could provide the needed reports, all of which were pre-configured in Gnucash. Two were small firms, but one was part of a major national accounting firm/franchise.
If you a small business with retail and payroll, tax tables being up to date are worth the price.
> I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators.
> System 7 and Windows 95
If Windows 95 was the complexity level of a pencil to you, Win 10/11 is merely a color pencil. You should be fine getting rid of the nagging and adapting it to your needs, it hasn't become 10x or 100x more complex, merely incrementally more.
> Microsoft [...] not exploiting their platforms.
That's a phrase I didn't expect. What part of Microsoft do you feel was leaving money on the table, as they were sued by basically the whole globefor their business practices ?
Every decade MS never finds a shortage of acolytes.
Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out? There is no price/performance improvement. Nor will there be for the next five years or so. NVidia says to expect 10% price increases each year. DRAM prices have doubled, and Samsung says not to expect price cuts. Micron just exited the retail RAM business.
Microsoft is trying to escape this trap by pivoting to Windows as a subscription service. It will get worse, not better.
Yes. So Microsoft (which manufactures hardware itself and has close ties to other hardware manufacturers) needed to find... other ways to, er, motivate people to buy new hardware anyway. Which brings us back to the blog post we are commenting on.
Not sure Windows as a subscription service is the end goal though. But maybe we should all wish for M$ to do that, maybe that would be what's needed to finally bring about the Year of The Linux Desktop™.
I don't think selling more hardware is the primary motivation. The motivation is ensuring everyone has TPM 2.0 enabled on their device.
This allows Microsoft to protect parts of their software even from the user that owns the hardware it's running on. With TPM enabled you finally give up the last bit of control you had over the software running on your hardware.
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> motivate people to buy new hardware
Open source drivers, and a sense that Linux support will forever be top priority, would be a motivator for me. Most of my tech spend has been with Valve in the past few years. I'd love if there was another company I actually enjoy giving my money to.
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>finally bring about the Year of The Linux Desktop™.
Do we actually want that?
If Linux ever reached mass adoption, big tech companies would inevitably find a way to ruin it
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> So Microsoft which manufactures hardware itself
The only computer lineup MS ever sold directly, to my knowledge, were the Surface things - an absolute niche market.
> So Microsoft (which manufactures hardware itself and has close ties to other hardware manufacturers)
You mean the Microsoft vacuum cleaner ? /s
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> Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out? There is no price/performance improvement.
Which is exactly why MS is pivoting to begging you to buy a new computer by harassing you with an apparently undismissable "upgrade" dialog.
They have to keep the upgrade treadmill running, and lacking "better performance" as the bait, they have resorted to outright harassment.
> There is no price/performance improvement.
Both performance and performance-per-watt continue to improve with each new generation of CPUs.
But that is squandered by piss-poor programming and stupid visual gimmicks.
I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.
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You're not wrong. But, I recently did the mistake of upgrading my iPad to version 26 (the liquid glass version). I had a relatively smooth experience on my 6 year old tablet which now runs painfully slowly. Even scrolling through different parts of home-screen lags.
My point being, with time performance might go up. But instead of that making my device faster/long-lasting, developers use that extra performance to cram in more stuff, at the end of which I come out only slightly better if not worse (as is in my case)
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You're not wrong, but I was disappointed recently by how well an eleven-year-old Macbook Air still works. I installed NixOS on it, and it's still pretty usable even on modern websites.
An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.
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My only complain is that nowadays laptops are usually poorly built, so unless one purchases an expensive guarantee, anything beyond the default guarantee is not guaranteed.
And the manufacturers are in a quest to remove as many keys as they can from the keyboard. Like you can hardly find any light laptop today with page up/down keys anymore. Why?.... Haven't these guys heard of keyboard shortcuts?
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I’m actually happy about DRAM prices and hope more people share your mindset. This is the only thing that can force developers to start optimizing memory usage instead of externalizing the costs onto the poorest users.
I sincerely hope it works out this way instead of pricing out open sourced development. A couple open sourced projects changed their licensing to help mitigate the increased cost burden from skyrocketing hardware costs. It'll be a sad and potentially dangerous day if most people are permanently priced out.
the #1 computing platform is the phone, 99.99% of users experience no memory pressure on iPhones
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I'm getting to that point where I may need to upgrade. Now I need to delay it more because AI is gonna make electronics even more expensive than the tarriffs in 2026.
2026 seems to just be becoming the "please don't break" era unless I can find some proper work this time. Car is on its last legs, a variety of housing appliances to repair, computer I use professionally. If nothing else, I upgraded my phone this year so that should get me through 2028 at least.
Well it also means it could be a good time to buy so you won't have to pay even more overprice for the same performance years down the line. I just bought one a good month ago. My old one was over 10 years old, not worn out, but not upgradeable to Win 11. I had been thinking waiting one more year before the security updates to Win10 are out... But I bought in when the first stories hit of the DDR5 price rises - at that time there had 'only' been a doubling, now the price is a further 3x of what I paid a good month ago. I thought it might be a good time to buy given the machine was so old and component prices were going up, and might for a long time. But yeah, performance improvements aren't what they used to. Part of the reason is that normal things were already felt so fast on the old one ;-) But I did get a much better gfx cards allowing some games that were unplayable before, and I think the CPU upgrade was needed for that as well, and then you might as well overhaul the machine. I also went from 16 to 64 GB, and the 16 GB had been a bit too little for some things.
More faster. I experienced huge performance boosts from upgrading CPU recently and GPU a bit back. (As always)
Compile times, game frame rates, computation time for simulations.
I had to upgrade to get DDR5, for one.
so my linux installation can be even faster
Any computer that can't run Windows 11 is almost a decade old. There has been plenty of improvement. Compare a laptop with a high end Intel i7 7920HK to even a lower end part like the Core Ultra 5 226V. Right now prices on pre-builts and laptops aren't totally reflecting the craziness at least.
A decade in computing used to mean revolutionary improvements:
- from the C64 to the Pentium
- from the Playstation 1 to the Xbox360
- from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.
Each of these in roughly a decade.
But 2015-2025 in terms of desktop PCs? Some decent (but not revolutionary) steps forward with GPUs, and much more affordable+speedy SSDs. But everything else has been pretty small and incremental.
And when enthusiasts upgrade, the old parts usually find new homes. My old 6th-gen i7 from a decade ago still has more than enough power for my Dad to use as a home PC for basic photo editing, web browsing, and spreadsheets. But Win10 end-of-life wants to turn that machine into e-waste.
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Cool, but my decade-old machine works perfectly well for my needs, as too I imagine a million other such machines.
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But somehow, apps and websites load just as fast on my decade old personal laptop as on my brand new work laptop.
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My daily desktop is mostly 2012 vintage. This hardware is still in use and works fine.
For what it's worth, that machine is being used while I upgrade my 2001 Computer Of Theseus once more. It's now getting it's third motherboard with CPU - this one salvaged from a 2018 or 2019 gaming machine. It's on its second case, and has seen more hard drive and memory upgrades than I can count - all of them piecemeal. Other than perhaps the motherboard screws and hard drive screws, I'm not sure if anything actually purchased in 2001 still survives in there. Maybe the power cable and pc speaker. And I don't remember ever replacing the rear case fan now that I'm looking at it.
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Many budget laptops from 2020 don't support Windows 11. HP laptops with AMD A4-9125, HP notebooks with AMD A6-7310 APU, HP Envy x360 models with first-generation AMD Ryzen processors.
The software I use for hobbies is locked in to windows. A lot of extremely good software in the DIY world is locked to windows.
Coincidentally I can run it all on a 10 year old PC. I see no reason I need to upgrade. I’d happily pay a small yearly fee for patches.
But that’s not why Microsoft did all of this. Their goal is to Hoover all your data into their cloud and lock your PC down so you can’t do anything but use their stuff. Their profit numbers are insane despite losing marketshare. It’s working because the current CEO is a ruthless non-tech moron.
People want to hate on Microsoft. Rightfully so. Apple has done the same thing. Once you’re locked into the Apple ecosystem it’s hard to switch. They push iCloud and Siri on you at every turn. They just made a “one OS” choice so it doesn’t feel as bad.
Anyone who says Linux solves all the problems has not tried to make something like solidworks and masterCAM run on it. I love Linux, I use it on servers, but it has 3% marketshare for a reason.
I have sub 1year old enterprise CPUs in my home lab. Disabling TPM is the first thing I do on bring up. Assuming that's a hard requirement, how do I install w11?
2020 Apple MacBook pro has an i9-9880HK, more than enough, but lacks TPM2.0. The issue is this is just a waste of resources and money for a large number of people and the TPM2.0 requirement is silly.
Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS.
Between these and services that suddenly suffer from amnesia and spamming me with marketing notifications and emails after months or years of silence, it’s becoming more tiring to use any service that grows significantly enough where they don’t need to care about what their users actually want.
The worst is when the only 'dismiss'-option is "I will do it later"... even if you have no intention of ever doing it... essentially forcing you to lie. It has been a while since I've seen it though, so that's progress!
> Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS.
I can offer a slightly different perspective. I remember Microsoft from the 90s and early 2000s. And while technical details differ, their attitude towards users didn't change that much.
Maybe we will someday have movies about this, alongside the movies where you get a chance to go back back in time to high school and be popular.
I used Rufus to make a Windows 11 installer USB drive that bypasses the TPM check and online account setup and a couple of other things. I've been using that along with O&O Shut Up 10++, and Firefox with uBlock Origin to refresh computers for local folks.
With the "requirements" check bypassed, Windows 11 actually runs on the Intel 1st gen Core i-series and newer, as well as any Ryzen CPU and, I think, a couple of earlier AMD generations. (It requires the popcount instruction, which isn't present on the Core 2 and older.)
Anything older gets Windows 10 IoT which gets updates until 2032.
One of the reasons I made the jump to Linux was the level of effort it took to disable all the shit that I don't want Windows to do. It became easier to just install Linux (Ubuntu, PopOS) and not have to futz with configuration to turn a bunch of unnecessary 'default on' stuff off - just get on and use the thing.
Yay Linux.
I switched for the same reason.
Company insisted that I upgrade to Windows 11, I decided Linux was better.
> bypasses the TPM check
The caveat with this is that it will fail the check on subsequent version upgrades too and will refuse to upgrade.
Non-Enterprise editions are only supported for 2 years so your 25H2 (or whatever it is) installation will go sour in 2027.
Perhaps, but Windows 11 has been out for 4 years and every version so far has worked without a TPM.
Wait so the TPM check is not some kind of real Windows 11 limitation? They could make an option to bypass this check (with all kind of "I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING" checkboxes I assume), they just chose not to do it? This is madness
They just really, really want to force the use of bitlocker on drives, which makes both "evil maid" attacks and data recovery harder. Coincidentally they're also trying to make everyone put everything in OneDrive.
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Yes. I think that initially there was even official documentation from Microsoft for how to bypass the check, although I can't find that now, just "unofficial" things like this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2121461/.... (The top two comments have two different ways of bypassing the check: a command line flag for the installer and a registry change.)
Wish there was a link to this ...
Rufus: https://rufus.ie/en/
How-to guide: https://windowsforum.com/threads/how-to-install-windows-11-u...
Alternative options that don't involve any third-party software: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2121461/...
O&O ShutUp10++: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Firefox: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/
uBlock Origin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
The Rufus way will break on updates. But there is a fully supported version of Windows 11 that doesn't have those requirements. Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC
Afaik you can install Win11 without TPM but you won't get Windows updates then. If I'm okay to not get updates I might as well stay on Win10?
So far updates work fine. It may change eventually, but as I noted in another comment, it's been 4 years, and none of the updates have required a TPM yet.
The most egregious thing in recent iterations of Win11 is that a fresh installation will basically map all of your home folder to OneDrive. My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, etc. A recent Windows update also told me that I need OneDrive now to back up my files. Yup, apparently you really, really need it.
Now Windows 11 also pops up a scary security notification saying Windows Security found a problem, then when you click on it it tells you that you're not using OneDrive and you should turn that on immediately.
They are using the same tactics as scammers: urgency and false claims. Microsoft doesn't even hide anymore.
This threw me so hard when I grabbed a cheap laptop from Costco with win11 pre installed. I was saving files to c:/users/me/desktop and then when I opened Desktop in File Explorer, my shit was gone.
Worse is that the notification for this “error” telling me I couldn’t back up without OneDrive was behind the little dot in the restart/logout menu in the start menu, which (until now) only showed me that updates were required. Now that they’ve infested that notification with ads there’s no reason for me to ever look at it again. Good job, Microsoft.
My dad has been raving because he discovered that his Windows computer has been uploading all of his pictures to OneDrive. He doesn't remember an option to enable that behavior and can't find any ways to simply turn it off. This is on top of the other nags and sketchy behavior that Windows has been pushing on him normally. He's fed up with it
The silver lining is that my dad's finally getting a new Linux machine for Christmas :^)
Windows 11 not only reinstalls OneDrive and Teams with every major upgrade, but also peppers the task scheduler with numerous runners to make changes to your system for things like OneDrive, Teams, and Edge.
Linux has made an insane amount of progress in recent years. Atomic distros like Bazzite and Aurora are so polished, modern, easy to use, and virtually unbreakable. Even most Windows games work perfectly out of the box (often better than on Windows). Anyone who tried Linux in the past and wasn't happy, should take another look. These distros are so incredible it's hard to believe.
Meanwhile Windows has been getting worse and worse. Completely unreasonable and unnecessary hardware requirements, spyware, constantly running antivirus and other processes you don't want, forced updates and reboots, shoving AI down your throat. In other words, you pay money to have a worse experience and less control over your own PC.
I've been ideologically opposed to Windows for a while, but a few years ago Linux required many trade-offs and compromises, to the point I wouldn't have recommended to most people. But now things are completely different and I would happily recommend it to anyone except those who have a hard requirement for MS software (or Adobe).
Okay, I’ll bite. Tell me the linux laptop to get, and the distro to use. Cost is no issue, but suspend/hibernate has to work and so does fractional scaling. Also WiFi.
I have an Acer Predator Helios 16. I have been running Kubuntu on it for around a year with almost zero issues. The only one I had was issues with secure boot and Nvidia drivers. I play WoW, Helldivers, and a bunch of other smaller games with no issue.
For many types of users, Windows is no longer viable. I have friends who work at a .NET shop and most of that team now uses Macs. Unthinkable just a few years ago. Meanwhile, I checked ProtonDB and now 90% of my Steam library is Platinum or Native. So I finally switched my gaming PC to Linux. Microsoft's priorities are elsewhere, Windows doesn't have a bright future.
Yeah. It really does seem that Microsoft is giving up on... everything? Like Xbox is kinda out, Windows is not great, and their AI never comes up as meaningful.
I wouldn't personally work for them ever. I've only heard bad things about their codebase... and I know people like to complain, but it's usually comedy levels of bad.
My limited understanding is that they are focusing on B2B and short-term milking B2C until it lasts.
In late 2025, there are plenty of alternatives:
Linux FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD DragonflyBSD Haiku Plan9 Redox ReactOS Debian Gnu/Hurd FreeDOS Genode SculptOS
And probably some others I haven't heard of. Using Windows in 2025 AND complaining about it is complaining about a self inflicted wound.
Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use.
I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
>I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I've been using Arch for about two months now. It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction because I have two literal decades of experience using a windows machine. That experience has value and the idea of throwing it away is a barrier.
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The more likely option than any of these excellent free options is going to be MacOS… just because your average user with even semi-technical inclination does not want to use LibreOffice Present; they want PowerPoint.
I have just seen this first hand with my significant other: they are very technical and more than capable of it, but have zero interest in learning Linux and instead just bought a MacBook on Black Friday specials when their 5 year old HP laptop finally got too annoying to use.
Well, I didn't mention MacOS because it is not installable on the author's win10 computer.
Also, MacOs is as difficult to learn as Linux is for someone who never used it. Resistance to change exist in all directions.
Most people are fine with the web version of Powerpoint.
I literally only use Windows for games. And I guess now RealityScan which is gaming adjacent.
If I had the confidence that I could play a new release on Linux day 1 without trading an enormous amount of performance, I wouldn't need Windows at all.
Depending on your hardware and gaming needs, the current state of Linux gaming may already be enough.
I run Arch with an Nvidia GPU (which historically had poor Linux support compared to AMD), and I’ve been able to play 100% of the games that I used to play on Windows with no noticeable performance decrease.
There is one significant issue with Dx12 on nvidia, but even that has been root caused and should be fixed next year.
I think it would be less daunting for many if there were 1 or 2 popular alternatives to rally around. Including window managers / desktop environments. (Granted, it's nice they can all coexist peacefully.)
There are a handful of popular Linux distros. Ubuntu is probably the most beginner-friendly one with the most staying power; it's the easiest place to start if you have no other ideas/requirements.
The thing is, a healthy ecosystem thrives on diversity. Rallying behind one or two tends towards a monoculture.
I think Linux is the most popular of the alternatives listed.
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Having a job that requires Windows is not what I would call self-inflicted.
That is besides the point. In that case it is self-inflicted by the company choosing to depend on it.
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True. It is a would inflicted by your employer in that case. Maybe you could find a different one that doesn’t inflict such wounds.
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The job should give you Windows Enterprise with the correct group policies that disable most of the enshittification. Otherwise it’s self-inflicted.
Haiku is very pleasing in an eyecandy sort of way, but that's sadly all it has going for it.
I personally wouldn't use it as a serious OS.
I think Haiku is in that "last 5%" phase. They have something that is 95% of the way there, it's 95% cool, but frustratingly, that last 5% is really important; there's a lot of boring, thankless work with any software that has broad reach.
Most people don't like doing it, but in order for the operating system to be "good", you really need most of this unsexy stuff to work; you need to be able to easily install WiFi drivers, you need to support most modern video cards, you need to suss out the minutia of the graphics APIs, you need to test every possible edge case in the filesystem, you need to ensure that file associations are consistent, etc.
I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I respect so much about the Wine project. It's been going on for decades, each release gets a little better, and a lot of that work is almost certainly the thankless boring stuff that is absolutely necessary to get Wine to be "production ready".
I ran Haiku a bit on an old laptop, and I do actually like it. It's ridiculously fast and snappy (even beating Linux in some cases), and I really do wish them the best, but as of right now I don't think it's viable quite yet. I'm not 100% sure how they're going to tackle GPU drivers (since GPU drivers are almost an entire OS in their own right), but I would love to have something FOSS that takes us out of the codified mediocrity of POSIX.
I have one machine that runs Windows (apart from one Windows 11 VM on my Mac laptop I use for work), all this nonsense has got me to install Fedora on a separate M2 drive on it, and I haven't booted up Windows in a few days now. Will be an interesting experiment, I've run it before but more for fun, but will try to go as full time on that computer as possible.
My boomer mother in law could handle Linux whether it be GNOME or KDE. What she cannot handle is not being able to put in a DVD of Turbo Tax 20xx and double click the install button. Nor can she handle not having the native Outlook client, or Microsoft Word.
Yes there are alternatives, and possibly even good enough web versions of these tools, but most of the world isn’t like you and me.
To be honest I think she can handle LibreOffice. Double-click to open file (can be docx), start typing and click save when done. Open any MS Office file. I really don't get the religuous attachment to MS Office.
I do worry sometimes about fonts. The default Arial replacement should be geometrically idential and thus not lead to issues. TBH I don't know if there are significant rendering issues between LO and MS Office, as I always use PDF. I sometimes upload it to Google Docs to see if it's displayed identically. So far I've never ran into an issue. TBH I think LO is better except for the performance which is okay but not great.
At this point Office programs are commodity. Apple has good options. Google has. And any Linux distro will come with LO. Really a non-issue I think. Even for older people.
Does TurboTax still distribute DVDs? I thought it was entirely online now.
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Microsoft with the push to require TPM 2.0, that isn't really required, is responsible for huge amounts of new e-waste. Any green initiative they claim is out the door.
It's an eco-disaster but on the other hand there is Linux... at some point people need to take a stand, especially given how crappy W11 is...
Im not going to do the support for my kids not using windows along with the schools using O365 and such. So found a refurb business laptop for them on the one without TPM2. Popped linux on the old one and it went from slow to fast for OS related things and not a terrible machine but snappy. Like, it's a 10yr old i5 but that was enough for sims4, office, and minecraft. It's crazy how much compute performance Windows is taking from its users.
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Surprisingly effective solution:
For reference: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/159624-how-specify-targe...
It may not work on Windows Home, however.
I have been using InControl successfully.
https://www.grc.com/incontrol.htm
Just curious what does it do?
Sets the underlying Registry keys for the Group Policy "Select the target Feature Update version". It tells the Windows Update service to select updates for a specific feature update instead of offering latest.
https://gpsearch.azurewebsites.net/Default.aspx?PolicyID=151...
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> at this point a Windows machine only belongs to you in name. Microsoft can run arbitrary code on it.
I get what the author is trying to say, but...like... obviously?
I get what you're saying, but OS vendors could prevent themselves from running arbitrary code, even from themselves, without the user's authorization if they really wanted to. I'm not sure it is in anyone's best interest since it would affect everything from security updates to automatically installing device drivers (e.g. people would be left with insecure systems or would claim Windows is broken since most would not understand the prompts). It would also be difficult to prevent Microsoft's marketing department from sneaking a trojan horse into things like security update.
Make it do the security stuff out-of-the-box, allow the user to change ANYTHING they want, including turning off the security stuff. Linux! It's in everyone's best interest.
The average user is not able to understand the code that is running and the 99th percentile user does not want to spend the time to understand the code.
Holds for Apple devices just as well.
I mean, the free software community has been saying this for 40 years now.
And it went from unrealistic paranoia to 'like... obviously?' seamlessly.
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In 1985, there were no autoupdates/forced updates/or really any available updates that didn't come on physical media.
I mean.. how is this different from any OS distribution? Apple can push whatever. So can Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo. Unless im literally running Linux From Scratch im at the mercy of maintainers to do whatever they want.
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Probably influenced by the Microsoft history of sneaky things over last 45 years
What are you talking about? It's my machine. I authorized the running of certain kinds of software from Microsoft. It's not supposed to be a running authorization for them to reach in and do whatever they want on it.
Do yourself a favor and start using Linux on both machines.
I ordered a basic Windows laptop, it comes with Windows 11. It's going to be my Linux starter computer. I'm not a computer person. Wish me luck!
If you decide to dual boot:
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
I run this as the first step on any new Win 11 machine, the recommended defaults remove nearly all annoyances I care about. It's a popular tool that's been around for years with a lot of users so isn't some random repo, and it's just Powershell so pretty easy to understand what it's doing if you want to audit the code yourself.
After running it once, I've seen nothing that I would consider an "ad" on Windows 11, and search looks only at the filesystem without any web/store trash. Somewhat ironically, it makes for a cleaner experience than MacOS where I regularly get spammed by Apple trying to cross-sell me something (iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, etc).
(FWIW, I have also never needed to re-run after an update or anything, based on 6+ full Win11 installs across three different devices.)
I hope you researched Linux driver support for that model first. I share the dissatisfaction with the direction of Windows -- but their driver library is unparalleled. Linux CAN run great on lots of machines, but it has nowhere near the hardware support.
> but it has nowhere near the hardware support.
My usb scanner would like to have a word with you. Its last supported driver was for windows 2000 and it still works well on Linux.
Hardware support vary between the 2 operating system and new stuff may be supported earlier on windows but I can't say that windows driver library is unparalleled, quite the opposite actually.
There are only really two big bloches when it comes to drivers these days: Wifi and Nvidia. And even Nvidia at-least works if you've got a modern card, so you won't be stuck with no output, you'll just get worse performance. Wi-fi you really should double-check though if you need that.
Some niche accessories also have issues, or at least niche features on those accessories.
I've not really seen that much of a problem with Linux drivers being available recently while the quality problem of windows drivers being unreviewed code seems like its partly addressed for central monopolies but still in the peripherals if you'll pardon the pun.
That may well be the case except for my Kyocera printer. I never managed to get the device to stay online for more than 5 minutes on Windows 10. Wanting to print a letter was actually a hassle taking ~15 minutes. When I plugged it into my Nobara(Fedora) PC it just worked - I didn't even have to specify a driver or anything. It can now even print barcodes. It couldn't with Windows 10, no matter what driver I tried. Also: KB505518 from April 2025 disabled all my USB ports - there was never a fix.
The Penguin is calling.
Not being battered by upsells nobody asked for every time you turn the laptop on is so refreshing.
This reminds me of the situation with online ads.
Most people with ad blockers don't realize how unusable the web is for those that don't have ad blockers. I think most would agree this is a poor state that industry incentives have landed us in, and with the web being distributed, it's hard to know how to fix.
Similarly those who use Linux probably don't realize how bad Windows has got recently.
Microsoft has managed to replicate this awful ux problem on a system that they entirely control...
When your computer does what you tell it and it doesn't actively try to undermine your intentions, computing becomes fun again.
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Windows used to be like that too, when MS was more focused on being hostile to the competition than its own customers.
My 5 year old laptop runs a lot faster as well.
Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. The UX isn't terribly worse on fairly old hardware.
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Instead, you get battered by proselytes every time you go online! :D
Exactly.
Upgrade, to Linux.
2026 year of the linux desktop
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Why bother with Linux when there is MacOS? You get decent hardware to go with it too
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I sure like seeing
every time I log in. Or
> You do not have a valid subscription for this server. Please visit www.proxmox.com to get a list of available options.
every time I log in.
Believe it or not, Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution.
Ubuntu broke new ground when it came out but around the time they switched to the Gnome desktop, they stopped focusing on a great desktop experience and it was surpassed by other, better distributions. I'd recommend trying Linux Mint instead as it has all the greatness of Linux without the crap from Canonical (eg. SNAPs).
I haven't recommended Ubuntu to anyone for years but there are still people recommending it because it was great years ago and they don't seem to know it's now lagging other distributions.
That’s if you run a OS version older than 5 years. You can still update to a newer Ubuntu version for free and get another 5 years if you pick an LTS version.
So disable it?
Ultimately, I didn't switch to Linux because I wanted to. I switched to Linux because Microsoft became so actively hostile to me I felt like I didn't have any other choice.
No Microsoft, I'm not buying new hardware just to get the new OS. No, I'm not going to let you nag me every single day until I get pissed off enough to. No, I will not tolerate all the little things in your OS that piss me off everyday. Your software sucks. Your filesystem sucks. Your constant nagging sucks. I don't want your cloud TPM security bullshit and I DEFINITELY don't want Copilot or Recall.
Seriously Microsoft: fuck you.
Giving up being able to play certain games - which require me to install malware into my computer anyway - is a small price to pay to have my sanity and freedom back. I own my computer, not you. Goodbye and good riddance.
I already used MacOS and Linux for work anyway. But don't worry Apple, you're riding that line pretty dangerously too - you're gonna be next on the chopping block if you don't get your act together. Framework Desktop is looking like a mighty capable replacement for my Mac Studio.
Very relatable. It was so scary when I jumped ship in 2021. It was simply no longer acceptable to stay on such a hostile platform. I was willing to accept a huge downgrade in terms of usability and functionality. It turned out to actually be a lot more pleasant to use. Better software, more software, better performance. Just better all around.
Use Rufus it'll disable hardware requirements, without hassle. You will need an iso. If you know someone with 11 have them download it. Otherwise download the generic.
It also lets you skip the first time install dialogue by setting defaults and add a local-only account. Rufus is the way to go about installing windows.
Had to scroll way too far down through windows gripes to find this, the real answer. Windows 11 will run just fine on your machine, OP. Just use Rufus and a USB stick to do the upgrade.
totally agree, but it is a bit ridiculous that this workaround is required.
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But it will break on updates. Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC doesn't have those requirements
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...but then you have to use Windows 11...
Or a Windows 10 installation that won't get security updates. I don't know which is worse.
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I switched to Linux about 10 years ago... I used to keep a partition on the side for Windows for dual-boot... But nowadays I just wipe my drive clean!
With my latest computer, I noticed that some kind of boot protection was added in the BIOS which made it harder to install Linux from USB... I had to disable the safety mechanism in the bios before it would let me boot... It's a shame because, at a glance, I actually thought the Windows UI had improved since the last version a few years ago which was appalling...
But yeah I hate Windows' coercive approach. This is why I was never an Apple fan. I hate how Apple keeps trying to hide the underlying hardware like the file system and external (non-Apple) devices.
These companies are basically PsyOps in my view. There are many better free (open source) alternatives available where you actually own the OS. I don't understand how people can stand renting inferior software for 10x the price as owning a better alternative.
It's like if I offered people to rent a Ford car for $20k per year or get a free Mercedes Benz, and 90% choose to rent the Ford because it feels familiar and their friends also rent a Ford... What is wrong with people?
There is something seriously wrong with people. It's like someone (or something) hypnotized them. Are we sure we don't have ASI controlling people? This is not normal.
This is like; what kinds of people are trying to accumulate fiat money nowadays? There's nothing behind it. It's just digits inside a bunch of different databases without any consensus between them and where the government can create unlimited digits for free. Something wrong with people.
A few days ago I started up an old Windows 10 laptop that I haven't used in a few years so my son could play a game that I haven't taken the time to set up in proton on linux. I was amazed at how much the Windows OS experience seems like an unhealthy relationship where the OS is trying to manipulate you and control you. It feels like it's not even my computer, it's a Microsoft owned kiosk that I'm allowed to partially use.
Another really remarkable thing is how cloud connected it is. For instance, the lock screen had online feeds shown. The setting to disable them is on a remote website, not in the screensaver prefs or some other local system pref. That was astonishing, and IMHO absurd. If it hadn't been clear to me before, that made it crystal clear that what MS wants the OS to be and what I want the OS of my personal computer to be are not remotely the same thing.
There must be a way to disable this thing. Maybe we can disable the service? But anyway I already switched to Linux for my daily usage. It is not smooth as Windows due to driver issues and other weird things, like Firefox crashing frequently when I’m typing in a text box like this one, but still feels better than Windows.
The Windows team and its product manager is determined to trash the product. Good work!
> There must be a way to disable this thing.
If Windows had a slogan, this would be it.
If you are on Nvidia hardware, make sure to use a distro that makes it easy to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers. In Ubuntu, just open the Additional Drivers tab and the rest will be self-explanatory. For other platforms, ask an AI.
Satya Nadella really nosedived Windows.
I disagree. I think his intention was to maximize shareholder value which he has done dramatically by making the user the product being sold. Microsoft stock has soared even at the expense of Microsoft shedding users. Satya has realized the true value of Windows as a revenue platform. It never was a competitive operating system.
From my earlier comment to another Windows post:
Windows 11 has transitioned from a standalone tool into a digital storefront that prioritizes recurring revenue through aggressive prompts for Microsoft 365 and OneDrive subscriptions. By mandating cloud-based Microsoft Accounts, the OS effectively anchors your identity to a marketing ID, allowing the company to track behavior and monetize your data. The interface now functions as an advertising platform, injecting "recommended" apps and sponsored content directly into the Start menu and search results. Ultimately, this shift means users are no longer just customers of a product, but recurring assets whose attention and telemetry are sold to sustain Microsoft’s ecosystem and maximize shareholder value.
I disagree. Satya doesn't give a crap about Windows; he's the cloud guy. Over 40% of Microsoft's revenue is cloud. Another 20% is office (which is also heading towards cloud). Windows revenue is a measly 9% -- even less than gaming.
Windows is what it is because it's really not important to Microsoft to anymore. It's effectively unmoored from the rest of organization and left to fight for some kind of financial relevance in an organization that doesn't care about it anymore.
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Given the continued dominance and success of the Xbox platform /s I'm surprised the shockwave hasn't reached the top.
Switch to Win10 LTSC iOT if you want to keep getting security updates for many years
Bonus is it strips out all the crap and is super fast
Downside is a few specific pieces of software refuse to install (for no good technical reason). Adobe Photoshop for example
There is also win11 LTSC iOT which I believe might actually install on older hardware that normal win11 will not (don't quote me on this)
Our kids‘ school received some old surface laptops for free through some initiative. I‘ve been tasked to take care of them. And of course, WiFi mysteriously stopped working for all of them, after ca 1 week of use.
It turns out that a recent Win11 update bricked the network adapter. After some digging, it is this problem: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4378104/...
I‘ve tried:
- Uninstalling the update and disabling updates for 5 weeks. But Windows just decided to reinstall the update after 2 days. Bricked again.
- Disabling fast start. This reactivated itself the next day.
- What finally worked, was disabling hibernation entirely.
The "Yes or Maybe Later" dialogue boxes that festoon the internet & Windows 11 need to end - time for another law imo:
"No" must always be an option, and notices must not be shown again if this is selected.
And it’s not just TPM. I have tpm module however they don’t support my Intel 7700K processor.
yup. Fixed list of supported cpus. Well, I suppose it grows to include newer CPUs.
That said the rufus workaround can work for these - I'm writing this from a machine that's not a supported cpu that I just upgraded to Win 11 with rufus. Runs just fine. Fun fact about my cpu: no cpu with the same socket is supported, so to be officially supported I'd have to also upgrade the motherboard.
Adding to the enshittified pile of bad decissions that Windows has become, the actual requirements for Windows 11 are just a corporate caprice and not a real "requirement". I did whatever it needed to bypass the checks at install time, and W11 is now working exactly and equally as well as W10 was, on a laptop which only has TPM 1.2 and an old CPU.
Where is the requirement then in modern CPUs and TPM 2.0, Microsoft? Didn't you mean "nice to have" so additional but perfectly optional security features could be enabled?
I'm guessing they'll break it later by actually using said requirement.
Then say "i told you so!"
Microsoft making advertisements for https://store.steampowered.com/steamos ?
In Win 11 Home, and want to add a local account and not change it to a Windows account, and not share my stuff with MS. No Cloud or "Backups", thank you.
The option to enable a local account was through the command line only. The dark patterns and persausion to convince me not to was off putting.
But every time I boot in to have to go through the nag screen is off the wall.
It is truly crazy how much I understand the dedication people have to avoid using a unfamiliar system.
The only reason I keep my home PC with windows still is that I use it mainly to play games and some have anti-cheat systems that are not compatible with Linux. But I play those games less and less the older I get, I play mostly older games / emulators. I see it very likely that I won't install whatever comes after Windows 11 and at that point I might move over to Linux for good.
These nags are very disrespectful indeed and widespread, Apple also sometimes has undissmissable iOS upgrade label (liquid glass, leave me alone!)
Though you can bypass tpm requirements if you want to upgrade to win11, and also can switch to ltsc Win10 version for a few more years of support
I'm happy with Windows 11 after tweaks to fix it. I certainly sympathesize with Windows 10 users who can't upgrade. But it seems to me Windows 10 users aren't getting the message: Microsoft just isn't that into you.
Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases? I'm guessing not (I don't have the figures) and Microsoft would rather you replace your 10 year old laptop that can't run Windows 11 or run Linux on it. They really don't care which, just as long as you go away and they don't have to support you anymore.
I'm not assosciated with Microsoft, just someone who has been using their products for 40 years. I am someone who can read in between the lines, and this is my take.
The author just wants Microsoft to stop harassing him. He's not asking for handouts. He's not even asking to be allowed to bypass the hardware requirements for Windows 11. He just wants to stop getting nagged by Microsoft to upgrade.
He could buy new hardware and run Windows 11. But this pattern will only continue from Microsoft. The only way out is to run a non-Microsoft OS (assuming he can).
The important point here is that data collection and telemetry is worthless and was never about improving the experience for you as a user. The coders behind the update nag had every opportunity to do a hardware check, but as I say, big data is never used to improve anything for end users.
You're not getting what I'm saying. Hassling him is the point. They want him to use Windows 11 or go away. He's a security update expense because he's too cheap to upgrade his laptop or run Linux on it.
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How did you tweak and fix it? I suffer with Windows 11 at work and everything is just so slow. Alt+Tab often gets stuck and clicking icons on the taskbar don't register about a fifth of the time. Take a screenshot with Shift+Win+S? That's gonna take at least 10 seconds for the snipping app to even load, after which what I wanted to screenshot is probably gone. Open a tab in Explorer? Five seconds, during which individual parts of the UI update. Delete 50k files from some image analysis? That's gonna crash explorer.exe and take down the whole shell. I suppose they rewrote the Windows shell in React, and every basic interaction is a major undertaking. At home I have a 12 year old PC, with Linux and the Gnome DE. It is absurd how much faster it is, everything is snappy and instantaneous. To me, there is nothing to fix in Windows 11 - they have failed horribly.
From my experience, a computer running that slowly is out of memory and hitting the swap file constantly. The tweaks I did are in settings. I turned off widgets, OneDrive and Ads. Also there have been comprehensive scripts for cleaning Windows 11 shared here on Hacker News if you look for them.
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Windhawk, O&O ShutUp10++ and a few other manual registry tweaks
There is no free support, e.g. call center agents for Windows 10 users. As for security vulnerabilities in Windows 10, Microsoft is going to continue fixing them until at least 2032 (probably longer with extended support) anyways, as Windows 10 1809 LTSC end-of-life is 2029 and Windows 10 21H2 IoT LTSC is supported until 2032.
Microsoft isn't that into you either. With Windows 11 you are not a customer, you and your data are the products.
Meh. I'm also a Linux destop user on a second machine. I'll completely switch when Windows 11 becomes a problem for me. Microsoft used to be a OS company, but is now a cloud company that offers Linux on it's cloud services.
> "Do you think Windows OS is a profit center...?"
The consumer editions are not all there is to Windows. Nearly every seat of Windows 11 Enterprise used in corporations is a paid license and there are a lot of corporations. Nearly every instance of Windows Server is a very expensive paid license and is required to run Active Directory, MS Exchange, SQL Server, etc.
I have no experience with Windows Server or Enterprise and don't know anyone who does. Forgive me for omitting "consumer" from my description. Yes, I mean consumer Windows.
> Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases?
They get money out of almost every computer sold all over the world. Are you saying that's not enough to keep a system that hasn't seen improvement in 2 decades and barely get bugfixes?
I upgraded to windows 11 as soon as it was offered. Even went out and bought a tpm addon for my motherboard - not that I needed one 100% but activating the onboard one on Zen 3 at the time was thought to cause stuttering…
Anyway, why would I do that?
Well, I got windows free at some point, a lot of years ago, and I am happy enough to jump through a few hoops to keep that going. I don’t use it day to day, I’m not sure why anyone would. I use MacOS and Linux as daily drivers.
But once in a while there’s a game I want to play that’s not that Linux-friendly, and there’s windows up to date and supported, without MS getting another cent out of me since about 2009. What’s not to like?
It's beside the point of the article but...
> The hardware limitation is specifically TPM 2.0
Almost every even half decent CPU made in the last decade does have TPM 2.0, albeit for some strange reason OEMs used to ship with it disabled. You may be able to turn it on in the bios.
My 7700k, a top of the line CPU from 2017, doesn’t support Windows 11 even though it has TPM 2.0. I had to install using rufus.
For sure, there are other hardware requirements a 2017 CPU may fail.
This is a massive pet peeve of mine as well. As far as I'm aware there's not a single consumer CPU listed in the Windows 11 compatibility list that doesn't have builtin TPM2.0.
> I also paid for a pro version of the OS.
Yep. And you got what you've paid for.
Look at it. This is "pro" now.
I switched to Linux (Slackware, Gentoo, Kubuntu, Arch Linux) some 22 years ago. It has been a pain and sometimes I still get issues.
But I am grateful my PC basically does whatever I ask it to.
A desktop PC lasted 10 years before dying. A laptop another 6 years. No NAGs, no service subscription.
And no ads from software (browser sometimes excluded), no nothing.
I could still install it on a very old machine, with some extra work needed, I could still use less than 1GB RAM.
So I am grateful, despite some extra work is sometimes needed. Nothing is really free. It's a matter of tradeoffs.
Just grab LTSC, it gets security updates till 2032. It's great! Also less bloat.
I love the phrase I heard recently: “software developers don’t understand consent”
It describes so much
When I, as a developer, was told (essentially forced if I wanted to keep my job) to implement dark patterns, I did it knowing I made the world worse. I was fully aware of it, and my coworkers as well, we discussed it openly, and I imagine everyone implementing such tech are. Of course I and other could claim plausible deniability, ”we didn’t understand consent”.
I hope one day there will be pushback on this from people like you, but when your boss has an economical stranglehold over you, not to mention the old adage 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it', it's understandable why we're in this situation.
Sales people don't understand it, not software developers.
If you are a software developer and you implemented that without question, you suck.
Which one invented "ask me again later" dialogs?
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See Windows and Android. Blaming only the sales people is ... not helping.
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What is the difference between software and car sales? The car sales knows when they are lying.
These problems are rampant enough in the OSS world too, never heard of an open source salesman.
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Software developers understand consent well but they understand dollar signs even better.
[flagged]
I wonder how hard would it be to just switch back to Windows 7 for these kinds of cases? Obviously the most ideal solution is to use Linux but there's still some edge cases where Windows is needed or is just preferred. If you install Windows 7 in a VM you'll be blown away by having a simple, clean OS that just runs applications and doesn't shove ads or Bing search into the start menu. And obviously it would be vulnerable to software exploits but if the device is mostly kept offline I can't see many issues with that coming up. Something to think about...
I know people who are still on Windows 7, but application support is becoming more difficult, including mainstream web browsers. You can still disable annoyances like in TFA on Windows 10, you just have to dig a bit.
I want to experiment with windows PE for that kind of use there used to be lite windows “distro” bashed on pe I used to love playing with
At a certain point you’ll lose application support, including from the major browsers and other services like Steam
I suspect there are cybersecurity stakes regarding win11 and win10, but I am not entirely sure.
I think that the spectre mitigation are not a problem in win11 because win11 is not supported on CPU that are vulnerable, which might be a reason they encourage people to get win11 and get a new PC, but that's an unverified guess, I am just trying to get them the benefit of the doubt.
SteamOS looks like it might take a lot of the windows cake, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to.
So far it doesn't look like SteamOS supports most of PC hardware out there, but it could be a next step for Valve.
Microsoft users are the product being sold
I had the same frustrations recently with my MacBook Pro, with macOS constantly telling me about Tahoe despite OCLP--which I used to patch my unsupported Mac to Sonoma--currently not supporting that version of macOS. These notifications aren't able to be disabled, just like in Windows--trust me, I tried to do that. They irritated me so much, that I've actually taken to installing Ubuntu on the Mac just so I can avoid seeing them.
I can only hope that this degradation of UX will make more people switch or consider switching to other distributions. It's the only thing that will make microsoft listen.
>The terms and conditions are simple. Every time you perform any network access, you have to send a copy of the payload and response back to my server. Either that, or you're in breach of my terms.
That's not how contracts work, at all. MS hasn't bought anything from him, nor was he able to require them to agree to anything in order for him to install the OS.
Picked up a Framework 13 for my daughter for Xmas. She’s a politics student, so she needs a solid keyboard. I hate installing Windows on this hardware, but she absolutely relies on Office and Citavi. Plus, proficiency in Windows is a standard requirement in her field. Maybe she'll discover Linux eventually!
> absolutely relies on Office
You mean "absolutely relies on being able to work with Office formats". Which most Linux distros do well out of the box. I'm not aware of any feature that LO doesn't support, although admittedly I usually exchange PDFs.
> Citavi
According to the WineDB page for Citavi:, "native Linux alternatives include: - BibSonomy / PUMA - JabRef - Mendeley - Zotero - Colwiz"
Of course when going through education you don't want to take risks, there is a lot on the line. But it may be worth to play with the alternatives a bit, albeit on a VM or something. Of course maybe the Citavi format needs to be exchanged; that could actually be a problem. Annoying.
Sure, it's doable, and I'm on Linux desktop as well and not missing anything. She never had a computer other than her iPad. So it's hard (for me) but for her it's the best solution right now.
Need a suggestion, and thought might as well ask here. I use a Mac now. Last windows was more than 15 years ago and now I want to try Linux. which version would you recommend? should I go with Ubuntu or Debian or Mint or something else? I am not a tinkerer. I want something that just works, on the lines of a Mac.
Ubuntu. Pay close attention; the normal Ubuntu is what I consider beta. The Long-Term-Support (LTS) variants of Ubuntu is what I consider the normal Ubuntu, which should always be used except maybe when working on Ubuntu components as a developer. This will save you a lot of pain down the road.
Probably Manjaro or Ubuntu.
And in my experience, nothing “just works”.
I am okay if some edge case needs tinkering. As long as every day common use cases just works. There is no distro that even meets that?
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The single stupidest thing people new to linux do is try to install it on random hardware and expect it to just work. Mac has the hardware idea right where all of their hardware is thoroughly vetted against their OS so practically no one runs into issues. To get something similar on Linux you'd need to buy from a vendor that offers their OS preloaded with Linux. Kubuntu Focus, System76, Tuxedo, are the ones that focus on Linux and Framework, Lenovo, and Dell offer linux as an option and at least support it.
I would happily switch to Linux, problem is it doesn't support the audio hardware I have. And although I've tried to figure out how the drivers get it working on Windows, I can't separate the wheat from the chaff in the 500+ USB packet dump Wireshark gives me :-( Otherwise I'd dump Windows and throw NixOS on this thing and stripe my two NVMes.
Is it possible to switch an existing windows 10 install to the extended support version? (Can't remember the exact term).
LTSC. Technically MSFT doesn’t offer them to laymen like us but I don’t think they would care if you pirate them.
https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
This worked for me to switch to Extended Security Updates (ESU): https://github.com/abbodi1406/ConsumerESU
massgrave. Even Microsoft support uses that script
I don't know how many years/months/days/hours the author is going to continue using Windows for, but this seems like a perfect task to be "resolved" by AHK, which is probably in the top 10 things Windows users have access to. Worth trying, at least before switching to another source of operating system.
Wasnt there a Google cross app logging framework and request tracking project 15 years ago?
Did grafana die when I wasn't looking? Does datadog still make money?
What's weird about this article is that it's the same thing being said 20 years ago. Is this a sign of people not learning from the better parts of Java deployment stacks?
Were you intending to respond in this thread instead?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346796
I've been running Win11 without a TPM for 6 years. Saying you can't upgrade isn't the same thing as Windows saying you can't upgrade. Knowing your OS seems to be a lost art. I'm not dismissing the valid complaint, but the title is empirically wrong clickbait.
The only Hard requirements are a CPU with SSE 4.2 and POPCNT. Win11 will simply not install on older CPUs. The rest of the requirements can be bypassed but Microsoft will block you from the annual major feature upgrades. You will have to do those manually too. They also claim that your stability and performance on pre-8th Gen CPUs will be degraded and they will give no support, but in reality it runs just fine. Win11 is sluggish on all CPUs anyway.
Win11 was released at the end of 2021. What were you running for 6?
Tried it when it was Win10 with a fancy name. Never had an issue with TPM or any other hardware requirements. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_11_build_21242_(rs_prerele...
They keep reminding you so you end up buying a new PC with Windows 11. That's all it is. No extra code logic is needed. Just keep pestering the end user with a popup. They don't care for any variations.
The goal is to get everyone on Windows 11.
This is not 1998 or even 2008. Times have slowly and "progressively" moved on. Truth is you NEVER OWNED a copy of Windows. You always purchased the rights to USE it. Now that technology has improved especially the internet Microsoft have tried to gain more control over YOUR computer.
Look at Nintendo and their Switch 2. In their world you do not own it. If they think you are doing something "you shouldn't" they will brick it! Sure, I am not suggesting Microsoft does this with Windows but I am 100% certain this type of tactics has been discussed in high-end meetings. The key here is CONTROL.
Today - if Microsoft want to push a program and "encourage" you to use it.. they will install it without any form of consent. Sorry, but if I OWN a computer then I want control with the software installed, including an Operating System. Microsoft has always been a huge '??' in this field and, to me, it is getting worse. I am not even talking about government involvement with the big techs, either.
Copilot -- I dont care.
This rumour (is it a rumour) that Windows takes photos of your screen every so oftern... NO THANK YOU!
I might have to continue using Windows (11) in my job, being given a work laptop, etc. At the end of the day I do not care as its not my laptop and decisions are taken outside my control by specific IT departments. Whatever. At home I am 100% GNU/Linux. It is sooo much faster and programs loads in <1.5 seconds compared to 5-20 seconds on Windows 11.
My biggest concern is the future of GNU and Linux. Well, the Linux kernel more so especially when Linus hangs up his keyboard. Hopefully the next guy in charge cares about our Freedoms. Honestly I imagine an alternative world where a corporations takes control. The beauty, thanks to the GPL, is people can branch off an continue their own. Sadly... GNU/Linux MIGHT get infiltrated one day and most of that will be people NOT caring about our FREEDOM. This, in my opinion, is all dependent on the future generations.
Linux
I get the sentiment but I find it frustrating when people write complaints like this when they know Rufus boot exists which disables TPM and online only accounts during the install.
Usually, whenever there's a workaround for something with Windows, you'll never know until it happens how long it will take before a Windows update makes the workaround ineffective.
Is Rufus any different?
2026 will be Year of the Linux Desktop, at least for Mr. Diallo!
Block updates, remove bloat via PS scripts. Done.
Rufus will let you install with a local account even on PCs that don't support TPM, but would you really want to?
I have this problem too, Microsoft is a terrible corrupt organization now without Bill Gates.
Excuse me, but what? Do you not know of the reputation Microsoft had with Bill Gates? Embrace, extend, extinguish?
looking at the author's photo in the OP, appears that they own a Surface. if that is the device referred to in the post, it is quite interesting to see that not supporting win 11.
I been using windows 11 Enterprise for home use. No bloatware.
Ten years old laptop? Pretty sure it has a TPM 2.0 on it.
I also have a 10 year old laptop with no TPM 2.0 module. It was pretty high end for the time too (Dell XPS). I haven't needed it for much in recent years, but it still runs perfectly fine and I'm happy to continue using it if the need arises again. Sounds like I'll have to switch that over to Linux like I have all my other PCs.
> It's one thing to be at the forefront of enshittification, but Microsoft is now actively hostile to its users.
Haven't lived under a rock until now must be relaxing.
I really hope this mess will lead to a significant uptick in Linux usage though. That would be a great effect. Unfortunately, most people will either adapt or go with macOS and be in a similar spot in a few years.
For what it's worth, a lot of the crowd who used to want to but we're hamstrung by the garbage support for games on Linux are now actually switching since Steam has essentially made it "just work" via Proton. The final real blocker for many people is finally gone this iteration of the cycle.
I myself have fully switched to Endeavor for my personal desktop, though I still use a MacBook for work (as I have for 17 years now, if you include college). It's been a surprisingly seamless experience, I highly recommend it over Ubuntu-based distributions, especially for Steam (I was a former Mint adherent but the general stability has gone way downhill).
I find macOS a pretty good compromise. I guess if it got too annoying I could go Linux. I use Word/Excel a lot but am fine with old versions - none of this 365 nonsense.
My old 6600 from 2016 is still running fine, I replaced the SSD (Intel 400GB to X25-E 64GB that will last 20 years minimum), the RAM (Micron to Samsung from aliexpress before the price hike... got 8 sticks of 16GB for $40 a pop for backup) and even the old trusty monitor (Both Eizo 5:4 matte VA; mercury tube to led, with f.lux/redshift the blue light is ok).
But with a 3050 upgrade from the 1050 and later 1030 (best GPU for eternity if you discount VR) I had in it it's good for another decade. If a game comes out that does not run on it I wont play it... simple as that... 150W is enough. So far only PUBG stutters, what a joke of bloat and poor engineering that game has become...
Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7. Win 11 improves NOTHING over 10.
YMMV but recommendation is still: do not buy new X86 hardware; do not use new OS/languages.
Build something good with what you have right now.
Make it so good it's still in use after 100 years.
> Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7
Windows 7 doesn't have compressed memory (ZRAM). Doesn't support TRIM for NVMe SSDs. Doesn't have WSL. Doesn't have ISO mounting built in. Doesn't have HDR, variable refresh rate, etc...
The better statement is 'Win 10 improved nothing directly user-facing over Win 7'. Sure, there are several technical improvements under the hood, but those are completely detached from what the user actually sees and experiences, and there's no real reason we couldn't have the Windows 10 technical improvements with a Windows 7 UI, other than Microsoft being the abusive parent that it is.
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Are those really improvements though.
RAM maybe wears quicker if compressed?
NVMe will break long before a good old SATA drive.
WSL... lol
ISO you can do with daemon tools for free...
Displays are good enough at 60Hz 5:4 matte.
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I have fedora xfce running beautifully on a 2011 i5 Mac mini. Replacing the hard disk with modern SSD was all it took to get it running at acceptable speeds where interacting with xfce is roughly instantaneous
> Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7. Win 11 improves NOTHING over 10.
You had me up to this point. The problem is that there are actually quite a few improvements under the hood over those upgrade paths, but they are unfortunately hidden under all of the bullshit. I was an early adopter of Windows 11 specifically because of their efficiency core support over Windows 10 when I upgraded my CPU.
You need to look at the cost of improvements, and they overshadow all progress.
I'm going linux with TWM (desktop with design look from the 70s) on ARM because M$ is clearly not thinking about the long perspective.
We need a stable platform to build quality software.
And that's saying alot seen how linux is deprecating libc after very short time and the legacy joystick API is not being compiled into modern kernels anymore.
Stability is way more important than bells and whistles.
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Just give me a side taskbar pls.
well and clearly written, and I feel the same about windows. to the author: maybe it is us that should leave windows alone.
The TPM 2.0 "requirement" is mostly artificial - you can bypass it with Rufus and Windows 11 runs fine on older hardware. But that misses the point.
Microsoft is using aggressive dark patterns (undismissable upgrade prompts) to force hardware obsolescence and create e-waste. This isn't about security - it's about maintaining the upgrade treadmill when performance improvements have stalled.
The real issue is consent. Users should be able to say "no" once and have that decision respected. Instead, we get daily nagging designed to exhaust users into compliance. This is the opposite of user-centric design.
Time to consider Linux seriously, or at least Windows 10 LTSC IoT which has support until 2032.
Windows 11 came out FOUR YEARS AGO. It’s time to let this subject die.
They’re harassing you because in not too many years, connecting your computer to the internet on their OS will be dangerous. They’re trying to save you from yourself.
And, quite reasonably, they don’t want to patch an OS that debuted 10 years ago so that it supports your hardware that’s even older than 10 years old.
It’s time to get over it. You’re using a commercial OS that you likely haven’t even paid for since Windows 7 debuted 20 years ago and that vendor needs you to at least upgrade to a still-pretty-shitty-and-old used laptop to remain compatible.
You’re free to switch to something else like Linux and, frankly, if you’re at the point of writing redundant blog posts of the same subject we’ve heard all about for the last 4 years, you definitely should. I did! And pretty much all of my Windows stuff runs on Linux effortlessly including and especially games.
Or you can disconnect from the Internet and kill the nags with some group policy stuff. As a bonus, being disconnected from the internet will stop these blog posts.
Use Linux hehehehe
Just go with LTSC
Just use something else and stop whining.
Use Linux
That's what you get for running Microsloth Windoze
Seriously though, don't get why anyone would voluntarily use, let alone purchase, any windows distro.
disable tpm in the bios
What would that accomplish?
it doesnt install windows 11...
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This popup just tells you to switch to another OS, more respective of you as an user...
The fucking hide of Microsoft, we need a class action to sue them for harassment.
Fucking hide of Microsoft, we need a class action to sue them for harassment.
Yet another reason I'm more than happy I switched my personal desktop use to Linux a few years ago now... After a decade of running Insiders, literally the first time I saw an ad on the Start menu search results, I was out. MS has only been increasingly hostile to users since.
Fortunately o265 web versions are pretty capable, including Teams, and most of the development work I've done is not specifically tied to Windows, and even where it is hasn't been too bad in actual business/enterprise environments (beyond typical corporate/govt hinderances). That said, I like what WSL brings to the table.