Comment by Kon5ole
5 days ago
I think Windows has improved as a basic OS tremendously in the past decade, with things like WSL, winget, terminal, storage spaces, fancyzones and such. The components of perhaps the best general purpose OS available right now are there, but they are buried behind a crappy car-salesman tabloid-press upsell circus that is frankly unbearable to some users.
What I don't get is why MS refuses to let you pay to avoid the circus - It's like a streaming service that only has the ad-financed tier!
I get that the people who care are a minority, but charging that minority a high purchase price for a just-the-os version of windows seems like easy money and would let them dodge all the badwill by presenting a choice.
Right now the official option is simply "suffer the circus or leave". It should at least be amended with "or pay".
My feeling is they would never do that because it would implicitly admit that stuff is bad and people don’t want it so much they’re willing to pay a lot to remove it.