Yeah, this sounds like Louis Rossmann's "rapist mentality" that he's been harping on for a while. They think they own your hardware just because they make software, so they'll force you to do whatever they think is "best" for you (which is probably using more of their products).
Just say no.
Software should give you an incentive to upgrade. I use Linux 100%, and I'm excited to use the next version because it'll fix issues and add features that I'll actually want to use. I'm on openSUSE, and here are some things that I've been excited about recently:
KDE 6 - fixed Wayland for me, so I was able to switch back from GNOME
reproducible builds - I can now theoretically verify that everything I install is built properly instead of having to trust them
cockpit is coming to Leap 15.6 - YaST on the CLI is cool, but clunky; this sounds like I'd get largely the same thing, but through a web browser (i.e. access a port via SSH tunnel, no remote GUI required)
Software should entice you to upgrade, not force you to upgrade. That has never been the case for me for Windows, so I bailed and now use Linux, where it absolutely is the case.
It's called possessiveness when humans do it. Thinking of someone as your possession. It doesn't have the bite to it as a term but it's 100% the case that companies think they own their users.
I loooove my openSUSE desktop. 11 was the last straw. No amount of AI is going to bring me back.
I HATE advertisements, and I paid for Pro but it seemed like they didn't care. They want to milk me for everything I'm worth.
Good thing we have options. Linux has gotten so good, it's better than Windows 11 while letting me decide how to use the OS. Big learning curve, but it's smooth sailing when you get past it.
Its a downgrade. It offers nothing but ads. Who wants ads? Why do they feel the need to keep altering the interface? If microsoft manufactured automobiles they would switch the brake and gas pedals every other year.
I can't wait for massive security problems on corporations once they shut down W10 support and those corporation considering if keeping with windows is woth the risk and the cost anymore.
This isn't the first time Windows has gone EoL in a corporate environment; what makes you think it'll be better or worse than previously? Some will begin the Win11 transition, some will pay for extended support until Windows 12, a few might switch to Linux, and the rest will run unsecured until circumstances force them to fix it.
This time around there are hardware requirements. Corporations equipment is not usually the latest hardware, and windows 11 is pushing customers to buy new hardware.
I suppose for many corporations upgrading to windows 11 would also mean upgrading the computer, which is an increase cost.
I think some smaller companies and government/ civil organisations might switch this time around. But probably most large companies will pay for long term Windows 10 support then begrudgingly switch to 11.
Those switching could use something else, but lets face it the only option mature enough other than Mac OS is Linux. Regardless of the number of organizations that do switch the increased exposure should make the idea of an OS that has no license fees being used successfully very tempting to a lot of people.
And an incomplete product; windows 11 was less functional at launch than windows 10. I've been a windows user since 98 and that's the first time I can remember having said that. Sure, there were off editions that were weird and unpleasant, but I wouldn't say less functional. Windows 11 just flat out was an incomplete product at launch.
And the live service dependencies: windows 11 pooping its diaper and having a fit about every other thing because it doesn't have an Internet connection even though an Internet connection isn't strictly necessary is a terrible UX choice. Anyone with half a brain knows it's because MS has decided that if you won't let them slurp that tasty, tasty data, then you shouldn't be able to use the product you paid for.
And the plans to stuff ads into your operating system
And them basically doing the same shit that landed them huge anti-trust lawsuits in the 90s, but we're doing it again because they figure they can make more money than the lawsuit will cost them, so fuck it.
Oh, I did. I ended up installing Linux mint and used it on my personal machine for about six months before re-installing windows. I would still be using Linux, I liked it a lot, but I found I had a lot of trouble getting multiplayer to work between my daughter and I. Gaming is 98% of the way there, but that 2% is really annoying and it's most of what I use my personal machine for. I'm sure I could have figured it out if I'd had a solid 12-36 hours to fine tune configs and Google hyper specific issues, but I just don't have that. I'm confident I will return to Linux in time, but Windows still has the edge in terms of out-of-the-box gaming, sadly.
They don't have to make people buy it. They just have to stop supporting 10 and have no new machines with 10 pre installed. It will naturally invade our lives.
That was an effort to get people to buy new machines. I loaded it on my gen 7 i7 and my gen 8. Both run it just fine but microsoft insists that one is good and one is bad. Its all about new sales.
Do it. Get a second hard drive and distro hop. Eventually you’ll find what you like and use windows less and less. Doesn’t have to be all or nothing at one point in time.
I'm still having troubles to understand why'd they even want Windows 11 to happen and I'd really like some more informed people to help me out.
They had massive mergers as an unpredicted expense. I also don't know many people who bought the last XBOX unlike previous gens or ever used MS Store. Is that sweet lobbying money from hardware producers? I thought they planned Windows X as the peak Windows platform to then sell internal products (game-as-a-service but OS), so did this plan failed?
Windows 11 looks like an afterthought and the centered taskbar may be intentionally put there to make it look different from Win10 while it's probably the least changed new release as I learnt after a brief encounter with it (after XP, I don't know much about earlier OSes).
My daughter has a Windows 10 notebook for school. We haven't seen a reason to upgrade yet. If Windows made a "never bother you again about anything you don't want to be bothered about" version of Windows 11, we'd upgrade because that's so fucking annoying. I hate Windows.
Yeah I had to do it today to vectorise some images for my gf in adobe ilustrator. But yeah I cannot really recall the last time I booted windows or what I did it for. I jave also been having issues for the past 2 years with windows just constantly adding in the fucking english keyboard layout for me and I cannot remove it so it happened often that I would accidentaly switch to it (because for some reason there are a million shortcuts to do that) and then I would type stuff incorrectly.
There’s a lot more telemetry. They’re stuffing ads into it (start menu, explorer panels, etc). They’re creeping generative cloud AI into it. The control panel/setting situation is unbelievably unfinished (for myself, all my audio devices take the name of other audio devices so they’re all working but mislabeled). A recent update broke all VPNs. High system requirements. Locking down features. Removal of customization. Buggy updates. Slow.
Not trying to defend Win11 too much here. But the system requirements aren't bad until you see how much storage it needs and how much it needs for all of the unnecessary fancy junk they put in to have the "best Windows experience" like Windows Hello.
Microsoft initially wanted to get rid of Control Panel entirely, which would stick us to the bare set of options we've been seeing degrade since Windows 8.
You don't need to actively use something to have a general idea of it. Maybe it's not on his machine but he sees friends/family use it. Maybe he's seen ads, reviews, YouTube videos, articles.
I've never watched NASCAR in my life but I'm fairly certain I could point out differences between one of those cars and an F1 car.
This is the kind of thing people don't get with others when they say that they haven't watched a particular movie or played a particular game. Why bother when there's quite a hefty amount of information out there to learn of them and judge based on that?
People love to trick others into these things by saying "You can't judge a book by it's cover!".
Yes, yes you can actually. You just want people to waste time and money to validate their suspicions that whatever it is, will not be to their liking.
Yup, that's why we have reviewers and whatnot, so I don't need to spend my time and money on something that I most likely won't like. Yeah, I probably miss some gems from time to time, but I'm not hurting for choice.
Anyone else think "Don't judge a book by it's cover" is so weird in a literal sense? Lots of people judge books, music, movies, etc off the visual art associated with it. Otherwise graphic design wouldn't exist.
You'll have your hopeless Windows users who're equally as bad as Apple cultists. Screaming at you to upgrade because "THE SECURITY! THINK OF THE SECURITY! YOUR SYSTEM WILL FUCKING DIE IF YOU DON'T GET YOURSELF SECURED!1!1" when all you fucking do is just check e-mail, oh my god. /s
But the fight to resist upgrading has gotten longer and will get longer. Going by the Windows OS global stats of it's marketshare, 3% are still clinging to Win7. 23% hopped to Win11. 70% is still Windows 10.
By the time Windows 10 loses it's extended support (that isn't the Enterprise edition), we're going to see the changes then.
My company is planning to upgrade to Win11 soon, and we are one of the larger employers in the region. I imagine there may be many other companies following suit as Windows 10 ages more.
That sort of thing probably has an outsized effect. They get hate it at first because everything is different, then they have to use it at work, and then they get used to it and want to use it at home.
It's not just Windows. I have an iMac (I used to be a video editor and it's standard) and it's 7 years old, so still Intel, and I'm still running Big Sur, which is 3 versions behind, on it because why bother upgrading when I get no advantages out of it?
I'd probably say a blasphemy, but ordinary workers only experience problems for their old HDDs\systems are overstuffed and are far from their prime, so they ask for entire new PC to start fresh. New Seven x64 on SSD is what most people would'be okay with*, since it's compatible with new Office document formats, doesn't need much resources or space, and can still do everything except for niche tasks. It's not as morbid as Vista\8, not yet filled with bloat like 10 or 11, not as limited today as XPx32 with older driver delivery model. I don't know much about security stuff, but I feel like older systems falling from popularity are not the usual targets of people who write them, and encountering one using an outdated OS would probably mean nothing since exploits they want to abuse aren't there yet.
* Linux would probably be better, but that's still a hard sell for businesses that don't use it intentionally.
I don't know much about security stuff, but I feel like older systems falling from popularity are not the usual targets of people who write them, and encountering one using an outdated OS would probably mean nothing since exploits they want to abuse aren't there yet.
The issues that are going to be the problem eventually are vulnerabilities that affect both new and old versions of Windows. The new versions will get the patch, but 7 won't. And it still might be worth exploiting to hit the machines with the newer version that don't update quickly or at all.
Probably, if they aren't that obscure. I don't know if a distance is that long between Windows 11 and Seven, but I suppose it's that big for older systems.
If you primarily game using Steam then it's easier than ever on most popular distros. Biggest hassle is likely still GPU drivers. I've never had any issues there but depending on what card you have you may be better off with either proprietary or FOSS drivers depending on what your distro of choice likes to provide by default. After that most games tend to just work, a handful may require you to pick a beta version of proton or something.
If you want to try it and don't want to do a lot of tinkering check out PopOS. It's probably the friendliest distro for gaming out of the box.
I've heard a lot of people reference PopOS and Garuda as of the last few months but I've never heard of them. When you say popular distros I immediately think Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Suse, etc. Does your comment include those as well or when you say popular do you mean "popular for gaming"? Also how is the Linux support for external controllers?
To be fair outside of Proxmox and some Debian containers with Docker I haven't spent much time in the Linux space for the last 7 or 8 years. I'm thinking about finally making the switch.
Pop_OS is based on Ubuntu. It's developed by System76 which sells linux laptops that run their distro by default so it's very well maintained and polished.
It's a popular recommendation specifically for people looking out to try gaming on Linux because there are specific features built in like performance improvements for gaming and some gaming-specific packages whereas Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora and OpenSuse are generally designed to be a general purpose distro. Pop_OS delivers packages as flatpacks by default as opposed to Ubuntu's snaps which are a bit controversial and also uses their Cosmic desktop environment by default (though as far as I know gnome, kde, xfce, etc all still work fine if you have a preference).
Mostly I recommend Pop_OS for people that are new to Linux, don't know about why they might prefer one distro over another, and want to try it out with the minimal amount of hassle. If you aren't gaming Pop_OS is still great but that's one of it's selling points.
Driver installation is really only a hassle for NVIDIA users. AMD and Intel GPUs simply work out of the box on most Linux distros these days (with the main issues being related to using slow moving distros that lack support for the newest hardware). Use a fast moving distro such as Arch and you likely won't have any issues even with recent GPUs. Hopefully NVK will make the situation for NVIDIA cards better too, been testing it on my laptop and it's starting to be viable for gaming.
It sucks ass. I actually returned my gaming desktop to W11 recently because I suck and my games just stopped launching. Never buying nvidia again, building a new desktop right now to get away from windows again.
Yeah, building a new PC without NVIDIA or at least swapping your GPU really is the best solution. The past two years I've run an Intel Arc A770 which was rough at first because the drivers were brand new but has been solid for over a year now and then in February or so I upgraded to an AMD Radeon RX 7800XT which has been absolutely amazing with my 4K 144Hz display. My setup before that was a 1080Ti and it was never an enjoyable experience on Linux and I usually gamed on Win10 on it. I haven't really touched Windows other than a small handful of times on the A770 or 7800XT as Linux runs great on them.
Pretty good for the price! I was using it woth a 144Hz 1440p monitor for at least a year and played mostly Overwatch and CSGO/CS2. It does pretty well and Mesa support/performance for it has gotten pretty good. I still use that build (the A770 paired with a Ryzen 9 3950X) for LAN parties and with my TV and it is a fine GPU. It wasn't handling 4K 144Hz too well especially on more demanding titles which is why I ended up getting the 7800XT. I'm definitely excited for Battlemage cards.
Arch?!? lol. Terrible advice for a newbie. You are one update away from fscking your system. Better go Fedora/Nobara way. The kernel and drivers will be updated frequently enough. Also, no, propiertary NVIDIA driver installation is not a hassle, Ubuntu/Manjaro and some other friends literally have "wizards" that let you click->click->next the driver.
Base Ubuntu with the non snap version of steam has been great. I only play a few games, helldivers, some rouglites, and apex. The thing I miss with windows is HDR and auto HDR. HDR will be added in plasma 6 but I had issues with it on KDE Neon but once it's on a stable build it will be good.
Not the original poster, but my experience was fairly smooth. I had minor issues with wifi drivers, and I got a new GPU that had some driver issues because it was pretty recently released (I guess the open source drivers didn’t have time to be updated?).
In terms of actual gaming, basically no issues. I mainly use steam and proton has been bliss, I’ve bought multiple games without even checking compatibility, and it just works. To my knowledge there is only one old game where the multiplayer doesn’t work, but everything else has been seamless.
Mint cinnamon is what I’m currently running.
I switched over from Win10 to PopOS! about a month ago. It hasn't been 100% painless but it's leaps and bounds better than the last time I tried to switch 5-10 years ago. For reference I'm in an AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU, NVME drives for both the system and game drives, SATA for a data drive, NAS for media. I've only reinstalled once because I broke everything tinkering with different desktop environments, but it was an easy recovery with the install media.
All the correct drivers were installed from the get go. I managed to overwrite my cloud save for Horizon Forbidden West because of an issue mounting my game drive and mapping the correct install location in Steam, but that was 90% on me because I rejected the idea of making a backup copy of the files because "I know what I'm doing". I ended up wiping my game drive entirely and reformatting it as EXT4 and haven't had any problems since - the drive was NTFS before and had a handful of games already installed from Windows.
A couple games require finding the right Proton version to run it, but GE works flawlessly for most things I've tried. Everything has run as fast or faster than in Windows with the exception of WH4K: Darktide. There's some microsecond delay in there somewhere that I couldn't pin down. Didn't seem to be video or network related. It's the kind of thing that I bet I wouldn't notice if it were my first time playing the game, but since I've got a couple hundred hours in it, it is just enough to throw me off and make me feel slightly drunk.
The main setup went smooth. I can recommend nobara which is what I used. I tried garuda as well, but it wasn't my style. Personal preference, no hate :).
Most steam games work pretty good ( see protondb ).
( make sure to set your steam settings > compatibility to all games ).
Any game with invasive anti-cheat will likely not work. LoL and valorant come to mind. I think some of the cs2 ones like faceit won't work on Linux. But standard cs2 and competitive work fine.
Battle.net gave me some issues on lutris until I forced it to proton.
Overall I've had a good experience. Sometimes a weird issue if I alt tab ( hots ) that it comes back super tiny. I worked around it by running it windowed fullscreen.
Overall I've no regrets so far. I installed nobara and it's quite user friendly. I've never used a fedora distro before ( more extensive experience with xubuntu/Ubuntu/pop ).
Helldivers 2, heroes of the storm and ff crisis core worked flawlessly.
Hots needs to run full screen ( windowed ) or alt-tab will make the screen tiny for some reason.
So far: no regrets.
When you first play a game it needs to compile the shaders first. So on your initial game there's a few minutes ramp up time. But any next times you start the game should be fine.
Thank you for mentioning hots, because that’s like the ONE steam game I couldn’t live without. Good to know it’s possible, even if I have to play true full screen vs windowed.
For hots: install lutris through the nobara app store.
Start it and leave it for a few minutes while you run other updates or something ( only the very first time ).
Go to the settings/preferences, ( three dots top right ), click runners, scroll all the way down to wine.
Click the cog and change the runtime from wine-.... to proton-GE. Thrn you can just install the battle.net app through lutris. From the battle.net app you can install hots.
Using the built in wine-.... Runtime I got errors like missing Microsoft arial or unable to validate certificate.
with proton it just instantly worked.
You can also add the battle.net installer as an external steam app and run/install it that way. The only downside would be that you can't play a steam game AND have bnet running ( which you can through lutris ).
Exiting battle.net doesn't seem to be enough to stop lutris running it. So you might have to click the stop button in lutris if you want to restart it.
Battle.net is a bit wonky. But once you've got it IP and running it's okay.
I have an older GPU (rx 470) and I play games that probably aren't super new so my main concerns were mainly my tech literacy and fear of fucking something up xD
RX470 is fully supported with the latest drivers. Anything from Radeon HD 7000 (GCN2) series from ~10 years ago and newer uses AMDGPU with (almost) all features available. GCN1 is experimental but also works.
Older cards use the Radeon driver and miss out on Vulkan.
Y'all need to get yourselves that Windows 10 2021 LTSC IoT badboy (IoT part is important). It's supported until 2032 and it's only bloat is edge. If I had to use windows again it would be that.
That version doesn't even have the Windows Store, which is a huge bloat of it's own. Oh and it doesn't even stop there, apparently Microsoft treats even their Pro-users like trash nowadays, that you have full control of what you do on the Win10 2021 LTSC/LoT as opposed to the Pro version and it costs more.
I was going to ask how WSL gets installed without the Windows Store, but looks like the install path doesn't use the store anymore. That was one of the few things I ever used the store for.
I couldn't find a version of this that would work in a VM. The few I tried were "preactivated" and then complained about hardware changes when I tried to install in a VM.
No I'm not asking people to find me a working release. I'm just complaining that I just can't be assed mucking around with unlicensed installations.
