I remain sad at this and other moves by Microsoft to generate recurring revenue from their operating system.
Having lived from before the start of "PC software" to the present, one of the things that warped people was that as the market is growing and you have lots of people getting computers for the first time, you can sell them a copies of your software and get revenue every year. Once you hit saturation, your 'new sales' market goes effectively to zero[1]. For software that is 'done' (which is to say does everything it says it does) you're only choice is to "add features" or "add recurring revenue" (or as Intuit likes to do add a feature that generates recurring revenue).
A much better plan (seeing it from this side), is to invest in a 'cold start' archive. Capture as much knowledge about the implementation and building of the software into an archive that a person 'skilled in the art' could access, and recreate the entire process from scratch to create a version of the software compatible with a new platform. Then record what it took to get it to the new platform and re-archive it. Similarly for fixing bugs. Yes it's boring maintenance work but ideally 90+% of the time the software incurs zero staff costs sitting in its archive. When that is the case, the cost of a bug fixed version or sales on a new platform handily cover the cost of the staff/operation needed to maintain it.
No need to suck blood out of a stone as they say.
[1] It isn't precisely zero but it can get pretty close.
There is still a lot of software that will not run well or at all on Linux making Windows unavoidable for some. Plus the fact that your work place might be a Windows only shop.
Not looking forward to EOL for Windows 10. Windows 11 started out bad, gradually got better with bug fixes, but then got immensely worse once they started adding Copilot to everything. Unfortunately, I have an Nvidia GPU which makes Linux and VR not play well with each other, so I'm not sure what my plan is going to be this time next year.
This was my situation with Windows 7. I stuck with it right up until Chrome dropped support, which was more "the wrting's on the wall" than about Chrome. So I started building a new PC to run Linux, all AMD, and for kicks installed Void Linux Musl just to give it a try. Turns out with Flatpak you can just install just about anything on a systemd-free Musl machine which is perfect for bloated dependency-hell software. So I have Steam, Chrome, KiCAD and Libreoffice installed via flatpak and the rest is built against musl.
I had almost zero issues switching. Just about every one of my Steam games run just fine. The few pieces of Windows software I use runs in a Win 7 VM.
Fedora with Nvidia drivers was a pain to install but nowadays it's a seamless experience for gaming for me. I wonder if I'm just lucky, but I don't understand what issues people have with Nvidia on Linux.
Really curious how the Windows 10 EOL crunch is going to go next year.
It feels like there must be a ton of systems out there with pre 8th Gen Intel CPUs and with no TPM. On the one hand, PCs are cheap enough nowadays that maybe MS can force them to replace it, not to mention that cell phones and other mobile devices have taken the place of the primary personal computer for most regular people.
On the other hand, Windows 10 might end up sticking around much longer in the same way that XP did. In which case MS might be forced to support it with security updates beyond 2025, or be forced to release a version of Win 11 without the CPU and TPM requirements.
I can not imagine how a phone replaces a PC for any regular people but maybe I am the one who is not normal.
I will be looking to move back to linux myself as I have the i7 6700k and I don't really want to drop hundreds of dollars right now to be pushed into a bad OS I don't really want. I guess my cpu is considered "old" in computer age but it is still way more powerful then I need on a daily basis. So I will just leave MS, this will be the push I finally need. I already switched over on my kids pc when my last hard drive died. I just haven't had the push to do it on mine. But this will be the perfect push. And I will preach the shit out of switching to anyone that will listen to me.
Good point on the phone thing. The Windows 11 restrictions could cause a marked decline in PC usage completely, as people give up and see how far they can get with just a phone. I’m sure many will realize they don’t need a PC anymore.
Microsoft is going to do more for Linux on the desktop than anyone can. It's blatant annoyances like these that forced me to remove Windows 11 weeks after installing it. The fact the matter is, it was a blessing in disguise and I am thrilled to be using Linux now. Thanks Microsoft.
I remain sad at this and other moves by Microsoft to generate recurring revenue from their operating system.
Having lived from before the start of "PC software" to the present, one of the things that warped people was that as the market is growing and you have lots of people getting computers for the first time, you can sell them a copies of your software and get revenue every year. Once you hit saturation, your 'new sales' market goes effectively to zero[1]. For software that is 'done' (which is to say does everything it says it does) you're only choice is to "add features" or "add recurring revenue" (or as Intuit likes to do add a feature that generates recurring revenue).
A much better plan (seeing it from this side), is to invest in a 'cold start' archive. Capture as much knowledge about the implementation and building of the software into an archive that a person 'skilled in the art' could access, and recreate the entire process from scratch to create a version of the software compatible with a new platform. Then record what it took to get it to the new platform and re-archive it. Similarly for fixing bugs. Yes it's boring maintenance work but ideally 90+% of the time the software incurs zero staff costs sitting in its archive. When that is the case, the cost of a bug fixed version or sales on a new platform handily cover the cost of the staff/operation needed to maintain it.
No need to suck blood out of a stone as they say.
[1] It isn't precisely zero but it can get pretty close.
Headline would be more accurate without the Copilot PC part; that was just one of the ads.
Anyway, here's the countermeasure I use to prevent Win10's obnoxious fullscreen upgrade-to-11 ads.
It's one line. Run in admin cmd. Result will be Success if the task exists or an error it couldn't find it.
For anyone finding this later, what I posted above does not for the new ads.
Below works for now but is a bit of a bandaid. Hopefully a better solution will show up.
Or you know, like not use such an operating system, I guess?
There is still a lot of software that will not run well or at all on Linux making Windows unavoidable for some. Plus the fact that your work place might be a Windows only shop.
Not looking forward to EOL for Windows 10. Windows 11 started out bad, gradually got better with bug fixes, but then got immensely worse once they started adding Copilot to everything. Unfortunately, I have an Nvidia GPU which makes Linux and VR not play well with each other, so I'm not sure what my plan is going to be this time next year.
This was my situation with Windows 7. I stuck with it right up until Chrome dropped support, which was more "the wrting's on the wall" than about Chrome. So I started building a new PC to run Linux, all AMD, and for kicks installed Void Linux Musl just to give it a try. Turns out with Flatpak you can just install just about anything on a systemd-free Musl machine which is perfect for bloated dependency-hell software. So I have Steam, Chrome, KiCAD and Libreoffice installed via flatpak and the rest is built against musl.
I had almost zero issues switching. Just about every one of my Steam games run just fine. The few pieces of Windows software I use runs in a Win 7 VM.
Fedora with Nvidia drivers was a pain to install but nowadays it's a seamless experience for gaming for me. I wonder if I'm just lucky, but I don't understand what issues people have with Nvidia on Linux.
Really curious how the Windows 10 EOL crunch is going to go next year.
It feels like there must be a ton of systems out there with pre 8th Gen Intel CPUs and with no TPM. On the one hand, PCs are cheap enough nowadays that maybe MS can force them to replace it, not to mention that cell phones and other mobile devices have taken the place of the primary personal computer for most regular people.
On the other hand, Windows 10 might end up sticking around much longer in the same way that XP did. In which case MS might be forced to support it with security updates beyond 2025, or be forced to release a version of Win 11 without the CPU and TPM requirements.
I can not imagine how a phone replaces a PC for any regular people but maybe I am the one who is not normal. I will be looking to move back to linux myself as I have the i7 6700k and I don't really want to drop hundreds of dollars right now to be pushed into a bad OS I don't really want. I guess my cpu is considered "old" in computer age but it is still way more powerful then I need on a daily basis. So I will just leave MS, this will be the push I finally need. I already switched over on my kids pc when my last hard drive died. I just haven't had the push to do it on mine. But this will be the perfect push. And I will preach the shit out of switching to anyone that will listen to me.
Good point on the phone thing. The Windows 11 restrictions could cause a marked decline in PC usage completely, as people give up and see how far they can get with just a phone. I’m sure many will realize they don’t need a PC anymore.
Next year I’ll be buying a Linux workstation laptop to replace my Windows 10 machine. Windows 11 is not the direction I want my UX to go.
Don't wait. Do it now; you'll be happy you did.
Don't go changin' Microsoft.
Microsoft is going to do more for Linux on the desktop than anyone can. It's blatant annoyances like these that forced me to remove Windows 11 weeks after installing it. The fact the matter is, it was a blessing in disguise and I am thrilled to be using Linux now. Thanks Microsoft.
Sounds like Microsoft is illegally abusing its monopoly and should be forced to sell Windows. /s
Absolutely appalling behavior from Microsoft. I used to really like Windows, but at this point I doubt I'll ever use it again.