Microsoft to test “new features and more” for aging, stubbornly popular Windows 10

Xatolos@reddthat.com to Technology@lemmy.world – 521 points –
Microsoft to test “new features and more” for aging, stubbornly popular Windows 10
arstechnica.com
244

Please don't. Just keep providing security updates for an extended time and don't make Win 10 worse with these 'features' that are keeping people away from Win 11.

But muh platform growth!?!?! It just needs more AI, that'll get the people upgrading

Nobody wants more AI.

From what I've seen, pretty much everyone from techies to the tech illiterate HATES AI Implementations. Yet corporations keep trying to shovel it down our throats. When are they going to admit no one wants this?

They are shoveling it down our throats because the corporations want it. The more they can get it to do without having to pay us poors, the more money they can keep in their pockets. AI has to mine data to learn, so they are trying to put it everywhere to learn. On your OS like copilot doesn't just learn what you type in on a specific site, it learns EVERYTHING you type, everywhere. Then later, Microsoft doesn't need to pay people writing code for them, doesn't need to pay customer service reps. Then they can sell either copilot or its learned data to other companies. WE ARE NOT THE CUSTOMERS, WE ARE THE PRODUCT.

ANYHOOO, I have no idea how AI works, I am talking out my ass, but this is my tinfoil hat rant.

Yep the few people that say "with ai my job has improved" are the people that were shit at their job. Like a dude was so happy on linkedin about how great it is to have chatgpt do the analysis of some csv, it would have been soooo difficult with a spreadsheet...

I have copilot because my company is ms partner and we have all the GitHub stuff and whatnot. It's only useful when creating mock tests and it creates values for variables. Stuff that before I was doing semi manually using a library to create the values during the test. Otherwise the suggestions are plain wrong or so convoluted (and I wouldn't know if they are right because I don't understand what's happening) that I would never allow it in the codebase, it probably took some l337code/codegolf challenge as an example...

I think it's obvious. They paid a whole lot of money, it turned out not as life changing as they thought and definitely not as good so they are trying to make us hooked to get back on the money

I think when you say "Hates AI" you mean "Hates ChatGPT"

"AI" itself has a lot of awesome uses, ML models with DLSS, robots that can maneuver over different terrain, image generation, audio transcription, etc.

Even with LLMs, I'm fine with them as long as I was the one that was able to pick and choose the model as well as the software to use to run it.

That's the point, make wi does 10 worse so people will update

Just switch to Linux, problem solved.

Sure, will you call the it admin where I work and tell him I'm switching?

I want to switch to Linux just as much as you, but at work I have literally zero influence over this. Private OS choice and enterprise / corporate are very different things, and businesses refusing to switch away from Windows is a very big reason why Microsoft's behaviour lately is a big deal.

OK, so what are you running at home?

I... don't have a computer at home?

Jesus, have we gone full circle already? There are people with no real computer at home again?

Smart phones and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

I work with computers and clouds all day. I don't really want to spend more time on it.

I respect that and I wish I could say the same. Sadly most of my hobbies and interests are computer based so I pretty much have to.

I haven't had a computer in over a decade. I'm not a luddite, I just haven't had a need for one since I got a smart phone.

That's pretty much exactly what I meant with my comment. Not having proper computers at home because they're replaced by smartphones.

Some problems:

  • Stability. For me, Linux on a VM (where I'm using it for development and getting myself familiarized with it) was a stability nightmare. Everything could go wrong after an update (I'm looking at you, Ubuntu 24.04), or even a restart, with no easy way to recover.
  • Lack of an easy recovery. On Windows, you can recover your OS from a faultry update easily. If a bit more things have gone wrong, just use the installer, to resurrect your own installation. On Linux, you're on your own, and while sometimes it's an easy fix, other times you're better off reinstalling your OS, leading you to have to restart a lot of other things, which leads to lost time that could have spent better with doing something productive. I've wasted hours on recovering data from a Ubuntu 24.04 installation which decided to no longer work in GUI mode, and it ultimately ruined my sleep schedule.
  • A lot of settings are hidden deep within config files, which need manual editing, and even worse, googling, which on today's internet, will likely lead you to an AI generated site filled with garbage. I managed to kill the Linux installation on my Raspberry Pi, which lead me to the previous point of having to reinstall, then having to google even more settings because Raspberry Pi OS had the great idea in the newer versions to "make setup easier", thus tieing your location settings and your keyboard layout, so I had a Hungarian layout that I had to change, as it's horrible to use for software development (a lot of commonly used characters are on the Alt Gr layer, and there's only one Alt Gr key, the other Alt is a dedicated menu key - thanks IBM!).
  • Production software and drivers. While Wine is fine for a lot of games, but try to use software with way more sophisticated copy protection schemes. They're already a pain to use on Windows with the original keys and such, now imagine them on a Windows emulator. Good luck with trying to find VST plugins, which copy protection can be 100% removed!

I'm not a good UX designer, but my first two rules for anything GUI related are:

  1. If it can be done by a single button press, it should be a single button press on the GUI.
  2. If it can be an easy configuration, it should be an easy configuration on the GUI.

Linux, alongside with many other projects in the FOSS community, regularly fail both of these, in favor of scripts, which are fine, but have their own issues. Your average user's average usecase does not involve "very repetitive tasks that are just perfect for some shell scripts".

I'm not here to argue that Linux is flawless if you just do this one obvious trick, but rather to say, for you in particular, with the issues you described: You might enjoy openSUSE more.

It comes with filesystem snapshots out-of-the-box. As in zero setup. And you can rollback to a previous snapshot from the bootloader, even if your system does not boot anymore.
So, assuming neither your filesystem nor hardware broke (and you noticed the breakage right away), it takes 5 minutes to get back to a working state.

It also comes with an extensive system settings GUI, called "YaST". It certainly does not completely absolve you from touching config files. It also will not make you weap from how intuitive of a GUI it is. But it is a GUI and it covers lots of the common stuff that one might tweak on a computer.

I do also find openSUSE to be less error-prone than Ubuntu in general (my workplace makes me use the latter).

Main downside of openSUSE: It is more niche. The community is smaller. When you do run into an error, there's fewer articles out there to help you. In particular, setting up specialty software like DAWs, VSTs etc., you may find less help for.

But the small community is more tight-knit and consists of lots of folks with higher expertise, so if you ask in the forum or some other place where the community hangs out, you will usually still get rather excellent help (and perhaps better help than what search engines unearth these days).

Ubuntu is bad, that's why you are having stability issues. Stop using it.

Also it's dead easy to recover a Linux installation that has snapshots. Just boot the previous snapshot and go. Also could just use an immutable Linux if not breaking things is your main concern.

Oh yeah, let's get rid of a checks notes a common and basic feature of an OS, because it's trendy with some programming languages to set everything to const, because people are not being taught what a debugger is and how to solve these issues with them...

Android and ChromeOS are also immutable, this isn't just a trend. Stop being insufferable. You don't have to go to using immutable OSes, using something sensible and stable with snapshotting would work just fine. Like OpenSUSE, or Fedora. Setting snapshots up on Debian I think is more work but still doable.

I think you also want to call me a tourist, mallcore, fashiongoth, fake metal Linux user, for not wanting to join the Arch cult...😉

Erm, no lol. I don't even use Arch. I've tried it don't get me wrong, but I don't understand the fascination with it personally.

Also the reason I am recommending you move away from Ubuntu is because of what Canonical has done. I actually was a fan of earlier versions of Ubuntu, even Unity.

Another great ploy by Microsoft to increase Linux adoption.

I just dual booted Linux Mint yesterday when I was reminded of the Win 10 end of service date, and hope to keep with it as my main system.

Linux has come a long way with compatibility since I last tried it ~10 years ago. The fact that Steam games ran perfectly without an evening of configuring settings blew my mind.

Honestly my ability to game has what has kept me out of linux. I trialed PopOs a while ago. I will more than likely switch to it when shit starts getting super annoying.

Gaming on Linux works like a charm now

It's the multi-player side that is still an issue though. The anticheat software is a pain.

Some multiplayer, but not all. Not that that makes it perfect, but I've had minimal issues with multiplayer games. I do not play popular FPS games where anti cheat software is prevalent, so that's mostly why. I did get Ghost of Tsushima the other day, and that is not compatible for online play, but I think that's because of Sony.

Personally I've had zero issues with multiplayer. But yeah, I'm also not playing the latest twitch shooters and whatever.

I'd love to run just Linux, but I don't want to hassle with dual boot for the couple of competitive shooters I do play.

It sucks because all the other games I play would run without a problem.

Yeah, totally understood.

Wonder if there's any chance the Steam Deck / Linux market share is getting large enough where gaming companies are having to seriously consider fixing this.

It's already super annoying, and this is what people always say. What's it going to take in your case?

As of right now? It'll probably be the drop in support next year. While I have my complaints about Microsoft or any major corporation, for that matter, I'm not the most tech savvy. If Microsoft were to come out and say support is extended, I'll stick with W10. If they come out with an OS that allowed me to pick and choose what software I wanted and didn't load it with a shit ton of bloat ware I'd be all over that like shit on velcro. I know these are pipe dreams, and I will most likely move. For now, I will stay the current course until it's time to jump into the Linux pool and learn how to swim.

I set up a second SSD with Bazzite for dual booting, but it's not practical for me to use as a daily driver yet. I have a Nvidia GPU, and the drivers just aren't up to par with their Windows counterparts yet. I could tolerate not having HDR, but also not being able to use 2 monitors with different refresh rates at the same time is killing me.

There's an update in the works that should fix at least the multi-monitor problem, but still no HDR.

Did you use bazzite with gnome or kde? If I recall correctly, kde plasma 6.1 has support for multi monitor with different refresh

I'm on KDE. It's quite an odd problem. If I keep them both set to refresh rates below their max, things work fine. However, if both monitors are set to their native refresh rates, the higher refresh rate one goes blank and the lower one starts flickering. If I disable the lower refresh rate monitor, I can set the higher one to it's max without issue though.

Essentially, when I'm booting into Bazzite, I need to either disable my second monitor or halve my refresh rate or it's unusable.

I'm on Arch KDE and have and Nvidia 2080ti. I can't run Wayland. Otherwise I run 3 monitors, 1 an ultra wide at 120hz. I haven't had any issues.

Interesting. If you have some time, might be worth trying to live USB boot drive of something like fedora desktop kde spin or pop_os cosmic DE just to see if the issue persists for other distros.

I'm theory this should be working now, it's too bad it isn't. My desktop is a 4 monitor setup that I'm hoping to move to a fedora based distro as well.

Pop_OS was the first distro I tried before coming to Bazzite. Cosmic sorta worked, but was overall worse... No flickering there, but eventually, a few minutes after logging in, the desktop would freeze. Completely unusable unfortunately. I think Bazzite is fedora based iirc? I don't know, this is my first attempt at anything beyond putting Ubuntu on old laptops.

Ya bazzite is based on fedora with an immutable file system, so it's called fedora atomic. Fedora atomic then has variants like bazzite, universal blue etc.

I'm curious if the baseline fedora desktop would have the same issues.

https://fedoraproject.org/spins/kde/download

Multi refresh rate on monitors is a relatively new thing for Linux so bugs are still being ironed out. It sucks that things like these are still not at parity with windows but it's improving.

Do you know if Nvidia Surround works? I've been gaming with a tripple monitor setup and would really like to keep it.

That I don't know, I only have two monitors and they're totally different sizes so I haven't looked into it, sorry!

On Nobara you can just double click .exe files and they open perfectly with winetricks. Absolutely bonkers.

This is with an nvidia card too, 0 issues 0 config needed

That's really awesome.

Does an old version of Ms office like 2010, 2013 or 2016 work with this?

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I just wiped Windows from my drive yesterday and committed to Fedora after dualbooting for 15 years...I've been maining Fedora for a while and always kept Windows around "just in case", but never actually seemed to need it. This recall/AI spyware was it for me though. Gaming has been a breeze for a while on Fedora/Linux due to Steam/Proton...such a great feeling to finally be completely rid of Windows!

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Stubborn? Windows 11 does not support my older hardware. With no other reason to upgrade, I'm not dropping that kind of cash just for Windows 11.

Regardless, I fully migrated to Linux last year.

TF do they mean stubbornly popular? My windows 10 works perfectly fine and I have absolutely no reason to change anything about it. What is this weird ass 'if you're not upgrading, you're being stubborn' when there is no reason to and windows 11 looks ass on top of it

Agreed, and I would think XP was the stubbornly popular version. People were on there for years after end of support.

A large amount of people still clinging to Win 10 because the only other (Windows) option is upgrading to 11 doesn't mean it's "popular" so much as it means people want 11 even less than they wanted 10.

Umm maybe it’s stubbornly popular because devices running it can’t be updated. My OG surface book (a Microsoft flagship device for awhile) is great hardware, but can’t update to 11. My gaming laptop is even better hardware but doesn’t meet the win11 requirements. Because they are sealed devices. I literally couldn’t if I wanted to.

Bring back support for Windows 7 and Windows 10 will die overnight.

Windows media center alone is worth resurrecting win7 for.

Honestly the experience of Jellyfin, Tvheadend and Kodi is these days nicer than MCE ever was

Does the tv tuner and tv guide work? I tried a few alternatives a few years back and they were garbo. Wmc always just worked.

I get over the air guide in tvheadend, but you can configure it to pull xml based guides off the internet if you prefer.

Every person I've talked to IRL about Windows misses Windows 7. We didn't realize how good we had it. Oh well, I'll just switch to Linux

Honestly, Windows 7 is an ergonomic nightmare for many modern users, me included.

I'm too spoiled with Windows 10/11 and Linux with KDE/Budgie.

I still like it but I never really got into workspaces or anything like that. The only thing I miss when I'm on my 7 machine is dark mode.

Hmm, because no workspaces? Can't think of much else they changed since then...

Rather a flat minimalist design that is easier to navigate and less distractive. Also tiles and other elements that allow for quicker inspection.

Windows 10 isn't popular. It's just that windows 11 is crap in comparison. Release an OS that isn't predicated on what's good for ad revenue and Microsoft's bottom line and everyone will upgrade.

One of the definitions of “popular” is going to blow your mind.

Well, it's popular not because of demand but because Win7 is ancient. In the old times there were utilities that copied win2k binaries into a winNT4 install to add features like new directX, I wonder if that is still possible on win7

I have never understood why people still like 7.

I thought it was decent when I last used it, but Win 10 is much better.

7 is fairly ugly and has a lot of missing stuff for 10.

Microsoft made a big mistake with Windows 10: it basically works fine.

That's when an operating system is supposed to do. They make mistakes when they make it worse. Usually, the operating system starts worse and eventually gets tolerable. That happened with Windows 10. Initial versions were far inferior to Windows 7, but now it's at a pretty good state. Windows 11 is a pile of fucking garbage. There is no compelling feature in Windows 11 that would make anyone want to upgrade. There are compelling reasons not to upgrade, such as advertising, menus that require more clicks to get the same shit done, forced use of Microsoft account, etc.

There's also the fact that Windows 11 refuses to run unless you have a handful of specific hardware in your computer, such as TPM 2.0, and a relatively modern processor. There is no technical reason for this requirement, it was discovered very early on that if you override the check it will install and run just fine. But Microsoft seems determined to get people to throw away their older but still perfectly good computers.

That is a very big part of why Windows 10 is still so popular. If you have a computer from six or seven years ago that you've upgraded once or twice, it's probably still perfectly good. No reason to throw it away for Windows 11 when you can keep on trucking with Windows 10.

I personally am quite grateful that my computer doesn't meet the requirements, because that means I won't be stealth-upgraded like happened with 10.

My wife's laptop was upgraded during a "maintenance window" one night. Now to downgrade I would have to wipe it clean and reinstall everything and restore backups.... Too much hassle and then maybe it will be upgraded again. Bios doesn't allow disabling tpm

I was at a win 95 launch event for pc sellers back in the msdos era. Microsoft sales pitch was "put windows on the comps you sell and we guarantee your customers will keep coming back for upgrades". Shit hasn't changed 30 years later.

Same was said about Windows 7 as people protested the switch to Windows 10. New telemetry, aggressively forced updates, and other factors made Windows 10 a nightmare for many. Yet now, when Windows 11 is even worse, people start thinking of Windows 10 the way they thought of Windows 7.

Essentially, Microsoft can make Windows worse and worse for as long as the previous iteration is better and people got used to it.

That is exactly how I felt back then. Waited as long as possible to switch to 10 from 7 but then got used to it. Honestly I still think 7 was better. But no fucking way I'm switching to 11 with the way things are going at Microsoft.

Usually Microsoft would have 1 good release then 1 release that is shit. Seems like it'll be straight shit from now on.

That's what they'll try to end now with buggy feature bloat shoehorned in.

They just want to make w10 as bad if not worse than w11. Because they want people say: I might as well use w11.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I can enable some TMP in my bios to give me "windows 11 compatibility" but I have no reason to do so. If I could chill on Windows 7 forever I would

So they're ending support but will use the remaining users like test guinea pigs.

Great...

This is called the "RedHat CentOS" strategy

So no change whatsoever then? Ever since it released windows 10 patch testing has been "release to end user and see what the complaints are."

Well it's only Windows that's complaining it can't install Windows 11 on my Windows 10 laptop. I'm not mothballing perfectly good hardware just because Microsoft is having a tantrum.

Remember to switch to Linux once it reaches end of life so you don’t risk your security

win 11 adoption must be pretty bad if they have to do their new features beta testing on win 10 (which should be on a security updates/show-stopper bugfix only policy by now) instead.

Windows 11 adoption to business customers is really bad. Most of the adoption to 11 has been from people purchasing new home computers and being stuck with 11 (I have two win 11 computers now).

Since the bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from business customers, they have a huge impact on decisions.

At this point the only decision Microsoft can make is to write off win 11 as a failue. Resuming feature upgrades to win 10 makes business sense.

My company basically said they're only going to update if they absolutely have to. IT and management are aligned for the first time in my entire career. There's been talks of switching entirely to Linux and Mac. Microsoft really fucked up.

Its not that 10 is more popular, its that 10 is less jacked up. Start jacking 10 and we'll all go back to 7

When I saw yesterday that M$ was doing a new beta for win 10 my first thought was "Well people don't want to switch to 11 cause of the garbage we keep adding? Let's see if we can get the same garbage in 10, then they will be willing."

Is there a commonly accepted reason why Microsoft makes these big releases so different?

AFAIK macOS has relatively minor changes, in terms of UI/UX, from release to release (look at screenshots of the original OS X vs. the current macOS version). And Linux is entirely dependent on distro, but for me it's just "has i3wm changed drastically? No? Great!"

My guess is that Windows just does it because they need folks to upgrade, and that's the only tool they have to force people's hands...

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Probably a sad attempt at adding “shiny” features to get people to upgrade to 11 once updates are no longer published for 10?

“We’ll get people hooked on these shiny features, 90% of which are not interesting. Then we’ll pull the update rug from under them. And bingo, they’ll upgrade!!”

Probably more like, “we’ll make Windows 10 indistinguishable from Windows 11, at which point people will have no reason to stick with Windows 10” (unless their computers can’t update to Windows 11, like my laptop)

Or maybe I’m just showing that I know nothing about how updates work and that I perhaps shouldn’t be commenting in a technology community…

Technically win 11 has the same main version number to win 10. They're essentially different UIs with extra features in 11. There's no technical reason why anything in 11 can't be backported to 10 unless it requires a TPM (maybe)

Even 11 doesn't require a TPM if you know what you're doing.

They're going to add things that make it worse and slower until you finally get fed up with it.

I'll just jump ship completely and use my Linux install 100% of the time. If I need to use a more mainstream OS for some stupid reason I'll just use my Mac.

Linux is still not there for gaming, that's what holds back most of the people who bitch about windows. People who just use windows to browse and do spreadsheets they don't care.

Gaming is absolutely there, if you want to say something about anti cheat and whatnot that's fair, but my gamescope enabled, AMD fsr utilizing arch install is performance parity to Windows 10, if not more performant. I'm not giving up that performance gain for an insanely small handful of games. You do you I guess.

My VR library is only half on linux or less and 1 of my streaming QoL apps is not even in the list. After 4 days (non consecutive over a month or so), and several steam updates, I finally got room setup to run and installed a few VR games last weekend, now steam overlay would not load to start a game. I want to switch to linux fully, I have for 2 decades. It is getting there, but still many miles to go.

Even for AC, most AC is supported. Battle Eye and Easy Anti-cheat both work fine (with the proton patches that should be automatically installed). Maybe there's some custom AC that doesn't work, but I haven't found it yet. I'd guess Riot's doesn't if you want to play Valorant or LoL and want to install their root kit. I've had issues with The Finals (who just took a long time to update EAC but works fine now) and Squad (which is using a depricated C function that isn't included in glibc anymore, but is included with the Flatpak version of Steam so it's still playable with that) but they're solvable. I believe that's all.

I think PC gamers tend to overestimate their importance in OS distribution these days - gaming on Linux is just as passable these days as on Mac, and there's much more to PC use than only gaming for 90% of users.

I feel that PC use is more complicated than gamers/productivity - but having switched over full time this year, Linux clearly has some work to do so the average user doesn't need to touch the terminal - but even compared to 10 years ago its infinitely more capable and user friendly.

Customers of paid software need to start either voting with their feet meaningfully, or lobbying to get software support on Linux if they want it - complaining that titles aren't available for Linux and then continuing to suffer through windows instead of making that known to the devs is seen exactly the same way - a sale.

I certainly miss some windows only software - but I'm not going to be held captive anymore for programmes I paid for, that refuse to consider my needs, when they are a part of my wider usage and expectations.

We don't, there are a ton of online games that will not work on linux. I don't know why this is hard to understand. I love linux, but I have my main rig for gaming running windows, because it's easier and games just work on it.

Yeah well, play the game that have requirements that you pc supports. It's always been like that.

Huh? I do play the games my PC supports, which is all of them, because I on windows still...

Only reason I need Windows is for Flight Simulator. If it weren’t for that I’d be on Linux for sure.

No fucking thank you, I have long since completely neutered my pc's ability to update. I updated enough to install drivers and get it stable, and that's it. I don't trust windows.

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You want "new features and more"?

Linux.

You're welcome.

I want old features and less. 😞

(I'm still switching to Linux.)

less comes with all distributions I know

Old features and less? No problem. Just don't install X, a window manager, or a desktop environment. It'll be just like the DOS days!

I'm curious, could you skip a a DE and window manager and still run full screen graphical applications like games? Run it really like the DOS days when you just changed to the correct directory and ran the executable and then doom launches...?

Id imagine all games rely on at least the X server running to handle the display.

I know back in the day you could do some cool stuff with framebuffer, but I don't know if you'd get 3d acceleration today even if you installed the drivers, because they probably need a bunch of libraries that are packaged as part of DEs/WMs

If you just want the experience of launching graphical stuff from the CLI, that can be done. You'd still install all the packages for your chosen display server and WM/DE, then you can write a small bash script that launches a desktop session and starts your program, then closes the desktop session after you exit the program.

How much you wanna bet Recall gets added to Win10 as well?

Oh man, I obviously don't want that, because there's gonna be companies and organizations and whatnot handling my data with a non-hardened Windows 10, but I'd still grab some popcorn and watch all the security and data protection people explode.

Windows 10 as is, was already a massive shitshow. The German Federal Office for Information Security started a guide for hardening Win10 and they very deliberately chose a name that would abbreviate to SySiPHuS, because I imagine, they never expected to see the end of it.

Now, that end would be in order, at the very least, because the worse Win11 should be taking over. And to then have Microsoft chip in a new massive security hole, making them update their guides and all the hardened systems once more, that certainly has some incendiary potential. 🙃

No you shut your whore mouth.

Some of us rely on windows only software and dont have the option to run linux or other OS's

My set up comfortably plays cyberpunk at dead fancy settings, but doesn't meet the system requirements for windows 11.

Yeah, I'm going to rub out windows 10 as long as I can (although I dual boot Debian anyway).

That's why it is stubbonky popular.

Is one of those "features" CoPilot? Because I did a search for it on my Windows 10 installation, and found several small bits of it, including a directory called "Microsoft CoPilot." It looks like a placeholder for a full installation, later on. I'm guessing Office 365 put it there.

The "and more" is the worrying part. They're telling us that some of the things they are adding are not 'features'. So then what are they?

Ads, probably. That's the trend these days. More and more ads, in everything, everywhere - just really probing the limits of tolerability.

It's almost like they're trying to make people switch to Linux and kill PC gaming altogether. Luckily gaming on Linux has come pretty far.

I really wish the anticheat co.panies would get their stuff working on Linux. I know anticheats aren't 100% effective but they are necessary, if you think it's bad with them imagine without.

Which anticheats aren't working in proton? Iirc the major ones work.

I was a late switcher as I had to wait for gaming support. Once I saw what the steam deck was doing and how amazing proton is, I pulled the trigger. It gets better all the time too, sounds like Nvidia users are finally gonna be getting proper Wayland in like less than a month too! It's been so smooth I was able to convince my wife to use it too. She LOVES Minecraft and after I showed her Prism Launcher she was sold.

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They're going to make it shit so you're forced to go to 11, or the much better alternative if it's an option for you.

I'm not stubborn, I'm just not going to accept a worse version of what I've already got.

Shit, I'd still be using xp if they let me.

Windows is not a serious OS anymore.

Please no. I didn't upgrade to Windows 11 on purpose. I'm just trying to hold out as long as I can until I'm forced to switch to Linux. I don't want to have to deal with more enshittification in the meantime.

Just turn off windows update. Security people are catastrophizing to justify their jobs, ignore their siren call.

Windows is still extremely unsecure even with the latest security updates so how much worse can it really be

I turn off UAC and defender too, those are basically spyware anyway. Even minimally competent should have no problem by just not downloading viruses and staying behind NAT.

Windows laptops generally get trashy battery life, and if this going to tank it further, I'd just run Linux full-time on my family laptop and call it a day.

The only reason we had windows was my wife's comfortability and sometimes zoom glitches out on linux.

You have any tips? My power consumption on battery is ~30% higher on linux than they were on windows

Unfortunately for us, Windows 10 is stubbornly popular because we dont want the new features.

(We also dont want a new CPU just to upgrade).

I recently had to roll back a windows 10 update because as soon as I installed it all of my startup programs stopped starting up at launch. As soon as I removed it, the problem went away.

No Microsoft, you cannot ruin my Win 10 experience to coerce me into migrating. It's gonna be a long annoying fight.

I mean, they kinda already did if you can't update it anymore.

Not really. I haven't looked into why it caused the issue it did. Presumably it is not actually intentional by MS, and there is some conflict going on that's causing it. I'll eventually get around to trying to let it install that update again, but life has been busy :)

What's funny is right at launch I would have seriously considered upgrading, but I'm on second gen Ryzen and that platform was deemed not new enough at the time. Now they've added a bunch of BS and even though I think they've removed the restriction I'm over the new shiny thing and am looking heavily into a full linux setup.

I too considered upgrading but there were months and months of botched updates, so I restraint myself and later found out there's zero benefit for upgrading.

First gen Ryzen user here, switched the TPM flag in the registry and Windows 11 works just fine, updates smoothly too.

Though I'm on Linux most of the time, which strongly limits the exposure I get to the system.

I love it, please keep destroying windows and let the holdouts suffer. Linux is the way

I'd love to go to Linux, but I use so many apps that are only available for Windows.

Other than Adobe shit. What apps do you need that can't either be replaced by a native app or ran in wine?

Lots of proprietary apps for work. No-go for me.

Personally i would use a vm to seperate work from Personal shit.

Hopefully they will at least not shove things into the packages that ship to LTSC updates as well. They did that with a cloud backup app awhile ago and it pissed a ton of people off.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


And last November, Microsoft decided to release a fairly major batch of Windows 10 updates that introduced the Copilot chatbot and other changes to the aging operating system.

Per usual for Windows Insider builds, Microsoft may choose not to release all new features that it tests, and new features will be released for the public version of Windows 10 "when they're ready."

One thing this new beta program doesn't change is the end-of-support date for Windows 10, which Microsoft says is still October 14, 2025.

Microsoft says that joining the beta program doesn't extend support.

Beta program or no, we still wouldn't expect Windows 10 to change dramatically between now and its end-of-support date.

We'd guess that most changes will relate to the Copilot assistant, given how aggressively Microsoft has moved to add generative AI to all of its products.


The original article contains 445 words, the summary contains 140 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I've got Win 10 and it works fine. I have no reason to upgrade to Win 11. If any new 'feature' gets added to Win 10, I will disable it.