> Microsoft's efforts do seem to be paying off (or, at least, some combination of Microsoft's efforts and Windows 10 PCs naturally aging out of the install base). While Windows 10 is still running on the majority of Windows PCs worldwide (about 53 percent, according to Statcounter's May 2025 data)
53% is huge mere months away from the end, and actually means that the efforts have resoundingly failed.
> When I reached out to Microsoft about Nixon’s comments, the company didn’t dismiss them at all. “Recent comments at Ignite about Windows 10 are reflective of the way Windows will be delivered as a service bringing new innovations and updates in an ongoing manner, with continuous value for our consumer and business customers,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “We aren’t speaking to future branding at this time, but customers can be confident Windows 10 will remain up-to-date and power a variety of devices from PCs to phones to Surface Hub to HoloLens and Xbox. We look forward to a long future of Windows innovations.”
How is it working for your non IT friends? I made the switch when Windows 8.1 went out of support, rather than switch to 10. And while proton worked much better for gaming than expected, there were enough complications to make the switch difficult for a non technical person.
after short help with bumping kernel version for one friend(newest AMD cards weren't supported in default kernel included with mint at that point).. it just works - they are gaming without issues.
Spent about 12mo on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint) and there were just too many issues.
Ubuntu had weird quirks that almost always turned out to be related to my using a snap package. Of course I wasted countless hours getting to the point where I realised that was the issue.
Mint stopped booting once for unknown reasons on modern hardware and I had to reinstall. Another time I wasted half my day trying to get my whatever-the-distro-calls-taskbar to reappear when it decided to disappear. Debian was stable but every time I had an issue I had to battle through advice that was too new to apply.
Linux is great at making me feel like I’m crazy - I must have wasted 2 hours trying to figure out how to get an app image to run nicely from the whatever-the-distro-calls-a-start-button. Everything seemed so complex and backwards compared to Windows. I have to configure the icon myself?! This was automatic in Windows 3.1. I wasted so much time thinking I was missing a better way only to realise, nope, this is the way. It was bizarre that everybody was happy to run a random 3rd party GitHub app to solve this. Unbelievable that in 2025 downloading an app and getting an icon to start it involved so much complexity (appimage vs flatpak vs snap vs gz vs sh… who the hell has time to figure this out?!).
Eventually I decided I’d had enough and don’t want to spend the rest of my life messing around like I’m a teenager with all the time in the world, and switched everything over to Apple, which is working out great.
The impression I have is that YotLD windows migration evangelism is honest so long as you don't go off the beaten track, but as soon as you do it gets hairy quick and that's where I find some of the evangelists dishonest by omission. It's fine if you just use a browser, or software as provided by a repository, or your steam games work and you don't need/want to mod/tinker with them. Otherwise you might be dropping someone recently transplanted into unfamiliar territory and they haven't build up a new knowledge base yet.
Just one data point, but I have gone full Linux Mint on almost all my computers. Being a MS guy since 1991 at 7 years old. Remember being in aw at windows 95 at 11-12. Avoided apples my whole life.
Seeing how much better my friends apple computers ran than my modern windows computers, I just went full Linux. Loving it. Telling my parents and friends to consider it instead of buying a new computer to replace the 'slow one'.
I have one laptop I got used to be able to daily drive Linux and for now am on Zorin Pro. A lot of people don't like paying for support, or Linux, and v17 definitely has some problems but so far I'm impressed how well it runs win32 stuff out of the box and looks great. Support is pretty awesome so far too.
Also yeah, I could do without paying just fine and work as basically a Windows engineer so I can Google stuff but I'm just over trying to deal with getting Linux working.
I do also have a steam deck and gaming is stellar on Proton but you still need Windows for DRM triple a games.
We're down to just three Windows boxes (four if you count the Xbox Series X) in our household, and are likely to winnow that down further following the resounding success of a Linux gaming box on old Sandy Bridge CPU + GTX 970 GPU + HDD. The eldest gamer in the household is so sick of Microsoft's nonsense that the only reason they're not fully on Linux already is because their production box is reliant upon Intel RST, which makes dual-booting a dangerous game.
Including the rest of my family, we have but one other Windows box amongst an extended family of ~dozen folks. Everyone else has moved to macOS or Linux.
Speaking from an IT perspective, I've also seen more organizations court macOS as a standard machine in lieu of Win11, especially with Microsoft's shift to InTune and away from Group Policy. Microsoft thought inertia would carry their customers into the cloud, but the costs involved posed enough of a speed bump that customers are reconsidering their Microsoft estate, provided they weren't already in Azure and/or didn't have M365 E5.
It's a bloodbath. Microsoft extending free support is tacit acknowledgement they s*t the bed and have no other gameplan ready to go right now.
The phone/tablet as most common 'personal computer' is what I see that will be a constant bleed on the audience for the desktop PC. At least for the home audience the price trends over the past decade seems like a big deterrence, and the old model of having a desktop for home use and an enthusiast upgrading/modernizing it involves more. I do a fair amount of gaming on my 8-9 year old PC, and it's hard to justify an upgrade (which at this point is a whole new build) for more recent games versus getting a PS5 for 400 bucks or so (or a used one for 200-300) which is less than a reasonably capable/modern GPU by itself.
I guess my concern is where are the gradual on-ramps for getting people into that desktop PC (windows or otherwise) environment so they can explore and discover what it enables for them? There's no trouble if you already know you're an enthusiast, you can make an informed decision if the bill of parts is worth it, and I don't see professional-workstations going away as a tool.
If we want to revive interest in the desktop or laptop computer, and cost is a concern, then we should be steering more folks towards pre-built NUCs and SBCs with an efficient OS on top (like a friendlier Linux Desktop). The problem is that so much of the internet is so bloated and heavy that, with the way the average person uses a computer, the specs quickly become anemic.
So I guess I’m banging my efficiency and optimization drum again, is what I’m saying.
The "bad copy of your competition" is probably in relation to the Windows 11 program launcher that resembles the centered design of the MacOS launcher.
But that can be easily removed using tools like Explorer Patcher and Open Shell.
When I made a complaint about their UI changes being unintuitive the response was that the intent was to make Windows more familiar to people un-familiar to Windows, as in make it more familiar to those who use Macs.
They assume existing windows users are a captured audience and are trying to capture the Mac market without realizing that they're instead making everything much worse.
Though now ironically with Apple going the whole 'glass' detour people using Macs may be more familiar with Windows. Could be a win for the Microsoft fast follower strategy - so what do I know. I wouldn't have bet on Apple fumbling but here we are. I still prefer Linux to both Apple and Windows.
You might be seeing it in the same lens as macos for instance, but windows' model is fundamentaly different and that deadline is only for specific cases (that's why they can play the "sign up for backup and we'll expand your time" game)
For instance Enterprise LTSC version of Windows 10 is officially supported until 2031.
A ton of the devices inside these 53% have no need to move away from win 10 in any urgent way.
I am running Enterprise LTSC version of Windows 10 in a VM for .NET development and it started to show full-screen popups saying that “it’s time to upgrade” to win11 with some text suggesting that it is urgent and time is running out.
That's such a Microsoft move. Corporate users under managed machines will never see that popup so it won't be an issue, so it's mainly heckling the users that probably installed Windows themselves or have a direct access to the someone who can perform the update.
On OS updates I'm willing to give them a pass, but that kind of split and "foot in the door" pushiness is so typical.
If your org has a fiscal year that begins in the middle of the calendar year (July 1), there might not have been the budget to do the upgrade until months away.
Compounded with general upgrade procrastination...
I'm assuming they're talking about spectre/meltdown which have mitigations slowing down performance, but the hardware is vulnerable without those mitigations
I have to say that after switching to Windows 11, I don't hate it as much as I thought I would. I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us, but some things like multi-GPU support is better than in Windows 10: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/what-is-ruining-dual-gpu-setups
On the other hand, for whatever reason Windows 11 right now refuses to install updates (I think the logs complained about their own web view components being unavailable last I checked, which is wrong because they definitely are there), which is kind of embarrassing.
With news of many games also performing better on Linux distros nowadays like https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s... it feels like vendor lock (certain anti-cheat and software not running on anything else) and familiarity is increasingly what's keeping folks on the platform.
While I've also seen my friends struggling to get an Arch install just right, it's nice to know that if I'm willing to say goodbye to some games (e.g. looking at https://www.protondb.com) and software (I actually like the Windows version of SourceTree and tools like WinSCP and MobaXTerm and even Notepad++), then I could go back to using Linux Mint with Cinnamon as my daily driver again - pretty pleasant setup.
Not sure man, I just want a version of Microsoft Windows without all the telemetry and the ads and the aggressive control Microsoft has on the system via updates.
Time and again they keep changing the default browser, throwing ads into Start Menu, blocking specific applications (such as Chrome etc. Bad example because Chrome is an evil junkyard. Imagine them blocking Google Drive one day because they want you to use OneDrive).
In general WSL is great but the entire Windows system feels so outdated and full of duplicate layers thrown upon each other with modern UIs on top of old APIs with the old UIs not even deleted and taken care of.
The productivity and cleanliness of OS X keeps convincing me again and again to stick to the Macs as a platform - in my POV this is one of the few things Apple has gotten right (with Apple CPUs), after decades.
Now having used an OSX laptop at work, my main pain points are how _everything_ seems to be different for the sake of being different (keeping legacy Macintosh-isms).
My main pain points:
* Keyboard combinations, can't 'theme' them to just work like every other popular platform.
* Docking stations + Multi-Monitors. TONS broken here. Worst of all is how there's no way to just FIX the dock to a single screen's bottom. Though if you pick Left or Right it'll stay there and not jump between screens.
* Per task focus / lists / menus. I like the WM to fuse the taskbar to each 'parent' level task window, NOT a screen edge. Similarly, the WM shouldn't group window switching per task (which makes work among a group of tasks super tedious).
PS: if there's a good way of fixing these on a corp-managed device please let me know. I've failed to find some obvious search result with ~15 years of web search history of others having the same pain points. With any 'solutions' now obsolete as internal component names / control schema completely renamed / redesigned over time, while seemingly not fixing any of the pain points.
Missing vertical taskbar is probably the most egregious omission, but it's not so much they took it away as it is they created versions of a number of Windows Explorer components in a higher-level technology without implementing half the features and shipping it with 50x the number of bugs. I at least weekly (and often daily) run into issues with taskbar icons overlapping one another, menus not coming up when clicked, the tray icons breaking, etc.
Same story with navigating the file system--the new implementation has a multitude of issues, including getting into a state where clicking files to select them only works below a certain invisible horizontal line in the window, windows not refreshing when files have been added/removed, trying to rename a file you just copied being an exercise in frustration with the view refreshing and exiting the rename state 5 - 10 seconds after the copy, the address bar breaking in about a dozen different ways... it's really frustrating software that's a full few tiers down from the quality standard set by Windows 10 and previous versions.
It's gotten slightly better since the initial Windows 11 release, but it still feels like pre-release quality software. I was hoping they'd get it up to release quality and add the important features back by the sunset of Windows 10, but it looks like Microsoft really doesn't care about the quality of the experience of using their UI.
If it were only missing the vertical taskbar as a design decision that would be one thing, but instead it's the very obvious tip of an iceberg of lack of user focus, care, quality, resourcing, and skill. They don't add it back because they know in their current state they're not going to do it well, and the money's in dreaming up new ways of force-feeding trash "news" and promotions anyway, not in helping you get things done and providing a well-functioning tool and bicycle for the mind. What if someone put the taskbar on the left side of the screen, it interfered with them seeing the clickbait brainrot of the widgets "feature", and Microsoft didn't get its average $.0003 for each interaction?
I’m so glad you mentioned the vertical taskbars being taken away. There’s a feedback item on Microsoft’s forums that’s years old now and they still haven’t addressed it. It seems so weird that they took away this functionality that they’d had implemented for years, seemingly for no reason.
Slapping a webview component into a native app is a lot less heavy than a full election app.
A lot heavier than not at all, of course, and webview felt heavy handed back then like election for OS components feels now, I feel a lesson has not been learned…
Either way they're shipping an entire browser stack, and back in 1997 it was even heavier in comparison to available compute. But rose colored glasses two US to ignore that.
> I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us
After getting a new W11 laptop at work and discovering the removal of vertical taskbars (ridiculous on 16:9 monitors), that particular loss is specifically what keeps me from "upgrading" from W10. Windows Updates warns me that "certain features aren't available on Windows 11" without specifying which ones; finding that sane placement of my taskbar is one of them means I'm plenty willing to pay $30 for another year of security updates to get to keep W10.
>On the other hand, for whatever reason Windows 11 right now refuses to install updates (I think the logs complained about their own web view components being unavailable last I checked, which is wrong because they definitely are there), which is kind of embarrassing.
Updates failing and the horrible troubleshooting process is the main reason I’d love to ditch their abortion of an OS. As it is, the most powerful computer of my many is just used for gaming.
Microsoft announced that you can extend Windows 10 support if you enroll in Microsoft Backup or purchase “Microsoft Points.” Just think if they get printer manufacturers in on this, just to keep your ink cartridges “authentic” and up to date, and you can keep using Windows 10. And so on...
You don't purchase Microsoft points. You can purchase extra support with 1000 Microsoft points that you can easily get for free in like a week clicking on some links on Bing.
This sounds like a black mirror episode to me. I've briefly used Windows Server 2012 a while back but otherwise used Linux my whole life. The way people complain about needing to learn how to type 'sudo dnf install' is too much work when they have to either install a bunch of tweaks to fix win11 or remove bloat from win10… I can't tell if I'm the insane one
For many, and hopefully increasingly more and more of us, time and attention can be more valuable than money.
Manipulating our behavior to develop familiarity with a product by seeding the habit of using it as an ad-clicking serf and nurturing that habit by drawing it out across a series of days as the means of acquiring security for our tools and information is a coercive and corrosive exchange.
It's designed to seem like such a small thing that it's benign, as if attention is worth infinitely less than money. By changing us, forming new and often bad habits, and extracting ongoing attention interest payments without us noticing, the cost can end up being far greater.
The backup requirement shows a lot of self-awareness from Microsoft, but it's still too hard to migrate a Windows machine. Contrast with a new Mac, I wait a few hours, and all my stuff is identically copied over via the built-in tools, and it feels like the same machine. With Windows, preferences all over just don't really copy. I don't care about a few .docx files, I want hundreds of legacy apps and settings to be preserved. As it is, it's more than a week of work when you get a new PC.
I've had nearly perfect success using the setup command line argument to install as "server". It says "Server" during the install but that's not what ends up being installed.
This has been patched out[0] of newer builds but a 24H2 install media will still work for an in-place upgrade.
Did you check your BIOS settings to see if you can turn on the TPM? Worked for me on several circa 2018 custom built machines. The builder, Puget Systems, shipped the machines with the TPM turned off. With the TPM turned on, Win 11 installed without undue drama.
This is good advice, I discovered two of my PCs had tpms just disabled at bios level. Though in the end I've got so annoyed with the advertising I've moved one of them to Linux and the other will ditch windows too, eventually.
It’s silly games like this that justify piracy. If I can get the extended support in 2 minutes by changing the edition and reactivating OR by doing an hour worth of Bing searches with Adblock on to accumulate the points, what’s the difference to them? It’s all fake.
The title is wrong. It's not free - you need to give them your data, in the most literal way possible, or you need to otherwise use magic "company points" that you earn by giving up your privacy. That's not free.
Win 11 is a bloated piece of shit, so I'm not surprised people are hesitant to adopt. Besides, it has nothing to offer over Win 10. Win 10 worked just fine, so why bother with the upgrade? People are also no strangers to running outdated hardware. At least 31% of the active Android users are running an EOL version of it.
I bought my parents a Dell laptop in 2019/2020. It has 7th gen i3 so just below the Windows 11 threshold. The machine is in perfect shape as it's used a few times per month max for watching YouTube or some online banking, or occasional LibreOffice usage.
I don't want to generate electronic waste, what would you recommend? Installing Linux Mint?
Note: I'm far from my parents so can't do IT support.
They won't, Windows isn't even compiled with AVX2 extensions on, even though every CPU in the last 10y+ supports it, for the fear of it running on some machine that doesn't have AVX2. The whole "CPU unsupported" thing is from the marketing side, trying to push purchase of new hardware, not from the actual devs.
>I bought my parents a Dell laptop in 2019/2020. It has 7th gen i3
7th gen came out in 2016. Why did you buy your parents a system with a 3-4 old CPU? Nothing wrong with buying old stuff if that's what you're into or what you can afford, but then you have to take into account the risk of less SW support when buying old HW, since now that CPU is 9 years old and no HW gets supported forever. Hence the saying "you buy cheap, you buy twice". Just install Linux on it.
You made me double check, actually it's 8th gen (came out late 2017). It was 2y old at the time of buying (I wasn't really paying attention to the processor tbh). So actually, not sure which Windows 11 prerequisites are not met, I need to dig more.
The only reason for me to ever boot into Windows is for gaming. As more and more games support SteamOS, it's increasingly tempting to just drop Windows altogether.
Windows 10 came out almost 10 years ago and they offered a free upgrade to Windows 11. I know people love to hate on Microsoft, but they’ve done better than most technology companies when it comes to security updates here. You’re lucky to get even half of that length of support from most Android devices for example.
Windows 10 was marketed with the promise of being the "last version of windows" by microsoft employees. Personally I think they should be held to that promise, at least in so far as supporting it as long as they still support any other version of windows.
The upgrade to windows 11 is not free in so far as it doesn't support the hardware that people have.
Microsoft made the announcement through very trusted Microsoft media experts which they have since burned. I remember their emphatic assurances at the time but didn’t believe them.
I previously worked at MS so asked friends about it and they agreed that there was an attempt to foster the impression of windows as a SAAS both internally and externally.
If that impression gets out and is not countered then it’s a tacit acceptance.
MS burns people all the time so we figured it would be another example of that. Just this time it’s more regular people and not just devs and partners.
Some people internally and externally legitimately believed that people would pay $100 p.a. to use windows. Had that worked they might have kept the subscription model going. Office 365 is an example of that model working.
It was also part of the billion devices push to make the case for the Microsoft App Store which we knew was in trouble, it seemed like a deliberate attempt to sacrifice long term trust for a short term gain.
It wasn’t marketed that way. It was a throwaway line that became a meme at Ignite back in 2015
It was meant to convey the change in delivery model for Windows updates.
Windows 10 and 11 are the same kernel from a CI/CD perspective, just run winver and see for yourself. The Win10 and Win11 paint jobs are not something the engineers have any power over.
I.e. an official Microsoft representative, again, in front of the press, said it. It was repeated ad nauseam by the press and they made no attempt to correct it - in fact they went around getting the press to say similar things like "Once your device is upgraded to Windows 10, it will continue to be supported for the lifetime of the device at no cost". That's an official binding statement on the company if I ever did see one.
No. He was in front of a crowd of developers in a developer training seminar and trying to overhype the buy in of live tiles to suggest they wouldn't be deprecated.
People rag on a company that is trying to force you to use an online account to log onto your local PC?
Doesn't using Windows Backup to qualify for these extended Windows 10 security updates require that you purchase more than the default amount of cloud storage too?
They make it close to impossible to install windows without making an account, you either need to mess around in the registry or run some weird Powershell commands in order to skip the account creation step. They do this because they know a non-technical person will just create an account instead. It's fucking bullshit and it is 100% intentional.
Actually, I discovered that, as long as the machine has a TPM and it is turned on, I can just set it (Win 11) up initially with a throwaway MS account. Then, I add local admin and user accounts and, using the admin account, I delete the MS account. I have done it many times now. It’s easier than all of the other crap trying to avoid that MS account.
Technically being able to opt out of a Microsoft account by solving a puzzle wrapped in a riddle that Microsoft changes every few months is as close to forced as their legal team is willing to go.
If we're comparing them to other software companies, what would be their fairest comparison? Is there another company that manages the overwhelming majority of client desktops around the world?
That free upgrade refuses to work with my hardware. I am glad they are continuing security, but they are literally forcing me to install another OS (as I understand the security difference).
My very expensive tower PC can't "up"grade because it doesn't have a TPM 2.0 module. So unless Microsoft plans to give me a new CPU (and new mobo) it's not free for many users.
I have a perfectly good machine that cannot be upgraded to Windows 11 for some arbitrary reason. Fortunately, I no longer specifically need Windows and can move on from it. I actually quite like Windows now that WSL2 is decent, but I don't need this specific form of enshittification in my life (along with all the tracking and ads). I don't use Android for the very same reason.
My Windows 7 laptop still seems to want security updates about once a week; maybe it's just Windows Defender and not kernel bugs but I find it interesting that MS still bothers.
You can run a script to scoop up the search points for desktop and mobile to skip the monkey work of collecting points. It won't get the extra points for doing other reward tasks.
> Microsoft will also extend a year of additional Windows 10 security updates to any users who opt into Windows Backup, a relatively recent Windows 10 and Windows 11 app that backs up some settings and files using a Microsoft account. Users can also opt into ESU updates by spending 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which are handed out for everything from making purchases with your Microsoft account to doing Bing searches.
Sometimes I wonder how far they'd have to go before people stopped putting up with their bullshit. This reads like something out of The Onion.
Obviously couldn't be used in most commercial spaces but would it really be that harmful to run at home? I'm not that knowledgeable about computer security. Just don't know why a hacker would target a random home user, if that's even the fear.
It's not harmful at all, as long as you connect through a normal router, which will have a rudimentary firewall enabled. That's all you need, really.
Other than that it's just the normal understanding that you shouldn't run virus.exe or virus.pdf.exe, and if you do, you'll have less protection versus on Windows 10/11.
53% is huge mere months away from the end, and actually means that the efforts have resoundingly failed.
53% is a huge failure on MS part, but that's what happens when you design OS to be a bad copy of your competition.
Is that similar? That would make it the last version you'll have to pay for. At least for most people.
Some conditions may apply:
* hardware compatibility permitting
* until we decide otherwise
* unless “the numbers” stop climbing
* until AI suggests so
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-ve...
It might not have come in a press release, but it came from marketing and wasn't taken back for quite some time.
IMHO, everybody was happy with version 10 forever, but then Apple decided 10 wasn't good enough, so Microsoft had to copy them.
Ubuntu had weird quirks that almost always turned out to be related to my using a snap package. Of course I wasted countless hours getting to the point where I realised that was the issue.
Mint stopped booting once for unknown reasons on modern hardware and I had to reinstall. Another time I wasted half my day trying to get my whatever-the-distro-calls-taskbar to reappear when it decided to disappear. Debian was stable but every time I had an issue I had to battle through advice that was too new to apply.
Linux is great at making me feel like I’m crazy - I must have wasted 2 hours trying to figure out how to get an app image to run nicely from the whatever-the-distro-calls-a-start-button. Everything seemed so complex and backwards compared to Windows. I have to configure the icon myself?! This was automatic in Windows 3.1. I wasted so much time thinking I was missing a better way only to realise, nope, this is the way. It was bizarre that everybody was happy to run a random 3rd party GitHub app to solve this. Unbelievable that in 2025 downloading an app and getting an icon to start it involved so much complexity (appimage vs flatpak vs snap vs gz vs sh… who the hell has time to figure this out?!).
Eventually I decided I’d had enough and don’t want to spend the rest of my life messing around like I’m a teenager with all the time in the world, and switched everything over to Apple, which is working out great.
Seeing how much better my friends apple computers ran than my modern windows computers, I just went full Linux. Loving it. Telling my parents and friends to consider it instead of buying a new computer to replace the 'slow one'.
Also yeah, I could do without paying just fine and work as basically a Windows engineer so I can Google stuff but I'm just over trying to deal with getting Linux working.
I do also have a steam deck and gaming is stellar on Proton but you still need Windows for DRM triple a games.
We're down to just three Windows boxes (four if you count the Xbox Series X) in our household, and are likely to winnow that down further following the resounding success of a Linux gaming box on old Sandy Bridge CPU + GTX 970 GPU + HDD. The eldest gamer in the household is so sick of Microsoft's nonsense that the only reason they're not fully on Linux already is because their production box is reliant upon Intel RST, which makes dual-booting a dangerous game.
Including the rest of my family, we have but one other Windows box amongst an extended family of ~dozen folks. Everyone else has moved to macOS or Linux.
Speaking from an IT perspective, I've also seen more organizations court macOS as a standard machine in lieu of Win11, especially with Microsoft's shift to InTune and away from Group Policy. Microsoft thought inertia would carry their customers into the cloud, but the costs involved posed enough of a speed bump that customers are reconsidering their Microsoft estate, provided they weren't already in Azure and/or didn't have M365 E5.
It's a bloodbath. Microsoft extending free support is tacit acknowledgement they s*t the bed and have no other gameplan ready to go right now.
If we want to talk about disaster it's that Microsoft lost the smartphone battle. The real future of computing.
I guess my concern is where are the gradual on-ramps for getting people into that desktop PC (windows or otherwise) environment so they can explore and discover what it enables for them? There's no trouble if you already know you're an enthusiast, you can make an informed decision if the bill of parts is worth it, and I don't see professional-workstations going away as a tool.
So I guess I’m banging my efficiency and optimization drum again, is what I’m saying.
But that can be easily removed using tools like Explorer Patcher and Open Shell.
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
The thing that made me switch to Linux is Microsoft's pushing AI into everything. I do not want their AI constantly looking over my shoulder.
They assume existing windows users are a captured audience and are trying to capture the Mac market without realizing that they're instead making everything much worse.
Though now ironically with Apple going the whole 'glass' detour people using Macs may be more familiar with Windows. Could be a win for the Microsoft fast follower strategy - so what do I know. I wouldn't have bet on Apple fumbling but here we are. I still prefer Linux to both Apple and Windows.
For instance Enterprise LTSC version of Windows 10 is officially supported until 2031.
A ton of the devices inside these 53% have no need to move away from win 10 in any urgent way.
On OS updates I'm willing to give them a pass, but that kind of split and "foot in the door" pushiness is so typical.
Compounded with general upgrade procrastination...
What?!
On the other hand, for whatever reason Windows 11 right now refuses to install updates (I think the logs complained about their own web view components being unavailable last I checked, which is wrong because they definitely are there), which is kind of embarrassing.
With news of many games also performing better on Linux distros nowadays like https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s... it feels like vendor lock (certain anti-cheat and software not running on anything else) and familiarity is increasingly what's keeping folks on the platform.
While I've also seen my friends struggling to get an Arch install just right, it's nice to know that if I'm willing to say goodbye to some games (e.g. looking at https://www.protondb.com) and software (I actually like the Windows version of SourceTree and tools like WinSCP and MobaXTerm and even Notepad++), then I could go back to using Linux Mint with Cinnamon as my daily driver again - pretty pleasant setup.
Time and again they keep changing the default browser, throwing ads into Start Menu, blocking specific applications (such as Chrome etc. Bad example because Chrome is an evil junkyard. Imagine them blocking Google Drive one day because they want you to use OneDrive).
In general WSL is great but the entire Windows system feels so outdated and full of duplicate layers thrown upon each other with modern UIs on top of old APIs with the old UIs not even deleted and taken care of.
The productivity and cleanliness of OS X keeps convincing me again and again to stick to the Macs as a platform - in my POV this is one of the few things Apple has gotten right (with Apple CPUs), after decades.
My main pain points:
* Keyboard combinations, can't 'theme' them to just work like every other popular platform.
* Docking stations + Multi-Monitors. TONS broken here. Worst of all is how there's no way to just FIX the dock to a single screen's bottom. Though if you pick Left or Right it'll stay there and not jump between screens.
* Per task focus / lists / menus. I like the WM to fuse the taskbar to each 'parent' level task window, NOT a screen edge. Similarly, the WM shouldn't group window switching per task (which makes work among a group of tasks super tedious).
PS: if there's a good way of fixing these on a corp-managed device please let me know. I've failed to find some obvious search result with ~15 years of web search history of others having the same pain points. With any 'solutions' now obsolete as internal component names / control schema completely renamed / redesigned over time, while seemingly not fixing any of the pain points.
Note that the items below are based on my personal opinion only:
1. Finder always seemed to suck ass - been the same for 10+ years lol. I use QSpace Pro as my full-time file explorer/manager.
2. Alt-Tab behavior also sucked for me -having to hold down controls and no thumbnail views....fixed with the AltTab app.
3. Can't control system volume when connected to an external monitor not made by Apple. Fixed with an app called SoundControl
4. Spotlight is lame and slow as hell - fixed with Alfred
5. No clipboard manager built-in - I use an app called Copy'Em Paste for this.
Same story with navigating the file system--the new implementation has a multitude of issues, including getting into a state where clicking files to select them only works below a certain invisible horizontal line in the window, windows not refreshing when files have been added/removed, trying to rename a file you just copied being an exercise in frustration with the view refreshing and exiting the rename state 5 - 10 seconds after the copy, the address bar breaking in about a dozen different ways... it's really frustrating software that's a full few tiers down from the quality standard set by Windows 10 and previous versions.
It's gotten slightly better since the initial Windows 11 release, but it still feels like pre-release quality software. I was hoping they'd get it up to release quality and add the important features back by the sunset of Windows 10, but it looks like Microsoft really doesn't care about the quality of the experience of using their UI.
If it were only missing the vertical taskbar as a design decision that would be one thing, but instead it's the very obvious tip of an iceberg of lack of user focus, care, quality, resourcing, and skill. They don't add it back because they know in their current state they're not going to do it well, and the money's in dreaming up new ways of force-feeding trash "news" and promotions anyway, not in helping you get things done and providing a well-functioning tool and bicycle for the mind. What if someone put the taskbar on the left side of the screen, it interfered with them seeing the clickbait brainrot of the widgets "feature", and Microsoft didn't get its average $.0003 for each interaction?
Ha, yeah, was amazed to see basic layout fails in such a core component! Web tech is eating the world, bringing all its sloppiness with it...
A lot heavier than not at all, of course, and webview felt heavy handed back then like election for OS components feels now, I feel a lesson has not been learned…
Have you tried this awesome mod app?
https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-vertical
After getting a new W11 laptop at work and discovering the removal of vertical taskbars (ridiculous on 16:9 monitors), that particular loss is specifically what keeps me from "upgrading" from W10. Windows Updates warns me that "certain features aren't available on Windows 11" without specifying which ones; finding that sane placement of my taskbar is one of them means I'm plenty willing to pay $30 for another year of security updates to get to keep W10.
Updates failing and the horrible troubleshooting process is the main reason I’d love to ditch their abortion of an OS. As it is, the most powerful computer of my many is just used for gaming.
It’s interesting/unsettling to extrapolate a dystopian future from these moves. Keiichi Matsuda’s short film “Hyper-Reality”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
It's astonishing this corporation exists.
Manipulating our behavior to develop familiarity with a product by seeding the habit of using it as an ad-clicking serf and nurturing that habit by drawing it out across a series of days as the means of acquiring security for our tools and information is a coercive and corrosive exchange.
It's designed to seem like such a small thing that it's benign, as if attention is worth infinitely less than money. By changing us, forming new and often bad habits, and extracting ongoing attention interest payments without us noticing, the cost can end up being far greater.
This has been patched out[0] of newer builds but a 24H2 install media will still work for an in-place upgrade.
[0] https://winaero.com/microsoft-has-patched-the-product-server...
https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobi...
My gaming Windows 10 LTSC will stop get support at January 12, 2027. I will probably hold out until then, and see what the landscape is then.
I don't want to generate electronic waste, what would you recommend? Installing Linux Mint?
Note: I'm far from my parents so can't do IT support.
Edit: also occasional HP scanner/printer usage.
Bypass instructions are on YouTube, Reddit, Github, tech blogs, etc.
then GP parents' machine will just bluescreen at boot with illegal instruction
7th gen came out in 2016. Why did you buy your parents a system with a 3-4 old CPU? Nothing wrong with buying old stuff if that's what you're into or what you can afford, but then you have to take into account the risk of less SW support when buying old HW, since now that CPU is 9 years old and no HW gets supported forever. Hence the saying "you buy cheap, you buy twice". Just install Linux on it.
The upgrade to windows 11 is not free in so far as it doesn't support the hardware that people have.
It was just that - marketing! To get a load of people to migrate to it, right? "Do it guys, it's the last one you'll need to do, we promise"
Trust Microsoft? Not even once
If that impression gets out and is not countered then it’s a tacit acceptance.
MS burns people all the time so we figured it would be another example of that. Just this time it’s more regular people and not just devs and partners.
Some people internally and externally legitimately believed that people would pay $100 p.a. to use windows. Had that worked they might have kept the subscription model going. Office 365 is an example of that model working.
It was also part of the billion devices push to make the case for the Microsoft App Store which we knew was in trouble, it seemed like a deliberate attempt to sacrifice long term trust for a short term gain.
Which is a real product they really do sell so yeah that makes sense.
It was meant to convey the change in delivery model for Windows updates.
Windows 10 and 11 are the same kernel from a CI/CD perspective, just run winver and see for yourself. The Win10 and Win11 paint jobs are not something the engineers have any power over.
https://globalnews.ca/news/2135677/what-you-need-to-know-bef...
No. He was in front of a crowd of developers in a developer training seminar and trying to overhype the buy in of live tiles to suggest they wouldn't be deprecated.
People rag on a company that is trying to force you to use an online account to log onto your local PC?
Doesn't using Windows Backup to qualify for these extended Windows 10 security updates require that you purchase more than the default amount of cloud storage too?
I wish. I have a completely capable machine that won't accept the upgrade, due to some completely artificial requirements MSFT built in.
My very expensive tower PC can't "up"grade because it doesn't have a TPM 2.0 module. So unless Microsoft plans to give me a new CPU (and new mobo) it's not free for many users.
And no one said the situation with Android devices is great.
In other words continue to supply the proprietary software that runs on my hardware.
How about, if you can't or won't "support" your product anymore, you are required to give away the source code.
We should be done holding users hostage.
https://github.com/jack-mil/bing-rewards
Sometimes I wonder how far they'd have to go before people stopped putting up with their bullshit. This reads like something out of The Onion.
No way I'm tossing it since it works fine (even battery is decent still). But no way I'm spending time with Linux if Win10 will still get updates.
If I will really need another Windows device though, I'll just buy a cheap N100 device.
Other than that it's just the normal understanding that you shouldn't run virus.exe or virus.pdf.exe, and if you do, you'll have less protection versus on Windows 10/11.
For example, in order to to create a botnet.
Much of the recent additions have been more about user information and chaining to cloud, than they have been solid improvements.