It was possible to skip Vista and go straight from XP to 7.
It was possible to skip 8 and go straight from 7 to 10.
This time around, Microsoft is forcing Windows 11 as the only option and it is backfiring on them. People are rejecting it and the competition (Linux) has never been as good.
Apparently some are even opting to reinstall Windows 7 rather than the trash fire that is 11. It seems like 10 was never loved, merely tolerated, and as MS continues to enshittify 10 in an attempt to force people onto 11 some are just going back to the previous good version of Windows.
I reinstalled Windows 7 on my laptop and dual-boot Linux and Windows 11 on my desktop.
Those people are stupid. Run a version of windows that won’t make you part of a botnet and make you my problem or don’t run it at all.
If they are taking the time to install windows 7. I’m sure they are at least smart enough to not run random stuff on thier windows machine.
I don’t care what they’re running. Don’t connect an unsupported OS to the Internet or you’re eventually going to become my problem.
That’s not how it works, especially since everyone doing this is behind a modern router.
Nothing will happen if you have a Windows 98 computer connected to the internet when the home internet router is on default settings. And modern internet browsers implement security in themselves on systems they still support.
Firefox still supports Windows 7 via the ESR channel, and every new install gets redirected to on automatically on Windows 7, 8 and 8.1.
They should just run Linux, but if they have to do Windows then 7 is just as good as 10 now, they’re both equally unsupported. Blame Microsoft for fucking up 10 and 11 so bad nobody is willing to run them. If they had at least left 10 alone people would still be using that but they’re too greedy for everyone’s data and they couldn’t leave well enough alone. It’s also not like there aren’t an absolute ton of Windows 10 and 11 installs that are part of bot nets. Running a new version of Windows makes it slightly harder to get rooted, but doing stupid stuff no matter what you’re running is ultimately the problem, not the version of Windows. The age of worms self propagating through service 0-days is largely over, it’s almost all phishing and trojans these days. It would be on things if we were talking Windows 98 or XP, but 7 is fairly solid out of the box.
Windows 10 was when the stupid accounts became a thing on Windows and candy crush being installed after a fresh install so makes sense people never really loved 10. And they managed to make 11 even worse than it was at launch with the copilot crap.
Anyone who asks me about this is getting the “At least try Linux for free first before buying a new computer.
Another example I have is that my mother-in-law is retired. You think she needs a new computer? Nope! She’s getting Linux before a new computer. The only other option for her would be an iPad since she’s just browsing the web anyway.
You could install windows 10 on something designed for windows XP, provided it has enough RAM
The reason w11 needs a new PC is pure marketing, it doesn’t actually need some specific feature that is present on 8th gen Intel CPUs but not on 7th gen Intel CPUs
They need it to run ai and bloat whithout it grinding to a halt.
Very good point. Especially with how broken pricing has been on home computers for years, throwing away your machine for something impossibly expensive is a tough sell to say the least. Especially in this economy. It‘s more feasible to switch to Linux.
they are forcing it earlier to stave off thier AI bubble bursting
Gee, I can’t imagine why that could be.
Oh, I can think of a few reasons.
You know it’s bad when even I switch to linux. I don’t understand linux. I literally back up my entire hard drive everytime I attempt to do ANYTHING. Because I WILL screw up my whole system to the point it won’t boot. I’ve done it many times over the coarse of the past year.
Then I gotta spend a whole day waiting for things to restore from backup. And then whatever I WAD trying to do, still isn’t done.
That has been my experience using linux this past year.
But Windows 11? No.
Idk wtf you guys are doing.
Even my parents haven’t screwed up the Linux Mint I set up for them to use. I’m super curious what in the world breaks it so bad that it doesnt boot.
It’s definitively something along the lines of “knows just enough to be dangerous”
Like, sure, I’ve also broken my Linux system, but I’m deliberately running distros like arch and doing things that the average user would never do, like, say, messing with the bootloader.
If you just install something like bazzite or mint, and use it like a normal user would, the risk for something breaking should be really low
Probably Arch or Fedora
I think you need Bazzite in your life (or some other immutable distro). But hey, fucking things up and recovering from it is how I learned both Windows and then Linux so there are upsides.
That’s how you level up in Linux. You break things, learn what you did wrong and do better next time. Linux won’t hold your hand, you can and will shoot yourself in the foot.
You are doing it right by having backups and playing it safe. You’ll be ok.
Since switching to Linux I have nuked my system maybe 5 or 6 times?
When I initially installed it I set the EFI partition to ext4, that caused some trouble when I updated my kernel lol. Grub just stopped working a few times and then just recently I accidentally wrote a floppy disc image to the wrong drive and wiped out my /home partition. Luckily
testdiskis a thing.For everything else I can just rely on my BTRFS snapshots. My drive setup is more than janky, but it works. Every time something went really wrong I was able to fix it myself.
“Why don’t you like our copilot features?” -Microshit-
I want to qualify this comment with the fact that I am not a super gamer. Most my games are older. The newest and most demanding game I play is Cyberpunk 2077. Most my other games are multiple years older and less demanding.
I finally switched full time to a Linux desktop OS. I have used Linux more or less daily for decades, the first distro I ever installed was Slackware what feels forever ago. But until Valve put the work into running games on linux for their Steam deck I felt I was trapped needing to have Windows to play games. I have even spent the last decade forcing myself to rely more and more on cross platform available FOSS dreaming of some day making a permanent switch. Honestly it was so easy for me to switch at this point, most games pretty much just ran. My biggest problem took a bit to grok and it was just because some games do not like running in proton from an NTFS partition. I have NVME and SATA SSDs separate from my boot drive that I used to install games on and it was trivial to reformat the NVME drive to a more Linux friendly filesystem and I have not had an issue since. Eventually I’ll do the SATA drive but I’m lazy and those games are working fine so far. You will absolutely have problems with some games, especially some that have overbearing anti-cheat systems, but man this has been so easy I couldn’t really have imagined. The only non-gaming problem was a document scanner we own that is not supported by SANE. I could not find a solution to run it on Linux so I just spun up a Tiny 11 copy of Windows in a VM and passed it through. We only use it a couple times a year so this is an acceptable compromise to me. The VM doesn’t have Internet access, it just sees a local drive as a network share. All it can do is scan something and save it to the shared drive so I can access it in Linux.
I chose Linux Mint because I am well versed with Debian and Ubuntu. But I suggest anyone new to Linux give Bazzite a shot. It’s designed to be a lot harder for you to break. It’s also more optimized for gaming if that’s your focus. For me gaming is a requirement but I’ve never felt the need for top tier performance.
The path from 3.1 to 11 has been such a sour one and the last thing I am willing to put up with is being the product in the eyes of my desktop OS. My computer is mine and it will do why I want it to do or it will do nothing at all.
My biggest problem took a bit to grok
Now that you’re on Linux pop Docker on there and install Ollama/WebUI on there so you can run your own grok at home and not have to support yet another horrible company
Try again.
You do realize he’s using the original definition of grok, right?
Fucking apatheid emerald mine inheritor ruining perfectly good words from the nerd culture…
I would imagine a big reason being that windows 11 doesnt work on a ton of older systems which meant nobody upgraded to it and instead lived out the life of the hardware until they actually needed to buy something new. The crazy part to me is older systems wasnt even that long ago. I remember when 11 came out and saw a bunch of systems only 2 years old that weren’t compatible. I said screw it and just forced it on them and honestly I have had no issues on about 3 different systems so whatever I guess.
That makes sense. Upgrading your PC/laptop when RAM and SSD prices are skyrocketing is ridiculous.
I recently bought a tpm 2.0 chip for a 7th Gen intel and found out that win 11 will install on 7th Gen without any hacks when done fresh from a usb install, and it only checks for tye existence of tpm 2.0. The cpu Gen block is 100% a choice MS made it seems, likely because not all 7th Gen capable motherboards had tpm or expansion slots so they just went “screw them, all 7th Gen and lower is blocked”.
I’ve used the regkey hack years ago, but recent ones seemed more difficult to bypass. I ended up using a USB stick as well and formatted it with Rufus which has all the options built in to bypass it all. It worked 100% of the time the 3 times I used it. Before doing that 2 systems just wouldnt complete and always ended up giving an error at some point. One of my older systems at work is a Dell Precision which came with a Xeon processor which is normally a server CPU and windows 11 doesnt support server at all so those CPUs aren’t compatible. Been running 11 on it 2 years now and is completely stable. The tower is almost 10 years old now, but I dont want to give it up because I know ill never get anything nearly as powerful as a replacement today haha.
windows 11 doesnt support server at all
It doesn’t? I have several servers at work running desktop 11.
Please use a server OS for servers at your hayseed ass company
It runs software that’s significantly cheaper–like tens of thousands of dollars a year–for a desktop licence, but it needs a whole bunch of hardware resources. I assure you, it’s justified.
I don’t think it actually needs the tpm 2.0 or even 1.1 as it’s only used for automatic bitlocker decryption
pretty much how I saw it. 10 was a push towards accepting all hardware configurations. 11 put restrictions in the name of security. so even if a user WANTED to upgrade, there’s technically a barrier that Microsoft would block them (albeit that check can be bypassed).
It’s a mystery
Ooo I love a mystery
Obviously. There is no particular reason to switch from old 7th or older gen intel CPUs since with 16GB (or even with 8) of RAM one can browse internet and use OFFICE 365 with no issues. And what most of people do with their computers at work?
Unless PC is used to render 3D/Video/DAW Audio/heavy VMs - there is no fucking need to buy new PC just to upgrade to win11. MS shot themselves in a foot with this one.
At some point, I need to get around to installing Mint on my desktop. Maybe this weekend, but probably not.
It was extremely easy when I did it. Had everything running in 20 min. The real drag was me wanting to use a more efficient file system, so I spent a day converting my drives to ext4.
Do it this weekend.
Zorin and Cachy are great choices too, but Mint is awesome as well. Anything but Windows 11 lol
The main problem for most people when installing Linux is partitioning. Normies usually only use Windows that has been pre-installed, and never install Windows from scratch.
I think you should try Linux on a VM first to get used to it.
The automatic options on Mint make everything extremely easy. Do you want to keep Windows, or get rid of it? How much space do you want to give to Mint and Windows? Okay, done.
I’ve got a Windows 11 laptop as well, so it’s not a big issue if I brick the machine.
I’m just gonna jump in head first. When I get around to it.
It’s pretty straight forward if you don’t do anything else, get a fresh new drive just for it. I’ve been using Mint for a few weeks now and honestly other than some glitch i keep experience here and there(steam store page is noticeably slower and laggier for some reason, and sound glitch that require restart to get rid of) and some initial setup fiddling to suit me, i really doesn’t notice any different than what i’ve been doing in win10.
turn on hardware acceleration for Steam
Hey I just did it! I completed my migration today. The only reason I keep a desktop around at all is for gaming and I’ve been locked into Windows for years because of it, but no more. Steam is a given, but I’m running games off Epic and Gog through Heroic and standalone games using Lutris (ESO and Elite Dangerous so far). Not a single problem with any of them.
Mint is great, the only complaints I have are minor and I can easily deal with them. Like when you launch things, you don’t always get a cursor animation to tell you you successfully set something in motion and you just have to wait for the window to pop up. That kind of thing.
Yeah, my pc has been sitting around for over two months. I think I’m gonna go with Cachy on my machine, just need to find some time 😫
I went with cachy a few weeks ago, and its been great.
I use windows 10 at home while I use windows 11 at work. The only thing I like about windows 11 is tabs in the file explorer. Besides that I’ve had to deal with Windows Explorer crashing on a daily basis, task bar freezing completely multiple times a week, certain software straight up not working that I need to get work done, programs crashing that work perfectly fine on 10, internet connectivity issues (usually DNS for some fucking reason), periodically hearing the disconnect sound for a device even when everything is still working, awful drop down menus, needing to change the registry just to get basic features that 10 has, and the list goes on and on. At home everything just works. I’ve been testing Linux and have been getting better stability than Windows 11 and I feel like every week there’s a new problem.
I have to use Windows 11 for work. Maybe this is because of CrowdStrike or something, I don’t know, but I often encounter a problem where the main section of explorer, where you can actually click files and stuff, just breaks. That entire region becomes unclickable and unusable, even though the rest of the Explorer window (like the icons on the top part) all still work. So I just have to close the window and then reopen Explorer, re-navigate back to where I was, and proceed from where I left off.
Never, in the decades I’ve been using computers, have I ever encountered something as stupid as this with this amount of regularity. Windows 11 is a uniquely bad OS compared to every competitor option, including prior versions of Windows.
I run into that same issue from time to time. Another one I run into is when I click on items on the task bar it doesn’t bring it up as the active window even when everything else is working. I have to ALT+tab to bring up any Window or minimize every window just to find the one I want and it is absolutely infuriating.
I haven’t used windows for over 9 years now, and it still blows my mind that I read about these constant bugs just like when I used it, only back then there was a bug every now and then and they usually got taken care of within a week, but now it’s like 1 bug gets squashed, but only after 5 more are already in place. Not trying to shit in anyone here, because if you need Windows, you need it, end of story. But I can’t recommend that everyone tried Linux for at least a month enough. Give it a shot, install it in dual boot, spend some time in it, if it doesn’t work for you, that’s that, but at least you tried it.
YES! Same!!!
On the positive side though, following all that backlash, Microsoft acknowledged Windows has issues, and as if on cue, the company in a new support article has admitted that there are problems on almost every major Windows 11 core feature. The issues are related to XAML and this impacts all the Shell components like the Start Menu, Taskbar, Explorer, and Windows Settings.
Explorer.exe crash shelhost.exe crash StartMenuExperienceHost issues System Settings silently fails to launch Application crashes when initializing the XAML views Explorer running but no taskbar window. other XAML island views fail to initialize. ImmersiveShell problems
Ah, it may be the decreased quality and increased openly aggressive data collection
No, it’s the non-users who are wrong!
My 78 year old mother bought a new laptop, windows 11.
Immediately I had to remote in because of some S mode BS which just put you in the MS only application environment.
3 months later and somehow she fubarred her login and can’t use her new laptop. There’s probably an easy fix, but since she hates windows 11 and wants to go back to 10, I suggested Linux.
So it will be a Merry Christmas for my mom when I visit and install IDK? Some version that’s super simple. Anything is better than what she currently has
Can’t go wrong with good old Linux Mint
Try Zorin OS, its Ubuntu based they have a windows 11 theme.
Do they still offer a Win10 theme? When I first tried it, they still had a Win7 theme.
Even slower than Windows 10? That’s impressive…
I mean if you tell 50% of your client base they have to buy a new PC…
Especially, in the current economic climate.
They should make 64 GB RAM a minimum requirement. That alone is 500€ right there.
with all the AI and bloat hogging up your memory im not surprised if its just there to peddle ADVERTISEMENTS 100% OF THE TIME.
Because 8 was garbage and people got rid of it as soon as possible. 10 was actually good, and 11 was barely a change functionally until they started messing with the ads push, and now they’re shoving LLM bullshit in to justify their exorbitant expenditures on the half functional tech.
Yep. I Kept 7 for as long as possible but had to upgrade so 10 was next. I wouldn’t move to 11 if support continued for 10.
. I wouldn’t move to 11 if support continued for 10.
Which is exactly the reason they’re ending support.
If you don’t have a reason to stay, Linux is definitely worth a shot. I moved from 10 to Bazzite in my rig earlier in the year, and it’s been pretty solid.
Windows 11 brings change but no significant features. The general population hates change.
Idk what you mean “no significant features”. I definitely needed AI integration in notepad.exe.
Also I definitely needed a broken start menu that doesn’t show any result when doing a search
What do you mean? Now I get the feature of not being to click on the clock on my second monitor to open the calendar! I had been waiting for that feature for ages.
The executive also noted that 500 million PCs don’t meet Windows 11’s system requirements while the others don’t need a hardware upgrade to run the OS. Although this would indicate that 500 million PCs would potentially be replaced with newer alternatives capable of running Windows 11 at some point, Clarke hinted at “roughly flat” sales for Dell PCs would moving forward . Clarke didn’t explain the reasoning behind this statement , but it could mean that people are just not that interested in upgrading to Windows 11 PCs.
It’s a simple reason. Everybody is abandoning dell in droves for lenovo in enterprise environments.
I used to buy dell exclusively for laptops across over a decade at multiple organizations where I determined hardware standards and purchasing. Everyone always wanted a x1 carbon or thinkpad but the prices were too high. This is no longer the case. Now everyone gets a thinkpad or x1 carbon where I work at least, and statistics for market share are heavily on the lenovo side now.
That’s how I see it anyway. This has nothing to do with windows 11, it’s just another service pack when you’re managing everything via GPO/intune/sccm/whatever.
Have you seen any traction with Framework in the corporate space? They are mostly marketed at individuals, but since you specifically mention people wanting higher quality machines, Framework fits the bill.
No way. People like me purchase a steady supply of standardized machines at a fair cost. Bigger companies than I’ve worked for want a lease agreement. We pay $X for Y units, you come in and swap them in 3, 4, or 5 years, rinse and repeat. We also need robust tech support, both from the manufacturer and wide user base. No way I’d suggest management purchase Frameworks.
Framework is awesome for individuals as you can upgrade! No one in their right mind wants to hassle with upgrading a fleet of hundreds, thousands, or 10’s of thousands of machine. You talking about pets when business requires cattle.
https://www.hava.io/blog/cattle-vs-pets-devops-explained
Great question! And BTW, thousands upon thousands of those “old” cattle are available on eBay from sellers who make a living moving off-lease machines. I’d never buy new. LOL, I bought servers that way from savemyserver! Boss came by while I was setting up a new server. “Is that new?!” “Nope.”
I know this probably won’t be received well, but I look at framework and I see the least usable option. On some level I understand the idea and think it is at least desirable. I just think the modular nature comes with substantial drawbacks compared to modern competitors.
For home use i’m mostly a gamer. They don’t really have powerful gaming options and I can just build my own desktop in the case I want with whatever hardware I want.
For not-gaming home use, I want something lightweight that just works. I just get something from work usually. It’s common to have a glut of laptops when you acquire someone or to just order something as a tester or to demonstrate an option- which happens to be the one system I really want to use.
Framework is expensive for what they provide. The upgrades are rarely worth the price to me. If I really had to buy something, I could buy something I really want with the specs and features I really want instead of having a ton of hot swappable ports that I never touch because I just want usb-c anyway. When it’s time for me to upgrade I end up giving my old to one of my friends or family members, because there’s always a need there- two such machines i’m handing out over thanksgiving.
Framework Corp is massively frustrating because their secret sauce tech makes absolutely no sense for individuals (seriously, run the actual numbers. It is almost always cheaper to just buy two laptops AND you have less ewaste because there is no box of spare parts) but is PERFECT for enterprise/fleet deployments.
But Framework Corp has no interest in fulfilling that role. To my knowledge, there are no bulk ordering programs and their software/OEM support is fairly mediocre.
As far as enterprise laptops go? There is a full industry around macs for obvious reasons. On the PC side? The only vendors I really “trust” are Dell and Lenovo with MAYBE HP if the middleman org is confident. And… I LOVE a Thinkpad for my personal use (the nub is love. the nub is life) but there are very serious supply chain concerns for professional purposes.
I’ve never, ever met someone outside of a tech role that even knows they exist.
If someone isn’t happy with a lenovo, it’s because they want that coveted apple logo on the lid.
The primary concerns in the enterprise environment are around standardization. I only want a couple of models to manage per year so that the support guys don’t have to worry too much about some willy wonka bullshit that doesn’t work because that one system is an oddball. The nice thing too about lenovo (or dell) has traditionally been support services. If you know the words to say you can get them to ship out anything with a tech to replace anything after a single call and not running all the silly diagnostics. I know dell has been on the decline for support services and I honestly don’t handle any of the warranty repairs myself, but my impression is that it still works.
Has Lenovo stepped their game up recently? Work used to be all Lenovo, and a few years back they switched over to Dell because the Lenovos just weren’t reliable. Which is a shame because I still think the Lenovos are better designed with better keyboards, screens, port layout, etc. but it’s all moot if the thing craps out after a couple of years.
for some reason my work is the opposite. they were all lenovo (which were great), but we were forced to switch to shitty dells.
Funny enough, job before last I was buying all Dell. Next job, all X1 Carbons and the occasional Mac for the devs.
In some weird way it does feel like things flipped overnight. Maybe it was the pandemic? Definitely went from ~2019 all dell to ~2023 ultramajority lenovo. None of this is scientific though lol
It’s almost like “you have to buy a new laptop to install it and help train our AI on all you documents” is somehow not convincing enough. Maybe if they also removed local accounts and forced you to have an online MS account? Nah scratch that, it would be stupid
