remember when windows 10 was supposed to be the last os they ever made
Dude, they’re still struggling with Windows 11 adoption because of the unreasonable requirements of a TPM 2.0 capable motherboard/CPU… and they are asking people to upgrade their CPUs again?
They only started seeing real growth in Windows 11 numbers as of January of this year. Windows 11 finally hit 73% last month while Windows 10 is down to 27%. Linux continues to gain marketshare, and there’s no telling if the reason that Win 11 is finally gaining marketshare is from people dumping Windows entirely for other options. Mac and Chromebook shares have been growing as well! It took them four and a half years from release to break 50% Win 11 adoption and they want to release Win 12 on year five while forcing more upgrades when half the people who got in just upgraded?
This on top of trade wars, actual wars, and an AI arms race that is making buying PC parts obscenely overpriced… and they think people will fucking go for this?
The suits at Microsoft are out of their fucking minds. Even businesses won’t want to upgrade this soon after many only just making upgrades to meet Windows 11 requirements just recently… because businesses are also facing the same increased costs due to the above issues!
god i hope they fuck this up
They’re already fucking this up with vibe-coding Windows 11, so if they seriously go all-in on this, Windows 12 will be a bigger disaster than fucking Windows Vista and Windows Millennium Edition combined.
…and frankly, I think they will. They’ve bet the farm on this AI shit, and they need to force it into everything to justify it’s fucking existence even though Copilot is the most dogshit out of all these dogshit generative AI systems.
vista was great on compliant hardware. w11 is very much not.
Right, but that’s just it, they’re basically pulling another Vista if they release Windows 12 later this year.
It’s not clear whether Windows 12 will welcome any non-NPU processors. More likely, PCs that don’t meet its system requirements will lose some functionality.
As the article reasonably posits, it’s way more likely that they’ll just degrade the experience for people without NPUs, which in other words means decreased performance on older hardware, a la Vista on non-compliant hardware.
whoof. i still don’t understand what makes an npu different from a vector coprocessor (except the proprietary api) so if they’re smart about it they’ll fall back to gpu use. they will not be smart about it.
The suits at Microsoft are out of their fucking minds.
Yes. They are stupid and don’t deserve their huge paychecks.
They could’ve done basically nothing. Maybe security updates. And they would’ve had a decent brand that kept bringing in money. Their leadership is worse than doing nothing. A dog would make a better ceo.
The OS desktop environment has stagnated over the past 15 years.
Many businesses have transitioned from a 3-4 year rotation on desktops/laptops to every 5-6 years today. Hell my work laptop is 6 years old and I don’t forsee replacing it for another 3-4 years. For work functions there is no significant improvement to upgrading more frequently today.
So if they launched W12 next year, widespread adoption will likely not occur until 2032-2033 or at the Win11 EOL whichever comes first.
The developers today are working on a system that will not become mainstream for 8+ years. They want to launch in the next 2 years knowing it will not be adopted for years.
They ignoring the reality of today’s market and building to meet the latest fads. It’s Windows 8 all over again.
Windows 7 was arguably the last OS they ever made.
This line of thought goes all the way back to NT, and even then IBM would have some comments.
DOS was the last one they built, and they made a really decent GUI for it before they switched to NT.
And they still haven’t even finished making PowerShell anywhere near as functional as Bash or any other Linux shell environment.
I don’t outright hate PowerShell but it’s clearly a hacky afterthought after realizing Linux was eating their lunch in the server space via quick rollouts to thousands of computers at once through Bash scripting.
I find PS pretty great. Probably the best improvement to Windows since going 32-bit.
For sure, it’s a vast improvement, but there’s still so much you can’t do with it.
Windows 10 arguably became passable for stability about 3 years after release… but you still had to cut out the advertising bloat, spyware, and all which undermined any gains of stability because that shit was just fucking annoying.
wasn’t advertised as such though
No, because that was a shitty headline that mischaracterized an employee’s one-off statement and was then held up as gospel truth by the internet.
it was from a press conference where they said they were done with version numbers and that windows 10 would basically be supported forever. that’s not mischaracterisation
Yes, like Arch but for windows
It was certainly the last one that I voluntarily used.
No, that is not what they said. Stop spreading this propaganda.
Absolutely, it was at the height of the “software as a service” phase and they were doing rolling updates for the Windows Insider program.
If you’re not ready to switch to Linux:
Windows 10 Enterprise IoT is supported until 2032, works great, contains almost no bloat, and is free to activate.
Be warned though that some installers will yell at you for not having a “compatible version of Windows”. Its rare, but some apps don’t like the enterprise editions.
My brother used to use enterprise windows 10 until he started having that vary issue with trying to play COD.
Damn, I guess he can’t play the same game that’s been rereleased annually for 20 years then huh. What a bummer
Iv already started seeing games with older versions of BE and EAC say consumer windows 10 isn’t supported any more and not working.
Trying to stay on windows 10 and be a gamer is quickly going to become a nightmare with more compatibility issues then Linux.
I’m banking on the world ending before then. Or I get an incurable cancer. Either way, fuck Microsoft.
Or I get an incurable cancer.
So you are planning to upgrade?
I know, right! How can they expect to die from incurable cancer when we’ve got all the world’s compute devoted to curing it?
Damn, a somewhat disenshittified Windows that still has support??
It’s the barest of bones. I use it for one of my consulting machines in the times I’m forced to run windows.
Me: Using 11 year old PC. Originally rjnning Windows 7. Now running ZorinOS.
I don’t particularly like linux, but…
looks at Windows 10…11…now 12…
Yeah, fuck that dumpster fire.
Congratulations for saving yourself from Winslopshitification
As long as you are not blasting away on random sites downloading every link you see then you are pretty safe. The old days of a hacker getting into your PC because you forgot to update your firewall are kind of gone.
Wrong on a ton of levels.
You can get infected by drive-by malware. It’s actually quite common. Zero interaction required on your part.
Running an outdated operating system or software like a browser makes you even more susceptible to this
You can, but that doesn’t mean you will. Unless you’re raw dogging your pc fully exposed on the internet there’s no way for malware to go to you, you have to go to it.
You can pick up malware from a website or an advert on a website. You can pick it up by a friend bringing an infected device and attaching it to your home network. You can pick it up from a phishing link or attachment. You can run an IoT device that downloads malware and propagates it to other machines on your network. You can install a dodgy app on your phone. You can run an application that has a chain of dependencies down to some obscure backdoored library (xz). You can run software that downloads automatic updates and whose update server was compromised (Notepad++) or whose signing certificate was compromised. You can pick it up because someone else in your family did any one of these things or many others.
Malware isn’t just for people who do obviously dangerous things like downloading cracks and keygens.
I’ve had a Win 7 running for 12 years as a media server, never once been hacked.
ISPs and even old school Win 7 to Win 10 OSs have the old ports blocked by default that prevent “drive-by malware”.
What you are talking about is the equivalent of a Boogeyman that only exists because people are stupid about what they open up or install or allow to control their firewalls. Your points even prove that.
i agree with you,some people are just paranoid.
It’s not paranoia but verifiable fact…
However, newer processors with dedicated Neural Processing Units (NPUs) reduce strain on cloud servers and GPUs. As a result, PCWorld believes that CPUs, including Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen AI chips that support 40 TOPS or more, will become mandatory
in other words, your pc will be doing ai shit for someone else’s pc while you are idle
They couldn’t afford enough electricity to run it in-house so now they just run a mandated botnet to make you pay for it instead. If this isn’t a page out of a George Orwell novel, it should have been.
2026 even has newspeak in the form of bullshit like “unalive”
That’s called algospeak.
That’s not at all what that means, nor does it make any sense.
Windows is already occupying your hardware and network with “telemetry”. I would be surprised if telemetry overhead alone was all that was needed to burden modern hardware and yet when i boot into windows those fans never shut up.
Good luck with that shit.
Yes please!
I could use a few more modern tiny/mini/micros to make into useful Linux boxes.
Making windows worse, AI, and forced CPU upgrades in this economy? There really is something for everyone to hate here.
God it feels good to be Windows free by this point.
So they’re going to try to get everyone to buy new hardware when there is a shortage of ram and storage and they are ridiculously overpriced.
The timing of this couldn’t be worse.
Pass the popcorn.
“Don’t worry about that, you can just run it in the cloud for an eternal subscription” - Microslop.
I guess I’m no longer ever going to play a video game that runs on Windows. At some point game developers need to realize that Linux is the future of gaming if Windows keeps pulling this shit.
That’s what Proton is for.
I have 100 or so steam games. Each one that I’ve tried (around 20 so far), all of them work perfectly well on my Linux box.
Proton works great. I now play all my windows-“only” games on Linux.
Not out of principle. I’m just lazy. My coding laptop is always within reach and Proton works. The Windows laptop is, like, way over on the other side of the living room and I don’t feel like spending the evening disabling more ad shit or ai shit or whatever they did to Windows since I used it last.
Except for games that use kernel level anti-cheat.
Which won’t matter at all once they start losing market share to Microsoft’s stupid decisions. The world will not sit on its thumbs because of Fortnight players. And good riddance in any case.
You mean the shitty games? Oh no…
proton is just emulating windows games,it needs windows to exist.
Confidently incorrect.
you mean correct
You might want to look up how Proton actually works? Proton doesn’t need Windows. It doesn’t emulate the games either, it doesn’t emulate hardware in some way. It isn’t a copy of Windowsrunning inside Steam or something.
It’s a compatibility/translation layer, translating the API calls from the games into calls that will work on Linux, on demand as they occur.
No Windows install needed.
But you really sold your confidence! A for showmanship! 👏
I’m beginning to think this is all a conspiracy to try to kill Windows because Microsoft doesn’t want to support a desktop OS anymore.
This is an excuse to build out AI, wreck the consumer electronics market, and sell us all dumb terminals that connect to their AI cloud, so they can monitor and profile everything everyone does (including enterprise)
It’s Clippy all over again, but with the AI slop it’s now named Drippy.
My theory is that all these CEOs in charge of all these companies that are incorporating AI are being gaslit by the AIs. I mean, has anyone ever met an actually strong minded and intelligent CEO? It’s probably really easy.
I’ve had a similar suspicion actually, but it’s also possible they’re on some incomprehensible level of incompetence.
To people in the real world, it sure seems like it. I think the people managing the product (middle management on up) live in their corpo bubble so far from reality, they don’t feel/hear or have to deal with actual state of things.
Short term profitability over all else seems to be the mantra.
Are they loosing money on the OS? I don’t believe for a second that the capitalist company chooses less capital. But, maybe they’ve determined there’s more capital in less market share? What’s your theory, exactly?
Make it infeasible to run Windows on your personal machines by limiting how long you can use the hardware, but conveniently support it as a cloud vm service that is always guaranteed to work with a monthly subscription.
I don’t believe for a second that the capitalist company chooses less capital.
But what if it very slightly makes next quarter’s numbers go up? Any future cost might be worth that, after all.
Didn’t they jest release windows 11?
Didn’t they once allude to windows 10 being the last windows because no more revisions were necessary
No, media did say that at over point, but it was never based on any announcement from Microsoft.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32658340
It came from the mouth of a Microsoft executive, and Microsoft followed up with a statement saying they were moving Windows 10 to a service model.
They’ve been saying that since XP
tbf XP was peak
no garbage just ran your programs
No, windows 11 has been out for like 5 years now.
Oh, well it sucks and I don’t use it.
Same. Switched my personal machine to Mint instead of “upgrading” to 11. I have to use 11 for my work device, and it’s not hyperbole to say that it gets worse every single week.
Its not enough for me to see linux do better. Microslop needs to suffer.
