It was possible to skip Vista and go straight from XP to 7. You could even use the same PC.
It was possible to skip 8 and go straight from 7 to 10. You could even use the same PC.
This time around, Microsoft is forcing Windows 11 as the only option, forcing people to throw away their machines, and it is backfiring on them. People are rejecting it and the competition (Linux) has never been as good as it is today.
The executive also noted that 500 million PCs don’t meet Windows 11’s system requirements
So much unnecessary e-waste. I never want to hear about how ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ Microsoft is again.
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.
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.
You think people installing Win7 in 2025 know what a botnet is?
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.
Sounds like the systems you are using should focus on that problem and not how to integrate ads and AI into everything. While trying to extract every molecule of value for shareholders.
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.
Worry the unsupported systems behind pure internet or providing public internet services, or the users installing the free PDF editor Google advertised as first in search. Those are many more than older Windows enthusiasts.
especially since everyone doing this is behind a modern router.
Are they? If they’re irresponsible enough to run an ancient OS it wouldn’t shock me if they’re also running “retro” network equipment
They are not, come on now.
Retro networking is a different community, and all is still done behind a modern router. They are a subset of the retro computing community, but they don’t run such systems as their daily driver.
Most of the legacy OS enthusiasts running on as their daily driver are not interested in matching their networking to be period correct, they just want it to work well and quickly like everybody else. For that you need basic modern equipment, that is often included into ISP plans.
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 one thing if we were talking Windows 98 or XP, but 7 is fairly solid out of the box.
I reinstalled Windows 7 on my laptop and dual-boot Linux and Windows 11 on my desktop.
I love it, but is anyone supporting the bug fixes for security?
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.
The only other option for her would be an iPad since she’s just browsing the web anyway.
Give her a Steam Deck and some cozy games. 😁
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
Because Windows 11 shouldn’t have been made in the first place, I can’t find one reason why they couldn’t just kept updating 10.
Beside greed, forcing people to use fully integrated AI. Cuz they know damn well that 90% of us will disable that shit like we did One Drive.
I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?
I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.
A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.
When you have a solution in search of a problem, and lots of money to push that solution. They assume their customers will invent the use cases and workflows that might make it valuable,
this is the real reason, much like whats google is doing with it on thier devices.
Pretty good for live transcription, are blind or partially blind ppl using it? Translation I guess. Better recognition. Idk how useful the language models specifically are, ai everywhere else is useful. Like in gene sequencing and making mediciine. Ai can like find diffrerent combinations that make the same result, idr why thats good, just that itd take humans many many years to simulate what they can have ai run through.
seems like a very small population, that may or may not benefit from it. no justification other than shove down everyones throat to stave off the bubble.
Funny thing is I still don’t know why they needed a new version of Windows for that, I mean 10 was already bloat they could have just shoved AI into it, as in the TPM 2.0 they could have just made a new 25H(whatever the fuck) version where you’d need to enable that on the motherboard.
I’m guessing to capture the consumers that just upgrade without thinking. Like they’ll 100% put this shit in next years iphone and people won’t even blink.
It’s because Apple moved on from X. They skipped 9 just because they didn’t want to be behind Apple.
Wasn’t the reason for skipping 9 to not break programs assuming “Windows 9” meant 95 / 98?
It sounds like when Microsoft named their second console “360” because they wouldn’t want to be behind Sony. But somehow I’m not buying that
One good reason: so all of the fucking half ass obnoxious shit that have put into 11 didn’t taint 10.
10 was obnoxious enough. 11 dialed it up to 11.
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I n ever understood why they couldn’t make TPM 2.0 work on W10
Win10 already supports TPM 2.0, it just becomes mandatory in 11.
And no, TPM doesn’t spy on you.
Heh, you know it’s bad when the OEMs are throwing shade.
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
Yep. I’m fortunate enough to be on the other side of the curve, but “it just breaks” when you first start tinkering. The average computer user who will never open the terminal will never run into this problem
Probably Arch or Fedora
This happened to me when I installed a new GPU.
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’ve wanted to switch to Linux since Windows 10 and its inescapable trash “features”(looking at you, OneDrive).
I did upgrade to 11 and while I haven’t experienced any catastrophic failures with it (yet) it’s becoming increasingly aggravating with all the added bullshit they’re implementing and the amount of ads they’re trying to sneak in.
I’ve been bugging my husband for months to help me because he is near fluent in Linux and I’m a noob. He’s now building me a new PC that will have Linux installed and I can’t fucking wait to finally ditch Windows.
This article is trash, it mentions existing windows 10 features in windows 11 like it’s a groundbreaking new technology.
Virtual desktops and clipboard manager? Cmon man we’ve been having that for years now
having that for years now
since abaout the late 90’s to early 00’s. KDE 1 released with virtual desktops, and from what I can tell, Klipper either released with it, or a few years later
fvwm, 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM
Blows my mind seeing people look on windows 10 as some kind of last bastion, apparently not realizing that was Windows 7 at best.
10 is the one where they fucked up the UX beyond repair, made everything slow and added insane amounts of spying. If you willingly switched to 10 then don’t pretend like 11 is a bridge too far now.
I still can’t grasp that Microsoft, a $3.6 trillion company, developed a new settings interface but failed to migrate all settings to it, forcing users to use both. Even I know that’s day one UX shite and I’m quite stupid.
What’s hilarious is that this started with Win10 so its been an issue for over a decade now and two major revisions at least (possibly started on Win8).
It did start on win8
In their defense, we all try hard to forget that iteration.
I’d actually say it was 8.1, but the problem with 8.1 is that it died before people could discover how good it is combined with classical start menu. It was basically a fleshed out, faster, more stable Windows 7 with updated tech like newer directx and cached boot (aka. Fastboot). Almost non-existing market share, but I liked it far better than 7, 10 and 11 (only gave it 1 week). I installed a tweaked 8.1 version on all my friends/family’s PCs and never heard a single complaint, shit was awesome.
I didn’t willingly switch to 10, though, that was my only choice
It took me ages today to work out how to map a drive letter because they’ve changed where the menu button is. You used to be able to do it from the taskbar at the top, but now it’s hidden in a right click menu in a different part of the file browser to where it used to be. I don’t understand the point of changes like that, by all means add more options but keep the old ones around for consistency.
Managing printers in 11 is the worst. The sad part is that the old-style devices and printers menu is still in the OS, you just have to dig for it a bit, and it works 1000x better.
the old-style devices and printers menu is still in the OS, you just have to dig for it a bit, and it works 1000x better.
For the last 13 years this has been the most infuriating part of the incomplete control panel migration. I find myself struggling to use the new settings, and having to then resort to digging for the old ones that actually have the option I need.
Win 11 finally pushed me over the edge with ads and spying. But I still have to deal with Windows at work.
net use still works
10 is the one where they fucked up the UX beyond repair
Was it? I gave up on 8 because of the UI, downgraded back to 7 and that was my last Windows machine. Was 10 worse?
8 was such a disaster that people don’t really consider it a real version of windows. 10 was actually better than 8 but that’s not saying much
People said they will never upgrade from 7 to 10, and now they are saying they will never upgrade from 10 to 11
The difference is that Windows 11 is locked behind behind hardware requirements. A lot of people simply can’t upgrade.
^ This, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming from 7 to 10, and now looking forward to another 3 years of Win10 security updates, while fervently praying that Adobe and my online games add Linux support during that time >_>
Will it make you even more frustrated to learn Steam has a Linux-native build of Substance Painter, but Adobe still won’t support it themselves?
It did :P
Just ditch those games.not worth it
Ah yes the classic purist arguement.
If the applications I want to use don’t support Linux then apparently that’s their problem. I wish I didn’t have to live in the real world, but unfortunately I can’t pay my mortgage in moral righteousness. If I can’t use the programs I need to use my job, because I’ve decided to switch to an operating system that they don’t support, I’m the one that’s going to suffer.
So no you can’t just ditch applications that don’t have Linux support.
In the real world you have to dual boot and that’s a pain in the arse because it means Microsoft are still going to be getting some money from me.
The fuck sort of dipshit argument is this for video games…?
He was saying ditch video games man… VIDEO GAMES.
Yeah, some people get really defensive when you suggest they can get all the things they are asking for, and all they have to do is stop giving money to user-hostile developers. And saying kernel-level anti-cheat is hostile to the user is a massive understatement. Why would you defend Saudi Arabia having kernel-level access to your computer just to play a game? (It’s crazy that that statement isn’t even a joke in the context of EA.)
I understand if someone decides not to take the suggestion, but it is still a reasonable suggestion to make.
I can’t switch to purely Linux because I need windows in order to be able to do my job. The fact I also play games on the computer is irrelevant.
I don’t understand what you’re not understanding.
It’s a catch 22. If you need applications to make money sure. But games. Come on.
I get a PC from my job, it has windows and that’s their choice.
Maybe not worth it for you, but I’m enjoying them too much to ditch them 🤷
and now they are saying they will never upgrade from 10 to 11
The stats show people are committing this time. English speakers are jumping ship at historically unprecedented rates. Steam stats
I was on Windows 7 until April of 2021, when I was taking a certification exam remotely, and didn’t find out that the software they used for it didn’t work on 7 until after I had paid the registration fee. Windows 10 was useable enough, but I never thought it was preferable over 7. Anyway, I’m on Bazzite now.
Couldn’t imagine why lmao
Is Linux good? I’m thinking of changing over one of my old alienwear laptops to Linux cause it’s just gotten so slow on Windows
Well yes it can be. If you have a Nvidia GPU it wouldn’t be the best because they sometimes have driver issues (that’s Nvidia with closed shitty drivers for linux). I will probably run fine anyways. I would recommend Bazzite if you don’t want to tinker with linux and just use it. CachyOS if you want a snappy experience. Gaming wise they don’t have any difference and with Bazzite you can’t fuck anything up. Edit: If you have an AMD GPU you should just change to linux no question.
Thanks for that, yeah unfortunately it is nvidia but i might give those two a run anyway at the end of the day i can always re install windows if need be.
Yea I wouldn’t be too concerned with trying just because you have an Nvidia GPU, I’ve been running it for years and haven’t had any show stoppers. Now is probably the best time to give it a go.
It’s almost like “you have to buy a new laptop to install it and help train our AI on your private 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
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 what 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.
Fucking apatheid emerald mine inheritor ruining perfectly good words from the nerd culture…
You do realize he’s using the original definition of grok, right?
Never heard the original term lol, I wondered why the AI had such a weird name
“Slower” implies you’re projecting the same end results. Do they think the missing numbers are just not using a computer at all? In the digital age? By far your largest numbers of actual Win11 migrators are companies whose tech policy is the CYA “update everything in case we get hacked”.
The common folk are not going to buy a new computer just to get a slower Windows installation. The people who migrate from Windows 10/7 holdouts are going to be migrating to Linux.
Literally me biding my time on W10 for Autodesk to pull their head out their ass and make AutoCAD for Linux.
Honestly, just being less hostile to Linux and not purposefully pushing out updates that break it under wine/proton would be great…
That would be decades of legacy. I mean, with people paid to survive rewriting that legacy, should happen - if and when Linux is a mainstream platform. EDIT: … for companies’ workstations.
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.
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).
Ah, it may be the decreased quality and increased openly aggressive data collection
No, it’s the non-users who are wrong!
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.
I have bazzite Linux as dual boot. Few usecases stop me from moving fully over. Nvidia drivers and VR support. And Remote Desktop doesn’t work the way I want it to.
Also for some reason my ryzen system stopped seeing my linux sata drive in bios so can’t boot anymore.
Have you checked your BIOS if CSM is enabled (gets disabled when enabling secure boot iirc)? If your Linux drive has an old partitioning scheme it needs that to show up during boot I think.
I’ll try it. But I don’t see the drive detected in the BIOS so thought it might be more than that.
Also bazzite should have secure boot.
I’ll let you know!
Interesting. I ditched team green years ago and have been running rock solid since. My Nvidia GPU was always the reason I went back to windows. Sorry to hear your ryzen rig stopped, have you looked for a bios update? Might be something simple like that (assuming your disk didn’t shit the bed).
Can’t say I’ve had any rdp issues on Bazzite, what’s it doing?
I can see the disk in windows. It just doesn’t show up in the bios. I’ve been recommended to do a fully CMOS reset by pulling out battery but don’t really have time. It disappeared after a BIOS update :)
As for RDP. I regularly RDP to my windows machine and it auto changes resolution. And then I can log in on the PC itself and it returns to the monitor resolution. So I keep the same session but view it from multiple places.
I can’t get the same on Linux. Either I get my current session which doesn’t resize (stuck at connected monitor resolution). Or it creates a new resizable session which I don’t want because I want to continue what I was doing.
I’ve been recommended to do a fully CMOS reset by pulling out battery but don’t really have time. It disappeared after a BIOS update :)
Did you load the default BIOS settings after that? If not, that might be easier than removing the battery.
And if you did, the default settings could have enabled the CSM, or changed other settings like fast boot that might make the drive not show up.
Tried every reset option. I set to RAID mode and I saw hard disk in bios but boot failed at bazzite load screen.
That is definitely odd behavior. Multiple sessions is a server side setting, so your Linux system shouldn’t be able to do that without windows being ok with it. As for the resolution issue, it might be a config issue in your client. Give another client a shot, or see if there’s a way to configure the client to use smart sizing. I can’t recall which app I use on my system, but I can’t say I’ve ever had an issue with scaling between connected and remote connected sessions.
You probably know this, but for others who might not: MS is now allowing some/many/all (???) people to extend the security updates for Win10 for another year free of charge. You have to go into the Windows update area and click a button to accept. At least in the USA, this seems to be a somewhat newly available option, as it was there the last time someone asked me to look at their laptop to see if I could upgrade it to Win11.
I had already upgraded when I saw this. But it’s only another year, if it was 2-3 years I’d actually take the hit and roll back. I’d actually pay for it! Although next year I might move totally over to Linux. Will see.
