It’s kinda funny reading an article where someone glazes Windows as much as this community does for Linux (Mint btw)
It’s obviously biased, but it’s also still surprising to me that the author’s recommendations for incompatible devices were “buy new supported hardware” or “get fucked”. No mention of swapping OS (but that’s “windowslatest.com” for ya).
Your devices are incompatible, what would you like to do?
- Go broke
- Get fucked
🤣 This is should be an actual modal window.
You know, there was a time when I kinda rooted for Windows. Windows 10 had come around and dealt with many of the sins of Win8, Edge was a competent browser, Cortana could be easily ignored, and Windows Defender was finally good at its job. Sure, the whole shift to have every app use WinUI was a bit clunky and piecemeal, but gradually modernizing from the older Win7 style made some sense.
Then Win 11 hit; it became obvious that WinUI “upgrades” were being used to hide key features from previous control panel stuff, those same control panels still exist with their older style alongside the changed controls, Cortana has been replaced with Copilot and shoved into everything, Microsoft collects even more “user metrics,” and while Edge is still competent, it’s affected by the previous two points pretty heavily.
Whatever Windows could have been, it did the predictable enshittification thing, and they deserve to lose users like me to the greener pastures of Linux.
But Windows is doing the enshittification thing since the nineties, generally every other release:
- Windows 95: Good
- Windows 98: Bad
- Windows 98 SE: Good
- Windows ME: Bad
- Windows XP: Good
- Windows Vista: Bad
- Windows 7: Good
- Windows 8: Bad
- Windows 8.1: Bad
- Windows 10: Good
- Windows 11: Bad
8.1 is the outlier, but otherwise this thing works like a clock. You could argue that 11 is enshittifying more than the rest, but that’s probably because LLMs are enshittifying everything, I think.
I wonder if Microsoft will shift direction back to consumer friendlier practices if more people keep swapping to Linux
Win11 is probably done for, but the next one maybe better toward the end user 🤷♀️
I’m never going back and it does suck to see what became of it. Win11 was my final straw
I wonder if Microsoft will shift direction back to consumer friendlier practices if more people keep swapping
If Microsoft needs to now compete, I’d like to see them get competitive. But it’s been like 30+ years since they needed to actually compete, and I’m not sure they remember how.
i don’t think they have the talent anymore since switching to JavaScript as a systems language and reliance on AI to boot. they’re cooked unless they make major changes.
You can consider whether upgrading to a newer PC makes sense for other reasons as well. Or if you’re technically confident, you can look into whether your motherboard BIOS has a community-supported update path, though we wouldn’t recommend it.
Or one can install Linux and be free of Microsoft Slop. I installed Linux Mint on my father’s laptop and now he no longer calls me for support He likes it a hell lot more than Windows.
Yes I got my parents moved over in the last couple of years as well. Overall there have been basically no issues with Linux itself. I used to get calls all the time why isn’t the Wi-Fi working. Why isn’t the printer working. Windows is asking me if I want blank do I want blank? The only calls I get now is why is the printer such a piece of shit? To which we jokingly both respond because printers are designed to be pieces of shit and modern-day torture devices.
Fortunately they don’t fall in the general category of people Reliance on any sort of proprietary software. They just want to watch Netflix browse websites and check email generally. So they were easy to cover.
Installed Linux on family’s computer
They no longer call me for support
“No, don’t call mereo, last time I asked for help getting to my email and they put this crazy penguin on my PC and now I can’t talk to Cortana”
