No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final Windows 10 is reaching the end of the road, with the current release – version 22H2 – confirmed as the final one, and support for the platform is scheduled to end on October 14, 2025. Microsoft disclosed in an update to its client roadmap that there will be no further feature updates for Windows 10, and so the current version …
I don't know, I think both Windows 10 and [Show more options] Windows 11 are turds. Perhaps Microsoft are upping their game and we now need to skip to the third re-release.
Or really it was always the *kernel* that we wait for the second release on. The Windows kernel has barely been updated for a decade so we have been strategically updating incorrectly.
I know there's a lot of love for Win7 on these forums, but on all the computers I run or am responsible to admin, Win10 has been far, far, far more stable and less problem-prone. Win10 BSOD are almost unheard of compared to Win7, and even the update service is more stable (note, not saying the stability and effectiveness of the updates themselves, for although I have never had problems I know there are reports of plenty) with almost no hung update installs. And rebuilding the network stack in Win10? Almost unheard of, compared to Win7.
Life is good for many people under Win10 as an update from Win7, I am quite sure the largest majority of users do not wish to go back if asked (present company of this forum excepted).
I will admit that I've not tried any recently, but when I used such an app with windows 8 (heaven help me) back in the day, it was quite flawed due to the way it wasn't (possibly couldn't be) integrated into the OS, so a crashing app might lock or crash it. As I say, been a while, so things may have changed. I might hunt one down, although it might not be worth it as I'm starting to lean into linux (Mint) a bit more as I don't like where Microsoft is headed with windows.
Since Windows 8, I've just been clicking the start button and typing. It's much faster than clicking through menus. I'm never going back to the Windows 7 hunt and click method. At this point I don't care what they do with the Start Menu itself as long as search keeps working.
Well yes, but they even managed to break the search. On a Windows 10 system here yesterday I wanted to change the behavior of the power button. You can get to that option manually via Settings->System->Power->Additional Power Settings (or from Control Panel if you're old school). But as you correctly said, it's vastly quicker to hit Start and type b-u-t-t-o.. until the correct option appears.
Except that on this occasion, it didn't. I got results for "Settings -> Change mouse buttons", and the usual dismal bing web searches for "buttons", "what is a button", "how to buy buttons", "10 things about buttons that will SHOCK YOU", etc etc, but not the ONE option I wanted, which had mysteriously vanished from Search's ken.
Grrr.
I generally click the button1 and start typing, but about 30%-50% of the time it doesn't work – keyboard input is just ignored. I have to mouse away, click the desktop, and try again. I have no idea how they managed to screw that up so badly, but it happens on both my work and personal machines, so it's something to do with my configuration.
WIMP GUIs are ill-conceived and abysmally implemented in so many ways (modal dialogs, focus stealing, z-order issues, ...), but Windows always seems to go the extra mile.
1I used to use Ctrl-Esc rather than screwing about with non-keyboard controls, but the Win10 "start" button doesn't grab focus successfully when Microsoft's misnamed "X Mouse" feature (i.e. implicit focus) is enabled, so Ctrl-Esc is not reliable.
For myself, on DOS and Windows, I use an old DOS program, "DougMenu", in which you can jump to a menu entry by typing a single character. On Linux/Unix, I use pdmenu, which has a different syntax, yet similar capabilities.
From my main text menu, g q [Enter] [Enter] [Enter] q 8 4 [Enter] 1 [Enter] 9 [Enter] starts Quakespasm v0.94.7 (I have multiple game engines) and runs the fan-made map "OxyBlack Fortress" using the Arcane Dimensions v1.80p1 mod.
The Windows "menu search" feature won't let you select or search for the map (or dataset, or document, depending on what app you're running) you want.
I'm one of the "prefer Windows 7" folk, it was simply the last OS Microsoft released that felt as if it was both well designed and flexible.
Windows 10 is flexible, but felt as if it was in a perpetual beta state - it still feels like that now, but at least some of the messier aspects of the UI can be fixed with 3rd party tools. There's also the manner of the forced and often buggy updates unless you use yet more 3rd party tools to wrestle control of the updates. Windows 11 looks more polished (although far from perfect), but has all the flexibility of a turd, plus insane system requirements.
Who knows, maybe with Windows 12 we'll finally get another version that looks pretty, consistent, finished and flexible. Not holding my breath.
Overall though, this is a good move for Windows 10 users. Most of MS's feature updates have been questionable at best, finally a few years of stability for the platform at last.
Me, too - though the difference in performance between Windows 7 originally and towards the end of its supported life with all of its accumulated patches and additional cruft was very noticeable.
The thing that pushed me into being a confirmed Linux user was not a deficiency of Windows 10's technical merits (though its UI is a mess), but its intrusiveness. As of its latest incarnation you *must* have a Microsoft account in order to install it (though you can switch to a local account afterwards) and then there's the telemetry, the nagging, the advertising and the "personalised" gossip feed. Much like a cheap Chinese phone, much (but not all) of this you can turn off, but you're never quite sure what's actually going on behind the scenes.
I occasionally need Windows for some legacy software but that need is dwindling to vanishing point.
> As of its latest incarnation you *must* have a Microsoft account in order to install it
?
The November 2022 Microsoft download of W10 2H22 still gave the option to do a domain install, this simply required the creation of standalone local account to permit installation. Having installed Windows, had no prompts to actually connect to a domain.
"Who knows, maybe with Windows 12 we'll finally get another version that looks pretty, consistent, finished and flexible. Not holding my breath."
Probably best not to, considering the time from Win 10 to Win11. Win12 is a few years away yet! I wonder if there'll be a Win13 eventually? Americans seem to be very wary of the number 13, at least in marketing terms, floor numbering etc.
I don't think most people would really notice, once they manage to disable the ads and "tips" they get thrown at them. As an OS, Windows 10 is more reliable because it's nearly all managed code – there's a lot more stuff than no longer works – and hooks for administration were improved. But most of the changes were cosmetic and, as usual, not consistent. Then there was the usual removal, hiding or reorganisation of configuration. For example: you used to be able to disable the performance sink that is file indexing in a single option but not any more. It's almost as if they never heard of soft updates or rsync.
Win7 works OK. Win10 has had a few problems with drivers (same hardware, BTW). Both versions seem quite stable although I've not asked them to do that much.
I don't get why people are always needed 'feature updates'. The only feature I need from an operating system is that it should work. The user level features that I want come from whatever application I'm running. I know this is a bit old school but then that's why I prefer to run Linux -- this system "just works", its slick, reliable and doesn't hog system resources.
"I don't know, I think both Windows 10 and [Show more options] Windows 11 are turds. Perhaps Microsoft are upping their game and we now need to skip to the third re-release."
You might well be right, I haven't used 11 at all to be honest. Given my day job is (usually) image creation and deployment, I generally ignore new versions of Windows until such time as I'm starting to deploy them. Apart from a few well-publicised bugs Windows 10 has by and large been very stable in the places I've deployed it, although a lot of that stability does come from locking things down sufficiently to A: stop MS patching things and adding features and B: stop users from breaking things.
I've been using Windows 11 on my work computer and have installed it on my Windows image for my personal computer. In both cases, it's very similar to Windows 10. A few things have changed, but they don't affect me very much and nearly everything looks the same. There are some problems, such as Windows 11 having more Microsoft account stuff, but since I'm not running the home version, I could bypass that without hacks.
I don't administer it across others' devices, but just as a user, it's not causing me any problems I didn't see in Windows 10.
That's certainly been one nice feature for me as an admin, with the Win 10 release model as it was change were very much incremental rather than wholsesale.
I'd say it's obvious that Microsoft wouldn't want to upset the Enterprise channel, but they frequently do, so it's not something to take for granted.
We're in the process of rolling out W11 on many of the work laptops (most of the desktops are too old!). Doing it via Intune, with devices already in use. Getting it as close to how I would like it for the users has been massively more hassle than W10, with assorted Powershell scripts (direct and via proactive remediattions), app rules. etc. The end result isn't too bad but there are still some things which are a step down from W10 - especiallly how they've buggered up the start menu and the right-click menu. These can be fixed by third party apps, but not really an option with a business deployment.
Not had a huge increase in support calls (other than one program, where we know there is an issue and have a fairly easy manual fix) so it's clearly familiar enough that the users don't have any major issues in most cases.
Another annoyance is how crap Intune's reporting is - a proportion of machines (not massive, but significant) simply never install the upgrade and the reporting is so crap that it doesn't tell you why (and we've found there are several possible reasons - compatibility isn't one as we've not pushed it out to computers which don't meet the minimum spec). Microsoft support's answer is always that we need to get the laptop in and extract all these logs, then they'll take days to look at them and possibly want more logs. I gave up - we can't waste this much of our or the users' time, so if we get our hands on problem machines we normally just tackle them straight away and see if we can get the upgrade on manually (which we usually can, in most cases - only one or two have needed a clean install).
FYI you can add a registry key in to force all the right-click context menu items (Which you can incorporate into InTune!) - This is per-user:
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID
- Create a key called '{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}'
- Create another key called 'InprocServer32'
- Blank out the REG_ZS subkey
Voila! On reboot, the machine will have the full context menu items :-)
Except all those "turd" versions of Windows introduced a lot of important things.
Vista, for example, laid a lot of very important groundwork. Hardening of the driver model, much better overall security compared to XP, better resource management, the GUI was rewritten as a DirectX app to use 3D hardware acceleration instead of a software rendered 2D app, it included the initial support for the process scheduler to know the difference between multi-core and true SMP which is a subtle but important distinction, and probably a lot of other things I'm forgetting about. Many of the things everyone loves to crow about regarding Win 7, wouldn't have been possible without the important under the hood improvements of Vista.
Win 8, had a lot of additional hardening of the driver model, a number of security improvements, you had overhauls of things like the file copy/move and task manager, MS actually reduced the size of Windows by several GB during the Win 8 years, more refinements to the process scheduler to take into account CPUs with ever increasing core counts.
Win 11 is the only version of Windows which supports the big.LITTLE design of Intel's 12th gen (and later) CPUs, a lot of security features that had to be manually enabled in Win 10 (and were buried 3-4 layers deep) are now on by default. Sure, the decision to use the incomplete Win 10X UI was an odd one, but you get over it after about a week unless you're the sort who holds grudges in unhealthy ways.
Let's also not whitewash history here. XP, for example, was a security nightmare. Literally, and I do mean literally, almost every week (sometimes more than once per week) you'd have some major security flaw being found in XP and/or IE6. A great many of which didn't require any sort of user intervention, or all you had to do was just go to a boobytrapped site with IE6. This was the golden age of malware and every tech had a collection of like 5-6 different scanner apps. This went on for around the first TWO YEARS of XP's existence. We also shouldn't forget how everyone hated XP for those first two years because it took about that long for the hardware in low to mid-range computers to catch up. The only reason people like XP today is because Vista got stuck in development hell for so long, XP ended up sticking around for a lot longer than intended and people got used to it. If you look even a tiny bit beneath the surface, the whole "every other version" idea really is exposed as the superficial nonsense that it is. The UI is important, but the UI is not the OS.
I've tried every Windows since 3.1, and I must say that life is easier if you just get the latest one, try it and get on with it. If you really like or need Windows, every new version is always better in many ways (and often in ways that matter to both everyday use and advanced use cases). Although the Start Menu is the entry point for any task you need to accomplish, it's not the only thing the OS is about, and for power users (like the audience of The Reg) it's probably something secondary to typing on it instead of clicking things on it, Win+R or already having the required app pinned (and started with Win+1..9). I've always felt that the people that complains the most about Windows UI changes are the most able to reap the benefits of new UI *and* under-the-hood changes if only they just put 5 minutes to recalibrate their muscle memory for the next 5 years.
I know people are averse to change for many valid reasons, but deciding to stick to an older, unsupported, vulnerable system just to... I don't know, be able to click on the same places(?), seems the argument of a 5 years old that always wants to eat the same chicken nuggets for lunch forever.
And yes, the Control Panel/Settings situation is a real pain in the ass, but what is the motivation for Microsoft to keep improving and porting more configuration sections if most people insist on staying behind and disabling telemetry? It doesn't make sense.
Putting in the time and effort to develop the habit of using the Windows search instead of the start menu has been one of the best things I've done in a while. It wasn't easy at first, and it doesn't work in every scenario, but searching is so much better than sorting when you have the computer do the searching. One of the great things about Windows 10 and 11 is that the search function works on settings in the control panel/settings app as well. You can even go directly to parts of the settings app that are two or three layers deep otherwise. So it doesn't matter if someone moves them around, you can still go directly to them.
Starting around Windows 8, the search function actually started becoming useful. I don't blame people who used anything from 95-7 and just assumed it was slow and useless, but it's not the case anymore and it really is worth the time and effort to learn a new habit to press Win + S and type a couple letters instead of trying to navigate the Start menu.
I would upvote you BUT you seem to be missing one minor problem - cost. Its great for those where the business buys the new hardware and software but ignores those who have to spend their own money. In my case I'm still on W7 and the reason is that to move on from it I would have had to spend a couple of thousand replacing a lot of software I'd accumulated over the years. Now I'd need a new PC when my old i7-4700MQ laptop is still going faster than I can!
I could switch to Linux and replace all my software with freebies but I'd still have to invest masses of time to convert.
" Although the Start Menu is the entry point for any task you need to accomplish, it's not the only thing the OS is about, and for power users (like the audience of The Reg) it's probably something secondary to typing on it instead of clicking things on it"
Except typing in the start menu to search has been largely broken since Windows 8. It does work perfectly in Open Shell though.
> I've tried every Windows since 3.1, and I must say that life is easier if you just get the latest one
Disagree, when it comes to machines being used for real work.
By being a bit of a laggard, I avoided the teething problems with 95 and 98, jumping straight to the more stable W95-SP1 and then W98SE, avoided Millineum by going to W2k, which lasted until XP-SP2, XP-SP3 gave way to W7-SP1 and so avoided Vista. This in turn was replaced in 2020 by W10 1909, hence avoiding W8, W8.1 and the various W10 “beta” test versions.
I expect to migrate those systems that need Windows to W11 circa 2025, but by them MS may have released W12…
"if only they just put 5 minutes to recalibrate their muscle memory"
If only it were this simple to learn to love (or at least come to accept) each new iteration of the Windows UI...
No, the problem I and many others have with it isn't due to the way stuff keeps moving around from one version to the next (or even from one revision to the next within the same version), it's the way MS have decided to take away damn near every option they used to give us for theming the UI as we saw fit. Look at a Windows 7 or earlier system, and note just how many options there are for tweaking how the UI appears. Then look at W10 or 11 and see just how limited life is now.
THAT'S the problem I have with the UI. It's an egotistical control freak that dares to presume that IT knows better than ME what MY preferences are for the thing I have to look at all day long when I'm working on my PC. I don't recall MS giving me a free eye test before foisting this UI on me, in order to know for sure that my visual acuity, colour vision deficiencies etc. are all taken into account with their one size fits all UI design. So how dare they just presume to know better than me and take away almost every option they used to provide here? If that's what we call progress in the OS world, then I'll quite happily wear my grumpy old git hat with pride as I demand a return to the good old days...
Vitsta was actually not too bad provided it was run on hardware which could cope - I actually rather liked the GUI. The main issue was that the minimum hardware specs were set too low (presumably to appease hardware manufacturers), and if run on a low-spec machine it was an absolute dog. To the extent that when Microsoft wanted in on the short-lived 'Netbooks' fad, they reintroduced a 'starter' version of XP because Vista would have been barely usable on that sort of hardware.
The main issues with 11 are the poor design of parts of the GUI (and this is what users see, so how the non-tech will judge it), and the minimum hardware requirements. Now I don't deny that the extra security is no bad thing, but they could very easily have written it so that it would make use of these features if the hardware supported them, but work without them if not. What they have done by setting high minimum specs will create a needless wave of working computers being scrapped - and presumably was intended as a perk for the hardware manufacturers so that they wouldn't see such a sales slump after the rush to buy lapsops in 2020.
The "Vista Capable" program was a big self-inflicted wound that didn't need to happen, but IGPs of the day weren't able to handle the new Aero GUI. Of course the same basic thing happened with XP. I don't recommend ever trying to use XP on anything less than 256MB of RAM or performance takes like a 50% (at least) hit.
As for the Win 11 requirements. My guess is that it's just Microsoft's way of establishing that TPM 2.0 will be required from now on. Right now they aren't really using it for much, and you can bypass the CPU requirements if you want. So, I figure when Windows 12 rolls out, that's when the hammer will actually fall and it won't be "strongly recommended, but optional" it'll be required, full stop. They certainly could have done a better job of explaining this when Win 11 was being rolled out, or even any time since, but they clearly don't seem inclined to do so. People love to come up with these shadowy cabal conspiracy theories about back room deals being made between Microsoft and PC vendors, but the reality is that sort of thing would likely result in a lot of unwanted attention from government regulators all over the world, so is highly unlikely. And there hasn't been a single disgruntled employee who decided to turn whistleblower in all these decades? There are times when Microsoft may do things that happen to work out for PC vendors, but any sort of coordinated effort just doesn't seem likely.
You're conflating a bunch of different things. Splitting the UI out from the kernel and other low level parts of the OS doesn't mean the UI will remain forever static. Technology changes. Once upon a time, 1024x768 was considered a ridiculously high resolution. These days MS has to contend with low end laptops that may have around a 720p resolution, all the way up to 8K and beyond. They need a UI that can be functional at any resolution within that range, which is why you see a lot of white space in apps these days. It also helps with overall readability as anyone who works in layout and design will tell you, but you take an app from the Win9x days and try running it on Win 11 with a 4K ultrawide monitor... The experience won't likely be that great.
And, let's face it. As much as people like you love to do your chicken little routine any time something is moved so much as a single pixel, if Microsoft didn't change things up from time to time, you'd just be complaining about that. If tomorrow Microsoft released a download that would make Windows 11 look and act like Windows 95, you wouldn't touch it with a stolen 10ft pole, even though you are always loudly moaning about how you want such a thing. You just want to have something to complain about, but of course admitting that would make your complaints seem trivial and pointless... they are, we all know it, but at least this way you can pretend like they're not.
> They need a UI that can be functional at any resolution within that range
They failed at that, as any one who used W7 Starter on a netbook will tell you about the dialog boxes that. We’re too long for the screen and couldn’t be scrolled to display the buttons…
Splitting the UI out of the kernel makes it more of a skin. Remember one of the reasons why there are so many Linux desktops is because the desktop isn’t hard coded into the Linux kernel.
"If tomorrow Microsoft released a download that would make Windows 11 look and act like Windows 95, you wouldn't touch it with a stolen 10ft pole"
I can't speak for the previous commenter, but trust me, I absolutely would. Give me the stability of the modern kernel with an official 95-esque UI theme (as opposed to having to install a bunch of third party hacks which may or may not break the next time someone at MS sneezes), and I would be a very happy bunny.
I hate, detest, utterly despise, modern UI design, and no amount of academic reasearch that "proves" modern UIs are better will persuade me to change my mind. The only thing that might do that is if someone releases a modern UI that I actually find pleasant to use. It hasn't happened yet, and I'm not going to hold my breath that it ever will.
You know, something with an imaginary component.
While I applaud their move to providing cloud-based services (when they work, when they are fully functioning), I think they are also pushing away a whole segment of lowly developers that targeted the Windows environment, or at least included it in their cross-platform releases.
Slowly, slowly, over the last 15+ years, I've migrated to another platform (not Apple based), and have found the tools and environment to be at least as good and much more useful for multi-platform development. Maybe that's why MS has pushed WSL, but it seems strange to have a bloated whale under a slim-and-trim OS just to try to stay on the same hardware.
Donald Knuth has prior art with comparably baroque version numbering systems…
How about a version number that's an irrational number? Something for all the math nerds. Or "Windows Divide By Zero" which I guess sounds a bit more like a cheesy action movie title, but you could abbreviate it as DBZ and then include some Dragon Ball related easter eggs inside the OS.
I think you might have missed the irony... still, what do I care? For me, it's been the Year of Linux on the Desktop for the the past 25 years.
(I do have a spare Windows 10 machine at work that I am obliged to dip into now and then - always a jarring and disorienting experience.)
I think you mean sarcasm, and no, I didn't miss it. I think maybe you missed the sarcasm from my comment.
I'm a fan of Linux and open source, but I don't see Microsoft or Apple having anything to worry about. The Gates era Microsoft overreacted in a big way to open source and Linux. It was only ever a potential threat to their server software sales, and even then, it wasn't that big of a threat.
Linux is the biggest server OS by far. Windows is not quite a rounding error, but not far off.
What Gates and Ballmer failed to understand was that it didn't matter. They don't need the server OS market and would in fact be better off without it. Clients and hosting (cloud) make the money.
> If I had a nickel for every time someone...
Another predictable response, then.
I've never used Windows 11. Or 10. Or 7. Or Vista. (Though I had lots of fun watching many people who tried to use them.)
Because it's been the year of Linux for me for the past 20 years.
For a lot of small businesses it more or less was. A lot of SMEs in the 80s & 90s were running some industry-specific package running on a Unix server with an RDBMS and character terminals. Later in the period those character terminals might have been running under Windows which was a great way to be able to run multiple terminal sessions with a single keyboard and monitor.
There's quite a few features "under the hood" that you do actually want, and probably even need.
Things like the s-channel TLS implementation (so not everything is on various versions of Open SSL), mDNS (so you don't have to install Apple Bonjour) and other RFC APIs.
The trouble is that they've utterly trashed the GUI, either forgetting or deliberately ignoring the last 30-40 years of HMI research.
*sigh* my aging desktop (2nd generation i5, 16gb RAM, 512gb SSD, Nvidia 1050TI) is more than capable of handling everything I can throw at it - libre office, Lazarus, Vs code, Gimp, inkscape, several chrome's each with dozens of tabs open, visual studio community edition, various other bits and bobs.
Yes, it would likely struggle with heavy video editing, or fancy games, but that's not what I do. I object to scrapping a perfectly good PC just because it can't run Windows 11. If it's still running when 10 goes out of support, it will be getting an upgrade to Linux, distro to be decided at the time. Anything that really needs windows will be relegated to my laptop - almost new mid range gaming laptop that I rarely use.
I understand that Microsoft don't want to support legacy hardware and software indefinitely, but neither do I want to scrap a perfectly good PC. There are a LOT of home and micro business users out there who don't need or want the latest shiny toys, and who object to the expense and inconvenience of replacing a functional PC. Many of them will soldier on with Windows 10, just as quite a few are still using Windows 7 and have no plans to change. In trying to force them into buying a new PC, Microsoft is encouraging a security nightmare of unpatched Windows boxen. They really need to relax the hardware requirements for 11 to allow it to run on older hardware, perhaps with a disclaimer,but I doubt that will happen.
It is a little crazy. I use a Z420 as my main workstation. With hacks to get around Microsoft's artificial restrictions in Win11, it works fine. It is still much more powerful than new Win11 certified hardware coming out.
It is all a big con. Windows is reaching end of life and it is only a matter of time before we see a big change. My prediction is WSL2's internal distribution (CBL-mariner) will "seemlessly" become the main kernel for Windows and the efforts to maintain drivers will land on the open-source Linux community.
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"My prediction is WSL2's internal distribution (CBL-mariner) will "seemlessly" become the main kernel for Windows and the efforts to maintain drivers will land on the open-source Linux community."
You wouldn't be the first to have made that prediction, and it doesn't make any more sense to me than it did before. Windows doesn't just slot into the Linux kernel. Its services are tied into the NT kernel, so stripping that out would take a long time. As for drivers, Microsoft does not benefit from making drivers part of Linux. If anything goes wrong, it is Microsoft that will suffer, not the Linux community, so they don't have any reason to do Microsoft's work for them.
Moreover, if that happened, it would probably be pretty useful for driver availability in Linux, at least at the computer level (ARM will probably still be relentlessly nonstandard, so no benefit there). If you are in the belief that Microsoft is evil, and if you're not there are plenty of others who are, then there's another great reason for Microsoft not to do this: if they did, it makes shifting users and applications to desktop Linux much easier, making it much more convenient to stop using Windows.
If you pop Windows 10 LTSC 1809 onto it, you'll get security updates until late 2028 - one option to consider anyway. Or wait until the LTSC version of Windows 11 lands and install that with tweaks to bypass the requirements checks. My VM testing shows that Windows 11 on unsupported hardware will download security updates just fine, but not feature updates - which makes it a royal pain to use if you use a standard version as you have to do an ISO upgrade install every time your build runs out of support.
LTSC runs perfectly M365, whatever the channel, this is what we have at work.
At a time is was "not supported", because you are not supposed to put software that is not stable like M364 on these Windows versions.
But once MS Edge went the Chromium way, I was not able to find any reference to that prohibition again, and we even got updates for M363 currently deployed using the latest SCCM release...
I have been using Linux as my main OS for 7 years, and windows for those machines which are old and do not need upgrading.
There will many older generations who use computers without knowing the detail. Windows 11 will be forced upon them, and force them to purchase new hardware. Microsoft have a monopoly and are abusing their position.
People don't know about Linux, and i expect that they will go ahead and purchase a new PC based out of ignorance. I will suggest to people to purchase a Mac if they don't need windows, or are unable to install a new hard disk and Linux etc.
We all know that Windows 11 is coming with the turn off date for Windows 10, yet i do not see any public guidance as what to do.
I do not see the Windows 11 requirements as critical for a home user.
"I will suggest to people to purchase a Mac if they don't need windows, or are unable to install a new hard disk and Linux etc."
Before you do, consider Apple's support lifetimes for operating systems as well. They're doing the same thing that Microsoft is doing. I have a 2014 Mac which is stuck on Mac OS 11. It can run Mac OS 13 if I hack it, just as a similarly old computer can run Windows 11 if the checks are bypassed, but Apple will not allow me to install new versions normally. When they have made that change, they immediately stopped releasing new application versions for Mac OS 11, in my case the latest XCode version, but it applies to any applications they've made. They also have been known to lag security updates for the old versions if they get to them at all, including critical priority ones.
Microsoft's generation of ewaste is annoying to me, but it's worth keeping in mind that a computer of the same age would continue to run Windows 10, with full security updates, for two more years while Apple dropped the machine 18 months back.
"The fact that you consider it "perfectly good" implies that it's a long way from being "legacy hardware", of course"
To me, it isn't - it works just fine and does everything I need. To others, it's prehistoric. Certainly, it's not eligible for Windows 11, which I guess means Microsoft think it's legacy.
On the other hand, until about 10 - 12 years ago, a local shopkeeper was running Windows for Workgroups on a 486 in his shop. It ran a dBase application for managing his newspaper delivery rounds and solitaire, but obviously no internet. I did something (BIOS flash, I think) to y2k proof it sometime towards the back end of 99, replaced the PSU, sorted out a few printer problems, but by and large the machine was still doing it's job when he retired. It seems that legacy is a relative term:)
"The fact that you consider it "perfectly good" implies that it's a long way from being "legacy hardware", of course."
My very early Intel macbook (2006) running LM 21.1 is perfectly good at doing what I ask of it while (I assume that) most people would regard any laptop of that age as "legacy hardware".
If I'm already running Linux WSL is meaningless but I suppose from a Windows PoV it's a step in the right direction. Terminal? - had that for years. Chromium Edge? - no thanks. Sandbox? - dunno, is that something like chroot? DoH? - wazzat, Department of Health? I gather, however, that you now have options of tabs in your file manager and that somewhere along the line you also got multiple desktops but that's just playing catchup.
So instead of a gradual uplift in hardware over time, someone at MS decides to force new hardware on everyone. Sure that is potentially a big money spinner for hardware manufacturers, but really? Is TPM 2.0 really that good and that necessary that everyone has to have one? I look after a small fleet of W11 PCs and frankly there is no discernible performance change over an average W10 PC; looks like they just rehashed the GUI.
So to meet this challenge, either Canonical and Red Hat are going to have to seriously up their game to address the business PC market, Google need to really push Chromebooks (and sort the 'sell-by date' issue), or Apple is going to be selling a lot of Macbook Airs.
Is TPM 2.0 _really_ not in the platform?
Microsoft's true marketing problem:
How to raise the uptake metrics for Windows 11, by encouraging the technically challenged (withOUT pissing off the OEMs, who [have always and will continue to] see Win 11 as an opportunity to sell more shiny) to either:
1. Update their BIOS <cough> UEFI </cough> to the new version (provided [under MS duress?] by MoBo/system providers) which defaults to TPM 2.0 mode active?
2. Hit the magick key on their keyboard, during power up from cold start (rather than plain "turn on"); you know: Del, F1, F12, or the Blue Thinkpad key - that key their tech guru told them never to hit while turning on their computer?, enter the forbidden BIOS/UEFI screens, turn TPM 2.0 mode on (after navigating to the setting location - good luck!), F10 to save and reboot?
There are a number of platforms, in existence, whose CPUs are capable of TPM 2.0 (emulation or otherwise), where the feature is disabled by default in the original BIOS, possibly for security reasons, but generally due to (at the time) standard, conservative engineering practices (i.e. Might it Break? _We're not sure._ Do customers need the feature? _Not yet._ Fine, we'll ship with it disabled, and worry about MS, later.)
My guess is MS is playing a longer-term game. The TPM and CPU requirements for Win 11 are not really enforced ATM, and you can bypass them if you want. Not that you'd want to, but someone got Win 11 running on a Pentium 4. However, a new major Windows release gave them a perfect opportunity to do things like finally ditch 32-bit versions of the OS and start making sure everyone is sporting hardware that they will be using for future security related functionality. So, when Windows 12 rolls around, people should already have the necessary hardware.
If you know what you are doing with computers, yes you can often bypass them - but Microsoft is relying on two things:
1) non-technical users won't know how to do this / will be afraid to try, so will buy a new computer
2) businesses won't want to risk it with a load of production PCs, knowing that Microsoft could at any time decide to severely bork them (we fall into that category - I've not put W11 on any machines which don't meet the official hardware requirements).
If you go through a doorway you end up beyond it so obviously "through that date" must obviously mean "beyond that date". I'd hope that an English court and jury would interpret it that way if it came to a breach of contract.
And are there any videos of top MS management saying Windows 10 will be the last version? Deepfakes excluded, of course.
If you go through a doorway, you end up on the other side, but not necessarily anywhere else since you can stop immediately on passing the doorway. If we're using the analogy, that means they should be supporting it at 23:59:59 on that date, thus having completely supported it throughout the date they set, and then they can drop support from a grammatical perspective. Since they weren't clear, let's say that's 23:59:59 at UTC-12:00, so that it's universally considered to be past that date everywhere on the planet when support is dropped.
"'I could care less' in the bin of non-communication and obscurantism."
I assume the offending phrase would mean that "one could (is able to) care even less than the infinitesmal that one already does but one couldn't be arsed to do so." ie 1/2hv quantum of apathy separates the absolute zero of "couldn't care less" from "could care less" :)
Not using windows at all but whenever a new versions is shipped I get more or less a sense of "Oh, Windows is still a thing then?" but otherwise couldn't give a rat's.
For the poor sods that must run Windows I would suggest trying the server version. Years ago I was pleasantly surprised when I had to install Windows server 2008R2 on server hardware to run some dodgey dongle locked license manager software. I think it was roughly equivalent to Win7 but much cleaner.
It may well be American, but unlike most business speak, I don't (generally) have a problem with this one:
... through <date> = ... [up to and] through [which means including, unto the very end of (23.59.59.999+)] <date>
saves time, well defines the inclusive/exclusive boundary condition,
what's not to like?
Unless, of course, "through" means "until close of business day," in which case, I agree - American shite.
Using instructions published on The Register (somewhere, I can't be bothered to find them), I was able to build a Windows 11 upgrade image that worked on my older PC which lacks a TPM module of any sort. Not saying that the average reader will want to do such a thing, but it's certainly possible.
It works fine, but with one major caveat - Windows Update won't show feature updates for you because it sees your hardware as unsupported. On one hand, a good way of avoiding them, but on the downside it means using a flash drive and ISO to "upgrade" the OS every couple of years so you don't stop receiving security updates.
Maybe time for someone creative to release another utility like wufuc that unblocks the updates?
For Christ sake finally.
you aught to see this win 10 Crap in asia.....
There is adverts all over the menus and some damned cat or girl appears, just like clippy used to...
It is absolutely pounding our leased lines with the continual GARBAGE, that dose nothing to add value to a business.
It's about time Linux took over the desktop. For all its warts and bumps it's becoming IMHO the only way to keep ownership of our data and privacy. The price of Windows isn't that much of a deal really, but it's implications for not being able to keep control are too dangerous to ignore.
I've already migrated many relatives and family members to Linux Mint. And even the ones that are completely clueless about computers never complain about it. I also rarely update their software (maybe once a year at best). It just keeps on working and does everything they need (browsing the web, writing email, watching Netflix and YouTube, write or view a Word document or PDF). I believe this holds for the majority of users. No real need for Windows. And I believe it's vastly more secure.
If Linux works on your computer, it works great. The problem is Linux doesn't work on all computers. Depending on your computer, you may need to find some obscure non-free driver, or you might just be SOL. I'm running Ubuntu-MATE on one of my laptops and it works great but for some reason FDE doesn't work. I couldn't get Debian to work either. You run into these kind of problems all the time with Linux. That's why my main laptop is running macOS. Sure, it's non-free and somewhat locked down like Windows, but you still have all your unix tools at your fingertips and it's more stable than windows and definitely more stable than Linux. Linux is good if you want to tinker but if you want to just get work done I suggest macOS.
Of course your opinion is absolutely not a reason not to use Linux (or any other OS that anyone chooses). You could make exactly the same complaint about any of them, including Windows. Windows only works on the buyer's PC because someone has taken the time and expense to ensure that it does, i.e. they've have done the buyer's 'installation' work for them - reflected in the price, of course.
The reality is that that if an OS works for someone that is 'good enough'. The fact that it doesn't work for you is utterly irrelevant to them.
Millions of people around the world are using Linux (and other OSes that are not Windows), are you seriously arguing that because [arbitrary OS] doesn't work on 100% of possible hardware that it isn't worth bothering with? The facts strongly suggest otherwise.
" Windows only works on the buyer's PC because someone has taken the time and expense to ensure that it does, i.e. they've have done the buyer's 'installation' work for them - reflected in the price, of course."
Well no.
I've had no issues installing windows on anything for well over a decade. I've often had problems installing various flavours. It used to be finding drivers that was the big issue. These days it's just getting stuff to work. Recently I was setting up a media server on an old i3 PC. Mint installed fine but there was an annoying problem, left alone for any length of time the OS world simply freeze, absolutely nothing you could do to make it respond other than restart. Nothing in the logs to suggest what had happened. The best I could get from any support forum was "it must be the hardware". So I tried windows 10 which installed with no issues as had Mint. The difference was that Windows has been entirely stable since.
I'm 99% certain the issue was likely to be driver interpretability rather than Linux itself, but that's still a problem with Linux as an ecosystem.
The problem is your anecdote doesn't scale into a generalisable reason to avoid Linux—it's just your particular experience in one particular case. It literally could happen to anyone, using any OS, on a particular device, for a multiplicity of possible reasons.
I've been installing and using using Linux on various machines for over a decade, I cannot recall any installation within the last ten years that has had a deal breaking issue, and the vast majority have been issue free. That doesn't deny your particular problem, but your particular problem certainly doesn't suggest that my experience is unusual, or a reason why people generally should be shy about installing and/or using Linux.
The usual reason for Linux not working on some H/W is that it's too new and the distro hasn't caught up with it yet. This is particularly the case with very conservative distros such as Debian and derivatives such as Devuan. The solution there is to install Mint, wait until the new release of your preferred distro or just buy non-bleeding edge H/W which is likely to be cheaper. The opposite side of that coin is that you will be supported on H/W at which Windows has long since turned up its nose.
I'm a fan of Linux, used it off and on since around 1996 give or take a year or two. Your post reminds me of things I said back in the day. I keep hoping one day it will finally grow up and become a real competitor, but after 30 some years of watching and waiting, I'm not holding my breath any longer. I used Linux as my primary desktop back in the late 90s to early 00s, back when you had to be a lot more hands on and manually tweak config files, but eventually it just got to be too much hassle. Sure, if I needed to share a document with someone I could, but it usually required a lot of extra work on my part to make sure it would work correctly on the other end.
Linux is in a perpetual "almost there" state. You can get 80% of the way easily enough, maybe even 90% in some cases, but it's that last little bit that is maddeningly always out of reach, and always includes something that is important. And to make matters worse, every time Linux starts getting close to being a real competitor, someone comes along and decides they need to rip up a major subsystem and replace it with something else. That's not to say that there may be good technical reasons for it, but it basically never fails that it happens just as Linux starts to gain traction. X11 was finally starting to come into its own, so what do they do? Create Wayland. Maybe there are some good technical reasons for it, I can't claim to have looked at it closely enough to judge, but a lot of distros started switching to Wayland before it was really even all that stable. And developers tend to hate writing documentation, which is why in the corporate world there's people who are dedicated to that specific function, or someone is forcing them to do it if they want their paycheck. With open source, where it's primarily a volunteer basis, no one is making them do it so they don't. Leaving you to scour web forums and discord chats to try to find a solution to problems.
And the volunteer nature of a lot of Linux is both a blessing and a curse. Developers are free to work on whatever interests them personally, which is good, but it also means if no one really cares about X, then X never gets worked on. You also have a lot of personality conflicts and it often happens people just get bored with a project, or life happens and they don't have time, maybe they die, or any number of things which result in a project being abandoned. Maybe someone picks it up and carries on, maybe they don't. Trying to get your head around someone else's code can be extremely difficult.
Then there's gaming. Linux has come a long ways, no doubt, but it's still barely a thing. Proton is impressive, but it's far from perfect, and if a game doesn't work with it there's no guarantee it ever will. I don't think we'll ever see Linux on the desktop. Linux on the server, we've already seen that happen. That's where all the commercial interest is. Work on things like KDE and GNOME are more hobby projects for the developers to make for a better development environment for themselves.
Someone else already touched on the hardware aspect. If you're willing to take the time to carefully research every hardware purchase, Linux can be viable. However, for people who like to be able to just go out and grab whatever random printer happens to be on sale that week... it's not going to go so well.
Maybe tomorrow all of that will change, but after watching Linux basically tread water for the last 30 or so years, I figure the window has passed. Once smartphones started becoming ubiquitous, the desktop started dying. Who knows if it'll ever completely go away, and maybe in 10 or so years we'll be back to where the emphasis is on everything running locally, but it's less and less of the focus these days with everything being about the mobile experience now.
Like I said: Linux is sufficient for the majority of users. If you're into hard-core gaming, stay with Windows. If you're a Windows developer, stay with Windows. If you absolutely need certain features of Microsoft Office, stay with Windows.
The rest of us can just migrate towards Linux Mint (which IMHO is as close as you can get to a perfect Linux desktop) and keep our freedom and privacy.
Except that it's really not. A couple subsets of users, sure, but nowhere near a majority. If you're going to be the dedicated admin for the system for an elderly parent, grandparent, or whomever... sure. If the person has very specific and largely static needs, you can probably make it work. But the average person... not a chance.
If it works for you, great. Time was I loved tinkering with various things on Linux. Then life happened and my free time started to evaporate. After a long hard day, I just want to be able to switch my brain off for a little while and not have to dick around with the OS because some random thing broke.
And the whole freedom and privacy thing is laughable. There's telemetry in Linux apps same as Windows, but even if their wasn't, that's just one source. They're busy tracking your web activity and trying to correlate that with as much info as they can get on you from as many different sources as possible. You probably carry a smartphone around with you everywhere you go, and unless you've gone significantly out of your way to disable a lot of functions, advertisers are getting far richer info about you than they could ever hope to get from a desktop OS like Windows. Combine that with your Google searches, Facebook activity, and various other touchpoints, and... Let's just say I always get a good chuckle out of people who complain about Windows telemetry but then use Google Chrome on their desktop, carry their phone around with them everywhere, use Google Assistant/Siri, use Google for web searches, and are active on Facebook.
A family member recently was looking to get a new bed. They did a few searches to get some prelim info on their Android tablet, then took their Android phone with them to a couple local mattress stores. By the time they got home, probably less than 10 minutes later, they were already getting spam for mattress deals. Windows was never part of the equation.
Methinks you are merely trying to convince yourself. Linux Mint is one of a number of modern distros that have, at least in my humble experience, a very low maintenance overhead.
I'm sitting here in my office: my desktop system is Mint, the server next to it is Ubuntu, the local backup unit is OpenMediaVault. None of these cause me any grief, I mean they just work. I runoccasional updates, but I have not had any 'breakages' since they were setup over a year ago.
Okay, that's just my experience, but I'm not some kind of IT specialist, it's not what I do for a living, I merely have enough interest and nous to get these systems up and running. After that I really don't want to know about them, apart from the routine maintenance, i.e. updates—I genuinely cannot afford the time to be bothering with something that isn't reliable and simple to maintain.
It's a good thing in the sense that every recent feature update by Microsoft in recent years has been a downgrade- removing controllability and flexibility and enforcing what Microsoft thinks we ought to be doing. Forcing the Cursed Office Ribbon, removing customising and control of the Start Menu. That kind of update. No thanks.
> making the task of software support easier for Redmond.
Here's a radical idea. Why don't MS make support easier by writing an operating system without bugs in it?
And for parts that are outside of their control, such as third-party drivers, design it such that their own code is robust enough to survive poor design.
I like Windows 10. It seems to be fairly dependable and fast, tolerably secure.
I'm sure there are people who love the idea of tabs in notepad, but I've used notepad++ for many years.
Most of the major features announced for Win10 seem to be about things like live tiles, which I disabled in the first five minutes after installation.
If MS wants to leave Windows 10 features unaltered and just have security updates, that seems perfect. Thank you, Microsoft
I find myself continually wishing MS would just drop Windows entirely and do a completely new greenfield OS. Roll the decades worth of lessons learned into a brand new effort where they are free to break binary and API compatibility. It'd also give them a chance to ditch all the legacy cruft that's in Windows. You can still find legacy bits from the NT 3.1-3.51 days if you know where to look. On top of an OS which has all the latest in kernel design theory and security best practices, it would give them a chance to redo the UI from the ground up, which hasn't been done since Windows 95.
IMO, the kernel and driver model could be completely brand new, maybe coded in as much Rust as possible, and then the new Windows API could be a combo of .NET and DirectX to make porting apps easier. Or they could just do something similar to Apple or Google and build a proprietary GUI on top of Linux or *BSD. With virtualization functionality in the CPU and container software, Microsoft would be in a much better position compared to Apple when they were moving from OS 9 to OS X.
That's never going to happen. Doing away with the backwards compatibility throws up an opportunity for a competitor to jump in with a newer and better product. Microsoft drags a lot of history with it, including paradigms that are old-fashioned. A newer startup wouldn't have this and could come up with new ideas that make Windows look archaic.
Without the ability to run old Windows software Microsoft probably wouldn't stand a chance.
Who said they had to get rid of backwards compatibility? That's the whole point of containerization. They can just wall off the old, insecure, Win32 API for the first couple of years while people create native apps, and then when they feel enough time has passed, they depreciate it and remove it. Anyone who still really needs it can always load up a copy of Windows in a VM.
Also, these days Microsoft wants to move its corporate customers onto Azure. People like you and me, assuming you're not a CTO for a Fortune 500 company or something, are not really Microsoft's customers. They're happy to sell to us, but all of us together are basically a rounding error on the Microsoft balance sheet.
I thought you meant a clean-slate OS, without any backwards compatibility. Yes, they could keep Win32 intact, but Windows is much more than Win32 these days. They'd have to practically shove the entire Windows 11 ecosystem into that container.
I believe the consumer market is still very important to Microsoft, although they're investing only the minimum to keep users happy. Losing the consumer market would mean losing mindshare. And in the server space Linux is already dominant, so they're only plodding forwards on inertia, not any meaningful innovation.
I also suspect the Azure cloud business will start to max out this or next year. Businesses are starting to feel the cost of cloud deployments and will be looking for other options.
You can do both. The new OS has its own unique API and ABI. It could be based on Win32, but maybe they finally remove all the depreciated arguments and whatnot. Personally I'd just adopt .NET as the new OS API since that was sort of the original goal of .NET and it's pretty well established. Whatever they do, the point is that they get rid of all the legacy stuff that was written before the Internet was a thing and before Internet security was on Microsoft's radar. Stuff that might be a major hassle to refactor for multiple reasons.
Then you can use something like Docker to run legacy Windows apps in their own walled-off containers. After 2-3 years grace period, you can announce that this function will be going away in a future version. If you really need some legacy app you can always load up a copy of Windows in a VM on your own. Or maybe they offer access to legacy Windows via a Remote Desktop connection via Azure.
Microsoft already controls Office, which they could make available from day 1 of a new OS release. They could then throw money at other companies, like Adobe and AutoDesk to make sure their products were also available at launch. There are basically only two browsers left standing these days: Chrome and Firefox, both of which would be ported extremely quickly. As far as gaming goes, as long as they port DirectX, any game engine that hewed closely to the official API should be pretty trivial to port since the CPU instruction set isn't changing and the DirectX API is still the same. That would make it so most games would just need a recompile, and maybe a few minor tweaks, to work on the new OS.
Really, compared to when Apple made the move from OS 9 to OS X, it'd be pretty trivial for Microsoft to do something similar now. Then you've got a fresh codebase to work from. If you've done any programming at all, you know that sooner or later your app will end up going in directions you never anticipated at the beginning. Eventually it becomes easier to just rewrite the entire app than try to keep bolting on these features. In a lot of cases, you'd end up having to rewrite large chunks of the app anyway, so may as well just bite the bullet and do the whole thing. Take all the lessons learned from your first attempt and use them to make the second one better.
"After 2-3 years grace period, you can announce that this function will be going away in a future version. If you really need some legacy app you can always load up a copy of Windows in a VM on your own."
Sometimes those legacy apps are the sole reason the computer was bought. They're the ones that control horrendously expensive H/W whose cost still hasn't been amortized and the app authors have long since closed the business.
If mictosoft does the same thing with win10 as they did with win7, your favorite software will soon not function. Many of mictosoft's sycophant software peddlers tweaked their products so they wouldn't function properly on win7, thereby forcing users to upgrade to win10. I still haven't seen any great benefit to having "upgraded" to win10, other than umpteen hundred patch, fixes, and things that go bump in the night. It does seem to me that win11 has had even more patches, most of which have been to plug security holes. I never had any security problems with win7, which is probably because I never click on every URL I see or open emails from senders I don't recognise. And the couple seconds I gain from win10's slightly quicker load time means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
You have any evidence to support those rather fantastical claims?
Also, how do you know you've never had any security issues? Do you know with 100% certainty that there isn't some trojan on your computer, right now, silently exfiltrating data? I'll answer that for you. You don't. None of us do. It's the magic rock defense.
P1: I have a magic rock that keeps tigers away.
P2: You live on a continent where tigers are not native.
P1: See how well it works?
This post has been deleted by its author
"Many of mictosoft's sycophant software peddlers tweaked their products so they wouldn't function properly on win7"
What a load of delusional conspiracy crap.
Software peddlers do not really care what Micros~1 wants. The reason why they cut support for unsupported operating systems is because that way they can clean up codebase (right...), use more modern compilers, use new APIs of the OS, and lessen their help desk duties.
Another explanation is that Windows 7 usage is dwindling fast into the single digit "others" area on desktop market share.
Many software could be run on Windows 95 if push came to shove. Did you cry for them as well?
I’ll just run whatever as a virtual machine.
I’ve got Ubuntu server, Win 7 ultimate, win 10 pro retail, Monterey… open step, solaris, we’ve got Amiga OS, even geos if I care to.
The nice thing about compartmentalized virtual machines is I can run whatever virus I want & completely eliminate it from my system whenever I feel like it, just delete & restore.
They’re busy installing fibre to every single house in the city because they intend to control everyone by their online activity. No deal. HTTP and HTTPS are merely a type of protocol. Anybody can invent their own protocol, be it xmodem ymodem zmodem kermit “punter,” or torrent, or dark web. If HTTP becomes too commercialized I’ll just switch to something else, I don’t care. I don’t need Microsoft anymore, now they are merely another environment to choose among on my Proxmox cluster.
If do, I need to get another AV tool installed. I'm running behind a fire wall, and I'm appropriately paranoid about what gets downloaded from where, but when it comes to online security paranoia is not enough. If Macrosquish is no longer even pretending to fix zero day bugs, we no longer have a belt and have to rely on suspenders an be skyhook...
I'd consider running, and even paying for, Win11 if it ran on my existing hardware. But the laptop is much too old, and the desktop is barely to old. While I agree that folks should be being encouraged to use the best hardware security features available, "available" is still constrained by budget.
If MS doesn't want us legacy customers, OK; I can probably migrate to Linux at this point, though there's still better DAW support on Windows. It's a pity, though, they had finally gotten WSL to a point where it was a decent Linux environment just in time to abandon the customers that might have retained for them. This time, "embrace, extend, and capture" failed to follow through..
I certainly understand not wanting to burn resources supporting old versions of the system, and can't blame them for wanting to move everyone to the new version. But they could have done so in a way that made migration easier, letting improved security bring us to new machines as the hardware base turned over naturally...
Maybe they replace machines every year so they don't see a problem. Most companies are on a 4 to 5 year cycle, and most consumers hold onto machines until they find a compelling reason to move. "We said so" isn't compelling.
What's the deal with the new hardware anyway? Do they need another layer of TPM and DRM to fend of security risks?
May I remind you that despite all those technological advances on security Microsoft promises at each new release of Windows ransomware peddlers seem to have no problem scaling the walls and thousands of companies are taken hostage every year.
I maintain that Linux is vastly more secure. Also note that disk encryption is only offered on the Professional and Server editions of Windows whilst being included in almost every consumer-grade Linux distro.
The world I work in has my product on millions of endpoints. I have recently had a number of my large accounts switch their workstations over to the Linux flavor of my product. Not servers, workstations. Deep in to the 5-figures. With so much work being processed remotely 'in the cloud' via a browser, they have questioned the need for an expensive* Windows workstation.
If there are any CxO's reading this, you might want to check in to what your peers are doing. It is not critical mass yet, but the trend is heading that direction.
* Cost of licensing, obviously. But also care & feeding. Necessity for 3rd party tools for security & management. Monthly critical update-right-now patches. Etc.
I wish the technology media outlets would give Microsoft a whole lot more hell than they are about "Windows 11". The release of windows 10 came with a pronouncement that "Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows" at Microsoft Ignote in May 2015.
So why aren't they being held to their word? Either call it something iother than "Windows" or stop trying to create a new version. A or B. Black or white. Or is what they are really telling us iws "it doesn't matter what we tell you, its all a lie and we will turn 180 degrees at any time and suck it."?
Yeah... the article author hints that it may have been a misunderstanding, as that is what Microsoft much later claimed as they attempted to retcon their original lore, but it was not a misunderstanding. A MS spokesperson claimed it was the last version ever, a statement that went viral and was widely cited by the computing public for years, and for all that time, MS did not contradict or amend it. That makes this the official stated policy of Microsoft for all those years.
Back in the early days of Windows as a Disservice, the support roadmap only listed the support period for the currently existing builds. Each new build was essentially a new version of Windows, with "Windows 10" serving as a platform name more than a specific product within that platform. I remember this, as I was regularly referring people to that page on microsoft.com when I was arguing against WaaS. Each time I cited the policy that I knew quite well (having mentioned it many times), I would go back and check the page to make sure my understanding was still correct... and one day, a conventional Windows roadmap was there, listing a 2025 EOL date for Windows 10 as a whole, rather than just listing the EOL dates for various feature releases.
They have tried to explain away the "last version ever" as one "rogue" employee posting on the company blog, but that does not cut it. If the company did not retract the statement, it stands as a statement from Microsoft, and the "you misunderstood" bit does not work when for years they had no EOL date for Windows 10 listed (which is what you would expect if 10 was "the last Windows ever."
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