Lol. Man, did I see this coming like 2 years ago.
There’s never going to be a “Year of the Linux Desktop” where there’s some critical inflection point like a lot of people think. But Microsoft has fucked up here in assuming that consumer trust is a linear relationship and it’s not. They broke the trust, the cracks are there, and users will keep bleeding. They’ll keep a certain percentage of users through apathy or complacency, but the momentum is flowing in reverse now.
What it takes for any one person to cross over is going to look different, whether that’s Linux getting up to speed on a feature they were looking for or Microsoft crossing yet another unacceptable threshold, but despite all my anger and personal grievances aside, I truly believe Microsoft as a company is incapable of correcting this problem.
Their goals are entirely misaligned, they believe they can dictate the market at the consumer and their revenue is dependent on that. They’re bleeding more money and talent through this AI debacle and that’s making them even less capable of facing and addressing the issues. Unfortunately I don’t think they’ll ever fully implode, but just like Chrome eventually ate IE’s market share and now won’t go away, so it will be with Linux.
Bonus points: I’m calling it, I truly do believe that in ~5 years or so Windows will cease to be its own operating system and start shifting towards a Linux distro with a bespoke DE (again, see Chrome/Edge). They don’t want to have to keep maintaining an OS like this and one of the biggest arguments for doing so has been the backwards compatibility, but everything is cloud and SaaS now and they want to push more business customers in that direction anyway. Server will be a thorn in their side for awhile, but consumer facing Windows distro will be the perfect testing ground. Mark it, ~5 years … EEE
Install Linux, Problem Solved.
One more year…
;-D
Gat dayum Microslop fucked up.
They fucked up so hard, they still don’t know how bad they fucked up. The done goofed. Done screwed the pooch.
This desperation ain’t nothing. Give it time. It’ll just get tastier.
I booted an old win 10 laptop the other day to see if it still worked. It has a GPU so I thought it might be nice for a few light games while I travel. Immediately started screaming about updates and all the normal windows stuff.
I booted to Bazzite from a flash drive and had it installed in like 20 minutes. Runs like a dream now. It’s amazing to see what that old hardware can do without Windows choking it.
It’s so easy now to run an option that doesn’t suck.
so you could have updated a windows machine in 5 minutes, but you have installed bazzite in 20 mins
Generous to say Bazzite installation takes 20 minutes
Even more generous to say a Windows update takes 5 minutes
Yes, but then they would still be left with Windows
I don’t really trust windows updates anymore. Sure it may fix critical security issues, but at the same time they stuff new AI BS in, roll back changes and settings I made (“set edge as default Browser?” and maybe intentionally resets registry settings that I had to make, like disable telemetry and other built in spyware.
People avoiding updating windows because of how long it takes your machine out of commission for and how opaque the process is has been a meme since like Windows XP. It’s never five minutes. Plus the future hours saved not having to deal with windows bullshit.
Will upgrade from windows 10 to Linux.
I did it last year after postponing it countless times. And I will recommend you do it. I know it feels like a huge step, but it is much easier than you fear and once you have done it it is such a big relief to be completely free of all of Microslops nonsense forever.
Install alongside. Dual boot. Happily play and try Linux without anxiety.
As the RAM apocalypse continues to plague all of us, it’s only fair for users to continue using the more efficient Windows 10, instead of the memory-hogging Windows 11.
Win 10 isn’t even that memory efficient and still slams the heck out of plattered disks. Not that I recommend an HDD over an SSD for boot drives, but it was usable up to Win 8.1, and even today with Linux.
My jaw dropped when i upgraded from hdd to ssd back in win7. Hdd will take about a minute something to boot, but ssd took about 7 second. When ms dropped win7 update i upgrade to win10. The boot time dropped down to about 15 to 20sec. Still not too bad, cachyos took about the same time. But win10 keep bloating whenever there’s an update, the thing i never experienced so far on cachy.
Usable doing a lot of heavy lifting lol.
I recently upgraded to Windows 11. I’ve been putting it off, but there are a few apps I need that simply do not work under 10 anymore. Bleah.
I’ve been using it on a work machine for several years, but I am still surprised at just how much it sucked to switch from 10. My personal setup has been heavily customized over many years to suit my particular needs and wants. More than half of that customization is no possible under 11. There are workarounds for a few pieces of it, but even those are unlikely to remain stable and functional for very long. Microsoft is constantly changing things that cause unsupported features to break.
So I now have a slower, less reliable, less versatile, and less configurable software environment. It also conducts far more surveillance and sends even more information about me to Microsoft. There is not one single way in which this could be considered an upgrade, except by Microsoft’s shareholders.
I’m going to set up dual boot with Zorin. That will allow me to boot into Windows 11 for the few things I need that will only run in that environment. The remaining 99.9% of the time I will just run Linux. (I already know Linux pretty well, I just haven’t run it as my primary desktop.)
I suspect my next project will be replacing my Android phone’s OS with something less invasive.
https://github.com/ravendevteam/talon
This is how I tolerate w11
I jumped ship over to Linux just in time then. 10 was bad, but serviceable and it got more stable in EOL. They’re going to ruin it even more with slop
And with things like selling HEVC support in their new media player, something that was free previously (and still free with VLC Player.
The generic HEVC decoder was never free, what was free was the OEM version that comes pre-installed when you buy a new computer (Because the price is included in that).
But you always had to jump through hoops to get that version installed, it wasn’t ever something intended for end users.
If you’re too lazy to switch to Linux like me, Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC is supported until 2032 and free to download and permanently license..
As someone who is lazy, I find running Linux to be less work than fighting with Windows.
Linux you fight a bit when setting it up and then its like clockwork. With windows it’s easy to setup, but then it starts doing weird shit you never asked for and and undoes your changes making more work forever.
Linux isn’t hard to set up anymore
Basic install yes, getting all your favourite apps and network connectivity…well, it’s much better than before, but still a short term pain.
This is part of why I like Mint … it’s like 5 clicks to install
I like Mint. Got two boxes. 1 bazzite, one Debian and one Arch for shitz and giggles.
Mint comes in debian, arch and bazzite?
Uh. No. I have 2 mint boxes. 1 bazzite one debian and one arch… heh.
It comes in Debian … not the others
As someone who just installed bazzite today and fucked around with Mint a couple months ago this is very much true. Kinda reminds me of bashing Windows 98 into doing what I wanted.
I installed Bazzite, and I had a bit of trouble!
… Because I pulled out the USB halfway through the install! Like the world’s biggest dumbass! Couldn’t boot the computer at all! Oh no!
Then I stared at what I’d done for a while, sighed, rebooted and started again.
And it was easy as piss. Bazzite 10/10 for me.
There’s no struggle free OS, every OS has operations and processes that will need more detailed investigation, and hence read as “fighting with the operating system”.
No design is intuitive to everyone, all the time, and in all situations. I’m sure Linux is fine, but let’s be real, you know what I mean.
I’m glad that Linux is more intuitive to you than Windows. Good job finding it, and setting it all up 👍
Honestly, a lot of desktop environments are designed to feel very similar to Windows. I tried Mint on a laptop and started liking it right away. The setup was put it on a flash drive, and run the installer. It took 20 minutes to nuke Windows.
My OS struggles come from trying to get windows-specific DAWs and CAD Software to work, which will hopefully come around as more people switch to Linux. I have some alternatives that I’m playing with right now.
Yeah exactly. I set up Zorin OS for my family who are not tech savvy at all. It was a bit different at first but they said they felt much “calmer” using Linux. Modern Windows feels like trying to read an article online or watch a YouTube video without an ad blocker.
You won’t do this on corporate machines, but converting a Win install into an IoT release and generating a key for it is like a couple of clicks and a reboot.
But, but - the way massgrave is still accessible and not fought against makes you think Microsoft wants the fluctuating users to keep on using their products and ecosystem even if they don’t pay the initial sticker price.
So if it’s at least slightly feasible for your workflow, it’s always better to switch and leave M$ behind.
P.S. I can be wrong, but IoT right now doesn’t shield oneself from installing copilot and other garbage, making this edition not better than others, you still need to debloat it.
P.S. I can be wrong, but IoT right now doesn’t shield oneself from installing copilot and other garbage, making this edition not better than others, you still need to debloat it.
a full year in here, with regular security updates. 11iot is still unmolested by microsoft shenanigans. nothing installed on it i didn’t put on myself, or didn’t come with the stripped-down windows, which isn’t much at all. there’s no store, so all the store-delivered shit is absent.
Probably leftovers since I switched to IoT from other ISOs.
Might not be a bad idea to start learning on a separate device though, so you’ll be ready when 2032 hits.
(That’s my current setup)
I’m going to try Steam OS on one of my laptops. See what that’s like.
I suggest that you try Bazzite instead. As of now, SteamOS doesn’t support Nvidia.
Oh I’m poor my laptop has AMD.
AMD is better than NVidia anyway
Bazzite also has a better package management system. SteamOS is meant for gaming almost exclusively, whereas Bazzite is meant for both.
After using Bazzite, I’m convinced that image based distros are the future for end users. Need to install an app? Flatpak. Need to install command line? Homebrew.
It all installs in user space. And Flatpak at least uses an effective sandbox system.
Distros that maintain their own package spaces are duplicating a. lot. of work.
The downside of Flatpak is the disk space usage. But that doesn’t matter as much to me as it used to.
I ran SteamOS for a while before they made the recent announcement. It works great. Previously, just had to tell it to always boot in Desktop mode.
I can chime in for Bazzite. It’s imperfect, but I’ve blown up my fair share of aliens and they make playing your games on Linux really easy compared to anything else I’ve used. I can even stream the game from my desktop to a laptop in my bedroom via sunshine/moonlight which Bazzite helps you install as SteamLink doesn’t play nice with Bazzite.
Upvote for Bazzite - the caveat being how much support the distro gets and how long it lives. That said it turned a truly piece of crap all in one hp to something that was fun in about 30 minutes. it’s a good gaming OS but I wouldn’t use it as my daily driver.
I don’t think steamos is a great choice for a general purpose OS…yet
Probably not but maybe I’ll be able to play a game. Old laptop. Old Games. New OS. See what happens.
Both bazzite and CachyOS are built for computers and will likely work better for a laptop than SteamOS. And they both have gaming focused builds. I haven’t tried Bazzite in a while, but CachyOS has easy to understand instructions on how to install their gaming package.
Can confirm Bazzite is incredibly easy to install, and all my steam games work without any tweaking at all so far except Tropico 6. And I haven’t even tried to fix that.
(Windows was being a dick fuck, and life means I don’t have brainspace right now to fuck around with my laptop, so no-tweaking was the goal. Bazzite has delivered that.)
Appreciate the suggestions, probs check them out afterwards. I just wanna do it for the shits n gigs
Totally understand that. I have tried a bunch of different Linux builds to see what I like. So certainly won’t begrudge your explorations. And I haven’t tried SteamOS on any of my machines because it didn’t have a desktop build when I was last playing around with new builds. CachyOS has been great though. Everything works well on my machine, and its been easy to use as a daily driver.
11 iot is also available, and is void of nearly everything people hate about 11. it’s good to 2035.
I have no intentions of going back to Ravenholm anytime soon.
You are the champ for pointing people this direction but eventually like Adobe they will close the holes.
Yes, but it is pointless like whack a mole.
massgrave can activate 3 years ESU on regular Enterprise for people who want things IoT LTSC is missing, like WMR. I’ve got Enterprise alongside Bazzite and when the updates run out I’ll either switch to IoT LTSC or nuke Windows altogether.
Same, I’ve got a headset on WMR and it’s basically trash if I have to update to Win 11.
you guys might be interested in this, then:
Oasis is a Windows 11 driver for SteamVR for VR headsets of the Windows Mixed Reality family, such as the HP Reverb, Samsung Odyssey, Lenovo Explorer, or Dell Visor. This driver does not require the Mixed Reality Portal application and is therefore compatible with the latest versions of Windows 11 (24H2 and future).
https://github.com/mbucchia/Oasis-Driver-for-Windows-Mixed-Reality/wiki
Chiming in to say oasis not only made my WMR kit work without Mixed Reality Portal Garbage, but it’s more responsive and tracks better with it. It’s incredible. I’m on 10 LTSC IoT which Oasis’s doesn’t technically support and it works flawlessly. Amazing.
I love you, Oasis dev.
This is false. The latter is, anyway. I am running 11 IoT LTSC on my main gaming rig and WMR is still supported. The key is, you cannot install a version any newer than 23H2. There are third party tools available that will block Windows from attempting to “upgrade” you to a new feature release which breaks WMR. My Reverb G2 is still working fine.
…For now. WMR support on a fresh install is still reliant on a Windows Store download which Microsoft will probably cease providing at some point if they haven’t already.
Doing the Lord’s work!
I hate windows but it is clear that 10 is better than 11. I love linux doe… like that whole thing with recall… if you are using windows let me fuck your wife.
Nice try?
This is just kind of how all software is; operating systems, video games, whatever. It’s going to be shit for a while after launching. Sometimes it becomes less shit as it matures.
Not true. Things haven’t always been like that. “Bananaware” (software that ripens after the sale) was enabled by two factors: internet connections and consumers willing to put up with this shit.
Win 11 is different. It is always has been a piece of shit
Yeah maybe they’ll get it with version fucking twelve
I still remember people calling me a Linux shill when I said the microslop “windows 10 will be the last windows version ever” statement was bullshit in 2015.
I wonder how many “users rejecting Windows 11” are people who refuse to replace perfectly good hardware just because it doesn’t meet Windows 11’s arbitrary requirements.
It might also be people who want to log in to their computer with a local account, given the problems with letting a US company decide who can use your computer and who can access your files.
Especially now in the NANDpocalypse, like no way I’m upgrading my hardware.
Listen, if someone broke into your house they could get into your computer and hack it and see your browsing history and gta6 progress because you dont have TPM 2.0. You dont want that, do you?
Veracrypt/LUKS encryption:
Yeah my 8yr old comp was built to be top of the line at the time and it still rips on non-current AAA games. Any upgrade aside from gpu at this point would mean a new mobo and essentially a wholesale. Fuck that
that’s probably most the holdouts left. the absolute brutal persistence of ‘upgrade’ offers and win10 doomsday warnings on eligible hardware got most users to do it, even if they didn’t really want to.
NO, it will only be hurt by updates, win 10 has been more stable than ever since they fucked off to molest and ruin windows 11 with AI slop.
The support is just security updates, which all that Windows 10 has been getting since October 2025. These updates are what makes it remotely safe to use the system online.
This is a good thing.
