This feels like such a fuck you to working class. People can’t afford another layer of these costs right now.
… This is bait right? You want somebody to tell you there’s a simple and free solution, and then you’re going to say it’s a bad solution?
FINE! I’ll bite: Pirated copy of Windows Enterprise LTSC. It’s less useful, more resource hungry, privacy invasive and has worse support for older hardware than Linux though.
Working class people at large don’t know about these alternatives, I’m certain you know that. IT folk and nerds alike do, but anyone outside of these circles don’t necessarily see the choice they have
Those people that don’t know options exist are also people that don’t care about or know about support life for something like the OS - they just see it as what the computer comes with. Most of them probably wouldn’t have upgraded from 7 to 10 without it just doing it itself. A lot of them will just keep using 10 well past the end of support.
Also, I really enjoyed Railcar’s subversion of expectations with all that lead up to what we all assumed was a Linux recommendation to end up being pirated windows. That got a chuckle out of me. I feel like the haters didn’t get the joke.
Working class people at large don’t know about these alternatives,
You mean only the elite know about Linux? Preposterous!
*proceeds to clean monocle
Jokes aside, it might be a good time to teach and learn. Or pay, or have less security moving forward.
It was a staple of the “working class” to be resourceful, to know to repair stuff. It’s on Microsoft best interest that you change the computer, that you pay another OEM license, that they can drop support for older hardware… And this will happen again with windows 12.
Working class doesn’t have time to do this research and just needs a working machine
Objectively speaking Linux is not a Windows replacement, its a minix replacement and competes with FreeBSD. Not everyone wants Linux and tbh I wouldnt reccomend Linux to most people.
I’m very interested on a longer explanation of this take, considering how many people use Linux as a replacement for windows.
And if the argument is “not everything that runs on windows works on Linux”, remember that can be said with windows vs Mac, iOS vs android and even windows 10 vs windows 11.
Objective is a very strong word there. “[OS] Replacement” could mean any number of things.
My dad’s bringing his PC to my house when they visit for Christmas so we can setup Linux as a dual boot for him to see if he can switch from Windows 10 to Linux instead of buying a new PC
My dad (in his mid 80s) told me proudly that he had just bought Linux and installed it on his computer. It’s great that he wanted to try Linux but I wonder what malware-riddled scam distro he found, and how I’ll sort it out on my next visit.
Can’t be that bad. Some distros accept donations. It just could be that he felt he was making a purchase rather than just a donation.
Doesn’t Ubuntu and a few other distros still sell physical install discs?
They used to, but I don’t think they do anymore. In fact, I think they used to send one to you for free. I got an official Ubuntu install disk for free at college (someone was handing them out), and I’ve been on Linux ever since.
I do see Ubuntu install USBs on Amazon, but I wouldn’t trust those.
You used to be able to buy physical media. And that may be what they’re talking about? Hard to say. For a long time this whole write it to a USB stick and install it was newfangled and not at all common. I 100% have a version of red hat in a box that I bought off a shelf of a local Best Buy back in the 90s. Yes you could have just downloaded and installed it or created your own install media. But having your own CD burners even weren’t that common at the time. I remember 1999 being when I got my first CD burner and how special that was lol. It seems almost quaint by today’s standards. And downloading wasn’t really an option either. 56 kilobits per second if you were lucky would have taken days and days. Now it’s just minutes over most broadband.
I think my retiree parents (and in-laws) are going the same way. They only use their computer for email and search, and the options are just better.
I’ll have to ask my parents about it. They mostly just use a web browser, but they also occasionally use Word for writing Christmas letters and whatnot. I could probably get them to switch to LibreOffice, Google Drive, or Office365, but not completely sure about that. They are interested in getting a Chromebook, so I guess we’ll see what they end up needing.
I try not to force Linux on anyone, but I have brought it up before as a suggestion (they were complaining about their computer being slow, and ended up buying a new one). My dad really likes Windows, but they really don’t use anything Windows-specific other than Word anymore.
That’s fine, I’ve closed the door on supporting Microsoft. They could have just charged for the ‘upgrade’ and that would have been better since it wouldn’t result in the colossal amount of e-waste that this is creating. Even without the forced obsolescence, their products have become hostile, invasive and generally just a PITA to use. Meanwhile Linux distros are knocking it out of the park lately.
I really don’t know what Microsoft are thinking. They haven’t made particularly good strides towards gaining any kind of goodwill, so once it becomes common knowledge that alternatives not only exist but actually show them up, those lost customers are people that they will never get back. Look how pathetic their marketshare is for Edge for example, even though it’s the default browser on Windows. They still haven’t been able to shake off the bad stigma that Internet Explorer had (and to be fair, they aren’t doing people any favours with Edge either).
The new Outlook is fucking awful.
How did they fuck up email? Just put them all on the left and let me read and move them in the fewest clicks possible.
If you go to Google and search for xview mailtool screenshots, you might realize just how fucked up today’s email UIs are.
Thank you Microsoft god bless I will stay on core 2 duo forever 🙏🙏
It would be safer to use a Linux flavor and run the apps you need using Wine/Proton…
KDE Plasma + Klassy can do that. I think you can pull off a Win7 look with just those two.
KDE Plasma can get you far with its customization options, and Klassy adds more customization on top of that, and adds the translucent/transparent effects you need to emulate the Win7 look.
Just a heads up while the look might be easy to emulate the feel part will at best be close. Which is actually good because a lot about that is rather shoddy in windows… and focussing on getting what you had with windows might make you miss stuff you didn’t think you wanted. Like MMB click on scrollbars, or dragging and resizing windows with Super+LMB/RMB
I bet it’ll still try to install itself on that hardware though and break it.
I’ve got a full screen ad for Windows 11 one day, despite having TPM 2.0 turned off. Not sure what exactly was written there, as I have turned it off immediately, but fuckers probably advertise their shitty “Windows 11-compatible” computers or some other shit.
