Next year Windows 10 goes End of Life. Microsoft will undoubtedly push windows 11 hard, but a lot of machines won’t support it leading to a few economic points of interest:
The demand for new machines will be high, driving up cost.
The supply of unsupported machines will be high, driving down the used market.
Are you all ready?
If MS decides that my hardware is obsolete, I’ll just go full Linux 🤷♂️
Personally I use Linux Mint on my other machine and Windows on my main PC
Before Windows 10 goes EoL I’m going to get my NAS running a Windows VM for Fusion 360 and Lightroom and my main rig will be on Linux Mint as well
I just need a need to finish my NAS rebuild to get everything rolling at full steam
Unfortunately that means I need to stop buying car parts first
As your attorney I advise you to buy a motorcycle. Bikes and bike parts are cheaper. And then you can have more bikes than cars, and more bikes to buy parts for. Wait, where was I going with this again?
If you wanted to get rid of windows in general, Darktable seems to be a good alternative to lightroom, for raw editing. There’s a learning curve, but there are plenty of tutorials available.
Not sure about Fusion 360 though… Maybe FreeCAD?
Do you game at all? Gaming on Linux has made great strides, be be fair, but for a lot of titles you still need to consider a dual boot of some form of Windows, thanks to over the top anti-cheat, DRM, and developer support.
Something to consider for the gamers out there.
The only titles that don’t work in Linux are the ones with invasive anti-cheat, some multi-player titles.
Virtually all single players game work. I’ve had games that don’t work on Windows due to crashes / performance but run on Linux.
Apex started acting up on pop a year and half ago which drove me back to my windows partition (that I hadn’t seen in almost 18 months).
I don’t know if my issue is: pop, proton, steam, apex, my hardware(bad ram?), flatpaks, the deb, or something else. In my opinion it’s one of the toughest part about Linux gaming–when something goes wrong you arent going to find a ton of help since there is so much fragmentation.
But anyway, I echo your sentiment. Windows is still a necessary evil for a lot of us if you are big into PC gaming.
Apple’s the only hardware vendor for MacOS, so they’ve got slightly different incentives than Microsoft does for Windows. If a new MacOS release induces hardware purchases, that’s a lot of money for Apple. If a new Windows release induces hardware purchases, Microsoft sees little of that benefit.
Yeah, people are just going to keep using it, they just won’t get updates. That means they will be vulnerable to any exploits that come along afterward but most people don’t care. M$ shot everyone in the foot when they decided to limit windows 11 compatibility.
When windows 7 came out I knew people who stuck with windows xp until they bought a new computer with 10 or 11 on it. The market will get a slight bump from EoL but it isn’t going to force everyone with windows 10 to run out and buy a new computer immediately.
It’s mostly just to force the hands of businesses that will now have to upgrade to stay compliant with security standards
With Valve pumping all that development money and effort into proton, I will finally be able to go full Linux before Windows 10 ends it’s life. I only needed it for gaming, but those days are finally gone! Thanks Valve! _
I did it many years ago. Some minor hiccups (Mostly at the start, with a select few games taking a while before running well in proton), but overall my experience has been pretty smooth as well. Especially in like the last…3ish years? I dont think I’ve been held back from playing anything I seriously wanted to play.
IMHO people just won’t give a flying fuck about it. Most people won’t even be aware of it.
They’ll upgrade when they’ll buy a new PC, just as usual.
Just get yourself a copy of the LTSC (long term service contract) versions, they will still be supported until 2027, and in the past have been extended by up to 5 years on top.
It’s the only viable alternative to Linux, for those who can’t switch for one or another reason. Windows 11 is pure cancer.
Having used 10 and 11 interchangeably since 11 came out… meh.
I mean, maybe there are additional annoyances from the IT/sysadmin side that I just don’t bump into as a user, but besides some UX downgrades that don’t make sense (that taskbar… why?) it’s a pretty neutral change. Maybe I’m to grizzled by having been there in the switch to 95. I unironically had Windows Me on my computer there for a while. I even caved and did some Vista eventually.
But not Windows 8. Windows 8 was unusable.
The taskbar is one thing, but it’s horribly slow, even on a rather high spec laptop. The delay from clicking start menu icons to programs starting is very noticeable, and some programs freeze regularly. MS Office are actually some of the worst offenders. I tried it for 2 weeks and then did a fresh install of Windows 10.
I didn’t even mind ME, for me it was running pretty stable. I heard most issues came from people updating from 98 or 98SE to ME, a clean install was usually stable.
I skipped Vista though, went straight to 7. Still my favorite Windows. 8 was crap, 8.1 was not bad once you applied the taskbar fix.
Hm. Not been my experience going back and forth between 10 and 11, but that’s always the case with Windows, isn’t it? Bit of a crapshoot in general.
Honestly, I have no idea how to evaluate real laptop performance these days. Most of the performance issues I have on battery devices are some unholy combination of horrific power management, bad software and semi-deliberate online weirdness with services throttling you out of adblocker spite.
People are out there telling you how well Youtube is meant to perform playing video and how long the battery is meant to run based on that and I don’t even know what they mean anymore.
Funny that this started with 10 in my experience. Our family laptop did an involuntary upgrade back in 2016, and its 2 cores, 4 gigs of ram and hdd just couldn’t handle it. And none in our family was savvy enough to downgrade to 7. Thankfully same did not happen to mom’s similarly weak one, it was saved from running an EOL system by Linux)
I actually liked the full screen Start menu from 8/8.1 for the specific use case of my living room PC. You got a big 10-foot UI by default with nice large icons you could punch from across the room.
The whole put-your-mouse-in-the-corner-and-swipe for the charms menu was baffling, though. I get that this was supposed to be a tablet UI thing, but why make it mandatory for the mouse interface as well?
Windows 8, maybe. But Windows 8.1 was awesome. The optimization, it ran perfectly on a potato.
Yep. I get they wanted to pretend 8 wasn’t a complete bust, hence the 8.1 nonsense, but they should have called it Windows 9 and been honest about it. They certainly acknowledged it by the time 10 came around.
Windows 11 is garbage:
- UI is garbage, from right click to the taskbar, its a alpha release being sold to as complete product.
- settings missing alot of control panel items and you cant go back in some cases for even simple things like sound device management, network management, all settings are far far from parity.
- Poor hardware compatibility, bsod on same hardware is common occurance.
- Privacy invasive spyware. From the search service to the telemetry. Its a data mining platform
- Security is terrible. Internet connected Services are on by default that shouldnt be like search and telemetry. Any on by default service, like telemetry can and are abused with zero days. Mandated cloud services as a bandaid to poor local account security. Security is a bandaid full stop, from the kernel to cloud services its not secure by design.
Agree on 1, mostly. I forget that’s the case because I have software installed to fix it, which is fairly trivial but shouldn’t be necessary in the first place.
2 is a day one meme thing that no longer holds. Sound management in particular is now much better than Win 10 in several key areas, IMO. Likewise with 3. Echoes of Vista and Win 8.1 dragging day one legit complaints way past when they were no longer an issue.
4 and 5 are the kinds of things that average users typically don’t know or care about (and mostly don’t have to) and are debatable from a power user’s perspective. If the argument is Win10 is reaching end of support and you care about the implications of that, then you are the type of user that can fix that problem. And if you’re the kind of user who doesn’t care about a supported vs unuspported Win10, you don’t care about this specific observation either.
Let me be clear, I’m not an active apologist for Win 11 or any other Windows, I just don’t have a preference. Win11 was a sidestep, the best I can say for it is that I’m kinda glad MS was semi-forced to keep it as a separate version rather than a patch to 10. But it’s also mostly just fine. A few people got really incensed about it early on and have tried to keep up a pretense that it’s a disaster iteration in the vein of some of the really bad ones, which using it day to day is clearly an exaggeration.
11 has artificial hardware requirements built in that will prevent it from installing on a lot of computers (possibly most computers deployed in the world, at this point) which is the main issue. All those non-technical home users who bought a brand name prebuilt PC in 5, 6, however many years ago that still works just fine will not be able to upgrade.
They will be left in the lurch unless M$ relents and removes those requirements (unlikely), they all learn to patch them out themselves (extremely unlikely), or they all go buy new computers with newer hardware (extremely annoying).
As me and others have said all over this thing, Windows 10 no longer getting updates doesn’t mean it’s mandatory to update. Most of the users you describe will not notice or care that security updates die out and they will just take whatever runs in the next PC they buy, as they normally do.
This mostly matters to power users and corporations. If that. I’m arguably a power user and have zero intention to upgrade my legacy Win10 machines for this reason, either.
