yeah, I updated one machine that was running Win10, it’s now running LinuxMint
I moved to pop!_os on the 14th and I am not looking back
My windows laptop has been disconnected from WiFi while I back stuff up so I can migrate it to Linux. Last windows device I own.
Looking forward to them building out on Pop OS and hoping they do these:
- Apps in Folders and Folders in Folders and Folders in Folders in Folders for App Launcher (For better app organization)
- Having different task bars for each workspace pinned and saved to save different workflows
- A simple quick way to add Icons to Executable Apps instead of manually finding each to add them. Maybe an app to make executables integrated right away and to simply put Icon on it by picking an icon
good for you.
remember, you’re not alone and many people are making the switch. find a community you like and help each other.
Welcome. It’s a good OS for me.
The logic behind the voice controls sounds pretty questionable, but it’s supposedly backed by data showing that users spend billions of minutes talking in Microsoft Team meetings, according to Mehdi — so they’re already used to talking on the computer, right?
Do they really reason like this? Oh my. That’s stupid. And here I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people.
As with a lot of corporate thinking, someone is tasked to justify the idea after the fact. Its not that they are unclever but that they think backwards. Conclusion first, support later.
I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people
As a programmer, I’ve had numerous colleagues who have ended up as software engineers at MS. They were mostly either unbelievably lazy or extremely incompetent. The rest who were both ended up there as managers.
Microsoft’s technology specialist are top notch regarding their own product. The other 90% are sales(wo)men and their managers.
deleted by creator
TBF this was all more than 5 years ago when the job interviewing process at most IT companies involved just putting a moistened finger underneath the candidate’s nostrils. Apparently the programmer job market is pretty horrific these days, although I wouldn’t know since I drive a school bus now.
Linux is the only viable solution to this mess. And no it is not as scary as it seema
Does Lemmy have a “Stallman was right” community? Or is that just all of Lemmy.
i was thinking the same thing
If you replace the c/ with ! it will become a clickable link that will take the visitor to their local instance’s copy of that community.
thanks :)
No problem, thanks too! :)
See ya on Windows 7 with 0patch micropatches :D
yay! hi mint!
I am also newly minty fresh.
Although up graded anyway because the games I play aren’t an Linux.
The only downside is gaming.
I made a portable flashdrive for Linux for anything I want to keep privet and left windows for exclusively gaming.
Games work great in Linux!
And that’s not like “oh, about 3/4 of my favorite old games work without too much trouble.” It’s more like opening steam and “holy crap, half of my old favorites have native Linux versions and everything else just works using proton.”
Remember, the Steam Deck and the general shittiness of Microsoft has directed a lot of Valve’s resources towards gaming on Linux.
If you want to play some brand new AAA multiplayer thing with rootkit type anti cheat, then maybe you’d be stuck dual booting into windows.
I’d argue that those games could be abandoned, because there is SO much choice out there that I am certain I already own copies of dozens of games that I will never play. But if it’s a matter of playing what your friends are into, then yeah make the computer adapt to the human needs and not the other way around.
Can’t wait to see the day when every game, or as close to 100% as possible, are made for Linux Native and Linux Compatible. We are getting there day by day
If someone, totally not me, were in possession of exe-files of games outside a platform like Steam, Epic or whatever, would it be possible to run them on a Linux distribution? Say something like a Steam rip or a GOG rip. Said someone has tried researching but didn’t find any conclusive answers
Yes. It’s very easy. There’s really two ways to do it. You can actually open Steam and add non-steam games to steam if you want it all in the same place. Otherwise you can use something like Lutris, which is what I do. That gives you a nice place for everything also and you can even load your Steam games on. But yes you can absolutely use GOG stuff and exe files.
What would adding the games to Steam accomplish? I assume I can’t just log on to my account and have the required files to download and install the games since they’re not originally from Steam. Or is it just a matter of being able to launch them once they’re added to the client? Or a convenience thing?
If it’s a new release sometimes it takes a minor fiddle but zero issues more than not.
So, I don’t know off the top of my head, but I need to figure it out as well because I have plenty of game installers that I’ll want to use eventually. Lots in my GOG account, others from 20 years ago with sources lost to time, lol.
I would expect that Steam could be used as a launcher, but I know there is also an app called Lutris for managing games and compatibility layers and such.
I’m thinking about it, and yeah I may have not yet installed a windows version of a game outside of Steam at all. Honestly I have most often installed Linux native versions via steam.
Lutris and one other program is used for that, I seem to remember. I’ll probably have to do some research. What’s the current go-to distro for gaming?
I’m not sure there is a go-to, which is good. There are some gaming-focused ones to be sure, but i’m using Mint which is super mainstream focused and user friendly (and based on ubuntu and debian) and I’ve had a great experience.
Even some Windows rootkits work well with proton. For example Helldiver 2 with nProtect work perfectly since release.
Absolute truth. I haven’t run into a single game that doesn’t run on my second-from-top-of-the-line gaming PC I built last year under Linux. I know they exist because I see articles about a developer removing Proton support for odd reasons, but it hasn’t impacted me yet.
MS has largely made their own OS irrelevant by putting the Office Suite in the cloud. If you need Excel but don’t want Copilot throwing all your screengrabs to Redmond a box running Ubuntu or Mint or Bazzite or MacOS (a legit option for some people with niche applications that cater to the Apple crowd). MS is following the same playbook with the Xbox brand. If everything is an Xbox then why would you harness yourself to a crappy MS branded one?
It’s funny you mention the office side of things in addition to gaming, because I have remarked about the same thing.
Using Librewolf(firefox) on Linux, all of the M365 applications work fine in the browser. Probably even better, since I can actually close them when I want to. I use Teams the most, which is obviously a very connected thing. But for a word processor, which seems like the most local thing ever, the web app lets me share in MS format and accept comments and all that.
I could absolutely see Microsoft’s execs planning out the most efficient way to grind every bit of value out of the windows brand on their path to subscription everything.
Depending on the games you play, thanks to Valve with Proton and Steam Deck, most games are actually already playable on Linux. The only exception is newer multi-player online games with kernel-level anticheat. I haven’t done any gaming on Windows in years pretty much.
While there is quite the push thanks to Valve, they built upon the work of others, mostly Wine (which I think they fund nowadays) and DXVK (they hired the dev after a short while). So they’re definitely not freeloading, but the main lifting has been done by Codeweavers and Wine contributors through their massive work over the years, plus the quantum leap that was DXVK.
I’m not trying to shame Valve here, they definitely go beyond what they’d be required to by license, but I feel it’s also not fair to call them the reason most games work under Linux when others have poured literal years of work into making it possible.
I assumed you knew I was talking about the DXVK dev given that he’s literally an employee of Valve, as you mentioned. Either way, I’ll now be more detailed with my comment.
Of course all the contributors to Wine deserve credit too, and I do have an active Crossover license, but Valve are the ones who explicitly made a push for gaming on Linux and focused specifically on the gaming aspect. Wine covers everything, not just gaming, Proton is specifically for gaming. It’s doubly true given that they want to sell more units of the Steam Deck so they can get more people into the Linux and Valve ecosystem. Not that you don’t know that, but it’s worth pointing out regardless.
I’ve been daily driving Linux since before Proton was even a thing, and the difference between gaming then versus now is not even comparable, it is infinitely better now and keeps improving. I no longer have to hope that a new game will work or that I can somehow manage to get the right set of libraries and flags to get it to run, if a new game comes out and it doesn’t have a kernel-level anti-cheat, I can expect that it will work out of the box just fine without any tweaking because I have seen this happen multiple times now. I’ve even started getting into Mac gaming to get some of that tweaking and configuring thrill back that I used to get from Linux gaming, having to tweak and configure things to get them to work properly or to work even better.
Steam has a native Linux client and every game I bought on Windows runs just fine on Linux.
All my older, non-steam games, like “Deus Ex” or “Giants: Citizen Kabuto” run great under Wine, using the default settings. Also, there are Linux versions of DOSBox, for older games.
There is also the Lutris project. I play Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online with no issue. AND they have install scripts for many games on their site.
basically my current setup too. it took me just a couple of months on Win11 to straight up give up on Windows because it’s just not very good
Not sure why we’re surprised. And even then, it took a while for the “good” OSes to get good. Windows 7 is remembered fondly because it ended well, not because it started well.
Windows 95: OK Windows 98: Bad Windows 98 SE: OK Windows ME/2000: Bad Windows XP: OK Windows Vista: Bad Windows 7: OK Windows 8: Bad Windows 10: OK Windows 11: Bad
Windows 98 wasn’t bad. It was a big improvement in stability over 95. Windows ME/2000 were two completely separate products. Win 2000 was based on NT which always got better until maybe Vista. Vista itself wasn’t bad. The problem was end users not liking security. Vista made it easier than sudo to temporarily elevate security and everyone still complained. So they backed off on 7 which was less secure because it didn’t enforce security elevation as much.
You also can’t list 98SE and ignore Win 8.1. 8.1 was a bandaid fix for the start menu of 8 but was still a bad. Not to mention that there was also Win95 OSR1 and Win95 OSR2.
There’s no significant difference between 10 and 11 to claim one is good and the other is bad. All the spyware and advertising garbage in 11 was also in 10.
We can all agree that ME was a complete clusterfuck, though. “What if your desktop was also a Webpage and what if it crashed about every hour?”
Active Desktop. That actually started with Windows 98, or at least that’s when it came bundled with. You had to install it on purpose on Windows 95 and NT4.
You could do some interesting tricks with this if you wrote your own local content for it. Different wallpaper images on different monitors, interactive wallpaper effects, and so forth. I have no idea what its actual intended use case was nor what anyone at Microsoft was smoking when they made this available by default. Parking anything on there that accessed external web content always struck me as rather a bad idea.
*backed off on 7 ?
I think you’re also overlooking that the driver model changed for Vista, so tons of hardware listed as supporting Vista was just extremely unstable at release until hardware vendors figured out the new driver model
If its drivers, then XP was really bad. It was so bad it didn’t even support HD’s bigger than 128GB at release despite Win2k supporting the larger drives.
It’s insane how much extra time, effort and sanity you can retain simply by switching to Linux. I initially switched a few years ago, then fully shortly after. Using my PCs has never been better and I had no issues with gaming. The only games that don’t work are some of the live service ones I’ll never be interested in.
One of the best decisions in my life, right up there with deleting all social media. Life keeps getting better, relatively speaking, but of course rich pedophiles just can’t tolerate us having a good time.
Switched everything to Bazzite as a start. Easiest switch after figuring out Windows sabotages boot drives.
I may have pirated all my Windows but man it feels good to be off that ride. Spoofing corporate licenses for the authenticator was such a hassle.
These threads feel kinda redundant, all comments are just preaching to the choir.
Can anyone comment about anything besides “[…] switched to Linux […]”?
What else do you expect everyone to do? Please enlighten us if you have something more to offer than switching to Linux — which seemingly is the best option currently.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t, I am saying that there’s more to discuss than “switched to Linux /thread”.
For example let me just quote microsoft “The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.” and think about what that means for your workplace. Windows isn’t going to vanish in a few years. The companies that have a lot of windows PCs will have to deal with increased hardware requirements in an already expensive market, have to wrangle user settings that the ai set on voice commands or fight against Microsoft to shut it all down.
I feel like there’s going to be a lot of wasted productivity in the coming years spend on fixing what ai broke.
I think it’s time for a class action lawsuit. But yes, you make a good point. Our state agency just got new PCs due to the ending of windows 10 support, and it sucks because I have no way to turn off the AI bullshit because I’m not an admin. As much as I enjoy now having a machine with bluetooth so I can use earbuds, I’d go back to my old work PC in a heartbeat.
Just saying, you might have a sympathetic IT department. Stuff like that I’m more than happy to come and disable.
Hell, there are one or two of my users I make administrators of their machines, along with the advice to not do anything I wouldn’t do.
Sure, I switched to Mac.
Don’t they also push their new AI on customers? I don’t use MacOS so I’m a bit ootl on that.
There are a few ai based tools offered, but nothing shoved in your face.
There are several common refrains on Lemmy that many people find cathartic. If you don’t care to tell us about your preferred Linux distro again, maybe another thread will pop up soon about how streaming services are enshittified and you can tell us about what you’re self-hosting again.
I use arch btw
I get wanting to tell people that you’ve switched from windows but these threads just feel too repetitive to be engaging, there’s no interesting discussion when everyone is just repeating the same points every month.
There’s also no discussion about the article or if there is then I couldn’t find it because of all the switched to Linux comments.
Oh well, back to other threads…
Just downvote. Downvotes don’t mean you dislike them or think they’re wrong, it just means you think the comment should have less visibility.
windows 10 LTSC from massgrave.dev site for afew years, but that will come to an end too. after that if you hate yourself there are the BSDs, or you can install hackintosh too. but the linuxes are the most mature alternative that won’t just fuck you over
Stay on 10 and force M$ to give further updates because of sheer popularity, just like they had to with XP
Companies have already updated, new notebooks come with windows 11, it’s sadly inevitable that most users will sooner or later be switched to windows 11.
For now, the Copilot features will be technically opt-in, but it’s more than possible that this will change in the future.
As much as i dislike some Windows 11 elements, let’s stick to facts. The headline make it seem way worse than it actually is, although still not good at all.
This is how Microsoft has rolled out everything for decades.
- opt in
- opt out when prompted
- turn off from control panel
- turn off from registry
- turn off from two places in registry
- turn off with 3rd party app
- “you’re being weird, everyone uses that”
Microsoft is going to implode with the AI bubble
I hope you’re right but they’ve been overdue since USA vs Microsoft.
MS is waaaay too big to fail.
Yes. At this point they are pretty much trying to fail but failing at that.
Forcing users to ditch WIndows 10? I can’t help but feel like this is a giant media campaign by microsoft to make people switch to Win 11. Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. I can still use Windows XP if I want to.
Corporate users will find it unacceptable to use an OS without regular security updates. Individual users will do whatever they want as per usual. Unfortunately without the security updates, the average Windows 10 user is going to be less and less secure over time, although MS will undoubtedly patch major things.
Long time windows user, games retained me but I found Proton so bye bye forever windows. Now convincing my wife to switch it’s the real challenge haha
Just do it while she’s at work!
Wow the new Windows 11 UI update looks wild… I like it.
“Honey, why is the wallpaper of ‘Hannah Montana’?”
How bad would running Windows 10 past support be exactly? Seems like most vulnerabilities should have been patched by now.
Extended security updates are available. This can be activated for free using Microsoft Activation Scripts.
Microsoft tech support has been repeatedly caught using these scripts to resolve support tickets for license issues. (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-support-cracks-windows-for-customer-after-activation-fails/) Also, the open source MAS code is hosted on Microsoft-owned Github, so they are appearantly not very concerned with people taking advantage of this exploit.
If you go this route, please also see the FAQ entry here. There is currently a glitch with commercial ESU keys (which this uses) and Windows Update will continue to claim that your device will no longer receive security updates. This is also effecting W10 LTSC systems. However, you can verify that the license key is active through Command Prompt and instructions are given in the FAQ.
See an example here:
Microsoft said both issues could allow attackers to execute code with elevated privileges, although there are currently no indications on how they are being exploited and how widespread these efforts may be. In the case of CVE-2025-24990, the company said it’s planning to remove the driver entirely, rather than issue a patch for a legacy third-party component.
The security defect has been described as “dangerous” by Alex Vovk, CEO and co-founder of Action1, as it’s rooted within legacy code installed by default on all Windows systems, irrespective of whether the associated hardware is present or in use.
New attack vectors are found constantly. Having no support can very likely result in a system that can be automatically breached in a few weeks to months.
As long as you don’t have a public IP on your device and are in a trusted network you should be fine. But if you use a public wifi or somehow expose a port to the internet you’re increasingly vulnerable for each day after the last security update.
There’s always going to be vulnerabilities, that’s why they’re ending support. They don’t want to spend time updating an OS they don’t want people using.
Windows 10 is probably fairly secure… today. In 2 years, someone might discover a new vulnerability, and you won’t get the update. If there’s a new way to do web security and the browsers need OS support to implement it, you’ll be stuck on legacy security settings.
It’s not going to take 2 years…
New vulnerabilities are found on a daily to weekly basis.
To put this in perspective. In 2024 there were 1360 vulnerabilities reported, 587 confirmed with 33 deemed critical.
I would hazard there are critical vulnerabilities that are right now being worked on, or are complete but unreleased. There was a concern of the exploit being patched. That concern is gone for millions of PC(s).
Out of curiosity, does anyone know how many critical vulnerabilities are currently unpatched in Windows 7?
Short term honestly likely fine for your avg person. After even six months tho I wouldn’t trust using it for banking, government sites or anything more sensitive then looking at cat memes.
Its probably more lazy than anything. Security always depends on what you need to protect. If you want to keep using it, dont keep sensitive information on it. People will target vulnerabilities in Windows 10 as time goes on.
If you want to keep running Win10, look into 0patch. They do in memory patching and are MUCH smaller, it’s what a real OS manufacturer would put out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a conspiracy where Microsoft purposely left a massive hole in windows 10. And they are going to attack their own system in 2 months and be like “oh noez, welp guess you have to come to windows 11”.
They don’t care about forcing you to 11 other than it saves them development costs. All the ads and spyware are also in 10.
It’s the same reason Linux distro’s don’t patch old kernels but force you to upgrade every 12 years.
I hate windows 11 so much. Notifications are so much harder to read compared to 10 due to the right menu being nonexistant, instead we have this floating notification area that I never use. Everything takes ages to load, even on my beefy pc Settings still takes like 10 seconds to open. And it feels like the programmers died halfway though re-coding the context menus. Everything slightly more advanced can only be done through the old stuff so you end up with this awful mess where there’s no design consistency, and it takes twice the clicks to get to something.
Glad I ditched windows 11 for linux mint.
