Damn, that sucks. When does my Arch support end?
Nuance
Okay if you wanna get technical, some folks define support as meaning some sort of official paid support process, in which case there is none at all. But I feel like a funnier joke would be that Arch “support” lasts until there’s any sort of update to any package you have.
If only there were some kind of alternative… I would call it “Linux”
The entire article is based on a false premise:
With ESU, you can still get security updates and minor fixes or improvements, but the catch is that extended support ends on October 13, 2026.
Not true, there are three years of ESU updates available.
Do you have a source for that? Everything including Microsoft itself I find tells me that free ESU support for private users will end in Oct 26. Do you mean some paid feature for companies or so?
You can activate 3 years of updates for free with Microsoft Activation Scripts: https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol
You are talking about the business extension that was already available everywhere, but it requires buying it. I haven’t looked into it but I haven’t seen anything saying it was free. The article is talking about Germany and the free version that Europe forced Microsoft to enable for everyone, even without a subscription - but only in Europe. That one is only one year.
The link I shared contains steps to activate the 3-year extension for free, on a non-business computer. I don’t care if this extension is marketed towards business accounts. You can activate all 3 years on your personal computer for free.
Piracy is usually free yeah but that really doesn’t count.
I honestly think it’s a bit of a stretch to call it piracy when the open-source code is hosted on Microsoft-owned Github, and Microsoft support has been caught using it themselves: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-support-cracks-windows-for-customer-after-activation-fails/
I just know they said from the start that you could buy three years at escalating prices. Then later, closer to the original end of support they made the first year of ESU free for users in the EEA, and then they made it buy-able for reward points or something like that for everyone.
tells me that free ESU support for private users will end in Oct 26
You’re probably right on that
With how Microsoft are handling updates lately, no longer getting them might actually be a selling point
I’m migrate my notebook to Linix Mint, perform way better than Windows 10.
I’m trying to figure out a way to transport my modlists from MO2 in Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim to run on Linux, once this is done, i goodbye windows forever on my personal devices
Mac is going to shit too, which is so sad since that transition to ARM was a huge success. Their OS is ridiculously janky dogshit now. It’s not Microsoft level bad but it’s heading in the same direction.
I’m glad I finally started switching. The Linux stuff is more annoying in some ways but in predictable and therefore manageable ways. Mac=there is no war in bag sing sei. Windows=I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further.
What is wrong with Mac? I find macOS to be very clean and nice. I find it similar to KDE Plasma.
It’s been a while since I used Mac OS but I remember it was quite janky even around 2020.
And of course the whole liquid glass thing is just bonkersly stupid. Vista did it years ago and it was terrible back then because it just made the UI hard to see. I’m not interested in how clever it is.
Okay, cmd+space and search.
Waits.
Fucking why?
Results pop up, if what I want is on top (never is) I click and just before I do, it changes the top result and opens something else.
Fucking why?
Liquid Glass just existing.
Fucking why?
Giant window corner radius
Fucking why?
Dynamic resorting lists are awful.
I dont use macs, havent for years, but its genuinely sad their ui has fallen to that low.
It’s also ridiculous that I’ve never got to this point in the first place. Spotlight was a solved problem. It was fast as hell. You type, it did. That was it no drama no waiting nothing it just did the thing and it did it fast and predictably then this last update comes out and they ruined spotlight.
My iphone just updated to the version with liquid glass and it’s the worst thing I have every fucking seen. Wasted space on the edges, over exaggerated animations, moving buttons that are normal (contacts in the phone app) from 1 click to 2+ depending on what ever fucking mood is is in, the lag on all the buttons where things bop around right as you click as if it’s loading ads on a page right before clicking a URL. I gave it a week and then sold my phone and go and android. Hurts breaking an entirely apple ecosystem household,but fuck liquid glass.
Apple‘s mobile UI definitely needed a visual overhaul. It’s time. But liquid glass was a step in the wrong direction. I’m firmly in the camp of neumorphism. This was horseshit. This does not solve a problem. It is not visually interesting. It is an obstacle in every goddamn fucking way. This says they had no engineers or designers in the room when they made this, it was all business majors and they fucking suck.
I’m firmly in the camp of neumorphism.
Why not good old 3d controls (or skeuomorphism) like in Winamp classic skin or Windows 3.11 or you get the general idea?
Why even combine fake 3d with flatness?
Also “electronic paper” (as in no 3d look, just lines and geometric figures and fillings, but not what’s called flat design - element borders are lines, elements without borders don’t exist) - fine. Think, if talking Apple, MacOS 8, but with less pretense.
Neumorphim mockups I’ve seen were visually interesting, clean and easy to read and understand, and flexible.
I have a Mac for work (dev shit) and used to love it. Still prefer it over Windows, but what really bugs me: All the preinstalled jank you can’t get rid of makes it do weird default behavior way too often. And the screens man. Trying to use multiple monitors on a dock makes me hate my life a little more every day. It’s an absolute shitshow
I’m a developer who uses both Linux and Mac (because of company machine) for work. Directly comparing them every day, I’m just much more happy with the Gnome (with popshell) experience than Mac all the time
I’ve actually been really enjoying MacOS because of how they’ve sort of abandoned it. There’s no gimmicky bullshit in it. It’s just simple and old school and just works.
Maybe I’ll give it a fresh install when the next OS releases.
There was a period when “ergonomics” became something users assumed to have been achieved for all eternity. Late 90s, early 00s, when developers generally made UIs following strict guidelines and looking natively with no designer bullshit.
Before that period (and before popularization of computers) “ergonomics” was something absolutely paramount, half of any mechanism a human uses. Another half would be the actual functionality, which differed between domain areas, but ergonomics didn’t. And once a factory would start issuing those mechanisms with some kind of control panel, it wouldn’t just release an update a few days earlier, no Star Trek transporters, no Harry Potter transfiguration, Carl!
So, somehow making ergonomic UIs is now irrelevant for profitability of making a product.
It’s not really about AI. It’s not really about ads. It’s not really about telemetry. And it’s not even really about something being slow.
It’s just about ergonomics of old concepts implemented being by inertia not totally awful, but gradually worsening, and ergonomics of new concepts implemented being non-existent. That’s all.
After spitting left and right for a few years even I would generally be fine with agentic AI or whatever else. If those things had ergonomic controls. They don’t.
virii still work w/o upgrade
Even I, a long long long and ooooold ms-fanboy finally ditched win11 in fear of the copilot shit hole that’s coming.
And now I regret not having switched years earlier. Everything is a lot better now, and those things that are worse are just worse because companies hate Linux (looking at Logitech et al).
And when even I left windows (I do have every certificate from them, sold hundreds of thousands of licenses and whatnot) that tells something 😔 sadly so, I might add.
Long story short: fuck copilot.
Copilot is not the problem. If Copilot was just one more program (like Notepad or Paintbrush), I wouldn’t have an issue with it. But Microsoft (and other companies) insist in putting it every-fucking-where. Like in Notepad? WHY?! So yeah, fuck Microsoft.
Yes totally. They’re a company, they want to make money. Sure, fine. But if things stop being optional (or at least uninstallable like fucking onedrive) then I get pissed.
When I want AI, I start one. But in settings? In notepad? In my coffemachine and nutsack-warmer? Noooooo.
piper manages logitech mice and it’s quite good!
Yeah but not mine sadly. G502 x plus wireless
I know that isn’t the point of your comment, but what issues do you have with Logitech hardware on Linux? I have just mice from them, but honestly an embarrassing amount. I just use Solaar and I can configure all I need? I also have always only used the onboard memory (so I can move them between computers), and don’t really use macros though…
Solaar only let’s me do DPI for mine. I have to set that fucker up in a VM with lghub and use onboard profile and input-remapper. Without mapping the extra buttons in lghub to something, inputremapper gave me nothing to work with)
So far I have not needed my scripts or macros yet, so that is a problem for later 😁
(G502 x plus lightningsomething btw).
Get off American monopoly tech. The desktop is the easiest.
A GNU/Linux desktop has endless advantages and doesn’t include the anti-features.
Linux, in some form, runs a lot of your life already, even if you don’t know it.
If your a tech, you really should deeply know Linux/UNIX anyway.
Windows is being re-written from the ground up to be ‘agentic’. This means that Copilot is not going to be a feature of Windows, Windows is going to be a feature of Copilot.
Oh, and Copilot is going to be writing the code too. Microslop brags that 30% of their code is AI.
Hey hey, let’s be honest here, bragged, it’s been 9 months or so by now. Who knows how much of windows is vibecoded at this point, it might be as high as 50%.
Maybe the new stuff. The Windows NT core has 22 years’ worth of code.
And following decent coding practices there shouldn’t be a ton of code there (not saying a small amount, just little enough that AI would be able to compete in volume in this amount of time), just because less is so often more.
My office jumped ship at XP, it was that bad. We went to Linux because getting work done was actually more important.
So many things finally caught up, we did a lot of server client things with the Linux stack for field offices.
Now they call it the cloud. Which means it isn’t your server.
XP started the enshittification and it continued year after year…
I just installed Linux Mint last weekend. Working great so far!
People aren’t just rejecting it and staying on 10. they are actively downgrading (going back to windows 10) or leaving the windows ecosystem entirely for Linux. Someone actually went out of their way to tally up and explain all the shit MS broke over the course of the last year. It’s a ridiculous number of things.
Microsoft removed my quick access links to my desktop folder today
why? I don’t know. I guess they want to force me to use the OneDrive desktop folder. which I do use, for shit I want synced to OneDrive. but I also have a local desktop folder I use for temp files, and fuck you very much Microsoft left me fucking use my computer how I want to
side note, I had a little program that would export a file that a user had open to their desktop in a specific format. great program, super useful for the application we were running it in, it made a multi-step process of navigating menus into a single button click. I’ve been using it for the past few years at this company. cue my surprise when some new people inform me that the button doesn’t work for them and so they haven’t been using it - BECAUSE MICROSOFT TOOK AWAY THE LOCAL USER DESKTOP FOLDER LMFAO. it blew my mind that people had to go manually create a desktop folder, I had never thought to add checking if that folder exists to the code.
Yeah, OneDrive became an instant uninstall for me because of how it works. I have 2TB of empty cloud storage that I would love to use, but refuse to completely rework my file structure. I am not going to move literally everything. I’ll let you read my boring ass work shit, I don’t care, I let Google do it probably when I upload shit to drive, I just want to organize things the way I have them, because that’s how they work.
I don’t know about such claims. I’ve just finished installing W10 on one of my laptops.
Use case? BMW coding tools are only built for Windows and using them via wine doesn’t really work.
As a long time Linux use I can’t even describe what I’m feeling right now.
Can you do a Windows VM for that?
I could sure, with usb passthrough, but the laptop is pretty shit, so it would just be painful and truthfully, I was also curious about how shitty W10 has gotten over the past 10 years.
I will reinstall linux after I’m done with it anyway.
Yep. I have 1 app that requires Windows (or Mac) that I use once every 4 or 5 weeks. I run Win 10 in a VM for that.
Eight months to learn Linux is a LONG time. You’ll be fine.
Been daily-driving Linux for several months now. There are literally zero critical workflows that I can’t do just because I’m not on Windows.
40% of things I use my PC for are browser-based. 40% have an equivalent FOSS app. 10% are Windows apps that run fine using Wine. The other 10% I can live without.
I’ve got till 2032 I’m good. Then I’ll switch to Linux which will hopefully by then be better than windows at running windows games.
It already is actually. Proton driver’s are great.
Mandatory reference to Protondb, which lists how well every game performs on Linux. 84 % of the top 100 games on Steam are rated as gold or platinum.
Yeah, it’s very well done. Only issue is anything with kernel level anticheats, need windows. Fuck that, so many great games besides gtav and call of duty.
Some games with Kernel level anti-cheat still have linux support, though. It‘s always worth checking because some game devs actually care about Linux when you would expect the don‘t.
I don’t play too many of those, so have t checked
So i lost my lol addiction, is that a negative?
Depends on what you’re doing with your spare time. Do you feel a load was lifted off your shoulders or left on your face?
😦
Windows LTSC?
Win10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 is the good one.
Updates till 2036 right?
Ummm… Yes, Proton was already mentioned in this thread so I won’t repeat it. But I’m curious which problems you have with games on Linux or did you just repeat what was true 5 (?) years ago.
Don’t get me wrong: I tried gaming on linux when proton wasn’t even remotely in the pipeline and it was
horribleimpossible. When I first heard about proton I tried again and ran into issues with the first game I tried (Europa Universalis 4, the new Paradox launcher was broken at the time) so I jumped ship again. Then I tried again in early 2025 and haven’t looked back since then. There hasn’t been a single game I tried that didn’t work (although some games needed some tinkering but that’s where protondb comes to rescue). There is one game I’d like to play (The Crew 2) that doesn’t work because of it’s anti cheat. But apart from that: Great experience!You see, I get where you might be coming from but maybe don’t way until 2032 and give it a try again?
But I’m curious which problems you have with games on Linux
Not who you asked, but I still cannot get the Sims 2 ultimate collection to even work, and I’ve been struggling with this since october lmao. The problem seems to be EA trying to force everyone to buy legacy edition thus targeting everyone making UC installable, but I refuse to buy it because not only fuck paying more for a game I’ve owned for twenty years, it also lacks the Ikea pack and bodyshop and I desperately need both. At least Lazy Duchess, the modder responsible for RPC made a patch that gives some of the functionality to legacy as well…
Also, that’s only the first hurdle. There’s like four or five small programs you need to actually play and mod the game properly, and I haven’t even gotten far enough to try to get them to work. I don’t have enough skills to understand running virtual machine stuff either, so it seems like my main rig will be stuck in win10 forever as I will not upgrade it to 11 but I also cannot sacrifice my most played game (there’s also the problem with getting paint tool SAI running that’s keeping me on windows but that’s an entirely different affair, sigh)
I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux for a few years now, and I can say Bethesda games, and specifically modding Bethesda games. That shit works a well as can be expected on windows, and if you keep the mod list light, can actually run better than vanilla.
I will say, the free Fallout 4 creation club content good enough as far as light modding goes, and runs extremely well.
Skyrim on the other hand, would honestly probably be fine if their creation club had half the mods that I want to play with.
Well Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 has weird distorted music. Apparently it’s due to .wma files and possible to convert them to MP3 (or use some weird fan patch of Proton) but that sounds like a lot of effort for something I was hoping would just work out of the box.
Not who you originally asked, but I am aware of an example where Windows is still better than Linux for a specific game: Guild Wars 2. Not because of anything directly in the game, but there is an insanely useful overlay program called BlishHUD that runs as a separate process. On Windows it just works; on Linux it is a pain to get it to mostly work.
But overall things have clearly shifted from gaming on Linux being a joke, to being possible but a huge pain, to being ok-ish but a bit clumsy, to finally being sometimes even better and on average equal. There will always be differences, and Windows currently still has the benefit of being the default. Maybe that too will change one day.
GW2 gamer here too, I’ve been switching over to Linux over the past few months and this is on one of my to-do lists(figure out HUD/overlay software for GW2).
Another hurdle I’ve had is getting mod support. For example, Tale of Two Wastelands. The standard installer is exe only and it runs via proton but it doesn’t use all CPU threads to decompile the game assets. Takes over a hour to do. Luckily someone was able to build something that fixes this for Linux, takes 10 minutes or so depending on your CPU: https://github.com/SulfurNitride/TTW_Linux_Installer
So I’m sure something is also available for GW2
That’s the biggest reason I’ve not switched. Gears of War is one of my favorite franchises, and games like that still need some time, it seems.
