The big difference is, if you make a fuzz, Apple or Microsoft won't send the secret police after you (not yet anyway), so I guess the only option left is organized outrage on social media (or flee the country to an uncertain future in the "Free West").

When even Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi jump on the bandwagon of "oh, we changed your configuration behind your back whether you like it or not," it's hard for me to have hope for the future. But Windows 11 is beyond the pale. As it is, I've already skipped Windows 8 and 10, and 11 is an even harder pass.

There are more options than ever before to avoid corporate lock-in nowadays. It just doesn't come to you - you have to go to it.

* VPN for network encryption

* Black hole filters for telemetry

* OS-like special purpose software running as admin to escape from default OS tooling (i.e browsers, game launchers)

* Throwaway accounts for all online services

* VMs for everything else

* A strong stomach to endure this burden

- Vote for a political party which creates laws to protect privacy

- Donate to companies like Signal, Noyb.eu, EFF who had success fighting for user privacy

Why is this off the table? This is precisely what you do. The other thing you do is tend your own garden and not worry about what operating system other people use.

With almost all OS updates I find the focus of new features are things that I never use even on my personal machines as a regular user, though I recognize many people do use these features. Computers are appliances for most people. Steve Jobs vision is coming to full fruition. Smart phones just had to show how it could work. And for most people computers are infinitely more usable and less scary today.

With that being said, I do think Windows 11 looks quite nice and there are a lot of little quality of life improvements. Also the removal of the awful tiles in the start menu will save me time from removing each tile one by one, so I can’t be all mad here.

I imagine if you have Windows 10 Pro you can upgrade to 11 Pro for free. I also wonder if the consumer version of Windows 11 just starts becoming truly free because Microsoft knows they will make money on search, subscriptions, and enterprise.

If it's not too late to radically alter our economic system to combat climate change (which I certainly hope it isn't) I think we can fix tech by almost extension.

The solution is to stop being a passive spectator and to start making proactive decisions. To make proactive decisions, you will need to decide what is important to you since you will never find the perfect solution. (There never was a perfect solution in any domain, only better and worse ones for a particular situation.)

If you've decided that you need Windows, that's fine. You will have to deal with the consequences of that particular decision, but it does not have to dictate every decision that follows. You can still choose applications that don't impose some sort of consumption model, require online accounts, or depend upon telemetry. I don't know what the situation is like for commercial software under Windows (surely there are some vendors who respect privacy), but there are always open source alternatives to consider. Feel free to choose according to your circumstances. If you're a graphics designer who needs Adobe products for your job, but can get away with LibreOffice for administrative tasks, then choose that mixture. Even though your decision won't put any pressure on Adobe, someone else's decision may (e.g. an office worker who uses Office 365 and Inkscape).

The way I see it, there are two big problems with the computer industry today: people don't like to acknowledge competing products that may better serve their needs when there is already a dominant player, and those who are aware of the alternatives are rarely willing to support them. In effect, this problem is partially the making of consumers who have been behaving as passive spectators.

For information, you can bring your phone with you everywhere but it is hard to do so with a laptop, so a phone wins. Phones are also easy to use for calls/messages and video, where the camera is actually better than anything available on a laptop.

A few people might want to balance their budgets, but it is also pretty easy to do on your phone, as your bank probably has an app that you can use and if not, your phone is plenty fast to do that.

Gamers might be the last who cares about the more powerful computers, but even then dedicated gamer phones exist, so maybe that niche is also slowly aging out as new gamers grew up with phones.

If you want some sort of solution, I think having a really good Linux build that works and which can be deployed on laptops in the moment a person gets too tired of windows is always a solid idea.

The tech monopolies want their tithe. That's why you can't buy Photoshop or office anymore.

Soon you won't buy Windows, you will simply rent it forever. One day you won't own your phone or computer either. It's far more profitable to extract rent from your customers indefinitely when you're the only game in town.

The government needs to step in. By a great many metrics were living in another 30's gilded age, robber barons and all.

Windows basically does not exist for home users except a few Western countries, and even there it's just due to inertia.

I've had great success with Ubuntu for non-technical users. For games you get a game console or play something in the browser. For everything else Ubuntu will do just fine.

Same with macOS... Regular folk have no reason to buy macOS. It's pure class signaling at this point.

Of course, there are business tools on each of these OSes, but if you make money with Adobe tools might as well buy the Pro OS.

Basically what I'm missing is an equilavent to Visual Studio for my line of "work" (game modding and reverse engineering with IDA + x86dbg and working with the win32 API). Writing and especially debugging windows binaries with mingw + winedbg has been painful for me so far, also I simply couldn't find any IDE/editor I could get comfortable with (I've tried VS code, kdevelop, qt creator and vim so far). Contrary to that VS simply let's me create a new project with a few clicks which lets me immediately get to work, gives me premade Release / Debug configurations with (mostly) sane defaults, an intuitive GUI for managing compiler + linker settings, running and debugging with the click of a button with multiple views for resource consumption, local vars and what not, the ability to easily debug dump files, etc. etc. Essentially in the time I tried to get basically anything done on any of the other toolsets I've probably already done some actual work on VS. It just works perfectly for my use case.

The last time I've tried running Linux I actually went through the effort of setting up a KVM VM with dGPU pass through + intel gvt-g to drive the SPICE display (I have a laptop with an integrated + dedicated gpu and that seemed like the most intuitive setup) and - while it did work fairly well - the refresh rate was kind of off (even after patching QEMU to allow for more than the hardcoded 30Hz) and there was some weird stutter that I couldn't resolve (I've tried setting up virtio devices + installing the corresponding drivers, enabling hyper-v enlightments, changing the amount of vcpus, core pinning, static hugepages, etc. already, nothing helped in my case unfortunately). Those along with the realization there isn't much of a point of not simply running it in bare metal if I'm going to be in the VM most of the time anyways, brought me back to where I am right now: running Windows out of necessity / comfort.

Not sure what to classify this wall of text as (a mixture of rant and search for suggestions?) but that's essentially the cause of the "dilemma" (nothing short of a first-world problem basically) I'm in right now: I want to run Linux as my desktop OS and regularly try to do so but as soon as I want to be productive I just have to reach out to Windows again.

Note however that if your device is designed to run Windows you may have occasional problems with WiFi or suspend. This is not a Linux fault. I am using a laptop designed for Linux and it is rock-solid.

The day these issues are resolved, Windows is no more. To me at least.

Do you want to send following data: <Data that will be collected,...> <legalese>:

Big font: NO Small font: Yes

This would be the fairest design for all. Users would be able to make informed consent, vendors get data on a moral good way.

For (3), there’s a pretty good chance just from code rot that your “settings” may not always work. Certainly not if some company’s entire business model seems to depend on the more anti-consumer values for “settings”, you can bet they will not heavily invest in testing their accuracy.

And the real problem for privacy-related settings is that if they ever fail to protect you, even being buggy for just a short period of time, your information is then out there. Leaked. Gone. Even if you close the barn door, the animals have left. It is the type of software that has to be working 100% of the time to really protect data.

So I don’t really want privacy “settings”, I want privacy, period. That should be the default and only behavior, where the user has the only keys.

You can buy a 20 pin TPM module for about £3 which can plug into the standard header and for about £7-8 for those snowflakes like ASUS that use the same 20 pin interface but with a slightly modified pin out.

The only question would be the BIOS initialization, but many OEMs have already released new BIOS revisions with added/better external TPM support or have announced their intention to do so.

For those system who don’t have a TPM header, Intel PTT and AMD’s PSP fTPM would provide the required compatibility.

And this is a good thing if this was still optional it would not put pressure on manufacturers to add TPM support as a standard feature.

Windows 10 will be supported to at least 2025 with feature updates and probably longer with critical security updates.

The fact that people complain about this is ridiculous.

This will be the most straight-forward thing to happen. I predict that MS will have to start another massive campaign to get people to upgrade again, like they did with WinXP. I wonder how well that will work if it means buying a new PC though.

I cut Windows out of my life almost entirely after the encroachment of user hostile policies such as telemetry and have found I don't really miss much.

I can't imagine there won't be ways around all that pretty soon.

The crazy hardware requirements for windows 11 won't apply to VMs apparently. And my work will provide me with a Microsoft account, so that is fine. Plus it's a work-only machine, clear segregation.

We have 3x Windows 10 laptops, a MBP that dual-boots with Windows 10, and a Windows 10 tower. On top of that, I also run a Windows 10 VM.

All are running Enterprise edition (I have the Microsoft Action Pack, which includes 10x Enterprise eds licenses), so it doesn't force updates (though it can be a little naggy at times, but I think that's fair enough for security updates at least).

All machines are kept updated at least weekly, though I stay away from the bigger "feature updates" until they've had time to bed-in.

I haven't had a single problem at all with Windows 10 updates during the years I've been using it.

As an aside: even as a relative Windows fanboi, Windows 11 seems like a pointless and unwanted exercise in moving things around and making colours more garish for no reason - a waste of a version bump.

Yes it does, I did it this week.

Unless things have changed in the last eight days this isn't right.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27624555

Edit: typo, had 'online' while I meant 'offline'.