How long has windows 11 been out? Edit: Since October 2021.
Why do I use a “health” check to see if I can upgrade? (My PC can’t be upgraded, so I guess it’s unhealthy?)
I guess your options are:
-
Do hacky workarounds to install Win11. If you make an install disc with Rufus there’s a checkbox to do this automatically. There’s no guarantee MS won’t bork your install at some point due to this, but so far it’s worked well for people.
-
Install Linux.
-
Stay on Win10 and lose software support from MS and your installed programs. This is risky, and the longer you do it the more risky it’ll get.
-
Send your PC to the landfill and buy a new one.
-
And yet, whenever I see it, w11 feels like beta software to me. There’s apparently stuff being added and removed all the time. Broken updates every now and again…
I haven’t used Windows much for ages even though I tried to follow a little what was going on on that front, but it never felt that way with the previous versions.
Linux Mint is also an option 😉
Linux
Mintis also an option 😉
The most frustrating aspect isn’t that the Windows would stop updating, but that everything else stops supporting it as well. W10 gets retired - Chromium browsers stop updating - Websites detect your UA and puts a popup block suggesting you to download a new version rendering sites unusable. Shit’s snowballing for the end user.
That’s most likely going to take a long while though. Win 7 ended mainstream support in 2015 and extended in 2020, the last chrome version to run on it is 109 which was released in 2023.
It’s the cost of installing Linux. 🤷
That’s not what this post is about.
I understand, and agree, with the sentiment that more people should switch to Linux, but please don’t pretend the answer to every topic regarding Microsoft or Windows is “just switch to Linux”. It is for some, but it derails and invalidates a necessary conversation about shitty behaviour by Microsoft.
I have a machine running linux at home, I’m not afraid of a package manager, but Linux is not the answer to everything. Not yet at lesst.
I can’t refuse to use windows at work, and much as i would sometimes like to, I can’t just go and quit over what OS our computers run. That would end poorly for my livelihood and family.
The purpose of this article is to highlight unfair behaviour by Microsoft, especially towards businesses, which is a topic that needs more attention. Microsoft is in every level of infrastructure in almost every big corporation, and no matter how attractive linux is, that doesn’t make the dangers of centralised IT belonging to one company any less relevant.
We should all do more to lobby for more companies and corporations switching to Linux, but replying with “just switch to Linux smh” is not pushing that agenda.
i think the problem is the game of peoples reasoning to not get off windows.
I do agree its not the answer to move everyone to linux (just for context, my desktop is a modified windows 11, laptop is garuda(arch based), media nas is debian), its just a subset of the people have really terrible priorities.
for those who have hardware with gen 7 intel or order, yeah the situation kinda sucks. If youre IT at a company, also sucks. for those staying on 10 strictly because privacy reasons, is pretty silly given they already made the tradeoff that they rather trade off some privacy staying on windows to have a reletively hassle free experience installing other stuff (this applies even more to those using windows 7, which I find hilarious how stalwart they are not moving off the OS)
outside of how updates are handled and aome telemetry, windows 11 could be modified to have a very close to windows 10 experience, its just a game of people not wanting to make that jump if they are an individual user. I see it as a game of them not willing to put any effort in any direction to fix their situation.
Janette in finance is going to murder whoever tries to give her a FOSS alternative to Excel or forces her to fuck with a VM or web Excel.
We remember the last IT admin that tried to do a platform swap on her. RIP Patrick.
"Hey Janette. Switching to Linux will save the company $$$$$$$ per year.
Your options are:- Create more value than that so it’s worthwhile to stay on Windows for you
- Find a new job
- Deal with it"
As someone who uses Excel on Windows and Calc on Linux, I can totally understand. There are some big differences so there’s a valid reason for sticking with Excel. Casual users won’t notice anything big, but advanced users will.
On the other hand, if you’re an advanced Excel user, it usually means you’re trying to make it do stuff that it isn’t very good at. If you want stuff that Calc can’t provide, it’s a clear sign you should have written that calculation in R or Python a long time ago.
I really wish there was a more sensible path from WYSIWYG sheets to full programing language and database. Heck even better find a way to make calculation description procs that can be ran as separate functions for better scalability
LabVIEW pulls off visual programming pretty gracefully. It feels like, it’s written by, and for, electrical engineers, so if you’re not familiar with circuit diagrams, it’s going to take a while to wrap your head around it. However, it proves to me that programming can look very different too. Let’s just hope that eventually someone does something similar to matrices, dataframes etc.
And honestly, I’ve been using Excel for work stuff a lot lately (no OO or I’d use that) and it fucks up a lot and in maddening ways. Click a cell at the bottom of your multi-page sheet “Oh, you must have been trying to click A5 so I’m going to scroll way the fuck up here”
Copy-paste from other (even MS) apps also sometimes does weird shit
Oh, it certainly has infuriating quirks. Like, if you copy a cell from here and you plan to paste it into 15 different places here and there. Somewhere along the way, you’ll accidentally add some text to another cell, and you lose the content of the clipboard. You need to copy that thing a second time in order to keep on pasting in the remaining places. Like, why is this a feature? Editing one cell suddenly kicks out whatever you had copied earlier? Why?
Fortunately, Calc still has a sensible clipboard that actually remembers what you put there.
I think the most infuriating part about web Excel and desktop Excel is that they don’t have feature parity.
There’s stuff that works on desktop but not web and it’s really frustrating.
Don’t you know? Some calculations can only be done locally. They are too complicated to be performed over the cloud. It needs to be done on your i3/4GB RAM PC.
It’s time to move to talking about spreadsheets on Linux instead of gaming on Linux
I’m really glad during the pandemic, a bunch of departments in my company focused on getting everyone Linux laptops. That led to a widespread adoption companywide.
I doubt any department is going to get approval to move to Windows 11 and deal with Microsoft’s fees.
I doubt any department is going to get approval to move to Windows 11 and deal with Microsoft’s fees.
What fees are you talking about? Genuinely curious because I haven’t seen any articles about new or increasing business fees.
I mean, Microsoft isn’t free. Linux is.
Are your network, systems and infrastructure managing themselves?
We never had windows servers. So there was never a licensing cost there.
Business license. You need to license the OS and get the business version, times however many computers. And we’ll need to buy new computers, get the win 11 business, and deal with all the Microsoft bs like office 365 etc.
Or just slap a Linux OS and have it join the rest of the fleet.
What office do you use?
libre office is great
It’s not that great, I’ve recently tried such a piece of abandonware as the Linux version of WordPerfect (never used it before, just digital archaeology), and the fact that you can show any part of the document as text with escape sequences is just wonderful. Not using it cause I need Cyrillic symbols (which doesn’t work even with single-byte encodings like ISO8859-5 and KOI8-R, I do have the fonts installed) and UTF-8 (that could even be optional, but no).
But that’s about modern formats more than it is about LO. They are too complex and Web-like (inside) for my taste. Everything is better than pre-XML Word formats, of course.
So I’ve got a year to get everything I need running on Fedora. My only concern is Linux audio configs as I never have to use audio running servers.
Unless you are running some really bizarre hardware, I don’t really see how you’ll have to worry about any of that with a modern pipewire stack
This is just going to lead to people using outdated Windows 10 for various reasons. I don’t use Windows much but have it installed. The trackpad gesture customization is basically gone in Windows 11 but was at least serviceable in Windows 10 (to change virtual desktops and volume easily).
Is it me or is Microsoft being boldly presumptive and an asshole?
To be fair, my wife’s previous company, when it learned that all its Windows machines were reporting back home everything about it (which could interfere with litigation at the time, the company went Meh. ) and it was a medium-sized contractor.
I want to believe big Mic can only push us so far.
$61 for most folks, $45 for people using Microsoft Intune or Windows Autopatch.
So… not really expensive at all I guess
If that’s per machine that’s pretty huge.
It is. And the price of ESUs goes up each year that a product is EOL.
The cost of ditching Windows 10 at your business and upgrading to the latest software might end up being a rather expensive process, Microsoft has revealed. Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, with businesses then needing to pay out for its Extended Security Updates (ESU).
Why would anyone pay for extended support if they’re ditching Windows 10 and upgrading to 11?
I’m confused, where is ditching 10 mentioned?
It’s the fourth word in the quote.
So everyone complains about Windows updates, and then they complain about no Windows updates too. Microsoft can’t win.
Oh wow, people complaining that forcing enshittified Windows updates breaks their workflow are also complaining about constantly having to shell out money to continue receiving security updates? What hypocrites! /s
My humor is lost on many
I don’t complain about updates. I complain about them being shoved down my throat
Windows has a tendency to force install updates at the most awkward times. Especially when you really don’t want Windows to reboot.
Companies will fire whoever is <30 so the boomers can afford to keep using their precious Microsoft until they die(they cant/won’t retire).
30 year olds aren’t boomers.
Really? I had no idea.