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?
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 just upgraded my work surface book 3 to 11 and for me it seems that program start faster, not slower 🤔
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.
Nothing got named “Windows 9” because Microsoft feared compatibility issues with janky programs looking for the first set of characters in “Windows 95” or “Windows 98.”
Later this was changed by the marketing department to some blather about “wanting consumers to perceive a clean break from the previous version.” But then, Microsoft also claimed Windows 10 would be the Last Windows, and it would just have feature updates built on top of it forever as a service. So you sure as fuck can’t take anything they say at face value.
I think when Microsoft said Windows 10 was the last version, they were serious about it. And they kept it up for a pretty long time too. I think windows 11 happened only because some marketing person wanted to be able to pitch a new version, and a UX refresh was already being implemented.
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.
Windows 11 is garbage:
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.
So bother with all that mac imitation especially when the upgrade is not possible? Just buy the more power efficient, faster and improved value chrome book.
Wait, who is talking about ChromeOS? I thought we were talking about Win10 v Win11.
I through that in for bait ❤️ for the MS bros
I swear, the fact that people treat operating systems as if they were 90s kids arguing about Sega vs. Nintendo is exhausting and I have zero patience for it.
Coolaid for any company is exhausting. Yet here we are, entire ecosystems built to serve coporate self interest and sheep drink it.
The first release of windows 11 LTSC is supposed to be out sometime this year too.
Much like the 10 version, I expect it to have most of the bloat removed and only require a couple tweaks.
Long term servicing “Channel”
Ah, that was it. Thanks!
I use 10 at home and 11 at work and I can’t say I’ve really noticed a difference tbh. Apart from the start menu I guess.
Feels similar to what people said about 7 and 10.