MudMan

I mean, it may be higher than I think, because the amount I think is pretty low.

But I don’t think it’s the default. I am not THAT detached from younger people. iPads and Chromebooks are very region-specific options.

If you have numbers to any of that feel free to share them, because this is very far from a binary thing. There are literal billions of Windows PCs out there and that split isn’t going to be 90/10 (which would still leave you with hundreds of millions in the small bit anyway).

Citation gonna be extremely needed there. I have no idea what the penetration of the MS store is these days, but I’d be surprised to find most people punch in “VLC” in their app store before doing it in Chrome. Never mind that growing up with Windows 7 puts you in your mid 20s, who in their right mind bought into the Windows 8-era iteration of UWP? If you had said Windows 10 I would have rolled with it, but… yeah, gonna need so much citation.

But in any case, as I said above, the MS Store app is not the same as the multiple Linux package managers. You’re not going to write VLC and find three different identical-looking results with only fine print revealing which is which type of installer (none of which you can tell apart if you come from Windows anyway).

It’s fine, but I think I either didn’t play deep enough to get to the hook or it didn’t grab me as much as it did other people, because it does feel a bit overhyped to me.

I think in this vein I’d recommend Return of the Obra Dinn before I do Blue Prince. Not that I think Blue Prince is a bad game in any way, just a bit… soft around the edges, I guess?

Hey, no, no malice read into it and I’m all for having a conversation about the subject. But it’s also true that if we have to litigate the basic facts we’re talking about (specifically, that Windows 10 WILL in fact have purchaseable security upgrades for several more years) over multiple posts it’s just not a very productive conversation, you know? Ideally the chat starts from the actual information being shared in the link, or at the very least in the headline.

In any case, yes, businesses will need to keep getting security updates and they will get security updates for the foreseeable, be it by moving to Win11 where they can or by moving to the long term support tracks for Win10 where the hardware doesn’t support it or it’s cheaper.

Not in the US.

The point of LTSC builds of Win10 is they will keep getting security updates, in some cases until the 2030s. That’s what the actual article we’re all supposed to be talking about is explaining.

So yes, there is a planned solution to keep a secure build of Win10 for businesses for at least a few more years. For that reason. That’s what this conversation is about. Normally I’d chastise people for not reading through to the body of the linked article, but this time it’s right in the headline. You literally could not have reached this post without reading it at least once.

I’m not a fan of the “most stuff just goes in the browser” argument, because then your OS is just Chrome and it doesn’t matter what you use underneath it. If anybody genuinely believed that people wouldn’t get so militant about the stuff you use to boostrap your PC and launch your real OS.

I also don’t agree that things are comparable just because MS keeps a vestigial proprietary app store (and a vestigial but quite competent CLI app manager, while we’re at it). Standalone installers are the default for Windows and there are very few times you’re forced to deviate from that, including for driver installations. That is a fundamental change, even before you get to the absolute mess that is the variety of repos, package formats and package managers across the Linux ecosystem. Even if you choose to use the Windows Store for some reason it has a single possible setup and more in common with a mobile store than with Linux package management.

Maybe it’s having recently switched to Fedora with GNOME and being frustrated by how patchy and unreliable their GUI software app is, but even after installing additional repos most of the stuff I want to use isn’t there and I’ve started defaulting to CLI because it’s just more reliable. It is by far the biggest hurdle I’d foresee for a newcomer, and if I had to recommend a distro/DE combo to a Windows user I’d focus on what package manager works best and most straightforwardly out of the box before anything else.

And yes, I did break something badly during that whole process and had to do some serious patching up at one point, so I do appreciate the empathy.

Honestly, dual booting is mostly fine now, I’m just annoyed by how awkward and inconvenient it still is to share a local hard drive across both systems and it feels weird to be cut off from physically mounted hard drives that are right there in your system just because there is no universally accepted OS-agnostic modern filesystem.

These days I have one computer with Windows and one with Linux. My solution ended up being sharing files over a local network and using GNOME so I can easily remote desktop from my Windows machine if I have to. It’s less annoying than the performative “run Windows in a virtual machine” thing people like to brag about and I wanted to keep a machine constantly running as a little home server anyway.

No, what? I’m saying all current desktop OSs (and mobile OSs, for that matter) will default to an app search interface when you press their respective Windows/Meta/whatever key or shortcut, so there being a “start” menu and a taskbar instead of a search bar and a dock ribbon makes no difference and is intuitive when going from Windows to Linux no matter what distro or DE you choose.

And that there being “like 3 other ways” to install applications is the issue. Windows users go to a place, click on a the “download” button, then click on the file they download and go. In Linux you could try to approximate that, but it’s the least convenient option. Instead you have an app manager that sort of looks like an app store from the other OSs, but sometimes not everything is in there and you have to manually add repositories and sometimes a thing IS there but it shows up like four times because there are multiple ways for apps to be packaged and it’s not obvious at a glance whether you’re downloading a containerized instance, a bundle of loose file dependencies or straight up code you’re about to autocompile. And when you ask online people will (correctly) tell you it’s actually easier to just use the command line package manager, except those are all distro-dependent and they all use subtly different syntax depending on what flavor of Linux you’re using.

So yeah, that’s a bigger difference and barrier to entry than “the start menu”.

The file structure you should need less often if you’re not a power user, since the user home directories are pretty much the same across the board. But hey, still, it’s very different on Windows compared to other systems, what with devices and volumes being automounted at the root level with a consistent drive name as opposed to a /mnt location and most of the pieces and dependencies of an app being kept in a consolidated folder. So yeah, it’s still a bit of a moment when you eventually have to edit a config file or manually navigate to a removable drive or something and it’s not immediately obvious where that would have gone by default.

That, and to this day it still trips me up that Linux GUI file managers mount network locations and Samba shares in arbitrary real paths you can’t easily navigate to in CLI but mounting them in CLI makes them appear in the file manager in a way that is visually indisinguishable, despite being mounted in a completely different place. That is not awkward because it’s different from Windows, that’s just weird and bad in absolute terms and I don’t get why it’s that way at all.

Famous last words before getting a keylogger that leads to all your bank accounts being drained due to lack of security patches.

Well, yeah. What kind of security do you think normies are running? They won’t even get hijacked by an unpatched Windows 10 exploit, they’ll just try to download The Last of Us by opening “WatchOnlineMoviesFree.exe” when a pop up tells them to.

Business operations will go with whatever is cheapest to maintain, which is the entire point of LTSC and the article in the link.

I mean… you go, grandpa.

But hey, that is a fair point. A lot of people talk about moving to Win11 like it’s something normies will want to avoid like the plague, as if all the things they point at as dealbreaking enshittification haven’t been rolling back to Win10 pretty much in real time. Hardware incompatibilities aside (and those are probably overstated, too) the leap will probably be very smooth unless the person in question is simultaneously extremely activist about hating modern Windows and extremely reluctant to use anything else.

People keep treating Win10 EoL as if the software is going to catch on fire. Every time they phase out a Windows version people just happily keep it installed indefinitely until they just naturally buy a new PC, at least.

I predict the big replacement for supported Windows 10 will be unsupported Windows 10. I expect that’s a pretty safe bet.

People fixate on those things. I don’t think those are the key things.

If I had to define what makes something Windows-like I’d point at the software and drivers being self-contained, self-installable executables and the old DOS-style disk handling and directory structure.

I mean, I don’t think that’s necessarily a great thing, but it’s been a long time since Windows took the “press key, type what you want to run, press enter” thing from… I’m gonna say MacOS. That start menu, taskbar and icon tray thing was a differentiator with Windows 95, but probably not since Windows 8.

They do.

Probably should give it a clearer visual cue now that they do blue ticks, but it’s there.

They actually lampshade this further down the article, at the point where clickbaiting has fulfilled its goal.

It’s almost nostalgic being mildly annoyed at some slightly sub-par journalistic ethics displayed by Gizmodo and company. Feels quaint and nostalgic now. I honestly didn’t know Gizmodo was still running, if I’m perfectly honest. It’s been quite the decade.

Honestly that’s because speeding up localizations by having the first pass be machine-made is not something that waited for GenAI to happen. It’s been going on for a while using good old machine translators.

Now, Google Translate and similar tools have been reliant on machine learning for ages, people just weren’t freaking out about it because “AI” hadn’t gone viral. It’s been weird to watch this sort of thing play out.

FWIW, if they are using the same loc workflow and genAI works better than good old machine translations for a first pass go ahead and do GenAI. From what I’ve seen casually it’s not necessarily faster or more reliable, but I’m not working on loc professionally. Maybe that’s what he means when he talks about using it in “backend processes”?

I mean… too late? Face recognition has been part of biometric passport security for years now.

If anything my first flag for this is that about 50% of the time I try it I end up having to call over a security person because it tends to flake out a bunch. I’ve had better luck recently, so maybe it’s ready now?

This becoming an app may be the logical next step, but I do think there’s some value to carrying a physical copy of the biometric data with you. If we’re not losing the paper passport I don’t see why I’d need to double up on recognition software. If you’re already matching my face to my passport and my boarding pass is also matched to my passport it sure seems like we already have all the pieces in place for this without wasting more money on more contractors and giving them more of our data to store.

In the US. Key part there is “in the US”. You guys deal with this nonsense. I intend to be playing my MSRP Vietnamese/Chinese console at launch, thankyouverymuch.

Hell, I’ll take whatever stock you don’t, maybe we can get a tenner or two shaved off the price. I’m sure the “let’s sneak in the exchange rate and pretend it’s VAT” thing is starting to look less appealing right about now.

Neat. I dig some of the industrial design on the thin laptops.

Gotta say, though, the “Here’s how to try to fix sleep issues on Linux” blog post being right there on the front page is… telling.

Go outside. With a sign, maybe, but you may also find you have a sound-making enabled face-hole.

Voting also helps, if the chance is ever provided. That ship may have sailed, though, so you may find you need to go purchase a time machine type device instead.

Maybe it’s just getting grumpier in my old age, but I’m increasingly annoyed at all these posts going “here’s how to lock down your comms from all the people coming after you for all the protesting you’re not doing. Now hold tight while sitting at home, I’m sure the official summons to go do the revolution is incoming from the official revolution organizers any day now”.