It is the last - that a lot of us here will ever use willingly

Yeah, if the MS store and UWP apps worked out for Microsoft (they didn't lol).

Now win11 is "okay, now this really will be last version of windows, because you can't refuse installing our crap."

I think that's because they don't understand or don't care about the risks. Annoyingly I was in the process of making my own version of this campaign when it launched but I was aiming to explain why someone should care that the os is no longer supported and why its a problem first, then suggesting what to do about it. Options weren't exclusively Linux but I realise buying a new device isn't always an option either so some people will absolutely keep using 10. It's not about getting to 100%, just enough that you can make a difference or keep devices out of landfill.

You “need” that?

In the absolute, you are wrong. Some will. Some have. I have migrated a few myself.

The end of support is a problem for Windows users and therefore an opportunity for Linux supporters.

Will a large fraction of Windows users migrate to Linux? Probably not. That said, more will move if we educate them and offer our assistance. Even a small migration of Windows users would be a significant increase in Linux Desktop users. If 5 percent of Windows users migrated, it would double the number of Linux users. So, moving even a small percentage of Windows users would be a major success.

Why does that bother you?

I know. I was going to post, "and how's that campaign going?" There was a bit of a spike months that was pretty clearly due to Steam and the Steam Deck, and TBH Linux is undercounted because Linux users are, as a group, less likely to share accurate telemetry and to masquerade as other OSes, but still. I'm not seeing a giant market share spike. I'd expect the refugee population to be less likely to masquerade and to show up clearly a Linux.

Noice LMDE

Proton / wine is modern day magic

Most Windows only steam games work out of the box (you do have to enable it in the right click menu > Compatibility options, per game)

Games that use Anti-cheat aren't likely to work (it depends on the Anti-cheat used and how it's configured)

ProtonDB is a good resource for checking if/which games work, or fixes and workarounds

You can use proton or wine on non steam games, but that requires additional setup that I'm not familiar with

There's also Lutris, https://lutris.net/, which uses wine and other software underneath, but with a nice GUI and a lot of scripts to further make playing your games on Linux easier.

I moved mine over about 2 years ago.

Only issue was getting the printer to work.... Took a few hours.

• Microsoft recall.
• Ads in software you paid for.
• Inability to use local accounts ( they're closing the workarounds ) or dark patterns to switch you to one if you do have a local one
• bit locker forking you over

Edit: shoving AI down your throat

And this all besides all the other already present points to shit on Microsoft like the data collection

Lots more data harvesting. Lots more AI. Lots more malware.

My partner isn't tech savvy. I asked them to type "CPU-Z" into the task bar and instead of it opening the installed CPU-Z on their computer, the first suggested result was a download link for CPU-Z. They clicked it to download CPU-Z and got full-on AI-suggested malware that forced us to nuke their PC

Have you seen what microsoft is pushing on 11??

I actually wouldn't mind upgrading to Windows 11, but I ran Microsoft's compatibility tool and it told me I couldn't. I only built my computer in late 2018, and have upgraded storage space since then. But it's nowhere near old enough to need replacing the motherboard or processor.

Microsoft is just requiring an arbitrary hardware specification as an olive branch to their hardware manufacturer partners.

The big one is W11 now requires a TPM chip, so tons of computers will stop getting updates soon, with no way to upgrade.

And they keep getting worse with a bunch of annoyances, like more ads, trying to force ai, making it harder to avoid a microsoft account, and getting rid of ways to customize the desktop layout.

With the steam deck proving that Linux gaming was not only possible but easy, I could remove gaming as a reason to keep windows, which meant the only thing I actually wanted windows for was an Adobe subscription that I hadn't used in over a year. With windows fighting me the whole time, Linux got out of my way and let me use my own device how I wanted to. Which by the way sounds like I'm using it for something complicated or specialized but I'm not, I need it for web browsing, gaming, and light photo editing, that's about it.

So that's the positive case to move away from windows. The other side is that Windows is actively hostile to me as a user. I don't want or need copilot. For starters I don't have the hardware to really take advantage of it, and I don't want it using power unnecessarily. I don't want office 365, I don't want OneDrive, I don't want another UI on top of the 5 other UI frameworks that exist in windows which only serve to make it harder to change things to what I want. I don't want to sign in using a Hotmail account I made when I was 12 and haven't touched in years. I don't want windows telling Microsoft how I use my own device. There's some cool stuff in windows 11 like WSL which is awesome for me as a dev in my day job, but it's not enough to keep me in a system that, by design and direction, is trying to lock me into it.

Xbox app is another example, where my game controllers sometimes work and most of the time don't. Sometimes there's cross play with steam, sometimes not. Sometimes even installing the game doesn't work and I have to re-download the entire game again. Just bafflingly bad and costs me more than steam ever has. Ridiculous.

As far as I can tell it's mostly the TPM requirement and pushing more ads / AI nonsense.

You can easily avoid the latter by using the LTSC IoT version. I just bought a new (second hand) computer for TPM (my old one was very due for an upgrade).

With the IoT version it's absolutely fine. Definitely an improvement over Windows 10. The only issue I've noticed is it doesn't come with Windows Game bar or some nonsense so after you run games you'll get a random dialog about there not being an app available to handle ms-gamelink URLs or something. You can just ignore it. I might fix it one day.

Many can't upgrade to 11 and don't want to buy a new device. They'll believe it's their only option unless told otherwise. It's not necessarily a "Win11 is bad" or "Linux/BSD is better" scenario, just a "to keep using your current device which you paid for less than a decade ago, do the following".

Times are hard and people shouldn't be forced to buy new hardware because of the current monopolistic software companies's latest money making scheme, especially when their old one works perfectly fine and the environment is going to suffer.

Anti-privacy by default, pushing AI slop that takes all your data, more than one improperly checked update rolled out that bricked many computers, shoving Ads everywhere...

Of course you could say these to not be strictly new, but it is a new level of enshittification way beyond what we used to know.

Also, my $250 elgato capture card doesn't support Linux.

Which one? We use a few Elgato capture cards with OBS on Linux at work and all of them are bog-standard UVC video devices.

I played minecraft with my spouse

Check out Prism Launcher if you play Java Minecraft. It allows you to easily manage multiple Minecraft versions. Modded, unmodded, different versions, etc..