It was possible to skip Vista and go straight from XP to 7. You could even use the same PC.

It was possible to skip 8 and go straight from 7 to 10. You could even use the same PC.

This time around, Microsoft is forcing Windows 11 as the only option, forcing people to throw away their machines, and it is backfiring on them. People are rejecting it and the competition (Linux) has never been as good as it is today.

The executive also noted that 500 million PCs don't meet Windows 11's system requirements

So much unnecessary e-waste. I never want to hear about how 'green' or 'sustainable' Microsoft is again.

Gee, I can't imagine why that could be.

I want to qualify this comment with the fact that I am not a super gamer. Most my games are older. The newest and most demanding game I play is Cyberpunk 2077. Most my other games are multiple years older and less demanding.

I finally switched full time to a Linux desktop OS. I have used Linux more or less daily for decades, the first distro I ever installed was Slackware what feels forever ago. But until Valve put the work into running games on linux for their Steam deck I felt I was trapped needing to have Windows to play games. I have even spent the last decade forcing myself to rely more and more on cross platform available FOSS dreaming of some day making a permanent switch. Honestly it was so easy for me to switch at this point, most games pretty much just ran. My biggest problem took a bit to grok and it was just because some games do not like running in proton from an NTFS partition. I have NVME and SATA SSDs separate from my boot drive that I used to install games on and it was trivial to reformat the NVME drive to a more Linux friendly filesystem and I have not had an issue since. Eventually I'll do the SATA drive but I'm lazy and those games are working fine so far. You will absolutely have problems with some games, especially some that have overbearing anti-cheat systems, but man this has been so easy I couldn't really have imagined. The only non-gaming problem was a document scanner we own that is not supported by SANE. I could not find a solution to run it on Linux so I just spun up a Tiny 11 copy of Windows in a VM and passed it through. We only use it a couple times a year so this is an acceptable compromise to me. The VM doesn't have Internet access, it just sees a local drive as a network share. All it can do is scan something and save it to the shared drive so I can access it in Linux.

I chose Linux Mint because I am well versed with Debian and Ubuntu. But I suggest anyone new to Linux give Bazzite a shot. It's designed to be a lot harder for you to break. It's also more optimized for gaming if that's your focus. For me gaming is a requirement but I've never felt the need for top tier performance.

The path from 3.1 to 11 has been such a sour one and the last thing I am willing to put up with is being the product in the eyes of my desktop OS. My computer is mine and it will do why I want it to do or it will do nothing at all.

I would imagine a big reason being that windows 11 doesnt work on a ton of older systems which meant nobody upgraded to it and instead lived out the life of the hardware until they actually needed to buy something new. The crazy part to me is older systems wasnt even that long ago. I remember when 11 came out and saw a bunch of systems only 2 years old that weren't compatible. I said screw it and just forced it on them and honestly I have had no issues on about 3 different systems so whatever I guess.

At some point, I need to get around to installing Mint on my desktop. Maybe this weekend, but probably not.

Windows 11 brings change but no significant features. The general population hates change.

My 78 year old mother bought a new laptop, windows 11.

Immediately I had to remote in because of some S mode BS which just put you in the MS only application environment.

3 months later and somehow she fubarred her login and can't use her new laptop. There's probably an easy fix, but since she hates windows 11 and wants to go back to 10, I suggested Linux.

So it will be a Merry Christmas for my mom when I visit and install IDK? Some version that's super simple. Anything is better than what she currently has

The executive also noted that 500 million PCs don't meet Windows 11's system requirements while the others don't need a hardware upgrade to run the OS. Although this would indicate that 500 million PCs would potentially be replaced with newer alternatives capable of running Windows 11 at some point, Clarke hinted at "roughly flat" sales for Dell PCs would moving forward . Clarke didn't explain the reasoning behind this statement , but it could mean that people are just not that interested in upgrading to Windows 11 PCs.

It's a simple reason. Everybody is abandoning dell in droves for lenovo in enterprise environments.

I used to buy dell exclusively for laptops across over a decade at multiple organizations where I determined hardware standards and purchasing. Everyone always wanted a x1 carbon or thinkpad but the prices were too high. This is no longer the case. Now everyone gets a thinkpad or x1 carbon where I work at least, and statistics for market share are heavily on the lenovo side now.

That's how I see it anyway. This has nothing to do with windows 11, it's just another service pack when you're managing everything via GPO/intune/sccm/whatever.

I use windows 10 at home while I use windows 11 at work. The only thing I like about windows 11 is tabs in the file explorer. Besides that I've had to deal with Windows Explorer crashing on a daily basis, task bar freezing completely multiple times a week, certain software straight up not working that I need to get work done, programs crashing that work perfectly fine on 10, internet connectivity issues (usually DNS for some fucking reason), periodically hearing the disconnect sound for a device even when everything is still working, awful drop down menus, needing to change the registry just to get basic features that 10 has, and the list goes on and on. At home everything just works. I've been testing Linux and have been getting better stability than Windows 11 and I feel like every week there's a new problem.

I thought that thumbnail was sonic the hedgehog

Blows my mind seeing people look on windows 10 as some kind of last bastion, apparently not realizing that was Windows 7 at best.

10 is the one where they fucked up the UX beyond repair, made everything slow and added insane amounts of spying. If you willingly switched to 10 then don't pretend like 11 is a bridge too far now.