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Microsoft to test “new features and more” for aging, stubbornly popular Windows 10
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Microsoft made a big mistake with Windows 10: it basically works fine.
That's when an operating system is supposed to do. They make mistakes when they make it worse. Usually, the operating system starts worse and eventually gets tolerable. That happened with Windows 10. Initial versions were far inferior to Windows 7, but now it's at a pretty good state. Windows 11 is a pile of fucking garbage. There is no compelling feature in Windows 11 that would make anyone want to upgrade. There are compelling reasons not to upgrade, such as advertising, menus that require more clicks to get the same shit done, forced use of Microsoft account, etc.
There's also the fact that Windows 11 refuses to run unless you have a handful of specific hardware in your computer, such as TPM 2.0, and a relatively modern processor. There is no technical reason for this requirement, it was discovered very early on that if you override the check it will install and run just fine. But Microsoft seems determined to get people to throw away their older but still perfectly good computers.
That is a very big part of why Windows 10 is still so popular. If you have a computer from six or seven years ago that you've upgraded once or twice, it's probably still perfectly good. No reason to throw it away for Windows 11 when you can keep on trucking with Windows 10.
I personally am quite grateful that my computer doesn't meet the requirements, because that means I won't be stealth-upgraded like happened with 10.
My wife's laptop was upgraded during a "maintenance window" one night. Now to downgrade I would have to wipe it clean and reinstall everything and restore backups.... Too much hassle and then maybe it will be upgraded again. Bios doesn't allow disabling tpm
I was at a win 95 launch event for pc sellers back in the msdos era. Microsoft sales pitch was "put windows on the comps you sell and we guarantee your customers will keep coming back for upgrades". Shit hasn't changed 30 years later.
Same was said about Windows 7 as people protested the switch to Windows 10. New telemetry, aggressively forced updates, and other factors made Windows 10 a nightmare for many. Yet now, when Windows 11 is even worse, people start thinking of Windows 10 the way they thought of Windows 7.
Essentially, Microsoft can make Windows worse and worse for as long as the previous iteration is better and people got used to it.
That is exactly how I felt back then. Waited as long as possible to switch to 10 from 7 but then got used to it. Honestly I still think 7 was better. But no fucking way I'm switching to 11 with the way things are going at Microsoft.
Usually Microsoft would have 1 good release then 1 release that is shit. Seems like it'll be straight shit from now on.
That's what they'll try to end now with buggy feature bloat shoehorned in.