Technology

Even better: petition for Microsoft to release the Windows source code under the GPL

Sadly besides freecad all the other CAD programs i use are not made for linux

said no music producer ever

As much as I love Linux that’s not happening anytime soon

Your entire statement here stems from not knowing what you're talking about. That's OK. I'll provide some insight.

Secure Boot is a security feature of UEFI that only allows trusted, cryptographically signed operating systems to boot. The nature of this prevents rootkits. Software that runs before the OS and injects itself. BIOS has many hard limitations and disadvantages over the modern standard that is UEFI. Your comparison going from 32 to 64 bit architecture is quite fitting. It's not that different. There are many hard limitations and disadvantages to 32 bit. It's unfit for today's standards due to lack of features and security. All aspects of technology have to move forward.

Remember when Windows 10 were advertised as the final and only Windows? Pepperidge farm remembers...

I have multiple machines for different use cases, so I switch between Windows, MacOS, and different Linux flavors constantly. They all have their benefits and drawbacks.

People like to push Linux gaming, but 90% game support still can't beat 100% support. Meanwhile, I wouldn't let Windows ever even touch a server machine. You can trust software like Ubuntu Server or Amazon Linux to be stable if you're not touching it, while Windows likes to keep you on your toes...

MacOS is a good middle ground but not one I would personally use outside of a work machine. It's fairly stable, and it has a Unix style base so it can run Shell happily. Meanwhile software is seemingly a horrible mixed bag that has only been exasperated with the Arm jump. For a computer noob however, it's great. If you don't mind staying in Apple's little zoo then you're not going to have issues.

I don't know why I went on this ramble.

I've tried and gaming is a lot better than it was, but I still prefer Windows in that department though I do stick with SteamOS for the Steam Deck and haven't bothered running Windows on it.

Please let me keep these old chains for a bit longer!

We must continue to improve freedom-respecting operating systems so that more users will switch.

Is Arch really that popular nowadays?

I mainly know it from the colleague who switched to it back in 2006, and then we made fun of him over the next year for all the stuff that was broken on his system, and worked on ours. He only was let off because a new hire went for Gentoo, and had stuff even more broken.

Linux is the way. Microsoft will never stop making Windows worse.

It killed my dog :(

Some valid, a lot overblown. Take everything with a grain of salt.

A lot of people on Lemmy revere Linux to the point that Windows anything is a dirty word, so negative qualities are amplified quite substantially in discussions here.

I use Windows 11 daily on my personal laptop. As (what I am assuming to be) a typical end user, I will say I don't hate or love it any more than Windows 10. But I've never been one to nitpick over small details as much as others seem to.

I'm generally unfazed by start menu changes because I access the majority of my apps by just typing the name into the start menu. The dedicated search button in Windows 10 is superfluous for that reason, so I never used it and don't miss it. Rounded corners vs straight corners in the UI is essentially meaningless. And while Windows 11 currently does not allow you to reposition the taskbar to other sides of the screen, Windows 10 doesn't allow the taskbar and start menu to be centered, so pick your poison.

I think the right click context menu is improved in Windows 11 over 10.

Honestly, a bit of both. It probably gets more hate than it deserves but there's a lot of pointless change just for the sake of changing things. It's better than Win10 on a Surface, touch screen and pen support have improved. But beyond that, I don't really see a reason to jump to it until they force the issue by ending support for 10.

Tried it for the first time today and I hated it. Everything I organized for the start menu is gone and they replaced it with a stupid apps menu. It definitely runs sluggishly.

Honestly, I ended up with 11 after years on 10, and I don’t find it nearly as horrible as everyone makes it out to be. It took some tweaking and a few tricks, but it’s fine and useable for what I do. I certainly spent less time futzing with Win 11 to run games than I ever did Linux.

That said, I haven’t been able to use windows for serious work/development since the 90’s… i only really boot up windows for gaming, so ymmv. For the most part that all works out of the box. For dev/ops work I’m a Linux or (since my work doesn’t allow Linux anymore) MacOS guy, which is much better workflow and capability-wise than Windows. IMHO.

Basically Microsoft tends to release operating systems in a 2 stage cycle. Every other version of Windows does something new and innovative, and then the next version is more polished, stable, and normal.

95 - new, innovative, and crappy
98 - solid
Then it got weird. They wanted to stop building the consumer version of Windows on top of DOS, and move it on to the NT kernel as 2000. The consumer version wasn't ready by the deadline, so they released 2000 for business only, and released a new DOS based Windows Me.
2000 - Really nice but boring. Extremely innovative new features for business use (Active Directory). The amount of work they put into Active Directory is probably why they didn't have the new consumer friendly UI ready in time. It's a rock solid OS but they significantly missed their goals.
Me - Absolute garbage, a cash grab. They basically put something out to satisfy the bean counters since they couldn't market NT to consumers yet.
XP - They finally pulled it off, and it's a pretty good OS that has the stability of NT, and all the multimedia features that consumers want.
Vista - They rewrote a huge portion of NT to be 64 bit, require signed drivers, and be more stable. The release version was pretty crappy but after 1-2 service packs it was actually pretty decent. But by then its reputation was already tarnished, and overall it was innovative and crappy.
7 - This was a very solid release. They took Vista and refined the UAC system to be less intrusive. Also a really nice new feature where you can use the taskbar like a dock where an app's icon stays in one place, even if it's not running.
8 - Experimental implementation of adding a touch UI to Windows. They made a decent effort but it really felt like a tech demo and nobody recommended it for anything outside of tablet devices. It was dreadful for people using traditional mouse and keyboard.
10 - Another solid OS. They basically took 7, added 8's touch UI features, and figured out how to blend them without it being annoying. The touch interface doesn't get in the way if you're using keyboard and mouse, and vice versa.
11 - I'm really not sure what the purpose of this OS is. I guess they're experimenting with trying to make the Windows UI more Mac-like. The taskbar centers the icons by default so it looks like the MacOS dock, and they're really pushing the new app store where all the apps have to be written with the newer UI libraries that work a lot more like mobile development platforms. So it really seems like Microsoft is planning for a future where Windows can run on many different types of devices and run the same apps. And Windows 11 is kind of a stepping stone to get there.
So Windows 12 should be interesting.

Also, while all of this is going on, with every new release generally comes a server version as well. They're constantly expanding the Active Directory schema and adding a lot of cool new features to Active Directory, such as new Group Policies that can be applied to groups of computers and users throughout an organization, which can automate a ton of things. If you want everybody in an accounting department to have a Q: drive with their QuickBooks files in it, you throw them all into an AD group or OU, and set up a new group policy on that group to map that Q: drive. And now all of those users will have that drive. I think it was starting with Windows server 2008r2 (Windows 7 server basically) and Windows 7, they added new Group Policies that did the drive mapping differently, and they would automatically map without the user even having to log off. Also, if the Group Policy is removed from a user, or a new user is moved into that group, it will automatically handle the changes. There's so much more to Windows than most people realize.

I don't think that's available for private customers. Unless of course you pirate it; but even then it comes with the limitation of being English only. And there are plenty of people in other countries who want/need their OS to be in their native language.