Technology

Paid updates may as well be no updates. Give us privacy or cost.

Of course Linux is the only way

That's the day I get Linux, I guess.

I've been with Windows forever, since version 3. I'm old.

These past few months I've been trying Ubuntu, and it's fine for everyday use, browsing and file management. And, LibreOffice has been my office suite for years, so no problem there--I don't demand much from that.

But, graphics applications are barely there. Blender is fine. Inkscape is so-so, but I just discovered recently that it doesn't keep track of object rotation, so there is no simple way to set the rotation back to zero. Corel Draw gave up Linux support years ago, or that would be my go-to. I haven't tried LibreDraw yet, but I don't have much hope for it. Gimp is, eh.

I haven't tried playing FO4 or Starfield yet, though. I've just been switching back to Windows for that.

I don't mind using Terminal, it reminds me of MS-DOS days, but I don't see myself ever become proficient at it.

I won't be getting Windows 11, I've decided that. But I see that I'll likely need to give up a lot to make that stand.

Windows 10 LTSC IoT + a certain mass grave script or whatever has got you covered until 2032.

Why are people making a huge deal out of this? Win10 was released in 2015, and support ends in 2025. That's 10 years of support, I don't think this is unreasonable for a consumer product by any means.

As far as industry goes it's a bit short, but nothing catastrophic. There's plenty of xp machines still running just fine in many places. Lack of security updates is less crucial for most of these applications since they're often not required to be connected to internet.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Windows 10: three additional years of security updates, provided to those who can pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program.

The initial announcement, written by Windows Servicing and Delivery Principal Product Manager Jason Leznek, spends most of its time encouraging users and businesses to upgrade to Windows 11 rather than staying on 10, either by updating their current computers, upgrading to new PCs or transitioning to a Windows 365 cloud-based PC instead.

The company told us that "pricing will be provided at a later date," but for the Windows 7 version of the ESU program, Microsoft upped the cost of the program each year to encourage people to upgrade to a newer Windows version before they absolutely had to; the cost was also per-seat, so what you paid was proportional to the number of PCs you needed updates for.

Windows 10 has mostly been in a security-updates-only maintenance mode since the 22H2 update came out late last year, but Microsoft did "revisit" the operating system last month to add the Copilot generative AI assistant and a handful of other tweaks.

For businesses, educational institutions, or governments, the point of the ESU program has always been to buy slow-moving IT shops extra time to learn about the new features in newer versions of Windows, to educate and inform users about the upgrade, and to test for incompatibilities with other mission-critical hardware and software.

Windows 11's new system requirements add an additional wrinkle, though—not every single Windows 10 PC in every single organization officially supports Windows 11, adding the time and cost of hardware replacement (or migrating to a cloud-based setup) to the time and cost of changing operating system versions.

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