/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25745083/copilotplusprompt.jpeg)
Those aren’t prompts. Those are ads. Call a spade a spade. “Microsoft tries to convince Windows 10 users to buy a new PC with full-screen ads”
I’m just a “normal person” lol but I have a 8 year old MacBook Air running I can’t remember what version. I’ve never been forced to upgrade. Does everything I need it to. I told Microsoft to fuck themselves in 1998. Now at work, I’ve been stuck with PC’s but that’s on the company’s dime, never mine.
If your Air hadn’t reached it yet, eventually it’ll reach EOS and you’ll stop receiving software/OS updates from Apple. While this won’t force you to upgrade hardware, it does add significant risk to your online time, since vulnerabilities will go unpatched. But, again, an important difference, which you shrewdly point out, you’re not forced or coerced to upgrade.
Edit: autocorrect
Micro$oft doesn’t understand that these full-screen new Win11 PCs are actually Linux ads!
I’m praising Valve right now for all the work they’ve put into Proton.
95% of my games work on Linux. Quite a few windows specific programs too. Praise proton and the wine team!
Yes, because of Proton, I’m seriously considering dumping Microsoft now. My big holdup was my library of Steam games. I just found out about Proton a couple of weeks ago, and as it turns out, most of my games are pretty compatible.
My game library was what was holding me back too. Now I just have to see if animationdesk runs on linux and I’ll be all set make the switch.
If it doesn’t I don’t know what I’ll do. I haven’t found any other animation programs built primarily around onion skinning. I don’t need AI to create the tweens for me. I just want a bare bones program that let’s me do everything by hand.
I’ll have to check when I get out of work today and if it’s all good I’ll probably start researching installation processes this weekend. I don’t know much about Linux, but I guess I’m about to learn
You could run a windows vm on linux :)
If most of your games are on Steam, it makes the transition super smooth (with only a few exceptions I’ve had so far, and none that I’ve been unable to get working with a bit of tinkering)
I made the switch and never looked back.
Only thing it cost me was recently Apex Legends but I can deal.
Do it! I just made the switch (using PopOS as my distro, AMD CPU, 1080ti GPU) and haven’t had much trouble with my extensive Steam collection. The biggest issue so far was Bioshock Infinite which actually runs native and I had to edit some configs for texture pools. SteamVR / Index has been a little unstable but seems to generally work (I don’t use it enough to be sure if it’s Linux or my hardware getting old).
SteamDB has been a excellent resource for checking compatibility and game specific tweaks.
This whole Win 11 mess is what finally convinced me to switch. I still can’t get over that Settings hasn’t reached feature parity with Control Panel yet. Figured if I have to re-learn how to do settings for the 10th time, I might as well do it in an OS that isn’t shoving ads in my face.
I was simply trying to format a disk and so searched in the start bar expecting a suitable control panel item to pop up any would have happened in any sane era of windows. Instead fucking bing opened and it brought me back web results for “format disk” as well as unrelated ads. fucking web results!
gargh
Try Fedora! I find it it just works out of the box and the little I don’t know I can Google, tho im Linux newby myself
I think for people who like Out-Of-The-Box, Fedora is ideal. It’s the only OS I didn’t have to troubleshoot the Bluetooth immediately.
I put it on my grandmothers computer and she hasn’t had any major complaints in 2 years 🤞
I have started switching my parents. Last year before all this really started getting crazy and I bought my mother a used HP elitebook laptop and set her up with Linux on it. Just to get her to test it out and use it. And replace her older laptops. There’s very little she does that actually depends on windows. Everything tends to be in the browser. There was only one odd application that’s odd even under windows. But it has an Android version that I got running with waydroid.
In the last month and I got my father a new used office PC that was about 10 Generations newer than what he had processor-wise. And set it up with Linux out of the box. He’s been enjoying using it it’s so much faster snappier and less spammy. And here this month when I have time. Getting my mother’s desktop PC converted over to dual boot at least with Linux as primary. I’ve had far fewer tech support issues since I’ve done it too.
Between system 76, framework, tuxedo, and a few other sellers. There are actually a few options now offering Linux out of the box. Next time I buy a PC it will likely be from one of them depending upon what I’m looking for. And if anyone asked me for recommendations they will be the only ones I will recommend. Apart from ordering used office machines and repurposing them LOL. Unless you want to do current gym Triple A games at 4K etc. You can get six generation i7 systems for around $100 and use graphic cards for 50 to 100. And play most games and have a great time. It’s actually kind of hilarious I have a couple of Verizon systems from the last 4 to 5 years. The system I spend more time on is a 6th generation i7 Lenovo business Tower. Largely because it’s running Linux and the others are running Windows.
I am concerned that most users won’t understand that either
I use Linux at home but my work computer uses windows. Work just bought me a new laptop with windows 11 pre-installed and I got ads to upgrade to a new “AI capable computer” on the login screen. This computer is maybe 3 months old and there are already ads telling me I need to get a new one.
🫢you don’t use windows enterprise at work?
We’re a small nonprofit, so we usually just go with whatever is cheap and works most of the time. We don’t have many issues with it, so I don’t think its on the list of things to fix.
Don’t underestimate cybersecurity, even as small nonprofit…
Seconded. Data breaches at big companies may be what makes the news, but small businesses (and other organizations) are compromised far more often.
I say this in a lot of threads lately but, here I go again:
I’m so glad I swapped to linux
Which distro?
Arch (well right now more precisely cachyos)
I’ve been using Linux on my homeserver (debian) and on previous laptops (arch) for almost a decade, but I only swapped my main desktop over this spring when nVidia sorted out waylaid explicit sync
Ubuntu, I wanted to go Debian but the installation wanted an ethternert connection to get that accomplished and I didn’t know that/think that far ahead
You chose netinstall iso?
I think so? I don’t remember now. I tried a few different ways and it came down to needing the ethernet connection so I bailed. Granted, I probably should have spent more than an hour on problem solving but I had a family hollering for me to go do stuff with them.
I can only hope that nothing ever happens to where I’d have to use Windows again. (been using only linux for over 10 years and the latest Windows I ever used was win 7 at work).
If that happened, the shock of all the last 10-15 years’ accumulation of enshittification hitting me at once might give me a stroke. The boiling frogs of today have gotten used to their OS serving them ads and spying on them by now, but I wouldn’t be able to deal with it.
I dual boot at work, which in practice means I have a Linux laptop with a Windows partition for occasional use.
It’s windows 10, not 11, and the machine has decent specs: 6c/12t, 32 GB ram, and an SSD. Windows feels legitimately clunky and slow to me when I use it, and I am not using some lightweight Linux distro meant to be blazing fast. I run Mint Cinnamon which is as mainstream and all-in-one as it gets. But it still feels like it was created to serve the user rather than third party business interests.
I have some desktop machines at home that run windows 10 as well, which I use pretty infrequently. One of my winter projects is going to be fixing that. The OS part anyway.
Having moved fully to Linux some months ago, I look at this kind of thing both with with a feeling of smug satisfaction and with cold chills of somebody who only now starts to fully realise just how massive, heavy and fast the incoming train they just dodged is.
It’s really wild looking back at what we considered acceptable in the Win 7 era versus now.
Ah yes, there isn’t even an option to permanently disable this popup, only
remind me later. When the operating system is the nag ware. `Those “remind me later” options should be illegal
Then again, just install Linux already and you don’t ever have to deal with any of this shit.
Remind me later… in 50 years.
Some group who hates Microsoft should just start doing their own unofficial security updates for 10 and slowly turn it into a Linux distro
People can’t afford groceries and Microsoft is over here saying this. So out of touch with reality.
I bet they’re gonna have to do what car dealerships do… Yeah bring your old iPad for trade in!.. Okay I don’t see my trade in discount though…it’s right there! Look in the small font, it’s $5.56 we compared against Kelly’s cousin’s purple book of laptops.
I hate how microsoft seems to think they own the term PC now and it can mean anything they want. Some of the “Copilot+ PCs” they’re advertising on things like this have ARM CPUs which means they aren’t PCs. I would even argue that a lot of x86 computers aren’t PCs now because they only support UEFI booting so aren’t PC compatible. They need to just call them computers or come up with a new term
have ARM CPUs which means they aren’t PCs
Why on earth would architecture have anything to do with it?
only support UEFI booting so aren’t PC compatible.
Oh wow, I don’t think anyone using the term “PC” this century was referring to “IBM PC-Compatible” like it’s 1981. The only vestages of that is that the term excludes Mac even today.
They may not have realized it, but until UEFI-only computers started becoming common, people mostly were still effectively drawing the line at IBM compatibility
What’s the fundamental difference between an Intel Macbook and my old 2018 Lenovo laptop? Either of them can run modern Windows, Linux, whatever. For most modern uses, they’re basically equivalent. The one thing that makes the Lenovo different though is its firmware. The Lenovo has BIOS support and the Mac doesn’t.
If you then add my current Framework laptop, which is UEFI-only, to the comparison though, it gets kind of fuzzy. It’s clearly not a Mac, but what is there to really define it as a PC? It can’t run MacOS, but that doesn’t really work to separate it because plenty of PCs can run MacOS. It’s not made by Apple, but if that’s all it takes then is a Chromebook or one of the Talos POWER workstations a PC too? It’s kind of hard to say the Framework is a PC without including so many other things that the term PC kind of loses all meaning.
I think the term PC has just outlived its usefulness and we need to move on to saying more specific things than that to describe computers. In most modern contexts, all that matters is what architecture a computer is and what operating systems will run on it, and PC just isn’t really a great term to convey that information anymore.
PC = a computer that you use to do computer stuff on. Windows PC, Linux PC, MacBook or a Chromebook, it’s all PC.
I use cloud computing to run a lot of my computer stuff. Not a PC. I self-host some services on a home-server. Also not a PC. I can install a GUI on these if I want and RDP into them, still doesn’t make these PCs.
I can use my personal laptop as a server if I want (and I have!) with remote-access enabled; so it is both a PC and a not-PC?
I think we have to settle on PC being usecase-driven; not hardware-defined. Which is what I think you were trying to get at, but abstracting too far.
Doesn’t PC just mean personal computer though?
Yes, but ironically the PC was a reaction to the more authoritarian IBM server/terminal model. The PC was really about owning and being able to hack your own shit. It seems like cloud+device lockdown is just reinventing servers and terminals…
I mean, they’re not called International Personal Machines, are they? The server-terminal system worked well for a large organisation, and it’s not far away from how many companies still do things.
Yup, I go out of my way to call any personal computer a PC. For example:
- Macbook Pro PC running macOS for work
- Thinkpad PC running Linux at home
- desktop PC running Linux for gaming
- desktop PC running Linux as a NAS
- handheld PC running GrapheneOS for a phone
- handheld PC running SteamOS for gaming
- wearable PC running WearOS as a watch
They’re all PCs, because I can run whatever I want on them. My Switch isn’t a PC because I can’t run whatever I want, but everything else in that list absolutely is. Yeah, I get weird looks sometimes, but I’m stubborn.
And it’s worked on my brother in law who’s announced he’s buying new PCs for the whole family specifically to upgrade to 11. jFC.
He should donate the old ones to Linux enthusiasts
I will encourage him to do just that. Looks like we’ll have some PCs coming our way.
Are you excited for him to finally get everything setup and then he sees the ad again?
I still can’t believe that so many PCs are getting cut off from software updates. Its going to be a huge security issue. There will suddenly be millions of unsecured computers being actively used. I can imagine that this will be allowed to happen.
I think Microsoft is doing this because they want to make the ultimate spy network with copilot or what ever they are calling it now. I really need to figure out how to get a single work app to work on Linux reliably. I use it for like 99% of my work, so a virtual machine is kind of useless. I honestly think I will need to wait for a native version of the app to be developed and who knows if that will happen.
I really need to figure out how to get a single work app to work on Linux reliably
what work app?
I use it for like 99% of my work, so a virtual machine is kind of useless
i mean, it depends on your computer (like if your cpu & motherboard supports virtualization) but you can in theory get a VM with pretty decent performance
on my m1 macbook i have a windows VM that runs very smoothly and i can effortlessly use a gesture on the touchpad to switch between them. it’s pretty cool
on linux it’s a little harder to set up (i had to pay like $100 for the software on the mac) but it’s doable
Got that the other day on my gaming computer. Very irritating.
Especially since I bought the computer in 2021 specifically to run the virtual cycling program Zwift. I’m not replacing it just to placate Microsoft. It’s more than powerful enough to run Zwift and will be for years. I’m hoping the options for using Zwift on Linux pan out.
