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Chrome security and Google project zero wrote that windows 7 is insecure, will never get the security fixes in Windows 10 and you shouldn't use it.

Google stopped allowing their staff using Windows a decade ago (with very limited exceptions).

I presume Google have not relaxed that rule for Windows 10.

I talked in person to some technical Googlers at an event a few weeks ago.

I asked them about this particular rule and they said they were allowed to use Windows but certain other engineers were not allowed to.

I came from the same understanding as you but my new understanding was that except for certain departments they are allowed to use Windows.

But you don't want to run the special corp Google distro with hardening and spying / remote control as your personal computer. I wrote about their recommendation for regular users, which is to prefer win10 over win7.

I wish there were a Google distro I could use - I trust Google to properly vet all dependencies. I worry that other distros have trojans via app dependencies.

I have been thinking about using OpenBSD - but I am guessing that a secure OS is no help when you need to use insecure apps.

That is false.

...has no one made an EFI bootloader that will start BIOS operating systems?

Hackintosh users have been doing the reverse for ages, because Macs have used a variation of EFI since they first switched to Intel, long before EFI existed on PC.

Before Bootcamp was a thing the community developed XOM to boot XP on Intel macs (which at the time lacked the legacy bios in it's ROM) so it should be possible

I'm not having much luck finding very much information on it though

The page is still there on SourceForge, but no download. I found the Clover EFI bootloader by chance there, too, but it appears to load a UEFI environment from a legacy BIOS environment.

For the purposes of running Windows 7 on modern systems, we'd have to do the reverse, emulate a legacy BIOS environment from a UEFI system. XOM appears to fit this description, it simulates a legacy IBM BIOS on an Mac's EFI boot environment.

I only briefly Googled it earlier, but thanks for the ideas, rest assured, if I ever look into it and get Windows 7 running, I'll post about it.

You could use your virtualization technology to run it, execute reference SeaBIOS using that. Qemu, Xen and VMware apply.

Of course this won't fix your driver problems, if any.

Alternatively load and execute a CSM in your UEFI firmware, but we do not have a reference implementation of that and AMI, Phoenix do not want to share.

...like the Clover EFI bootloader? Does this work? I boot into Clover's UEFI "shell" (?), which then emulates a legacy BIOS and then boots me into Windows 7? Is this plausible? Has someone tried this out?

I'd still have the problems of no drivers, but it's a step closer...

Clover is what I was primarily thinking of—it can boot EFI OS's on computers that only have a BIOS.

But I'm pretty sure you can't do the reverse with Clover specifically. It's designed for booting macOS, which always uses EFI.

Switch over to Linux Mint, it’s the spiritual successor to Windows 7 (same look and feel), but it’s also Linux which is phenomenal.

Windows 7 used to be all I used, because all the latest windows versions take away too much control of my computer from me (eg Windows 10 requiring updates to be installed middle of workday at most inconvenient times.)

> Windows 10 requiring updates to be installed middle of workday at most inconvenient times

That just means you haven't told Windows your working hours, or you never shut down. This has literally never happened to me.

It will only start to force you if you've ignored security updates for 2 days or so, which as an IT professional you should appreciate.

It's true I never told Windows my working hours, but I would shut down mostly nightly and it'd still happen.

I just find it to be incredibly user-hostile to force updates in the middle of a session, starts to feel a bit more like Microsoft's computer than mine at a certain point.

I know the feeling, it’s like rent-seeking applied to consumer electronics.

If you turn off your machine and never give it a time to install updates except during the day, that's inevitable. Security updates are more important than user convenience for the same reason that vaccines are more important than people's opinions.

I wonder when consent stopped being important? And how that was accomplished. I know the mentality from authority has always been;

WE the government can stick anything into your body, cause we know best. And WE the multinational corporation can stick anything into your devices, cause we know best.

But we the consumer seem to have just given up. If i wasn't averse to tinfoil hats I'd say it was something in the water.

what an asinine perspective.

If you remove the users autonomy from how / when that security gets applied you've now made the security situation quantifiably worse, for 2 reasons, one users will now jump through hoops to confound your mandatory process, two you're impinging on possible mission critical infrastructure which blanket policies decided arbitrarily by a software conglomerate.

> Security updates are more important than user convenience for the same reason that vaccines are more important than people's opinions.

That's exactly the attitude I'm trying to get away from.

I’ve had that configured, didn’t help. E.g. Windows hangs midday, so I shift click to shutdown, but still get forced updates which I have to wait for to finish. Fastest laptop I could buy and it still takes too long. Fuck that.

It also messes up some settings and customizations.

LTSC gets security updates, antivirus updates, etc, and never even notifies or restarts.

Why do you need a new Windows build every 6 months then?

It's a host OS for all the useful software...

Don't forget it updates when shutting down... Like, I need to take my laptop and go, wtf...

> Like, I need to take my laptop and go

So take your laptop and go? It'll happily continue updating, and then shut down, on the go.

I actually did experiment with that - Core 2 Quad laptop under moderate load in a closed backpack will overheat and shutdown in around 10 minutes. Longer than I expected, and I will never try that again.

You might want to check also Manjaro Linux, which is featured as one of the best Linux distributions (as for distrowatch.com) and it delivers always updated packages, since it's based on Arch.

Majaro actually looks beautiful, I'll definitely check into it, thanks for the heads up!

Some part of me is tempted to make the jump to qubes too

Is this actually suggested for first timers? I use Manjaro, but would not classify it as beginner friendly.

I wouldn't even classify Arch or its derivatives as something appropriate for real production use. OTOH, if you're dealing with cutting-edge hardware as OP is, installing an Arch derivative may be the easiest way of getting it to work, at least until the support makes its way to e.g. Debian's "testing" channel, and then its stable release.

well, if you call a MacMini 2008 "cutting edge hardware"...For Apple it was dead back to MacOS 10.7, but it works awesomely with Manjaro Linux 32 bit

I've been using Manjaro Linux since 2013 for personal and production usage, on new or old hardware. It simply flies.. The Xfce variant needs only 300MB of RAM, while Gnome and KDE are hungrier.

I've had multiple problems with Mint/Ubuntu/Debian, especially with nvidia drivers and kernel updates, lately also with kernel 5.3.0

Yes, Manjaro is first timers user-friendly, since you can manage everything graphically and kernel updates have never been so easy to update (along with drivers).

There are also LTS Kernels, plus a huge selection of software. Definitively an alternative to Ubuntu/Mint, check distrowatch.com

You could run almost any desktop environment and give it that kind of look and feel. No need to limit oneself to Cinnamon or Linux Mint.

Just run Win7 in a VM on Linux. That lets me run my legacy apps with no native replacement.

For some of your complaints, a pihole and then some additional Windows-specific blacklist entries may help.

I love 10 (as far as Windows goes). 8 was a flop, but in my opinion 10 is a slam-dunk. It is to 7 what 7 was to XP. Other than the annoying thing where your profile has to be tied to an online account, I don't understand why anyone is still holding out.

Windows 10 was enough to push me to finally switch all my PCs to Linux.

The countless bugs didn't help(e.g. randomly (dis)appearing keyboard layouts, taskbar in the foreground during fullscreen mode but invisible when leaving fullscreen, ...).

But at least the bugs didn't force me to reinstall the OS multiple times like the updates did - not to mention on one machine I had to switch back to Win 7 because Win 10 was suddenly unusable after a certain big update, even failing to boot most of the time. This was a new one, as before that point I was used to Windows "just working" after installation.

It feels like Microsoft intentionally tries to prove to users how little they care. Resetting desktop wallpapers and open sessions, updating right out of suspend, hiding telemetry options and offline logins behind almost invisible links...no, thanks.

The telemetry issuers are big for me, I know there are tools to limit what Microsoft collects but when your vendor is trying to get that information and you have to take steps to stop them, that's enough for me to move away from a piece of software.

I'd been switching between linux and windows for a while, but with proton and wine to back me up, I can't envision ever installing w10 on any of my machines.

I don't know what makes your situation different, but I've had it on a custom-built desktop since the free-update period years ago and have never had a single issue like you describe.

I read about the tying to an online account, and also read that keeping the PC offline while installing is a useful remedy.

Which I did, so at least my Windows 10 installation is a "local" installation.

But when you stop to think about it: Are we living in a sane world, when I have to "fool" my PC/OS in order to get it to act in a certain kind of way? That, in a nutshell, is my biggest gripe with Windows 10. I have no problems with the defaults being made to accustom the computer illiterate, but you should allow power users to do whatever they want to a their PCs, and this is what MS doesn't allow (anymore, or at least, not in ways that they previously allowed).

Since you asked, the following may be a bit non-conformant to HN standards, so I'll set it in quotes, it's my post/rant on FB venting my initial frustrations with Windows 10: ""Why does less information fit on my laptop despite it having the same resolution as my desktop? OMFG, who the fuck resetted my display scaling?"

"Oh, defaulting to 'public network' is nice. Finally, some common sense. Let's check out the firewall... every Microsoft app has an exception ...well, I'll retract that again. Also, every app I installed now has an exception on public and not on private, so I have to not only add the exception on private, but remove it on public too. At least Windows 7 asked me each time, so this shit wouldn't happen. Wooo! More grinding. Thanks, Bill!"

"Can I add shortcuts to the start menu? NOPE! THIS IS NOW OUR ADVERTISING SPACE!"

"My computer on the desktop, I need that. Where is that option? Looks, looks, looks and gives up Fine then, I'll just create a shortcut if there's no 'real' 'My Computer' for the desktop. It kinda works (but no 'Manage' option on right-click, since it's a user shortcut, not a system one). But it feels like a step back. Why did MS remove 'My Computer'? Oh, because USE THE FUCKING CLOUD YOU MORON! MANAGING YOUR OWN DATA IS SO 1998! WHY WOULD YOU NEED ANYTHING OTHER THAN ONEDRIVE (which is preinstalled, but fortunately still, uninstallable)?"

If Windows 10 would behave like Windows 7 with the extra features (newer UI, UEFI, that stuff), I would've welcomed it, hell, with the company I wouldn't even bat an eye to pay for retail copies. But no, they didn't decide to do a new Windows, they decided to turn your PC into an advanced XBOX. Fuck you! Stop being so DISRUPTIVE TECHONOLOGY and just create good operating systems, FFS. But it's too late now.

And so it goes."

- The online account thing is annoying but really doesn't feel like a huge deal. Also, from other comments here it sounds like they made it truly optional.

- You can absolutely add shortcuts to the start menu (and remove any default "advertising" ones).

- My Computer is alive and well under Explorer. Removing the shortcut from the desktop by default isn't some conspiracy to frustrate anyone who dares be a power user; it's a visual cleanup done because a) most people never use that, and b) it remains easily accessible by other means.

In fact, in several ways they seem to be catering even more to power users than they used to. There's WSL, Explorer got updated with tabs among other things, they're building that new open-source Windows Terminal, etc. It would really make zero business sense for them to tick off power users just for the sake of it, especially with how much effort they're putting lately into becoming the ecosystem for developers (VSCode, buying GitHub, etc). I think you're projecting a whole lot of personal anxieties into an operating system and making a handful of minor points of user-friction into something much bigger than it actually is.

> "My computer on the desktop, I need that. Where is that option? Looks, looks, looks and gives up.

One of the biggest problems with Windows 10 is the dual nature of Settings vs. Control Panel which has made simple things like this that aren't directly on the new interface yet much harder to find.

To get My Computer back on the desktop:

- Right-click on Desktop and select Personalize

- Click Theme on the left

- Scroll down past pretty much everything to "Related Settings"

- Click the "Desktop icon settings" text

- Tick "Computer"

The dual Settings and Control Panel interfaces is such a stupid problem.

Microsoft should not have introduced Settings until it was ready to move over all first party functionality.

Having one control panel with outdated visuals is much better than having two separate control panels (one of which still has outdated visuals).

It's not even split like "normal settings" vs. "power user", which would at least make a small amount of sense. e.g. Mouse pointer speed isn't in the new Settings yet.

I agree with everything you just wrote.

<hug>

My old gaming box is still running Windows 7. Honestly, I view the OS as nothing more than a platform to run my apps - and for most of my (ridiculous) steam collection, it runs the games, vmware workstation, my dev tools, and browsers just fine. All the hardware in there has drivers. The 'extras' in Windows 10 just are not things I use or care about. The only feature that interest me is the continued support - so some time this December, I'll be updating those machines. I likely hung on to XP64 longer than I should have, as my apps just worked... so same 'unfamiliar' pushback this time around.

From what I understand, you can still do it without an online account... if you don't install with a network connection.

I kicked Win10 around when my threadripper hardware came in and ended up just installing Centos on my primary box. EOL for Windows 7 just seemed to happen really fast.

Now we have 2 control panels, search sucks, auto updating drivers and killing receipt printers (Line for a city block because the cash drawer took 45 seconds to pop for each cash paying customer) Thanks windows!

You may already know this, but you can set up an “offline account” that’s not connected to an online account and then delete the one you connected online. All my Win10 machines have offline-only accounts.

Because it's horrible in a myriad of ways too numerous to list.

UPDATE

looks like everyone above me actually listed em all.

How about the enterprise version of windows. I feel like there are restrictions they would put on consumers, that they would not put on an enterprise. Even if it costs more, it might make you happier, if you get a better experience.