I've basically demoted my Windows 10 box to headless status. If I want to do anything I either use Remote Desktop or Steam Streaming to access it.
Interestingly OS X also has plenty of Cloud services, but Apple seems to have at least figured out how to sell them in a less intrusive manner while letting you feel like you're still in control of the machine. Just little things like you setup a local account and then Apple sells you on "Hey want to link your iCloud so you can remote wipe this machine if it is stolen?" vs forcing you to lie about internet connectivity so Windows 10 gives you the local account option.
Agree with Apple except that we learned it constantly streams your activity to their servers now (things like when you open an app).
Back to Microsoft - the smack in the face for me is that OneDrive/their servers is listed as the top choice when saving files in Office. You cannot remove it/demote it in any way even when disabling OneDrive as a connected service. Its more obnoxious/a direction I dont like that they are headed towards than a crippling thing I cant work around.
I like to think that Microsoft employees mostly realize how stupid stuff like this is, and intentionally leave loopholes like that until forced to "fix" it.
One of the first things you see is "Windows 10 is a service" when you install it. That's always been it's premise since it was released. They aren't hiding that detail.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...
I use local myself but I think its decently useful stuff to most people.
To my surprise (still), I've lived in Linux comfortably for years now. It's, hands down, a superior OS for programming (unless you're married to Visual Studio [the IDE, not Code]), but being able to live in it otherwise so well is still surprising, from gaming to interpolation on videos with mpv + SVP (which, pretty strangely, is free for Linux but costed me a subscription on Windows! https://www.svp-team.com/get/). FreeOffice (https://www.freeoffice.com/en/) has a clone suite of Microsoft Office that works with all the formats (plus, Microsoft Office is on the web now, anyway, right?), and preferring roguelike and indie games (which are reliably native) over AAA games enough to make do with running the odd AAA on Proton when available has been key for me. If I was really into AAA games or doing audio editing or something, I'd probably've gone back and made do with WSL2.
To save you time if you try switching, the best distro for a Windows refugee (or non-server, end user generally, in my strong opinion) is Manjaro with KDE. KDE's the most featureful, powerful, and Windows-like DE, and Manjaro's most Windows 10-like in that you're getting new updates all the time, indefinitely, which are pretty close to bleeding edge but held back for a margin of safety (as opposed to Ubuntu, where you're stuck with old stuff unless you mess with PPAs or install the new version of the OS every few years -- however, in edge cases like CUDA development, you might want to have older packages, since Ubuntu kind of dictates the pacing of outside development given its marketshare). It also benefits from the insanely-detailed Arch Wiki (since it's Arch-based) and has the AUR, which has every package ever, and it has GUI tools for kernel rollbacks and driver stuff, AND the Manjaro forums are amazingly helpful.
AaronFriel you can only pause for a few weeks and you need to keep doing that in perpetuity. That said, its not so much impossible to work around, its just annoying and feels like an encroachment. If I want to run my PC as a server with near 100% uptime then just let me do it.
moksly, an enterprise license is for 500+ employees and will have a cost to match that.
I wasn't onsite to pause it myself.
That one has to do this is galling. The availability of a product SKU to work around the "evergreen" nature of Windows 10 doesn't eliminate my distaste for it.
It's not burdensome or expensive to deal with. (I'm not a reseller, so it affords no advantage for me-- kickbacks, etc. I just like knowing that expensive server software licenses can be moved to new hosts, etc.)
The factory I know using CNC machines bought them many moons ago, for a fixed payment (the old fashioned way), from a small business. They don't have any kind of subscription, they are fully offline, and they won't go anywhere near any kind of network. I don't really see recent Microsoft product lines delivering what's required in these scenarios.
Arguably this is more of a use-case for Windows Embedded, but that has its own licensing challenges. Ultimately the small system integrators will end up shipping with Ubuntu if Microsoft makes it too hard to build products around the Windows ecosystem, as it will save them time, money, effort and support costs.
The minimum volume license buy is 5 licenses. Any good reseller will sell you 1 copy of LTSC and 4 of the cheapest SKU in the catalog (usually $5-10 / ea) to get your volume license contract started. After that you can purchase piecemeal for 2 years before you need to fulfill the minimum purchase again. The licenses themselves are perpetual.
I don't like it, but it's not too hard to do either. The trick is finding a reseller who will leave you alone after the purchase (no sales calls, etc).
I don't recall if we found a workaround, or were able to get someone in the office to do the reboots.
Your statement about getting bit by Windows policies only spurs more questions on. What on earth is going on that you need someone physically present "to do the reboots", and why don't you have any remote administration tooling, and why are you using Windows client OS boxes, and...
Should I send you my card, or use my (still active, I think) partner status to sell you some server or LTSC licenses? Put you in touch with a managed service provider?
It seems to me no different than writing that you installed say, Ubuntu Desktop or MacOS in the office, set up your company's webapp or some critical software to start after user login, neglected to set up any remote administration software, and then when it reboots to install security updates it's the software's fault? There were a lot of ways things went wrong before the reboot.
Windows 7 is no longer supported and you now have devices not receiving security updates that are (if they're getting updates) connected to the internet.
We don't have any sort of contractual set-up with the company using the CNC machine, they just brought it to us and said "fix".
According to that company though, the machine is disconnected most of the time, only being connected occasionally to update the CNC software.
Edit: And yes, I'm well aware Win7 isn't supported. However, as it is almost always offline, working is better than not working.
All of that being said, I may be interested in getting a few if you can sell not in bulk.
Just call CDW or one of the major manufacturers - Dell, HP Enterprise, etc. They can all sell you windows 10 LTSC volume licenses.
I think 200$ a license is a bit out of range for me anyways.
On-prem/on-pc is also harder to debug and support, and harder to keep customers on the latest release, so you have to maintain more releases.
Overall cloud makes sense from a business perspective because it's cheaper and takes less effort, so you can dedicate your developers to add valueable features to your software instead of dealing with customer specific situations.
For a vendor, creating, maintaining and supporting on-prem software is more expensive than cloud software, which means it will have a higher price. Don't see users willing to pay a higher price, if it's not considered important.
I'd love that offering in a slightly different sense.
I do most of my personal compute intensive work on AWS these days. If I am processing a bunch of old files into a different format, or archiving old photos, I might spin up a many cored instance and parallalize it to turn a day's processing into an hour (mostly the code, and a few minutes of compute). And I store old junk in AWS for at least an order of magnitude less than dropbox or google drive can get me. I had a personal project where the naive thing to do involved a massive matrix multiply, so I saved myself a ton of time by spinning up a machine with half a terabyte of RAM and did it naively, saving myself an enormous amount of time trying to do something clever.
At this point, for my own machine, I'd love something that amounts to a big battery with a wifi connection (and maybe a teeny tiny cpu somewhere in it). For workloads that can be done over SSH, it's all I need. If the rest of my needs could be met that way, I'd love it. It would be great to just have a remote desktop I can spin up in AWS, changing the size and specs as I want. Basically stadio/geforce now for everything.
I expect as internet becomes more reliable, this will be a thing. Sadly, instead of being able to install windows or OS X on an EC2 instance with an image that I can pass around wherever, moving to GCP or nvidia whenever I decide to, it'll probably be a locked down offering like some services we are starting to see today :(
(Note, this actually happened a while back)