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Comment by supportlocal4h | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood the mentality of staying on an old release of Windows. If you use Windows, you should stay current. If you are not willing to stay current, you should move to something else that is responsibly maintained. To stay still is to accept ever increasing vulnerability. That is bad for you and bad for everyone you touch (which probably means everyone, period).

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I can't talk about others, but for me, the number one reason is the UI. If I could be 100% sure that updating to a newer version would keep my UI just the way I know it, and that no workflow is going to be broken, I would probably update as soon as possible. I still do that with a lot of other software. On the contrary, Windows is very fond of changing everything whenever they can, and it becomes tiresome fast. For example, several versions ago (it started with Vista, I think), someone decided that updating the file association info and the commands associated with each file type could no longer be accessed from the file explorer. Instead, you need to access the registry. Cue the myriad of different small tools, each with a slightly different and possibly incomplete behaviour.

It's very telling that extensions like OpenShell and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker are so common. Also, I'm still salty at the removal of the Windows Classic theme and of the detailed. I use WindowBlinds as a patch of sorts, but there is still a lot of customisation missing. Customisation that used to be available in older Windows.

Sticking with Windows95 because you like the UI is a bad move. Ditto XP, 7, 8.

10 is still maintained, so it's a different case for now. But W10 users should be developing a migration plan -- either to 11 or away from Windows.

In the case of Windows 11, it is not feature complete - there are things in 10 not in 11. Additionally, hardware support is different, and if you have some things that cannot go to 11, why take anything to 11 and have an inconsistent set of devices? 10 is still fully supported.

In the case of macOS 10.14, it has 32-bit support and .15 doesn't. macOS also has gotten increasingly user and developer hostile every release (my opinion, of course).

In the case of iPadOS 15, in my opinion it entirely broke multitasking and I wish I could go back.

Some Linux users are still suffering from the "upgrade" to systemd.

In general I have found over the last decade that OS "upgrades" change things, break things, cause regressions and make my life unhappy. I wouldn't mind so much if it was once every 3-5 years but this annual cycle of breaking and changing things is tiresome to me.

To name a few examples why one would have that mentality:

  - Feature set changes (take telemetry for example with Windows 10, or changes in group policy options)

  - Unknown/untested compatibility with small non-corporate backed programs that a user needs to use

  - BIOS / Hardware issues (i.e. Power management changes and tweaks may push limits outside operating status)

Generally speaking while I agree with your vulnerability point, its not unreasonable to say new vulnerabilities can be introduced. Many people may value other things more which results in the mentality why one would ask or stay on a previous version of windows.

This is not specific to Windows, but reasons not to upgrade a system:

- New bugs. Most recently, my iOS 15 made my bluetooth headset twitchy in new subtle ways. Now it will unprovokedly switch from headphones to speakers without warning. If I pause whatever I'm playing and press play, it will go back. This is very unfortunate. Thank you, upgrade.

- Arbitrary UI "improvements" break workflows and simply change the look/behavior of things I didn't ask for. Menu layout changes means you no longer find things in the places they used to be; maybe the new place is better, but it places a burden on constantly having to re-learn menus. Microsoft Office, in my experience, has offended the most here. Compare this to UNIX command-line tools where parameters have not changed in decades upon decades.

> To stay still is to accept ever increasing vulnerability

That's what security updates are for.

If software vendors would differentiate between

- security updates

- deprecating old APIs/libraries

- adding new features

then we might have more software that Just Works.

For every major OS and software, as long as there are security updates and the new major release is still in infancy, staying w/o update and waiting out while stupid decisions are reverted and inevitable bugs are reported&fixed has been my default strategy for a while to save my sanity.

As long as the release is still supported by MS, what’s the problem? I use Windows for a very narrow use case: run games. I never interact with windows itself and the software it ships with beyond the most basic system maintenance, so there’s a very low chance that I’ll benefit noticeably from an upgrade. However, there’s a good chance that some games won’t run as well or not yet until more people upgrade and the kinks get worked out. It’s perfectly reasonable to delay your upgrade by as long as MS still supports 10.

You can use a bit more logic than that.

We need Windows because we need apps (and in some cases drivers, which was more of a problem in the past) only available for Windows. I generally use 100% Linux for years but return to Windows every some years as I occasionally need Visual Studio (not VS Code) and occasionally feel like I'd like to play some games and don't have time for Wine hacking. Some times I also have to process huge amounts of data on NTFS drives and Linux NTFS driver is not nearly as fast as the original.

Every newer version of Windows usually introduces a number of changes (in many aspects, including the UI) people don't want.

Every new version of Windows and some of its early updates usually introduce a lot of bugs so we "always wait for a service pack" (now as there are no service packs this means just wait a couple of years) for the new Windows version to become acceptably reliable.

History has shown that newer releases don't equate to direct upgrades.

You should have the right to run whatever you want, "security" paternalism be damned. Fuck your authoritarianism.

Windows 10 EOF is Oct. 14, 2025.

This argument only really works when your OS vendor pushes more security patches than forced regressions, which generally stopped being true after windows 7.

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