More PCs Running Windows XP, 7, and 8 Than Windows 11 | Hacker News Reader

More PCs Running Windows XP, 7, and 8 Than Windows 11

thurrott.com

27 pointsingve21 comments

Windows 11 is a pure attack on my freedom, my privacy, and my productivity as a power user. I'm not aware of a single thing that Win 11 would improve over Win 10 for me. But I'm well aware of all the additional advertising locations.

And I'm pretty sure by the time games refuse to run on Windows 10, Linux and Steam will be ready for it.

No need to upgrade.

> Windows 11 is a pure attack on my freedom, my privacy, and my productivity

Insofar as this is true, how is it not true in such a way that these facts merely constitute continuations of problems that already existed with Windows 10?

> No need to upgrade.

Given that Windows 10 will eventually not get security updates, there certainly is a "reason" to upgrade. You have the right idea with switching to Linux, I guess. That is a solution insofar as Microsoft is effectively offering you an all or nothing deal: either accept Windows as it stands, or use something else. Anything else is basically just a delaying action, and it's important to recognize that using Windows 10 is already a compromise in the areas you're talking about.

This idea of security is interesting. Having a backdoor built into the OS (Android, Windows 10, 11, 7 with telemetry) has nothing to do with security. You can have as many so called "security patches" as you want as long as the OS makes what it wants behind your back.

I mean, I'm not defending OS backdoor but "telemetry gets sent to Microsoft" is very different from "0-day hijacks all your data to unknown attackers".

You are right. "telemetry gets sent to Microsoft" is "hijacks all your data to known attacker". It does not ad any level of trust or security.

Let me fix that for everyone: "Companies that's IT departments decided to ran a program called LanSweeper have more PCs running XP, 7, and 8 than Windows 11"

There are a lot of 50+ kEuro devices which run old Windows OSs.

Even aside from the things that Microsoft is doing that come off frustrating, the tone-deafness is amazing.

The whole "we don't want to let you move the taskbar" saga is a disaster of messaging even more than it is a technical fiasco.

Even if you have actually decided from some top-down diktat that the taskbar is now permanently glued to the bottom, the appropriate corporate answer is "We're taking your feedback into account and considering it." It creates no obligation. You don't whine "very few people actually want it" or "It's too hard even though somehow it was doable in 1995 on a 386SX." That does not make your customers feel appreciated and valued. (I'm sure this then pivots into a "they're not really our customers if they aren't a PC OEM or large enterprise" discussion.)

If they don't want to reach out to the power-user community directly, they still have the ability to pawn this sort of problem off on third-party developers. I recall back in the late Win3.1 era, it was, perhaps not common, but not "strange" to use alternate shells. Compaq and Packard Bell home PCs booted into their cutesy custom UIs in instead of Program Manager, and on the more enthusiast-side, I fondly recall Calmira (the Win95 Explorer clone) and the one IBM prepared which was a cutdown model of the OS/2 Workplace Shell.

These days, alternatives feel almost illicit-- "You can install Classic Shell or the like, but odds are you're going to have to keep battling with Windows updates that want to restore the defaults."

When they acknowledge the third party ecosystem-- the biggest selling point Windows has over MacOS or Linux-- they can then reframe the message as "We're providing a basic solution that services most people's needs, but there's also a vibrant ecosystem of alternatives." All it requires is respecting user choice.

I'm personally mostly not interested in Windows 11 because of the account requirement. (PC login is a huge obvious point for "I have a home persona and a work persona and potentially multiple of each, so trying to force One Account To Rule Them All is just going to conflate details that should remain siloed") Yeah, I could switch over to local accounts after install, but it feels like it ends up with some terrible situation where the license I paid $120 for is locked behind a throwaway Microsoft account I can no longer recover.

Ignoring all the telemetry arguments, just from a corporate perspective, Windows 11 simply isn't ready yet.

There are still compatibility issues with various hardware and software (including Teams), critical bugs (especially AutoPilot and other deployment workflows).

It's so not-ready that Microsoft aren't really pushing it on corps, and most OEMs are still defaulting to Windows 10 on business orders.

It feels like they've prioritised getting it ready for consumer release and intend to fix up the corporate side later.

I can't think of one single reason I'd want to go anywhere near Windows 11. If a machine came with it preinstalled I'd uninstall it in favor of 10 and call it a day. There is nothing compelling about Forced Obsolescence: the OS to me.

Well I can think of a couple of reasons: Windows Subsystem for Android, and WSLg support.

They're not compelling ones, though.

Pretty sure WSLg is also on Win 10 no?

I think it was only available on some particular Insider builds of Windows 10, not the general releases. Cynical take is obviously that they discontinued support precisely to entice developers to migrate to Windows 11.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/so7t...

>wslg

Is the mingw X server that hard to install? When we had Windows PCs at work I used it all the time.

>Android

There's an open source Android runtime for Linux. No need for the Microsoft thing.

WSLG supports faux GPU passthrough/sharing with the host, e.g. for CUDA workloads or graphics acceleration from within the WSL environment.

How many PC's can officially run Windows 11? Windows 10 ran on virtually anything from 10 years ago and was a free upgrade even to pirate users of windows. Windows 11 is barely out of demo and requires a pc from the last three years or so.

Many years ago when XCOM Enemy Unknown was released I was forced to upgrade to Windows 8 to play it, something to do with DirectX I think.

Such a moment has never occurred since, so I'm happily still using Windows 8. Don't fix what isn't broke.

you got jibbed, because you don't need windows 8 to install the newer version of directx to play xcom. Win7 works fine.

Aren't both unsupported? By MS.

Not when xcom came out at the time!

It will again for something. iTunes for some reason REQUIRES Windows 10 now. Why I can't fathom but it does. For games I can't see directstorage being backported to 8 either.

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