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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

Don't they still charge a $100+ license for Windows? I have Windows 10 for games, but I haven't booted into it in months since Steam has been fantastic on Linux (relative to it's past, it has some ways to go).

I'll be the classic Linux desktop optimist: the improvements over the last four years along have been fantastic and I really hope for a future when it can meet everyone's needs.

My OS shouldn't advertise to me. It shouldn't sell my data, or shouldn't do anything like that. It especially shouldn't harass me to log into the owning company's account. I shouldn't need any internet account to just use the OS (missing features relates the said account is obviously reasonable).

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>It shouldn't sell my data, or shouldn't do anything like that. It especially shouldn't harass me to log into the owning company's account

Consumers didn't react harshly enough after the prism leaks. Microsoft has gotten the inch and is taking a mile.

Professional is more like $200, and has all that crap as home version.

The difference between home and pro is very small these days. Hyper-V, BitLocker, and Group Policy, are basically it. You can grab a cheap OEM licence to upgrade Home to Pro very easily for far less than $200.

Don't forget Remote Desktop.

Good shout. That and hyper-v are why I upgraded to pro (on the very cheap) on my main windows machine & laptop.

Wasn't it also true that the Home version can't connect to regular SMB/CIFS shares? There's a very faint bell ringing in the back of my mind about that.

Erm. No? I use it and I don't remember ads that I can't disable (honestly I don't remember ads in windows except in Edge but thats different story), or some tricky interruption on windows load.

Upd: Im about win10.

I have a distinct memory of seeing an advertisement for a windows store game in the start menu of my copy of windows 10 professional in the year 2015. The widows license was $200. I hadn't used windows in years before, and I only used it briefly in 2015.

You can get a technically-legal Professional license from shady websites for $20.

Retail price is ~$140 for Home.

They do and it is absurd. I bought Win11 Pro from here for about $20, the price has since gone up a bit: https://www.vip-urcdkey.com/key/microsoft-windows-11-pro-oem...

This does not look at all legitimate

I’ve purchased a handful of keys over the years. It’s legit.

They’re OEM keys which are against EULA to use in this way. It might work now, but they could ban those keys later if they want to.

It's "legit" insofar as "it's gets you a string that you can enter into windows and will activate". I doubt it would satisfy any legal requirements, although to be fair a home user probably wouldn't be very concerned about that.

In Hungary you can get them as cheap as $7-$10, because of the EU regulation that you can't exclusively bundle hardware and software. Meanwhile the retail version is $91, for the cheapest Home version. Ridiculous.

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