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Comment by seeknotfind | Hacker News Reader

Cost to consumer, incentivizes companies to adopt new technology and avoid relying on specific OS versions. Seems like a good policy.

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Another way to incentivize companies to stop relying on specific OS versions is to stop making every successive version ever more user-hostile and jammed with adware, spyware, and dark patterns.

Can you name adware, spyware or dark patterns that are present in win11 that weren't present in win10?

Windows 11 tries to trick you into thinking your files aren't backed up if you don't back them up into OneDrive via a flashing button right in Windows Explorer. You'll quickly run out of space and have to pay to increase it. And running out of space will shut down your Hotmail/Outlook email account connected to your install.

Windows 10 and 11 both try to trick you into switching from a local login to a cloud login. And in that process trick you into putting your Documents, Desktop, etc into the OneDrive cloud. As you run out of space, your connected Hotmail/Outlook account will shut down until you pay them to increase the space.

My Dad's 80+ year old neighbor had this happen to her. She couldn't figure out why she wasn't able to email pictures back and forth with her daughter. And she was already paying for Carbonite cloud backup. It took me an hour to get it all sorted out.

Or force you (the consumer) to upgrade to newer versions with hostile terms of service and/or applications. It works both ways.

This is a really negative take. They could also add hostile terms of service at other times or do hostile things. It's about cost and marketing.

Windows N+1 will share a majority of code with Windows N. Microsoft would now have to maintain two copies of the code N and N+1. This is added cost.

Alternatively Windows could do continuous releases, but this is less fun to market, and users might not like big changes happening many times a year instead of all at once, etc. There are also compatibility challenges for this since behaviors are tagged to such specific versions.

It's amazing how nobody complains about this with any other operating system -- at least since Leopard/Snow Leopard (IIRC - that was the one that had major compatibility EOL).

The problem isn't the EOL. The problem is that the newer versions of Windows are user-hostile and the alternatives are being retired.

I was able to disable the annoying programs pretty easily and don't know of any licensing changes.

Or is this hypothetical?

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