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I suspect this will lead to an increase in the number of people staying on Win10 and below. Naturally, MS will also continue spreading their usual FUD in their attempts at persuading the userbase to "bend over and take it".

This will also lead to an increased demand for custom "distros" and modding tools and such, which has always been a bit of an "underground" community but has occasional resurgences. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40130230

As the old saying goes: "challenge accepted." ;-)

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>people staying on Win10 and below

everything below 10 has been EOL for a good while now, and 10 only has a year left

No one really cares about that "EOL" crap unless they've been brainwashed by the FUD. A lot of very important software[1] still works on Vista or 7, and a large portion of that even on XP and below. Also don't forget that Win10 IoT LTSC is officially supported until 2032.

[1] Not things like the latest games, but LOB applications and related software that companies rely on for their work.

It's not FUD when they stop issuing security patches. I am switching to Linux.

No longer receiving security updates on an OS who receives most malware and has a history of vulnerabilities isn't FUD

Exactly the sort of brainwashing I was referring to. Security depends entirely on your threat model.

Look up the CVE stats by OS and you'll see the truth.

> Look up the CVE stats by OS

2024: https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php?year=2024

9 of 10 are Windows branded operating systems. 3,276 across all of these platforms. Of these, over 1,000 are different versions of Windows 10. Compared to 1799 on the Linux kernel, which is actively developed and will be actively developed for the foreseeable future.

Are you arguing that Windows doesn't continuously get CVE entries? That is not supported by the data.

It is not logical to arrive at the conclusion that after the manufacturer states they will no longer address vulnerabilities, which are actively being found as if this year, that this is FUD.

I'm saying that the newer the version, the more CVEs it has.

Of these, over 1,000 are different versions of Windows 10

Precisely. Windows 11 will be worse.

Of course this doesn't exclude bogus/trivial ones, since CVE-chasing is a thing now, but how many were found in older versions?

...and no surprise that I'm being downvoted by the corporate-authoritarian shills for speaking against the narrative. Yet it should be clear that the newer the code is, the buggier it is --- especially with the sort of competence that passes for developers these days. MS is adding more and more attack surface every day.

"Truth doesn't mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged" ;-)

> Precisely. Windows 11 will be worse.

The difference is Win11 continues to address these vulnerabilities. Or you switch to a Nix or air gap the machine. The incorrect approach is to continue using Win10 in production as if nothing is going to happen.

I suspect we have gotten sidetracked into arguing different things at each other for this reason

>Of course this doesn't exclude bogus/trivial ones, since CVE-chasing is a thing now, but how many were found in older versions?

Glad I am not the only one who has observed this. That Python int to str conversion “denial of service” CVE from a few years back was a complete joke.

>9 of 10 are Windows branded operating systems. 3,276 across all of these platforms. Of these, over 1,000 are different versions of Windows 10. Compared to 1799 on the Linux kernel, which is actively developed and will be actively developed for the foreseeable future.

How many of those CVEs actually affect you in a tangible way as to disturb your sleep at night?

If you are not considering your threat model to discern which threats you should actually care about, you are doing computer security wrong.

The OP invoked CVEs for the FUD argument, not me

I agree completely that they have a low signal to noise ratio

I agree security depends on your threat model but CVEs counts tell you newly noted vulnerabilities and you don't really need to bother with that when the you've already got dozens that'll never be patched.

Gamers will care though. I know that demo seems irrelevant but I would assume a non-insignificant % of Windows users use the OS just to game. I hope some developers can recognize the concerns many of us have with Win 11 and continue developing for 10 past EOL.

Windows 11 recently surpassed 50% on Steam, so yeah.

The reality is Windows users have a looong history of drawing lines in the sand and saying they will go no further... then meekly going further anyway. Somebody who's done this half a dozen times already to wind up on Windows 10 will almost certainly do it again.

I went looking for this because I knew I had just come across something like it.

Repo is here: https://github.com/ntdevlabs/tiny11builder

I can't imagine IT departments are going to put up with this, either.

Nope, not enjoying this at all. We're already looking at full OS alternatives for our workloads.

Linux + Bottles / Lutris.

I wouldn't go to Win 11, and Linux actually is good enough now.

> Linux actually is good enough now.

You say this like there is one Linux that people can use. Instead, it is fragmented to hell and back with various distros. Since it's a replacement for Windows, a GUI will be needed. There's more than one of those as well.

So now, some one needs to go down that rabbit hole of trying to decide which distro/GUI will work for them. So a generic "use Linux" is not very helpful.

I installed Pop OS with about 10 minutes research as soon as this Recall bullshit was announced, and everything I've tried so far works fine.

Having more options isn't a bad thing unless you let yourself suffer choice paralysis. You can just not do that.

I switched to Pop!_OS last year when I was doing a hardware refresh. I started reading up on all the hijinks in Windows 11 with trying to trick users into signing in to their local machine through an on-line MS ID. I had a big problem with the idea of paying someone a subscription fee to use my own machine. Showing ads and "feeds" on my desktop and in my start menu that I had no control over was already bad enough in Windows 10, but Microsoft had indeed cranked things up to... well... 11.

Since then, Microsoft has only added evidence that my decision was a good one.

Decision paralysis is just a lame excuse people use to mask their real reason for not doing something. If you don't know enough about the choices to know which one you prefer, then either you simply chose any of them and subsequently have a more informed preference next time, or you chose none of them because you don't actually want the thing in the first place.

I want ice cream and approach a vendor in the park. He has brands and flavors I've never tried before so I throw up my hands and say there is too much choice, he needs to pick one single kind of ice cream before he gets my business. Somebody who behaves like this doesn't actually want ice cream in the first place but is pretending to for some reason.

I think the fragmentation problem extends well beyond "golly, which does my little head ever pick - they're all so perfectly usable I just don't know how to pick one!" and more to "well this one has Q, G, and Y... but that one has M, G, and Y but I can get Q if I tweak... and this one has M, G, Y, A, Q, Z but switching to that means I have to take its unrelated opinions on B, O, J, and N which I don't like" kind of scenario. There are plenty of flavors which can be acceptable but the premise is finding a flavor you want to use more. Without extreme ideological grounds on the level "Microsoft did ${thing} so I'm never touching them again" that becomes difficult to weigh.

I generally get away with a lot of use cases at work just saying "It's the front facing LTS of Ubuntu" and a lot of use cases at home just saying "Since it's just for me I'll customize Arch to what I need" but there are still plenty of scenarios, in each, just going with Windows makes a lot more sense (or sometimes is the only viable option, e.g. home HDR or work vendor application support).

I'm sure there will be GPOs and registry keys to disable it. We're actually not worried about it at all, at least no one I know is. Corporate Windows deployments are not the same as Windows Home. We manage it very differently.

So it's ok to have Skyward installed as long as it is disabled?

I don't think any enterprise is going to be shocked Windows has a few extra bytes of cruft than they need in the base install. Ultimately it actually being disabled is a matter of general trust in the data controls - for which Microsoft is a lot better favored on the enterprise side than the consumer side.

Yeah, Win10 will be my last Windows once the curtain starts to fall. Win11 has only got more invasive since release.

Win7 4 lyfe. dozens of less RCE opportunities by the day.

Exactly. Known unknowns vs. unknown unknowns.

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