Microsoft asking us to buy new Windows 11 PCs is wasteful

At best, you're gaining marginal security benefits at the cost of major productivity loss of power users and performance loss on older OS/hardware combinations.

My work gave me a Win11 machine. It works well enough (for a 16Gb machine trying to juggle Docker and JetBrains software) but I find it frustrating in trivial regressions:

* I didn't ask for rounded corners, and it tends to make software look weird if it doesn't expect to have the bottom right corner chopped off. Evidently there is no trivial way to disable this-- I looked and saw guides like "you basically have to disable hardware-accelerated graphics to force it into a compatibility mode" which seems rather using a chainsaw to cut butter. This just seems to be another stop on the "the user shouldn't be theming their machine at all" journey. (I set up a clean Win10 install this week and was surprised to see now it seemed to default to a randomized Bing wallpaper instead of the Windows logo) noticed

* The little pop-up calendar if you click the taskbar is gone. "Is October 30 a Thursday" is the sort of question I ask a couple times a week for scheduling purposes; an immediate answer is now gone, replaced with nothing.

Yes, these are small problems, but the overall problem is that Windows 11 doesn't give me enough 'new and better' to make up for even tiniest of drawbacks. Even Vista, for all its warts, said "here's a shiny new UI that's interesting rather than just "we made it look more like MacOS because for some reason every design enthusiast on earth can only sniff Apple's farts" and "64-bit support that's actually going to work on most mainstream gear."

If they can't provide enough pros to outweigh "I miss a tiny calendar in the corner of the screen", what chance do they have to respond to the well-documented bigger annoyances like "let's break common taskbar configuration options", "cramming MS accounts even harder down people's throats" and "let's obsolete kit that would run it fine for poorly elucidated reasons."

You'd think they'd have put a lot more effort into trying to find some killer feature or app to actively sell Win11, that makes it worth dealing with the faults, like how back in the day, a new DirectX or IE version might have justified going beyond Windows XP. I guess they're just in maintenance-rundown mode-- not really caring if people embrace Win11 because they know that eventually enterprises will be required to accept it for support/compliance reasons.

Does user mean 'forced into malicious spyware eco-system in order to complete University tasks under surveillance' these days? If so, yes, I sadly had to give my maxed out 11th gen X1 to M$ spyware to do school work now.

I'm taking a break this semester so it just sits with a dead battery in the closet for now. Such a waste of good hardware.

I think this is why, just like the legacy financial system, these obsolete, bloated forms of spying disguised as an OS will never go away: you're forced into abject compliance with no recourse with only repercussions if you deviate unless you're willing to de-couple entirely.

There are no alternatives if you do work using these enterprise based products, and if you're one of the few lucky WoH class you pretty much allow this thing to monitor you day and night at this point. Same goes for your smart phone, but at least you can just get a dumb phone there and most won't be the wiser.

Windows will be with us for decades to come. There is no shortage of industry-specific software that doesn’t run on anything else.

Take our family business: Our CAD doesn’t run on Mac; and forget about the CAM software for a router. That’s just our industry - I would say almost every industry has it’s bespoke software that isn’t going away.

For many other businesses, Microsoft Office is non-negotiable. What’s the alternative, sending PII to Google Docs? Knowing that if you open that 2011 document, the formatting will be cooked? What if you need Adobe or Affinity software?

I’ve just accepted that Linux on the desktop will never happen.

Edit: The comment below me on Adobe, shows the commentator is clueless. Adobe legally has commercial rights to their stock photo library (Adobe Stock) and the 248 million images in it. That’s plenty for training AI, and as a result, a copyright challenge against Adobe has never been attempted. Many artists have been fairly vocal that this wasn’t what they intended when they literally sold their photos to Adobe, but that’s hardly a winning legal argument.

Apps that only run on Windows. (Some Windows apps don't even have macOS versions.)

>I think if someone is setting up Windows for grandma to use Facebook on, then surely Ubuntu can serve the same purpose? Maybe some dedicated grandkids can try and report back.

I know a "grandma" in her late 70s that runs Windows with sewing embroidery software (Bernina and Brother) and Quicken for personal finances. Those apps don't run on Linux and using workarounds such as Wine or virtual machines for them is not reliable.

So it's not just the exotic business apps like CAD/CAM and Adobe Photoshop/Premiere that keeps users on the Windows platform.

If a user is using the desktop as just a way to run a web browser 100% of the time, then yes, a Linux desktop is a realistic platform for non-techies.

Most other games have become perfectly playable via Proton. 76% of Top 1000 Steam games have a ProtonDB rating of "Platinum" or "Gold", meaning that they run with no or very few tweaks.

https://www.protondb.com/dashboard