Yeah, obviously everyone knows about this, let’s just have a relaxed conversation about the next big thing
You know me, you know what I think (I’d post this in “And we also dislike” category if there was one), I’m not even gonna preach lol, let’s keep it chill mkay Let’s just say some people aren’t happy about win11, forced TPM and stuff. More control for the company, less for the user it seems, as expected.
I’m curious, what do you Windows users think about this? Will you upgrade (if you’re even given a choice)? Downgrade? Is this when you switch to “something else”?
My brother is unironically switching to Windows XP
Honestly I didn’t expect this, I thought they were just going to keep pushing updates to Win 10 forever as the era of buying big “boxed” software releases is obviously over.
This is a tough call. Because of work, there will be no option but to adopt windows 11 at some stage.
Dassault (SolidWorks) and Adobe still do not support any other OS. I do not see that policy changing.
Last year, I noticed I slowly slipped from Windows to Linux. In 2019 my go-to machine was still my HP laptop with Windows, now I do 100% of my programming / hobby stuff on Linux.
Windows 10 has been a sort of an abusive relationship. Microsoft has been forcing upgrades such as the W10 creator edition which, among other things, broke my Wacom-enabled touch sensitive screen drivers completely. There was even stuttering on MS Surface laptops and I do not think the issue was ever solved. Add to that the fact that my smaller laptops have endured 10’s of gigabytes of “updates” to W10 which have not brought any usable features.
With Windows 7, there were no “downsides” to using Windows. It was a pretty solid OS and performed flawlessly for many years. Windows 10 redefined that relationship, where you never knew (when booting the computer) if you’d get stuck in an “updating windows” message for 5-10 minutes, or if your PC webcam, sound card & touch drivers would still work the next time you booted up, with no way to opt out.
Summary:
win 11 experience is likely to be even worse than win 10, because the marketing dept is firmly in control of the show now
but there is no alternative OS in sight for professional (CAD) users, so I have no option but to continue
From business point of view you’ll need to continue with Win11 in one way or another, but I’d say it’s most reasonable to not rely solely on it, basically what you’re saying. I think now is a good time to make an alternative OS (Linux et al) the “main” home of a project honestly, or simply free the project from dependencies on any specific OS as much as possible, while trying to keep it compatible with Windows for your customers. Because Win is simply becoming too unpredictable in its behavior, as you say.
As much as I dislike CMake, it can provide a way to create build projects for many OSes (makefiles for Linux and project files for Windows dev tools, probably even the Mac stuff).
For personal use, I don’t see much reason to keep continuing Windows other than a) games (which is also becoming a weaker and weaker argument, especially if you’re kind of casual – Linux runs most games nowadays) and b) behavioral inertia (being “used to it”). That is, if you have a choice (most people don’t as they don’t know how to install another OS, or their computer doesn’t even allow it).
I am basically in the same boat as Jonne. As a hobby platform, I have switched to Linux because of the cost and that Windows did not work any more in my laptop with a slightly defective gfx chip.
At work there is no other option than Windows.
However, I miss certain free Windows tools when coding on Linux (Zorin/Ubuntu): most often Notepad++ and TortoiseGit, sometimes Process Monitor and Process Explorer too.
My laptop seems to be compatible so I do have the choice.
I’m using Windows for gaming (steam, itch.io, GOG) and digital drawing (OpenCanvas, GIMP).
I’m also using it as an extra backup location (in addition with the NAS).
I’m not using it for development, except for a weird browser game I keep customizing and playing.
(It has always been painful to dev on C/C++ on windows when you want cross-platform, so I eventually got out of that).
The updates are annoying me.
I do 99% of my development on macOS these days. Pretty much all of it is either cross-platform or cross-platformish (Like the pokitto ).
I rely on online services (google, trello, github, …) for a lot of things.
Some old games and programs aren’t working well on it, and some can probably be emulated by now.
macOS has become more and more annoying and closed too. GIMP and Inkscape often had a hellish experience on it.
Clearly I don’t have many thing tying me to windows, beside nostalgia. That’s been my main OS since my first PC, not really out of choice initially, and also because I’m too lazy to switch out.
What I intend to do later this year:
Getting a distro / setup that fits my everyday needs:
Basic image manipulation and drawing (gimp, inkscape, it’d be also nice to get something as simple as Irfanview)
Development (pokitto, unity, sdl, sfml, qt, an equivalent to Notepad++, …)
Not spending too many hours making the whole thing works
Keeping an installation of Win11 for games only.
Tho also for drawing if I can’t make it (wacom+software) work nicely on linux.
And also for testing cross-compiled/platforms things (Unity, etc)
(not really related) trying to use less google services.
I still need to figure out some things. I know I need fresh things too, and possibly to get involved into some OS projects, so switching to linux is definitely going to happen for me.
The modern Windows don’t have anything in common with the old ones besides the name anyway, so for nostalgia you’d better downgrade rather than upgrade I have old Windows nostalgia too indeed, but I am rather trying to replicate it in a better way than it used to be, i.e. on a free system – I run some GNU/Linux and make it look 90s by for example disabling font antialiasing etc., plus that’s also more suckless xD It’s a win-win to me. I then install something like freedoom and run it in chocolate-doom engine with low resolution to get the oldschool looks.
For escaping Google there are a lot of alternatives too, I’ve been using Disroot for cloud and email, but generally it’s best to avoid cloud as much as possible I think, or rather not rely on it but use it as a support to your work. E.g. with things like git hosting I’ve basically stopped relying on single any online service, I just use them to mirror my offline repos, i.e. I have my work synced on two computers via git and then have multiple remotes on gitlab, codeberg, source hut etc., to which I automatically push and it’s all backed up on these multiple servers. I try to replicate that with other services like cloud storage too.
For drawing and graphics – have you tried Krita?
Resisting the temptation to suggest my preferred text editor xD
This is the first I’ve heard of Windows 11.
So much for Windows 10 being the “last version of Windows”.
I take this as an indication that Microsoft’s realised that making Windows 11 will bring them more money than not making one (which may in turn imply that the “OS as a service” model either failed or wasn’t as profitable).
Personally, I plan to hold out on Windows 8.1 for as long as possible, which is exactly what I was doing before the announcement.
I had the option to upgrade to Windows 10 long ago, but decided against it because I was happy with Windows 8.1 and there were several things I didn’t like about Windows 10 (e.g. Cortana, discontinued Paint). When it was first released, Windows 8.1 was the thing that everybody loved to hate, but actually it’s not all that bad. Most of its quirks are easy to hide away and ignore.
I’d like to give Linux a go some day when I actually have a second computer to run it on. For the most part I think I could manage quite well since most of the software I use regularly has a Linux version (e.g. Firefox, GIMP, VSCodium, LibreOffice, Steam?, …), but there’s also a handful of things (mainly games, but also older versions of Visual Studio) that I couldn’t run on Linux (or at least, not easily), so I’d still have to keep a Windows computer for those things.
I don’t think I’d ever want an Apple computer unless I absolutely had to use one though.
(I don’t hate Apple, but I do hate a lot of their design decisions.)
Don’t knock it till you try it. I have used Windows for work and at home since DOS days. I bought a Mac 5 or 6 years ago and have refreshed once. It is my preference now for any developing that I do. Actually its my preference for everything I do - and its not just the 27" 5K screen but the whole platform I like.
I’ve used a Mac twice and I really can’t stand them.
I’d reel off a list of the things I don’t like, but no doubt someone will try to argue with me about it.
Frankly I couldn’t afford to buy one even if I did want one so any argument about the pros and cons would have no practical impact.
I will say that Windows 11 appears to now do one of the things that I don’t like about macOS.
Lol … fair enough. I have an iPhone and about five Apple TVs and love the integration between these devices. But that’s not my biggest love … it’s not the endless patching cycles (Windows) or the need to build your own environment (Linux) it’s just the consistent interface / the uniformity of it all.
As I said I have a number of windows machines (including the high powered machine I have now) but they are just second best to the Mac.
I don’t want to sound like the Apple fanclub but it’s a compelling platform if you can get over the entry price of hardware.
This is entirely optional. Like most things in the Linux ecosystem. I don’t build my own environment, I just use what Fedora Silverblue gives by default.
Without bringing up too much ideology let me say I think it’s best to not depend on any single operating system, be it windows, mac OS, Linux and any of its distros or BSD. That’s why POSIX is great – it defines a standard environment for you and frees you of any hard dependency or brand loyalty. You no longer identify with your OS, desktop environment or any other tool. For me, all I need is a Unix environment and I can always bring everything over and make it my own.
In this sense, Windows 11 is trying to be the exact opposite of POSIX.
I have no option, because everything i use for work and most of the stuff for private usage is windows based. A lot of drivers, hardware, etc. only work with windows. So i will have to swap hardware and software sooner or later.
I just can’t stand the whole way technical things evolve. I also stopped to buy new gen gaming consoles like ps5 or xbox x - it’s all about being online and only rent the things you want. I play retro games and listen to records instead again and if i could use my computer based things that way i would
@Zockeromi you still have a choice in personal computing if not at work. I feel the same way as you about the technological development. Check out freegamedev forums and libregamewiki, it’s a community where people usually try to make games that respect old HW etc.
Historically, Windows has actually had a handful of official ways to make Windows POSIX compliant including the ‘POSIX subsystem’ in the 90s and ‘Services for UNIX’ in the early 00s.
Then they seemed to stop caring about POSIX for quite a while after the mid 00s, all the way up until 2016 when the ‘Subsytem for Linux’ (WSL) was introduced.
Assuming WSL is going to be continued in Windows 11, (I see no reason why it wouldn’t be,) that makes Windows 11 actually more POSIX compliant than XP through to 8, so calling it ‘the exact opposite of POSIX’ probably isn’t an accurate description.
Yeah I mean in the sense of trying be anti-compatible, discriminating and with monopolistic goals rather than unifying, interconnecting and liberating computing platforms, but yep, they’re a corporation, what else to expect You can kind of run Linux inside it… yay.
I’ve used Mac and honestly the thing I couldn’t stand (not including the price) was the lack of customization (which is possibly one of it’s biggest selling points, as @filmote has indicated that’s one of the key features he likes about Mac).
With Windows 11 I’m mostly curious on how much they’re going to brute force people into upgrading (even if there system is incompatible). My Grandma’s computer auto-updated from 7 to 10 overnight (despite me explicitly disabling the update), then none of her programs worked and the Microsoft ones she used (like outlook, etc.) had all changed drastically and it’s hard for people to constantly adapt to unnecessary interface changes (Blender anyone ).
Though I will say this: I really don’t like Mac or Windows and will avoid using them at all costs. I’ll try everything I can to get a Windows game running on Linux before eventually just switching over to my windows install (dual booted PC) to play it. However, despite my incredible disdain for both Windows and Mac I will also do what I can to build my various projects on those platforms because I still want users of my tools/games/programs to be free to choose whichever system they are most comfortable with. For example over on the Arduboy side of life I’m nearly done with my ArduManFX tool and despite how difficult it is to make a Mac build without an actual Mac I’ve still managed to do it so people like @filmote (and others) can use it on their Mac, and I’ll continue to do the same with any other projects with PC releases.
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You can kind of run Linux inside it… yay.
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