Unrelated but didn’t a lot of things about that time skip a few versions to land at 10? Like I don’t think there was an iPhone 9 and so on.

They also didn’t want to appear to be “behind” OS X.

As someone who was stuck on vista as a teen towards the end of its life is wasn’t a bad OS, but it did deserve the hate early on for being a buggy OS that was poorly optimised for the average hardware of the time. But then I moved to 7 and fell in love with it( or at least I thought it was great).

Then I upgraded to 10 and hated it. I switched to Mac for a couple of years and started liking unix but missed the hardware of PCs and didn’t like the 10.15+ direction of MacOS.

So I switched to Linux( which I had messed with on an old laptop on and off as a teen, but at the time liked all my proprietary crap I was used too) and have never looked back.

I was one of the few people who bought the original Surface and I actually loved Windows 8 on that thing. I even used Internet Explorer because the touch interface was fantastic. It all got taken away though.

I got a laptop with Vista when it was new and though I’m wasn’t really a Windows fan, I never really had a problem with it. I suppose I had never used XP though.

Vista became pretty good after tons of upgrades.

Vista was more stable and usable for me than xp ever was.

W7 was really just a vista service pack, but they had to rebrand it to make people want it.

I was running an it services business at the time, so got to see a broad number of machines and peoples complaints.

I think the massive jump in ram required was a huge problem, it went from most people having 128mb to 256mb, to a minimum of 512, but a reality of 2gb required.

Plus the indexer was relentless and just smashed HDDs.

Drivers were a problem too but people understood they would need to be have upgrades for their fancy new system.

Certain things do run better on Linux. So if a game heavily relies on one of those things, it’ll run better. But there’s still a lot of game engine stuff that is experimental or just plain non-functional on Linux, so the games that utilize those are basically unplayable.

Until fairly recently, things like Ray tracing and DLSS were windows-only, because they almost universally used DirectX, which is a windows API.

These days it’s more “which games don’t work on linux?” Rather than “which games work on linux?”

Here is my attempt to answer this genuinely and in detail. To game on Linux, I think you should be able to, or willing to learn how to:

1. Install operating systems on your computer. There are folks that genuinely can’t handle this; they use the OS installed on their computer and if it breaks they either buy a new computer, or it’s a trip to the geek squad or the genius bar or their brother that “works in computers.” Installing Linux on a PC is practically the same skill as installing Windows on a PC; it asks you things like how you want to partition the drives and such, you have to deal with the BIOS at least a little bit. The main difference is Linux is installed by default on comparably few computers, and even then if you buy a System76, you’re going to get Pop!_OS, if you want Mint, you’re going to do it yourself. So.

2. Learn a bit about how to day-to-day administer a Linux system. How to update the system, how to install new software, how to uninstall software. Learn how the Linux file system works and how drives are mounted onto it, things like that. It is done differently than in Windows; some of the concepts transfer over, some don’t.

3. Not completely freak out when you encounter the terminal. I have seen people pitch a complete bitch fit at the very notion that us Linux users do occasionally use the terminal for things. Here’s one thing that the terminal is really great for: Your sound isn’t working, you ask about this on a forum. Would you rather have someone say “Oh yeah right click the Start button and click Preferences, go to the Devices tab, scroll down and click More Information then a window will pop up, scroll down until you see Sound Card, expand this, then for each entry in there right click, click Properties, go to the Status tab, and then type what it says in there” or “Open a terminal, type lshw | grep -i audio and copy-paste what it spits out.” The terminal is just your computer, you run programs by typing their name instead of clicking on an icon, that’s all. Don’t have a cow, man. Unless it’s cowsay.

4. Play the right games. I have long attributed my success with gaming on Linux in large part to my tastes happening to align with game availability on the platform. I like small studio/indie projects, I like nerdy creative/problem solving/building games, so I play stuff like Zachtronics games and Factorio, and wouldn’t you know it those folks tend to release Linux native builds, or their Windows-only games run great in Proton. I play practically no “AAA” games, I haven’t bought an EA game since the SNES, and I have never owned a Bethesda game.

5. When you first install and log into Steam, go to Steam > Settings > Compatibility and turn on the option “Enable Steam Play for all other titles.”

Depends on the distro, times have really changed in the last 5 years and even more since the steam deck was released. I distro hop a lot and my recommendation for a newbie would be pop os! Or Ubuntu. I was really impressed with pop, everything just worked right on install. Same with Ubuntu for the most part. Any guide for the current release of Ubuntu will work on pop os.

I’ve been using EndeavorOS recently and enjoyed it but I wouldn’t recommend it to someone new to linux. It’s not as hard to use as other distros but might be a bit much for a newcomer.

It’s not nearly as hard as it seems, but you do have to be willing to search around Google for a bit and things might take a few tries to get working. Steam has an option in their compatibility settings to run windows games through Proton that has worked well for me, but I only really play smaller single player games. Can’t vouch for how well it works for multi-player stuff. Also I’m using Manjaro (based on Arch Linux) not sure if it works the same for all distributions.

Dunno if he’s dumb but you’re dumb based on your dumb comment.

How much of that £80 does Lenovo take though? I doubt they’re selling licenses at cost

There are a few factors at play, I think.

1. Microsoft isn’t nearly being as aggressive about pushing free Windows 11 upgrades as they were with Windows 10. Windows Update will offer it to you, but not install it unless you explicitly opt-in.

2. Windows 11’s system requirements of a processor from the last 5 years plus TPM being enabled (it was off by default on most motherboards bought before 2022) leaves a lot of users not even being offered the upgrade (they can manually upgrade after jumping through some hoops).

3. Windows 10 is still actively supported and will be for a while, removing any impetus for users or organizations to upgrade unless they specifically need some of the new features.

All of this adds up to a substantial portion of Windows 11 installs likely being new machines rather than upgrades.

Yep. Hate the curved edges.

There a way to set it back to angled edges without the use of a 3rd party app?

There are more sinister ways to force people to do something than just outright requiring. People seem to have forgotten, or never knew, that time when new DirectX was supported only on Win7 and didn’t work on previous versions mysteriously, but all new games required it. WIndows 7 didn’t see such a huge adoption naturally. Same thing when new Office is released file format changes just enough so that old Office doesn’t support new files, but new Office supports all the formats, so people would end up upgrading. Otherwise majority of people don’t need more than configuring margins, fond sizes and bold.

But will they though? They should, but will they? I predict only very very very few will.

Time for Linux 2.0

I agree with what Plopp said. The logical response is “fuck that” and move on to something, ANYTHING, else. But we should know by now that most people will just suck it up because it’s too much effort to learn something new.

I don’t remember XP or 7 being installed automatically on anyone’s PCs. That was what I was referring to in my previous comment. The “upgrade” to 10 and I think 11 happened automatically, without consent, on some people’s PCs.

Love Arch Linux! Been running it for over a decade now.

Promise?

“slowly”

Removed by mod

They’re a weird case, but they’re able to basically improve boot validation, they can store keys, and they can act as an improved secure random number generator.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Trusted_Platform_Module#Using_TPM_2.0

A TPM is just a piece of hardware, just because you don’t like how Microsoft used it … doesn’t mean it’s some technology for oppression or something. At worst, you can just not use it.

That said, TPMs are supposed to have manufacturer signed keys. TPMs could conceivably be used to properly block someone cheating in an online game from returning (i.e. a “hardware ban”) since the crypto can’t be spoofed (like an IP, MAC address, or serial numbers).