Yeah, this seems like the kind of thing they’d try to push on Business/Pro+ users, where management is willing to fork out absurd amounts of money monthly as long as the per-seat price can be vaguely justified. Doing this for home users would just be dumb. Plenty of people would see the monthly subscription and go “eh I don’t need a computer, I can just use my phone.”

But… But… But… Russian propaganda! Microsoft bad, Linux good!

with how things are going, I might have to “downgrade” to win 10

It’s more that MS has leaned into the subscription model with Office 365 and such.

Windows is already kind of a “Freemium” OS, so I’m expecting them to continue in that fashion. Your are right, the article is mostly pointless speculation that was refuted anyways, but I’ll admit it sounded a bit off to me anyways. MS wants people to be running Windows, so they can seem then GamePass subscriptions, Office365 subscriptions, and whatever other services they can think of. As such, I expect the core OS to be very free. Just what constitutes core functionality versus Premium features might change.

It is very worrying that they’ve detained destroyed their reputation so much that any negative news about them is automatically believable.

Growth is the MO of every business.

You forgot “Use AI”

I guess I gotta be the basic bitch here.

Try mint, particularly with their own DE, cinnamon. It really is a great overall experience. I’ve run it on something like five or six different PCs in my own home, plus two laptops. Zero issues in years. Right now, the only thing in the house that isn’t running it is my audio PC, because musicbee is a pain to get running on Linux at all.

That’s the only downfall for Linux currently. There’s no good audio programs that are Linux native. At best, stuff like clementine and similar options are acceptable players, but they’re shit at anything else.

My most recent laptop, it was as easy as popping in the usb drive, installing, and putting it to use. But that’s a ThinkPad, and they’re super Linux friendly. Mint has the important stuff on it to begin with, so unless you need specific programs, you’ll be functional faster than with a fresh windows install. Even if you have a handful of other programs you can’t live without, you aren’t going to run into major issues.

Mind you, any of the other distros mentioned so far are pretty much just as plug n play too, but mint seems to play well with any hardware at all. Plus, cinnamon is such a damn nice DE

I’ve had a very good experience with Fedora for the past few years, but I’ve also heard good things about Endeavor OS for an Arch based experience

if your looking for something super beginner friendly, i would reccomend Mint (ubuntu based). if you want something slightly more work to learn, then EndevourOS (arch based, similar to manjaro), because it has Pacman and the Arch User Repository. both have good support and community, and many editions (different desktop environments preconfigured), i would recommend KDE or maybe Cinnamon (better for Mint), though it is not as big of a choice as distro (you can change DEs). KDE has a lot of awesome features out of the box, so its a great choice for beginners

Pop_OS is where it’s at

I’ve been running PopOS, and it’s been flawless.

Like the others say, Linux Mint. If you wanna spend a bunch more time configuring everything and solving issues then you can use other distros like Arch and Debian. For new users though, I suggest Linux Mint.

Win 10 was decent, perhaps better than Win 7 in many ways. It doesn’t hold a candle to Linux though. I’ve been almost entirely on Linux since Vista, and the last time I booted into Windows was last year to get Minecraft Bedrock set up for my kid so he could play with his friend (that friend flaked, so we haven’t bothered since).

My kids have pretty much only used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (my Linux flavor of choice) and ChromeOS (at school).

Now that after two long years Windows 11 exited the alpha stage and now has an usable taskbar in beta, it starts to be decent. Since they finally allowed “never combine” in the taskbar last week I’m using it as my main os and I plan to upgrade all my win 10 machines (unless on older machines because I’m not going to bother with the artificial limitations and install checks, those will just go to Linux)

I think we already know. It’s not the technology but the business that spoiled everything since Windows 7. Technically, Windows is probably better than ever today. But for user experience it has never been worse.

🤑

From what I remember that quote was taken out of context.

the last one you “buy”, anyway.

That was so hilariously either ignorant or deceitful when they said that.

I’m pretty sure they used 10 because 7 was build 7xxx, 8 was build 8xxx, and 8.1 was 9xxx, making at least the initial versions of 10 10xxx.

I thought they jumped to it because ancient, poorly made software would check for Windows 9* to cover 95 and 98, and could now potentially catch windows 9 as well

No the company itself never said it

Yes, but they’ve always been liars.

I said it was going to by my last version of Windows. Coincidence?

Exactly what I was thinking.

Seriously. I’ve been using Windows for years and every time I’ve tried to move it’s games that stopped me. Proton is literally a game changer. I’m not a hardcore Guild Wars 2 player but I play daily. The game ruins flawlessly with Proton.

Valve 👏

VR Support is sorely lacking, though. And no, the Quest standalone is not a solution - it’s an android phone strapped to your face.

First of all they’re going to have to release a distro which actually has, shock horror, proprietary drivers installed on it, because your average user isn’t going to understand how to install them.

I’ve said this a few times but no one wants to hear it, I understand why they can’t have proprietary drivers, but the fact that they don’t have them is a major reason as to why Linux isn’t more mainstream.