They put some under-the-hood improvements in 10 that they didn’t put in 7, such as a new display driver model and Directx 12.

But that does not make a difference to most people. Industry desupporting of Windows 7 is the biggest con to it.

Eventually, 10 will share 7’s fate. So you’ll have both 10’s regressions and 11’s and so forth to live with as long as you’re on Windows. You can’t stop Microsoft from desupporting and killing their software in the long run.

Microsoft has a multi-decade history of enshitification when they do not perceive any major threats. Internet Explorer, DirectX, Windows Server, etc. all rotted. Some of these are still active and supported, yes, but they all peaked years ago and are aging poorly. Microsoft doesn’t really do the labor of love thing much when customers are bagged.

Linux may be able to dethrone them to an extent if it can reach an ease of access/UX that most people are comfy with. And it has made huge strides over the years. It can also run most Windows software very well.

Mac is still priced very high and still feature-limited and a 2nd/3rd-class citizen when it comes to platform targeting. Offering lower priced conputers would make them a pretty big threat I think.

I think ChromeOS is a decent threat to Windows but it loses tons of features vs all the other options. At least it is really cheap and easy to use.

TVs have a history of listening and collecting a lot more data than a smart device.

With a TV device like an android or Linux box, you can prevent that as well as ad-injection because you can install whatever you want on the device and it’s not as locked down as a TV. You can even disable or physically remove recording devices if you’d like, and many smart boxes do not even come with them.

Also, a pihole does not guarantee you filtered out everything or prevented the TV from interfering with your experience.

A TV can also change its policy on the fly and suddenly start injecting ads. Many TVs do this to add additional income after your purchase.

What do you mean Albuquerque has fewer people than NYC? One time I was at this cafe in Albuquerque and it was packed!

Technology never ceases to amaze me. It’s crazy to think about what ancient people must’ve had to do to get pants on

Do we have good malware scanners and anti malware for Linux these days? Forgive my ignorance.

This is super cute, haha

I felt like clarifying that the updates issues I faced were the last straw and that if anyone was interested, I listed the other reasons I quit working with them and never looked back. That’s why I wrote all that at the bottom.

Even if Microsoft does some things right, they still have a history of doing things wrong and have a bevy of other dark patterns. I do not trust them to get it right anymore. They could go back to their old ways tomorrow and I wouldn’t be surprised. Thankfully, it’s not my problem except at work

The updates quietly happening in the background are still a problem because they can’t be paused or canceled and they use a lot of sysrme resources to get done. And when they’re complete, your experience is less stable till the reboot.

I usually notice them when my work computer slows down and things start having more bugs than usual. My work computer has very respectable specs

I haven’t used Windows 11 interestingly, so I don’t know if they’ve changed their update habits, and I wouldn’t be surprised either way. Windows 10 is the last edition I’ve used. Since Windows 8, I had plenty of issues with Windows and Microsoft, and it got worse every release. I’ll bullet-form my personal complaints at the bottom of this page.

My final straw for Windows 10 in my personal life was a forced restart, and I had all my update settings where I wanted them, and still, I lost a really important session to that reboot. Since I was pretty comfy with Linux, I went that direction. Since then, Linux has gotten more user-friendly and plays videogames, way more than Mac. It’s still not something I recommend to most people, but probably someday, it’ll get to a Mac or Windows ease of use.

At work, most of us haven’t been migrated to Windows 11 from Windows 10, and I still get updates installing in the background a lot, causing issues even on our Windows servers. I’m sure our ops team can tune these abhorrent update defaults, but it’s just a frustrating experience nonetheless.

I think a prompt or reminder could go really far to let the user configure that during setup.

Here are some of my complaints over time:

• Force installs and bloat. Inclusion of bloat by default. Reinstallation of bloat on updates.
• Resetting of my settings and registry edits regularly.
• Ads on the desktop
• Needless nagging to use their other bullshit like Onedrive. You think it’s good? Great! Let me uninstall it and use the cloud providers of my choice.
• Forcing an inferior start menu without a choice to use alternatives or the old ones.
• Windows tracks insane amounts of users’ data and actrivities, and I do not trust them to admit to all the tracking they do but the tracking they admit to doing is already mind-boggling.
• Windows 10’s forced upgrade and Windows 10 popup scandals were completely dishonest and disgusting, and I have not heard enough apologies for what they did. This personally affected me and broke a bunch of crap before Windows 10 was even well-baked.
• A history of forced updates. A history of forced reboots. A history of lost work. This is me and my family. It sounds like Windows has reverted some of their worst practices, but the precedent is set, and I’ll never trust Microsoft to stick to it.
• The Windows seeker’s scandal personally affected me. They put all sorts of beta garbage on my computer without telling me. This caused a loss of files. They’ve made a resurgence on their unethical behaviors in the browser space. I have faith they’ll continue to revisit their other old habits. Look up Embrace-Extend-Extinguish and it’ll get you started. IE was their old baby. Edge is the new one.
• Buying and killing small companies and studios, such as Rare, a bit like EA had done
• Moving away from some of the nice things earlier Windows versions did, like a start menu with a neat list of organized and searchable programs.
• Having just 1 UI experience that isn’t super customizable and breaking 3rd party UIs.
• Fullscreen popups and nonsense over nothing
• Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior has been a factor most of my life. They still push the boundaries of anti-competitive behavior to the Nth’s degree. Again, that reading on Embrace-Extend-Extinguish will give you a taste of their BS.
• Having fewer features and techs than Linux that I like to use, such as specialty filesystems, IO schedulers, process schedulers, swapping systems (ZRAM/ZSWAP) etc. Being stuck on NTFS (are you kidding me?) REFS is too little too late and you can’t even boot off it
• Way worse IO/Disk performance and features
• inferior memory management

Overall, I don’t want to do business or help in the success in an organization I do not like by offering up my data, watching their ads, and using their products less than necessary. I like some of the things Bill Gates has done, but it doesn’t change any of my views on this.

Yeah, the security in knowing that if you’re way top busy right now, you don’t have to install or even download any updates. And you don’t have to worry your system will suddenly become crashy, glitchy, and unstable because it decided on its own to install some things and let you know you can reboot whenever.

It’s so freaking annoying I have to use Windows at work. It takes liberty to do what it wants and then my workflow gets hosed.

I get that there is security, but if you force updates, I should have some kind of notice or “hey, we need to install mandatory updates. You can schedule in the next 24 hours when or you can get them over with”

From what I understand, they’re divesting resources that aren’t in Firefox or at least involved in a trustworthy/open source AI project.

I see a lot of people in this theead are upset at this, but I’m tentatively excited. If they can pull off a good AI engine, especially built into the browser, that would be nice. If it had offline capabilities, that would be amazing.

Even if they can pull off a good AI solution that’s not built into Firefox but it’s offline, I’d be really excited. I’m not crazy about having especially detailed and intimate information being thrown to some vendor out there, not knowing where it’s going. Modern AI can do some amazing things, but a lot of them reserve the right to have a human read whatever you put in them and warn you about that. This is too limiting to me for my preferred use-cases.

One concern I have is that Firefox and its engine are one of the last non-chromium browser platforms that have a household name and are FOSS. So to me, that has to be the first goal to keep healthy. Maybe the AI thing will help in this respect

I remember about a decade ago, when I was a student, I helped a small company with some office work. An office admin showed me various things using her computer, such as their QuickBooks data. The bevy of ads I saw suggested to me that she was a religious, dog-owning, single parent, and she was clearly seeking a partner and she was about 50 years old. I got all this just from the front page of her yahoo and was blown away at how specific and personal those ads were. And some of the ads were Spanish so she’s easily bilingual.

Totally creeped me out and I wasn’t sure she even knew that her computer was just broadcasting to her office all her personal info. She regularly collaborated with countless others, even new faces, using this same computer, where anyone could see what I saw.

If you would just continuously use our proprietary, wireless DRM-enabled, subscription disinfectant, the wounds we keep cutting into you will (likely) remain uninfected

I now realize I completely misread your original statement. In light of that, my previous replies don’t make any sense. I actually agree with what you said, I think I just didn’t comprehend it the way it was intended.

I think I’ve read somewhere that strife increases religiosity. I’d say it’s a very defensible stance. I think it’s also defensible that the religiosity sadly causes strife, too. The world would be better off if certain common religious ideas would be abandoned.

“If any god at all” in that context implies the person has doubt in the existence of any god. This again is not a statement of preference. One can be an atheist and happy with their beliefs or unhappy with them.

I just don’t see anywhere that the person said they’d like for things to be that way. They could easily be very unhappy at a disbelief in a god for all we know.

Said another way: just because I don’t believe I’ll ever be a millionaire doesn’t mean I’d prefer never to be one.

EDIT: I want to acknowledge that many people get strength and relief from their faiths and beliefs. And I would like to acknowledge that people’s happiness and comfort in a difficult world is a very good thing.

They didn’t say they’d like for life be without a worship-worthy god. They said they’re not sure why so many people think that there’s a god worth worshipping.

By itself, their comment is really just statement of belief, not a statement of preference.

I think this is their reasoning for that position: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

For a more detailed explanation of the reasoning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

I’m rooting for Intel in these efforts. Hopefully someone can pressure TSMC 's prices down and maybe even offer alternative fab sources for chips. Especially with the geopolitical situations with China.

I probably sound like a crazy person, but sometimes I worry about too much global reliance on TSMC and their plants usually being in Asia. Diversity should keep the market more affordable and at lower overall risk.

I also have 12 GB. There are usage patterns where additional RAM wull be useful or even necessary on a phone. When you have more RAM, the phone can sleep tasks and leave background apps alone without having to discard their contents from RAM. This means fewer cold startups. Also, more contents can be cached, which means faster app startups. Both of these techniques also reduce CPU usage and improve battery life. You can also achieve more tabs in your browsers and more and bigger apps running at the same time. More RAM also means fewer situations where swapping is done or needed, so additional CPU and disk cycles are saved and battery usage is reduced. Some apps will actually require more RAM or spin more when memory is scarce. Examples can be advanced content creation apps in audio, video, or picture/photography. Also, some games, especially in high settings.

Are these additional GBs necessary? No. And most people would not notice them, as even 6 GB is overkill for quite a number of peoples’ usage patterns. Your phone does maybe 95% of what it does just about as well, even when you have a low-midrange CPU and GPU that is from a few years ago, and just 4 or 6gb of RAM.

This holds true for iOS and Android. They’ve both done a fair bit of housekeeping and software improvements to reel in excessive resource usage gen over gen. I think Android was doing some catch-up here for a while, but I don’t know how they go toe to toe on this anymore, and it’s difficult to empirically compare the two in this area.

I’ve slept with each of these before:

LockpickingLawyer (lockpicking videos)

Trent Lenarski (multi content. specifically his Stardew Valley playlist is nice and relaxed)

Pekinwoof (streamer. Keep to his first channel for sleeping. Channel 2 is louder)

Talking Feds with Harry Litman (lawyer who talks law in politics)

Sean Carroll (podcasts. Various science topics)

Sam Harris (podcasts. Some episodes can get loud when he’s playing recordings of news events.)

I think this would make it tough to enforce the patent if it’s actually commonly used. If I were somehow granted a patent on tap dancing, its common usage by others before me would probably cause my patent to be invalidated if I then tried to sue a tap dancer.

Not a patent lawyer, but IIRC, US patent law had some protections for things (including non-patented) that are already common practice.

EDIT: Clarity