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The Windows 11 crisis (Link in comments)
I feel pretty sad for the bunch of Windows users that do not want all the AI features being forced upon them, but are not tech-savvy enough to switch to other O.S.
I know many of them will not care but it's so sad for the ones who do.
Title: The Windows 11 Crisis (by Cold Fusion)
I could edit the title but then the link is gone, so if we want a more “correct” title, OP should also add the Link to the body I think
Maybe edit the title and also add "link in comments", or even ping @deimos to just modify the post if you can't do it yourself.
Seriously, @herson just mis-used the system, and made a self-post when it should've been a link post. We shouldn't be afraid to fix the mistake on procedural grounds.
Unfortunately you're right, I believe it's impossible to change a text post into a link post without directly editing the database, and I'm not sure @deimos wants to do that all the time.
I can normally edit links, but there's no edit link button on text posts like this one.
I'm not sure Windows was ever a "beloved operating system" as the video says at the end. I've been using it in some form since the 90s and never really liked it. I use it because either someone pays me money to do so, or because I need it to play most PC games.
But based on what I've been hearing, 2026 might finally be the Year of the Linux Gaming PC for me.
Aside from a few multiplayer games with a kernel anticheat, gaming on Linux is pretty good nowadays.
(personally with Linux Mint and a Nvidia GPU)
I second this. I use Linux since around 2010 as my only OS on my desktop and while it was rought at the beginning, nowadays with Steam and its Proton layer, I just buy games and play them as I would do on a Windows PC.
Good point about anitcheat in (mostly) multiplayer games though!
For the brief period of late Vista and Windows 7, I genuinely liked Windows. It was XP-like enough to be familiar, but had a ton of QoL improvements. Were it a secure option at all, I'd still be on Win 7.
I don't like windows 11, but does the video have any evidence that regular people are indeed rejecting it? I haven't heard a lot of noise around me.
Anecdotally, I've rejected it and I'm a regular user. Most of my friends have rejected it too, in large part due to the relentless injection of AI into everything.
It's basically boiling down to 4 paths I see
The gamers being more willing to try Linux or chip at it, the normies more likely to cope or Mac. The thing is, any uptake amoung the last two means putting cracks in the monopoly armor.
If Valve can crack open a smooth, unified, VR/Console/Handheld/PC experience, it'll really take a chunk out of the consumer market, especially if build-your-own becomes prohibitly expensive (yall see about Samsung exiting the SSD market?).
At a certain point, the largest non-tech sectors will consider if a deploying *nix browser kiosks will save millions, and we'll have come full circle to thin clients again.
Please don't throw that curse around lightly. Sincerely, a former thin client admin for non-technical users.
(seriously Karin, how did you manage to print a screenshot of an email, annotate it with pen, scan it back in, print it, and then fax it??)
I mean, is that really worse than the screenshot of a pdf embedded into a powerpoint then emailed to the entire org by mistake?
Are Chromebooks sort of losing their relevance to mobile at this point? I would have figured they would have covered the niche of "I just want to check my email and do some work online," but Windows still has the work market, and mobile covers casual use, so I guess I answered my own question.
I think Chromebooks are kind of their own worst enemy due to the majority being the same sort of painfully cheap $350 laptops you'd see lined up at Best Buy (barely) running Windows, but are sometimes even worse with storage being dog slow eMMC instead of a proper SSD or even an spinning HDD.
You have to go up the price bracket a few hundred bucks to find something that's not miserable to use, but at that point you're competing with fare like the $500 Walmart M1 MacBook Airs and old used business laptops, both of which are dramatically better hardware for the money and fully capable "proper" computers.
My friends are unhappy with windows, none of them reject it. The only non-programmer I know that’s rejected windows is my wife, who graciously allowed me to install Linux on her PC when Windows 10 reached EOL.
The average user just doesn’t want to relearn how to use their personal computer.
The big crowds I see are anti-ad and becoming more privacy aware as it gets worse.
TBH you put an average user in front of a KDE desktop with Chrome on it and I'll bet 99.9% don't notice.
In my bubble it's normal to get the ESU or IoT Enterprise updates for Windows 10. Windows 11 is perceived to be slow (in comparison) and full of bloat.
That isn't wrong per se, but it's a fairly specific bubble. Most people use what you put in front of them.
...i was one of the last holdouts in our studio still running windows 10, but federal security requirements finally dragged me kicking-and-screaming over to windows 11 this fall, and: it's alright, i guess; i'm still able to get my work done albeit in cumbersome fashion...
...i don't think i lost much more than a day's productivity researching + disabling all the sundry cruft to arrive at a reasonably-usable windows-compatible operating environment, doubtless hastened by having already wrested a similar result from our microsoft application/service suite's cloud-migration initiative over the previous year or two...
...mostly it's the little things which sap my productivity now, countless tiny delays which add up to a substantial whole, be they cumbersome UI choices, incessant pop-up dialogs, inconsistent-yet-persistent latency issues, and just a general design ethos of making the user a second-class-citizen in the operating system...it's a manageable productivity loss, one which tests my patience only when manifesting its paradigm of users serving the system rather than the inverse, which i've mostly hammered-out at this point: thankfully i'm one of the few folks in our operation provisioned a separate administrator account to do so...
...i think presentation disruptions are my last remaining acute pain point; i work around them as best i can but really the operating system has no business getting in my way when presenting something prepared weeks in advance...sure, everyone in my meetings deal with the same issues daily and i can take some recourse in that but it still looks unprofessional as hell...
The formatting on this one is a little weird. You may want to try reposting with the link in the second text box instead of the title box.
I agree, although the Youtube link as the title is a bit more eyecatching than usual - mostly due to novelty I imagine, links consistently replacing titles would get annoying fast.
Interestingly, the use of the link in the title makes this Tildes post the second highest Google result for that link after the video itself.
I suppose I should add to the conversation: I've moved to Linux for my non-work setup. I've tried a few distros and I'm sure I'll try some more. I am lucky to have some technical experience beforehand, but the learning and tinkering is a lot of fun and is something I've missed.
True, it's the only reason I'm here
I don't have the bandwidth to switch to Linux. All of my PC's, with one exception are Intel/Nvidia or Intel/Radeon or just Intel/Intel. My one computer that is all AMD could make the switch, but it's my primary server/host PC and I don't feel like spending a week or more reconfiguring everything.
I would love to switch to Linux full time and have done it in the past. I even have a couple of minor, functionary PCs around the house doing tasks using exclusively Linux. But whenever I switch to it full time on any of my PC's, I run into issue after issue that causes me a complete stoppage of what I'm trying to do so I can focus on fixing that particular issue. My most recent experience was about two weeks ago, using Debian; loved the style of the OS, loved that I could configure it exactly how I wanted it to function; it was snappy, worked great. But, it doesn't handle my Intel processor correctly, which ended-up being the major issue and why I ultimately switched away from it again.
Trying to play a simple game, the processor would run briefly, then suddenly throttle itself down to 200mhz and lock itself there. It doesn't do this in Windows; using the same software, the CPU will throttle to 800-1000mhz, which ends-up making what I want to play completely functional and playable.
Or on my other laptop (Intel/Nvidia) running Mint. MOST stuff works, but random odds and ends crop up, where I spend hours troubleshooting and looking for solutions. For some reason in one particular game I happened to be playing at the time, the fans just straight-up refused to go over 2000rpm, resulting in massive throttling and performance loss. These issues abound anytime I use Linux, it's constantly one little thing after another that I end-up spending hours on trying to figure out and not doing what I actually want to be doing.
I don't hate Linux; in fact, I quite like it and I want it to an alternative to Windows, but it just always feels halfbaked. Thrown together by too many cooks, so there's always an issue here an issue there, something that never gets resolved. Windows notifications and nags don't bother me; I can turn most of them off and even when they do pop-up, it's a simple click and they're gone. Linux issues bring everything to a complete halt for me and I need to focus on getting that task sorted before I can move on to doing what I actually wanted to do in the first place.
Again, it may just be a hardware issue. My Steam Deck works great and I'm regularly interfacing with the desktop and doing stuff within there; I have an AMD/AMD desktop PC and I could throw a 1tb disk in there just to try out Linux on it and see how it goes, but it also means reconfiguring lots of things, not because Linux, but just because it's my primary server that does a lot of the work in my house. I'd love to have an AMD only laptop just to experiment with, but that is far outside my budget at the moment.
So until then, I'll continue to deal with the Windows nags and annoyances, because it's still the fastest way to do what I want to do on my PCs.
That is very weird to hear. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of problems with Linux and intel cpus. It would be very strange since, until recently, intel dominated the datacenter market, and Linux is king in the datacenter. Before ryzen, laptops recommended for Linux almost always had intel chips. And for things like WiFi chips, intel was the recommended option.
For what it's worth, MAS Activation makes windows 10 viable for another half decade and possibly longer since security updates can keep coming through.
It's free, fast and extends your stay on this sinking ship.
I thought I read recently that they are finally taking action against windows activated like this. It was very recently, I'll see if I find the news article on it.
I wonder where that lands Windows 10 installs that have a valid license key, but cracked updates (because having to pay $30 for updates is ridiculous).
Not too long ago I replaced the TV gaming box's Windows 11 install, which had become subject to the "Windows creep" that requires a periodic reinstall to keep it running smoothly (which has become much less severe than it was back in the XP days, but still exists). Instead of reinstalling 11, I put on 10 out of frustration with the constant nagging that 11 is infamous for and its general trend of it getting bogged down as slower and each component receives a "modernization" pass.
To my surprise 10 activated itself perfectly, because apparently I'd bought a license for it or the 11 key also works for 10 or something, I can't remember. Whatever the case, I didn't need to feign activation like I was expecting, but extended updates still needed activation of course so that's what I did.
The difference in overall… "crispness" is incredible. That machine is now much much more responsive than it was under 11. Some of that is just the typical speedup that comes with a clean install but a lot of it was 11's fault too, I'm sure.
Can't move it to Linux unfortunately due to a couple games that technically run under Proton/WINE/etc but are not officially supported and come with a slim chance of a ban. If push comes to shove I guess I'll just have to pay for updates.