Re: [PLUG] Topic for PLUG North tomorrow -- Goodbye Windows 10

[JP Vossen via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

First, the REALLY BIG thing that occurs to me that I never hear anyone talk about is *why* there is such a panic about Win-10 to Win-11.  As much as I hate to admit it, MS has every right to deprecate old versions!  Everyone does that, all the time.  That's fine.  The problem is the Win-11 hardware requirements, which, **for no good reason**, mean that a huge number of perfectly good Win-10 computers "can't" run Win-11.

That is complete and utter BULLSHIT they should not be allowed to get away with!

They will argue that it's for "security" [1] and performance reasons.  BULLSHIT!  Yes, TPM is a nice-to-have (sort of, not going there).  WHICH IS WORSE for the entire world, a huge number (40%+?) of Win-10 machines that stop getting support and thus sooner or later (sooner) become bots rife with malware?  Or having TPM?

For the performance argument, well...allow the user to decide [2] if Win-11 performance is acceptable on an older computer.  And sure, part of the reason to deprecate old code is old hardware.  But not perfectly good 5 year old hardware that's fully supported by the Windows (10) ecosystem!  Also, STOP WRITING SHIT CODE, in general, and in particular that needs faster hardware.  Moore's law is dead, at least for now, so figure it out!

So...there is absolutely NO REASON why they couldn't fix the Win-11 "requirements," allow many more/most Win-10 computers to "upgrade" (if that's the right word) to Win-11, and solve this problem.  You can argue that the hardware vendors will get screwed out of all the sales they planned on due to a totally manufactured and 100% preventable bullshit reason.  Yup.  Too bad.  Also, there's the whole part about all the people who are going to ignore this and not buy a new computer anyway, so no H/W vendor sale there anyway.  (Or the tiny number of folks who have finally had it and switch to Linux.)


Speaking of malware, to my mind, *Windows* is malware.  Aside from everything above, think about all of its egregious behaviors, privacy violations, security failures, and so on, and tell me you *want* those things.  So, if it's software, and it does a bunch of evil things, it's malware.

The only reason to ever run Windows is because:
	1. You *require* some software that only runs on Windows.
		We'll lump gaming and MS Office crap in here.
	2. Someone is making you do it (work, school, whatever).
	3. You like it for some reason.

If your problem is #1, you can't just ignore it and have it go away.  Whatever software you require?  It's probably gonna stop working on Win-10 pretty soon, if it didn't already!  I'm pretty sure I read that TurboTax has already said they won't support Win-10 next year.  We dropped them when they did that for Win-8.  But you can't really blame them, any vendor has little upside to running on an (even less secure) end-of-life OS.

There's also the flip side of #1, where you *have* to run *old* Windows because the vendor hardware/software requires it.  Lots of obvious cases in medical & manufacturing gear, and ATMs and such.  It's horrendous, but it's not *this* problem.

If your problem is #2, then ideally whoever is mandating that you use Windows use has to go figure it out [3].  Of course lots of times its BYOD and be "compatible," in which case you're screwed.  If you try to avoid "upgrading," pretty sooner problem #1 will pop up.

If it's #3...I got nothin'...  :-)


[1] Microsoft does not get to talk about "security."  Ever.  They are terrible at it, at least partly because their code base is such a giant mess that it's nearly unmaintainable by humans.  And it's very clearly untestable by humans, or else they might actually, you know, do some testing before they ship their monthly patches that break more than they fix.

[2] It would be awesome if MS would allow the user to decide...well...ANYTHING?  It is absolutely infuriating how many stupid UI and design decisions they make, then jam down everyone's throat.  (Not gonna talk about Apple, who is far worse.  Or Gnome.)

[3] $WORK "upgraded" us a couple years ago, and I find Win-11 noticeably worse than Win-10, even though I mostly use it as a platform from which to access my Linux Mint VM where I do all my real work, or to use company mandated stuff, which these days is mostly Edge anyway.  And, OK, Outlook.  Not going there either.

Later,
JP
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JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ | http://bashcookbook.com/
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