this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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DO NOT PAY FOR WINDOWS 10 UPDATES.
They're pushing this plan to make people pay to continue to get support for 10 very hard.
Don't fucking do it. Make them eat this loss of a shitty invasive OS that nobody asked for. This trend is evidence that we're in control in this situation, not Microsoft.
Force their hand and make it so they have no choice but to keep supporting Windows 10 for free for five more years.
Look, I'm a Linux user primarily, but that doesn't mean you should just let these corporate fuckholes walk all over you. Windows 10 is ride or die. Make Microsoft pay for trying to fuck you out of a cleaner operating system that is less infested with spyware and actually works half the time.
Not everybody has the time or energy to figure out Linux, but either way, the best way to fight Microsoft is by hitting them square in the pocketbook.
I've been saying this for years to people, but it won't happen, sadly, if history is anything to go on. The average consumer will always take the easiest path to convenience, even foregoing their leverage as a consumer, if given the choice for a simple monetary resolution.
If the average consumer had the fortitude to resist getting something they wanted now for better pricing/functionality, a lot of these businesses wouldn't be doing the bullshit they have been doing with price hikes and enshittification. We are simply not a society that can live without these conveniences.
Those that try to "vote with their wallet" (econ 101, baby) know the power the consumer has if principled enough to give up convenience for leverage. Unfortunately, as long as someone can throw money at a problem and call it fixed, it will be difficult to pressure companies to do anything to improve their product. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Hell, maybe one silver lining of the impending tariff disaster is the consumer will be unable to afford it as stuff we need gets too expensive for the stuff we want.
Linux is mostly pretty easy to install/use at this point as long as you stick with a main distro like Mint
What people have to watch out for now is unlocking their bootloader if they want to test Linux on a USB drive or dual boot, for example, it will trip Bitlocker (conveniently installed on every Windows computer via update without notification or consent), and that will irreversibly encrypt their Windows hard drive without warning.
Ask me how I know.
Also the fact that linux installers seem to fuck up dualbooting like 60% of the time, effectively locking you out of your windows partition... Make backups you guys!
This. And if folks are worried that their computer's hardware won't be supported (wifi, touchscreen, mousepad, soundcard or a weird mobile graphics driver) I recommend testing it by booting from a live linux flash drive. If everything works with the live version, it should work with the installed version, too.
Yo it's stupid easy to install on a Microsoft Surface watching a 10 min YouTube video. Everything works
Yup. The main concern is if there's specific software you cannot do without, such as:
But if you're a bit flexible and are willing to try different software, then yeah, Linux is pretty rad. Most Steam games I've tried work, you can play Epic and GOG games through Heroic, LibreOffice is fantastic, VLC works the same, and you can get almost any web browser you want (Firefox, Chrome, etc). And if your hardware isn't too old, it'll probably work well w/ Wayland, which resolves a number of problems people have had in the past.
If you have any questions about app compatibility, ask away! I probably haven't used whatever it is, but surely someone else has.
Even Mint you have to jump through hoops to not have to put in your password every time there's updates. Hoops that are too complex for a newbie on their own.
Most Linux users don't want to admit that a huge thing that makes people hate Linux is having to type in their password every time there's updates (and there's always updates.)
It's seemingly such a small thing, and as Linux users, we know the why behind it so we don't question it, but the average user doesn't and they hate typing their password over and over to get into the computer, let alone to update it.
To them, Windows is easier since the updates happen silently in the background, and aren't in the forefront because Linux expects you to know what the fuck you're doing.
Every Linux box that I didn't fuck with to make sure updates happened silently in the background that I gave to anyone else would always be wildly out of date the next time I touched it because they just... don't install updates instead of typing in their password.
Often, they've forgotten the fucking password, if you've made it so they don't have to put a password in when they log in (my mother has done this one countless times).
Until we figure out a way to make Linux secure and straightforward for end-users, people will stick with Windows.
That's... by design. Nothing can change your computer until you decide to approve it. As you said, you can change that setting but it's not an oversight. Many of Windows' historic security vulnerabilities were because they gave every user admin rights and didn't prompt for changes. It's also how many users were unknowingly upgraded to Windows 11 without wanting it...
Absolutely, and it's very good design.
But people can fuck right off with this "Linux can be used by everybody" shit, because apparently remembering to type in a password is too god damned confusing for most.
The second my father asks me about this is when I revoke his computer privileges.
I've heard people claim Mint is easy enough for non technical users (grandma, etc.), but I think that's with the caveat that they will have someone to support the machine.
The same is true for windows though. I have to help my dad with some minor thing at least once a month.
Yeah, nobody's paying me so I don't have the time or effort to be everyone's tech support for Linux. If they can't figure out how to type in their password to install updates, it means most people are way too fuck stupid to handle Linux. No offense, but I mean really. If Linux still needs me to manage their system for them, it's by definition NOT friendly to the non-computer-savvy.
I've gotta be like one of the few Linux users who still sees it as too much for the average user, mostly because average users are fucking whiny crybabies who hate learning anything new ever. See also Bluesky vs. Mastodon.
You're not alone, I've been screaming into the void about this for a long time too. People keep saying "Linux is user friendly enough these days for even non techy people" and I'm sorry but it's totally not.
I think most Linux users just don't realize how technologically illiterate most people are. Most people can barely use a browser and send emails. They absolutely don't want to mess with anything related to "updates" that they have no idea wtf is doing to their system anyway.
I guess people who say that think of the average non techy user as someone like me: I don't really know how this works under the hood, but I do troubleshoot my own stuff, am willing and able to search for help and apply advice on my own, try different things, and hopefully realize when that advice starts to sound fishy.
The thing is, that's not the average non-techy user. That's already "dabbling in tech".
The average non techy user is Homer going "oh, a talking moose on the Internet wants my credit card number? Sounds fair."
Yea, definitely. Also just the fact that you're here says a lot. I don't think you can find many (if any) of these "normal" users on the fediverse.
That's fair. I maintain a Fedora installation for my elderly mother, whose Windows laptop is on its last legs. I revitalized a 15 year old desktop with Fedora for her, installed everything she needed (browser, file manager, libreoffice, iscan, brother printer drivers, password manager, zoom meetings, etc.). But yeah, every month I hop on, open up a terminal and run
sudo dnf upgrade, and every 6 months run the Fedora major version update.Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed my Mom has been able to get all her business done using Fedora, but I definitely am acting sysadmin should anything in the slightest go wrong or confuse her. That said, I think she could run the upgrades if I left her with extensive notes (but if anything went wrong, she'd lose her shit, ngl).
I don't know, I think a Linux distribution with automatic updates would be a good thing if you could ensure every user would be guaranteed to not be greeted with any issues upon reboot from said update.
But yeah, sadly, even on the most user friendly of distros, you still have to have a decent familiarity with the command line , and have the patience and knowledge of where to look for, and then read and comprehend, the documentation. And I doubt there will ever be a time in the future where 100% of users are comfortable with all that, though imho if you use any computer at all, you should at least try.
I think this is, for most people I've spoken with (including coders in games, my kids, etc) the major issue -- they don't want to have to use the command line for things. It's fine if you can, but that alone is a massive wall for some people. People are exhausted right now, and having to learn a variety of command line prompts instead of just clicking on icons is too much for some people. That can be argued till you're red in the face, but I think a major reason so many people bounce off linux, myself included, is that it's not 'as easy as windows.' We need to stop telling people it is, because that means they won't try again later.
I definitely hear you on that, and in some ways, it's a shame more people don't have the option to learn more about how their computer works.
The Linux OS is, in my experience, one of the most amazing things I've ever taken the time to learn. In my pursuit of not only learning programming and computer science fundamentals, but also the internals of the Linux operating system, I've gained a granular control over my computing devices that has allowed me to be spared the onslaught of forced "AI in everything" that has recently been pushed down people's throats. I also have minimal exposure to invasive advertisements, and other unwanted features.
But the cost for access to said knowledge was an immense amount of time studying, an equivalent amount of patience, and a strong desire to learn difficult subjects. That's a cost the majority of users are unable or unwilling to pay. They simply dont have the time and/or desire, and that's just reality.
Ultimately, I don't think it's acknowledged enough that it requires a vast amount of privilege to have the time and energy to devote to such endeavors such as learning how Linux, the command line, and Computer Systems more broadly, work. I think this is because to acknowledge such would open the discussion up to the more broader topics of the qualities of our education systems and our cultivation of more positively reinforced learning models, which is a much more difficult topic to navigate and argue about when contrasted with the "It's easy to install Linux. Windows bad, so just do it." argument that pervades the discussion space.
This is an incredibly thoughtful and well said point, thank you for making it. It's important to remember to empathize with users because we didn't all start in the same place, or have the same time or money, and so on. The comments about the privilege to have time and energy to learn it are spot on.
So again, thank you :)
You don't have to use the command line at all.
Here's step four of Mint's installation guide:
Then we get this:
Honestly this sounds like it'd be so far in the future that it's not even realistic to contemplate right now. We're clearly not even close to this being the reality.
Sadly, I'm in very much agreement with you on this. I love the Linux OS to death, but I'm very very much into learning as much as I can about computers right now, and I am not representative of the majority of computer users.
I understand now why updates are required, why they sometimes break things, and ultimately what has to be done either by myself or, usually, others, to fix them.
But most people seem to go absolute ape shit when things don't work as expected, and I think that has to do more with human societies not cultivating enough patient, non-stressed, curious, people. And that's what bums me out more than this whole Windows vs Linux thing..
That's my beef. Most of the time I don't have the time to reverse engineer my volume knob drivers via the command line, let alone figure out which obscurly-named (but generally under 8 characters) random function or shell script or what have you is the fix, but oh you gotta install the repository, but first you gotta find out which one is compatible with your kernel, and then do it all again cause you forgot to type sudo and your password at every goddamn step
Hell, people get mad about having to hit a 'Cool, do that button', let alone something like a password. It's how we ended up with UAC v2, because people were steaming pissed about having to accept when a badly written app was doing something stupid that they just changed the scope of 'stupid' to be much less restrictive.
In fact it's even bled over to OS X, as people are SO mad about entering passwords they're angry at Apple over it, too.
Basically, any time a UI hops in front of you and goes 'Wait! This is important!' people get annoyed, and well, all OSes are moving towards more of that shit rather than less, as if they didn't know that was annoying or something. Glad I don't work in UX or I'd probably lose my mind at how much stupid hostile shit is being added constantly.
It honestly baffles me how this keeps being a thing. Not just for OSs but for a lot of websites too. And the wild thing is that most of the time, it's not even that important and the user does not and should not care about it.
on top of which it creates a security issue too:
by teaching users to always instantly click on "OK", "Accept", etc, they stop reading the actually important messages, because they're being bombarded by so, so many useless pop-ups everywhere...
Macs also make you put your password in all the time for updates, installs, etc. Laymen seem to use macs just fine
I installed Mint this week.
It did install more smoothly than the others I tried on this run of "I wonder if Linux is viable now" (Fedora 41, Pop, Bazzite, if you're wondering). It, however, does not support HDR yet and it, like every other one, won't do proper 5.1 audio out of my ASUS MB, which has no official Linux drivers.
So Windows it is, then, because all the other distros had bigger problems. Fedora is the one that has all the features I need, and it still has the audio bug and it crashed a bunch after I went through all the hoops to set up an Nvidia card.
if only my professional software supported it...
Linux works great when using programs like Blue beam, AutoCAD, Revit and VR.
Oh wait, no it doesn't.
https://massgrave.dev.
lol this is the exact same rethoric people were spewing when Windows 7 went EOL because Windows 10 was sooo bad and now everyone's fighting tooth and nail to keep using it. W11 is basically a better skin on W10. Just move on.
No. Go to 11 or go to a different OS. Been hearing these arguments since Windows95 came out, and they are never correct.
You don’t own Windows. You cannot maintain Windows without Microsoft. Either get onboard or find a different OS.
You expect them to work for you for free? What kind of entitled bullshit is that?
Not paying for the 10 security updates doesn't hurt MS. They don't make money from their consumer OS. The money is from Office, Cloud, and corporate contracts. It only leaves your PC open. You don't have the time to install Linux today but you will make the time to attempt to recover your Windows PC from ransomware because you left it unpatched.
Install Linux today. Stop making excuses.
This is just funny.
Oh yeah, nevermind, I'll use the free operating system made by people who are working for me for free. Or wait, is that entitled, I'm confused.
Pick a fuckin lane, dude.
Demand that a Linux developer must add a feature that you personally want and yes you are entitled. "I don't want to upgrade Mint! Patch the old kernel. I demand it!"
MS is selling a security patch. Buy it or don't.
Linux is available for free. Install it or don't.
You don't have a right to demand either way. It's especially hypocritical given you spend more time on a phone that doesn't give you 10 years of support like Windows 10 did.
Man you gotta stop making assumptions about other people.
I have numerous computers and only one of them has Windows on it, and even that one is set up to dualboot with Linux. I live and breathe Linux daily, friend.
I live and breathe Linux so much that I set it up so that I don't have to touch my phone, because I fucking hate phones. I guarantee you I spend way more time on the PC than on a phone.
I have network-level blocking to prevent a massive amount of data entering or leaving my phone and PC.
I'm a Linux user by default, and I think what Microsoft is doing is anti-consumer so I don't really give a shit if they make money off it or not.
Taking a financial loss because you fucked over your customers is how capitalism is supposed to work. All this talk of entitlement forgets that I paid for my fucking OS. It doesn't matter if the OS isn't their moneymaker: if it isn't that's more reason for them to stop fucking their customers for a quick buck.
Also, finally, if Microsoft really cared about their OS and licensing, maybe they should have updated how their licensing activation works at some point in the last 20 years so the massgrave exploit would stop working.
That doesn't mean you get patches for the rest of your life. Again you are using a phone that doesn't give you 10 years of support and you are acting like MS is evil for not giving you more.
MS is evil because they don't do more to stop piracy? Wtf?