If Microsoft does, I am not using Windows 12, I am going to Ubuntu. I won't even pirate it. I refuse to pay a subscription for an OS, that should be pay once and be done paying.
You can't be serious. This is a subscription of an entirely different kind, and most certainly will not be too useful for most people. So long you run an LTS release, you get a stable target that will remain stable and supported by security updates for 5 years. For free.
You are already paying a subscription for an OS. How old is your computer, 4 years-5 years old? Take $200 (cost of OS) and it's $40 or $50 a year or $3-4 dollars a month. Same applies for Apple Mac OS you just pay the $200 in the price of the $2,000 computure.
That's an oversimplification because it requires the utility of the device to be maintained over it's operational life. Routinely the utility of the device changes as new features are added or removed during OS upgrades, support for software, and eventually hardware support is dropped entirely. It doesn't matter if the hardware is still functional.
This isn't even necessarily in the vendor's control. For example, Google Chrome just stopped loading TLS encrypted sites on my partner's MacBook this past week and displays a lovely pink banner over every tab saying the OS is no longer supported.
Companies are not held to any standards for support and the amount of support they give varies based on the product. Apple has provided decades of support for some products but considerably less for others because they shared an architecture or platform that was eventually dropped. Google is notorious for just dropped support for products on a whim.
The problem with Amortization in the consumer space is the lifetime of the device. Sure, you can keep running a computer for year 6 instead of the standard 5 years...but 90% of consumers don't - What machines from 2016 are you using today? If you do, let's get serious you're already looking to upgrade in the near future, no?
I agree no one uses devices for long. But as a pedantic N=1...
I use a computer from around 2011-13.. can't quite remember.
Added a stick of RAM(it came with 4gb), and changed the HDD to an SDD, and had to replace the coin cell battery in the nvram once, all told for <10000INR. So it's the original cost + 10000INR for something that works perfectly well today, after 10+ years ;)
So yes, we exist too.
But, no complaints, linux windows all of it work flawlessly.
What? Say you bought some pants last year for $60. Do you think you paid a $5/month subscription for that? What have you ever purchased that's not a subscription then?
The problem is, in a capitalist world even libre/open source needs money to live. A race to thr cheapest is a loss for everyone in that kind of society. No OS is ever "done", there is always maintenance, security updates, ...
Yes but what is the right price for a one-time payment of software ? If you're going to use maintenance, updates, all the work that comes after you paid, what do you consider is a correct price to pay in advance for all future changes ?
The "correct price" depends entirely on the specific software, so this is an impossible question to answer in its literal sense.
> what do you consider is a correct price to pay in advance for all future changes ?
You don't. Outside of security updates, which should never be charged for, you pay for the software as it exists when you buy it. When future changes come around, you buy the upgrade (if you want it).
It's the tried-and-true method of charging for this stuff.
We're specifically talking about an OS here, so the scope is not really the same, but still: are you ok with no package updates ? No update to the documentation, the wiki, and stuff like that ? No forum or chat ?
Nah - the alternative is choosing software that is stable and open.
Not some crazy "not made in house - gonna code it myself" crap... that seems like some weird personal thing.
Approach software as a set of tools, with the expectation that you must learn and master its use, but then you will be functional and productive for a long time.
That's what stand-alone installers or self-hosted alternatives are. They require more learning, but they don't sell you out, close down, jack up the price, or turn off features because it's "not generating new users".
They also don't randomly rework the UI nearly as often because "if it's not shiny we can't sell it".
But they do require more work and learning up front. For me, at least... that tradeoff is a clear and easy win.
---
Good software is like good woodworking tools - hard to master, but very productive once you're there. SaaS is always the opposite: Super easy to start, incredibly frustrating to be a power user.
Saas doesn't want power users - it wants more subscriptions.
> Approach software as a set of tools, with the expectation that you must learn and master its use, but then you will be functional and productive for a long time.
The first 2, LOL. People just click some buttons and frequently create abominations with them. They in no way, shape or form, "master them".
Image editors and the like are pro tools, not mass market tools. You either use them well or you don't have a job.
If you're wondering why word processors and spreadsheets don't count is that for most jobs you just use them incidentally, it's not your day job. And there is a very small minority that masters them, but it's just that, a minority.
Are you referring to people not having the desire or time to learn how to set up these types of things, but want to use them?
The solution is... centralization, on a smaller scale. Maybe that's a home network admin, or a whole street, neighborhood, city, community. I don't really know.
It's not reasonable to think everyone needs or wants to manage their network and services, of course. The cost to ensure everyone has this specialized knowledge is terribly high, it will waste what else they could have known instead.
Now to provide these kinds of services as a city or community is certainly not free, even if the software is free. It costs people's time, experience, and knowledge. It requires powerful enough servers to handle requests and storage for everything.
Another thing to mention is that these open source services are probably full of very critical and damaging exploits, but they are not seen or cared about yet because these services are not mainstream popular or often not public facing at all. Popular open source services have had many of their high level exploits discovered, and closed source things are scrutinized differently.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, especially in the context of something as monumental as Microsoft Windows. But just in general, how does a subscription model prevent naive competitors from trying to make an alternative?
> I've wondered why microsoft hasn't done this already.
Step 1 was to make TPMs ubiquitous. As soon as everyone's computer can make attestations on behalf of (or, more accurately, against) them, then it's game over. I bet Microsoft starts splitting out app features and charging for them individually similar to how Adobe does with Acrobat.
I'm sure you're making a clever joke and I'm just not getting it.
All Windows branded as NT as well as 2000 (the first NT not branded as such) predate Windows 8 by over a decade, so I don't understand why you'd think one of them would be number 9.
Ah, my bad... I mean the last one worth using wasn't 9, but either 2000 or NT, which for the love of god always confuse nowadays despite having used both back the day... I think my preferred one of all time was 2000, but again not sure if actually was NT... I'm getting old...
Edit: Just realized GPs joke... There never was a Windows 9... And it isn't even that late...
NT version numbers were weird, and major releases didn5 increment major version numbers, but if you the first major release (NT 3.1) as the next major windows version after Windows 3.x, (so as 4) you would get to 9 about Windows 2000 (this counts 3.51 as a major release.)
Of course, that would leave out the consumer line starting with Win 95.
I am willing to believe that MS might try a subscription model, but this doesn't look like particularly strong evidence for it.
Those strings could be anything - For all we know, it's just tracking office 365 subscription status/enterprise enrollment, or tracking windows account notification subscriptions, or any of a hundred other valid reasons.
Those terms are just too generic to be particularly meaningful.
I think they will offer two options, advertising or advanced features. The advertising option speaks for itself. The will put ads in different parts of the O/S. Kiss goodbye to any privacy you thought you had.
The features option will make more O/S options like photo and video editing apps a subscription type model. Pay $10 a year and get the advanced features.
Either way, I think this should help Apple and open source operating systems.
If your average user buys a new version every 5 years and the Pro version costs $250, they could charge $50/yr. $10/yr would be quite generous, unless they think they can get lots of people to stop pirating the OS. $10/month seems like an unlikely price point.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would pirate windows. Its full featured if you don't activate apart from a watermark. If you choose to activate you can get an oem key for like 10 usd.
$1/year is entirely unreasonable. They build a product, they sell it to you, transaction ends there. They should sell you a product that works. Bug fixes are part of making the thing you bought closer to what was advertised, so it's part of the initial purchase. An OS is not a SaaS, and nobody considered doing it until it became popular, because it's a fad.
10 and 11 sure, but 7 and 11 have quite a few differences under the hood. WSL, the new terminal system, hardware scheduling for GPUs, direct storage, REBAR, etc.
11 was meant to be Microsoft's "Windows 10X" for a Surface brand dual-screen folding product. The product folded before launch and they decided to merge Windows 10 stable to the 10X as an outcome of their infighting around the fold.
Windows 11 has two features that I appreciate enough to hesitate going back to 10, specifically AtlasOS.
The first being auto-HDR. I don’t have to manually switch my displays to HDR when I launch a 3D game with HDR support, and I don’t have to have the awful always on HDR on my desktop.
The second being Windows 11 remembering window position when you disconnect and reconnect monitors. It’s great being able to take my laptop off the dock with two monitors, then bring it back and my windows go back to where they were in each display. Windows 10 just puts them all on the primary display.
God damn it. I really like the Windows ecosystem I grew up in. Feel so much at home on Windows; I dislike macOS profoundly, and can barely function in a Linux UI distro (feels like I'm working with one hand tied behind my back).
But there's no way I'm buying into more ads and bullshit from MS; if this comes to fruition I'll hold on to debloated Windows 10/11 for as long as I can then begrudgingly move over to the least disruptive distro of Linux I can find :(
It's a good thing that Valve made so much progress making games runable on Linux over the past 10 years. Imagine your plumber charging an annual fee for the copper pipes he replaced a decade ago.
this would be an enormous mistake unless it is radically cheaper than I know it will be. It would have to be under $5 a month to be worthwhile. The market of windows users able to afford more than that is a tiny fraction of current owners, and no a lot of them aren't even pirates they just paid for it with a pc bundle deal. See netflix usage rates in romania (2.5%), hungary (3.6%) etc as an illustrative example, these are middle income countries where I can assure you people are interested in the content but will not pay $8 a month
I already dual boot windows 11 and NixOS. I only use Windows for some games on Steam, everything else I do in nix land. (My work computer is a Mac but that could be switched easily as well.)
There isn't a world where I would pay a subscription for an OS, given the plethora of good and stable distros of linux (and OSX)
Similar story here, I take it a step further and boot windows as a guest VM with hardware passthrough w/ evdev + ddcutil as a software kvm switch. The only time I boot it baremetal is for programs that are hostile to being run in a VM.
It's a good learning exercise, and the community over at /r/vfio + their discord is pretty helpful.
I used to run Windows as a guest os with passthru access to a dedicated disk/drive and it did run great. I could even reboot natively into Windows using the same disk.
I haven't done it again on my upgraded machines and instead use a dedicated Windows gaming machine. Proton should work fine for the games I play as it doesn't need any (incompatible) anti-cheat software--just haven't got around to it.
I would guess that they are not planning on charging a monthly fee to use windows on your own hardware. If I had to guess I would say that this is related to a subscription for an online version of windows. Pay a monthly fee and get a full version of windows dekstop in a browser that you can use anywhere.
Yes. There's already leaked screenshots that kind of show what this might look like. Windows already allows for multiple desktops (Win+Tab, Win+left or right). An idea is you would have cloud desktop instances available seamlessly in the list when logged in with your Microsoft account. Or through a browser.
Microsoft already has a chunk of this infrastructure in place with Xbox Cloud Gaming, which in my experiences works pretty well. I've been playing a lot of Starfield on cloud streaming on a cheap $300 Walmart laptop on WiFi, even public WiFi at places like cafes and tethered on my phone.
Windows is already a subscription OS, usually for businesses. Subscription licenses are included with higher Microsoft 365 tiers. It's just one of the many ways that it's sold. This doesn't indicate that the perpetual licenses are going away, but it seems logical that they would package certain services in a subscription tier like bundling Microsoft 365 with Copilot and other future features.
Except the part where Windows used to be installed on a machine and that was the end of that. Then Win10 encourages you to use a Microsoft account "for syncing". Then Win11 insisted you use a Microsoft account, making it close-enough-to-impossible for regular users to still use a local account at all.
So there's nothing new here, because MS already started down this path years ago, we're just commented midway through. If they'd gone cloud at Win8, no one would have gone for it. At Win12, after this gradual descent into "listen to my voice, you don't even want a local account, you can't even remember why you ever wanted one in the first place, this is so much less of a hassle", it'd be a fairly easy sell to the masses.
Throw in an yearly subscription plan that buys your company permission to run windows server, where your hardware can act as access point, syncing with MS's infrastructure, but isn't the primary data host, and that sure sounds like something Microsoft would absolutely love to be in charge of.
Source site seems to be down. Windows Central has some clarifications:
> Now, references to a subscription model were found in the latest Windows preview builds, suggesting that Microsoft is finally going to force users to pay a monthly subscription to use Windows, right? No. These references are almost definitely tied to the newly discovered "IoT Enterprise Subscription" edition of Windows 11, not the client version of Windows vNext.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadhttps://ubuntu.com/pro/subscribe
The critical difference is that amortization decreases your cost per unit time with use. More use, better value.
Subscriptions do not work that way. Having to pay $50/year for a 5 year old laptop doesn't excite.
This isn't even necessarily in the vendor's control. For example, Google Chrome just stopped loading TLS encrypted sites on my partner's MacBook this past week and displays a lovely pink banner over every tab saying the OS is no longer supported.
Companies are not held to any standards for support and the amount of support they give varies based on the product. Apple has provided decades of support for some products but considerably less for others because they shared an architecture or platform that was eventually dropped. Google is notorious for just dropped support for products on a whim.
And subscriptions won't fix this problem.
So yes, we exist too.
But, no complaints, linux windows all of it work flawlessly.
Most of my machines are that old or older.
> If you do, let's get serious you're already looking to upgrade in the near future, no?
No. I only look to upgrade if the system stop working or if it can no longer perform as I need it to.
Nobody else could, because it would require Microsoft to agree to something that's against their interests.
LSW, if you will.
> what do you consider is a correct price to pay in advance for all future changes ?
You don't. Outside of security updates, which should never be charged for, you pay for the software as it exists when you buy it. When future changes come around, you buy the upgrade (if you want it).
It's the tried-and-true method of charging for this stuff.
Why shouldn't you be charged for for security updates?
Sure
But don't expect to get any updates to what you paid for - after all, updates are no longer the same OS
The $oftware boys already have a full explainer about why $aa$ is the best thing since open source, so why shouldn't Microsoft jump on board too?
C'mon SaaS devs, tell me again about value add and how you love paying monthly for the software you use...
Not some crazy "not made in house - gonna code it myself" crap... that seems like some weird personal thing.
Approach software as a set of tools, with the expectation that you must learn and master its use, but then you will be functional and productive for a long time.
That's what stand-alone installers or self-hosted alternatives are. They require more learning, but they don't sell you out, close down, jack up the price, or turn off features because it's "not generating new users".
They also don't randomly rework the UI nearly as often because "if it's not shiny we can't sell it".
But they do require more work and learning up front. For me, at least... that tradeoff is a clear and easy win.
---
Good software is like good woodworking tools - hard to master, but very productive once you're there. SaaS is always the opposite: Super easy to start, incredibly frustrating to be a power user.
Saas doesn't want power users - it wants more subscriptions.
This does not scale to end users.
Image editors and the like are pro tools, not mass market tools. You either use them well or you don't have a job.
If you're wondering why word processors and spreadsheets don't count is that for most jobs you just use them incidentally, it's not your day job. And there is a very small minority that masters them, but it's just that, a minority.
The solution is... centralization, on a smaller scale. Maybe that's a home network admin, or a whole street, neighborhood, city, community. I don't really know.
It's not reasonable to think everyone needs or wants to manage their network and services, of course. The cost to ensure everyone has this specialized knowledge is terribly high, it will waste what else they could have known instead.
Now to provide these kinds of services as a city or community is certainly not free, even if the software is free. It costs people's time, experience, and knowledge. It requires powerful enough servers to handle requests and storage for everything.
Another thing to mention is that these open source services are probably full of very critical and damaging exploits, but they are not seen or cared about yet because these services are not mainstream popular or often not public facing at all. Popular open source services have had many of their high level exploits discovered, and closed source things are scrutinized differently.
Step 1 was to make TPMs ubiquitous. As soon as everyone's computer can make attestations on behalf of (or, more accurately, against) them, then it's game over. I bet Microsoft starts splitting out app features and charging for them individually similar to how Adobe does with Acrobat.
All Windows branded as NT as well as 2000 (the first NT not branded as such) predate Windows 8 by over a decade, so I don't understand why you'd think one of them would be number 9.
Edit: Just realized GPs joke... There never was a Windows 9... And it isn't even that late...
Of course, that would leave out the consumer line starting with Win 95.
https://trackerninja.codeberg.page/post/latest-google-chrome...
Those strings could be anything - For all we know, it's just tracking office 365 subscription status/enterprise enrollment, or tracking windows account notification subscriptions, or any of a hundred other valid reasons.
Those terms are just too generic to be particularly meaningful.
The features option will make more O/S options like photo and video editing apps a subscription type model. Pay $10 a year and get the advanced features.
Either way, I think this should help Apple and open source operating systems.
Says who, exactly?
Why should bug fixes be included?
If they should, for how long should they?
They have already been doing this.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/1790329/i-paid-for-microsoft... https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/microsoft_windows_sta...
Perhaps you mean third party ads from their ad network? https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us
Wait, they already do: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/ad-products/...
> Kiss goodbye to any privacy you thought you had.
If you haven't already, it's too late.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3684413/how-to-protect...
https://www.wired.com/story/windows-10-privacy-settings/
> Either way, I think this should help Apple and open source operating systems.
Doubtful. They've not cared so far, I don't know what's going to really have to change.
Most folks I know don't really care about the OS, but many or all they apps they've learned are only on Windows. So they see themselves as trapped.
Hell, I don't even know what's the difference between Windows 7 and 11
Edit: some references: https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/824c74574893...
The first being auto-HDR. I don’t have to manually switch my displays to HDR when I launch a 3D game with HDR support, and I don’t have to have the awful always on HDR on my desktop.
The second being Windows 11 remembering window position when you disconnect and reconnect monitors. It’s great being able to take my laptop off the dock with two monitors, then bring it back and my windows go back to where they were in each display. Windows 10 just puts them all on the primary display.
But there's no way I'm buying into more ads and bullshit from MS; if this comes to fruition I'll hold on to debloated Windows 10/11 for as long as I can then begrudgingly move over to the least disruptive distro of Linux I can find :(
https://twitter.com/XenoPanther/status/1710027423981388161
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-ve...
There isn't a world where I would pay a subscription for an OS, given the plethora of good and stable distros of linux (and OSX)
It's a good learning exercise, and the community over at /r/vfio + their discord is pretty helpful.
Some madlads take it a step further and create something similar to wslg, but with the host programs overlaid over the guest desktop, https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/yrqcq4/2in1_os_with_l...
I haven't done it again on my upgraded machines and instead use a dedicated Windows gaming machine. Proton should work fine for the games I play as it doesn't need any (incompatible) anti-cheat software--just haven't got around to it.
Microsoft already has a chunk of this infrastructure in place with Xbox Cloud Gaming, which in my experiences works pretty well. I've been playing a lot of Starfield on cloud streaming on a cheap $300 Walmart laptop on WiFi, even public WiFi at places like cafes and tethered on my phone.
enterprise rigs normally come blank, and get imaged in-house from corporate standard image masters (and against corporate licensing)
You own a license to use software
So there's nothing new here, because MS already started down this path years ago, we're just commented midway through. If they'd gone cloud at Win8, no one would have gone for it. At Win12, after this gradual descent into "listen to my voice, you don't even want a local account, you can't even remember why you ever wanted one in the first place, this is so much less of a hassle", it'd be a fairly easy sell to the masses.
Throw in an yearly subscription plan that buys your company permission to run windows server, where your hardware can act as access point, syncing with MS's infrastructure, but isn't the primary data host, and that sure sounds like something Microsoft would absolutely love to be in charge of.
> Now, references to a subscription model were found in the latest Windows preview builds, suggesting that Microsoft is finally going to force users to pay a monthly subscription to use Windows, right? No. These references are almost definitely tied to the newly discovered "IoT Enterprise Subscription" edition of Windows 11, not the client version of Windows vNext.
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/no-o...