every discussion like this has at least one of these comments. The year of the Linux Desktop must be nearly here. They've been predicting it for years already!
I've been using Linux since the 90s, however I was never super awesome with it. I can do the basic stuff, and with a bit of documentation/guidance, a bit more. I was able to install Arch Linux at least 3X, for example. I also managed to build a kernel like twice...although I didn't do a great job of configuration.
I think my crowning achievement came early on when I managed to follow Linux From Scratch all the way through.
I say all of this to say that I am finally off Windows for good. It has become my daily driver. I've no obstacles. Not in gaming, software dev, personal work, media consumption (beyond streaming services degrading streams for a non-supported OS), or anything else. I've found open source apps to be quite a bit better than their closed source equivalents.
Things have really shifted in the past 5-10 years, and I dig it. KDE + CachyOS is great! Although I hear Bazzite is better for new users (I have some decent experience using Arch so I prefer Cachy)
I don't foresee ever moving back to Windows. The AI and constant push to Microsoft Edge, Second OOB experience, and other nonsense (including Diablo 2: resurrected, a [now] Microsoft owned product that still gets a few updates, hard locking my system), I decided to take my ball and go home...to Linux. A few people I know who aren't even remotely computer literate at all have done the same, and they've been surprised at how much better everything is, particularly on somewhat older hardware.
I suspect that Microsoft doesn't even care anymore.
Windows is not at the core of their strategy anymore. With Azure, they are as much of a Linux company as they are a Windows company now, and most of their software runs in a browser now. Windows is just a gateway to their services.
If it was easy for them to have their users run Linux instead of Windows and sell Office 365 subscriptions, they would prefer that instead of having to maintain a full OS.
I have not used windows in a while but thinking of building a PC. Is there a way to install way older version of windows 10 without Microsoft's AI nonsense and the online account requirement?
Windows 10 is outdated, not recommended at all. Just install Win11 Enterprise and get your favorite LLM to give you instructions to remove the stuff you don't want, after like 15 minutes it will be totally cleaned for perpetuity.
If you're willing go through a little bit of trouble -- and it sounds like you are -- it's pretty easy to configure Windows 11 to look and act pretty much like Windows 7. You'd be hard pressed to tell what version of Windows I'm running if you gave it a cursory glance.
O2O Shutup ( https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 ) is also pretty useful for disabling anything you don't like all in one place -- it doesn't even install.
When Nadella took over from Ballmer, he steered Microsoft in a better direction for a while. But by now he's become a lot worse. The biggest software company can no longer produce good software and its products are actively hostile to users. Nadella cares only about one thing, which is shoving AI everywhere and to everyone, at any cost. The irony is that he knows nothing about AI, how to build capable models or how to build useful AI products, nor does he have people who do. AI is his Metaverse: something he's singularity focused on, to the point of neglecting everything else, without any idea what to actually do with it.
I noticed an immediate dip in quality of the products when Nadella came into power. Even Windows 8, for all the faults of the Metro UX, felt like a complete product.
People have forgotten this, but he did the same with Windows Phone for a while at the very start of his time as CEO. His motto was "cloud first, mobile first" where cloud meant Azure and mobile meant Windows Phone. After some time he gave up and they pivoted into the direction he is now well known for, which was to focus on good developer tooling regardless of OS.
People don't understand that this is MS culture. It doesn't mater the CEO. They'll always move to lock customers into the useless products they create.
This one youtuber, I forget his name, was fired as part of that layoff. He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.
The other is a deeper societal problem with healthcare and loyalty between companies and their employees.
For me, they are unrelated problems. In a welfare state, the QA team may have been reaffected to some other tasks within the company and have the health benefits provided by the state, but it wouldn't have made the software less shitty.
I feel the same, but in hindsight it makes a ton of sense once you consider that Microsoft customers have not, and for a very long time, been its end users. Instead, it's been those (mostly technically incompetent) FortuneXXX middle/top-managers and IT support department managers that they hooked on to Azure & al. via obscene service agreements (for no better cause than "everyone else is doing it anyway" and "nobody ever gets fired for placating MS stuff everywhere").
Microsoft is just profiteering off of their defacto monopoly, selling more is their only metric, the "what" is secondary.
Not aiming at you specifically, but I am tired of seeing shitty behaviour that is dismissed as best as incompetence. I do not want to believe someone becomes the CEO of one of the strongest organization on earth without a strategy sixth sense. So, why would he be shoving AI everywhere ? What does he know that we don't about it ? Is it just plan surveillance ?
True, its insane how bad MS teams performs and is built and this is coming from a company that have written their own OS, Programming languages, frameworks etc.
I actually just had to independently tag him on LinkedIn after my son had an issue with his Minecraft account. Their account recovery flow directs you to call on the phone and then when you call on the phone, it directs you to use the account recovery flow. When we went to their Support page we received a stack trace from asp.net. After wasting several hours, we screenshot of the error and tagged him on LinkedIn and filed a credit card dispute.
In my LinkedIn post I questioned if they can’t be trusted with a $30 game license how can we trust them with a multi million dollar copilot rollout? I pointed out that it seems like this is more than just a lack of human support. It is a company that: does not care about their own brand, the up-time of their own systems, their own employees, or their customers.
I question if their goal is to simply extract money under unethical conditions. I question whether they expect the customer to just repeatedly purchased the game every time the company fails to deliver it. I also questioned to him why he has hiring managers bragging on LinkedIn that they expect people to output 1 million lines of code per month, so they can rewrite the operating system in rust, while their systems are off-line.
Nadella had it easy when he took over. Stock soared before he did anything. The only improvements seemed to be made by others using the CEO change to try & push a few better agendas.
Acquired podcast had Ballmer on this past year. Gives interesting take of how he was never a true CEO, always had Gates still running things.
I imagine Microsoft probably has about 5-10 CEOs running it right now. Nadella is just the face. Amy, Brad & Kathleen for sure. Would not be surprised if Bill still has a lot of say. Guthrie probably doesn't have enough say.
For the big companies, you are no longer a customer - you are a source of training data. Windows feels like a data extraction platform at this point. Well, I am Steaming on Linux now. Have fun with your AI.
I have a little AMD AliExpress PC where the Windows installer recognizes neither the wifi card nor the Ethernet port. I guess there's a way to download the drivers on another computer and load them during installation, but instead of figuring out how to do that or what the latest option for circumventing the online requirement is, it now runs Pop OS.
Just go find the PCI IDs (lspci) and download the appropriate cabs from the Software Update Catalog. Extract them and throw them on a USB stick. Really effing simple.
Microsoft is the US military's biggest supplier. There is definitely a solution for this. And that solution is probably not available to regular users.
I don't think regular Windows 11 is that useful in those cases. You probably either want an intranet connected Windows client, that gets activated and updated via a local server. Probably also a LTSC release, that doesn't get feature updates all the time.
Or a Windows 11 IoT image, that only enables some specific features, and is stripped down for a specific purpose.
For individual use I guess the solution is to set it up once with internet connectivity and air gap afterwards.
Internal key activation can be done through a KMS host , which can be activated by phone (or some other dedicated mean if you're big enough for MS to care)
Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"
It does require logging in (to the website) with a Microsoft account, but Microsoft claims:
By logging in with your account, it will not associate the account to the licenses.
From there, it's just a web version of phone activation (you enter your Installation ID and presumably they give you the Confirmation ID). No idea what happens when moving a licence between machines (with phone activation, the automated process would fail due to the existing activation and you'd be handed off to someone in a call center who would generate the Confirmation ID for you).
I read their handheld Xbox is a version of Windows with none of the bloat nor slop. I'm sure they'll never sell that as a version of Windows but I wonder if it's possible to make it into an installable by third parties like other custom ISOs that float around the internet.
When I recently installed Windows 11 on my new rig, it didn't recognize the built-in motherboard wifi and I could only connect after installation of Windows + mobo drivers. How would that work now?
With both Windows 11 and macOS Tahoe now being non-starters for many, it's clear that we're going to continue to see impressive growth in the Linux desktop in 2026. Last year I migrated my Windows gaming machine to Ubuntu, and it's been a great success. I don't play games that require kernel level anti-cheats, so for me, Proton has worked great. I'm playing new games like Anno 117 on my 2019 vintage RX 5700xt and am having a blast. I'm about to wipe my Windows 10 partition and not look back.
I still have an M1 laptop with a broken screen that is going strong in clam shell mode, but once it dies or I can no longer run Sequoia for whatever reason, I'll be tempted to abandon macOS if Apple can't move beyond the mess they've made with Tahoe.
I understand why this is bad, but I personally would sign up for a Microsoft account anyway. Mainly, I don't want all my stuff in "C:\Users\micha". Is there a way to set your username?
If/when support for Linux gaming becomes widespread and easy to navigate with few configuration hurdles, Windows will die very quickly. As for MacOS, I genuinely can't wrap my head around why anyone who is technically competent would prefer that OS.
The responses here baffle me. This IS GOOD NEWS. HN more than anyone should understand this. Every mistake Microsoft makes with Windows is a free win for Linux. We should celebrate this and encourage Nadella to make Windows as hostile as possible. Add that nasty recall ai spyware, put ads everywhere.
People here hating on Nadella and loving Ballmer are missing the point. This is not a partisan issue. Windows stopped being good a long time ago. Arguably XP was the last good version of Windows.
Windows becoming an OS mostly for corporate types is beneficial for the world. Let us celebrate!
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 60.0 ms ] threadI think my crowning achievement came early on when I managed to follow Linux From Scratch all the way through.
I say all of this to say that I am finally off Windows for good. It has become my daily driver. I've no obstacles. Not in gaming, software dev, personal work, media consumption (beyond streaming services degrading streams for a non-supported OS), or anything else. I've found open source apps to be quite a bit better than their closed source equivalents.
Things have really shifted in the past 5-10 years, and I dig it. KDE + CachyOS is great! Although I hear Bazzite is better for new users (I have some decent experience using Arch so I prefer Cachy)
I don't foresee ever moving back to Windows. The AI and constant push to Microsoft Edge, Second OOB experience, and other nonsense (including Diablo 2: resurrected, a [now] Microsoft owned product that still gets a few updates, hard locking my system), I decided to take my ball and go home...to Linux. A few people I know who aren't even remotely computer literate at all have done the same, and they've been surprised at how much better everything is, particularly on somewhat older hardware.
Windows is not at the core of their strategy anymore. With Azure, they are as much of a Linux company as they are a Windows company now, and most of their software runs in a browser now. Windows is just a gateway to their services.
If it was easy for them to have their users run Linux instead of Windows and sell Office 365 subscriptions, they would prefer that instead of having to maintain a full OS.
The main tool for me is https://www.startallback.com/
O2O Shutup ( https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 ) is also pretty useful for disabling anything you don't like all in one place -- it doesn't even install.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1626871/microsoft-to-b...
This one youtuber, I forget his name, was fired as part of that layoff. He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.
One is Microsoft releasing shitty software.
The other is a deeper societal problem with healthcare and loyalty between companies and their employees.
For me, they are unrelated problems. In a welfare state, the QA team may have been reaffected to some other tasks within the company and have the health benefits provided by the state, but it wouldn't have made the software less shitty.
Microsoft is just profiteering off of their defacto monopoly, selling more is their only metric, the "what" is secondary.
In my LinkedIn post I questioned if they can’t be trusted with a $30 game license how can we trust them with a multi million dollar copilot rollout? I pointed out that it seems like this is more than just a lack of human support. It is a company that: does not care about their own brand, the up-time of their own systems, their own employees, or their customers.
I question if their goal is to simply extract money under unethical conditions. I question whether they expect the customer to just repeatedly purchased the game every time the company fails to deliver it. I also questioned to him why he has hiring managers bragging on LinkedIn that they expect people to output 1 million lines of code per month, so they can rewrite the operating system in rust, while their systems are off-line.
Acquired podcast had Ballmer on this past year. Gives interesting take of how he was never a true CEO, always had Gates still running things.
I imagine Microsoft probably has about 5-10 CEOs running it right now. Nadella is just the face. Amy, Brad & Kathleen for sure. Would not be surprised if Bill still has a lot of say. Guthrie probably doesn't have enough say.
It's just exceedingly bizarre watching this AI stuff and not except that global capitalism is deranged dick measuring.
Is it possible to activate via a web browser on a separate computer, similar to the flow for phone activation?
This is a small roadbump to home/smb free activations.
Or a Windows 11 IoT image, that only enables some specific features, and is stripped down for a specific purpose.
For individual use I guess the solution is to set it up once with internet connectivity and air gap afterwards.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...
283 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471081
I still have an M1 laptop with a broken screen that is going strong in clam shell mode, but once it dies or I can no longer run Sequoia for whatever reason, I'll be tempted to abandon macOS if Apple can't move beyond the mess they've made with Tahoe.
People here hating on Nadella and loving Ballmer are missing the point. This is not a partisan issue. Windows stopped being good a long time ago. Arguably XP was the last good version of Windows.
Windows becoming an OS mostly for corporate types is beneficial for the world. Let us celebrate!