Honestly, between the telemetry data collection, the strange hardware requirements, advertisements, bloatware, and unknown future licensing model, Linux is looking like an attractive option. At this point, I only use Windows for Office and gaming, and Linux + Proton has gotten really good lately. I don’t see a reason to use Windows on my personal machine any more.
The subscription rumor was debunked pretty quickly. I honestly don’t see that happening anytime soon, PC makers would get pretty upset (especially if they don’t get a cut of the revenue).
No, it’s coming. And for thin clients it’s already here.
Yes, that’s reporting on the “leak” from Neowin, which Neowin later redacted because there wasn’t actually enough evidence: https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-might-want-to-be-making-windows-12-a-subscription-os-suggests-leak/
Windows 365 is a cloud streaming PC that isn’t even available to consumers yet.
I had not seen that newer Neowin article, thank you for the correction.
But Windows 365 is certainly available to business and enterprise users right now. When they roll it out to home users is a separate matter. I would add that home users are not usually thin client users, lol: even Chromebooks have a limited OS on them.
EDITED TO ADD that you might want to take a closer look at the article you linked, as Cloud PC is the name of Microsoft’s subscription OS for thin clients:
Other than AI, Microsoft is also gradually making it clear how it hopes to move Windows, or at least a major chunk of it, to the web. Back in March, Cloud PC options began to appear inside Settings. Following that, more Cloud PC-related leaks started popping up. A separate report suggested that Microsoft was working on something called “CorePC” for the next Windows version. Finally, an FTC filing revealed how Microsoft was apparently working internally to “move Windows 11 increasingly to the cloud…” (bold emphasis is my own)
The original source for that is an internal presentation with poorly-worded language that said Windows will “move” to the cloud, the whole presentation slide makes it clear they’re talking about Windows in the cloud as an option: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/27/23775117/microsoft-windows-11-cloud-consumer-strategy
Forcing everyone to stream Windows from a cloud server would not work well for the vast majority of PCs and internet connections. Microsoft isn’t dumb, they’re not going to try that and lose even more market share to Apple. I was linking to the article to show the correction, the original article was junk based on nothing and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Appreciate the clarification, thank you for taking the time.
ITT: People who just read the headlines and not the article, and then going off on their own Windows rant/Linux evangelism instead of discussing the article.
I read the article! It suggests in a hundred different ways that Windows 11 sucks and that sticking it out with Windows 10 is a bad idea for a dozen different reasons.
The people here suggesting Linux nailed it. If you’re not using Linux at this point you’re just being lazy, IMHO. If you have any issues you can always just troubleshoot and fix it but based on the anecdotes posted so far it’s obvious no one claiming to have tried Linux has done much of that.
Get off your ass and learn something new for real or stop bitching and bend over for Microsoft with your wallet ready to pay them afterwards for the privilege.
People bitching about Windows on their personal PCs is like people who don’t vote bitching about politics.
If you’re not using Linux at this point you’re just being lazy
I used Linux for over twenty years and stopped about two years ago due to Linux invariably moving to lazy, poor development and design all the way from the kernel up. Rapid kernel development with tons of random new patches and ideas instead of the old way of maintaining a stable kernel and doing random patches and ideas on a separate branch (the odd minor versions vs. the stable even ones, and even the modern “stable” kernels are just the same branch of constantly rapid updated kernels where they just choose one at random and say “this is ‘stable’ now and we’ll keep patching it instead of telling people to install new ones”), systemd being more of a problem than a solution, the push for everything to move to Wayland forcing every single thing that has to do with lower level desktop interfaces, including all of the lightweight window managers, to completely rewrite themselves with tons of bloat that replaces everything X.org did by default as well as Wayland’s devs taking a “it works on my computer” approach to bugs and dismissing tons of major issues people have found, pipewire still not being a stable, reliable audio system (Linux has never had one, but using ALSA with the right hardware back in the day where everything would mix via hardware was a decent solution), distros becoming more and more unreliable and buggy (even “stable” and “long term support” ones), distros and developers giving up on native and running bare metal applications and substituting things like flatpak to run things natively with any sort of cross-platform reliability and fucking wine – essentially a new version of Windows running in Linux, which is an admission of failure to make a successful game platform if I’ve ever heard one – to run games, and on and on.
I’ve been able to use Linux very well until a few years back. I used to be one of its biggest advocates and wouldn’t dare run Windows.
No more. People bitch, moan, and complain about Windows 11 so much but for me, it just works. Simply, easily, no problem. Do I wish I still used Linux? Hell, yes. But am I given how bad it’s become? Nope. I’ve even tried going back here and there and quickly ran into the same huge list of problems and aches that were never there before and back to Windows I go.
Sorry, Linux is a pain and it’s not about being lazy, it’s about wanting to use a decent OS that just works as well as Linux used to.
I’ve been using Linux since 2008, and yours and my experience is basically opposite. I stayed on X until about a year ago, and haven’t had any problems with Wayland. PipeWire was basically immediately better as soon as Fedora switched to it. I could use Jack plugins and patch bays with my pulse apps, including all the electron apps, like Discord. Systemd has always been better than sys5 init. Maybe you don’t remember how bad the old init daemon was.
I’m sorry you had trouble with Linux though.
I remember the old initd. It was fast, efficient, didn’t hang up for 10+ minutes when it got confused about what needed to shut down when, and just worked until a bunch of impatient new Linux users wanted to get to the desktop in 0.00007 seconds and couldn’t patiently wait for a proper init boot order so they created this bloated monstrosity. But those aren’t even the worst part of NuLinux: to this day Wayland is absolute unstable garbage not worth using. Visual glitches, UI glitches, instability, slowdowns, and outright crashes that even REISUB can’t recover from. Meanwhile, Xorg still Just Works.
Modern Linux is garbage and needs to be either fixed or thrown away.