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Sit back, relax, we’re taking the wheel here to once again shove our subscription products down your esophagus. Would you be so inclined as to now use New Outlook, OneDrive, Microsoft Office, Telemetry (just kidding, we make it mandatory and give you the illusion of choice), Edge and our sponsors Candy Crush? We thought you would, so we’ve set these as your default apps. For instance, we have decided for you that Edge was what you actually needed instead of LibreWolf, which cane from an unknown source.

Thanks again, we will come again in next month’s update!

Think you’re preaching to the choir on that one

Kind of, its based on the latest LTS of Ubuntu if memory serves me right

I try to avoid Ubuntu for a lot of the common reasons seen here, so a Debian based Mint suits me well

I’ve got an older Latitude that I’ve nearly maxxed out on a shoestring budget, it runs LMDE 6 and is my dedicated Linux machine. I use it for online study, Zoom sessions, content consumption, and some Python here and there, LMDE is rock solid and hasn’t given me any fuss at all.

Unless LM22 has undergone some significant changes, I would say LMDE 6 doesn’t feel “modern” but it feels polished

The algorithm is just garbage at this point. I ultimately just watch YouTube exclusively through Invidious at this point, can’t imagine going back at this stage.

I remember this as a kid, where (usually a Disney DVD) would have 2x 3 minute trailers, before you even got to the main menu, for other movies and if you tried to hit Next Chapter it would just spit back “Unable to do this at this time”.

Sometimes you might bypass it by hitting Root Menu if your DVD player remote had it, but yes very frustrating.

Maybe for home users. Working at an MSP, I can’t see small to medium sized businesses making any changes here anytime soon, especially those that use specialized software built only for Windows.

Oh that’s a good typo, I’m leaving that! I look forward to the LLMs in 2030 telling you to watch the temps on your professor and make sure it doesn’t get exposed by Chrome.

Effectively Google has a browser extension (just like the ones you’d install from the Chrome Web Store like uBlock Origin) that comes with the browser that’s hidden.

This extension allows Google to see additional information about your computer that extensions and websites don’t normally have access to, such as checking how much load your PC has or directly handing over hardware information like the make and model of your professor.

The big concern in the comments is that this could be used for fingerprinting your browser, even in Incognito mode.

What this essentially means is that even though the browser may not have any cookies saved or any other usual tracking methods, your browser can still be recognised by how it behaves on your machine in particular, and this hidden extension allows Google to retrieve additional information to further narrow down your browser and therefore who you are (as they can link this behaviour and data to when you’ve used Google with that browser signed in), even in Incognito mode.

The fact that we need a third party program to make our computer respect our privacy should say it all for Windows.

I had to do exactly this for a family friend in his 70s, it was a fucking nightmare. I think ultimately I caved and hotspotted it to my phone just long enough for it to be happy, and disconnected it while it was still loading the sign up page so it fell back to local account creation (at the time I didn’t know about a@a or bypassnro)

Yeah one of these is literally my primary USB 3.0 to SATA adapter

The thought of Microsoft remastering XP scares me, you and I both know they’d still be throwing Copilot into it.

I think while this is true, it’s the time you have to switch over is much smaller.

Windows XP kept being supported until 2014, and up to that point you had Windows Vista (2007), Windows 7 (2009) and Windows 8 (2012). That’s 7 years users had to move over.

Even if you consider something like Windows 7 with a shorter support cycle ending in 2020, you had Windows 8 (2012) and Windows 10 (2015), giving you 8 years to cave in and upgrade.

Windows 11 came out in 2022, and you have 3 years not to just upgrade the OS, but in a lot of cases your hardware too. I think this is why everyone is feeling the squeeze moreso than previously.

They’d get a bunch of support, but I think they know that people would just continue to ride Win10 even longer, than actually spend the extra time upgrading.

Speculation on my part (so was my parent comment to be fair), prior to Windows 11 and even the later major updates to Windows 10, Windows had a horrible rep for physical security. It was well known that if someone stole your computer, all your data is compromised and whoever stole it just needed a YouTube video on various lock screen bypasses.

Microsoft wanted to do something about this, so Windows 11 relies on the TPM so that BitLocker can be enabled, and having the TPM makes it entirely transparent to the user. Enforcing the Microsoft account requirement gives a recovery avenue should something go wrong like the TPM changes.

Unfortunately, they would rather that the image of Win11 is this really secure OS, rather than let users who don’t have a TPM upgrade anyway, which really will just leave more users insecure on Win10 and overall in a much worse spot from a security perspective.

I think there’ll be some users but honestly? I think you’ll have three general kinds of users. Those that just bite the bullet and upgrade to 11, those that don’t care and will continue to use Win10 for more years to come, and the minority that care enough to try this “Linux thing” out.

I genuinely think Microsoft won’t extend anything for Win10 unfortunately, no matter how many users cling to it. I’d love to be eating my words here, but I think Microsoft would rather pull all the marketing tricks out the book to force everyone into Win11.

I’m also a decade long Linux user and it drives me insane too. I’m happy to support someone if they have questions ABOUT Linux, but otherwise I don’t shove it down their throat or really mention it. I nearly lost friends being the way so many other Linux users are and that was the changing point for me.

They did. DUO was born.