Eh, “a few years” here is selling Linux a bit short. I switched about 15 years ago, and while driver issues were a thing, it was still a pretty solid experience. I had to fiddle with my sound card and I replaced my wifi card in my laptop, but other than that, everything else worked perfectly. That still occasionally happens today, but as of about 10 years ago, I honestly haven’t heard of many problems (esp. w/ sound, that seems largely solved, at least within a few months of HW release).

I don’t know what you’re talking about WRT GPUs. Bumblebee (graphics switch) was absolutely a thing back in the day for Nvidia GPUs on laptops, which kinda sucked but did work, and today there are better options. On desktops, I ran Nvidia because ATI’s drivers were more annoying at the time. Ubuntu would detect your hardware and ask you to install proprietary drivers for whichever card you had. I ended up getting a laptop w/o a dGPU, mostly because I didn’t want to deal with graphics switching, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t work, it was just a pain. For dedicated systems though, it was pretty simple, I was able to play Minecraft on the GPU that came with my motherboard (ATI?), and it ran the beta Minecraft build just fine, along with some other simple games.

In short, if you were on a desktop, pretty much everything would work just fine. If you were on a laptop, most things would work just fine, and the better your hardware, the fewer problems you’d have (i.e. my ThinkPad worked just fine ~10 years ago).

Playing games could be a bit more tricky, but for just using the machine, pretty much any hardware would work out of the box, even 15 years ago. It has only gotten better since then.

That’s a good point. I didn’t think about that.

Seems like you’re not the only one in this thread that fails to even read the title correctly.

Obviously, but we’re talking about a really, really small subset of users that probably would earn Microsoft less than a week of coffee in their corporate office.

Are they still doing that thing where OEMs pay licenses based on units sold regardless of OS? So even if you want Linux, they still have to pay for windows?

People who are technical enough to get around the system requirements to install windows 11 on a system that doesn’t meet the minimum requirements is most likely technical enough to upgrade their own computer.

I used office and QuickBooks oninux 10 years ago, easier and safer than on windows. What’s your point?

I decided to look up what that term meant.

The minimum specs seem to be an 800Mhz system with 512MB memory. No, Vista will not run good on that. Even Windows 7 will not like it. Windows XP with SP3 will run on that, but even that will feel sluggish on 800Mhz.

That’s like early XP computers being released with 64 or 128 Megs of RAM. That may be the minimum specs but it’s not gonna be usable.

No 7 sucked too. It just came off the back of Vista which was a real hot mess, so 7 appeared better.

The thing is, Microsoft has always had an adversarial (or abusive) relationship with its customers, forcing things on them that most of them don’t want. Like active desktop and IE integration in Windows 9x, “activation” and Fisher Price UI in XP, bloated (for the time) Aero UI that required a 3D capable GPU in Vista, UAC in Vista, forced automatic updates in 7, abandoning the start menu in favor of that awful tile UI in 8.x, telemetry you can’t disable in 10, a start menu that acts more like an app store and advertising place in 10, forced TPM and Microsoft accounts in 11 … the list is endless. And then when they back down on one thing, people are like: “Hurray, the czar heard us! Windows is actually good now!” … forgetting all the other things they have been forced to swallow in the past.

Seriously. Windows 7 was the first genuinely stable OS from Microsoft.

Everything before it required regular reformating. Granted, the frequency of the reformating less over time, but still required it. Like, Win95/98 required it like every 3 months, XP every 6 months to a year, just to avoid the bloat and slowing down and issues. Same with reboots, it didnt have to be rebooted every time you ran a program, either.

Windows 7? My longest run between formats was like 4-5 years iirc, and that was due to hardware changes, not due to any performance or maintenance need. Ans for reboots? Only time that computer ever got rebooted is when a windows update demanded it, or when the power went out. Neither of which was particularly frequent.

It was also slick, agile, easy to use. You didnt have to think about shit when you used windows 7, you just did shit.

I’m not a fanboy, despite what this sounds like, but 7 was legitimately the best Windows OS, hell it wouldnt take much twisting for me to say it was the best Desktop OS, period. It was the first time ever that I was able to use the computer, and not have to stop and think “Well, I just finished running a heavy game, I need to reboot before I do something else” I just stopped one heavy task, gave the background processes a second to finish up, then went right to another heavy task without issue or concern.

It also had a very good UI. But Windows always had the best UI, by comparison, in the market, cause they spent billions on developing it so that the most computer illiterate could pick it up and use it with 15 minutes of instruction.

I did, but I didnt feel it was necessary to go into an excruciatingly detailed list of all OS’s from now to all the way back to LEO I in my OS criticism, just to avoid some pissy OS ping pong of “You thought that was bad? You obviously never used (insert older OS here)!”

Fuck the 9x kernel.

If we’re doing that we gotta go back to at least 95 if not 3.1. Are we counting 98se?

Nah. Fuck the 9x kernel.

5 was terrible. No redeeming qualities whatsoever.

I just saw a deleted comment, then your username and found it funny.

No, I think they are referring to your username.

I mean for the big software boys to actually start caring about it.

The AMD bug requires the same access that any of serious previous exploits have given. You don’t need physical access. Any exploit that gives root means the payload can be the AMD firmware exploit which will make it permanently undetectable by anti virus and wiping the os won’t remove it.

For example the ssh exploit from years ago allowed root without even an account on the machine. Those affected detected they had been owned, wiped their machines and restored from backup. If something like that happens again, (https://thehackernews.com/2024/07/new-openssh-vulnerability-could-lead-to.html?m=1) you won’t be able to know you are owned.