The Death of Windows 10

[anmpr1]

No problem with wireless or connected audio devices etc. On the contrary, I once had an HP GDI laser printer that was no longer supported by a newer version of Windows. I would have had to buy a new one. With Linux it continued to run for years.

That is good news. I remember having to use certain printers due to lack of drivers--HP always worked pretty well. Wireless was always a wonky. When I was a user, even installing Nvidia drivers was an involved process. I guess that was around the time of KDE 4.x--so it's been a while for me.

However, for something like the Katana, it's goodbye Charlie, unless you are willing to deep dive. At least that's the message from the groups.

Strictly speaking, that is not the 'fault' of Linux, but Roland. My guess is that software/hardware interface design is, for many companies, a difficult and expensive thing, and once they've covered MS and Apple, they call it a day.

 

[computer-audiophile]

...Am also comfortable with using Linux but know that many distros do not support rolling updates. If you chose the Linux route, be sure to select one that does.

A point release distribution is recommended for production and business critical machines. You want a stable system here. I think that's better myself.

I prefer to use the stable Ubuntu LTS versions, which are updated very frequently. It runs in the background and doesn't bother me. Currently it is Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS. I always try out the latest versions on a test computer first before I transfer them to my other PCs.

 

[anmpr1]

I am confident Microsoft will offer a solution that avoids having millions of Windows PCs vulnerable.

Yes. On that special day, after you boot up you will get a pic of two buttons. If you click the left button you'll get a video of Nadella smiling, along with a message telling you that your computer will no longer be supported, and your option is to either buy a new one, or click on the right button.

When you click the right button, you'll get a video of Ballmer, telling you that you that although you can switch to Linux, that OS is a "Cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches, and will ruin the computing industry forever." Then he'll say, "Just kidding--I actually LOVE Linux." At which point he'll go into his 'monkey boy' sweat dance, shouting Ubuntu over and over while shaking his fists about wildly. Then, a new button will appear with a link to an Ubuntu distro.

At least that's how I think they should do it. But they'll probably just tell users to 'screw it', and get a new PC.

 

[Ron Texas]

@anmpr1 actually someone will offer you a choice between a red pill and a blue pill.

 

[Rick Sykora]

A point release distribution is recommended for production and business critical machines. You want a stable system here. I think that's better myself.

Agree, but was mainly figuring the ASR audience is individuals...

I worked with large manufacturers who have even greater resistance to change anything quickly. I have a small business customer who refuses to update regularly even though his main application provider is agile. Every few months, he pays me to get everything in sync. Establishing a stable baseline for applications to be tested against is good practice. Not many consumers are going to be that savvy though and are at the mercy of Microsoft. Windows 7 and beyond have been pretty good for the hardware ecosystem it supports. It is not always so and keeps me busy.

 

[Rick Sykora]

@anmpr1 actually someone will offer you a choice between a red pill and a blue pill.

I feel this is more like 2 or three different blue pills and tens of choices of red ones...

I finished college just before PCs were available. At that point, I had worked on 2 different mainframe OSes and at least 3 different minicomputers ones. That was 40 years ago and 2 of the minicomputer OSes were the basis for modern Linux and Windows. Am ready for something different!

Maybe a green pill?

 

[olbobcat]

I started my journey on a commodore 64. I worked at a store assembling Apple computers. I once paid $900 for a 60MB hard drive (wholesale). Build a memory card?
Dialup! There were no "good ole days". I am happy to embrace the new tech. Have a new 12genI7 mini PC on preorder, will add 64 GB ram and 2TB NVMe and be in at $650-700. I feel spoiled.

I think most people could get away with just a Chromebook/box.

I personally use Windows because I am lazy.

I will use Linux if needed with Pi, Media Server, or Network appliance as needed. When I have time.
These things take longer because I am going to be lazy about them.

As far as security there are a lot of problems out there that are caused by all things smart. What I find that I want more of and get less of every day is privacy.
The number of houses I go to with Ring doorbells is amazing. You might see me with a Ubiquiti doorbell one day on my network appliance. I don't want to work hard on these things but it seems like the world is spying on us and the search results come up in seconds now, not days or weeks later.

I am concerned about Malware as well. Most of the people I know that have had problems let it in themselves. I think there could be a correlation between people who use Linux being more computer literate than the average user and not only the operating system. causing less Malware. When a builder builds a house the garage code for the opener is usually set the opener at 1111 or 1234 to allow the trades to come and go. Some people never change the code when they move in. How concerned are they with internet and computer security?

 

[anmpr1]

Maybe a green pill?

I think with MS, you need the pink pills.

 

[Rick Sykora]

I think with MS, you need the pink pills.

View attachment 274634

Am more of a natural remedy sort. May be a ginger extract pill...

Anyway not into OS wars (certainly not Windows vs Linux). Both have strengths and weaknesses ime. Apply the one which works best for you or your customer is my approach. Neither is supplanting the other as far as I can tell. As I mentioned earlier, expect something new will replace both eventually.

I also have a MacBook Pro just to keep me challenged. Some days it seems ideal to me, but Apple has not perfected a green pill either.

 

[Deleted member 48726]

Surely you jest......everyone knows it was WFW 3.11 that was the real deal.
View attachment 274486

No no no, MS DOS version 3.2 came with 3.5 floppy support. Far superior to your infantile colorful "Windows".

 

[anmpr1]

Am more of a natural remedy sort. May a ginger extract pill...

Anyway not into OS wars (certainly not Windows vs Linux). Both have strengths and weaknesses ime.

To be fair, the OS interface is at least average. Under the hood it's certainly stable, and has been since about XP. The Pepto thing was more about the company's historical actions on (IMO) the borderline of RICO. But that's another story altogether.

But as we know, the home user, or the user in general, is not MS's customer. MS's main customers are governments, OEMs, and large corporations. Perhaps the subscription thing moves the home user back into the MS fold. I don't know. Since 7, I don't think MS even cares about making their OS helpful to end users. I've never seen a company muck up usability in subsequent versions like MS.

FWIW, MS does contribute code to Linux and open source in general. Evidently below IBM (Red Hat), Oracle, Intel and others. So they are not as antagonistic to other products as they were, during the Gates/Ballmer years.

 

[BlackTalon]

I've been maintaining PCs since the PS/2 days, had office-wide OS/2 systems, and many flavors of Windows since then, including several versions of Backoffice and Small Business Server. Started building computers ~20 years ago. I have zero formal education in computer science and have never taken classes/ seminars on Windows. I've somehow managed to keep a dozen workstations a server and a few home PCs and notebooks going. Windows has never really presented an issue for me. Maybe back 30-35 years ago it was a pain since you needed drivers on disk from the device maker, and there wasn't internet access to easily find/ download drivers, updates, etc. These days setting up and maintaining various flavors of Windows doesn't require much effort. For the switchover to Win11 Pro we'll have new PCs at my office, as the ones we have now are still humming along after 10 years (they were recently updated to Win10 Pro from 8.1 Pro). Our issues have been limited to a couple HDD failures, and a couple heat-related issues from dried out thermal paste mainly caused by a couple loose CPU fan fasteners (builder error from 10 years ago).

 

[Blumlein 88]

No no no, MS DOS version 3.2 came with 3.5 floppy support. Far superior to your infantile colorful "Windows".

Not to me. I like shiny pretty gui's. Though I prefer Linux, I don't prefer command lines, like gui's there too. Commodore was my preference in the days of MS-Dos.

 

[Keith_W]

Back in the early days, I had 640K of RAM, and a 40MB HDD, and ran MS-DOS 3.0. I remember using utilities like EMM386 to move system programs and knowing the difference between extended and expanded memory. When I learnt about clusters on HDD, and how a 200 byte text file would use up the same 4KB cluster as a 4KB file, I went around deleting as many useless small files as possible.

Ever since RAM and nonvolatile storage became cheap, Windows has become more and more bloated. Now my HDD is littered with all sorts of useless junk, which I can't be bothered cleaning up because storage is so cheap, and I might inadvertently delete something important. Opening task manager shows a whole bunch of useless processes chugging along turning cogs that don't need to be turned, consuming system resources and slowing down my PC. I can't be bothered eliminating them either, because there are so many of them and I don't know what they are for. I have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, and it pops up notifications every day to nag me to download updates for their products.

Once upon a time, there was the simplicity of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT*. Nowadays Windows registry is massive and incomprehensible and trying to learn all those settings is not something I am willing to do.

I sometimes miss the days when we were more resource limited, because at least back then programmers would be more careful with their code.

* Oh yeah, here's an old joke. What do you get if you cross Lee Iacocca with a vampire? Answer: AUTOEXEC.BAT

 

[computer-audiophile]

Not to me. I like shiny pretty gui's. Though I prefer Linux, I don't prefer command lines, like gui's there too. Commodore was my preference in the days of MS-Dos.

I also see it as progress that computers today have screens.

When I think back to the old days when the output devices were teletype-devices and computers were fed with punched tape. (The first computer I had access to was a Siemens 2002 at the astronomical computing institute of the University of Heidelberg in the late sixties)

 

[mhardy6647]

Firstly - who is 'We'?

You probably don't want to think too hard about this one!

 

[Blumlein 88]

Well I worked as a keypunch operator. Also used an early DEC with paper tape. Put programs in using levers in hexadecimal on the front. Don't miss it.

 

[mhardy6647]

Back in the early days, I had 640K of RAM, and a 40MB HDD, and ran MS-DOS 3.0. I remember using utilities like EMM386 to move system programs and knowing the difference between extended and expanded memory. When I learnt about clusters on HDD, and how a 200 byte text file would use up the same 4KB cluster as a 4KB file, I went around deleting as many useless small files as possible.

Ever since RAM and nonvolatile storage became cheap, Windows has become more and more bloated. Now my HDD is littered with all sorts of useless junk, which I can't be bothered cleaning up because storage is so cheap, and I might inadvertently delete something important. Opening task manager shows a whole bunch of useless processes chugging along turning cogs that don't need to be turned, consuming system resources and slowing down my PC. I can't be bothered eliminating them either, because there are so many of them and I don't know what they are for. I have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, and it pops up notifications every day to nag me to download updates for their products.

Once upon a time, there was the simplicity of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT*. Nowadays Windows registry is massive and incomprehensible and trying to learn all those settings is not something I am willing to do.

I sometimes miss the days when we were more resource limited, because at least back then programmers would be more careful with their code.

* Oh yeah, here's an old joke. What do you get if you cross Lee Iacocca with a vampire? Answer: AUTOEXEC.BAT

The nail has been hit rather squarely on the head.
When I was in (no kidding!) a Technology Strategy role at a rather large pharmaceutical company (with a rather Pfunny name) I had the audacity to invoke what I liked to call Hardy's Law of Technology:
There is such a thing as too much technology.

I remember "chaining" bits and pieces of programs in and out of memory on moderately early microprocessor PCs (Heathkit H-89 and Tektronix 4051, in my case) due to the limitations of memory in those two machines (16 kB in the former case; I cannot remember for the 4051 any more). We ran some pretty sophisticated enzyme kinetics simulators, nonlinear curvefitting programs for ligand binding, and graphics on those machines -- and I loved every minute of it.

 

[computer-audiophile]

Well I worked as a keypunch operator. Also used an early DEC with paper tape. Put programs in using levers in hexadecimal on the front. Don't miss it.

Interesting!

As an aesthete, I also attach a lot of importance to a tidy appearance of a GUI. This was also always important to me when I designed an application myself, for example in the field of computer-aided measurement technology.

Today I am very satisfied with the appearance of the Ubuntu Desktop. But I can also make many adjustments myself.

 

[mhardy6647]

No no no, MS DOS version 3.2 came with 3.5 floppy support. Far superior to your infantile colorful "Windows".

Win 2.1 wasn't terribly colorful.