During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.
"We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell's slice of machines. "And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can't run Windows 11." He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year.
↫ Tom Warren at The Verge
The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won't or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it's absolutely bonkers to me that we're mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should've 100% forced Microsoft's hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen.
Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there's also the massive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don't have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering – rightfully so – but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on.
At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gonemissing on Wednesday December 03, @07:37AM (13 children)
I've had several people ask me how to install Linux on their machines because Windows keeps telling them that they're about to be unsupported.
They just want me to confirm that it'll run their (usually very) old Windows applications - which I tell them that we'll just have to try Wine and see what happens...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday December 03, @08:17AM (9 children)
In my experience, wine has better compatibility for (especially old) windows software than windows does.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @08:35AM (8 children)
Wine also has better compatibility for old windows software than Linux has for old Linux software:
https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ [hiler.eu]
🤣
(Score: 3, Informative) by aafcac on Wednesday December 03, @03:15PM
Probably, if you want support for super old software, you mostly stick with the older OSes and run them in a locked down VM. Fortunately, a good chunk of those programs don't require a net connection. That being said, a bunch of them do.
Other than that, often times the *BSD will handle some pretty old software, although I haven't really tried, compatibility libraries are available going back quite a ways. Linux is just at a significant disadvantage in this respect owing to the way distros are cobbled together from a kernel and whatever 3rd party programs that the project is choosing to use. As a result, I don't even know how they'd go about maintaining long term support other than with LTS releases that don't generally get new features.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday December 03, @08:42PM (4 children)
It was a conscious decision with Linux. Being FOSS, you were supposed to be able to recompile your software. The commercial/closed source folks were thus strongly encouraged to keep up with developments.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday December 04, @03:10AM (3 children)
Not really, there are projects that handle it, some like Linux put zero thought into it and you had better hope that an older version that supports the use exists and runs in your environment if it's anything essential.
I like modern Linux a lot, but let's not pretend like this was planned or intentional, it's a broken ass part of the philosophy because nobody could be bothered to properly deal with the problem of having a consistent and defined base system independent of the stuff the users choose to install.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday December 04, @09:59AM (2 children)
I didn't claim it was the right thing to do, only what the idea was. I used to work for Sun (of Solaris fame) at the time, who took APIs and ABIs very seriously (even for device drivers). They used to criticise Linux for its attitude in that regard. However, FOSS eventually ate their lunch because it moved so much faster and had greater development resources behind it.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday December 04, @07:53PM (1 child)
Linux would have taken over even more quickly if not for that arrogant attitude. There were a bunch of times when I tried Linux and basic functionality was just flat out broken in ways that made no sense. OpenSUSE when I tried it could use a bluetooth keyboard just fine, but for some reason you could not use it to actually login. You had to have a regular keyboard for that. The first time I tried Ext4 as my filesystem, I literally could not reboot the computer without the entire thing being corrupted beyond repair, even when using the system options to shutdown or reboot. Or, when Ubuntu decided to put Unity into a release without disclosing that it was barely alpha software and would be completely unusable on some systems.
Presumably, things on the server side were less inconsistent, but Linux developers have an addiction to shooting themselves in the foot over the stupidest things.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by turgid on Thursday December 04, @08:35PM
Linux would have taken over even more quickly if not for that arrogant attitude. There were a bunch of times when I tried Linux and basic functionality was just flat out broken in ways that made no sense.
...and then you list things that were the fault of particular Linux distributions, rather than Linux itself.
That's the thing: when Linux gets the blame for something, is it the kernel (and which version and with whose special patches e.g. Red Hat). the GNU user land, or a particular distribution? It's not "Linux Inc." It's not done in the same way as Microsoft Windows (or erstwhile Sun Solaris for that matter).
I use Slackware on all my own machines. At work I use and have used everything from Debian to RedHat/CentOS/Fedora to Ubuntu to various embedded distros. I've installed Mint for people.
They're all diverging nowadays. Slackware is still very Unix-like and still doesn't even use systemd, for example. RedHat is now completely payware. It used to be notorious for having its own special kernel and gcc patches. Who knows nowadays? I've not seen it in years thanks to it going totally payware and CentOS is dead.
I prefer the choice and diversity that FOSS provides. I could never go back to proprietary software, especially operating systems. I need a unix-like OS with a Bourne-type shell and a free C compiler. And I shall rule the world!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by Bentonite on Thursday December 04, @05:15AM
Linux's SYSCALL ABI hasn't changed - only some rarely used legacy SYSCALLs are disabled by default and you can just set .config to get them back.
Even for running extremely old GNU/Linux binaries, as glibc's ABI was made to be forward-compatible 20+ years ago, it's generally just a matter of locating binaries of the needed .so files that the dynamic linker reports as missing and copying them to the same directory until you've resolved all dependencies and the software runs.
But if it's free software and it was decently programmed, with decent dependencies, you don't need to hunt for library binaries - you just compile the 25 year old source code, maybe fixing a mistake or two that a later version of GCC now detects and it works (the main pain in the neck that you can run into is if there is a configure.in file that was wrong from the start that only works by mistake with a specific autotools version - which needs to be renamed to configure.ac and fixed up for compilation to work).
(Score: 2) by cykros on Thursday December 04, @11:47PM
I definitely have experienced this.
Thankfully, it's quite easy to install a fairly barebones version of Ubuntu or Debian in a chroot to solve most issues there without too much trouble. I most recently went through this for libbitcoin v3 after trying everything else first and it was strikingly simple. Even managed to compile things portably so I could just copy the binary back to my host system.
Pretty sure you're not gonna pull that on Windows though...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ShovelOperator1 on Wednesday December 03, @03:08PM (1 child)
Unfortunately, in recent years Linux got worse in this area.
Yes, Linux will fix this... with GPU drivers which slow the system down tenfold. Had exactly this thing in Debian and nVidia graphics first, and then with ATI, for it I had no way to fix this (had to stay with the older version, only hardened it a bit more). Fortunately for nVidia I had only to patch a few procedures into kernel module's source code and build this into my DKMS. For these "leading edge" distributions - buy a new GPU.
Of course unofficial patches for nVidia are available, but these projects are notoriously understaffed, so nobody maintains them and they get abandoned quickly. The open source driver is I think ready to get almost the same performance for my GPU, but this would require pushing about 700 unsigned chars thru the chip's serial bus (with 90% certainty this is a set of feature-frequency-voltage matrices). The funny thing: this loading has been sent as patch about 8 times and every time it was submitted, it got rejected.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Ingar on Wednesday December 03, @05:29PM
"Fuck you Nvidia" - Linus Torvalds
Love is a three-edged sword: heart, soul, and reality.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday December 03, @10:40PM
Like with A320s, sometimes it's much better to not be running the latest release.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @08:27AM (11 children)
> that we're mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes.
And why should MS be required to support years-old, end-of-life'd software, for which they announced the end-of-life date ten years ago?
Are they still selling Windows licenses for new PCs? if so, isn't there some minimum window for which they must support it? 30 days? 90 days? 3 years? Did MS meet that window of support and warranty of fitness?
Where do OEMs fall into this, selling hardware that can't be supported? Why nothing on/against them, for failing to support the software that they sold with their computers?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Dr Spin on Wednesday December 03, @08:32AM
Don't worry. MS is finally promoting OpenSource better than millions of us have managed over the last 30 years.
I cannot see how MS will survive this PR disaster, even if they reverse the policy now.
Who ever came up the the sales strategy of alienating almost a billion users deserves the software equivalent of a Darwin award!.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @03:29PM
Because we still give them copyright privileges. As long as they have that, they should be required to support the software. So,either support or license the software or forfeit copyrights and patents. Problem solved
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday December 03, @08:46PM (3 children)
And why should MS be required to support years-old, end-of-life'd software, for which they announced the end-of-life date ten years ago?
Well, quite. If the customer isn't willing to pay... Microsoft is not a charity.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @09:03PM
:-) The comment above yours should make it clear that compulsory licensing would make the problem go away. The software would be forced open for third party support and distribution, and Microsoft can collect royalties. All perfectly fair. Screw them if they don't like it. Copyrights/patents should have a price, call it a "property tax" if you like
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Thursday December 04, @07:56PM (1 child)
Then, they also shouldn't be allowed to require it to be bundled with the machines. It goes both ways, if they're going to be allowed to have it bundled, then it should be required to be supported for the life of the machine. It's not like anybody has any idea how much they're paying for the copy of Windows that comes with their computer or necessarily have a viable choice. IIRC, they were issueing refunds of like $30 at one point for people that rejected the terms and I'm skeptical that they're only making $30 a copy on those licenses.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, @08:09PM
$30... times more than a billion
Not too shabby
There are a lot of people up and down the supply chain to pay off
(Score: 2) by Captival on Wednesday December 03, @09:56PM (1 child)
They have a new, free OS that would work on most of those 1 billion PCs, but they're arbitrarily deciding who can or can't have it based on specious reasoning.
I don't think Microsoft should be legally forced into supporting old software, but I do think they're acting in bad faith here and have ulterior motives.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @10:03PM
If they want to keep their copyrights on that software, they should be! All part of the social contract
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday December 04, @03:42AM
I dunno, but yesterday my Win7 laptop received 2 security updates.
And I was like... what year is this??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by KritonK on Thursday December 04, @08:33AM (1 child)
The real question is why does MS refuse to support hardware that is still current.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, @08:00PM
Really?! Of all the things to ask, that would be it? I always thought the real question was, *Why don't we solve the problem?* I mean, the answer is right in front of us, but apparently we just bump into that old cliche about leading a horse to water
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday December 03, @08:40AM (12 children)
I never understood why Dell never attempted to make their own operating systems out of BSD or Unix, like Sony and HP. Or Apple.
They just assisted Microsoft in keeping the common population under crush, for decades.
Why users tolerate that? Probably, it's comfortable for them or even makes them feeling good...
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday December 03, @10:18AM (2 children)
I never understood why Dell never attempted to make their own operating systems out of BSD or Unix, like Sony and HP. Or Apple.
It is because when the courts forced M$ to cease the illegal per-processor licensing fees [justice.gov], M$ pivoted immediately to similar requirements but dressed up as partnerships and advertising partnerships. The courts never caught up.
In short, the OEMs are under the belief that they must offer an option for pre-installed Windows. But in order to acquire the licenses at a cost which has a chance of being profitable, they must knuckle under to M$ demands that no other systems be provided or at least not made feasible to buy. Dell has had systems for sale with GNU/Linux pre-installed, but good luck at even finding them and fat chance at actually placing an order for one.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Thursday December 04, @03:45AM
Well, earlier today I happened to wander past Dell's site, peered at some laptop, and noted that one of the OS choices was Ubuntu.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday December 04, @07:59PM
I'm not sure that's correct. They have to offer a pre-install option for Windows if they sell machines with Windows because that's a tautology. The bigger issue is that it can cost money to support Linux for newbs and MS requires that every computer being sold by a licensed OEM be preloaded with something. Presumably under the excuse that they're bundling without paying.
Really, the whole thing is a pretty big scam as MS doesn't even provide discs any more and doesn't require that the OEM do so either.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by datapharmer on Wednesday December 03, @10:20AM (5 children)
They did try offering an alternative once. They were going to offer BeOS as an option and Microsoft strong armed them out of it killing off a really good operating system in the process. Be sued and won but it was too late - only the lawyers ever saw anything of value from it.
Similar to what Microsoft did to Corel to kill WordPerfect by buying up their stock, getting a peak under the hood, making Word better and dumping them at the curb.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Wednesday December 03, @11:12AM (4 children)
They did try offering an alternative once. They were going to offer BeOS as an option and Microsoft strong armed them out of it killing off a really good operating system in the process. Be sued and won but it was too late - only the lawyers ever saw anything of value from it.
The courts were not just slow, their remedies were about letting M$ keep doing what it had done to get into trouble in the first place:
With WordPerfect, M$ also engaged in price dumping. WordPerfect the word processor was about $200 and Borland's Quattro the spreadsheet was also about $200, thus the combined total was about $400 together. Around that time M$ started to bundle Word and Excel together for a sum of $199 for a few years until WordPerfect was sufficiently weakened and Quattro was more or less eliminated. Once they had the market locked up, M$ started making incompatible changes to the file formats with each new version, without patches to the old versions, to ensure that bumbling managers inadvertently forced their peers to buy the latest versions as a block so as to remain somewhat compatible.
They still do that even if the proprietary formats are an instance of XML. And, yes, XML is an open standard, but like what M$ does with it you can still use it to make proprietary implementations. And, no, not even M$ itself uses OOXML aka ISO/IEC 29500. And, no, M$ does not support the OpenDocument Format aka ISO/IEC 26300 though it will happily read those file while quietly deleting components of the documents. That M$ strategy goes back to the 1990s [justice.gov] as the single greatest threat to M$ control (monopoly) over desktop operating systems is not other operating systems per se but instead new software products that may support applications which can be used in conjunction with other operating systems. And those applications are controlled via the file formats. Once you have actual cross-platform interoperability, the horse is out of the barn and m$ has nothing to hold on with. In some ways, that is already happening because m$ client market share is far below the percentage needed to maintain an income from monopoly rents. Android and iOS made that happen.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Wednesday December 03, @12:41PM (1 child)
I remember when Win95 came out and Microsoft was saying "It's compatible with 90% of existing software".. You know what didn't work? Competitors to Word and Excel. I don't remember what word processor I was running at the time but it had real issues under Win95.
Every time a Christian defends Trump an angel loses it's lunch.
(Score: 3, Touché) by stormreaver on Wednesday December 03, @02:50PM
Remember Microsoft's internal motto of the time: "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Thursday December 04, @08:23AM
Look at Teams vs Zoom now. Many corps are locked into M$'s walled garden.
Exchange + Shitpoint + Teams + Windows + Office.
Windows is a detail in that behemoth.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cereal_burpist on Saturday December 06, @05:09AM
That link is no longer valid. I found this one that seems to summarize it:
https://www.justice.gov/archive/atr/public/press_releases/1998/1764.htm [justice.gov]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chucky on Wednesday December 03, @10:41AM (2 children)
Dell once had their own “OS” called VMware. Their own Linux distribution too, Photon OS. But they failed miserably on company integration and sold it to Broadcom.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday December 03, @08:33PM (1 child)
VMWare is a virtualisation/hypervisor system, is it not?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chucky on Wednesday December 03, @10:58PM
Yes, it is, if you speak about ESXi. It installs on bare metal. When you connect to it, it looks like yet another Linux, though very single-purpose. But then all the other functions (e.g. vCenter or the UAGs for VMware Horizon), which run as VMs, use their own distro. That’s the Photon OS, which is a very stripped down Linux.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @08:48AM (21 children)
Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 is still supported till 2032.
So that's what I'm using and moving other Win 10 stuff to.
Windows 11 is clearly not production ready, at least not by my standards.
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-admits-major-windows-11-25h2-ui-features-broken-too-alongside-24h2-on-some-pcs/ [neowin.net]
https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-cant-fix-windows-11-wont-stop-breaking-it/ [xda-developers.com]
https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/11/30/microsoft-says-ai-agents-are-risky-but-its-moving-ahead-with-the-plan-on-windows-11/ [windowslatest.com]
"Desktop Linux" isn't ready either - it's about as crap as Win 11 just differently crap. The server stuff is fine/great.
Maybe after 2032 I'd have to use "Desktop Linux".
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday December 03, @01:02PM (5 children)
I want to get hold of Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021, but I believe it is made deliberately difficult for private individuals to get a legitimate copy. As far as I can tell, it is for sale to businesses, in minimum bundles of 5 or 10 (I forget which) - at least, in my jurisdiction.
I would like to get it for several of my close relatives but how?
Also, 'upgrading' an existing Windows installation to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 while keeping programs and data looks less than trivial.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @03:19PM (2 children)
Does this work for you?
https://digitallicense.shop/windows-10-enterprise-iot-ltsc-2021/ [digitallicense.shop]
https://www.cdw.com/product/ms-win-10-iot-ent-ltsc-2021/7574182 [cdw.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday December 03, @07:08PM (1 child)
Thanks for that. I shall investigate. I need at least 3 licences, possibly 4 or 5, so that link to the Estonian company looks promising.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday December 03, @08:19PM
You might want to check this out:
https://www.keysfan.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=windows+iot [keysfan.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by epitaxial on Wednesday December 03, @03:20PM
Who cares about legit? Just head over to massgrave.dev and run the activation scripts.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday December 03, @08:43PM
Note the difference between "Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021" and "Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021":
( https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol [massgrave.dev] along with various cons and pros of the different editions and activation scripts if you can't get a copy legitimately / semi-legitimately through an unlicensed dealer )
compiling...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Wednesday December 03, @01:41PM (3 children)
"Desktop Linux" isn't ready either - it's about as crap as Win 11 just differently crap. The server stuff is fine/great.
Itchy chin.
My retired boomer parents are doing just fine with Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition [linuxmint.com]. It's been two years now and I think I've been asked for help about twice since I installed it for them, and then that was just to tell them to what to put into a search engine to find what they needed.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @03:08PM
The desktop stuff that Windows does better than Linux often doesn't work so well in Windows in a VM (talking to GPUs and other proprietary hardware).
Whereas the stuff that Linux does better than Windows, often works fine in Linux in a VM.
Except perhaps for RAID and SSD caching. I think that one Linux does better than Windows.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Wednesday December 03, @03:19PM (1 child)
I personally believe that thanks to the idiotic way that MS keeps radically changing the way their GUI works that a Linux distro based on roughly the same paradigm that was used from Win XP to Win 7 would be an easier transition for those sorts than going to a more recent release of Windows where a bunch of stuff was changed for no particular reason with no particular consideration paid for migrating users to newer versions. If you choose something sensible like Linux Mint, the amount of learning needed to do just basic stuff is pretty minimal and you're still able to grow into something more flexible if you really want to.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, @10:00AM
I put Lubuntu on an old laptop and gave it to my dad about 8 years ago. He fine with it and it's still running. All he needs is a browser, really, and everything has auto-updates turned on and it just keeps working.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snospar on Wednesday December 03, @03:08PM (1 child)
I'd argue that Desktop Linux is a huge improvement over any Windows. I started using Linux back in 1998 and things were tough: Lack of hardware support or system constraints often meant compiling a custom kernel; Lack of good package management frequently meant dependency hell; Support for gaming was almost non-existent.
Now in 2025 all those issues have disappeared. Modern hardware comes with Linux support almost out of the factory. PC specs are pushed ever upward by bloated Windows so running Linux on the same hardware is a resource paradise. There are a huge choice of distros and almost all have excellent package management with a vast array of software available (who needs the original Windows software when native tools are available). Gaming has come on leaps and bounds with things like Wine/Proton making it trivial to run most AAA games without any tweaks and they run better on Linux because you're not wasting resources on e.g. telemetry, windows update, anti-malware etc.
I don't see any "crap" there.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @03:33PM
Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc [youtube.com]
Still true many years after the video. That's why you still have so many crappy ways of packaging stuff on Linux Flatpak, Snap, etc. Hurray for bloat and trying to compete with Windows Store for crappiness.
And that's just one aspect.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 03, @03:43PM (4 children)
My experience with desktop Linux:
- Install is pretty easy, takes maybe 15-20 minutes which is good enough for OS+bunch of useful applications.
- Everything that comes with your distro Just Works. This includes good alternatives to a lot of expensive Windows applications.
- Snaps handle a lot of stuff that doesn't come with your distro well enough.
- More works well under Wine than you might expect.
So why do you describe it as "isn't ready"? What exactly do you need that doesn't work?
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday December 03, @07:13PM
One of the things that doesn't work are screen readers for people with visual impairments. Windows is just so much better than Linux for this particular niche requirement.
Unless you have long expertise in this area, please don't comment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @09:24PM (1 child)
How well does online meeting software work in Linux?
My customers (giant companies) mostly use MS-Teams and I use the browser version in Firefox ESR (on Win 7 Pro). Once I tried using the Teams download and that caused some instability in Win 7, so I don't do that anymore. It's still possible to login to Teams using 2FA, using a Google Voice account for the text message (I don't have a smart phone). However, more and more customers want MS-Authenticator which has been disastrous for one of my associates--not only did it quit working but all attempts to restore the phone and try a fresh version of Authenticator have failed.
I also use Zoom, again the browser version, which has some limitations (only share browser tabs, not windows opened by other programs.)
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday December 04, @12:56PM
Zoom [zoom.us] works pretty well on Linux, in my experience.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by Bentonite on Thursday December 04, @05:29AM
The perceived problems are that;
- GNU/Linux isn't 100% proprietary software (GNU rather exists to grant the user freedom by replacing all proprietary software) - although ironically how Linux is in fact proprietary software and all the proprietary software distro's ship, advertised as a feature, works towards that goal.
- Every last proprietary program doesn't run without fail (even though most problems are caused by proprietary sabotage to prevent execution with WINE and how windows often has issues running proprietary programs is ignored) - arguably it is a feature if proprietary software refuses to run, on what should be a free system.
- There's far more GNU than Linux and there are people who dare to say the f word - freedom (no matter how many times an error is repeated doesn't make it the truth - it's mostly the GNU system and Linux is merely the kernel).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedGreen on Wednesday December 03, @11:22PM (3 children)
"Maybe after 2032 I'd have to use "Desktop Linux"."
Microsoft and their agents in Linux will have completed their systemd subversion by then. Turning Linux into another enshitified OS controlled by them. So good luck with that idea. I am thinking the *BSDs are the way to go here damn soon giving up on my twenty-six years of Linux use.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by srobert on Wednesday December 03, @11:38PM (2 children)
BSD's are great if your hardware is supported. If not, there are still Linux distributions that use alternatives to systemd, e.g. Void Linux suits my purposes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedGreen on Thursday December 04, @01:46AM (1 child)
"there are still Linux distributions that use alternatives to systemd, e.g. Void Linux suits my purposes. "
Yes I know this, I tried the Void but could not get past the lack of detail shown in it. Everything you install you have to figure out some sane defaults for the configuration. This lead me back to my favourite of all time Linux distros Debian which does do that for you, I use the Devuan flavour of it to get rid of the garbage systemd problem. I also do not like most other of the systemd less distros as they are all rolling release packages upgraded all of the time/compiling every damn thing in sight to get it done. I really have until 2030 I think it is for Trixie support to run out so plenty of time to figure out what I want to do. That is if them people at Devuan keep it going for that long, been ten years or so now so it should be good. You never know how it will go in the open source world so always nice to have backup plan just in case.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by srobert on Thursday December 04, @03:57PM
Devuan (and Debian) are solid reliable choices. If what I'm doing were more critically important I'd probably use one of them as a backup.
(Score: 2) by r1348 on Wednesday December 03, @09:42PM
... to run linux.
It's a Lenovo T14 gen 6 AMD, beautiful machine, they sell it without OS too.