I'm regularly amazed at how many people there are on HN that tell on themselves by complaining about ads in Windows. It's like complaining that IKEA furniture is difficult to assemble.
Ironically, I haven't made the jump to 11 yet just because my decade old Dell has an i7 that's been remarkably resilient for the kind of work I do on it.
My favorite thing about Windows is the backwards compatibility. I had a 2005 era Dell laptop that had come with XP. I think I paid $35 for an upgrade to Win7 after running the beta. Had the Win8 beta on there, which upgraded to a full version for free, and eventually upgraded to Win10 freely somehow as well. By that time, it struggled to run more than a web browser, and the internal wifi card no longer functioned, but it was remarkable that the upgrades all just worked.
And I've got some pretty nice Firewire audio hardware that runs flawlessly on Windows 10 despite the last driver for it having been released in 2006.
> I'm regularly amazed at how many people there are on HN that tell on themselves by complaining about ads in Windows.
Maybe it's just me, but it gives me the feeling that the OS is actively working against me. I'm still having some configuration to do on Linux (hybrid graphics are fun and so is audio for my setup), but it's something caused by having so many options and limited time of contributors. On Windows, this is because the OS is trying to extract as much money as possible from me and that kind of adversarial relationship is not what I want to have with software that manages all of my data.
I just think that this argument is always an exaggeration of the amount of hostility commercial software is directing at users, especially reputable commercial software like Windows (we're not talking about some mobile game trying to sell me gambling tokens).
I totally understand that some people prefer FOSS but it seems to turn into portraying commercial software in a distorted way.
For being 100% free as in beer software with no profitable hardware ecosystem behind it (macOS), Windows 11 bothers you relatively minimally, all with things that are easily dismissed.
Selling things isn't by definition amoral or adversarial. Someone who decides to search with Bing or store their data on OneDrive is getting a solution to their problem.
Even open source non-profit products like Firefox and Wikipedia try to sell products or donations to financially support development.
I don't have a problem with commercial software, in fact I pay for quite a bit of it. I don't mind Windows being proprietary, either. However, the problem really is twofold:
The first aspect is that I, as paying user, am getting monetized even further with ads. The default software might be useful, but it's still not what I'm paying money for. If you can't support software at that price, just raise the price instead of deploying sleazy monetization techniques! But for that aspect only I agree; this is dislikeable behavior, but nothing to call Windows adversarial about.
The second problem however, is that Microsoft has crossed the line multiple times now. I have found Skype and Candy Crush (!) installed on a fresh Windows install; the latter definitely falls under "shady mobile game selling gambling tokens". The Windows 7->10 upgrade nags were also far beyond reasonable behavior for what I'd still call "reputable commercial software". Windows will also siphon my data by default and I have no way to fully disable that without third-party software and even then, a new update might include new ways which I then need to keep up with blocking.
Now, I still use Windows for when I need to, but I really don't trust Microsoft with my data anymore. Even if they most likely behave if I spent an hour configuring the system, trusting my data to such a leaky and adversarial platform that has behaved badly multiple times feels like just keeping up an abusive friendship and hoping that nothing goes wrong. YMMV, though, depending on what you like and your threat scenario using Windows might be perfectly fine for you and if so, more power to you!
That being said, yes, most people (in my friend group) did not explicitly pay for Windows, but they bought devices with an included license that the OEM paid for. So they did not directly send money to Microsoft, but they still payed for the OS indirectly (just like they indirectly supported AMD or Intel, for example).
Ironically, I haven't made the jump to 11 yet just because my decade old Dell has an i7 that's been remarkably resilient for the kind of work I do on it.
My favorite thing about Windows is the backwards compatibility. I had a 2005 era Dell laptop that had come with XP. I think I paid $35 for an upgrade to Win7 after running the beta. Had the Win8 beta on there, which upgraded to a full version for free, and eventually upgraded to Win10 freely somehow as well. By that time, it struggled to run more than a web browser, and the internal wifi card no longer functioned, but it was remarkable that the upgrades all just worked.
And I've got some pretty nice Firewire audio hardware that runs flawlessly on Windows 10 despite the last driver for it having been released in 2006.