Only semi-related: Why do they always show pictures of Gates when he hasn’t been involved in MS in a long time? Why never Satya Nadella?
EDIT: Also, yes, related to the actual question already living Linux full time and when October rolls around probably gonna back up everything from the Windows side of my dual-boot and wipe the 1TB NVMe Windows is on to use as storage.
I was thinking the same thing. He will just forever be known as the guy. Maybe it will change once he dies?
Didn’t work for Steve Jobs.
I don’t think so. Gates’ shoes are big ones.
You’re right, it’s really hard to fill the shoes of someone who abuses their power and position to try to hook up with women.
Maybe, he is indeed looking hella rough in this photo.
Seems he’s using the same orange tan as the other orange guy haha
Personally, I think this picture of Steve Balmer is so much more iconic and should be used for every single article about Microsoft or Windows:

It’s weird how MS’s putting developers first became a joke. Back in the 80’s, companies like HP and IBM had open warehouses with coders at desks lined up like factory workers. MS was the first big company to give a private office to every programmer.
The approach isn’t what became a joke, it was the absolutely unhinged way in which it was presented in that famous Ballmer stage appearance.
Oh sure, it was crazy. But the sentiment behind it was good. It’s like how Howard Dean got dunked on for his scream.
I’d take that any day over the unhinged AI focus from all these companies now or Google’s awful documentation from the past few years.
I couldn’t name another Microsoft employee if a gun was to my head. but I can still vividly remember myself in 4th grade reading about Bill Gate’s mega mansion in Popular Mechanics for Kids
I’m somewhat in the same boat but I remember Mister “Developers Developers Developers” Steve Ballmer who was also immortalized by the “Ballmer Peak” XKCD. https://xkcd.com/323/
Gabe Newell?
Because he set the general, evil directions for MS. Like keeping users uninformed and locked in, smearing the competition, sabotaging open standards, taking your control over your hardware and data away from users, etc. All happened during evil Bill’s reign.
Not to mention the many deals with hardware manufacturers in order to avoid competing OSs to have any chance. They managed to kill BeOS and dominate the Japanese market in the 90s
It’s maybe some kind of circular logic, but my brain doesn’t recognize a picture of Satya Nadella = “Microsoft’s CEO” for some reason.
Maybe your brain would, if it had a chance to connect the two if they posted more pictures of Satya and Microsoft in the same context…
Under his watch they did form the anti-opensource and EEE mantra
IIRC W11 share is barely near W10 and they are already forcing it out and crapton of perfectly usable hardware, if it is not planned obsolescence i don’t know what it is!? Fuck microsoft!
I want to point out, planned obsolescence only really applies to their surface offerings.
I am going to attempt to switch to Linux, I’m definitely not going to willingly use windows platforms again.
Switch to Linux. As a big-time gamer, I did it last year and it’s been fantastic. Only issue is if you main games with root kit anticheat…but with enough momentum in Linux direction, game studios will be forced to abandon those dubious detection methods anyway.
Switched to Linux (mint) recently.
All my games run (almost) perfect and (almost) everything has been working perfectly. Overall it is much nicer than Windows and isn’t that hard getting used to.
Would much recommend!
It’s going to be purchase a new hard drive and then jump to Linux Mint this August.
It’s not an experience I am looking forward to (5080S, I do a lot of modding, and enjoy fangames/indie games which do not always play nice with linux) but needs must - the Linux community in general is very friendly, so we’ll get through it, even if the first 6 months are rough. I’ll keep the dual boot and push the windows partition to 11 if needed by work, that way I can put off rewriting my elderly access database for another few years.
Honestly, Microsoft are committing suicide when it comes to home users. It won’t be sudden, but the wheels are turning, all the IT savvy folks are switching people over (already did my aunt’s potato, mum’s demi-tato is next week). Eventually, a tipping point will be reached and offices will start switching - I hope that day comes before I die of old age!
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Sticking with 10 for a bit, moving to Linux
Ditto. They are stopping support, but I highly doubt they will just brick all Windows 10 machines. If they do, I will just throw Linux on a flash drive and boot from that to recover my data ahead of switching fully to Linux.
I remember seeing a leaked paper about them putting an omnipresent advertising ticket at the top of the screen that will be displayed regardless of full screen status. The only reason I can think that they are forcing this so hard is that a lot of their forced ad servicing plans are not possible to implement in earlier versions of Windows due to root level functionality that cannot be changed. I’m guessing things like direct injection of ads in running processes or that ticker.
Ads have no place in an OS, especially not as kernel level processes. If ads on the internet have taught us anything, it is that bad actors can inject malicious code directly into them without content servers or hosts knowing and compromise untold numbers of machines who just, let me check, rendered the ad.
Between the aggressive plans for in OS advertising and the privacy abolishing actions and policies with AI datascraping, I am done with MS. Windows 10 will be the last one of theit OS’s I run. If work needs me to do something on Windows, it will be on a virtual machine that I remote into.
I’m blocking addresses at the router daily. I could live with 11 if I could uninstall their garbage. I’ve tried any number of things to keep crapilot 365 off of my domain machines but I’m told I have to have the enterprise edition to do that.
For now, ctt winutil does a pretty good job at removing the cruft. I’ve long since switched to debian for my daily driver, but as a remote-access sunshine host for games that require kernel level anticheat, it’s surprisingly usable.
For anyone looking to keep windows around in some capacity, I strongly recommend it. https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
They won’t brick it, but you can bet that a lot of people are sitting on unreleased 0-days for win10. It will likely be dangerous to connect to the internet on day 1.
Luckily I already don’t trust the internet already and don’t go anywhere online without script blockers and I don’t open emails as a rule of thumb. I am sure it will be dangerous, but I am not relying on passive security already.
Every packet you send/receive relies on passive security. Your nic drivers, the driver kernel model, all of the userland applications that sit on top of it. I get that in practical terms, your firewall will do a lot of the heavy lifting but there are passive rce vulnerabilities in previous unsupported versions of Windows that are trivially exploitable today.
Man, I wish these people would fucking be cool. I just want to play games. There is nothing valuable on my desktop for you
Me too brother, but I disagree with your assessment on value
An non-blacklisted residential IP address with reasonable throughput is valuable in and of itself. DDOS botnets, proxies to bypass geo blocks or to obfuscate illicit traffic, etc. Also your gaming PC could be used for distributed compute workloads of compromised, usually crypto mining.
Any hardware/connection has value if it’s “free”. It’s just a numbers game beyond that.
You’ve convinced me. They want access to my connection and maybe some processing power; they DON’T want my dungeons and dragons notes.
The more people hop onto Linux the faster and better funded support for Linux development becomes. If you’re a single player gamer or play Valve multiplayer games primarily, make the jump to Linux. Get on Mint, get on Fedora, Ubuntu, etc and get off Microsoft’s shitboat. You already took off from Reddit. Wean off all these other money/data leeches
Can Linux run Valorant?
No Kernel level anti cheat will ever work on linux. But probably Windows will disable the possibillity to manipulate on kernel level either in the future.
But probably Windows will disable the possibillity to manipulate on kernel level either in the future.
Sort of, right?
We know Windows will continue cracking down on kernel module adds, since the Crowd strike disaster.
But I figure most anti-cheat will just shift to non-kernel and keep working.
Of course, at that point most anti-cheat of will then work under Proton, on Linux, too.
Which was maybe your point.
Okay, I don’t think I added anything for you, but I’ll leave this in case it helps someone reading along with us.
Watching you reason this out was fun
Most people won’t budge. It doesn’t matter if Win10 is unsupported or isn’t getting a security update, I reckon a solid 40 of 43% will just stay on it until programs they use stop working.
Basically my plan until I can scrounge enough money up for a new computer. My current one literally won’t let me upgrade due to some component/driver it lacks.
You can pay to keep getting windows security updates and prolong the upgrade even further.
“you can pay us, and we won’t break your legs for a while longer” -ms
W10 IoT is a thing, and will get updates for a few more years, no mafia shakedown required.
It’ll let you upgrade to Linux. It doesn’t play those stupid games with you like MS does.
Definitely you should look into Linux, it’s really gotten quite good. Especially if you don’t need games with anti cheat.
But if you just want to use Windows 11, it’s super duper easy. Just Google “download Windows 11 iso” and grab the iso file from Microsoft website.
Then download Rufus.
Then pop in a thumb drive that’s at least 8gb. Open Rufus, select your thumb drive and the iso, then choose the option to remove windows requirements, then click start.
Backup your files on Windows 10, save them somewhere. Then pop in the thumb drive and install windows 11 fresh.
The requirements aren’t actually required. Win 11 runs fine on all sorts of hardware. Support stops at 8th Gen Intel, but I’ve installed it on 5th Gen. My work laptop is 2nd or 3rd Gen. It’s fine 🤷♂️
Technically less secure? Yeah, in some ways. But it’s miles ahead of running unpatched windows 10 after September.
Windows 10 ltsc massgrave.dev
Yep. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but valve dropping support for windows 7 was what made me switch to linux. Until the computer stops working for the average user, they won’t change.
Yep, I feel like people overestimate how much anyone cares about official support or security patches or whatever. People will assume it’s fine until they’re either forced out or something goes horribly wrong.
Regular folks will most likely let it be if possible, until it’s time for a new PC anyway.
My brother in law was still using windows 7 and it had never occurred to him that this might be a security risk. Normal people don’t care.
I play only on Linux, and it works great. Come on over!
I spent a couple hours trying to get Baldur’s Gate 3 running on Linux. It was rough but I got it to run at 1440 but the latency made it sort of unplayable. It runs great in Windows 10 at 4k with the default settings. I have some other windows-only software so I guess I’m going to “upgrade” all my computers that are able to do so but I don’t feel good about it. All my computers dual boot windows/linux, I would love to be linux-only.
Edit: lots of people are saying theirs runs smoothly, I’m going to have to do further testing. Thanks for the input!
Already on Linux. And proud.
I’ve been daily-driving Linux Mint (LMDE 6) on my Thinkpad T14 G1 for almost a year now. At this point, that laptop is easily the most dependable machine I’ve ever had. My gaming PC is the last remaining Windows machine in my house. Recently I’ve been making sure everything is backed up (Syncthing is great for this) and finding alternatives for programs that don’t have a Linux version.
My plan is to create images of both my SSDs (500GB & 2TB, both NTFS 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️) onto a 4TB hard drive. Then start from scratch, migrating data from the images (Steam games, config files, personal documents I may have missed, etc) when/if I need it.
I left Windows ~2-3 years ago since I got tired of having to keep up with ways to disable the MS account requirements or disable the ads every time there is a major version upgrade on a platform I use every day.












