[DanHulton]

Windows 10 hits EOL in 2025. I'm really hoping I can just completely convert my gaming PC to a Linux machine by that time, because Windows 11 started out rough and has become less appealing over time.

The Steam Deck is absolutely building that future, and I, too, am excited.

[MisterTea]

I just decommissioned my 2011 Windows 7 machine where I did most of my dev work and all of my casual computing such as web stuff and gaming. It ran all of the software I needed plus the Steam games I enjoyed. I had no technical reason to "upgrade" in all that time. In its place now is a kooky Linux machine.

The replacement started off as a toy turned experiment: a 12 core Gen 1 Threadripper with 64GB ECC and a Radeon Pro W5700. I wound up installed Void Linux Musl with XFCE mostly to see how useful a system-d/glibc free Linux machine can be. Turns out very useful if you install bloated Windows-style "applications" like Steam, Discord, Chrome, LibreOffice, etc using Flatpak. You can also setup a glibc chroot if need be but I have not ran into this need yet.

I can watch Hulu and other streaming services just fine in Chrome (haven't tried FF). I can play older AAA games you would never imagine running on Linux such as GTA5 and Skyrim with ZERO configuration other than checking "run this game using proton". However I have yet to get Crysis running :-( Anything I can't get running with Wine I can toss into a VM. And I can run lots of VM's :-)

And if you really miss Windows or want some familiarity back - XFCE + Chicago95 ;-)

[intelVISA]

Yup -- assuming you don't need malware like EAC installed to run online games you can have a surprisingly good game experience on desktop Linux nowadays.

[MisterTea]

Even weird distributions which I expected to be a miserable fight but nope. Just Flatpak it and all the dependency is inside and it just works. Couple that with out of the box AMD GPU support and it's painless. I expect that I could even run Steam on Alpine Linux. My only gripe is Flatpak'd programs like Steam need to be updated separately through Flatpak.

I also have a Nuc hooked to my bedroom TV running Debian and use a similar setup but no Steam (Its mostly a Chrome toaster).

[eloisant]

It seems like Windows is alternating "shit" and "decent" versions.

- Vista: shit

- 7: decent

- 8: shit

- 10: decent

[98codes]

Skipping v9 broke the old "Even number releases bad, odd number releases good" rule of thumb, but the tick-tock (tick-clunk?) rhythm still seems to apply.

[soiler]

The rule that existed from Windows 7 all the way to Windows 8?

[AnonymousPlanet]

It's now like Star Trek movies.

[tsgagnon]

While this sentiment is common, I've honestly never had this experience. Every Windows experience I've had post-Me has been a slow but steady improvement in stability.

I have Windows 10 for work and Windows 11 at home and I honestly forget that they are different OSes most of the time. I just do what I need to do on my machines and the OS stays out of the way.

Sure, I could say the right-click menu out-of-the-box is slightly more annoying now, and I've sure I could come up with a list of things like that for most releases at this point. UAC was a major shift, but I needed one.

But overall, there just aren't very memorable differences between the different OSes. Aside from the fact that BSOD occurrences have steadily decreased up until Windows 10 at which point they almost stopped entirely.

[delecti]

Agreed. I actually found Vista to be a massive improvement in stability. It changed how drivers were run in the kernel, so that a driver crashing often wouldn't result in a bluescreen. I had a ton of graphics card bluescreens on XP, and then virtually none with the same hardware after upgrading to Vista.

[OkayPhysicist]

Windows 11 really isn't that bad, mostly because it's not really a significant change from Windows 10. The default menu layouts changed a little bit, but not in any way you couldn't recreate in Windows 10, nor did they really remove anything such that you can't make Windows 11 feel like Windows 10.

I suspect the driving reason for the version number increase was to make a clear indicator of the OS's support for scheduling the new wave of hybrid core CPUs, and they simply took the opportunity to clean up some miscellaneous small things that wouldn't have been appropriate to include in a minor version release, but wouldn't have warranted a major version release in of themselves, such as changes to adding things to the file-right-click menu.

[twisteriffic]

... and completely replacing the start bar/UI manager with one that is both missing features that people care about and chock full of ads.

[dualboot]

Vista had some launch bugs that were horrendous.

Beyond that it was a solid operating system and one of the better Windows releases.

Most people just had shit computers, combined with "group think" regarding it's quality.

Vista64 on a moderately good system with a proper amount of RAM was fantastic for it's time.

[account42]

> Vista64 on a moderately good system with a proper amount of RAM was fantastic for it's time.

Well yeah, a big part of the problem with Vista was the enourmous increase in resource usage compared to XP, which many PCs sold with it were not ready for. That hardware now has enough brute force to make it work doesn't really mean it is not still needlessly inefficient.

[NikolaNovak]

3.1 great

95 ok

98se great

ME... Can't even describe how awful it was

XP great

Then your selection :-)

[brian_herman]

I've tried upgrading my gaming computer to windows 11 with a fresh install and upgrade both of them fail and I don't know why.