I’ll start with a bit of satire that I wrote for the Evening Shade on Monday.
With Windows 10’s end of support happening on 10/14, there will be a strong push to migrate to Windows 11. I started having the beginnings of a satire. I didn’t finish it, but it went along these lines.
You’re on the bridge of the Enterprise. The Romulans are attacking. You try to lock phasers, but you have to confirm that you’re over 18 first. Then you have to check a box saying that you’ve read the “Terms and Conditions” and accept before the “OK” button gets enabled. At some point you get locked out and you have to answer a security question. You sheepishly ask the captain for his mother’s maiden name. Then a code is sent to your tricorder that you can enter the code into your workstation. Of course, you left your tricorder in your quarters, so you need to godown there and get it. When you get back to the bridge, the code has expired, and you need to request a new code. The navigation screen will show up in 30 seconds, after the “Skip Ad” button shows up.
The “Romulans” turn out to be Pakleds [Entertainment Now] and they win.
The possibilities abound. But I didn’t finish putting it together.
Note that the satire has nothing to do with any version of Windows, or MacOS or Linux. The change to Windows 11 was just the catalyst of this story.
Microsoft has been very good to me. I started programming (C/C++) for Windows back in the 2.x days (before Windows 3 exploded). When I shifted careers to IT (about 20 years later), I was supporting Windows systems. It’s safe to say that Microsoft products have been the cornerstone of my professional life.
Microsoft has made a strategic decision to make the operating system a platform for selling you services. I can’t say whether MacOS/Apple haven’t come to the same conclusion, I’m guessing they have.
In the case of Windows, I can guarantee that corporate customers can’t support a model where every user has to create a Microsoft account. There must be alternative ways.
What is driving me away from Windows is the ubiquity that they demand total control of your data. Everything is on their cloud. They move your data (by default) to OneDrive behind your back. The free version of OneDrive is laughably small, so now you have to search for the data you save. It may not be where you left it.
In a comment I left in Monday’s Evening Shade
Windows 11 is difficult to install without the cloud. I’m sure there are ways (corporate customers will demand it), but for consumers, it’s damned near impossible, by design. On my Windows machines, I’ve installed normally, then created local user and admin accounts to get MS out of the way. In particular, I hated OneDrive moving my data around without my permission.
The local accounts help a lot, but I’m getting disenfranchised with Windows, which I’ve used since the 2.x days (before even Windows 3) and had been my area of income for most of my professional career.
This machine is still Windows, as is my laptop. I’m in the process of migrating to Linux, but it’s not something I want to leave myself without a workable computer for.
I’ve been using Linux for well over a decade and it’s still not natural for me.
More from my comments in Monday’s Evening Shade
All of the info I’ve seen is 10/14. That means no more updates, which is bad in the long term, but your device will still work. The bigger concern is that a lot of computers don’t have the security hardware that Windows 11 demands [Total Protection Module, TPM chip], so people will be forced to either deal with insecure systems [under Windows 10], get a new device or install Linux on their existing computers. None of these solutions is ideal:
- insecure systems leave you more vulnerable to malware.
- new systems are expensive and are a waste, ecologically.
- Linux is great and mature, but entails a learning curve that is tough for a novice.
The satire was inspired by the thought that many modern OS’s are sort of being designed around the thought that they exist as a platform to upsell you on services that you probably don’t really want.
I wrote it such that it is more generic and applies to all operating systems, but the inconveniences that we deal with on the intertubes are migrating to the OS now. Windows 11 is a great example. I’m working on moving all of my machines to Linux.
Someone in the comments said that we need more competition. THERE IS competition. Linux is the most mature. I love the idea of Haiku (Wikipedia) as well. It’s based off BeOS from the early millennium. I used BeOS for a few blissful months. There was no malware because no one wrote code for BeOS. There are other operating systems, but none are mature enough to use as your daily machine.
I can’t overstate how much of a learning curve there is to Linux. If you want to connect to a network hard drive (NAS) or a printer, the odds are quite good that you will become very, very familiar with your search engine and the command line. LibreOffice has been great to me, but if I had to share documents with others regularly, the standard is MS Office. Google’s web-based office offerings work well. Adobe apps are, AFAIK, not natively available. Devices that are unusual, such as video and audio production, may not have drivers (support) immediately available.
What Windows and MacOS give you is some serious fit and finish. Things just work. They also have a serious catalog of software at your disposal. Linux is mature and resources abound, but the decentralization means that it’s more chaotic and the history favors folks that are already techies.
I’m not suggesting that everyone should abandon Windows. I haven’t weened myself yet, and I have been a computer professional for a very long time. I am here to warn you that you are going to get confronted with this soon.
Mostly, keep your computers up to date with the operating systems they run. Windows is going to have, by design, a bit of turmoil coming up. If you aren’t already on Windows 11, you’ll faced with a decision soon. Try to time your transition so you have a few hours when your machine isn’t mission critical and do it then.
P.S., if you’re Linux curious and you are creating an external drive to boot off, turn off Bitlocker!!!. I failed to do so, and the lock out (ummm...) inspired me to install Linux on that machine. Realistically, I wasn’t going to defeat Bitlocker and I would have needed the manufacturer’s help to get the unlock code. I really didn’t have anything of importance on that machine, so it was more convenient to switch to Linux immediately.
Bitlocker is a good technology. If someone steals the physical machine, mostly the hard drive, the data on it is encrypted, so they can’t get at it. Countries like China, Russia and Belarus ban its use. It’s great in a corporate environment, but overkill for a consumer.
