I know some users held back on the upgrade while Windows 10 still had support, but there's many improvements to privacy & consent in Windows 7 that are worth considering, now that both are about to be equally out of their support window.
It's one of the last versions where the modal dialogs ask "Yes" or "No", instead of "Yes" and "Not now", "Maybe later", or "Ask again tomorrow".
I ran Linux for many years. But I needed to run some software that only supported windows and mac, and wine didn't cut it, so I had to reinstall windows.
I can't tolerate windows. I put up with 10 for a while then went back to 7. 7 was good. Then some stuff wasn't supported so I moved to 11. Couldn't do it. I'd get random garbage like a notification for some "grand prize giveaway". I legit thought I'd gotten adware installed somehow. Nope, official Microsoft notification! Want to configure the system at all? Keep defender from trashing your CPU for fifteen minutes after you compile something? Stop auto-restarts that close everything? Use actual sleep not the weird "connected sleep" nonsense? Tough, you don't get to. If you do it anyway it will revert after your next update (mandatory btw!) or sometimes just at random.
I can't remember a version since 7 that doesn't make me feel like I'm in a bazaar being accosted by freaking rug merchants.
I used to hate macs. I switched to a macbook. I am much happier now despite the occasional annoyances.
I don't want to motivate anyone to switch back to Windows (because Microsoft), but for anyone who doesn't want to or can't switch, but also doesn't want to endure Microsoft's chosen way of entirely ignoring user needs but instead focusing on squeezing money out of them through ads and the collection of user data in Windows 10 and 11, check out the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC version! It's still supported 'til 2031 iirc. Plus, as it's meant to Enterprises and IoT systems, it's stripped from all the ads, bloatware, and what not. When I installed it first one year ago, I was just sad that I didn't know it earlier. It's everything I ever wanted Windows to be: lean, fast, and (somewhat) minimalistic, at least compared to stock Windows 10.
Can't 100% say whether Windows 11 IoT LTSC is equally good, but from what I've read it also is worth considering.
> after you install Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation, you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.
> after you install Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation, you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.
I was already sold; you don't have to convince me.
The fact that this is even brought up as a solution really speaks to how bad Windows is.
i was going to say something similar. the fact that a version of windows that is designed for IoT devises is still usable as a desktop is absolutely ridiculous. imagine using OpenWRT as a desktop...
It's not designed for IoT devices per se, the naming is just terrible. A comparison to OpenWrt is not warranted here, although to reiterate, the naming is terrible.
In a way, it is for "IoT" devices...but enterprisey things. Where I work we have it on a few devices that I guess you could call an "IoT" device. Unattended driver kiosks for truck scales, manufacturing equipment that requires windows, industrial control panels, etc.
That's what it is for. A lot of this stuff uses really old software, some of which the vendor doesn't even exist anymore, and it only runs on Windows so these control panels and devices need windows (unless you manage to get some of it working on wine but that's usually not viable in these cases).
So yeah, it's supposed to be a full desktop, because these devices often require it to some extent, albeit a little slimmed down and LTS.
I think HN would be surprised to learn just how many devices run windows out there in the world outside of silicon valley. Windows is everywhere you'd hope never to see it running at.
well, i am not surprised that anything with a GUI would run some form of windows, even ATMs. i would not have categorized them as IoT devices though, but fair point.
The recovery partition has some value. But in an OS reinstall scenario Windows.old is a much more helpful feature.
However, these features won't used by someone installing Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation (Evaluation just means that it's 90 day free trial version). This is because to aquire the non-trial version of the OS you must either be willing to license Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC from Microsoft, or crack the activation. If you crack Windows you do not need the 90 day free trial! And any company which has institutional knowledge of what an LTSC edition is, is capable of running the 90 day trial in a non destructive way (pro tip: put your new OS on a new drive and keep your old drive in a drawer).
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is the best version of Windows 11 I have ever tried, no contest.
Can a legitimate LTSC licence be bought by a standard user? I couldn't manage it and instead had to resort to Windows Server 2025.
It is a tiny bit of a mess to setup on gaming computers because of lack of drivers (for the drivers which cannot be downloaded from the manufacturer site, need to get a Windows 11 install, let it download/install all the drivers as needed, then use pnputil to export them and import them in Windows Server) but I did manage to find a likely-legitimate seller (referenced on the Microsoft website as a partner) selling licenses for legitimate-looking prices. The price goes up with the amount of cores, happy I didn't have a Threadripper.
Also some issues here and there (such as needing a registry change to enable clipboard history, Meta Link not supporting showing the desktop or headset audio (could maybe use the pnputil trick for that)) that I didn't have with the LTSC evaluation.
My theory is that Microsoft offers LTSC IoT in part as a bone to throw the vocal complainants (read: people who use HN) - and that the terrible name is to dissuade standard users.
I just reinstalled my own system with a combination of LTSC and Linux (currently looking at a riced Hyprland on CachyOS) with the understanding that there will be occasional annoyances (but still less so than consumer W11)
Pro isn't ad-free by default. With appropriate regedits/privacy scripts/tools you can make it ad-free until an update inevitably reverts/"upgrades" some part of it. It's not hard to maintain it in this state but you are fighting against what microsoft wants the OS to be when you do this.
I've never had a Windows update revert anything like that. I turned this stuff off 3 years ago and haven't had to do anything since. I think this is just FUD that people earnestly believe and repeat because it sounds like something they think Microsoft would do.
Every upgrade you have have to go back and turn/GPO off various Copilot, MSN ads-in-your-start-menu and MSFT Rewards (the f that even is?) things. Same thing for Edge; drove me back to firefox.
An easy example, if you haven't already try going to GPO and enable 'Computer Configuration>Start Menu and Taskbar>Remove Recommended Section from Start Menu' then restart your computer. Open the start menu and be amazed that people weren't actually complaining about FUD as you witness a nice fossilized example of updates superseding users previous choices.
You can hunt out the other newer superseding settings (good luck without a 3rd party script or guide as you won't find required settings and steps to remove it in any MS docs just scattered parts) and eventually neuter the recommended section again... possibly as you suggest forever or possibly until an update touches this again.
Hear me out: MS Excel. The one true powerful version only exists on Windows. Another anchor: ODBC drivers. Some good SQL Server connectivity options are only available on Windows.
When your captive audience is accountants, traders, and CFOs, it's quite a moat.
And then, somehow, the desktop Outlook is better on mac than on Windows.
On Windows I can't even easily copy/paste from one email to another. It strips out half the formatting and any colors that were there. Nor can I copy email recipients from an email into a new one.
I tried switching to Windows last year and I just couldn't do it. So now my expensive and fancy powerful laptop collects dust and I'm back to my 5 year old m1 (which is somehow faster, usually).
my favprite notfavorite win11 feature is that they broke keyboard layout switching, permanently. It has been reported as an unsolved bug for nearly two years now :-/. in 25+ years, I had been taking it for granted to work correctly. Apparently nobody in Redmond uses the feature..
I am european, and (try to) use it minutes apart.
As an extra bonus, MS Teams regularly either ignores keyboard switch, or switches 50% broken, half the keys. But what can you expect, from an app which is a selfupdating web server that installs itself with squirrel :-/
I switched my spare PC from Linux back to Win10, and it's way less annoying than I remember (rug bazaar was right). Maybe because it's not getting constant updates anymore.
Only issue is that Windows will periodically re-bloat itself - so you have to re-run it after more or less every quarterly windows update.
The only thing remaining that I want to remove but cannot get rid of is edge. Removing edge is only available in the EU for $ome in$ane rea$on. You might be able to get an EU ISO for installation? Unclear to me but I haven’t dug too deeply.
Imagine any other thing treating you like this. Once a week, your IKEA cupboard locks itself and repairs some factory defects. You want something? Tough. Once every half an hour, it opens a random hatch and drops a ton of paper on the floor, full of IKEA ads. It has all kinds of cameras to see if it can sell you other IKEA stuff, but pinky promise, they don't sell images to others, except 700 partners. And every company in the world is petrified of fear about using other cupboards. But good news, here is some stuff a friend of a friend gave you, that stops all this. Mostly. For a month.
I was willing to give Edge a chance years ago. I didn’t see a compelling enough reason to switch, so I stuck with Firefox. However, while troubleshooting some problems on a family member’s PC I got to see what a ‘default’/‘opt in to everything’ Edge experience is like in 2025.
It’s horrifying. Edge is jam-packed with bloat and the entire browser is geared towards monitoring and hoarding every scrap of user interaction that passes through it. The worst part is that the average person likely has no idea just how pervasive Microsoft’s spying and ad-targeting is.
I envy the fact that EU Citizens have the right to decline all of these intrusive “features” foisted upon them by Microsoft. I doubt Congress would ever come close to affording us a fraction of these same consumer rights. Sigh.
The forced reinstalls for updates is the worst. Sometimes when working on some Excel file etc at night, I went away without saving (e.g. crying kid needs attention, and I never returned). Auto-saving only works when you store files in OneDrive. So then windows Update will shut down Excel, and Excel often won't create an AutoSave, and then hours of work are lost -- totally intentionally, deliberately, all using Microsoft products that are apparently specifically designed to make you lose hours of work.
What is an operating system? At it's core, an OS is a program to run other programs. Yet this Windows program likes to randomly kill all the programs it's supposed to keep running, at night, when it thinks you aren't looking. It literally fails at the most basic purpose of an operating system.
If they didn't force restart then the patches they release for vulnerabilities would never take effect. What normal user restarts their PC other than when they're having issues?
I don't see how it's possible to actually support that considering how many components make up an OS. What would happen if libc had a vulnerability that needed patching? I know a reboot wouldn't be forced but wouldn't it only take effect when all the processes using it restart?
Windows has been around for 40 years, and is worth more than the GDP of many nations. In fact, some of the Windows server versions actually include the feature.
It's not that it's an impossible problem, it's that Microsoft doesn't have to compete...so they don't.
> some of the Windows server versions actually include the feature
If you looked into it though you'd see that you do still need to restart at least every quarter for baseline updates. If you don't restart then future hotpatch updates will not apply because they only target the current baseline update. There are also unplanned baseline updates that require a restart to patch zero-day exploits that cannot be fixed in a hotpatch.
I'm still not understanding how this is a solved problem on Linux. If there is a vulnerability in libc then you need to restart (probably) all processes to have the fix take effect.
> m still not understanding how this is a solved problem on Linux. If there is a vulnerability in libc then you need to restart (probably) all processes to have the fix take effect.
Restarting the service that was directly impacted by the patch is preferable to the 1980's techno-brained idea of rebooting the entire system. Most of the time it isn't glibc.
FWIW - I did recently read that hotpatching is already there in 11 if you enable it in an enterprise. Fingers crossed it comes to home users.
> You know that other operating systems can manage without that, right?
Not for kernel updates (Linux, by default), and not for macOS which is now RO root fs and also requires a reboot because updates are image based, a. la. Fedora Silverblue.
Also FWIW, Windows now has hotpatching, albeit not available to consumers, it's attached to enterprise licensing
You can update the Linux kernel without killing userspace. Granted it's not without reboot though. Just hibernate/suspend to disk and choose a different kernel on startup, it will still load the RAM image just fine; every program will be still running.
Designed to force you to buy a OneDrive subscription? I bet relevant revenue numbers went slightly but noticeably up when this was introduced. Sweet promotion package stuff!
In the early days of Windows 10, it was even worse because the updates could brick your windows install and you would get stuck on a blue screen or a boot loop after it forced you to restart. I've had to reinstall W10 at least a dozen time because of bad updates.
I personally liked the W8 approach to updates. You were allowed to set windows update in a mode that would notify you of new updates but you got to chose when to download/install them. That setting as also permanent and they didn't "accidentally" revert it back during an update.
This has happened with every version of Windows. NT4 SP6 was a nightmare and recommended to skip because it would cause a BSOD. Microsoft had to release SP6a about a month later.
Updates and unbootable systems are nothing new, to treat any OS as a unicorn in this respect is ignoring past history. Happens with Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Just a data point on the "modern suspend" feature. I have a Win11/Fedora dual boot laptop. Fedora doesn't do modern suspend, at least on that machine. Found that deep, deep down in the "BIOS" (yes, I know, UEFI) menus - so deep that you have to do a secret keyboard dance to even get that menu - is a "enable S3 sleep" option. Figured OK, I'll just get good suspend in Linux and whatever in Windows.
Surprise! Windows 11 likes S3 suspend just fine. Push the button, instant screen off and winking power light... push it again, instant wakeup. So if by some miracle your hardware/UEFI still supports it, you're good. This is a 5-year-old-ish Acer Swift 3 for what it's worth.
Oh, wait, you mean Windows update toggles that setting back? Whoa.
> I'd get random garbage like a notification for some "grand prize giveaway"
???
how? what kind of malware did you install? have several W11 boxes, none exhibit this behavior. No "official" notification for a prize give away or any ads.
The malware is Windows 11 itself. It's an official Microsoft thing https://rewards.bing.com/sweepstakes/million/about You might not have seen it if the giveaway is not available in your region or if you are using an Enterprise/debloated version.
>It's one of the last versions where the modal dialogs ask "Yes" or "No", instead of "Yes" and "Not now", "Maybe later", or "Ask again tomorrow".
This difference captures so much...
I recently setup a minecraft server on an old windows machine and had a hard time setting it to never restart automatically. After reading some support forums I found the menu to control when it restarts but still didnt see an option to completely stop it.
Eventually I found a way that I can't even recall at this point.
So much easier to run mc servers on Linux boxes. You just grab the jvm that version wants and throw everything into a folder and use the jvms java executable on the server.jar.
Was gonna say the exact same thing. Getting Java installed is always a bit of a headache but that's really the only hard part. Once your JVM is good, everything from there is easy.
And even the JVM part, it's not HARD, just annoying.
Even on Windows it can be a hassle because so many links will send you to Java 8 which Minecraft won't run on. Even the official links on minecraft.net sent you to the version that wouldn't run Minecraft for some time.
I wouldn't recommend doing it for mc. They keep changing and or using old jvms. What I do is I just go on oracles site and get the jdk they list that works, and run it directly from the folder. Also some distros do make it a pain lol.
I haven't done this in forever, but last time the recommended OpenJDK answer was somehow not right. Got the Oracle one, had to figure out where you extract the tarball to, fix my
PATH, yada yada.
That sounds fine though. The PATH variable is a nicety for the user to not need to type long paths, really like using ~ for the home directory, not for program setup.
I'm not sure if you've tried it or not, but sdkman.io is a really handy JVM ecosystem environment manager that makes getting Java (and other JVM langs) really easy to install and switch between.
Of course, the OS doesn't really matter it's just easier to manage a Linux box as opposed to a windows machine half the time. Especially for a server. Theres a lot of stupid shit you'll see on consumer and even enterprise versions of Windows which I've had to unfortunately deal with for a decade in exchange for money. Since the gp mentioned how frustrating it was I can relate.
Edit: also ufw is so much easier than the windows firewall. That shit drives me insane.
Completely disabling Windows Update is very difficult, much more involved than simply disabling a service or two or a registry key.
There's multiple services dedicated to monitoring / "repairing" windows update, scheduled tasks to enable those, and further tasks to repair everything completely if anything is modified.
And if all of that is disabled... there's a single exe which "helpfully" re-enables and re-creates all of the necessary scheduled tasks and services, which gets called by the service manager automatically: "upfc.exe"
Renaming / getting rid of this stops WaasMedic & other services from respawning.
> There's multiple services dedicated to monitoring / "repairing" windows update, scheduled tasks to enable those, and further tasks to repair everything completely if anything is modified.
Sounds like we'd need some resident anti-virus-like software dedicated to enforcing the user's choices on the OS.
(but definitely do your updates so as to not become part of a botnet. Too bad the security updates must come with unneeded feature updates)
Makes me think of notices around adult clubs I've seen such as:
"CONSENT: A clear and unambiguous agreement, expressed outwardly through mutually understandable words or actions, to engage in a particular activity. Consent can be withdrawn by either party at any point."
and
"No means No"
What I'm about to say is strongly worded and I understand not a _perfect_ analogy by any means. However, it does sum up my feelings on this issue.
If Person A makes repeated unwanted advances towards Person B, we have words to describe that. But if Person A, a company, makes repeated unwanted advances towards Person B we call that business.
I wish Microsoft would have never changed the business model of Windows away from paid upgrades.
Now they have no incentive to make good upgrades. Instead, they are only incentivized to add privacy-compromising services that nobody wants or asked for.
Nice window you have there, would be a shame if somebody threw a upgrade into it.. should pay insurrance and protection money, so we could save things from "pimprovements"
If "support" doesn't allow opting out of their actively user-hostile decision making, I seriously question the value of "support" at all. In many ways I'd rather my computer go to some Russian botnet than trust an American corporation with my data—at least the former has a chance of getting shut down.
While both OSes are no longer supported, important software like Chrome still run on Windows 10 and will continue to do so for a while. Staying on Windows 7 means losing security updates, and very soon, not being able to load websites that use the latest web features.
Stop selling Windows 7 so much.. As a 40-year veteran of tech, "latest web features" are usually a red flag for me more than anything.. More spying, more PII selling, more addiction attempts, etc..
And of course the really important one where only Enterprise is allowed to fully disable Telemetry: https://admx.cengizyilmaz.net/policy/allow-diagnostic-data “Diagnostic data off (not recommended). Using this value, no diagnostic data is sent from the device. This value is only supported on Enterprise, Education, and Server editions.”
Well, you can remove the Windows spotlight stuff from the lock screen through the regular settings. Change it from Windows Spotlight to picture or whatever, and remove "Weather and more" from the "show detailed status". I'd say the ability to disable that through Group Policy stretches the definition of "important feature"
I'm not sure I'd agree those policies are enough to truly argue Windows 7 was a last version to not separate out important features to Enterprise -- I'd actually instead simply make the larger point that before Windows 10, Windows wasn't a chintzy ad-driven whorehouse.
Windows 7 is still dramatically less secure by design (i.e. not missing patches but architectural changes) compared to Windows 10, even Windows 8 had some meaningful kernel security features that 7 lacks. This includes sandboxing measures that Chrome & Firefox use, meaning you're still less secure even if you're not downloading shady software.
You're frankly better off applying a bunch of registry changes to 10, using a Education or N (EU) edition "illegally", or blocking DNS than going back to 7 just for privacy concerns. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
But this will install other stuff as well and might even upgrade the distro. I just want to update the kernel and its wrapper. Or does nobody have tried it and I would need to figure it out myself.
Meh... technically, you're probably right. In practice, it probably won't make a damn bit of difference. It's just like how everybody was scared to run without anti-virus years ago. More people got their computers fucked up by AV than by actual viruses. Still to this day Defender is there fucking up your computer and really not doing a great job protecting you from anything. Ransomware is still running amok despite everything being "up to date" and running AV, and 30 different corporate security defense suites.
Oh my god i HATE the lack of a “no” option! I’ve been meaning to go find a guide for editing registry to disable the windows 11 upgrade requests, but now I worry that might not exist?
It's one of the last versions where the modal dialogs ask "Yes" or "No", instead of "Yes" and "Not now", "Maybe later", or "Ask again tomorrow".