This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
"Microsoft testing new ways to lose customers".
It's well known that piracy was what made Word (.DOC) and Excel (.XLS) the de facto standard.
If the kids at home can't use windows, they'll find something different. And when enough of them find if, when they become decision makers they'll stay away from Windows.
Imagine how different the landscape would be had MS cracked down on Piracy for their flagship programs.
iMacs in schools weren’t for nothing, and neither are the weirdly good deals on Apple products for students and teachers. At a time when people are learning about these programs and using the machines pretty aggressively the good product company comes along and gives them affordable-ish equipment with a nice stable OS.
Tim Cook Apple being kinda underwhelming and being way more expensive than Steve Jobs Apple is not helping their image but they still have decent deals and are able to ride said image for a very long time thanks largely to Jobs understanding what you’re talking about.
Back to Microsoft, they don’t seem to understand that the general consensus on them has mostly always been that Windows is cheap and not amazing but certain programs run on only it. Now they want to make it cost a tonne of money/have ads? Jobs’ Apple products where expensive but they were high quality. Microsoft just can’t pull the same shit with their dogshit legacy-coded 30 year old hack-job OS and consistently mediocre-to-bad products. And they have to do it while competing with Linux amongst the very people who were doing most of the loud fan-boying for their shit for so long!
Of course they are. Coincidentally, newer devices being bought in 2025 are increasingly shipping with fully locked UEFI that prevents you from installing anything but Windows.
I thought that was illegal.
I tried to do a dual boot on my bf's new laptop, he was li-curious, it ended up being such a hassle he just switched entirely. He prefers the Mac like interface on Wayland.
Do you happen to know any specific hardware that does so? I haven't heard of that and I'm genuinely curious.
Also Microsoft: “Why aren’t people upgrading to Windows 11?”
From Fedora 42? Sounds like a downgrade.
They really need to name the next version "Windows 76". That should have the people throwing money at them.
“Nobody wants to Windows anymore!”
Luckily at work we are allowed to install a dual boot, or even single boot with Linux. The one obligation is to run the corporate antivirus and vpn client (and yes we had malware detections of Linux binaries).
Dual booting for the last 6 months, now 100% on Linux (Mint). Can’t say I miss anything from windows, maybe ms office’s polished apps but I can’t care less. Nowadays everything runs in the browser, it has become « the OS ». And almost every browser is a chromium variant that’s it.
Laughs in Linux
I hope it last, web enshitification may bring us back to the 2000s where that one site requires internet explorer, this one won’t allow DRM content on non windows platforms…
It’s just around the corner.
Once you people have finally had enough, Linux and/or Libre Office will be right there. Waiting.
I did this over a year ago. Man, I love that my computing is boring again. No distractions. The machine does what I tell it to do. It's lovely! Boring is lovely.
There are some tools that can make Linux feel more like home too for those who want to transition slowly
Will they run in WINE?
Tricky. Microsoft currently use two different executable formats and only one of them is compatible with WINE. That still doesn't mean that a compatible one will work properly though.
On the other hand, people who make ads want their ads to be literally everywhere, so they might make it Windows 3.11 compatible with all library functions baked in just to be safe. WINE would almost certainly run that.
So glad I completely gave up on MS after Windows 7.
Lmao. Genius, hope whoever suggested this got a raise. Can imagine the meeting where it has been decided. "Hey, have we thought about fullscreen ads for something we want to push on people?” "Genius idea, Maxwell! Go home to your wife and kids and tell them a big fat bonus is coming to their smart father!”
I'm in a constant battle to keep it removed off our office machines. You can't remove it completely since its cached and installed with every user login. In order to get rid of it we would have to pay for the enterprise version. Just another rip off from macroshit.
Complete clickbait article headline: the title should have been “for subscriptions where the payment method for the renewal failed”, not just for “expired subscriptions”. It’s to notify people who didn’t mean for their subscription to lapse that their payment method was refused.
Doesn’t make as “good” of a story then though, does it?
I have a windows game box, it nags me to backup my photos when I visualise 1 (one) image.
What a shit OS it has become lol.
Thank goodness I have zero use for any of their products.
Since I made the switch these kinds of news are hilarious! Yes, make Win 11 into hell! Your customers are your shareholders, users are too be exploited! How long can it last? Who cares, only the next quarter counts!
Do it! At this point Linux can do anything windows can do, I want them to fuck it up as much as possible, Fuck Microsoft !
