Posted by firefoxd 2 days ago
From my earlier comment to another Windows post:
Windows 11 has transitioned from a standalone tool into a digital storefront that prioritizes recurring revenue through aggressive prompts for Microsoft 365 and OneDrive subscriptions. By mandating cloud-based Microsoft Accounts, the OS effectively anchors your identity to a marketing ID, allowing the company to track behavior and monetize your data. The interface now functions as an advertising platform, injecting "recommended" apps and sponsored content directly into the Start menu and search results. Ultimately, this shift means users are no longer just customers of a product, but recurring assets whose attention and telemetry are sold to sustain Microsoft’s ecosystem and maximize shareholder value.
Windows is what it is because it's really not important to Microsoft to anymore. It's effectively unmoored from the rest of organization and left to fight for some kind of financial relevance in an organization that doesn't care about it anymore.
This isn't specifically or even unique to Microsoft. In fact, it perfectly explains Windows because this pattern has been repeated so often by so many other companies.
Personally, I think Microsoft's strategy when it comes to Windows is a mistake. There are so many companies that would kill to own a platform (see Meta) and Microsoft has this dominate platform. It's Windows that, I believe, is responsible for their cloud success. It also makes decent revenue. But they have a cloud CEO and they have cloud success and desktop operating systems are out of fashion.
> The hardware limitation is specifically TPM 2.0
Almost every even half decent CPU made in the last decade does have TPM 2.0, albeit for some strange reason OEMs used to ship with it disabled. You may be able to turn it on in the bios.
I think that the spectre mitigation are not a problem in win11 because win11 is not supported on CPU that are vulnerable, which might be a reason they encourage people to get win11 and get a new PC, but that's an unverified guess, I am just trying to get them the benefit of the doubt.
SteamOS looks like it might take a lot of the windows cake, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to.
So far it doesn't look like SteamOS supports most of PC hardware out there, but it could be a next step for Valve.
That's not how contracts work, at all. MS hasn't bought anything from him, nor was he able to require them to agree to anything in order for him to install the OS.
You mean "absolutely relies on being able to work with Office formats". Which most Linux distros do well out of the box. I'm not aware of any feature that LO doesn't support, although admittedly I usually exchange PDFs.
> Citavi
According to the WineDB page for Citavi:, "native Linux alternatives include: - BibSonomy / PUMA - JabRef - Mendeley - Zotero - Colwiz"
Of course when going through education you don't want to take risks, there is a lot on the line. But it may be worth to play with the alternatives a bit, albeit on a VM or something. Of course maybe the Citavi format needs to be exchanged; that could actually be a problem. Annoying.
And in my experience, nothing “just works”.