Vast Number of Windows Users Refusing to Upgrade After Microsoft's Embrace of AI Slop
Vast Number of Windows Users Refusing to Upgrade After Microsoft's Embrace of AI Slop
There’s nothing I do with my home computer that warrants that AI is integrated to the OS. I browse the web. Play games. Occasionally I work on some personal projects.
I can never see myself say ” Hey Cortana! I want to play Megabonk!”. I see much less reason for the OS to constantly record everything I do to do this.
Please don’t shove AI down my throat.
Man MS,…
-W8=> dude, we just want an OS that works
-Voice commands=> please don’t give hackers that kind of acces through our speakers
-Vista=> just fkn work already
-Onedrive all over the place=> nope
-365=> no thx
When will these assholes learn? If this is the straw that breaks multiple camels then good.
Windows users want a menu button in the lower left corner and shit to work after a short installer. How the fuck do you keep messing that up?
🐧
Windows users want a menu button in the lower left corner and shit to work after a short installer. How the fuck do you keep messing that up?
Capitalists are literally Mt Krabbs:
"Squidward! New rule! All customers must fill in this survey about the details of their day before they order!" Drops a giant stack of papers on the counter
Squidward sighs "Why are we doing this?"
"Because then I can sell their information for more MONEY! Hyukukukukuk!"
Also UI that operates near instantaneously. Not waiting for the option I want to pop in.
Working as intended by the shareholders.
I'm one of them, and currently looking into Linux, if I can migrate my Photoshop tools/brushes/gradients/etc successfully over to another program that is compatible.
My only hang up after that is gaming, and I feel that can be resolved with dual boot to win10.
Why not just play games on linux?
It works so well nowadays
I figure that at least a few games I like to play are not compatible with Linux. I haven't yet gotten the full list of games that won't run on it but I'd hedge a bet that there's more than one. One of them which I play a lot, Warframe, is apparently a bit buggy on it. I'm a sucker for multiplayer games and if there is kernel level anti cheat on them it might cause things to break.
Gaming on Linux works now. I play every game I care for.
Gaming on Linux is superior, on a lot of games! I dual booted and ran benchmarks on Windows 11 and Fedora, same hardware. Ran nothing but the OS and Steam in the background, (gaming mode on and off), oddly found better performance with gaming mode off, then tried the same thing with Fedora. 5-10% higher framerates in Fedora running Proton.
Tried the same thing with synched Firefox tabs, half a dozen open tabs, telegram and discord running. Fedora sometimes hit 15% higher framerates.
The only problem is some anticheats and older games. Whenever the boys and I wanna play Battlefield I gotta switch to Windows, but besides that it's basically fine.
While going for another program, ideally non proprietary, with a native Linux version would be ideal, I would not be surprised if running Photoshop on Linux with wine was a viable option these days. Or will be in a not-too-distant future.
As for games, what the others have said. Unless you're into a specific multiplier game with a kernel level "anticheat", then it should be fine.
In fact, I suspect Photoshop, rather than gaming, is much more likely to be the reason you'd have to dual boot.
Don't know if this is particularly relevant as a comparison to your Photoshop idea, but I have successfully run things like windows version of Cascadeur and Blender through Proton; in the case of Blender, it was for running an older Kenshi modding import export plugin, which only supports the Windows version of Blender.
Literally just set it up through Steam, Proton Experimental.
UI scaling / fonts can be a bit wonky, but for just doing the import/export steps, its totally workable, as... a .blend file is a .blend file, so you can do the other edits in a linux version of Blender.
Or, I could probably use ProtonTricks to add some fonts and font subpixel AA dependencies to get it to work 'more right', I remember that being what I ended up doing back when I was still using MO2.
Or, or, you could try Bottles, that would probably be a more sane way to try and set up a more... fully featured, editor type of Windows program, within Linux, it tends to handle those kinds of esoteric dependencies a bit better, has more of them as just part of the default preset.
In my understanding, still no, especially not the more advanced filters stuff. PS6 (or whatever the last one you could actually buy was) on the other hand is 95+% functional if you can go back. Not an expert, GIMP is fine for my needs, there's even a spin with PS-like menu layout if that's your jam, but happy to be told I'm wrong about new PS.
Adobe shit and AutoCAD stuff are the the last major sticking points these days, Office is in the cloud now. Shame these last two won't let their cash cows be rented in the cloud (instead of subscribed, you know, a long term rental agreement using your own computer) to my knowledge. There's always VMs.
Games work better on Linux than you might expect. Check out protondb for specific titles you're thinking of. Most things I've just hit "play" on steam or heroic and they work n
Thanks for the suggestion! I'll definitely check it out.
honestly, if there would be a 100% office compatibility, photoshop on linux, and proper anticheat support, we would have 40% linux usage
I know it isn't an exact solution, but people have created a Photoshop-like UI layout and keybindings for Gimp. That could help, should you choose to go with Gimp as the image editor.
I've dual booted my gaming rig with Windows 11 and Linux. The only thing I use windows for is Turtle WoW. If that would work on linux, I'd have no reason to have windows. I had it working on macOS, but it stopped working at macOS 26. and the emulation tool that i was utilising isn't being updated anymore. so it's unlikely going to work again. If Linux would run my Turtle WoW, I'd be 100% linux on my gaming rig. All my other games work out of the box. Anyway. Linux is the shit! I
I'm still using Windows 11 just from inertia, but I've been putting my kids on Linux Mint and Bazzite depending.
I don't think I can get away from Windows, as a professional .NET developer, but I won't likely have more than the one Windows laptop at this point. My entire home lab and home infra is Linux of one variety or another. If we count VMs, then I overwhelmingly using Debian.
I don't think I can get away from Windows, as a professional .NET developer
Because you have to use VS Code instead of VS? You can always deploy to a Windows VM if you need to be sure IIS works. Though everything will just run on dotnet and nginx through a reverse proxy if you want to stay within Linux.
I don't think I can get away from Windows, as a professional .NET developer,
I understand that .Net is nicely cross-platform, now.
But it's still simplest to run whatever the boss is running.
I’m going to drop this here. Both Affinity 2 if you bought it or the Free Affinity 3 works well on Linux.
I've started working with affinity and I'm pretty impressed so far. It does have some hiccups importing Photoshop brushes where the brush settings are wiped but I figure I have to look further into that to see if that can be remedied.
Nice! Do you know if the Mac License works with the Affinity 2 Windows version as well?
You might be surprised by how capable linux gaming has gotten. The only thing really missing is AAA FPS type games. That doesn't matter at all to me, but its something to consider. Just about everything else plays right out of the box.
Check out winboat
While I don't generally recommend it, NVDIA has streaming options for games on Windows. You can even run this from a browser if you wanted, all within Linux. I would be surprised if you couldn't use this for Photoshop or an alternative existed.
It's just important to keep in mind this isn't your computer, its a subscription to someone else's computer. I just thought I'd mention this because it's not commonly suggested and it's nice to know avaliable options.
You can also just get a separate computer with MacOS for Photoshop and ditch the kernal games or maybe play them on Mac if they're low end, and use Linux for everything else.
Maybe rootkits will be gone soon. 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop.
Huge numbers of Windows users are refusing to upgrade to Windows 11 -- and many of them are citing its AI features as the reason why.
Spoiler: They're not. They're postponing. Eventually, they'll almost all give in to the bullying :(
All my remaining W10 machines in the house are just in a holding pattern because I haven't bothered to move them over to Linux yet. For me (and hopefully many others), its just lack of free time and procrastination. There is zero chance they'll go to W11 for me personally.
I feel bad about the people who have no choice but to make a Microsoft account and then not being able to change the default browser app due to Family Safety™
Family safety, with your browsing data straightaway handed to the ICE Gestapo for deportations...
Yup, lots of people are going to take the extra year of Windows 10 updates Microsoft is offering and put off upgrading until next year, but so many writers want to find meaning in people not upgrading as soon as 10 was technically EOL.
it's really the stereotypical frog in boiling water. Had they shifted from Win 7 to Win 12 directly, people would have pushed back much harder for all the bloat and slop...
True. The only reason my PC doesn't run W11 is because I can't be arsed to mess with the drive for that secure boot bollocks.
Moved 5 home PCs from Win10 to either Mint or Bazzite this year. No complaints from the family; we'll not be going back to M$.
Like apparently everyone else, I moved to Linux Mint and have been loving it! It really is easy to use, but I've also realized that my technical knowledge is at a point where I really don't need it to be easy. Like, I've always considered myself kinda tech illiterate in comparison to the people I'm around (I'm a software engineer who specializes in JavaScript/React, but I'm around Rust devs and people who set up docker containers for fun) but apparently just being comfortable using the console is far above what the average user will do. I think there was an xkcd about this kind of phenomenon
This is the absolutely perfect way to describe what it's like listening to Linux fans give advice to newcomers.
yess, that's exactly the one I had in mind!
Eh. I installed Linux Mint this weekend because I was sick of Microsoft's bullshit and I had to connect my PC to my router with an Ethernet cable to install a driver for my wifi adapter from the terminal. I am quite tech savvy and was very comfortable with this whole process and it took no time at all, but my wife who knows barely anything about computers would have probably given up the moment the Internet didn't work when Mint installed. Most people use routers that they rent for too much money from their ISPs and don't even know you can plug shit into the backs of those routers yourself. The moment the wifi doesn't work on the new OS even though the password is right, it's game over for their ability to troubleshoot it. That is why Linux won't get normies on it anytime soon. After that my experience has been extremely smooth and I have been able to do anything I've wanted to do without touching the terminal (although I prefer terminal commands), but that initial hurdle is just way too much to expect from the average person who just wants to get on Netflix and Facebook asap.
I'm not a computer person at all and the most I did with my Windows laptop was gently prodding the drivers to fix themselves. I have experience with basic C++ and Javascript but thats back when I was in high school and I was never really good at it. I would love to move to Linux but honestly yeah the hurdle seems too big. The thought of rendering my laptop unusable for a few days and fucking it up even further to the point of no takesies backsies scares me.
But oh well, I need to save up for a new laptop first before worrying about these things lol
Yeah, the average user doesn't want to do scary console shit. Linux won't replace windows until people don't need to type console commands.
People don't need to type console commands. They're just the easiest way to tell someone how to do something in text.
Which is kinda sad. The console always feels like a more precise way to deal with a problem. So it's like people are saying "Using a mouse is too scary, I'd rather use a WiiMote while wearing mittens"
It's more than that, too. Even when there are GUI things (like the network manager in my system now) the GUIs are badly designed (because it turns out that UX design is an actual, learnable, technical field!), and, further, inconsistent from one piece to another so there's little in the way of shared learning. When you learn one of these little GUI utilities you've learned ... that one ... GUI ... utility.
At that point you might as well be typing stuff like ls -laR ~/Documents | awk '{print $9}' | grep -v '^\.' | xargs -I{} file {} | grep -i 'ascii\|unicode\|utf' | cut -d: -f1 | xargs -I{} sh -c 'head -n 5 "{}" | nl -ba -s": " | sed "s/^/$(basename {}): /"' | less -N
(Fake command line supplied by long-suffering SO who got a kick out of making something incredibly stupid.)
This is self-fulfilling bullshit. Everyone is saying that typing words is somehow scary, so everyone is scared of typing words.
Average user doesn't really has more problems with console, either they care enough to google how to fix the problem, and do whatever Internet tells them, or they don't and they ask for help and kick the problem down the chain. Will the solution involve typing words or clicking checkboxes is kind of irrelevant
I'm glad you've had a good go of it. I've been very unimpressed with Linux Mint. I expected it to be fiddly, I didn't expect it to just...not work out of the box. Like freezing up on the initial screens as part of the welcome tour? Baked in features like linking up with Google drive just...not working? Losing sound in games when messaged on discord, the de facto standard for side by side gaming audio? And all of these issues reported multiple times in multiple forums, with like 8 different solutions proposed depending on who you asked, with a healthy amount of "well that's not a problem, it must be your machine's fault" when it's happening to multiple people?
I fixed some of the issues after serious googling, and I'll get it working fully eventually, but I could never in a million years recommend it to someone unless they shared my desire to go mostly open source with high privacy, or were very tech-savvy. I even thought it would be a scenario like, I play admin and get things set up, then can hand off a working computer to my wife or daughter. Not a chance for the wife, and we are going to really need to keep leaning into programming for the kiddo. Maybe she'll be a tech whiz who likes fixing things, but if she needs something reliable for school some day it'll be a Chromebook or (gross) a Mac.
It's customizable as hell, it's free and open-source, and it's helping my computer skills, so I'll keep going with it for sure. But if I didn't love learning and problem solving and simultaneously have HUGE issues with privacy and Windows whole direction... I can't imagine sticking with it.
Linux is written by doctors? It's all in your head, mate!
I had the same impression with Mint and it was the one my distro research led me to believe I would be the happiest with. I think my first mistake was using current generation parts for my build so I couldn't get the GPU drivers to load or the monitor settings to detect properly. After troubleshooting for several hours and totally breaking my system at least twice messing with xorg.conf, I updated the linux kernel and that finally fixed it. A week later I realized I was spending 2-3 hours of troubleshooting for every hour of gaming or basic use and I finally made the switch to Fedora 43 Workstation.
Now everything works like I needed it to and I have been installing what I want to use with no more hanging, crashing, or horrendous screen tearing since v-sync doesn't seem to work very well on X11. My takeaway is that Mint is probably ideal for older hardware but it definitely was a chore to make it happy with an RX 9060 XT and newer stuff which isn't supported by the default kernel. My use case was more gaming oriented so YMMV.
I just tried out the long term service branch option, which is fine for now.
I'm not only refusing to downgrade to Windows 11, my home system got switched to Linux (with the support of my SO) despite me thinking Linux is probably the single least user-friendly system I've ever had the misfortune to use.
That's how bad Windows 11 looks to me.
I'm curious, which distro and DE did you pick?
This question is proof enough that Linux isn’t exactly a user friendly system. You need to be aware of many things you otherwise wouldn’t need to care about in other operating systems.
Personally I like this freedom, but many people prefer to get something that just works without worrying about differences between distros and DEs.
Mint. No idea what a DE is.
At first I read SO as "shared object" I am depressed now.
I still have a dual-boot desktop that I keep a copy of Windows 10 on for one or two bits of software that I can't get 100% working in Wine, and yeah I'm definitely not upgrading. For one thing I can't because it's an older CPU that doesn't have TPM on it, but also because of the AI thing.
The idea that Microsoft is expecting me to purchase new hardware (which is now ludicrously expensive because of companies like Microsoft going all-in on AI slop) so that I can 'upgrade' and make it easier for them to use their AI slop spyware to harvest my info is so preposterously arrogant and evil that I actually find it super funny.
It's like if someone was going to rob you and they expected you to go purchase and supply the gun they use to stick you up with lol.
Finally converted the last computer in my house from Windows to Linux. My wife was the last holdout and she's been loving her Linux machine.
Same, just got a new framework 13 laptop, it's not running Windows, sleep, fingerprint reader, Bluetooth, gpu drivers it all works. Linux now. All the games I currently play just work out of the box, steam just adds proton to the download. I don't use Microsoft Office apps though, more than happy with the alternatives.
I‘ve switched to Linux mint. 95% of my time I am using it instead of Windows and this is just because of that stupid kernel anti cheat software…
My Linux mint partition broke almost immediately :(
The windows boot loader has a tendency to erase the GRUB for booting Linux, borking it as soon as you load into windows. It's probably because windows is still in dual boot.
Edit: specifically, IIRC, it was windows update that borked it, but it always would auto-update when I opened it, so if you can find a way to guarantee windows never updates, power to you.
I have had 3 more friends in the last 24 hours tell me they are now going to make the switch in the near future. This is in addition to 2 who already have. This makes a total of 8 people I know personally who have already or will be switching this year/early next year.
I do not know a tonne of people, it's really pretty impressive.
I have used MS for years and also interacting with linux based server systems daily. I do stick with windows, but I also disable most of AI related features (I used auto captioning in some cases). While I use AI daily it is a local sandboxed instance. I think they should focus on other areas, but every tech company is FOMO on AI.
Breaking the preview pane in the final update for windows 10 was a nice touch.
"upgrade"
All these articles mention 10 being dead, but free extended support is offered by Microsoft with a couple of clicks until next year so really it's not. Massgrave gives you 3 I believe, and IOT is even longer.
And vast majority would rather become ransomware targets than try Windows alternatives.
Instead of going to Win11, I went Linux on Mac hardware.
I hating the thought of the day I'd have to "upgrade" to Win11 on my mobile device. Even if I went Linux it would mean there would be a good chunk of commercial applications that simply wouldn't be compatible and proprietary solutions would be out-of-reach without a mainstream supported commercial OS . It would also mean potentially having to have some kind of Windows for doing certain firmware updates.
I'm now 1 day in on using a Macbook Air M2 dual booting with Asahi Linux. I still have OSX to fall back to if I run into a proprietary application or solution I need to use or do firmware updates.
I upgraded my partners computer to windows 10 IOT.
Windows 11 itself+AI were factors, but the hardware restrictions were too.
I already have to use Windows 11 at work so I know the problems it comes with and I absolutely refuse to upgrade at home. I'd sooner go to exclusively Linux than upgrade at this point. I've already been duel booting Linux and Windows at home just in case I gotta bail completely. And as someone that has tried Linux back in 2015 it is leaps and bounds better than it used to be. Besides certain proprietary software you can basically do 80% of what you can on Windows at this point.
FTFY
It's probably been good enough for non-gamers for ages. There have been a number of attempts to make wine personable enough to run games for the average user. I think Valve finally nailed it.
Now we just need enough marketshare to break through the kernel game protection bullshit and for Adobe/Autodesk to get on board.
It's a reference to Game Changer.