7 ms·

Microsoft won't support Office apps on Windows 10 after October 14th

74 points by leotravis10 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sylware 2y ago
They develop software like monkeys on purpose, because that way they justify their planned obsolescence on security. It has been decades, their software should be mostly by now super audited and stable assembly code. The guilt is 100% them.
- recursive 2y ago
  Weird take. MS has some of the best backwards compatibility in the biz.
  - sylware 2y ago
    They push people to upgrade to the next windoz. This is unrelated to backward compat.
arrty88 2y ago
I’m planning on not supporting Microsoft in any way in the future myself. I wish they would stop making their suite of products less usable and more bloated
- BitwiseFool 2y ago
  >more bloated. I cannot believe how slow and laggy even the most basic of Microsoft applications are on Windows 11. Launching something as simple as the calculator takes a second or two to load in. What could it possibly be doing to warrant such a long load time? The 'classic' calculator on previous versions would appear near instantly once clicked. I am also baffled as to how something like the new right click context menu can have items loading in and then changing the order of icons once they do finish loading on every single click. For example, why does Skype need to have its menu item load every time the context menu is opened? Why not pre-load this on boot? The classic context menu had no such issues. Rather than go on and on, I sense Product Owners at Microsoft no longer care about fast and performant code.
  - fidotron 2y ago
    The Windows app development situation has become such a mess even Microsoft devs want to use Electron style containment for everything. That is the result. If in doubt, try making sense of the "Platforms" section https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/ and wondering if you would bet on those things being supported in 18 months time. Edit to add: I'm sure other people can chip in with more, but what I was told was the .net teams and Windows teams pulled in completely different directions. WPF/XAML was really widely liked by many developers for quite a while, then they put it on ice for no apparent reason (supposedly because the core Windows team had better ideas), and their on/off stance on this ever since has just driven everyone away.
  - like_any_other 2y ago
    > Launching something as simple as the calculator takes a second or two to load in. What could it possibly be doing to warrant such a long load time? Currently, telemetry [1]. Soon, "AI" probably. [1] https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues/148 https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues/148
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - formerly_proven 2y ago
      That repository is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time on Github, although it doesn't seem to be meant as a joke.
  - likeabatterycar 2y ago
    Welcome to the world of managed code. The calc.exe of yesteryear was written in C IIRC but 2025 programmers need to wear protection at all costs.
  - reginald78 2y ago
    I have a lot of smaller things to complain about in Windows but you've hit the two worst for me. I actually copied the windows 7 calculator over to my main machine because of this. For me the calculator's killer feature is loading instantly.
- Clubber 2y ago
  The only thing keeping me there on my desktop is games. If CoD would run on Linux, I would delete the Winders partition. I run Mac for my daily driver.
- tmpz22 2y ago
  I used to think gaming would always keep me pinned to Microsoft but with Valve and Playstation out competing them (while spending a fraction of the money) I think I'll never be in their gaming ecosystem again.
fassssst 2y ago
That’s over 10 years of support, seems reasonable.
- zihotki 2y ago
  and 10 months of support for a PC/Laptop which is being sold right now (like Dell Mini PC 6th-gen model). So is it? Why they were still selling OEM licenses to manufactures for W10 if it was going soon to expire?
  - gtirloni 2y ago
    Do you mean Dell is selling a brand new PC/Laptop with Windows 10 currently?
  - sieabahlpark 2y ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- surajrmal 2y ago
  It's also still the dominant windows install base. So it's a bit aggressive to drop support.
  - paxys 2y ago
    Nope, 11 overtook 10 a while ago.
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      According to...? Every source I look at shows 10 ahead of 11 still. October 2024: "At the end of September 2024, Windows 10 had a 62.79 percent market share and Windows 11 accounted for 33.37 percent." https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/01/windows_11_market_share/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/01/windows_11_market_sha... November 2024: "Windows 11 market share grows, but Windows 10 still twice as popular" https://www.pcworld.com/article/2508289/windows-11-market-share-grows-but-windows-10-still-twice-as-popular.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2508289/windows-11-market-sh... November 2024: "Windows 11 reaches 35% market share, but Windows 10 still leads by a wide margin" https://www.techspot.com/news/105408-windows-11-market-share-reaches-355-adoption-accelerates.html https://www.techspot.com/news/105408-windows-11-market-share... December 2024: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide/ https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/d... Etc...
gigel82 2y ago
It's likely hardware; things like POPCNT which we encountered in the wild when some folks were trying to run our software on ancient (15+ years old) CPUs that technically still supported Windows 10; so we changed our support story to Windows 11 only because that forces newer hardware requirement as well. I don't think they will actually crash on Win10 on purpose; this likely just means they won't be running automated tests on Win10 at some point (though probably not now considering companies can keep paying big bucks for back-compat support).
nehal3m 2y ago
I tend to avoid their office suite, is the online version mature yet? If so, then who cares which platform they support their native apps on?
- jpk2f2 2y ago
  Mature - maybe? It's certainly not a replacement for the application, as the online Word still falls flat on its face when trying to open, or even worse, modify, some of our larger documents.
- fuzzzerd 2y ago
  Mature? Yes. Better than Gdocs, debatable, but IMO yes. Replacement for the desktop app? Not quite, but it depends on which feature you specifically need.
  - tfandango 2y ago
    Interestingly my wife is offered O365 online as part of her Master's school as a way to write research papers. When she submits them in canvas, it cannot link to the document she wrote online, so it must be downloaded to her laptop which is a Mac. When that happens the only way to look at it is in our personal version of Word, locally, which distorts quite a bit of things, losing indention or adding spaces is common. It was surprising to me that a docx file is rendered so differently between the 2. This is a common problem for the professors it seems as they are asking people to download the docs to personal office apps and export them to PDF, negating the entire purpose of O365 online that they provided...
- sneak 2y ago
  The online versions are subject to warrantless government surveillance, whereas the local versions can still operate solely on local files and be denied access to the internet entirely. This is the last private and secure way to use MS products. When that is gone, we’ll be stuck using fake f/oss wannabe-Excel.
  - erremerre 2y ago
blibble 2y ago
still on office 2013 here...
phartenfeller 2y ago
Good, I hope this brings companies to change their setup. Office competition is strong, MS office is a huge and costly vendor lock in. Also many ransomware attacks start with someone allowing macros or clicking on a link in Outlook.
- subjectsigma 2y ago
  I agree more companies should look into MSFT alternatives. Not sure I agree with the rest. Is there any real competitor to Office 365? I know my current employer would never switch as we need an on-premise email server and that basically means Exchange. Also, we can blame Microsoft for a lot of things, but I’m pretty sure if Office and Outlook didn’t exist people would find another way to spread ransomware …
lelandfe 2y ago
> Office apps, known as Microsoft 365 apps I thought Microsoft 365 was the online cloud stuff. They just released Office 2024, didn't they? So is Microsoft 365 the whole suite, and Office 2024 is the umbrella term for the offline Microsoft 365 apps?
- nazgulsenpai 2y ago
  What was Office 365 is now part of Microsoft 365 for your convenience and to prevent you from ever trying any alternative since you're all bundled in.
  - BitwiseFool 2y ago
    What are the odds that it gets renamed to Microsoft One?
    - neogodless 2y ago
      X and One are old hat. Microsoft Pro and Pro Max are the new bundle options.
- reginald78 2y ago
  Nobody knows and it doesn't matter. Even if I knew the correct answer today it will be changed to something else equally nonsensical in a month or so.
- victor106 2y ago
  Along with realizing the buggiest software and cloud products, Microsoft's naming and branding sucks big time.
- n4r9 2y ago
  And don't get me started on DotNet Framework vs Core vs Standard.
herf 2y ago
It's remarkable how much they have neglected the upgrade process if you compare it to macOS Time Machine/Migration Assistant (which is hands off and totally easy). Why do you have so many people with ten year old PCs? Because for some people, it is a week of lost work to get a new one.
- sumuyuda 2y ago
  Or because for simple uses cases a 10 year old PC works just fine and there is no reason to upgrade.
- segasaturn 2y ago
  Indeed, switching Windows PCs is like pulling teeth because of having to re-discover all of the little programs you had downloaded previously. I was a supporter of the "Windows Store" they added in Windows 8 and 10 for this reason, it let me try to keep as much of my software in one place. MS also used to have a "digital locker" service for this kind of thing but that's long gone from the Vista days.
- HWR_14 2y ago
  A lot of people are on a ten year old machine because they'll get no additional value out of a newer one. Other than gaming, compiling, video editing or LLMs, what's the use case for a new machine?
  - jmb99 2y ago
    In some cases, power efficiency. Modern software is quite bloated in general, so a newer CPU/GPU on a more efficient architecture could actually have an effect on power bills in some parts of the world - especially over a 10+ year life span.
segasaturn 2y ago
I'm done with Microsoft. Switched to Ubuntu last week after a long break from daily driving Linux desktop (not since about 2013) and not looking back. It's much better here.
hypeatei 2y ago
I moved to Linux Mint from Windows 10 last year. Haven't looked back. Anytime I need to start up the Windows machine, there are a million things popping up, updating, Windows update notifications, etc... and no I don't have any viruses. Just good ol' first party malware from Microsoft.
- ycuser2 2y ago
  Yeah.. the longer I haven't boot up my Windows installation the more afraid I am do so because of the notifications. When I have to do something on Windows I use someone elses Win computer if possible.
- Scarbutt 2y ago
  That's great but office won't run on linux mint.
  - eikenberry 2y ago
    From what I understand, Codeweavers' Crossover (or Wine) supports running many versions of Office quite well.
  - leotravis10 2y ago
    You can do it via VM which a lot of people are going to do.
  - hypeatei 2y ago
    True, I use the web version of Office when it makes sense. I only reserve an actual desktop for things like Word because it doesn't work as well in the browser. I'm not a heavy Office user though, so YMMV.
NBJack 2y ago
Smells like desperation. Microsoft has been failing on the gaming front, trying to make their buggy "current gen" OS relevant by force, and is losing ground to other online competitors (i.e. Google docs). Azure is still growing, albeit slower than their top competitors. Bing has actually been doing good thanks in part to ChatGPT, but even there they still resort to bizarre tactics, like pretending to look like Google. [0] I would love to hear from others truly in the know, but it looks at times like the company is less an organism and more a writhing mass of creatures in a thin, shared skin trying to make it appear as one. [0] https://www.howtogeek.com/bing-stopped-pretending-to-be-google-after-backlash/ https://www.howtogeek.com/bing-stopped-pretending-to-be-goog...
- bun_at_work 2y ago
  > but it looks at times like the company is less an organism and more a writhing mass of creatures in a thin, shared skin trying to make it appear as one. This is pretty accurate. A bunch of disjointed orgs who get sometimes seemingly random direction from the overlord. The random direction isn't really random, it's whatever move the overlord believes investors will respond to. Copilot is a great example - shoved ungracefully into every product with the effect of making basic tasks more difficult. But hey - early movement on LLMs makes the stock go up.
- HWR_14 2y ago
  They are scared of Google docs and they make it harder to use Office? That doesn't make much sense to me.
- bitmasher9 2y ago
  It’s less desperate than you think. Windows 11 is 4 years old, so this is just pushing the straggling organizations into an overdue upgrade. Office and Windows have been a decreasing proportion of Microsoft’s revenue for years. The real money is coming from cloud services in its many forms. Microsoft may not be #1, but they are clearly in a strong position with good growth. Specifically Microsoft is great at onboarding mid sized businesses onto Azure/Teams and then building a big enough moat to keep churn low. Look at their growth numbers and you’ll see their business is in a strong position. Their cloud position is entrenched. Windows, Office, and Bing are all just bells and whistles to attract people to their real offerings (Teams, Azure, other subscriptions)
mleo 2y ago
Which uses more aggregate power, bitcoin mining or Windows anti malware software?
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Windows 11 is so bad. But I also don’t like what Apple does, with locking down their devices, the terrible iOS 18 changes, the upselling of their other services, the censorship, etc. There’s really no alternative though - I still find Linux to be unusable for daily use because random things don’t work well with it, but also mainly because battery life on Linux laptops is terrible. How do we get out of having just these two choices?
- jmb99 2y ago
  Windows 11 is quite bad, but so is 10 (just to a lesser extent), and 8/8.1. It’s really been a downward trend since 7. macOS isn’t great these days either, it’s been downhill since somewhere around 10.13 I’d say. The last truly great release, imo, was 10.9. There unfortunately isn’t a great OS answer if you just want a “regular computer,” from Apple or MS.
whycome 2y ago
Why is software the place where a company can get away with this shit? “Your car will no longer run on standard 87 octane gasoline after October 14 due to a software update”
- ielillo 2y ago
  Well it had happened in the past when they phased out lead from gasoline. Older would run poorly because they were tuned for that particular gasoline type
paxys 2y ago
Meh. Windows 10 launched in July 2015, and Windows 11 in October 2021. Not really a surprise that they aren't going to keep testing their apps against a decade old version. Apple for example supports an OS release for just 3 years after launch.
postepowanieadm 2y ago
Just think about all e-waste that this will generate.
lousken 2y ago
What about people running extended versions of windows 10? Either way, 80% of the people don't even need 365 desktop apps, unless they're heavy into word/excel. Most would survive with those and/or libreoffice, the only issue is that sometimes things get buggy or icons look different and because of user training, we still recommend 365 premium. With that said, I have been working for 3rd year like that on linux with very few issues. Now that Outlook users will be forced into the crappier web version, very few use access and it is just about word, excel and powerpoint, it makes even less sense to pay for the desktop apps.
- Melatonic 2y ago
  Exactly - curious how this plays out with Win10 LTSC (officially supported by security updates for years and years). Plus it has no bloat and crap and runs amazingly lean and fast. Also just realized I use LibreOffice anyways (or something similar) so I suppose this does not even apply to me
MarkusWandel 2y ago
To add my "whatever" voice... My work can afford to do things the Windows way. If I need an expensive tool like Visio, I tell them I need it and it (and the licence for it) appears. Some of our refresh laptops are on Windows 11, I'm still on Windows 10. Some annoyances creep through, e.g. every time you open an Edge window you're presented with a screen full of distracting stuff, even in the work installation. For home, free tools on Linux are more than adequate. Google Docs, or LibreOffice. For creating things, no problem. No need to perfectly parse two decades' worth of slightly malformed Microsoft Office documents. In fact, the token Windows machine has only been booted up for the following tasks in the past 12 months: Update the maps on an "LM" version Garmin car GPS, and do income taxes. The stuff Microsoft is doing to their desktop environment looks like a lot like a private equity outfit trying to milk the last bit of "brand value" out of a company that it's pillaging by cutting engineering, switching to cheaper manufacturing but still enjoying "premium brand" cachet for a while.
- nullfield 2y ago
  Google Docs is every bit the same hell, they just try to pretend they don’t and since it’s been bloated shit since day one no one wants to admit otherwise.
- supertrope 2y ago
  >do income taxes Switching to a web based tool like freetaxusa.com means my last two links to Windows are online games with anti-cheat and iTunes backups.
ourguile 2y ago
Made the move over to mac and Linux a few years back and haven't regretted it one bit.
methou 2y ago
I’m currently using a tiny11 modified installation of win11, I had to go through some extra steps to debloat the OS properly, after that it’s more usable. But last month, despite of all my efforts to not have windows update checked and applied, it booted with latest “upates”. With copilot and reinstalled edge as default browser. Since then I have blocked windows update related on DNS/Router and on device firewall. Security? It’s just a fancy game console.

74 points by leotravis10 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

They develop software like monkeys on purpose, because that way they justify their planned obsolescence on security. It has been decades, their software should be mostly by now super audited and stable assembly code. The guilt is 100% them.

recursive 2y ago
Weird take. MS has some of the best backwards compatibility in the biz.
- sylware 2y ago
  They push people to upgrade to the next windoz. This is unrelated to backward compat.

arrty88 2y ago

I’m planning on not supporting Microsoft in any way in the future myself. I wish they would stop making their suite of products less usable and more bloated

BitwiseFool 2y ago
>more bloated. I cannot believe how slow and laggy even the most basic of Microsoft applications are on Windows 11. Launching something as simple as the calculator takes a second or two to load in. What could it possibly be doing to warrant such a long load time? The 'classic' calculator on previous versions would appear near instantly once clicked. I am also baffled as to how something like the new right click context menu can have items loading in and then changing the order of icons once they do finish loading on every single click. For example, why does Skype need to have its menu item load every time the context menu is opened? Why not pre-load this on boot? The classic context menu had no such issues. Rather than go on and on, I sense Product Owners at Microsoft no longer care about fast and performant code.
- fidotron 2y ago
  The Windows app development situation has become such a mess even Microsoft devs want to use Electron style containment for everything. That is the result. If in doubt, try making sense of the "Platforms" section https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/ and wondering if you would bet on those things being supported in 18 months time. Edit to add: I'm sure other people can chip in with more, but what I was told was the .net teams and Windows teams pulled in completely different directions. WPF/XAML was really widely liked by many developers for quite a while, then they put it on ice for no apparent reason (supposedly because the core Windows team had better ideas), and their on/off stance on this ever since has just driven everyone away.
- like_any_other 2y ago
  > Launching something as simple as the calculator takes a second or two to load in. What could it possibly be doing to warrant such a long load time? Currently, telemetry [1]. Soon, "AI" probably. [1] https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues/148 https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues/148
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - formerly_proven 2y ago
    That repository is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time on Github, although it doesn't seem to be meant as a joke.
- likeabatterycar 2y ago
  Welcome to the world of managed code. The calc.exe of yesteryear was written in C IIRC but 2025 programmers need to wear protection at all costs.
- reginald78 2y ago
  I have a lot of smaller things to complain about in Windows but you've hit the two worst for me. I actually copied the windows 7 calculator over to my main machine because of this. For me the calculator's killer feature is loading instantly.
Clubber 2y ago
The only thing keeping me there on my desktop is games. If CoD would run on Linux, I would delete the Winders partition. I run Mac for my daily driver.
tmpz22 2y ago
I used to think gaming would always keep me pinned to Microsoft but with Valve and Playstation out competing them (while spending a fraction of the money) I think I'll never be in their gaming ecosystem again.

fassssst 2y ago

That’s over 10 years of support, seems reasonable.

zihotki 2y ago
and 10 months of support for a PC/Laptop which is being sold right now (like Dell Mini PC 6th-gen model). So is it? Why they were still selling OEM licenses to manufactures for W10 if it was going soon to expire?
- gtirloni 2y ago
  Do you mean Dell is selling a brand new PC/Laptop with Windows 10 currently?
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  [dead]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
surajrmal 2y ago
It's also still the dominant windows install base. So it's a bit aggressive to drop support.
- paxys 2y ago
  Nope, 11 overtook 10 a while ago.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    According to...? Every source I look at shows 10 ahead of 11 still. October 2024: "At the end of September 2024, Windows 10 had a 62.79 percent market share and Windows 11 accounted for 33.37 percent." https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/01/windows_11_market_share/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/01/windows_11_market_sha... November 2024: "Windows 11 market share grows, but Windows 10 still twice as popular" https://www.pcworld.com/article/2508289/windows-11-market-share-grows-but-windows-10-still-twice-as-popular.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2508289/windows-11-market-sh... November 2024: "Windows 11 reaches 35% market share, but Windows 10 still leads by a wide margin" https://www.techspot.com/news/105408-windows-11-market-share-reaches-355-adoption-accelerates.html https://www.techspot.com/news/105408-windows-11-market-share... December 2024: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide/ https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/d... Etc...

gigel82 2y ago

It's likely hardware; things like POPCNT which we encountered in the wild when some folks were trying to run our software on ancient (15+ years old) CPUs that technically still supported Windows 10; so we changed our support story to Windows 11 only because that forces newer hardware requirement as well. I don't think they will actually crash on Win10 on purpose; this likely just means they won't be running automated tests on Win10 at some point (though probably not now considering companies can keep paying big bucks for back-compat support).

nehal3m 2y ago

I tend to avoid their office suite, is the online version mature yet? If so, then who cares which platform they support their native apps on?

jpk2f2 2y ago
Mature - maybe? It's certainly not a replacement for the application, as the online Word still falls flat on its face when trying to open, or even worse, modify, some of our larger documents.
fuzzzerd 2y ago
Mature? Yes. Better than Gdocs, debatable, but IMO yes. Replacement for the desktop app? Not quite, but it depends on which feature you specifically need.
- tfandango 2y ago
  Interestingly my wife is offered O365 online as part of her Master's school as a way to write research papers. When she submits them in canvas, it cannot link to the document she wrote online, so it must be downloaded to her laptop which is a Mac. When that happens the only way to look at it is in our personal version of Word, locally, which distorts quite a bit of things, losing indention or adding spaces is common. It was surprising to me that a docx file is rendered so differently between the 2. This is a common problem for the professors it seems as they are asking people to download the docs to personal office apps and export them to PDF, negating the entire purpose of O365 online that they provided...
sneak 2y ago
The online versions are subject to warrantless government surveillance, whereas the local versions can still operate solely on local files and be denied access to the internet entirely. This is the last private and secure way to use MS products. When that is gone, we’ll be stuck using fake f/oss wannabe-Excel.
- erremerre 2y ago

blibble 2y ago

still on office 2013 here...

phartenfeller 2y ago

Good, I hope this brings companies to change their setup. Office competition is strong, MS office is a huge and costly vendor lock in. Also many ransomware attacks start with someone allowing macros or clicking on a link in Outlook.

subjectsigma 2y ago
I agree more companies should look into MSFT alternatives. Not sure I agree with the rest. Is there any real competitor to Office 365? I know my current employer would never switch as we need an on-premise email server and that basically means Exchange. Also, we can blame Microsoft for a lot of things, but I’m pretty sure if Office and Outlook didn’t exist people would find another way to spread ransomware …

lelandfe 2y ago

> Office apps, known as Microsoft 365 apps I thought Microsoft 365 was the online cloud stuff. They just released Office 2024, didn't they? So is Microsoft 365 the whole suite, and Office 2024 is the umbrella term for the offline Microsoft 365 apps?

nazgulsenpai 2y ago
What was Office 365 is now part of Microsoft 365 for your convenience and to prevent you from ever trying any alternative since you're all bundled in.
- BitwiseFool 2y ago
  What are the odds that it gets renamed to Microsoft One?
  - neogodless 2y ago
    X and One are old hat. Microsoft Pro and Pro Max are the new bundle options.
reginald78 2y ago
Nobody knows and it doesn't matter. Even if I knew the correct answer today it will be changed to something else equally nonsensical in a month or so.
victor106 2y ago
Along with realizing the buggiest software and cloud products, Microsoft's naming and branding sucks big time.
n4r9 2y ago
And don't get me started on DotNet Framework vs Core vs Standard.

herf 2y ago

It's remarkable how much they have neglected the upgrade process if you compare it to macOS Time Machine/Migration Assistant (which is hands off and totally easy). Why do you have so many people with ten year old PCs? Because for some people, it is a week of lost work to get a new one.

sumuyuda 2y ago
Or because for simple uses cases a 10 year old PC works just fine and there is no reason to upgrade.
segasaturn 2y ago
Indeed, switching Windows PCs is like pulling teeth because of having to re-discover all of the little programs you had downloaded previously. I was a supporter of the "Windows Store" they added in Windows 8 and 10 for this reason, it let me try to keep as much of my software in one place. MS also used to have a "digital locker" service for this kind of thing but that's long gone from the Vista days.
HWR_14 2y ago
A lot of people are on a ten year old machine because they'll get no additional value out of a newer one. Other than gaming, compiling, video editing or LLMs, what's the use case for a new machine?
- jmb99 2y ago
  In some cases, power efficiency. Modern software is quite bloated in general, so a newer CPU/GPU on a more efficient architecture could actually have an effect on power bills in some parts of the world - especially over a 10+ year life span.

segasaturn 2y ago

I'm done with Microsoft. Switched to Ubuntu last week after a long break from daily driving Linux desktop (not since about 2013) and not looking back. It's much better here.

hypeatei 2y ago

I moved to Linux Mint from Windows 10 last year. Haven't looked back. Anytime I need to start up the Windows machine, there are a million things popping up, updating, Windows update notifications, etc... and no I don't have any viruses. Just good ol' first party malware from Microsoft.

ycuser2 2y ago
Yeah.. the longer I haven't boot up my Windows installation the more afraid I am do so because of the notifications. When I have to do something on Windows I use someone elses Win computer if possible.
Scarbutt 2y ago
That's great but office won't run on linux mint.
- eikenberry 2y ago
  From what I understand, Codeweavers' Crossover (or Wine) supports running many versions of Office quite well.
- leotravis10 2y ago
  You can do it via VM which a lot of people are going to do.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  True, I use the web version of Office when it makes sense. I only reserve an actual desktop for things like Word because it doesn't work as well in the browser. I'm not a heavy Office user though, so YMMV.

NBJack 2y ago

Smells like desperation. Microsoft has been failing on the gaming front, trying to make their buggy "current gen" OS relevant by force, and is losing ground to other online competitors (i.e. Google docs). Azure is still growing, albeit slower than their top competitors. Bing has actually been doing good thanks in part to ChatGPT, but even there they still resort to bizarre tactics, like pretending to look like Google. [0] I would love to hear from others truly in the know, but it looks at times like the company is less an organism and more a writhing mass of creatures in a thin, shared skin trying to make it appear as one. [0] https://www.howtogeek.com/bing-stopped-pretending-to-be-google-after-backlash/ https://www.howtogeek.com/bing-stopped-pretending-to-be-goog...

bun_at_work 2y ago
> but it looks at times like the company is less an organism and more a writhing mass of creatures in a thin, shared skin trying to make it appear as one. This is pretty accurate. A bunch of disjointed orgs who get sometimes seemingly random direction from the overlord. The random direction isn't really random, it's whatever move the overlord believes investors will respond to. Copilot is a great example - shoved ungracefully into every product with the effect of making basic tasks more difficult. But hey - early movement on LLMs makes the stock go up.
HWR_14 2y ago
They are scared of Google docs and they make it harder to use Office? That doesn't make much sense to me.
bitmasher9 2y ago
It’s less desperate than you think. Windows 11 is 4 years old, so this is just pushing the straggling organizations into an overdue upgrade. Office and Windows have been a decreasing proportion of Microsoft’s revenue for years. The real money is coming from cloud services in its many forms. Microsoft may not be #1, but they are clearly in a strong position with good growth. Specifically Microsoft is great at onboarding mid sized businesses onto Azure/Teams and then building a big enough moat to keep churn low. Look at their growth numbers and you’ll see their business is in a strong position. Their cloud position is entrenched. Windows, Office, and Bing are all just bells and whistles to attract people to their real offerings (Teams, Azure, other subscriptions)

mleo 2y ago

Which uses more aggregate power, bitcoin mining or Windows anti malware software?

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Windows 11 is so bad. But I also don’t like what Apple does, with locking down their devices, the terrible iOS 18 changes, the upselling of their other services, the censorship, etc. There’s really no alternative though - I still find Linux to be unusable for daily use because random things don’t work well with it, but also mainly because battery life on Linux laptops is terrible. How do we get out of having just these two choices?

jmb99 2y ago
Windows 11 is quite bad, but so is 10 (just to a lesser extent), and 8/8.1. It’s really been a downward trend since 7. macOS isn’t great these days either, it’s been downhill since somewhere around 10.13 I’d say. The last truly great release, imo, was 10.9. There unfortunately isn’t a great OS answer if you just want a “regular computer,” from Apple or MS.

whycome 2y ago

Why is software the place where a company can get away with this shit? “Your car will no longer run on standard 87 octane gasoline after October 14 due to a software update”

ielillo 2y ago
Well it had happened in the past when they phased out lead from gasoline. Older would run poorly because they were tuned for that particular gasoline type

paxys 2y ago

Meh. Windows 10 launched in July 2015, and Windows 11 in October 2021. Not really a surprise that they aren't going to keep testing their apps against a decade old version. Apple for example supports an OS release for just 3 years after launch.

postepowanieadm 2y ago

Just think about all e-waste that this will generate.

lousken 2y ago

What about people running extended versions of windows 10? Either way, 80% of the people don't even need 365 desktop apps, unless they're heavy into word/excel. Most would survive with those and/or libreoffice, the only issue is that sometimes things get buggy or icons look different and because of user training, we still recommend 365 premium. With that said, I have been working for 3rd year like that on linux with very few issues. Now that Outlook users will be forced into the crappier web version, very few use access and it is just about word, excel and powerpoint, it makes even less sense to pay for the desktop apps.

Melatonic 2y ago
Exactly - curious how this plays out with Win10 LTSC (officially supported by security updates for years and years). Plus it has no bloat and crap and runs amazingly lean and fast. Also just realized I use LibreOffice anyways (or something similar) so I suppose this does not even apply to me

MarkusWandel 2y ago

To add my "whatever" voice... My work can afford to do things the Windows way. If I need an expensive tool like Visio, I tell them I need it and it (and the licence for it) appears. Some of our refresh laptops are on Windows 11, I'm still on Windows 10. Some annoyances creep through, e.g. every time you open an Edge window you're presented with a screen full of distracting stuff, even in the work installation. For home, free tools on Linux are more than adequate. Google Docs, or LibreOffice. For creating things, no problem. No need to perfectly parse two decades' worth of slightly malformed Microsoft Office documents. In fact, the token Windows machine has only been booted up for the following tasks in the past 12 months: Update the maps on an "LM" version Garmin car GPS, and do income taxes. The stuff Microsoft is doing to their desktop environment looks like a lot like a private equity outfit trying to milk the last bit of "brand value" out of a company that it's pillaging by cutting engineering, switching to cheaper manufacturing but still enjoying "premium brand" cachet for a while.

nullfield 2y ago
Google Docs is every bit the same hell, they just try to pretend they don’t and since it’s been bloated shit since day one no one wants to admit otherwise.
supertrope 2y ago
>do income taxes Switching to a web based tool like freetaxusa.com means my last two links to Windows are online games with anti-cheat and iTunes backups.

ourguile 2y ago

Made the move over to mac and Linux a few years back and haven't regretted it one bit.

methou 2y ago

I’m currently using a tiny11 modified installation of win11, I had to go through some extra steps to debloat the OS properly, after that it’s more usable. But last month, despite of all my efforts to not have windows update checked and applied, it booted with latest “upates”. With copilot and reinstalled edge as default browser. Since then I have blocked windows update related on DNS/Router and on device firewall. Security? It’s just a fancy game console.