These are mutually exclusive concepts, though, and it's not just operating systems - every relevant piece of software that's been regularly updated through the years necessarily has so much legacy and compatibility cruft that it's all held together by piss and glue.
I'm doing something similar as my Linux OS of choice is Zorin. I'm too old and too tired going back to being a code monkey so if it feels like Windows 7 then I'm in.
Heh, They haven't got their shit together since 2001. And that Holier than Thou attitude from many of the DEV's well they need to have their dicks removed and have them choke on them.
They're doing this specifically so they don't have a repeat of XP. XP proper remained in support until 2014, and its more specialized variants until 2019. Given XP came out in 2001, that's eighteen years of support, the longest any version of Windows has ever been supported. It even beat Windows 1.0 by a year!
Unironically, this is where I believe Microsoft will ultimately take the entire Windows family. You don't see it so much on the consumer/home front yet, but if you connect the dots in the business world the picture becomes crystal clear. For years, Microsoft has had a product called Azure Active Directory which copies your company's domain information to Azure so your employees have a single, company-managed signon for Exchange Server, Teams, Office 365, and anything else that can hook AAD. Microsoft Intune is their cloud-manage device management system, which I think another Kiwi said they're working hard to obsolete Group Policy and get people to migrate over to Intune. I have not used Intune yet, so I don't know what it can do beyond what the marketing retards say.
I think you can bypass all of this with an unattended answer file. Never used one; for now on Windows 11 Pro disconnecting from all networks entirely and using the Shift + F10 and OOBE /BYPASSNRO backdoor is still good enough for me.
The biggest complaint since day one has been the TPM 2.0 and the arbitrary Intel Kaby Lake/AMD Zen minimum requirements leaving billions of older but still serviceable PCs stranded. Since Windows 11 came out, I have also noticed that Microsoft is hard at work effectively making core components of the OS - like the taskbar and parts of Explorer - into Electron webapps. Seriously, install Windows 11 in a VM without Internet, pull up Task Manager, and you'll see a few dozen MSEDGE.EXE processes running in the background. Kill them, and bits of the UI start breaking.
I think they wanna do that. But I don't think it will actually happen. Its all dependent on internet access. What happens if some idiot cuts the demark cable for an entire building? I guess the company loses money. Sorry employees, go home. And even though companies like Dell and Lenovo would love to sell a cheap product at markup, they do depend business through support and repeated sales. So I don't think they would be happy to just sell a thin client only to major businesses and that's it. This idea you propose requires MS to flip the table over the tech sector house of cards is built upon and everyone being fine with it. I don't see it.
Does Win11 still refuse to run on any machine that doesn't have those special chips like what was happening when it was first released? If so, that can't be good for businesses to shell out a fuck-ton of money for new PC's even if they are under contract. Is the OS also still dependant on Edge at all times or is that no longer a thing?
Remember when Windows 10 came out and every retard said they would pry 7 out of their cold dead hands then those same retards started praising Windows 10?
You forget that all of these tech companies believe that 10Gbps service is commonplace to every home in America. Why else do we have 200GB day one game patches? And, everything that happens inside a business requires Internet access in some form these days anyway. Everything has some sort of "offline mode" that syncs your stuff back up to the cloud when Internet gets brought back online. Maybe these hypothetical Windows 365 terminals will offer a little bit of storage space for such a scenario. Microsoft also sells a product called Azure HCI which I think is intended to be an on-premises middleman between your local infrastructure and Azure? Everything I can find about Azure HCI is so full of marketing buzzwords I can't actually tell what Azure HCI is used for.
TPM 2.0 is sill a hard requirement in Windows 11, but it can by bypassed with registry tweaks. Microsoft is also hard at work rewriting the Windows 11 UI to run as a webapp, so Edge is still a hard dependency.
The M$ bugmen can pry Windows 10 LTSC from my cold dead hands.
I once made the mistake of recommending Manjaro to a non-technical friend. Then one day he brought his laptop to me and told me that he bricked his laptop by installing VLC. Never again will I recommend any Arch-based distro. Mint is solid but Fedora Silverblue is my distro of choice these days, even for my own use.
If anything the current version of Windows is less held together by duct tape and spit than usual - one of the VERY few good things the migration off of XP and onto Vista accomplished is that it let them clear out 20 years of crusty NT 4.0 code that was totally holding the OS back.
Fedora Silverblue is basically the Cadillac of Linux distros and if Gaben can ever get SteamOS to work as a better emulation layer than Wine it will immediately become my daily driver
Speaking as a Win7 dead-ender, the situation with Windows 10 has improved significantly since its initial release. You can debloat it and turn off most of the telemetry without having it all "grow back" at the next Windows update now. The initial FUD around LTSC versions has been debunked, and there are a lot of good tools, scripts, and tweaks available to secure your installation and get back to a Win7-style experience.
Makes sense. MacOS feels (and even kinda looks) like the world's most polished Linux distro.
