Yesterday when I booted my windows 10 desktop PC I got a bunch of popups (Win32 MessageBox) about errors in some O365 AI dll files.
Turns out some MS AI software was silently installed on my PC in late may.
I do not have MS Office or anything that should require any AI software.
I left Windows 11. The last straw wasn’t Microsoft accounts or Windows updates. I actually thought the OS was fine, most OS updates actually added great new features, and anything I considered an annoyance was easy to disable permanently.
Toss your Windows 11 ISO into Rufus and disabling things like Microsoft account requirements is a trivial process.
What I actually rage quit Windows over was AMD graphics drivers and a couple of my video games crashing.
What caught me by surprise is just how little I’d miss it. I thought I’d need to dual boot or run a Windows VM for little random things. Nope, I just don’t need them.
I didn’t expect to find an OS with more software that I tend to like better. Like my email client, where I moved from Thunderbird to Evolution and for the most part I find that to be a step up in user experience.
Linux has been usable for non proprietary software for decades now. The fact that people are refusing to jump ship even when Windows actively undermines them and itself speaks volumes of people's aversion (or inability) to switch OSes.
It depends on the type of software a user runs. I installed Windows 10 LTSC on a friend's computer last year thinking she could run it for at least 5 more years and just ignore the newer Windows 11/12/whatever.
But she needed Intuit TurboTax 2025 and it requires Windows 11 and it's a hard requirement. The installer aborts on Windows 10. It's not a soft requirement like Adobe where they only support Windows 11 but their installer still runs on Windows 10. Autodesk Fusion 360 is another example that requires Windows 11.
I'm guessing if there's a future Windows 12, Intuit TurboTax will be aggressive about making it a requirement that forces the issue even though nobody wants to upgrade to it.
I would add that I've also used Windows 11 IoT LTSC and that experience is very similar to Windows 10 IoT LTSC.
The same holes exists and have existed for some time already. If he was not worried about them before why be worried about them now? And if you're worried about security holes why not be worried about the ones that exist now?
In general I find it funny that some people think that system is "secure" when it's on the latest version. At time t0 version N is considered "secure" then an update is made at t1 with version N1 and suddenly N is no longer secure. But it didn't change... it's the same version it was before.
Fact is a computer system is never going to be 100% secure.
So till november 2026 or so everything is fine. Then I will probably have to switch to Linux.
The biggest attack vectors are the browser, the mail client and direct network access. I would never use outlook, edge or connect my computer directly without NAT or firewall to the open internet. And would never open a website without a add blocker.
You can count all other known big attacks(on unpatched Windows 7!!!) on one hand.
1) Remote execution via Wifi Stack
2) Remote execution via True Type Fonts
3) 0-Click code execution via USB Stick Icon processing
Windows update instead gives AT LEAST Microsoft a steady remote code execution on your and millions of other computers. It's a really interesting attack target when you go big. Why I should trust M$ to get the security there right?
I joke
[1] https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts