Praise be to our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds!

i think that's miku, actually

When I first got windows 10, I hated it. Then time went on and my hate flowered into a deep loathing. When it was time to say goodbye, I thought about all the times I hated that OS.

I can only tell Goku and Miku from that image, no idea about the other girls

Stockholm syndrome?

I believe the other two are Umamusume

it's gold ship from umamusume, kasane teto from internet and tokō madobe from windows

Our family PC still has 8.1 (parents really don't like change and Firefox got security updates until recently). I think I'll upgrade it to 10 when I have time, the amount of debloat required to keep it sane is manageable as opposed to 11. Mom could handle mildly riced XFCE Linux with Firefox and our legal copy of Office 2007 under Wine but dad uses Total Commander and won't use anything other than drive letters.

get the iot ltsc version, it's the only sane option rn

Hell no, fuck Windows 10 too. It’s what started a lot of the bullshit we’re dealing with today.

Man 8.1 Metro was the worst UI pick Windows has had

We've been using Classic Shell since Day 1 of course. I modded it to quit qBittorrent when Mom opens the Shutdown dialog* (yes, she always opens that awful window) because that takes the longest to terminate. I'll use it plus Explorer Patcher on 10, a semi-transparent taskbar without blur is so handy

* Classic Shell Start Menu can run arbitrary and predefined commands from buttons but not both at once. The Shutdown dialog can only be triggered with a predefined CSSM command or JS script so I'm using a VBS script (unlike BAT or JS, it can run silently) that runs the JS script and taskkill command.

Im loving Bazzite.

Except for the whole "now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can't figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware"

Sorry, why do you need new hardware? Bazzite doesn't detect them?

Are you sure you mounted the drives correctly?

the only sane windows left

Windows 8.1 exists.

sane

Windows 8

...are you ok? 🤨

Edit: guess the .1 WAS significant! I sit corrected!

A suggestion:

Dual boot!

Call the Linux partition "Mom's speed machine" and the old Windows 8.1 partition "Dad's slow shitheap".

Make the Linux partition as easy and intuitive to use as possible. Let the Windows partition rot.

I'm sure dad will come around pretty soon when he sees mom's sleek setup and he gets a pang of jealousy.

Good luck!

"I love Linux except for <devastating hardware compatibility issue>"

Sounds frustrating, I wonder if anyone's ever had that kind of problem?

Windows 10, the last "sane" Windows. Bruh, this is where the bullshit started.

No XP was where the bullshit started. I quit windows then.

2000 was the last sane (and maybe only) windows.

Why did did it start at XP? I'm too young to remember.

Not a hardware issue; Linux handles NVMe and SATA drives just fine. They probably encrypted everything with BitLocker. Of course Linux can't access an SSD encrypted using a proprietary Microsoft software with keys that may no longer be accessible.

No, XP started the bullshit we are dealing with today.

8.1. That's different. It was also IIRC the last Windows version without any sort of AI, enforced telemetry or any of that crap.

Luckily there is a new publicly known backdoor so they might be in the clear.

XP ruled idk what they're on about. Windows 8 really began the death knell of Windows IMO. A new UI people didnt want or like forced down your throat. They started their new hideous and confusing design language, which led to the truly abhorrent Windows 10 half-baked replacement for the control panel. Then the ads. Spyware baked in. Vibe coded start menu that takes 300ms to open. Sigh.

Not Bazzite, this one doesn't handle NVMe NTFS for whatever reason, unless that was changed in the last year. The only distro I've seen with that issue, and I've used 4 (okay 3 of them were Ubuntu or based on it).

Source: had to reformat my data (games) drive. Fortunately, Pop_OS could do that just fine.

Windows 8 with its over simplified UI style was to accommodate the fact that corporate users wanted to do RDP over slow connections from laptops made between 2007 and 2012, remember how fucked those things were?

Windows 10 only exists because of how much Windows 8 sucked.

Windows 7 also only exists because of how much Windows Vista sucked lol.

XP and 7 was Microsoft at their best. They'll never reach those heights ever again.

Linux actually can mount Bitlocker drives, even automatically, but you need the key which is usually stored in the TPM which I'm pretty sure you need to boot with secure boot to get working in Linux.

If you still have Windows, it's way easier to just set a secondary key and use that instead.

On a related note, I would actually recommend weighing the benefit of using LUKS because even with AES-256 hardware acceleration, it can significantly reduce your performance depending on your CPU.

Except for the whole “now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can’t figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware”

Do you mean reading the data or deleting the data?

"last sane windows left"

And the bullshit started a long time before that. I think people were complaining about win95 phoning home to MS.

Off topic but I always thought Vista was pretty good. A lot of the stuff people hated was just change. Things like UAC are normal now, can you image how bad it would be if everything still ran as administrator? Vista basically threw itself on the grenade.

I use Linux by the way, don’t lynch me.

XP ruled idk what they're on about. Windows 8 really began the death knell of Windows IMO.

Yeah XP was great. I would even say Windows 7 was the pinnacle. The best modern Windows before it started to enshittify.

Sanity died with XP (sp3)

Reading. Then deleting.

They're NTFS. Bazzite didnt like it when I tried to access them.

Ah okay, is it because of Bitlocker?

yup. Windows 10 made me switch to Linux. About twice a year, always a couple times a year, for whatever reason Windows 10 would essentially kill my wifi card on my laptop. reinstalling drivers didn't work, physically unplugging the card from the mobo and plugging it back in didn't work. nothing worked. the ONLY thing that would work? reinstalling the entire OS. I had to do this twice a year. they'd release some update and just nuke the wifi card.

So finally I decided to give Linux a go cause I had enough. been using Linux ever since. and the thing with Linux is that it made me fall back in love with using the computer again. with tinkering and customizing and everything. made me fall back in love with my development work because of the sheer ease of doing dev stuff on linux especially with NixOS. playing around with various configs and modules and what have you is fun. maintaining random packages is fun. hell even just maintaining my nixos git repo is fun. It's a blast.

Mate! If your hardware is good enough, then download windows 11 from massgrave.dev and then use this unattended method, which lets you turn off all the crap including TPM and BitLocked and all ai and o365 teams bollocks.

Source: me using windows for work

Probably they hate XP because it introduced Windows Activation Services for the first time.

That said, XP did suck. Windows 7 and Windows 2000 were the best editions of Windows IMHO.

Vista was OK, once it had its bugs worked out with UAC. XP had tons of security problems. Windows 8 actively hated people who had keyboards and mice for some reason. Windows 10 was shoved full of telemetry, which Windows 11 has taken to the max, plus added AI slop.

Plug them into a non-gaming Linux distro like Fedora. It'll read them no problem unless they're Bitlocker encrypted. Then reformat them in Bazzite so you can use them for storage.

I like how everyone glosses over Windows ME existing

there are tons of ofms for linux. show him gnome commander or krusader to start with.

8.1 was a very different os to 8. it was basically windows 10 light, all the features people were wowed by in 10 originated in 8 and were polished up in 8.1. it made the metro interface optional and brought back the start menu, improved performance, and was altogether a pretty pleasant experience.

Reformatting isn't going to change how your SSD is electrically connected to your mainboard. Do you actually mean NTFS?

I suppose a distro might ship without NTFS-3g or the ability to install it, although Bazzite should be able to at least read NTFS.

I write about this one a lot, because people have forgotten how bad it was, thinking only today is bad. So let me grab my notes and copy and paste some detials:

They started product activation tied to hardware ID. They created tiers of what you purchased. WGA phoned home to Windows servers, and they ran programs in the background to check on your computer. All of the "validate before you download" started with Windows, IE, Media Player, Defender, and Office here at XP, and expanded every year to today.

They started forcing bundled applications and lied to consumers that they could not be separated (explorer and media player for example). They even offered software that would "remove" these types of packages, but it didn't, and this was after they said only third party tools could do it.

They began the cut-off dates to force hardware upgrades and windows upgrades.

They bundled messenger into XP and tried to get people to use MS Passport accounts. If you didn't use passport, you could not download music from the windows store. This was the beginnings of required windows accounts. They used the passport ID's to tie together users and specific hardware.

They used registration screens to trick users into thinking they had to have a passport just to access the internet. An online privacy organization got involved when they realized just how much data Microsoft was collecting.

MSN explorer was pushed into the start menu, and began microsofts efforts of getting people over to MSN to see ads. There was even a time it would do pop up ads for microsoft dial up, msn messenger, and premium subscription services.

Then there is Active X, tied to Internet Explorer. The EU antitrust investigation was on exactly this: was IE + Active X used specifically to keep people hostage in IE.

Telemetry began here as well. Product Keys, Hardware Fingerprint, IP address, Bios info, applications installed, usage patterns and configuration. You could stop this in group policies, but who was looking at those in the consumer space? Several class action lawsuits were filed and Microsoft themselves called their daily harvest of data "personally identifiable information".

tldr; Microsoft began the tactics of telemetry, lock in, restriction of features based on software tied to hardware, and creating a account to use all the features of your computer back in the Win XP days.

Actually, what happened to win10? like much no updates, if some security hole get discovered, there wont be fix for that, sure, like it never was any extra secure in the first place... so, what changes now?

LUKS does reduce performance, but I'd argue that modern midrange or better NVME drives already vastly outclass the needs for normal users. Unless the user is doing massive audio or video encoding or using it for a heavily used database, they probably won't notice.

Source: Me, and I do the above activities and still think it's fine.