LOL! That's my entire response.

Such as? They're better by far AFAI've seen.

He's not saying AMD processors are bad, he's saying that AMD will also not be providing drivers for older versions of Windows. So the anti-consumerist practice you mentioned applies to both Intel and AMD.

I'm not really sure what Windows 10 offers me that I would choose it over Windows 7. However, I realise I can't speak for other users. Personally I've realised that it's better to have a consistent experience for longer rather than trying to have the latest and greatest and continually spending valuable time on learning to support it.

So looking at it from Microsoft's point of view, what benefit does Microsoft get from Windows 10 versus Windows 7? They're giving it away for free so we can rule out that they trying to force more sales in the short run. In the long run, we can expect them to try to make their operating system dominant over more types of devices in the future, thus expanding their market.

Hardware vendors will support whatever dominant operating systems there are, so if Windows 10 becomes dominant for good reason, then I can understand them wanting to drop supporting drivers for less popular operating systems.

So that leaves developers. I believe Windows 10 is supposed to offer a unified code base across PCs, tablets and smartphones, so perhaps that's a good reason to push Windows 10 as it will lower the development costs for programmers since their programs will support more devices and hence the cost of software programs should fall in general?

If Windows remains the dominent OS, they can make a lot money off the extras and spinoffs, by releasing Windows-specific software and tooling: Sell office for a hundred bucks, sell Visual Studio for a couple of hundred bucks to developers making software for Windows, sell Windows Server for a thousand bucks to admins that are hooked on Windows. Charge hardware manufacturers for that coveted "For Windows" sticker, etc.

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft has been making most of it's money from the Enterprise and its peripheral technologies for a very long time now and it's probably what pisses me the most about the Microsoft experience: Not the fact that you pay a, relatively minimal, fee for the regular version of the OS, but that you are locked in the Microsoft ecosystem which is both restrictive and a money drain if you aren't a fortune 500 company.

They've recently made strides to shake some of that heavy-handedness off (open-sourcing .Net, supporting Node.js and various open tools on their platforms, working on support for containers, etc) and I think it's great. However, they are doing it as a reaction to changing realities in a marketplace where Windows is only dominant on the desktop whose share of the market is rapidly shriking (servers, embedded device, smartphones, heck even supercomputers... they lose to Unix/Linux in every other market).

In comparison, the Linux community does the open ecosystem thing better, has been doing it for a lot longer and actually wants to do it: no coercision from the market is necessary.

We could argue Apple has been doing this for longer ;)

But if Microsoft wants to adopt the Apple approach, I'm more than happy to give Linux a serious look for personal use.

Mind you, I just realised my argument above is a little ironic about Apple since as other posters have said, I also use iTunes for Windows a fair bit.

I've been noticing many laptops coming with Win10 preinstalled lately, and so happens that the new laptop I got yesterday was one of them.

The OS annoyed me within the first 20mins where it has a been a pain to setup the user account, it was a bunch of settings and then the "taking care of a few things" screen which took like forever without giving me any idea what it was doing.

It didn't last for long after that though as I didn't bother to explore the OS any further after the desktop, as 5mins later I turned off Secure boot, wiped the entire drive including the recovery partition and installed Linux.

It still feels to me that Win10, like Win8 is clunky and bloated.

im going to hold out as long as possible against win 10, i started out with wanting it and signed up for it but the constant in your face and behind the scenes shinanigans they are doing to force this onto the whole populace has made me very anti win 10. I do believe that it will be nearly impossible to not get it in the long run, especially if they are going to start tying in pc components to win 10 exclusive.

Umm, that just means that MS is doing an incompetent job of designing their OS. My FreeBSD desktop will happily run code from over 20 years ago with relatively minor tweaks by the end user. Last time I ran old code it required a couple lines added to a couple configuration files. Not much work at all.

I think what you mean is that MS chooses to cripple their OS to force people to upgrade more frequently and developers deal with a ton of MS shit on a daily basis.
Or pretty much anything that isn't Windows. Apart from a small number of obscure hobbyist OSes, it's hard to find an OS that's worse than Windows. It's pretty much the OS equivalent of a turd sandwich.

That reminds me, I wonder what's up with Haiku OS, that seemed like an interesting one.

Well I just did accumulated updates for Windows 10 and it literally broke my system. After a lot of restarts I thought I was done. After leaving my computer for a while (Most stuffs seemed to work.) I now have a black screen where I can only see my mouse marker and the COMODO firewall monitor up in the right corner. Bollocks!

Edit: Reboot doesn't help and the only thing that responds are COMODO. Nothing else at all.

Reminds me, long ago with Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 where you'd install a windows program (Say, Office or Flight simulator or something) and it would come up with a note 'checking hard drive for ample space' for like 45 seconds, when i can just glance at the C drive and see there was 800Mb free, more than enough for the job.

I really have no clue what it's really doing. Clunky as hell...

I'd have done that too... Probably from the start.

It benefits them in a number of ways. It helps to reinforce lock-in, keeping users tethered to their ecosystem & making it more difficult to move to competing products (primarily Android and Linux, but also MacOS/iOS). Also they're shifting focus towards "services", which includes Windows as a central component... think about how tightly Microsoft's other services are tied into it; the Windows store, their cloud services etc.

And don't forget all the data mining; Windows 10 is "free" in much the same way that Google's services & Android are. The information they can collect is extremely valuable to advertisers, and Microsoft could even push advertisements to users directly through Windows itself.

I wouldn't be surprised if Windows ends up being made free (or close to free) on a permanent basis and users end up having to pay for extra features & support as time goes on, as opposed to buying a new version of Windows every few years.

Probably not going to happen. They've been at it for many, many years and they still haven't hit 1.0. And in that time Windows has had several new releases.

After all the MS shenanigans over the last few years, I'm not surprised.
Another article on The Register, reporting the same thing:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/18/microsoft_vendors_join_in_perfect_harmony_to_praise_windows_10/

Microsoft's struggle to get everyone on board Windows 10, would be hilarious if it wasn't so pretentious.
It's like watching someone failing to lead rats to a garbage can... or ants to a picnic. - with a poisonous stench.

My next PC: Linux + VMs all the way! :)

(PS: I think I'm missing the days when Steve Ballmer was in charge of MS. :P)