I don't want to motivate anyone to switch back to Windows (because Microsoft), but for anyone who doesn't want to or can't switch, but also doesn't want to endure Microsoft's chosen way of entirely ignoring user needs but instead focusing on squeezing money out of them through ads and the collection of user data in Windows 10 and 11, check out the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC version! It's still supported 'til 2031 iirc. Plus, as it's meant to Enterprises and IoT systems, it's stripped from all the ads, bloatware, and what not. When I installed it first one year ago, I was just sad that I didn't know it earlier. It's everything I ever wanted Windows to be: lean, fast, and (somewhat) minimalistic, at least compared to stock Windows 10.
Can't 100% say whether Windows 11 IoT LTSC is equally good, but from what I've read it also is worth considering.
> after you install Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation, you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.
> after you install Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation, you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.
I was already sold; you don't have to convince me.
The fact that this is even brought up as a solution really speaks to how bad Windows is.
i was going to say something similar. the fact that a version of windows that is designed for IoT devises is still usable as a desktop is absolutely ridiculous. imagine using OpenWRT as a desktop...
It's not designed for IoT devices per se, the naming is just terrible. A comparison to OpenWrt is not warranted here, although to reiterate, the naming is terrible.
In a way, it is for "IoT" devices...but enterprisey things. Where I work we have it on a few devices that I guess you could call an "IoT" device. Unattended driver kiosks for truck scales, manufacturing equipment that requires windows, industrial control panels, etc.
That's what it is for. A lot of this stuff uses really old software, some of which the vendor doesn't even exist anymore, and it only runs on Windows so these control panels and devices need windows (unless you manage to get some of it working on wine but that's usually not viable in these cases).
So yeah, it's supposed to be a full desktop, because these devices often require it to some extent, albeit a little slimmed down and LTS.
I think HN would be surprised to learn just how many devices run windows out there in the world outside of silicon valley. Windows is everywhere you'd hope never to see it running at.
well, i am not surprised that anything with a GUI would run some form of windows, even ATMs. i would not have categorized them as IoT devices though, but fair point.
The recovery partition has some value. But in an OS reinstall scenario Windows.old is a much more helpful feature.
However, these features won't used by someone installing Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation (Evaluation just means that it's 90 day free trial version). This is because to aquire the non-trial version of the OS you must either be willing to license Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC from Microsoft, or crack the activation. If you crack Windows you do not need the 90 day free trial! And any company which has institutional knowledge of what an LTSC edition is, is capable of running the 90 day trial in a non destructive way (pro tip: put your new OS on a new drive and keep your old drive in a drawer).
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is the best version of Windows 11 I have ever tried, no contest.
Can a legitimate LTSC licence be bought by a standard user? I couldn't manage it and instead had to resort to Windows Server 2025.
It is a tiny bit of a mess to setup on gaming computers because of lack of drivers (for the drivers which cannot be downloaded from the manufacturer site, need to get a Windows 11 install, let it download/install all the drivers as needed, then use pnputil to export them and import them in Windows Server) but I did manage to find a likely-legitimate seller (referenced on the Microsoft website as a partner) selling licenses for legitimate-looking prices. The price goes up with the amount of cores, happy I didn't have a Threadripper.
Also some issues here and there (such as needing a registry change to enable clipboard history, Meta Link not supporting showing the desktop or headset audio (could maybe use the pnputil trick for that)) that I didn't have with the LTSC evaluation.
My theory is that Microsoft offers LTSC IoT in part as a bone to throw the vocal complainants (read: people who use HN) - and that the terrible name is to dissuade standard users.
I just reinstalled my own system with a combination of LTSC and Linux (currently looking at a riced Hyprland on CachyOS) with the understanding that there will be occasional annoyances (but still less so than consumer W11)
Pro isn't ad-free by default. With appropriate regedits/privacy scripts/tools you can make it ad-free until an update inevitably reverts/"upgrades" some part of it. It's not hard to maintain it in this state but you are fighting against what microsoft wants the OS to be when you do this.
I've never had a Windows update revert anything like that. I turned this stuff off 3 years ago and haven't had to do anything since. I think this is just FUD that people earnestly believe and repeat because it sounds like something they think Microsoft would do.
Every upgrade you have have to go back and turn/GPO off various Copilot, MSN ads-in-your-start-menu and MSFT Rewards (the f that even is?) things. Same thing for Edge; drove me back to firefox.
The app is virtually indifferent to what it looked like literally 4 years ago, apart from having some more rounded edges and some different animations. I know there will have been some required changes from Apple/Google, but it will not be a lot. Also, the sync is nice, but if the 5 MBs of metadata are so expensive why not change that to use GDrive/iCloud instead or allow to locally sync your progress?
The app and their service is not worth the extremely high cost of a mere podcast player which downloads data from external sources and plays it on my phone. I also paid for Pocket Casts Plus when it was ,99 or $2 (I don't remember) per month because I liked to upload my own podcast files, but since it was raised to idk 4$ I am not ready to pay anymore.
While true, at least in my understanding of the world there is a massive difference in people involved in CSAM and people watching porn. The latter one is probably like 80% of humans with access to internet, the first one is hopefully a tiny bit smaller. Also, people are probably very aware that the latter is widely allowed and done by mostly everyone, and the first one is highly illegal, highly enforced and morally completely wrong.
I would not mind browsing porn on my work PC. I wouldn't do it, but I would not have a very bad feeling while or after it, because so be it. I don't think my employer can fire me for that.
This is wrong. Yes, they require constant maintenance. But that maintenance is pretty limited in scope, if it is required even. All they have to do is to push some updates once or twice a year at max, and maybe update the usage of some APIs. It's not like these companies can't do it. In the grand scheme they wouldn't even notice it if one of their developers would do that.
It's that they just don't want to. They're greedy as hell, and they don't care about you.
Even if it would be too much work at one point, e.g. if Apple would finally update their Bluetooth stack more often then every 10 years, and the API completely changes. Why not just open source the whole app, or at least their interface so independent developers could develop something so not all of their products need to go into the waste? Because even in this hypothetical scenario, one thing holds true: They're greedy and they don't care about you.
> I certainly hope my medical team is using AI tools, as they have been repeatedly demonstrated to be more accurate than doctors.
AI is not a new tool - transformer-based LLMs are. Which is what this post is about.
The latter are very known to be a LOT LESS accurate, and still are very prone to hallucinate. This is just a fact. For your health I hope no one of your medical team is using the current generation for anything else than casual questions.
I'm not an opponent, and I don't think straight up banning LLM-generated code commits is the right thing, but I can understand their stance.
Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content? Clients or servers for other open standards?
No, which means you’ll never see them get the level of polish or investment that closed stuff gets. Because when it’s closed you can make people pay or monetize it with advertising.
I’m not cheering for this. Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m pointing out why things are this way.
A major problem is that while free software efforts can build working software, it often takes orders of magnitude more work to make software mere mortals can use. That kind of UI/UX polish is also the work programmers hate doing, so you have to pay them to do it. Therefore closed stuff always wins on UI/UX. That means it always takes the network effect. UX polish is the moat that free has never been able to cross.
If the "spy on users and sell the data" business model were illegal, you bet your ass people would pay for chat. People were paying per message to send SMS once upon a time!
You’re right, but browsers are free because their cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the profits a monopolized browser status quo provides, for Windows/Office in 90s snd search/ads with Google. MS started it with free IE and Google improved upon their strategy.
One, corporate cash is just as good as people cash. Two, people absolutely paid for WhatsApp before it was acquired. And three, I am a people and I personally pay for Microsoft 365 and on occasion have used Teams.
B2B sales by definition is where the buyer is not the user. The software doesn’t have to be anything the end user wants or have a good user experience. In corporate sells, it often just has to be in the right upper quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Square.
They definitely weren’t bought by corporations because they care about open standards or great UX.
Closed source sells because open source devs don't know sales or marketing. In many cases, developers are the only users that the devs even acknowledge.
Just look at the successful/popular open source projects. There are nearly no paid open source apps, though most of everything is turning into software as a service.
Open source is built in such a way as to make outside investment very difficult to justify by most private investors. Why pay good money for something you already get for free? This is a flawed metaphor, because investors aren't purchasing anything, as investment isn't a transaction, but I think that's why we don't see more sales and investment in open source. It seems fundamentally ill-suited toward those aims and ends.
I think successful open source businesses are outliers, and as such are pretty interesting. The only recently founded one I can think of that does hardware is Flipper Zero. I'm sure there are others.
I'd be curious about who others think are the outliers in this reading, as those are folks whose work I'd love to hear about.
Can't 100% say whether Windows 11 IoT LTSC is equally good, but from what I've read it also is worth considering.
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