Back in January Microsoft encrypted all my hard drives without saying anything. I was playing around with a dual boot yesterday and somehow aggravated Secureboot. So my C: panicked and required a 40 character key to unlock.
Your key is backed up to the Microsoft account associated with your install. Which is considerate to the hackers. (and saved me from a re-install) But if you've got an unactivated copy, local account, or don't know your M$ account credentials, your boned.
Control Panel > System Security > Bitlocker Encryption.
BTW, I was aware that M$ was doing this and even made fun of the effected users. Karma.
I still don't understand why there is no other mainstream os in competition alongside MS except IOs, I wouldn't call Linux mainstream of course, don't you think that's a bit weird?!
MS abused its monopoly in the 90s. The Clinton administration was too lenient, then the Bush admin kowtowed completely. Now, there's largely no chance for another operating system to compete.
Why so! and what Clinton and Bush have to do with an operating system that is used globally!? I think you overestimate MS
I'm not sure how to explain the concept of walled gardens to people who grew up with four websites. In the 90s, most software was "shareware", you could try it out for as long as you wanted, but businesses were expected to buy licenses.
MS used it's dominant operating system to drive web browser competitors out of business. This is illegal. The whole concept of capitalism is built around competition, but MS used it's power to stifle ' innovation. The Clinton administration beat MS in court, then the Bush Administration dropped the case before the appeal was heard. If they hadn't done that, instead had broken up Google, Meta, Apple, and the lot of them, the world would be a lot different now.
Right wing politicians will always be in favour of big corporations, they pay good money
And big corportations will always pay good money, so long as it makes/saves them money in the future
Microsoft is almost good as dead. These days, Linux takes just as much maintenance as XP used to. They've got maybe 5 years left until laptops start shipping with alternatives to Windows. My bet is it's going to be SteamOS.
There are already big brands offering laptops with linux in lieu of windows.
Microsoft is thriving and will continue to do so, just probably on machines running Linux.
They get paid $$ per month per employee by most businesses in the developed world.
There is a mature alternative to desktop Windows now. But there isn't for AD, Azure, Exchange, Kerberos and M365.
My bad, I meant their consumer grade stuff.
I would generally agree with you on their cloud/server solutions. However, I do think AWS will get there some day.
I have way less maintenance to do than on my old XP machine.
And considering all the shenanigans Microsoft does starting with 10, I guess this still holds up.
Maybe SteamOS Lite if the device doesn't have a proper GPU.
iGPUs are more than enough to play most indie games.
Even older dGPUs like the R9 270/270X or 280/280X, hell, even the R9 290/290X or 390/390X (R9 390/290X is just a faster 290/290X which ships with 8GB VRAM as standard issue), while admittedly pushing it a little, will also work fine for most indie titles and even truly ancient (as in DX9-era and earlier, think stuff like Silent Hill 2 which launched in 2002 for the PC) AAA stuff, you'll just need to manually enable a compatibility toggle for GCN1 or GCN2 cards to work with AMDGPU in DIY distros like Arch or Gentoo while last time I thought some prebuilt distros like Fedora enabled it by default.
These are the compatibility toggles you'll need to set in kernel parameters for GCN1 and GCN2 cards to work with AMDGPU if they're not set already. GCN3 and newer natively supports AMDGPU without needing said toggles.
If you don't just look at desktop computers, GNU/Linux and Android/Linux are the most used operating systems in the world (not sure which is in the lead).
If you look only at desktop computers, the most used OS is Minix, which is installed on most Intel CPUs and motherbords.
no, most users just dont want to put in any work in learning something new