These will be the same people forever defending and holding on to 11 after 10 is dead and 12 has been out forever. Just like all times before. The people holding on to 7 are now these staunch 10 defenders after it was obvious 7 was a crutch.
The backwards compatibility starts getting unbearable after a while. XP runs like a dream on modern hardware but the fact that everything after ~2014 or so only supports 7+, there's a limit on how mucn you can do with it.
I think there is a fair balancing point between jumping on the newest release of an os, when you have an established workflow, and don't know about longevity (windows 8 had a shorter than normal support cycle) and holding on to an outdated os for ever and ever.
I don't plan on switching to win 11 anytime soon, but I eventually will I'm sure.
I was very happy with almost all windows update in the last 23 yrars. WinXp was bad for a little while but soon got good. Win Vista was terrible for a shorter period and soon got fantastic. Everything else had more good than bad from the start. Win11 had zero positive changes until the paint layers got announced, with a ton of negative changes.
This time really is different because windows is ending updates for windows 10 in 2025 AND they will not allow many computers to upgrade to windows 11, your only choice is to buy a new computer, which obviously isn't an option for everyone.
I built my gaming PC in 2017 and it still runs all the games and editing programs I want, but it is not eligible to upgrade to W11 because their DRM won't work on my processor.
No, no, I still hate 10 and refuse to use it. I keep 7 on one pc for musicbee, and that's it. Fuck windows. Fuck it in the ass without consent, using a razor studded strap on. Fuck 10, fuck 11, and definitely fuck 12
I hope you keep your win 7 isolated from the internet since it has been out of maintenence for quite a while now.
You always have to consider that probably at least 80% of the Windows code base is the same across versions. So when a current release gets a patch for a new security flaw that's a hint to the malware devs the old release is likely vulnerable too. As soon as a version gets out of maintenance its likelihood for infection rises steeply.
It's interesting how much worse this works than the Linux model of just having a single continuously updating release and trying to never break compatibility. There's stable releases with distros like Debian and branching major versions (sometimes), but updating to the next version rarely creates an actual nightmare like XP -> 7 or 7 -> 10 might.
Yeah, I use my main PC for internet access, then move files onto an external drive to transfer.
Not that I'd ever use it for anything but pirating music files at this point anyway. It's really not up to much tbh, the hardware is all old as hell, it's just fairly audio focused.