More like MS enabling Bitlocker and causing data loss without the user knowing about it, something that’s been pissing a lot of people off lately, and forced obsolescence refers to Win11 blocking everything prior to Zen+ and Coffee Lake, compounded with Win10 going EOL soon, which has at least the intended effect of making people buy a new PC even if their old PC is still good otherwise, and not all people are comfortable with having to sign up for an online account just to install their OS and would rather make a local account if possible; MS recently axed the workaround which enabled that for the consumer versions of Windows.

Also, I didn’t know local backups of your data ala simply copying it to an external drive at the minimum, weren’t an option that existed anymore. sarcasm

So, forced Bitlocker, forced obsolescence of otherwise still viable hardware, forced online accounts, and having Copilot/Recall shoved down your throat for the versions of that OS that a normal consumer can legally and readily obtain, make Win11 the best PC OS?

I mean, sure, you can get LTSC and Win11 even has an LTSC version, but unless you’re a large corporation, there’s no legal way for you to get it, the only legal versions a normal consumer can get are Home or Pro as those are readily available on the retail circuit, and if you bought an OEM prebuilt from any big box store, one can just download the normal Win11 ISO from MS and it should auto-activate to whatever version that system came preinstalled with, which is typically Home, and those are the versions that treat their users like hot trash, Home especially.

Windows 11 is the best Windows OS, and arguably PC OS, there has ever been.

I was thinking more in terms of MS locking out everything prior to Coffee Lake or Zen+ from running Win11, rendering a lot of otherwise still viable hardware obsolete, killing off Win10 GAC, and essentially forcing the purchase of a new PC with Win11 installed.

That’s odd given GCN1 and 2 will fully work in Linux with a compatibility toggle to enable AMDGPU support set in the kernel parameters, and GCN3 and newer natively supports AMDGPU without that toggle being required.

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.

amdgpu.si_support=1 amdgpu.cik_support=1

Except AFAIK loose mainboards aimed at the DIY market, as well as barebones kits, don’t ship with SecureBoot turned on by default and an off switch for that is mandatory to the PC spec.

If Win11 adoption is really massive, it’s because MS forced it down people’s throats.

So you’re suggesting MS will somehow block non-Windows OSes from installing, even on hardware like loose mainboards for building your own PC with, or even on barebones mini PC kits or certain laptop SKUs, which don’t ship with an OS installed to begin with and expect the user to install it themselves? I mean, unless something extreme happens like changing the entire PC platform to be like the current Macs, that won’t be feasible.

Also, doing that would kill the Steam Deck which I doubt Valve would take sitting down.

Good luck locking loose mainboards sold for the DIY market, which don’t come with anything installed by default, to a given OS, the only way that could maybe work is forcing the OS in ROM.

Another way would be to discontinue the socketed desktop form factors and replace them all with mini PCs that are as locked down as the current Macs.

Good thing PCs aren’t locked into Windows.

I’ve been happily running the mesa-dev stack (mesa-tkg-git from the chaotic-aur repo) both on semi-current hardware (an RX 6600 that’s sidelined by a bad fan atm) and somewhat older hardware (the Vega 56 I’m using as a backup because it’s my second best card after the RX 6600) for a while now so I don’t know what you’re doing.

This is tragically ironic given Metal Gear Rising was recently ported to GOG.

I hope I’m not the only one in here who nuked my Reddit account voluntarily after they started ramping up censorship.

Basically, I saw what was coming and bailed off that site while I was still ahead.

That I played with on an old Pentium II rig? The now-defunct Crunchbang (Bunsen Labs is that distro’s successor).

That I actually used as a daily driver? Ubuntu 12.10.

I’ve been daily-driving Linux for well over a decade at this point and have pretty much settled on Arch now after multiple distro-hops in that timespan.

I ditched Reddit because the writing’s on the wall for them becoming a complete hellscape with their ramping up of censorship recently, and I jumped ship before that Titanic of a platform sinks.

The Steam Deck is at least trying to attract the casual users in, and I feel like the Switch 2 getting hammered with bad press right now and getting destroyed by the Nintendo fanbase might convert a few people over to the Steam Deck too.