We are doing a review of all of our software to prep for Windows 11 right now. It’s not going nearly as well as you think because not all software is consumer-grade.
Not too long ago a bunch of our scientific devices got knocked out by Microsoft fixing an old serial bug. Turns out all the software to run these was built to workaround the bug and quite a few of these items are long since unsupported (or the vendor is gone). Some of these are tens of thousands of dollars, we can’t just replace these on a whim.
I’m aware not all software is consumer grade. And many depts like sci/lad/manufacturing/medical definitely have more to worry about with upgrades. Windows 11 is a shit show even at the consumer level, I’d hate to be managing a migration to it for an office, let alone any dept relying on custom hardware. But blaming windows for something that would just as easily happen on a linux machine is a bit disingenuous. Upgrades break shit across all the OSes. I’ve had to rebuild linux servers because an upgrade would break them and keeping them air gapped on a closed loop wasn’t an option.
The difference is that if an upgrade breaks a Linux install (which is much rarer in my experience) I can often simply change the setting, revert the update, use a different distro/version, or even undo the change myself. Hell if it’s was kernel deep, nothing stops you from recompiling yourself, if the problem warrants it.
We can more easily run special Linux versions in a virtual machine without having to do a bunch of registry/gp magic and hope it sticks because Microsoft likes to force updates through your settings anyway.
There are more options for dealing with problems and they suck less.
We are doing a review of all of our software to prep for Windows 11 right now. It’s not going nearly as well as you think because not all software is consumer-grade.
Not too long ago a bunch of our scientific devices got knocked out by Microsoft fixing an old serial bug. Turns out all the software to run these was built to workaround the bug and quite a few of these items are long since unsupported (or the vendor is gone). Some of these are tens of thousands of dollars, we can’t just replace these on a whim.
I’m aware not all software is consumer grade. And many depts like sci/lad/manufacturing/medical definitely have more to worry about with upgrades. Windows 11 is a shit show even at the consumer level, I’d hate to be managing a migration to it for an office, let alone any dept relying on custom hardware. But blaming windows for something that would just as easily happen on a linux machine is a bit disingenuous. Upgrades break shit across all the OSes. I’ve had to rebuild linux servers because an upgrade would break them and keeping them air gapped on a closed loop wasn’t an option.
The difference is that if an upgrade breaks a Linux install (which is much rarer in my experience) I can often simply change the setting, revert the update, use a different distro/version, or even undo the change myself. Hell if it’s was kernel deep, nothing stops you from recompiling yourself, if the problem warrants it.
We can more easily run special Linux versions in a virtual machine without having to do a bunch of registry/gp magic and hope it sticks because Microsoft likes to force updates through your settings anyway.
There are more options for dealing with problems and they suck less.