Windows 10 To Be A Free Upgrade: What Linux Users Need To Know

[yakman2020]

1st of all...it's NOT a free upgrade...you have to read "the small letters"...from AnandTech:

"The Windows 10 update will be free for all users of Windows 7 and Windows 8 for one year after launch....However, once updated to Windows 10, the device will kept current and supported over the lifetime of the device."

Try update the PC hardware, at least after that year, and goodbye to "your" "free" "license" of W10.

...also, Valve Boss was right, W8 was 1st step to Wall Garden Window$, they want to push everybody to "new" OS and to have only a single store for all Window$ apps...noticed "apps" in bold ?

M$ wants deprecate traditional programs...hell, i bet even games !

It gets better than that. The "during the first year*" part goes with the subscription. After the first year, you will have to pay a subscription fee, a la Office 365.

Exactly how much and what the frequency is anyone's guess, though the subscription cost of Office 365 should be a pretty good guide. Also, I suspect that like office 365, it will encourage/require the use of OneDrive, which also has that "first year free*" arrangement. So, after your halcyon first year free*, you too could find yourself paying $20-50 per month for the use of the hardware on your desk.

[yakman2020]

Is there something equivalent to Cortana and Holographic but in Linux? Coming from dual-booting Windows 7 and Linux to going completely Linux in November 2012 when I built my new computer, I don't have any enthusiasm for Windows 10, but if Windows is my only choice at home and at work, it will be Windows 7 with out-of-the-box Aero Glass and I don't like the new Windows 10's Start menu with tiled interfaces. And besides, I don't care for Windows Phone, but the last smartphone operating system I used is Windows Mobile 6.1 and I still like the look of the Today screen compared to Android. But since I've tried looking for Windows Mobile 6.1/6.5-lookalike widget for Android that scrolls up and down years ago, I started to forget about it. One of the nice things about Windows Mobile is even though it does not have an application store, I can sideload applications that I downloaded from the Internet, which is very nice. compared to Windows Phone, but then Android opened the door for that.

And ditching Windows is a very hard choice back during 11/12, but I'm able to live without it successfully.

Why on earth would you want an artificial "personality" wasting cycles on your computer?

I don't get it. And, yes I've seen and used Cortana. Yuck.

[Michael_S]

As people usually say, if something is free, YOU are the product.

I hate that saying, because it's deceptive. I pay a monthly fee to Verizon for my phone and Comcast for my internet, I pay interest to my credit card company, I pay for my groceries, and I pay for my purchases at Costco and I guarantee that despite my payments, all of those companies collect and sell information about me and use it for targeted advertisements. So their services are not free, and I'm still the product.

Yes, Google, Facebook, and Twitter make their money on data mining and advertising. But just about every other major corporation you deal with makes money on its core business and also data mining and advertising. We're the product everywhere, it's just most obvious with services that are supposedly free.

[AJSB]

It gets better than that. The "during the first year*" part goes with the subscription. After the first year, you will have to pay a subscription fee, a la Office 365.

Exactly how much and what the frequency is anyone's guess, though the subscription cost of Office 365 should be a pretty good guide.

Checking calendar...no...its not April 1st

Tell me you are jocking !?! Is M$ gone completly insane ?!?

Then again, not 100% surprised...their CEO was working in the "cloud" department and M$ hinted some time ago that were studying new ways to get revenue from Window$...seems that Window$ gone F2P route

No way in hell i go with that s**t.

[Michael_S]

Checking calendar...no...its not April 1st

Tell me you are jocking !?! Is M$ gone completly insane ?!?

Then again, not 100% surprised...their CEO was working in the "cloud" department and M$ hinted some time ago that were studying new ways to get revenue from Window$...seems that Window$ gone F2P route

No way in hell i go with that s**t.

Calm down, it's not confirmed yet. Even people who care nothing for Linux or open source are accustomed to not paying a monthly or yearly operating system license fee for their Windows PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Android device. I think an annual Windows subscription would be met with rage and rejection by consumers unless the price was incredibly low - like $20 per year.

[johnc]

MS has clarified that there is no subscription cost associated with Windows 10.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Sigh. The infrastructure behind winRT is tied to the outlook/live/hotmail account. I think it will be very hard to make microsoft accept calls to internal over-the-internet api to their servers.

So far only to download the app from the Windows store. Once you have the .APPX or have the app installed you can switch to a local account. This might change with Windows 10--who knows.

My thought it more in-line with the idea of 3rd party distribution of .APPX files. Someone can set-up a 3rd party repository with .APPX packages of free programs grabbed from the Windows store or elsewhere. It's sort of like how you can search for individual Android .APK's online and find them on various websites outside of Google Play Store or 3rd party App Stores.

Anyway, I don't think anything like this will happen anytime soon in Wine and it may be that Wine just sticks with Win32 and stops being useful for future apps and a new FOSS project arrives to implement WinRT and finds a way to make them work on Linux. Either that, or Android remains a popular platform for apps and has versions of same metro apps that are in the Windows store (plus existing and future Win32 apps may still be available as standalone installers and not just in the Windows store), and we just use the Android version of those Windows apps in Linux via Genymotion, Android SDK, or ARChon.

[Michael_S]

Some metro apps are just an API layer + HTML5

Some of the Windows app store applications are developed entirely in HTML plus Javascript. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib.../br211385.aspx

So even if Wine can't offer a Windows RT -compatible emulation layer, those applications should be able to be rewritten in platform-independent HTML5.

[Luke_Wolf]

You have Windows 2000 missing from the list. It was a real OS unlike ME which was a joke

While you're right, Windows 2000 was targeted at businesses as opposed to consumers, and so doesn't belong in the list, it's part of what became the Windows Server line. I'm also missing windows 3.11 and earlier but I feel those go into their own box where Windows, like GEOS could be run on top of but wasn't really considered the OS at that point.

[torsionbar28]

But Windows XP to Vista was 6 and a half years?

XP was supported for 13 years. Doesn't matter when Vista was released. People who had XP were perfectly happy with XP, and there were quite a large number of XP users in the world as of last year when support ended. Like my post stated, end users have no compelling reason to upgrade their OS, and they become irate when forced to do so within a short amount of time, as one does with most Linux distros.

The problem is that Linux Desktop users want to be able to do as much of the things they can do on Windows or OS X as possible. I could run Debian stable or RHEL 5 right now, but if I want up-to-date Firefox, Chrome, Wine, Steam (when it's not wiping out people's files), drivers for video cards, and Skype then I need something more cutting edge.

I think we're saying the exact same thing. For 13 years, XP users have been able to load the latest and greatest Firefox on a fully supported OS. Heck, XP is EOL and you can still load the latest Firefox on it! If Linux users want the latest Firefox, they're forced to throw the baby out with the bath water and blow away their entire PC, because their distro only updates for ~1 year and then goes EOL. And people wonder why Linux has failed to make a dent in the desktop PC market.