Ditching Windows 10 machines for Windows 11

[emeryjre]

My experience with chromebooks was driven by the needs of certain families to have one for online schooling
A group of old techies got together to gather old laptops and reformat and install the chrome operating system
We would then distribute them to various charities that knew of students that did not have one
I was amazed at how well a former Windows 7/8 laptop would run chrome and the google apps
I have always been aware that windows was bloated
But this was my first real world experience with how bloated

 

[ScoopKona]

But this was my first real world experience with how bloated

There's nothing stopping you from installing a bloat-free version of which version of Windows floats your boat. Get rid of the languages, accessibility features, and almost all of the Microsoft [Name-of-Useless-Feature] processes, and it runs fairly well.

Tiny11 only needs 8gb of space compared to 20 for a full install.


But, to be fair, the only reason I use Windows is for DirectX. Linux is fine. I don't like the UI of the others.

 

[jp10558]

My experience with chromebooks was driven by the needs of certain families to have one for online schooling
A group of old techies got together to gather old laptops and reformat and install the chrome operating system
We would then distribute them to various charities that knew of students that did not have one
I was amazed at how well a former Windows 7/8 laptop would run chrome and the google apps
I have always been aware that windows was bloated
But this was my first real world experience with how bloated

Yea, we've become very cognizant of that with straight Linux vs Windows. I find it amazing that there's a 6GB difference in a base install of Win 11 Enterprise 24h2 vs Windows 11 LTSC 2024 (same base OS) just apparently to get the store working and all the other crap MS foists on you. I shudder to think what the home versions add to Enterprise. I got overwridden to use the bloated one at work because we must have the store working, and all the online install the store on LTSC just didn't work reliably enough for us. I would have just forgone the store like we did for Windows 10 but Microsoft made Teams store only, and people disagree with me that the PWA version is just as good.

 

[billymach4]

To each his own. Any enterprise organization is going protect all endpoints of their respective networks. Having a TPM 2.0 requirement to shield the network is just another layer of Defense in Depth along with Zero Trust to keep out the phishing attempts.

Now for a personal individual it's an individual choice. For me I will follow the best practice knowledge.

 

[n42]

My experience with chromebooks was driven by the needs of certain families to have one for online schooling
A group of old techies got together to gather old laptops and reformat and install the chrome operating system
We would then distribute them to various charities that knew of students that did not have one
I was amazed at how well a former Windows 7/8 laptop would run chrome and the google apps
I have always been aware that windows was bloated
But this was my first real world experience with how bloated

Interestingly, the over-reliance on chromebooks in education has contributed to technical illiteracy that impacts employability. There are many students who graduate school with very little experience using traditional computers, and therefore are ill-equipped for jobs that depend on them. Chromebooks aren't widely used in the professional world.

 

[DrQ]

Interestingly, the over-reliance on chromebooks in education has contributed to technical illiteracy that impacts employability. There are many students who graduate school with very little experience using traditional computers, and therefore are ill-equipped for jobs that depend on them. Chromebooks aren't widely used in the professional world.

I didn't see that. When I was working, there was a trend toward "thin client" architecture. We had transitioned from Microsoft Office which was loaded on the workstation to Google Office which was based in the cloud. The same goes for coding, most of our new effort was based in either AWS, GCP or Azure and utilizing microservices via API's.

These cloud based office suites are more resilient to ransomware as they provide automatic versioning and archives.

 

[emeryjre]

Interestingly, the over-reliance on chromebooks in education has contributed to technical illiteracy that impacts employability. There are many students who graduate school with very little experience using traditional computers, and therefore are ill-equipped for jobs that depend on them. Chromebooks aren't widely used in the professional world.

Without chromebooks, the students we were trying to help would have had nothing computer related
They would not have had access to online classes, library books, homework assignments,
But unless you put one in their hands at an early age,
Have a supportive parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or other family member to teach them how to use it
They are behind the curve forever

 

[jp10558]

I didn't see that. When I was working, there was a trend toward "thin client" architecture.

Yea, people try that occasionally, and realize the performance sucks and the tech costs more than traditional computers. From what I can tell it's swung back.

We had transitioned from Microsoft Office which was loaded on the workstation to Google Office which was based in the cloud.

Depends a lot on where you work. We're told the users will refuse to use anything but MS Office, and even the Microsoft cloud versions "don't work right". I wish we could convince everyone to just use web based outlook and teams, would save me a lot of hassle. But management requires "the real software". Not that they can explain really why.

The same goes for coding, most of our new effort was based in either AWS, GCP or Azure and utilizing microservices via API's.

Also will depend a lot on what you're doing. Where I work there's almost nothing useful that AWS,GCP or Azure can do except waste money. Mostly cause we're not writing web pages, and the web interfaces we are doing need to run locally for us and our other potential users. This is driven by tens of terabytes of data that has to be ingested at 10 or more Gbit a second and cloud latency and storage costs push it to both too slow to work and way too expensive to store. Bizarrely we are considering some short term cloud storage at noticeably higher prices to let outside people retrieve their data, but I still can't really fathom how adding cost and a push from our side to cloud to then have the other person download from cloud would be any better than the outside person just downloading from us, but what do I know.

These cloud based office suites are more resilient to ransomware as they provide automatic versioning and archives.

Haven't used them so can't comment on that part.

 

[n42]

Non-profits that help people to find jobs have found that many students graduate school without the necessary level of technical literacy, since they have only ever used chromebooks. It's a failure on the school's part imo.

 

[FL Guy]

I have avoided updating to Windows 11 because I am still using MSOffice 2010, which I don't want to stop using (like 2010 version of Excel better than Office 365, plus don't want to pay the annual fee for 365). I've never been able to get a definitive answer from anyone whether Windows 11 will inhibit me continuing to use MSOffice 2010. Anyone here know for sure if MSOffice 2010 will work with Windows 11?

 

[DrQ]

Without chromebooks, the students we were trying to help would have had nothing computer related
They would not have had access to online classes, library books, homework assignments,
But unless you put one in their hands at an early age,
Have a supportive parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or other family member to teach them how to use it
They are behind the curve forever

The point was to help disadvantaged students get access to their normal coursework through remote learning.

Non-profits that help people to find jobs have found that many students graduate school without the necessary level of technical literacy, since they have only ever used chromebooks. It's a failure on the school's part imo.

That is not their charter. A Chromebook or Macbook or tablet can present the lessons in math, language, social studies ... as well as a full fledged Windows laptop. In fact, it is superior as it is less prone to malware and receives automatic updates each time it connects to the web. It is much easier to lock down over a full computer.

Google Sheets, Docs and other web based tools are my go-to "business" applications for new work. I can work on them with either my Mac, Linux, Windows or Chrome O/S workstations and it is stored on Google drive, I was mentoring some interns and they were building their python programs using Google's COLAB environment. No full laptop needed, only a browser. The interns taught me as much as I taught them.

If you want to teach computer literacy, that would be an elective.

 

[DrQ]

Also will depend a lot on what you're doing. Where I work there's almost nothing useful that AWS,GCP or Azure can do except waste money.

I have worked for several companies that provided high volume, high availability web based three tiered architecture applications. You would probably recognize most of the companies.

When I started out, DR (disaster recovery) was a joke. We spent a month moving a live data center from one location to another without a disaster using the published DR plan. (The Linux Admins had both quit when it was announced that the data center was moving) At another company, we would spend 2 days a year spinning up a cold DR site with mixed results.

One company would do a swap over on an active/passive site configuration and patch the passive leg. We were moving all new development to micro-services vi API's in a cloud infrastructure where CSM and payments were offloaded to SaaS. Database consistency between data centers is much easier with AWS and probably cost effective given the last time I priced Oracle's solution.

Where AWS gets expensive is where developers don't design their applications for the environment. If you "forklift" your application into the cloud, yes, you are going to pay a premium. If you design your application to ramp up and down based on demand and know your true traffic needs, costs can be contained. But that requires true management based of facts.

I've built, maintained and decommissioned solutions in data centers. If I were staring something new, it would be in the cloud.

 

[emeryjre]

Non-profits that help people to find jobs have found that many students graduate school without the necessary level of technical literacy, since they have only ever used chromebooks. It's a failure on the school's part imo.

Technical Literacy is a dream
What percentage of high school graduates can read past a 6th grade level
How many adults read past a 6th grade level
I put technology into my nieces and nephews hands when they reached the walking stage
They had numbers, alphabet, shapes, colors down by the time they were 2
The two 9 year olds are reading at ninth grade level and in 2nd semester geometry classes
Self paced, no fear of tech, started them down the right path
The 7 year olds are headed in the same direction
The 4 year can open laptop, fire it up, find her lessons on adding and subtracting, sight words, and other class work with no problem
I credit technology of a computer for a lot of their abilities
But they know nothing about the technical aspects of a computer