Jo22 wrote on 2021-01-24, 19:15:
[...]
Is recommending Windows 10 really better, though?
Windows 7 surely is old and vulnerable by now, but it was a true blue Operating System, at least.
It is old and vulnerable. That's the problem.
By comparison, Windows 10 is sly, fake, untrustworthy.
And near criminal: The updates and auto-reboots are truely unresponsible. […]
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By comparison, Windows 10 is sly, fake, untrustworthy.
And near criminal: The updates and auto-reboots are truely unresponsible.
Imagine, a system relevant computer that's unattended simply stops working while it's in the middle of handling an important task.
In my opinion, people who are recommending Windows 10 to others are partners in crime.
- No offense, though. 😀
Fake? It's a real enough OS. It has some very nasty habits, but what's the alternative? I'm a great proponent of Linux, but having tried (and failed) to offer enough support to nitwit users to do what they need to on their own, it's just not a option for a situation like this. MacOS is hardly any better than Windows 10 when it comes to privacy and autonomy, particularly now it's converging with iOS and more and more of iOS' walled-garden approach is leaking in. Beyond those, you're in the realm of real enthousiast stuff. It can be great. You can even run it on toasters. But it's even worse than Linux when it comes to letting a non-tech-savvy user just do their thing without you having to do pretty much everything for them.
IMHO the most important thing here is handing over a system which is completely patched up so all known vulnerabilities are fixed. Firewalls and antivirus can't help against attacks targeting vulnerabilities fundamental parts of the OS they're running on. So Windows 7 (or anything other than 10 in the Windows family) is out. Next, if you're donating something to help someone else, it needs to be usable by whoever gets it. I'd love to live in a world where educational institutions only used free, open-source software available on multiple platforms (indeed I agitate for it whenever I can), but that's not the world we live in, so there is going to be commercial closed-source software designed for Windows (and maybe MacOS). Yes, you can probably run most of it on Wine. No, you do not want to get a phone call whenever someone needs to do so. So however much I dislike both closed source operating systems in general and the privacy and autonomy trainwreck that is Windows 10, I simply can't suggest anything better at this point in time.