Windows 11

[47of74]

Windows 11 is coming out later this year.

Quote

When you choose a computer or smartphone to these days, you have to pick among several groups. There's Apple's software, which powers the Mac computer, iPhones and iPads, all designed to work together to help you share files, video chat and watch TV as easily as possible. There's Google's Android, which powers an array of phones, tablets and computers. But with Windows 11, Microsoft wants to break that mold. 

The software giant said Thursday that its next major version of Windows will launch as a free upgrade this fall, offering a host of new features that in some ways appear designed to position Microsoft as the company whose products work with ones from Apple, Google and pretty much anyone else.

The company's expanding its support for the Android app for example, allowing people to more easily run phone apps on their computer. Microsoft's building its Teams software into Windows in a similar way as Apple's FaceTime is built into Macs -- except Microsoft doesn't want it to be exclusive. There's already a Microsoft Teams app for Mac, iPhones and Androids. (Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella even told a reporter he'd be happy to accept FaceTime onto Microsoft computers.)

I checked and my PC laptop is compatible.  I guess when the time comes I'll put it on the laptop since it's my backup laptop. 

I watched the official Microsoft video and of course chuckled at some of the claims they made.  (Like when the guy said it was the most secure version ever). 

 

[Loveday]

Sigh. Just when I had gotten used to Windows 10. LOL. I'll have to check to see if my laptop will be compatible. Desktop, too, I still use one of those old dinosaurs.? I find it easier on my aging eyes to have big screens in front of me rather than a tiny cell phone screen. 

[47of74]

21 minutes ago, Loveday said:

Sigh. Just when I had gotten used to Windows 10. LOL. I'll have to check to see if my laptop will be compatible. Desktop, too, I still use one of those old dinosaurs.? I find it easier on my aging eyes to have big screens in front of me rather than a tiny cell phone screen. 

Yeah and some of this stuff they're introducing as new and revolutionary have been part of Mac and Linux for years now. 

My work has me using a small desktop.  Lots of places provide laptops for remote work but I think it was likely a cheaper option and make people actually work from home instead of working from a coffee shop, restaurant, brewery, library, parks, and so on.  

I have two 27" monitors that I bought.  One when I started working from home full time back in 2014 and a second one at the start of the pandemic.  Makes life much easier to have two large monitors for doing work stuff, even on a laptop.  I also have a gaming keyboard.  Yeah it's a bit more expensive than a regular keyboard but it feels much more solid than modern work keyboards.  I've got about five or six keyboards laying around now.  

There's still a use for the big old dinosaur sized laptops.  When Mac went to SSD drives and the drives were only 256gb at most I went and bought a custom built tower PC with a 2tb drive for about $500 and threw a copy of Ubuntu on there.  It mainly acts as a file server for my stuff - especially photos and videos - which are then backed up to CrashPlan automatically.  (It's actually supposed to be a small business plan but CrashPlan is the only one that can do online Linux backups).   

[FiveAcres]

On 6/25/2021 at 10:18 AM, 47of74 said:

There's still a use for the big old dinosaur sized laptops.  When Mac went to SSD drives and the drives were only 256gb at most I went and bought a custom built tower PC with a 2tb drive for about $500 and threw a copy of Ubuntu on there.  It mainly acts as a file server for my stuff - especially photos and videos - which are then backed up to CrashPlan automatically.  (It's actually supposed to be a small business plan but CrashPlan is the only one that can do online Linux backups).   

My main PC is a desktop has been running some version of Ubuntu Linux for years. For portable laptops, my partner and I both have Chromebooks. (When I bought my Chromebook, I decided I would rather have a mid-price Chromebook than a cheap Windows laptop.)  Chromebooks are easy to travel with (if we ever travel again.) These days, I mostly use my Chromebook to watch podcasts and youtube videos. 

I was an early adopter of Linux: I didn't want to move from Windows 98 to the next Windows thing (ME?), so I started messing around with redhat Linux. I am comfortable with writing scripts in Perl and Ruby, so I have a lot of custom stuff that I have been using for years. Although I am willing to believe that Windows security has improved a lot over the years, I still feel a little extra confidence running a non-popular operating system. 

I'll look into CrashPlan. It would be nice to have offsite backups.

[47of74]

2 hours ago, FiveAcres said:

My main PC is a desktop has been running some version of Ubuntu Linux for years. For portable laptops, my partner and I both have Chromebooks. (When I bought my Chromebook, I decided I would rather have a mid-price Chromebook than a cheap Windows laptop.)  Chromebooks are easy to travel with (if we ever travel again.) These days, I mostly use my Chromebook to watch podcasts and youtube videos. 

I was an early adopter of Linux: I didn't want to move from Windows 98 to the next Windows thing (ME?), so I started messing around with redhat Linux. I am comfortable with writing scripts in Perl and Ruby, so I have a lot of custom stuff that I have been using for years. Although I am willing to believe that Windows security has improved a lot over the years, I still feel a little extra confidence running a non-popular operating system. 

I'll look into CrashPlan. It would be nice to have offsite backups.

Yeah I played around with the various Linux systems over the years - Debian, RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, and Slack.  Along with FreeBSD.  I pretty much standardized on using Ubuntu at home because it seemed to be the most solid and had solid support.  Plus seeing it used at places I worked at helped its rep with me.  The one place I worked at gave us an option of using either RedHat Enterprise Linux or Windows as our desktop when we started work so I picked Linux.  I stuck it out for several months before switching over to Windows.  As Office and Windows-centric the team I worked in was it was too much of an issue to use RHEL  Work became a bit easier when I had my work machine re-imaged.  I just wish I had picked the lighter laptop with Windows to start with now.

My main laptop is a MacBook Pro.  I've been using Mac OS X at home since 2008.  I've had a few netbooks back in the day when those were a thing before tablets came along and I'd throw Ubuntu on those.  I'd take those overseas instead of my main laptop.  I figured if it got lost or stolen overseas I'd be pissed off but at least my main machine would be safe at home.  Plus it was nice to have a small laptop.  When I started law school I got a second cheap full size Windows laptop that is a backup for my main machine and also is my travel laptop.

[Cartmann99]

My laptop died last year and I found a refurbished one that had all the features I wanted, but it only came with a locked-down version of Windows 10. I kept looking around, but I couldn't find anything comparable in terms of price/features, so Mr. Cartmann99 offered to put Linux on it for me. We used to share a desktop with a Windows/Linux partition, so I'd used Linux before, but it had been several years. I'm not as tech savvy as you two are, so for me, using Linux is a humbling experience as I have to ask for help more frequently than I did with Windows.