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Comment by 7speter | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m wrong but Windows is “free” (as in beer) unless you want to change your desktop, and then you have to fork over 100 dollars (if you don’t just buy a license from one of these grey market sellers who advertise on youtube). It seems pretty clear to me that Microsoft serves ads and collects people’s data to subsidize, at least to some degree the losses of not selling license codes for 150-200 dollars.

This is because Google has its Chromebook platform that sells a laptop with ad subsidized (its their business model afterall) word processing, other cloud apps and “operating system.”

I don’t know if I’m missing something but if I’m not I don’t understand why people think Microsoft is just randomly serving ads on Windows (to keep up earnings wise with google from quarter to quarter as it gives one of its former cash-cows away for free).

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I'd gladly pay 100 bucks for Win 11 as it came out. But since then it's just getting worse, it's buggy (frequent BSODs/freezes/not-waking-up-from-sleeps on my AMD desktop), Windows Update is still shit (it reboots automatically without even once asking, yes I know there's a setting; sometimes the update takes ages on one of my laptops), it's an uphill battle, very reminiscent of ~2010 Linux desktop era. Oh that reminds me, "i know unix", why am I using this? And then I installed Ubuntu on the desktop box, and it works. And Steam and wine works, and it goes to sleep and wakes up, and amdgpu driver works, and HiDPI works, and so on.

>…Oh that reminds me, "i know unix", why am I using this? And then I installed Ubuntu on the desktop box, and it works. And Steam and wine works, and it goes to sleep and wakes up, and amdgpu driver works, and HiDPI works, and so on.

Funny, friend, thats been my experience too. I’m even living dangerously with a nvidia gpu in my system atm.

I even bought a geforce 2060 super, to eliminate one possible cause of the Windows BSODs. Both work well. (I've even installed some unstable unreleased something from https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v6.2-rc4/ , and via DKMS nvidia drivers worked pretty well. If I remember correctly. But I wanted to try test Wayland, so switched back to the 5700XT.)

It works! Until you install a bad update that bricks critical functionality of your OS. Just rollback the update! Ok, found a copy of an older package from some repo. Oh no!! This older version requires 5 older dependencies which were updated with 32 others during the update.

5 hours later: Ugh. I'll just have to do a fresh OS install again.

Microsoft doesn't really care about pirate home users, their primary source of income is business users, and these tend to buy many more Microsoft products than just client Windows. Moreover, the vast majority of home users just buys a laptop with a fully licensed copy of Windows preinstalled.

Even then, google proved most people are okay with having their data collected and if they can get away with it, might as well profit off of it too. Also, maybe this is an old thing, but doesn’t ms get some money for having windows installed on prebuilds. And yes, I know microsoft makes most of its profit off of enterprise and government contracts, but thats not gonna stop them from collecting data for immediate (and potentially long term, if they find some new thing to do with said data) profit.

It’s not ‘pirating’ to not pay for Windows for quite a while now. The license is optional and I don’t bother with it on VMs.

For anyone wondering some details here [0]. You can now easily download the installation ISO directly from Microsoft, and choose to run it either 'activated' or 'unactivated', but there's no piracy involved.

0: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/get-windows-10-free-or-...

You can download the ISO from Microsoft, and an unactivated OS is usable, but this is still not a properly licensed copy of Windows, which constitutes piracy.

Thanks, I've had a closer look at the Windows EULA and you're right. Guess I should apply some of my product keys to those VMs!

There are no losses. Firstly they charge the manufacturer to bundle a license, secondly their Office revenue depends entirely on users being able to run the software. And their Windows Server and Azure AD revenue depends on connectivity with Windows clients. And they need people to be familiar with Windows UI more than could be achieved just using it in an office.

> unless you want to change your desktop, and then you have to fork over 100 dollars (if you don’t just buy a license from one of these grey market sellers who advertise on youtube).

That, or you install vlmcsd somewhere and activate against that.

Or py-kms.

What annoys me is there is no price I could just pay to get an ad-free, perpetual licence for Windows with no "telemetry".

It's all rent seeking and I will drop Windows like a bad smell as soon as Linux works well for a couple of things I use that are Windows-only.

Still on Win 10 for my desktop but the laptop came with Win 11 which is an abomination.

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