MudMan

Famous last words before getting a keylogger that leads to all your bank accounts being drained due to lack of security patches.

Well, yeah. What kind of security do you think normies are running? They won't even get hijacked by an unpatched Windows 10 exploit, they'll just try to download The Last of Us by opening "WatchOnlineMoviesFree.exe" when a pop up tells them to.

Business operations will go with whatever is cheapest to maintain, which is the entire point of LTSC and the article in the link.

I mean... you go, grandpa.

But hey, that is a fair point. A lot of people talk about moving to Win11 like it's something normies will want to avoid like the plague, as if all the things they point at as dealbreaking enshittification haven't been rolling back to Win10 pretty much in real time. Hardware incompatibilities aside (and those are probably overstated, too) the leap will probably be very smooth unless the person in question is simultaneously extremely activist about hating modern Windows and extremely reluctant to use anything else.

People keep treating Win10 EoL as if the software is going to catch on fire. Every time they phase out a Windows version people just happily keep it installed indefinitely until they just naturally buy a new PC, at least.

I predict the big replacement for supported Windows 10 will be unsupported Windows 10. I expect that's a pretty safe bet.

People fixate on those things. I don't think those are the key things.

If I had to define what makes something Windows-like I'd point at the software and drivers being self-contained, self-installable executables and the old DOS-style disk handling and directory structure.

I mean, I don't think that's necessarily a great thing, but it's been a long time since Windows took the "press key, type what you want to run, press enter" thing from... I'm gonna say MacOS. That start menu, taskbar and icon tray thing was a differentiator with Windows 95, but probably not since Windows 8.

They do.

Probably should give it a clearer visual cue now that they do blue ticks, but it's there.

Right.

I have to assume you're outright trolling at this point, so we're gonna leave it there.

Man, I REALLY hope you're outright trolling. Mostly for your sake.

Nobody around the tiny, itsy-bitsy, entirely irrelevant circle of people you talk to.

I assure you plenty of people "believe in Christianity", in Europe and particularly outside of Europe. Even more of them use Christianity as a political tool.

Hey, you wanna know how many people "believe in Christianity"? This was Europe this last weekend, not believing in Christianity.

For one thing, Belgium is like 2% of the EU, so barely representative. For another, being actively practicing is less relevant than how much political influence is wielded and how many institutions are baked into the legal and political system to align with a particular worldview.

And for another another, this isn't about Europe (or the US) much at all. They matter way less than the countries trying to secure a semblance of civil rights in the context of an increasing interference from Western-originated religions using them as breeding grounds for retrograde conservatism.

So you are very welcome to remain oblivious and pretend you have culturally overcome the footprint of Christianity (which again, hah, nah), but that has zero bearing on the relevance of these events.

Europe has a history of stripping power from Christianity? Like, Europe Europe?

Is this some other Europe I don't know about? There may be an Europe I entirely missed somewhere, I suppose. Because the Europe I know took a millenia to marginally diminish the power of Christianity, and it only happened because of liberal democracy quietly supplanting spirituality for convenience. It was in no way, shape or form a political choice based on them "misbehaving".

I mean, even if that was true, which hah, nah, the places where the Catholic church is growing these days are in Africa and Asia. Stop making me have to lump Europeans with the gross ethnocentrism of USmericans.

I am very curious to know who "we" is in this context.

Compared to the iron grip the reactionaries held before my understanding is you're right. That doesn't mean that wing is going to get away with a continuist choice. I mean, it's more likely than it used to be, but I'm not making a call until the Habemus Papam.

It is literally a political position. There's about to be an election to choose the next guy.

I agree that it is serious in that it's going to have an impact on people's lives, far beyond the relatively small direct power they have. That concerns me.

To be clear, I have zero respect for the institution, but I care about how they wield the influence they have, and I'd much rather have a relatively progressive guy like Francis than a relative reactionary like John Paul II, with all due respect to Polish pride. I'm assuming we can at least agree on taking him over Benedictus.