Families exist. I'm the "IT guy" for 3 people using laptops

Call me when Windows doesn't suck and it's not getting worse year by year. I will laugh every time they add more ads and more tracking.

Baby duck syndrome.

Not my first, but the one I landed on after years. It's just so good.

Can't wait for the "The end of Windows 11 is approaching..." article in a few years. Keep me posted.

Just look up windows related cves. There's like 10 new exploits almost every month or so. Sure, not all of them will be super critical, but as time goes on they will stack up. I would not want to risk it, but you do you.

That's reasonable; I just wouldn't have called my wife's laptop my laptop I guess. It was either that or there was probably an interesting story behind it.

EOL means no more security updates, which means attack vectors don't get patched.

If you keep using a Windows installation (or any OS for that matter) that isn't patched regularly you are very likely to be victim to some malicious actor eventually. It's not manual hacking anymore, it's bots scraping the whole internet exploiting known vulnerabilities completely automated.

The risk is much lower if you're in a home network with NAT, where your PCs IP is not publicly reachable, but if you communicate with any webservices you're still vulnerable.

As example. If you nowadays put a Windows XP machine live on the internet with a public IP, it will be compromised within minutes.

So yeah. Good call switching to Mint, but please don't use unpatched Windows.

I don't know what kind of software that particular machine runs, but for server and backup Linux appears to be the go to tool. I'm not saying that you have to migrate everything to Linux. I just say that for servers and the like the transition is probably easier than for desktop.

Windows 12, with AI even moreso integrated.

I saw a YT video about XP being compromised. It was literally about 2-3 minutes, and it had been attacked.

back in 2017, the company I worked at had a win 2K server. Crazy shit. It was for a critical system (ran the phone system)

Yeah, we managed to recreate that in a lab. Those old OS's are super vulnerable.

I've been migrating some of my clients (I do on site support for SMBs) to LTSC 2019, which gets updates until 2029.
An added benefit is that it gets a lot less updates, essentially security updates, and comes with a lot less crap preinstalled.

Somehow, windows 11 is even MORE spyware than 10!

Nah, there'll be a new boogeyman by then.

Now with AI! So Windows can use your processing power to record and analyze every use of your computer, and report back useful findings to MS. What data is sent back? Who knows? You certainly won't be told what 'core telemetry' is required at any point in time.

2, though they are both quite old

They are all my personal laptops from different parts of my past, that I just never threw away when I upgraded

GF recently wanted to buy Ms office because she had a nice looking CV template for it that would not work well in LibreOffice. So I spent some hours making a good one without Ms crap, just so they would not get anymore money.