Windows 11 Will Support Rolling Back To Windows 10, but Not for Long (extremetech.com) 91
Microsoft took the wraps off Windows 11 recently, and we expect the new OS to arrive later this year. Upgrading to a new version of Windows is often a painful process, and in the past, you were stuck even if the new software ruined your workflow. It's different this time: Microsoft says you'll be able to go back to Windows 10 if you don't like Windows 11. You'll only have 10 days to decide, though. From a report: How will you know if Windows 11 is worth using? There's a preview program for Windows 11, but the preview builds are still missing some elements of the final release. You don't have to mess with the Insiders builds at all -- you can install the final version when it's available, and take it for a spin. This news comes by way of a PDF that Microsoft has provided to PC manufacturers. It's an FAQ format, and among the various redundant queries is this gem: "Can I go back to Windows 10 after I upgrade if I don't like Windows 11?" The answer is a resounding yes... for 10 days. You'll have that long to decide to roll back to Windows 10. Wait any longer, and you're locked into Windows 11 unless you reformat your system.
The old M$ :( (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds so much like the old Mafia$oft that I always hated and still do.
Not very much like the newer Microsoft which in so many other areas now plays much more nicely with the rest of the world, and which I sometimes even defend, when I believe it is deserved.
Still think the newer and less destructive version of Microsoft will win, and certainly hope it will, but this is a pretty big regression back to the old days, and I have no real wish to go back there.
Re:The old M$ :( (Score:5, Insightful)
They are still releasing technically inept, overpriced software. Still practicing FUD. Still practicing EEE. Still making company decisions based on some obscure Excel file.
Re:The old M$ :( (Score:4, Informative)
I'm referring to the Microsoft behind .NET Core, and C#, and Visual Studio Code, and even bits and pieces of the Linux kernel.
From my standpoint as a developer, their behavior at least toward the development community is 1000% improved.
But unfortunately there still exists the old M$, still guilty of the behaviors you mention, and probably worse.
If I were the king of the world (a strange thought for a libertarian?!?!) I'd do what I lawfully could to encourage the better-behaved parts of Microsoft, and to make the old FUDding and EEEing and fraud-committing parts of M$ either quit behaving like lawless bullies, or somehow go away.
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Not my job though. Windows and Office are still going downhill. They keep adding bullshit no one asked for and won't bring back older features that were security risks.
They want to be a lifestyle company a
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I believe you can use Visual Studio Code (open-source and cross-platform) to develop Unity apps, although Unity itself is not open-source AFAIK.
I can't disagree that at least large parts of Microsoft have not changed sufficiently, or perhaps not at all.
But I can't help liking and appreciating what it has brought to the open-source community.
I just hope it doesn't prove to be some sort of trap.
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Would that be plain DOS, DOS Shell [wikipedia.org], Desktop 2 [mevis-research.de], Norton Desktop [toastytech.com], Geoworks [tedium.co]. So many to look worse to.
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I still have a GeoWorks Pro owners manual, copyright 1992, including the 5-1/4 install disks, in my computer library. It sits between my retail boxed copies of Windows 3.1 and WinConnect. I just haven't had the heart to throw some of these early items away.
--
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Re: The old M$ :( (Score:1)
Yeah, all the stuff they stole to decorate themselves with.
Ever since Gates bought DOS off a student for 50 bucks to claim it as his own and sell it to IBM as the PC's OS, being a total dick to everyone.
After 30 years of being old enough to read the news, I learned one thing: If you ever think MS came up with anything by themselves, you haven't looked hard enough.
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I'll agree with that in the general case. But C# was written mainly by Anders Hejlsberg while employed by Microsoft. It is one of the best things Microsoft has done. There are some others.
I'd say they are capable of innovating, when they need to. They haven't always needed to, but the more the world migrates to open source, open protocols and open standards, the more they will be motivated to do so.
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Indeed. It is really surprising how inept they are after all this time. It is like they actively and and determinedly resist learning from experience.
Re: The old M$ :( (Score:1)
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What new Microsoft? Microsoft is doing the same thing as always.
What previous versions other than the most recent one gave you the option of a full system downgrade? 7? Nope. Vista? Nope. XP? Nope.
The downgrade is not for happy feely windows trials. It's a backstop if something is wrong. No companies willing provide users with a feature that says: "If you hate the new product, that's okay don't use it."
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Protip: when you make claims don't use hyperbole like "in every aspect" considering there are objective measurements which show the new system as improvements. Otherwise you just look like yet another irrelevant hater.
In the future put a bit more thought into your Trolling. List the things you don't like. Call them out for the garbage they are. This isn't Twitter. Your audience deserves better.
Same no longer good enough (Score:3)
What new Microsoft? Microsoft is doing the same thing as always.
Exactly and doing the same things just isn't going to cut it anymore in the race to be the most Microsoft-like company. Just look at the strides Apple have taken recently: slowly reducing your device speed (just so your battery lasts longer of course), forcing you to use only their app store that just happens to take a 30% cut, their innovative butterfly keyboard etc. Microsoft needs to step up its game if it wants to stay in the competition and a 10-day roll-back period simply is simply not going to cut i
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What new Microsoft? Microsoft is doing the same thing as always.
Same thing? It's not like they've historically had a downgrade path and macOS, iOS, Android, etc haven't got this either.
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Indeed. That quasi-monopoly is cancer. Lets hope WASM can finally break it.
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WASM is not particularly useful in advancing the state of things to break Microsoft's hold on the desktop market.
WASM is only useful for background calculations. WASM code cannot speak to network, access any storage, or manipulate the UI. So you aren't going to take some MFC application and use WASM to magically compile it to a browser application, even if you had source code.
WASM is a way to make computationally heavy backends to javascript function calls in the browser. Javascript has to move data into
Re: The old M$ :( (Score:1)
Windows, Apache, Shakespeare [99-bottles-of-beer.net], MySQL?
Re:The old M$ :( (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds so much like the old Mafia$oft that I always hated and still do.
Yeah they should follow the Linux model which lets you roll back ... errrr. Okay no, the BSD program which lets you roll back ... ummmm. Or the Apple model which lets... or doesn't...
The reality is these rollbacks aren't a friendly test run. They are emergency backstops incase something is broken. Windows 11 is coming. Windows 10 is going eventually. This is not optional for a supported OS. Never has been.
You say it sounds like the "old" MS? What "old" MS? How did you roll back the Windows XP upgrade? Format your PC. How did you roll back Windows Vista? Format* your PC. Same with Windows 7. There's nothing "old" about this. The fact that you can roll back a major OS update at all is pretty damn new.
*Technically they backed up the old system in Windows.OLD, but attempting to roll back *NEVER* worked.
Re:The old M$ :( (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux itself (the kernel) is a cinch to upgrade or downgrade. Build the new one, alter grub.cfg, and reboot.
Most Linux *distributions* on the other hand have a TERRIBLE upgrade story, never mind downgrade, so I'm not saying Microsoft is unique in this regard.
What's different though is this. Microsoft is fully able to do the downgrade. But they choose, after an arbitrary but likely insufficient time, to block you from doing this.
Linux distros are hard to downgrade for more technical reasons. Many of them resulting from dependency chains breaking. Note that I rarely have this problem with Gentoo Linux, a rolling-release, source-based distribution. I can usually downgrade anything I want, and while the downgraded package's deps will need to be rebuilt, it's very rare in my experience for anything to break beyond a moderately technical user's ability to fix. (Note that Gentoo is not particularly suited for nontechnical people, but there are plenty of distributions that are.)
In short, the problem isn't that Microsoft can't let you downgrade, but that it won't. Meaning, probably, that it will break on the 10.0001th day, and, because it's .0001 days past the deadline, you're screwed.
People are going to hate this. And then someone will (hopefully) come up with a registry hack that fixes it, albeit in a non-Microsoft-supported way.
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Well except you still make his point with "dependency chains" and "beyond a moderately technical user's ability to fix". Not even getting into source compilation can be a time sink. The basic point is that most operating systems aren't designed to be rolled back and forth like the pages in a book. Could one be built? Maybe. But that's not the current reality.
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Here as in much of life, there is a correlation between what you're willing to learn, and what you're able to do.
Gentoo, as I think I already pointed out, is not meant for nontechnical users. You have to know a certain amount just to get it installed. But, in return, it lets you do a number of things that you can't do with distributions more tailored to newbies.
You do NOT have to be a genius. I'm certainly not. You just run your regular tools. Mask a package. Re-run emerge against the @world set. If
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Build the new one, alter grub.cfg, and reboot.
That's not an upgrade or a downgrade. That's a metric fuckton of work to setup a parallel system not at all like running sudo dist-upgrade and calling it a day, an action from which there very much is no going back.
But hey if you like the work then Windows 11 is also a cinch to roll back at any time. Just boot from Windows 10 install media and blow away your primary partition. It's *at least* as easy as what you're doing happily with Linux.
Re:The old M$ :( (Score:5, Insightful)
I've done both (re: different versions of Windows, but the same reboot/reformat/reinstall process). Multiple times. I'm more familiar with the process than I want to be. On both Linux and Windows. But I'll choose the Linux version 10 times out of 10, if I get to pick. Here's why.
Upgrading or downgrading the Linux kernel is NOT difficult. 3 or 4 commands, which, if you do them often, you just put into a script that you can run once, wait a few moments, and then be done. Have a rescue thumbdrive on hand just in case, but I usually go years between actually having to use one.
If you want to talk about the whole distro? Yes, I already conceded that most don't have a great upgrade story, never mind downgrade. A problem that needs work.
It's unfortunate that a reformat/reinstall would ever be required, and it usually isn't. But even if it is, it's a piece of cake compared to its Windows equivalent.
WAY easier to do this in any Linux than any Windows, because Linux has one place where your data is supposed to be: /home/username. Copy it off (cp -ar). When ready, copy it back again (cp -ar).
And you don't have to manually run 50 different installers, in the exact same order that you ran them originally, in order to get all your software back.
You instead save off your package list before you do the reinstall, then afterward run apt or yum or dnf or whatever your package's software manager is, to re-install everything all in one pass.
Though not hard, this *is* time-consuming, and, partly to avoid having to spend days dealing with such nonsense, I've been using a rolling-release, source-based distribution. Gentoo. As a rolling-release, anytime you do an update (emerge -u --deep world), you are completely up to date. Piece of cake. Even easier for non-source-based rolling release distros, though I use source-based for a number of reasons that make perfect sense for what I do. (YMMV.)
My daily backups contain a copy of the package list. If I had to reinstall, it's basically going through the stage 3 instructions, then emerging all the packages in my world package list, same as other distros, though it would take a little longer since they'd all be getting compiled from source rather than merely copied.
Linux and Linux distros are far from perfect, but there is no way they come close to the amount of pain that maintaining Windows, or downgrading or upgrading it without Microsoft's permission, tends to be.
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Upgrading or downgrading the Linux kernel is NOT difficult.
Neither is a Windows one. Kernel upgrades are part of security updates all the time and you can uninstall those easily. You seem to be having a problem understanding what a system upgrade is.
I'll leave you to your fantasy that we're talking about a kernel version, rather than a major distribution release.
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What fantasy? Did you read his comment? The paragraph right after the one you quoted? He's talking about a major distribution release, and how it's possible to manually upgrade or downgrade in Linux using standard tools. This is not something most people do and it's not easy, and most distros do not support it with their installer. But it is possible to do. Windows has no such facilities, so downgrading is only possible without a reinstall as long as MS supports it. After they stop supporting rolling ba
Re: The old M$ :( (Score:1)
Install from scratch (Score:2)
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Shouldn't be that painful. Just watch the defaults, and only install what's needed. Golden image, then add latter anything else.
Don't need 10 days (Score:3)
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When the plug was pulled on 7, I made the switch to Linux. I avoided having to buy new hardware that way, too.
I'm hooked now. I will never go back to Windows. Ubuntu is awesome.
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I would go with openSUSE if I had to pick one. But my Steam library says otherwise. I do not want to fuck around with a bunch of settings and config files when a game doesn't work.
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That should be the work of those trying to convince you Linux is the best thing ever. If they can build the success story that's Wikipedia, then a database of settings and config files should be easy.
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Except for Unity and my Steam library.
I would go with openSUSE if I had to pick one. But my Steam library says otherwise. I do not want to fuck around with a bunch of settings and config files when a game doesn't work.
LOL - Truly first world problems. "I can use an OS that does almost everything I want, runs Steam, but may possibly require changing a setting to get the game to work so I will stick with using and bitching about windows."
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Or editing config files, which is always annoying regardless of OS.
Then there is WINE. Which has never been fun to mess with.
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It's a lot more plug and plug with Steam nowadays.
Not going to debate whether it's a 100% because it's not. Sooner or later, you have to decide what is more valuable to you, the games that don't work or whatever your issue with Windows is.
Re: Don't need 10 days (Score:1)
I take it you haven't heard of https://www.protondb.com/ [protondb.com] ?
Yeah, the games run. (Learned of it just yesterday myself.)
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I've had my fair share of people call me a windows fanboi because I dared to not think Windows 7 was the best thing eva, but I agree with you in this case. Windows 10 I like. Windows 11 seemingly offers nothing compelling.
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The only thing compelling in Windows 11 over 10 is Android apps and they only introduced that because Chrome OS has it.
But that might only be compelling if you run a touchscreen Windows device, as opposed to a desktop. Which I suspect isn't the case for the vast majority of Slashdotters, myself included!
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I do run a touchscreen device (Surface Pro) and honestly I see zero compelling reason to run Android apps. The few app based systems which I actually use have native windows variants (WhatsApp, Spotify, etc). For the rest I see Android app as an incredibly poor counterpart to PC software.
Emphasis on the PC part. For ChromeOS the ability to run Android apps is essential as it lacks a software eco system of its own.
Actually the multi windows features look the most compelling to me.
Ten Days (Score:2)
So, on Day 9, I revert my system to Windows 10. Then I upgrade to Windows 11 the next day, resetting my trial period clock to zero.
Rinse and repeat.
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If you are going to go threw that much trouble, you might as well just have a duel OS install. Just share your home directory across both OS installs.
While I think 30 days would be more sufficient 10 days is much too quick, as that one piece of software that you run for month end was never tested.
However I think 10 days is just a way to get the OS installed and if it goes bad quickly you can recover.
Why not forever. Well you are going to have a lot of components installed and just filling your disk that wi
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Windows 10 had a 30 day roll back to Windows 7 policy when it went live (I assume it still does I just haven't had to try it recently). Ten days should be enough to make sure that your software still works in the updated Windows 11.
The reason that the rollback isn't unlimited is that in order to do the rollback Microsoft has to basically make a copy of the Windows 10 directory (at least all the crucial settings files) before doing the upgrade. This takes up a fair bit of space so by limiting the rollback pe
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> This takes up a fair bit of space so by limiting the rollback period they can delete these saved files and recover space on the drive.
Yeah, as if Microsoft ever did anything to free up disk space. When I upgraded from 7 to 10, I had to manually delete the old copy of Windows.
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So, on Day 9, I revert my system to Windows 10. Then I upgrade to Windows 11 the next day, resetting my trial period clock to zero.
Rinse and repeat.
Why? You think there's some major new insight you're going to gain on Day 11? I mean other than the obvious insight that you hate yourself for having wasted several hours of your life on pointlessly trying to "reset the trial period".
If you're interested and unsure then run a Preview build, or install it in a VM.
Great, always some new screw-up (Score:2)
... never any real maintenance or making a product good. And then you more-or-less get forced on a new version. Besides my gaming-machine, I am going to windows only in VMs, with Linux below. That way you can at least easily roll back their crap yourself when they have (again) messed it up.
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On my personal machines I'm dropping Windows entirely. I'm not a gamer, so I have no particular need for Windows. For my development server it's just as Raspberry Pi 4b with 8gb, and I've got MacBook Pro now for most of my work. Still have to use Windows at work because we're using an RDP server, but that's as far as it goes.
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I did that decades ago. There was a learning curve back then. Still is, though it's much less steep. But I've never regretted it, and never looked back.
And when I work from home, usually from my Linux box, I RDP to my Windows laptop at work.
Anyone who's at least moderately technical, and sick of the Microsoft upgrade treadmill, really ought to give desktop Linux a try, at least in a dual-booting or VM setup. Again, there's a learning curve. I'd be lying if I claimed there weren't. But for me at least,
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I completely agree. One of the big pluses is that on Linux it is actually possible and worthwhile investing effort in customizing your desktop. And you have a truely astonishing range of things you can do and many are really good. I am still on the same FVWM desktop I customized for myself almost 30 years ago. (Yes, that was probably the first version and that was on SunOS.) The only time I had to invest a day to update the config was when they moved to fvwm2. Most of that day was probably because I customi
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Awesome!
To my knowledge, the Windows desktop has never been as customizable as Unix and Linux already were back in the early 90s.
Also, it's gone downhill in most respects since Windows 7.
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Thank you!
Are you also vegan? (Score:3)
You have also given up consumption of products with refined cane or corn-derived sugar?
And what are your cholesterol and blood pressure numbers?
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For the most part, gamers don't need Windows either, anymore. I am a gamer, and I play nearly all of my games on Steam on Ubuntu Linux. There are some that just don't work. Those I either don't buy, or if I can't live without them then I buy them on console.
Also I use Lutris to play Blizzard's games. World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch have all worked great thanks to Lutris.
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Still have to use Windows at work because we're using an RDP server, but that's as far as it goes.
RDP from Mac works very well. Microsoft even makes the software for it, so you are not dealing with some reverse engineered version that "mostly" works. Mostly.
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I've been using my Mac to work from home for the last couple of weeks. The biggest complain thus far is relearning hot keys (I come from the old DOX and Unix world, so keyboard is my primary input device for darned near everything). The problem with RDP is that it's a kind of peculiar mashup of MacOS and Windows hot keys, so it's really my brain that's my biggest enemy. At the same time, I love a good challenge, keeps this nearly 50 year old brain agile. And thus far I like that MacOS is a lot like my favor
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Will accept now Windows 8 (Score:2)
Upgrading to a new version of Windows is often a painful process,
I will gladly accept an option to downgrade any version of Windows to 7 or 8.
A bloo bloo bloo (Score:1)
But hey this is Slashdot, so everything M$ does is wrong. Even if they offered to roll back the responses here would be "huurr see they know becuz 11 is so bad!1 lolol".
So Microsoft does not trust its own product ? (Score:2)
Sinch I heard of protondb.com and Lutris... (Score:1)
... Windows is pretty much dead in the water.
I found my Windows music production and image/movie editing software to run pretty well on Linux, quite some time ago (not that Ardour would miss anything, given that I can add my own patches as I please anyway), and game development and 3D editing is no problem nowadays with Godot, Blender, and Autodesk stuff being native to Linux too.
And multiplayer games are cancer nowadays anyway.
So games were the last problem. I had somehow missed Proton. 76% of all games ru
All your base... (Score:2)
You'll only have 10 days to decide, though.
Turns out it's 10 days IN BINARY!
Linux gaming it is then... (Score:2)
After a typical fubar on a year old windows 10 box, that I just use for casual gaming for titles that aren't available on other platforms - e.g. RDR2 - I tried gaming on Linux.
It actually worked DAMN well, but sadly, one title I really wanted to play, the aforementioned RDR2, was an absolute ball-ache to run.
A lot of stuff I threw at the distro I chose, worked flawlessly - I'd say, 70% of the titles I own.
I cling onto windows ONLY because of some casual gaming. For everything else, it's macOs or Linux - and
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... as for the fubar, I have no idea what happened - just blue screen after blue screen. Pretty much typical windows, really.
I used windows from 3.11 right through to XP - years of experience, from hardware and an OS perspective - I tended to understand the BSOD and mitigate it pretty well.
But windows 10 is a special beast - when it gets fucked up, it gets PROPER fucked up.
The only way out, is generally, a re-install - and I don't CARE what windows diehards say "You don't have to do that!" - oh yeah, really
The Windows PC is more about function than style (Score:2)
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That's what a lot of people said about XP and win7. "Who needs the upgrade, just stick with the OS you have." Eventually support for the old OSes was removed so people were forced to upgrade, or face unpatched security problems.
Or, as described countless times on Slashdot in the XP and win7 days, (and again today) throw windows away and use Linux. Have windows in a VM for those rare times when you really must use it.
Still waiting to upgrade from Win10 to 7 (Score:1)
Clonezilla (Score:1)
please don't suck (Score:2)
There's basically only one thing besides email that I need from Windows, and that's compatibility with Adobe Creative Cloud. That's basically all I use Windows for. So the choice is clear: Upgrade, work with Adobe CC, note the problems, if I can live with them, continue. If I can't, recycle the PC and buy a Mac.
The problem with that is that I don't WANNA have to buy a Mac. I switched to Windows in the G4 days and I really don't want to switch back if I can possibly help it. I don't like the culture, I
So given that every other version of Windows sucks (Score:3)
So one good working strategy is resist upgrading for as long as possible, and wait it out until user outrage makes Microsoft admit it sucks and release something that works.
I'm callin' it now. Microsoft releases 11 with a whole slew of bugs and nonsensical changes that screws up everyone trying to get work done. They will at first blame the user, then they'll release a soft update that purports to fix the problems but actually does not, then they'll declare it's a success anyway, then later they'll admit it's not a success, and finally they'll produce a face-saving release with some of the more cosmetic features of 11 but with the utility of 10 restored. This process will take years, so I'm staying on 10 until the dust settles. Or switch to Mac. I haven't decided yet. If Adobe CC ran on Linux I'd gladly go that route. It's the only reason I still use Windows. It's all about the apps, not the operating system.
How will you know if Windows 11 is worth using? (Score:2)
It doesn't take much effort to be pretty sure it isn't. I mean, I can say that already, and that's without even trying the preview builds or even paying much attention to the thousands of "articles" about it in the last couple of weeks.
Let me guess: more garbage-tier apps that are uninstallable; some random UI changes (bonus points if those make life harder for anyone with a disability); a FOURTH "Windows Update Enforcer" service (no, seriously: there really are already three of them - and that's not counti
Re: How will you know if Windows 11 is worth using (Score:2)
"ruined your workflow" (Score:2)
I'd rather roll back to Win7Pro (Score:1)