I give it 3 more years, tops, until Windows is fully a subscription service. Hope you enjoyed the era of owning your PC because it’s coming to an end.
I own my PC. The annoying thing is that I might have to pay a subscription for the gaming OS that I dual-boot to sometimes. Might just make me buy a console instead. OTOH, Sony already charges exorbitant subscription prices for the ability to play online.
The more I am forced to use win11 at work, the more I love not using any Microsoft products outside of work.
So umm… Could you technically pirate these updates? Someone could just nab the installer files and share them publicly. I find it hard to imagine that Microsoft built countermeasures for OS update-piracy.
People will probably just post a Powershell script on Github to make it update directly from the official servers without paying the extra fee. It’s funny how the most popular activation scripts are on Github, even though Microsoft owns Github and could easily just delete them.
That’s what some third parties do for ancient OSes that can no longer use Windows Update but where people want to at least have the last patches made for it, like when people make retro machines. There’s an installer package out there that will apply every Windows 98 update ever released in one go. Same for XP I think.
A lot cheaper than I thought but I guess it depends on how long they intend to offer it for. Will it just be this one year to help people transition to Windows 11 or will it be a more regular arrangement?