this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Windows Home, Windows Pro, Windows Pro for workstations, Windows Education, Windows Pro Education, Windows Enterprise, Windows Enterprise LTSC, Windows S mode, Windows IoT
And there are some other variations for different regions and support levels.
Do you know which one does what? Because I only vaguely do.
Windows isn't a single thing either. It just comes preinstalled. Most people have never installed an OS, not windows nor linux.
All machines come with windows pre-installed, no one ever needs to worry about different flavours unless you work in IT and manage windows devices.
I haven't had to worry about which windows to get since windows 98.
Fyi, I'm on Linux mint now.
I was curious, so I checked the laptop offers in our local shop aggregator (arukereso.hu)
2390 / 3795 = 62% windows
No one who doesn't know anything about installing windows is gonna buy a laptop without os or with freedos, so you can deduct those too.
The real choice for probably 99% of consumers is between windows and mac.
The point was that end users extremely rarely need to worry about what windows flavour they need. The laptop already comes pre-installed with the correct flavour OS for that laptop.
I agree, if not by mistake the cheaper FreeDOS, buyers will select the windows preinstall I presume. I was checking if all machines come with windows. Clearly not.
With what frequency they choose what offering, is a harder question to answer and would give a different distribution. MacOS would be higher, and without os and FreeDOS close to zero.
Isn't that what I'm saying? Windows isn't prevalent because there is one edition of it, but because it's the default.
Apparently this is downvote worthy information?
Are you a home user? Choose the home edition. Easy.
When I worked at an MSP I kept running into folks (both businesses and residential customers) using the cheapest PCs they could get and having to work around Home edition limitations. I'm blanking at this moment but there was one limitation that was consistently a righteous pain in the ass... I gotta look up the differences and see if one jogs my memory
Edit: aha! it was the freaking Microsoft account. Its required on Home edition but optional on Pro. A super common issue folks would run into was from Microsoft removing the Windows Mail app and replacing it with Outlook, but the in-place upgrade/replacement would gum up their signed in emails and Outlook would be stuck thinking it's both signed in and not at the same time. Easiest solution is to simply sign out of all accounts at the device-level and sign back in, because Outlook just looks at and manages the accounts that are signed into at the device-level but you can't do that on Home edition, so I'd have to spend even more time rooting around until Outlook finally decided that the account that it was failing to sign into wasn't in fact fully signed in and pop an actual signin prompt
"What do you mean home user? I'm a computer user."
You're right, it doesn't matter.
Choose the home edition. Easy.
Aren't all these versions just the same product with different features locked behind payment options? It's very different from Linux, where every layer has multiple alternatives written by different authors that can behave very differently.