autoconf and stuff like this? Not anymore. Since ~5 years here it’s cmake everywhere, Conan, ninja.

I don’t know in USA, but in Canada with $2.4 billion we can have maybe 2 miles of track and one train station, no more…

I have tested multiple distro, in the beginning was mostly hack of multiple things and almost LFS, downloading floppies images from usenet… I then started to use Debian early 00, then used Ubuntu for years, but I don’t like snap/flatpak and lots of changes Ubuntu made so I switched to Mint Cinnamon, but hated it, often broken, glitches, etc, so I switched to MX because it is Debian based, always up to date (like latest FF and latest Xserver with last night CVE fix etc and always native .deb, no snap/flat). I also always loved minimal DE so Xfce is perfect and light. Also I mainly develop in Linux, no games.

I’m old, I come from old X11R4 time, motif, mwm, twm, fvwm, things from previous century. In modern Linux I used mostly gnome, and Cinnamon for a few years and tried to love it but cannot, I finally went back to Xfce because it works, it’s simple, neat, nice, I have no icon on my desktop, I have a kind of windows 3 setup: a startup menu (and some quick launches), the window bar, the notification area with time etc

I’m using MX Linux for maybe 8 years now with Xfce

updated screenshot:

the development/testing is done on Windows under VMs rather than a sample of real world hardware

I highly doubt it, seriously, I don’t think they test update some VMs and say “that’s good”, there’s thousands and thousands people working at MS, I don’t know how many on win11 but certainly a few hundreds, I doubt none of them install the upgrade on real hardware to test.

I know it’s not a hardware compatibility problem. People just don’t want ads/tracking/AI bullshit, a removed control panel, settings that are hard to find/hidden, etc.

All intel processor 8th gen+ (and even some 7th gen IIRC) are win11 compatible, motherboard have TPM2 for years, even my intel 6th gen MB have TPM2.0.

Next year the intel 8th gen will have 8 years, people have PC/laptop more recent than that. Problem is that win10 will not get security updates and all.

I’m using MX Linux BTW.