S410

Being able to do things to your property is one of the basic concepts of, well, property.

Let's say your car's manufacturer fixed the wheels using security bolts and they're the only people who have the sockets.
With actual cars it would be, at most, annoying. You'd still be able to undo the bolts, either by buying or making a fitting socket, or just smacking a regular one until it fits.

In the digital world, however, just because it's called a "security" socket, you're forbidden, by law, from tampering with it. And if the licensed services stop servicing the model of your car one day... You're fucked. Because, even though you "own" the car, you are legally forbidden from doing basic maintenance required to use it.

Whenever a game or program or goes unplayable you can not go and fix it, despite "owning it".
Removal of any kind of DRM, even if for personal, even in products you've bought, is illegal.

And there's no lower-limit on how "secure" DRM has to be: even if the client-server communication is not encrypted in any way, doesn't include any identifying information, and you can perfectly re-implement server-side software, tricking the program into itself into talking to your server, instead of the original, is, at best, legally grey area.

When you "buy" digital content, be it music, movies, software or games, you almost never actually buy the product. What you get is a limited license to view or use the product for an undefined amount of time.

Generally, companies reserve the right to, at any moment, restrict how can access the content (e.g. force you to use a specific device and/or program) or remove your ability to use or view the product entirely.

For example, a movie or song you've "bought" might get removed from whatever streaming service you're using. A game or program might stop working due to changes in the DRM system.

Actual example from less than half a year ago: Autodesk disabled people's supposedly perpetual licenses for Autocad and other software, forcing anyone wishing to continue to use their software into a subscription.

Imagine buying a house, only for the seller to show up 10 later and state that they change their might and staring from this point in time the house is no longer yours - despite the fact that you've paid for it in full - and you own them rent, if you want to keep living in it.

"Our goal is knowledge, so we're going to obfuscate everything to fuck and make things unreadable"

Well, to elaborate: I never purchashed Windows willingly. I mostly pirated it.

XP was the only Windows that was worth its money. Back then there was nothing better.
Seven was, too, best for its time, but it was still meh, compared to XP.

If it was possible, I would've never stopped using it.
If Windows was more like Linux, XP would've been still supported, even if by different people (like Mandriva is living on as OpenMandriva, or Gnome 2 as MATE).
But, no, we can't have nice things. Microsoft have to force their "upgrades".

Also: Almost everyone younger than 20-25 has grown up with Window 10. There's a ton people to whom the fact that Miscosoft kill off operating systems and force new, objectively worse ones is news.

I've, in fact, never purchased Windows willingly.

The only few times I (technically) did were with laptops and small form factor computers which were only available with it pre-installed.

This, honestly, should not be legal.

I suppose it's true for very old or more exotic hardware.
Since last year we can't even run Linux on i486 CPUs, and it's not even some relatively exotic architecture!

You can use Debian Sid, for example. That way, instead of waiting for a bunch of updates to install them as one big upgrade, you, basically, always have the last version. You don't get those big upgrades at all, this way.

That's not possible with Windows. Even if you were to install every update that comes out, you wouldn't end up with a system that's somewhere between Windows 10 and Windows 11. You're forced into a major upgrade.

You do, in fact, need to accept support to benefit from it. Those releases are the support. Support = updates!

Sometimes people or companies retire their distros (e.g. Mandriva), or just do stupid decisions that piss of their users (CentOS) and force the users to switch to a different distro. This, however, is extremely rare. Microsoft do that on a schedule.

Debian releases are more similar to Service Packs on Windows.

Windows releases are entirely different products.

There are changes to the defaults, sometimes, but they're just that: changes to the defaults. If you're upgrading your existing install, they won't affect you.

For example: Debian switched to Gnome as its default DE a couple years ago. It used to be XFCE. However, if you already had a system with XFCE, if wouldn't go and replace it for you.

On Windows side, meanwhile, when Microsoft decide to change up the DE, you get the changes, whether you like it or not. Remember Windows 8? It's not like those who upgraded from Windows 7 got to keep their Aero theme and Start Menu.

It's not really comparable to the way Windows versioning works. Releases of distros like Debian are closer to Service Packs on Windows: they're just a bunch of updates bundled together.
Alternatively, you can use Debian Sid or Arch, for example, and get all the changes as they're being made. That way, you get a lot of smaller updates a lot more often.

Literally most of them. All the big ones like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Arch, etc. are 10+ years old and still get updates pretty much daily.

Debian had its 30th birthday back in September, actually.