My computer guy doesn't rely on the internet for his info, in fact, he disdains most of us who do!!! (Yeah, he's an arrogant little cuss, but he knows his stuff!) Although I haven't and won't dare ask him to prove it (you don't insult someone who considers you a friend and therefore gives you free service...), he claims he gets his info directly from Microsoft, if not from his own experience. Now he didn't say anything about Microsoft forcing anyone to pay for updates. Just that they would be available if someone wanted to purchase them. But at some time in the near future all those monthly (or more often) automatic updates we've all been getting all along will be a thing of the past. Once you install Win10, whatever updates the version you happen to have at the time of installation will be all you ever have unless you pay them more money for the more current updates.
Now, I suppose if those updates aren't all that important, you might not really need them. But how will the average user ever know which ones are important and which ones aren't? And even if we could make that decision, will MS allow us to pick and choose, or will the updates be designed that each one is dependent on the one before it so that if some time in the future you want the features of one particular update, you will have to purchase all the prior updates in order to get the one you want? I don't put it past MS for one second to do something like this. It's already done a lot by a lot of software companies. And this wouldn't even be an underhanded tactic that they could pull off in a way that coudln't be known or proven to force people to buy updates. I wouldn't put it past MS to pull underhanded stuff too. And even if someone finds out, how many people have the money to pay for powerful enough lawyers to win a case against the likes of Microsoft's legal team? Most or all people will just decide it's best to not pick that battle and just go ahead and pay for the updates, and MS wins another one.
Or dump MS altogether.
Were it not for my flight sim hobby that just has too much software that needs widows to work properly, I would love to experiment with some of the alternative OS's. Maybe some day I'll pick up a cheap used computer to convert to Linux and try it out. Might be fun.
