Point being, even.04 Ubuntu releases vs Windows seem to be the better metric if we're talking about support. Anything outside of those (non-even.04 Ubuntu or Windows Insider releases) you get the benefit of being on the bleeding edge, but you're going to be poked more than usual.
[For completion's sake: 8.04 (Hardy Heron) is the roughly closest Ubuntu LTS to Windows 7, and hasn't been supported since 2013. 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) was the closest LTS to Windows 7 SP 1, and also hasn't been supported since 2013 (on Desktop).]
I used the more closely aligned dates because Windows and Ubuntu have been aligned to similar-ish 6 month cycles for a while now and especially in Windows 10. It's interesting that the LTS equivalents are in opposite parts of the cycle with Ubuntu LTS in the Spring and Windows LTS in the Fall. But even accounting for LTS versus LTS, the fact of the matter is that Windows extended security support still dwarfs the comparable Ubuntu timeframes and few are complaining that Ubuntu's support windows are too short. Of Desktop LTS support, Microsoft's seems almost by far the longest of any Desktop OS/distribution and no one is expecting Desktop support for even a Linux LTS distribution support like they expect from Windows.
Unless there is no option to keep the chattiness of the system only to user-initiated connections (and keep that option on the same value after updates!), many people simply won't migrate.
YMMV, but I feel that Windows 10 is respectful about my privacy and that Microsoft has been working to address every concern people have had.
Have you tried the FCU recently or do you intend to keep grinding the same ax from two years ago indefinitely?
If they introduce highly illegal telemetry and dial it back to slightly less illegal, then it's still illegal and yes, it very much makes sense to keep grinding that same axe from two years ago until Microsoft abides the law.
But thank you for reminding me, that any criticism not towing the party line is met with derision.
It's also a criticism that I'm having an increasingly hard time understanding or sympathizing with, because the privacy tools in Windows 10 do continue to get better and more transparent with each update. I am starting to wonder if this criticism is simply the easiest excuse available (because it will always be hard to 100% satisfy a tinfoil hat that "there are no magic hidden NSA bugs"; I read Slashdot for long enough to know how deep that rabbit hole sometimes goes), and that there is no actual way to satisfy this criticism, it will just continue to haunt every time Windows 10 is even remotely brought up in conversation for the rest of time.
1. Allow telemetry 2. Allow sharing telemetry data with third-parties.
There was no need to "improve privacy tools". There is simply an option to not send anything. You don't need to research "what's new in this version". One checkbox, done, forever. The result is verifiable on the firewall.
I'm sure, that if Microsoft did the same, including respecting the setting, everyone would be happy wrt telemetry.
And then we could discuss forced updates.
The telemetry Windows 10 didn't allow you to opt-out of at launch was the same telemetry every version of Windows since Vista (including 7) have not allowed you to opt-out of (including Windows Error Reporting, which even Windows XP had a stripped down version of that). There's a bit more of it in 10, but it's not like it magically appeared overnight...
Now there's half-dozen or so checkmarks, all in one spot, with a lot of information (and links to a lot more information) on a lot of detail as to what each checkmark includes (and what is impacted by turning it off). It's overkill compared to Apple's "one checkbox", but a lot of voices shouted they wanted a lot more information and a lot more ability to pick and choose.
The same people that trust Apple to just have one checkbox and be done with it, are some of the same people that want 100-page documents with specifics from Microsoft and why we've come to this page full of checkboxes and tons of stuff to read impasse. This is part of why I'm getting cynical about privacy complaints and feel like this discussion isn't going anywhere productive.
Meanwhile, all the new options look like convoluted way to not change anything, but being able to demonstrate to regulators and PR, that something is being done. An effort for show, do not care about the result.
The reason, why Apple can do one checkbox and everyone is happy, but there is a higher standard for Microsoft is very simple: Apple has demonstrated, that they can be trusted, while Microsoft has demonstrated exact opposite. Dragging their feet doesn't exactly help. Even Canonical when they did their misstep with Amazon, had a lot to do to repair their reputation. But they honestly tried; Microsoft didn't start yet.
Still, silencing a Mac on the network is way easier than silencing a Win 10 machine. It is not only the telemetry and the visibility into which process does what, but also the control over updates and persistence of your rules. Silent updates that change or misinterpret your settings (firewall rules bound to executable version, then updating this executable and applying default rules instead of yours are definitely not my favorite experience) significantly increase the time and effort needed, compared to other systems.
With Windows, it's very much arguable if the upgrade from 7 to 8.1 or to 10 is beneficial (or even legal for you to do, thanks to the increased surveillance) and if you dislike this upgrade path, then you can't easily switch to the next operating system, run all your same applications and continue using most of your configurations and scripts.
There's also still a monetary cost to upgrading Windows.
That kind of supports my point that if you were sticking to Ubuntu specifically you've seen a lot of change during the support lifetime of Windows 7. No IT department in their right mind would still be running a comparable Linux distribution on user desktops as old as Windows 7, and those Linux distributions have changed nearly as much as Windows 7 through to Windows 10.
Monetary cost is apples-to-oranges and irrelevant to the point I was trying to make, but: the Windows upgrade from 7 and 8.1 to 10 was made free for consumers and small businesses, and Microsoft has aligned with Apple that starting with Windows 10 upgrades are free for the support lifetime of the hardware; businesses above a certain size (the most likely ones to be conservative in their IT) have always paid for the latest version of Windows with their software assurance agreements, regardless if they deploy/upgrade to it.
Similarly alternative distributions are great, it's nice to have alternatives, but are also irrelevant to my point. Certainly in the Windows 7 support lifetime maybe you moved Ubuntu to Mint because you thought Unity was a mistake and maybe by now you are considering moving back to Ubuntu now that it is switching back to Gnome. The point is that you've still done many more distribution upgrades than Windows upgrades in the same timeframe and don't question it. (For the most part you'd still want the latest kernel and applications support, you mostly aren't just leaving machines be and not upgrading them.)
Not having more options in Windows upgrade direction is a fair complaint, but the point was that Microsoft in return granted one of the longest security support lifetimes of any desktop or mobile operating system out there.
I think it is useful to have that perspective on that, regardless of what you think about Windows or Microsoft. Whether or not Windows is moving the direction you want it to, the fact that so many people have the option to rest on their laurels for three more years before the next major scramble to a supported Windows version for their desktops (I'm ignoring servers and embedded appliances, this thread has always been about desktops), is largely unprecedented outside of Windows, and the refusal by some major corporations to keep Windows up-to-date would be laughed at if they were running Ubuntu or macOS.
Which is not the point I was making there. The point was that Windows Upgrades are subjective, whereas when Linux Upgrades are subjective, you can hop to the next OS.
Many end-users have no problem doing even twice as many upgrades, as long as what they're getting isn't worse. And often you're even able to avoid UI changes by making these sidesteps. For example, you could've gone from Ubuntu with GNOME2 to Ubuntu MATE or even Xubuntu and you'd still be using essentially the same UI as you've been able to use since 2002. Program compatibility wouldn't really change then either, it's still Ubuntu, still Linux under the hood.
I also really don't feel like it's fair for you to act like Ubuntu is the only distribution. If you know you want conservative, boring, then you'd install Debian. openSUSE Leap would also be an option, for the most part not quite as conservative as Debian, but at least it's out of its experimenting phase. And if you don't mind monetary costs, then SUSE Linux Enterprise will give you 10 years general support + 3 years extended support.
Lastly, the upgrade isn't just subjective for many companies, it's even likely illegal due to the increased telemetry. Either because they're in a field where by law, they have to abide to user data protection, or because they have contracts that ask for secrecy. And I do think that that is a very legitimate reason to not be upgrading right away or at all. That one, however, is on Microsoft.
I agree with you though that migrations increase in pain the longer they're put off.
[1] https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/
Even Windows 8.1's equivalent Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) fell out of support two years ago. Though arguably that's intentionally unfair because Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) is the closest LTS and still has support for less than two more years (through April 2019). Though that's quaint in comparison to Microsoft's generous extended security support of Windows 8.1 until Jan 2023.
The reluctance to migrate users by corporations creates its own worst enemy. The longer you wait the tougher it is to migrate, the more versions you skip in the middle. That's both a detriment to user learning (they miss transitionary learning steps and evolutionary UX migrations), and a one of those "doctor, it hurts when I migrate because I do it so seldomly, so I migrate less often and it hurts more" problems. The less often you distro upgrade the more problems you have so you loathe to distro upgrade creating more problems. Maybe distro upgrade a bit more often? I realize that is a radical assertion in modern corporate IT, but it seems like a common sense one.