Next year Windows 10 goes End of Life. Microsoft will undoubtedly push windows 11 hard, but a lot of machines won’t support it leading to a few economic points of interest:
The demand for new machines will be high, driving up cost.
The supply of unsupported machines will be high, driving down the used market.
Are you all ready?
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If MS decides that my hardware is obsolete, I’ll just go full Linux 🤷♂️
My machine is 7 years old and runs fine on Windows 11. I don’t understand all these posts about Windows 11 not being supported. TPMs have been a thing for 10+ years now.
Do you game at all? Gaming on Linux has made great strides, be be fair, but for a lot of titles you still need to consider a dual boot of some form of Windows, thanks to over the top anti-cheat, DRM, and developer support.
Something to consider for the gamers out there.
The only titles that don’t work in Linux are the ones with invasive anti-cheat, some multi-player titles.
Virtually all single players game work. I’ve had games that don’t work on Windows due to crashes / performance but run on Linux.
Game pass games also do not work afaik.
Apex started acting up on pop a year and half ago which drove me back to my windows partition (that I hadn’t seen in almost 18 months).
I don’t know if my issue is: pop, proton, steam, apex, my hardware(bad ram?), flatpaks, the deb, or something else. In my opinion it’s one of the toughest part about Linux gaming–when something goes wrong you arent going to find a ton of help since there is so much fragmentation.
But anyway, I echo your sentiment. Windows is still a necessary evil for a lot of us if you are big into PC gaming.
Same with apple, tho 😇
Apple is king of new OS doesn’t work on the old hardware though
Yes! Luckily the opensource folks are crazy and make awesome progress reversing m chips It matters to me because somday (maybe 10y) I’ll get the one of my mother for free 😂 like i got my other apple PCs (running Arch/endeavourOS)
Yeah, people are just going to keep using it, they just won’t get updates. That means they will be vulnerable to any exploits that come along afterward but most people don’t care. M$ shot everyone in the foot when they decided to limit windows 11 compatibility.
When windows 7 came out I knew people who stuck with windows xp until they bought a new computer with 10 or 11 on it. The market will get a slight bump from EoL but it isn’t going to force everyone with windows 10 to run out and buy a new computer immediately.
It’s mostly just to force the hands of businesses that will now have to upgrade to stay compliant with security standards
Which is probably the play. I’d doubt Microsoft really gives a flying fuck about home users buying licenses anymore, since their revenue model for consumer Windows is just ads and data harvesting now anyway.
A few months back we just upgraded some school computers from Windows XP to Windows 7, so that checks out. They can barely run that anyway and get almost no use.
Your machine needs to be around a decade old to be incompatible I think.
MS shot itself by being so backwards compatible.
The primary requirements are TPM, a security feature.
With Valve pumping all that development money and effort into proton, I will finally be able to go full Linux before Windows 10 ends it’s life. I only needed it for gaming, but those days are finally gone! Thanks Valve! _
I did that this year, smooth sailing so far!
I did it many years ago. Some minor hiccups (Mostly at the start, with a select few games taking a while before running well in proton), but overall my experience has been pretty smooth as well. Especially in like the last…3ish years? I dont think I’ve been held back from playing anything I seriously wanted to play.
This is the year of Linux on desktop?
every year is the year of linux on desktop, or so has been claimed.
My Grandma uses Arch by the way
Just get yourself a copy of the LTSC (long term service contract) versions, they will still be supported until 2027, and in the past have been extended by up to 5 years on top.
It’s the only viable alternative to Linux, for those who can’t switch for one or another reason. Windows 11 is pure cancer.
Having used 10 and 11 interchangeably since 11 came out… meh.
I mean, maybe there are additional annoyances from the IT/sysadmin side that I just don’t bump into as a user, but besides some UX downgrades that don’t make sense (that taskbar… why?) it’s a pretty neutral change. Maybe I’m to grizzled by having been there in the switch to 95. I unironically had Windows Me on my computer there for a while. I even caved and did some Vista eventually.
But not Windows 8. Windows 8 was unusable.
The taskbar is one thing, but it’s horribly slow, even on a rather high spec laptop. The delay from clicking start menu icons to programs starting is very noticeable, and some programs freeze regularly. MS Office are actually some of the worst offenders. I tried it for 2 weeks and then did a fresh install of Windows 10.
I didn’t even mind ME, for me it was running pretty stable. I heard most issues came from people updating from 98 or 98SE to ME, a clean install was usually stable.
I skipped Vista though, went straight to 7. Still my favorite Windows. 8 was crap, 8.1 was not bad once you applied the taskbar fix.
Hm. Not been my experience going back and forth between 10 and 11, but that’s always the case with Windows, isn’t it? Bit of a crapshoot in general.
Honestly, I have no idea how to evaluate real laptop performance these days. Most of the performance issues I have on battery devices are some unholy combination of horrific power management, bad software and semi-deliberate online weirdness with services throttling you out of adblocker spite.
People are out there telling you how well Youtube is meant to perform playing video and how long the battery is meant to run based on that and I don’t even know what they mean anymore.
Funny that this started with 10 in my experience. Our family laptop did an involuntary upgrade back in 2016, and its 2 cores, 4 gigs of ram and hdd just couldn’t handle it. And none in our family was savvy enough to downgrade to 7. Thankfully same did not happen to mom’s similarly weak one, it was saved from running an EOL system by Linux)
I just upgraded my work surface book 3 to 11 and for me it seems that program start faster, not slower 🤔
I actually liked the full screen Start menu from 8/8.1 for the specific use case of my living room PC. You got a big 10-foot UI by default with nice large icons you could punch from across the room.
The whole put-your-mouse-in-the-corner-and-swipe for the charms menu was baffling, though. I get that this was supposed to be a tablet UI thing, but why make it mandatory for the mouse interface as well?
Windows 8, maybe. But Windows 8.1 was awesome. The optimization, it ran perfectly on a potato.
Yep. I get they wanted to pretend 8 wasn’t a complete bust, hence the 8.1 nonsense, but they should have called it Windows 9 and been honest about it. They certainly acknowledged it by the time 10 came around.
Nothing got named “Windows 9” because Microsoft feared compatibility issues with janky programs looking for the first set of characters in “Windows 95” or “Windows 98.”
Later this was changed by the marketing department to some blather about “wanting consumers to perceive a clean break from the previous version.” But then, Microsoft also claimed Windows 10 would be the Last Windows, and it would just have feature updates built on top of it forever as a service. So you sure as fuck can’t take anything they say at face value.
I think when Microsoft said Windows 10 was the last version, they were serious about it. And they kept it up for a pretty long time too. I think windows 11 happened only because some marketing person wanted to be able to pitch a new version, and a UX refresh was already being implemented.
Windows 11 is garbage:
- UI is garbage, from right click to the taskbar, its a alpha release being sold to as complete product.
- settings missing alot of control panel items and you cant go back in some cases for even simple things like sound device management, network management, all settings are far far from parity.
- Poor hardware compatibility, bsod on same hardware is common occurance.
- Privacy invasive spyware. From the search service to the telemetry. Its a data mining platform
- Security is terrible. Internet connected Services are on by default that shouldnt be like search and telemetry. Any on by default service, like telemetry can and are abused with zero days. Mandated cloud services as a bandaid to poor local account security. Security is a bandaid full stop, from the kernel to cloud services its not secure by design.
Agree on 1, mostly. I forget that’s the case because I have software installed to fix it, which is fairly trivial but shouldn’t be necessary in the first place.
2 is a day one meme thing that no longer holds. Sound management in particular is now much better than Win 10 in several key areas, IMO. Likewise with 3. Echoes of Vista and Win 8.1 dragging day one legit complaints way past when they were no longer an issue.
4 and 5 are the kinds of things that average users typically don’t know or care about (and mostly don’t have to) and are debatable from a power user’s perspective. If the argument is Win10 is reaching end of support and you care about the implications of that, then you are the type of user that can fix that problem. And if you’re the kind of user who doesn’t care about a supported vs unuspported Win10, you don’t care about this specific observation either.
Let me be clear, I’m not an active apologist for Win 11 or any other Windows, I just don’t have a preference. Win11 was a sidestep, the best I can say for it is that I’m kinda glad MS was semi-forced to keep it as a separate version rather than a patch to 10. But it’s also mostly just fine. A few people got really incensed about it early on and have tried to keep up a pretense that it’s a disaster iteration in the vein of some of the really bad ones, which using it day to day is clearly an exaggeration.
- Is absolutely still an issue expecially when manufacturers advise on disabling OS features for compatibility. Dont forget that user base you talk about, this is an OS upgrade so if its not stable, its not suitable. My god is it not stable, read kernal processor power management. Its a stability nightmare for general users.
So bother with all that mac imitation especially when the upgrade is not possible? Just buy the more power efficient, faster and improved value chrome book.
Wait, who is talking about ChromeOS? I thought we were talking about Win10 v Win11.
I through that in for bait ❤️ for the MS bros
I swear, the fact that people treat operating systems as if they were 90s kids arguing about Sega vs. Nintendo is exhausting and I have zero patience for it.
11 has artificial hardware requirements built in that will prevent it from installing on a lot of computers (possibly most computers deployed in the world, at this point) which is the main issue. All those non-technical home users who bought a brand name prebuilt PC in 5, 6, however many years ago that still works just fine will not be able to upgrade.
They will be left in the lurch unless M$ relents and removes those requirements (unlikely), they all learn to patch them out themselves (extremely unlikely), or they all go buy new computers with newer hardware (extremely annoying).
As me and others have said all over this thing, Windows 10 no longer getting updates doesn’t mean it’s mandatory to update. Most of the users you describe will not notice or care that security updates die out and they will just take whatever runs in the next PC they buy, as they normally do.
This mostly matters to power users and corporations. If that. I’m arguably a power user and have zero intention to upgrade my legacy Win10 machines for this reason, either.
The first release of windows 11 LTSC is supposed to be out sometime this year too.
Much like the 10 version, I expect it to have most of the bloat removed and only require a couple tweaks.
I use 10 at home and 11 at work and I can’t say I’ve really noticed a difference tbh. Apart from the start menu I guess.
Feels similar to what people said about 7 and 10.
Long term servicing “Channel”
Ah, that was it. Thanks!
IMHO people just won’t give a flying fuck about it. Most people won’t even be aware of it.
They’ll upgrade when they’ll buy a new PC, just as usual.
There are people out there still using Windows XP. Not everyone will jump because Microsoft is trying to force their hand
If by people you mean botnets, then yes.
We are trialing about 20 Linux desktops (10 Linux mint and 10 zorin OS) across 2 of our MSP clients.
So far, they have had zero technical tickets in 6 months. They did have double the average user training tickets compared to windows machines. Most of the questions were around how to work with editable PDFs and where is the document was they just saved (file manager questions).
Zorin OS seems to be winning on the usability metrics. Its very polished and more closely matching the UI of people coming from windows.
Are there any windows programs you’ve had to set up through wine?
Not in our case. We only take on clients that converted to browser based apps. Bit we are yet to convert the heavy excel users. The one we have converted are light Excel users and online excel is working just fine for them.
It’s my only hangup. I vba on the regular. Work forced win11 on me, but at home, once i can be assed, I’ll vm windows eventually and migrate completely, and scheme alternative languages for my spreadsheet wizardry lmao
Libre calc Scripting imo is more matured and better than excel. Better and far more popular language (python or javascript equally far better than vb)
I’ve heard good things but haven’t looked into it yet. Thing is, I got so good at vba that I got a promotion out of it lmao. As archaic as it is, my work is essentially hardcoded in windows for the foreseeable future, so I have to be able to dick around in msoffice.
If you want yet another promotion you know what to do next
I highly recommend skilling up asap. Its really eol. Nothing stopping you from changing your code to python (which is supported in excel) with the goal to migrate out to either an application or FOSS office suite. LibreOffice costs your corpo IT nothing to deploy unlike MS Office which costs to buy and keeps costing with every proprietary service and feature you use.
From the bottom of my tortured soul: fuck Windows.
Corporations (the only people who actually care about their OS being in support) upgrade their machines every few years so they’ve already done that. Home users don’t know what that means and won’t care. The remaining 2% have already installed linux.
This.
Official OS support is a security concern. The machine I have in use at home that is running Win10 is doing so on deliberately old hardware for preservation and it will continue to do so indefinitely, just like my XP machine. I’m even a bit surprised myself by how few Win10 computers I have, considering I haven’t once upgraded one to Win11 on purpose. I thik I may have an older laptop that is still on Win10 and can happily stay there, since it doesn’t see much use.
But hey, corporate office PCs ARE likely to hit the used market in higher numbers at that point, and those are often a good deal for cheap DIY builds. It’s still a good date to track if you’re into that sort of thing.
Already got my NEW 12-core machine before prices go up, running Debian 100%. With my 25 year history of using Linux and pirating Windows, MS never saw a damn penny from me, and I’m proud of that fact. Not even an OEM license (all my laptops I ever had were work supplied and I build my own PCs)
To be fair, I’ve been using windows since 3.1. I haven’t paid for windows since xp I think. I got an oem key second hand right around w7 for my desktop. That key has just lasted me all the way to w11. So I haven’t paid ms anything either in decades (except for my personal data I guess?)
I’ve never paid for a Windows license, ever. I sure as fuck didn’t for Win 95 when it came out, since us script kiddies figured out pretty fast you can install it with a CD key of all 1’s. And then I used Windows 2000 for a long time. So long that I still remember the (stolen, MSDN) license key I used from having installed it umpteen times.
DDTPV-TXMX7-BBGJ9-WGY8K-B9GHM
There, you can have that one gratis and for nothin’. For all the good it’ll do you now.
And I still have one of those grey and blue plastic MSDN tackle boxes full of CD’s of all the Microsoft stuff. You want a copy of Visual Studio 2003 or something? I got you.
I’ve extracted about 40 keys from my school, all W10, Education edition (equal to Enterprise), but work with any newer edition. Unlimited number of uses, no expiration. I’ve been sharing them left and right, and if one goes bad, I just let them switch to a new one.
MAK isn’t unlimited number of uses.
Well, then I didn’t hit the limit yet lol.
Yeah I recently purchased a new laptop to replace the one I’ve had for 12 years. Hoping to get another 12 years out of it and I didn’t want to fight the enterprise customers.
Yes I am.
I hope for the cheap unsupported to-be-Linux machines.
Using rufus it’s pretty easy to install windows 11 without meeting their bullshit requirements.
Did that for my work laptop, which is getting old but runs just fine. Including windows 11.
Plenty of reasons to switch to Linux, but this can be circumvented. And anyone who doesn’t know how to, because it is too complicated shouldn’t really switch to Linux anyway IMO, because they will already run into trouble with finding compatible printers, getting software for proprietary hardware they are using, etc.
Thanks for the lead. Now I know about Rufus https://pureinfotech.com/rufus-create-bootable-windows-11-usb/
Out of interest, have you seen the recent headlines around Windows 11 stopping working on unsupported hardware that it had been installed on anyway?
Recently switched to Mac for work and all my home stuff is Linux. Let the rain fall
Sounds like there are going to be a lot of machines running a fresh install of Linux next year. Microsoft really does ♥️ Linux.
Tbf they genuinely do.
They’ve invested heavily in Linux and are one of its major contributors. I think they were in the top 5 of contributors.
They realised years ago the Linux desktop isn’t going to take off with the average user. So there’s no need to compete directly.
Azure actually runs on their own custom distribution of Linux.
Not really, but I have 18 months to migrate all my shit away from there. I’ve already moved a lot of my critical stuff to FOSS software running under win10 and I’m more than passing familiar with Linux. Shouldn’t be a massive deal.
