This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Microsoft's new OS has never been a concern of mine. I still have a windows XP, Vista, and windows 7 PC's. They all work fine but zero security updates of course. You don't need to upgrade your OS and most people will simply just keep windows 10 instead up buying a new computer.
I'm just going to setup dual boot with linux since i have some modding and custom software that only works on windows.
How much of this is people not wanting to upgrade vs not being able to upgrade because their PC isn't supported?
I'm a sys admin in the public sector and the hardware requirements of W11 are a great blessing. I couldn't have convinced thousands of workers to switch to Linux and get used to another GUI but this forces it on us because there simply is no money to replace all that hardware. Rolling out Mint clients and between this and mobile operating systems Microsoft is finally losing its monopoly on the OS market.
I have been called by friends, family friends, and their friends to help with this and so many have hardware that is not supported, and some are not able to afford a new PC right now. That's my limited and personal experience about this.
I have reservations about installing Linux Mint/other for these people because I don't have time to help right now and you do need sometimes help if you are slightly tech aware but not enough to be able to troubleshoot yourself or search for right info. For folks who barely touch any settings and just use it for docs + web it's easy, but for others not always.
Microsoft is such an ass for doing this.
Microsoft has given users fair warning, and said that users can get a year of updates for free but eventually the company will have to face facts and extended support beyond October.
We can’t recall a time where Microsoft has done such a thing but these are extenuating circumstances given that most users just aren’t budging.
WTF is this guy talking about? Far as I can tell this is the Win7 playbook all over again. Looking it up, this was the timeline:
Jan. 13, 2015: Microsoft ended Mainstream Support for Windows 7.
Sept. 6, 2018: Microsoft announced the ESUs for Windows 7. The ESU program is a paid service that provides critical security updates for legacy products for up to three years after Extended Support ends.
August 2019: Microsoft announced a year of free ESUs, but only for select users, including customers with an Enterprise Agreement or Enterprise Agreement Subscription with active Windows 10 Enterprise E5, Microsoft 365 E5, or Microsoft 365 E5 Security subscriptions. This was limited to only Government E5 stock keeping units.
Jan. 14, 2020: Microsoft ended Extended Support for Windows 7.
Jan. 10, 2023: The ESUs reached their end of life on the first Patch Tuesday of 2023.
That's almost a decade of post-end of support updates. If anything, MS confirmed ESU before trying to shut down home user patches this time, so it looks less like terrified backpedalling. And as the linked article itself admits, the data they're reporting on shows a significant number of users still on Win7. The article waves it away as just "too many", but the original report says 8.5%.
Because, as it turns out, the kind of people using Kapersky antivirus software and the number of people who would not upgrade from a 16 year old OS that has lost support half a dozen times over the past half a decade show significant overlap. In the Steam survey right now Win 7 is only 0.07%, for reference.
While we're at it Win 11 is 60% vs 35% for Win 10. For all the headlines when Steam shows Linux growth you don't often hear over here that Win 11 went up by 0.5% and Windows overall went up by 0.36%, although it's worth noting that Windows has been pretty stable between 94 and 96% since the survey started.
I've said it before and I'll keep reality checking it: the Win 10 end of support process has been wildly overhyped, particularly among Linux-friendly circles. It is not meaningfully different to moves out of other "good" versions of Windows and it's not a catastrophic crisis point for MS, for better and worse. They'll keep support up for the people who need it for as long as they're willing to pay and most legacy home users won't even know their old Win10 is unsupported because it'll just keep happily chugging along with all the same malware it already has until something breaks and they have to buy a new laptop with a preinstalled Win11 or 12 or whatever.
The most the Win10 death hype is doing to hurt MS is create a flurry of social media posts that can convince tech savvy, Linux-curious users who were previously held back by lack of gaming support to give user friendly distros a try.
I sidestepped the win11 artificial requirements, and things are great.
It convinced me to ditch dual booting and to go full Linux
I just went straight to Mint as I had another PC running W11, which I rarely used. And then when I had to use it, W11 would always force me to download a ton of updates that had no positive effects on the PC. After dealing with this about 5 times, I just converted that W11 PC to Mint too, so I’m 100% Windows free now.
Wait...
Excluding half of the active PCs or so from upgrade due to arbitrary hardware constraints didn't push upgrading?
How can this be??? 😯🫢
It's not "arbitrary" I'd say. It's part of a long term plan to probably push a fully trusted platform. Yes, so they can ID you by hardware etc but also lock down driver installs and maybe even software installs one day.
That's exactly what arbitrary is. It's not for a good reason, it's so they can push bullshit later. The limitations were chosen arbitrarily because they're not real limitations, they're entirely imposed by a Microsoft for their own ends. A non-arbitrary limitation is like minimum graphics card requirements for a game - won't run without it. What do you think arbitrary means?
Read the room, Microsoft.
I got your upgrade right...
here
This is one guy you don't see palling about with Donald Trump.
