Can’t upgrade your PC to Windows 11? Buy a new one, is Microsoft’s laughable solution
https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/cant-upgrade-your-pc-to-windows-11-buy-a-new-one-is-microsofts-laughable-solutionOpen linkView original on lemm.ee231
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On one hand, eff Microsoft and install Debian. It'll run on a potato.
On the other hand, I look forward to the coming glut of secondhand PCs I can install Debian on.
As melon scratchers go, that's a honey doodle.
I think we're gonna see a dramatic rise in Linux systems in the coming years if Microsoft keeps this course. Nvidia have started upping their Linux driver game as well so it's gonna be a breeze to pick up decent second hand systems and reselling them with a proper OS that'll take us to the end of the world in 24 years.
Been reading this sentiment for twenty years now.
And yet it's stayed true. Linux is above 1% on steam and rising every year, it's never been easier to buy a Linux device, or install and use Linux for desktop consumer purposes, and even the tech uninformed know Microsoft is a bag of dicks.
Recent Linux gain is inflated due to Steam Deck. Their market share has been pretty stale for years at 1,5%.
That's not really being inflated, steam deck and the prerequisite investment into proton is why most gamers can switch to Linux without encountering a single issue these days.
If that were the case, the market share at least should have doubled after people saw it was viable for desktop gaming. That didn't happen. It only gained a predicted increase from the estimated sales of Steam Deck's, which indeed inflates the desktop PC numbers.
So we don't count Microsoft Surfaces running windows or windows (on arm)?
But this time it's real! /s
I think you’re massively underestimating the laziness of most people, and overestimating their level of concern. People. Don’t. Care.
Yeah I think you're 100% correct but a guy can hope. For my country, if it's gonna touch them in their wallets I guess we might see a change. On the other hand, most folks walk around with 8 year old fucked up laptops that desperately need replacing anyway so they'll just get that new one after all.
My wife is more technical than all of her friends and family, plus she has me to help her understand stuff she doesn’t understand. Does she get concerned when I tell her all the fucked up shit these companies are pulling? Nope! She gets annoyed at me for being a downer. If she’s an above average user, and she doesn’t care, then how little do average users care? If I change her settings for her then she’s glad for it, but she won’t go figure out how to do any of it on her own. She just doesn’t care enough to spend the time doing that.
I am in the exact same position there. My wife uses her laptop only professionally now, she used to game on it but she has a Series S for that now. I once asked her if she wanted windows 11 on her laptop since it meets the requirements, she's way to afraid it'll be too different so switching to Linux will be too much of a hassle
I would have already put Linux on my wife’s computer, but she has a Surface Pro, and I’ve read that there aren’t any distros that will get all of the hardware for those working properly. I don’t want her first experience with a Linux system to be something that is inferior. But she started saying a couple weeks ago that she wants a gaming system, so I bought parts for one last week, and I’m going to put Linux on it after I build it. That’ll be a good introduction for her, and if she loves it then she’ll be a Linux convert!
I think primarily all the systems using like Skylake and Kaby Lake cpus will now flock to Linux after win10 support is over. The i7-7700K is still a beast so it'd be a shame if that becomes e-waste. I think we'll see it getting used in home media servers and the like. My old i7-4770 is in my home server with Arch Linux and it does great.
Don't you mean 13 years and 3 months? At least, that's when the UNIX Epoch ends...
If you're on a kernel newer than 5.6 (which is almost 5 years old now so you should be) you already have 64-bit time.
Thank you MS for working so hard to boost Linux market share.
Either way, you're net positive.
Why would you scratch a melon? How would you even know if it's itchy???
Can you scratch pumpkins too?
My computer can't upgrade to Win11 and I am buying a new one, but I'm putting Linux on it.
My computer can upgrade to win11. I clearly remember the vendor stating that when I bought it last year.
I'll stick to linux, though.
Mine too. I tried 11 and went back to 10. Honestly, only thing keeping me on Windows currently is my plex*arr servers. Guess I have a year to figure out docker.
Just pointing out, Plex and *arr work on Linux too...
LOL.
I cannot seem to find that setting in uefi to turn on that chip... Anyway, I keep trying to get my VR library (98 games) to register more than 3, and room setup is a major stroke of luck.
If there are any suggestions on a distro that will power my rtx 4070ti super, ryzen 7 3800, 32 gb ram, HTC Vive, on its own 4tb sata SSD, I would like to hear them. So far Kubuntu has gotten me the closest.
I have parts on the way to build a new PC. Believe it or not, also Linux.
Put Linux on your old one.
That was actually the plan but my old computer broke and won't boot up anymore. Powering it on causes it to enter a reboot loop.
Does it successfully POST? Can you get into the BIOS menu? If yes, the problem is probably the storage, either the boot sector is fuxx0r3d or the drive itself is dead.
It doesn't reach the BIOS menu. It powers off about a second or two after turning it on and then it will turn itself on to start the loop. It doesn't stay on long enough for the monitor to even display anything.
Okay yeah failure to POST is a bigger problem.
I will not be upgrading to W11. Some time between now and when they sunset W10 I will be switching to Linux.
Im sure Win10 will get unofficial patching etc for some time yet
True but you really shouldn't rely on that. If you must use Windows 10 you can always air gap it
I always gasp for air but that's because I swim a lot, and by swim, I mean very fat
PCs that can’t run Windows 11 are valuable to people who don’t want to wake up one morning and find they’ve been upgraded against their will.
Windows 10 will be EOL this time next year. You have one year to do something.
A lot of people will just be paying for 0patch for a while, I'm sure. The remainder will just not patch at all and hope for the best.
You also could just move to Windows 11 or Linux. Realistically Windows 11 isn't that big of change. Windows 10 gas most of the same anti features.
Or I could switch to Linux...
OH WAIT, I already did that, darn. Such a shame I can't ditch Windows twice.
You can, install it and uninstall it once again. Repeat until you're sated.
I would've, but Framework ships with your choice of OS (including none) so I didn't have to switch twice!
This isn't news, it's just the standard notice that Microsoft isn't going to spend time making their new shiny OS work on 10+ year old hardware.
You make it sound like an older gaming rig wasn't powerful enough to run win 11. It's not about the older hardware being too weak, it's about enforcing their TPM bullshit with which they aim to gradually create an apple style walled garden where they control what you can do with your machine.
FTFY
New Shitty “Os”*
*(Legal Disclaimer “Os” is actually malware)
idk, sounds like an ad for Linux to me
I dunno, I've got a laptop who's CPU was too new for win 8.1 to have drivers or support for it, and is too old to put win 11 on it...
This is the first time they've intentionally cut off the ability to run their OS at all just based on hardware age when it could otherwise run it just fine.
Not dedicating support to old hardware is one thing, blocking it intentionally is something else entirely.
Oh, that laptop? High end gaming laptop that was 6 years old when Windows 11 released. The fact it's blocked is flat out ridiculous, and defending it is equally ridiculous.
They want you to buy a new Windows license. Also all of there bloated Electron apps run better on fast hardware
Shocked face
Its almost as if Microsoft makes money from new hardware
That's not what anyone is asking and if that's what MS said then they're just dodging the issue entirely. If you buy a motherboard on your own today TPM still wouldn't be enabled. And their "support" never went farther than hardware manufacturers registering where Windows could pull driver updates from. So that's just the worst take I've seen in this whole thing.
Yupp, Linux it is
Windows isn’t even that good. The OS is kind of a huge mess. It has two unfortunate advantages though: it’s the default on many devices, and (because of that) software availability is best. I wish it wasn’t the case.
It also has the benefit of inertia. Everyone knows Microsoft from either school or marketing. They are the standard and anyone else has to fight decades of standards. It also helps that they historically created the best tools for easily managing fleets on machines. Now days they are pushing everyone to Azure but before they had the best tools to build your business on. It was so convenient to have Windows server with all the server stuff like AD, SQL and IIS. They basically were they only well known option until the last 5-10 years.
PowerShell is another advantage, oddly enough, though I've been worried for a bit the direction they're going with that... Everything they're doing now is Azure and they're pushing everything to Graph, and the way all of it works is a massive pain for anyone trying to use PowerShell the way it was designed to be used
Python exists but I personally like PowerShell more. I'm not crazy about it being Microsoft owned, but it's at least open source at this point, for whatever that's worth.
After about 10 hours of reading and video watching, it seems pretty unanimous that linux mint with cinnamon is the easiest one to use and everything else is hobbyist stuff.
Right? The easiest one is the hobbyist stuff, everything else is srs bsns.
I daily drove Linux Mint for 10 years. The Cinnamon desktop is still my favorite. I'm using Fedora KDE right now because of its Wayland implementation, I wanted better support for stuff like Freesync, mixed refresh rates, there's even experimental support for HDR. Mint is just now rolling out any Wayland support at all and it's not ready.
I'm actually at the point where I'd recommend Mint Cinnamon with X11 for Nvidia systems and Fedora KDE with Wayland for AMD systems. If it's a work machine that uses integrated graphics and it'll do spreadsheets and quickbooks.com all day, go with Mint it's comfier.
Smells like Microsoft air in here... A bit stale, dirty, corporate vibe.
Windows users have no idea what they are missing out on by avoiding Linux.
Honestly, I'm afraid of how complicated it sounds and have no idea where to begin.
In my opinion Linux is now easier to install than windows. The installers don't have any user hostility built-in, nagging you for Microsoft accounts or activation keys or any of that crap. Once it's Installed you could park your grandma in front of it and she'd be able to figure out how to surf the web.
If you're interested, start here
I'm pretty sure that there are grandmas now who have actually used Linux.
You begin right here. There's lots of enthusiastic Linux users here on Lemmy and we're happy to answer any questions.
Let me ask you a couple questions: What do you mainly use your computer for? Content creation, playing games, business, web browsing?
Have you ever installed Windows on a computer before?
The only difficult part is getting Linux on to a USB stick. After that, you boot your computer from the USB stick and click next, next, next until it's done. It's super easy.
There are guides how to burn a iso file with the Linux distinction to a USB stick too. Just start there, see if you can do that as step one.
As for Linux distro, pick something common and easy, like Pop OS or Fedora.
I've recently been dabbling with Linux for the first time, so here's a few things I've found along the way.
First, look at whether you can disable secure boot. Most computers can, but as I've recently discovered on my laptop, the option just isn't there for some motherboards. If you can't or don't want to for whatever reason, it's not the end of the world, you'll just need to pick a distro that supports secure boot, I know Ubuntu does, and I believe a few of the other more popular ones do too.
Next, grab a few distros to try out. You may want to look into recommendations if there's anything specific you want to do. For example, I wanted to make sure gaming setup was as straightforward as possible, so I looked at distros that were tailored towards that. Create some bootable USBs and spend a few minutes just looking at each to get a feel. You'll pretty quickly decide whether or not you like a distro, there's really no point spending more time with one if there's something that puts you off from the get-go.
Dual boot is the way to go until you feel like dropping Windows entirely, if you can. And if there's something that just isn't going to work on Linux, it's good to be able to just jump across to Windows for that purpose. The only annoying thing I've found is that Windows updates can break the dual-boot partition, so just be aware of that. If it happens, it's not that difficult a process to repair it.
Other than that, Linux isn't that different from other OSes in how you'll probably use it. There are a few different ways you can install programs due to the different distros, so you'll want to look at things like how to install a flatpak. For Windows programs, you can look at whether you can get it running in Bottles or a VM if you don't want to bother rebooting.
It’s not like it used to be where you absolutely needed to know command line and memorize them. It hasn’t been that way for at least a decade now.
Most Linux distros look identical to Windows that the average user would assume it’s Windows with a different skin.
And with WINE and Proton, Windows apps (except Windows Store apps) can be run with little to no issues in many cases.
The biggest obstacles are going to be:
I’m currently on KDE Neon which I love. Thinking about moving over to it fully on other computers too.
I’d say getting a distro with KDE Plasma is a good thing if you are accustomed to Windows.
GNOME if you are more accustomed to Mac.
Just in the way it looks and behaves. KDE Plasma feels a lot like Windows 7/10.
Some good distros to try with this would be KDE Neon, Zorin, or SteamOS. There are others out there to try.
YouTube is fantastic for any setup questions or just to follow for a painless experience.
Don’t be scurred! Download the Pop!_OS disc image, use Rufus to create a bootable USB drive. Put it into your USB port. Boot. Hit f12 if needed to select your boot device. Boot to the thumb drive. Follow the on-screen instructions. EZ!
PS: move your data off your primary hard drive before proceeding with step 3 above. You should follow a wiki, but it really is that simple.
Just run windows 3.1 dual booted with Linux mint. Easily the most rational decision.
FreeDOS
"upgrade"
If one's hardware is 10+ years old, I don't think upgrading to the latest OS is likely high on their list of priorities.
Why upgrade hardware that still does all you need?
I'll just keep running Windows 10.
For 1 year at most. After that you need to either move to Windows 11 or switch to a different platform like Linux or Mac OS.
I mean, I'm on your side, but many of these people won't do that at all. There's people still running vista. I ran into a machine running fucking XP just two years ago. They'll run 10 until they get ransomware, or the machine breaks physically, or it slows down from being resource hungry on old hardware. Maybe they'll switch in the case of the latter if they can't afford a new machine, or if something like "microsoft spying and pissing them off enough to ditch."
We should encourage for sure but I wouldn't hold out for most of them just yet. Best we can do is be here when they're ready, they're on lemmy they're bound to install Linux one day, it's in the contract we all signed as I'm sure you remember!
Nope, the vendors see that as a win too. Go buy new hardware. Stop being a poor.
BlizzardMicrosuck: "Don't you all have bank accounts?"So in other words, switch to Linux, never look back, bever again use anu Microsoft software or product. Done.
People talk about Linux as if it's easy to use for most people. Also the reason I never switch to Linux is cause of the annoying Linux people who won't shut up about Linux
It IS easy to use for most people
There really isn't much complications in the way of installing and using linux, I think it's even fair to say that at this point it's easier than windows.
The reason annoying people like me exist is because people like me see people like you paying money for shit and then complain about the smell. You don't need to smell shit, you know.
It feels like screaming into the void on Lemmy, but until there is official support for peripherals I use every single day (looking at you stream deck and GoXLR) I will likely never switch to Linux as my only OS. Dual boot on different drives on the other hand....
I’ve spent much of the day trying to get Yunohost/Debian running on my old 2011 MacBook.
It’s much quicker and easier to install the latest macOS on it, and that ain’t right.
I just would like to point out that you would not be using Windows 10 on or past Oct 2025. You have exactly one year to move on.
As soon as it reached end of life you know it will immediately be a huge target. Don't let personal preference put you at risk.
looks at self
How many other ways are my personal preferences putting me at risk?
They said that about XP too, but I never heard of anyone getting massively pwned after support stopped.
I hope you are joking...
Because MS is so good at quickly releasing quality patches for every vulnerability that it's not already a huge target?
Compared to not getting any patches at all? That doesn't seem like a good justification for staying on something EOL.
I stayed on XP until some game I wanted didn't work (by that time, 7 was out), I stayed on 7 until some game I wanted didn't work (by that time, 10 was out). Nothing bad happened to me. I'll take my chances. At least until I find the time to get into Linux, whenever that may be.
One more year of dual-booting should be plenty of time to ween off the Windows teat.
I mean, not really? Unless someone holds onto a really bad exploit until after that point, it'll be no different than going increasingly behind on updates, there's no magic switch that will be thrown that makes it more vulnerable after EOL
Get a new OS for free for your PC.
Humm, I installed Windows 11 on a really old Dell laptop (clean install). I'm sure it was not HW supported but it installed fine. I may have had to click something like, " Yeah I know it doesn't meet the specs"; but otherwise fine.
No, I don't like Windows but it's what my partner needed at the time.
As long as it is 8th gen Intel or newer it is officially supported. It depends on what you mean by "really old." I have hardware from the early 2000s that runs Debian.
Finally got around to looking up the info on it.
It's a Dell Latitude D630 (model PP18L according to the label). CPU is: Intel Core 2 T7250, 2.00GHz, 800MHz, 2M L2 Cache, Dual Core Built: 27 MAR 2008 (actually newer than I thought) Last OS to have support from Dell was: Windows Vista 32/64 bit RAM is: 2.0GB, DDR2-667 SDRAM
Per this page it doesn't meet the specs: Windows 11 requirements But that page also states:
so it's more of a soft spec than an actual hard minimum.
I have systems from before 2000 that I'm sure would run x86 Linux (especially DSL Linux: [DamnSmallLinux.Org](https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ and such). Can't wait to browse using Lynx again :-)
edit: formatting
You can run a bunch of of things on that hardware. The limiting factor is the ram so if you can upgrade it there will be a massive improvement. Also look into getting a SSD.
I would go Debian with Firefox ESR and ublock origin. You can apply the Firefox privacy patches if you want.
I can't see investing upgrades into HW that old (I know I could, just doesn't seem like the best use of money in the long run).
Also, my partner's SW is only available for Windows and I don't feel like teaching them enough Linux to run Wine under it.
Well that hardware isn't going to run a supported version of Windows anyway.
2 GB of ram should be enough
That was my original point: it is running Windows 11 right now. A bit slow, but it runs.
Windows 11 requires 4 GB of memory and a newer CPU. There is no way that's officially supported by Microsoft.
However, somehow I think you know that. Just keep in mind it probably will have issues and updates may not apply. (No security patches potentially)
*ad supported Windows
I'll just keep running my Win 7/Ubuntu dual boot machine tyvm
I hope you don't connect Windows 7 to the internet...
It is fine as long as it is air gapped properly. It also might be fine on its own vlan as long as you don't go browsing the internet.