I'm amazed that Microsoft are doing this, especially since a lot of PCs cannot run Windows 11. My current PC can but that's literally because I bought a new prebuilt gaming PC two months ago. It's...
I'm amazed that Microsoft are doing this, especially since a lot of PCs cannot run Windows 11. My current PC can but that's literally because I bought a new prebuilt gaming PC two months ago.
It's like they're begging people to switch to Linux at this point.
Here's the thing... Microsoft have only discontinued OSes in the past when their latest OS has topped usage statistics. Windows 98 SE and 2000 weren't discontinued until after XP was widely...
Here's the thing... Microsoft have only discontinued OSes in the past when their latest OS has topped usage statistics.
Windows 98 SE and 2000 weren't discontinued until after XP was widely adopted, with ME being the commercial flop released in-between. The main reason why XP saw wide adoption was because it had far better multimedia features than its predecessors.
XP wasn't discontinued until after 7 was widely adopted. It was inevitable that 7 would be picked up by the masses because XP was becoming seriously outdated with many security vulnerabilities, while Vista was sluggish due to poor driver support and overbearing user account controls.
7 wasn't discontinued until after Windows 10 saw wide adoption, and the main reason a lot of people picked up Windows 10 was because actually having a Start menu was a clear upgrade from the Metro interface forced upon Windows 8 and 8.1 users.
We now have the unique situation where Microsoft have already announced EOL for Windows 10 in two years time, when Windows 10 has almost 80% market share and Windows 11 has less than 21%.. A big reason why 11 hasn't been more widely adopted despite it being a free upgrade is because the technical specs greatly exceed that of Windows 10, despite the actual OS and its features not really being an upgrade.
Microsoft were also foolish to release Windows 11 in the midst of a global pandemic and semiconductor shortage, and now in the face of a global recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russo-Ukrainian War, it feels foolish to tell people their hardware is going to be out of date when they likely cannot afford to replace it.
And Linux is nowhere near as convoluted or barebones as it was fifteen years ago. The fact that you can actually run a lot of games and Windows applications through Wine and use Vulkan graphics libraries like DXVK and VKD3D to get almost DirectX levels of graphical performance is astounding. The only problem Linux honestly has is anti-cheat support, but the success of devices like the Steam Deck are already spurring anti-cheat developers to support SteamOS (and by extension, Linux.)
It's been at least four years, and they announced a decade of support for it back when it launched, and has maintained its launch timeline. Maybe the argument is that in light of recent world...
We now have the unique situation where Microsoft have already announced EOL for Windows 10 in two years time, when Windows 10 has almost 80% market share and Windows 11 has less than 21%..
It's been at leastfour years, and they announced a decade of support for it back when it launched, and has maintained its launch timeline. Maybe the argument is that in light of recent world events they should either extend 10's support or drop the firm TPM requirement, and I would agree that these events suggest they ought to extend the lifecycle or modify the new release.
Linux is great today, but the thing with adoption is that for most people they need to come with it with minimal, almost no friction, and non-coercively, and somebody just now aware of Windows 10's EOL meets neither of these conditions. Linux is at least 80% competent for most people after adapting many workflows, but this friction will send them back to their Redmond-based overlord because of that 20%.
I have installed and used many Linux distros. Fedora didn't strike me as super easy to install. In fact, I completely gave up on it. It feels like it's targeted at IT guys in corporate...
I have installed and used many Linux distros. Fedora didn't strike me as super easy to install. In fact, I completely gave up on it. It feels like it's targeted at IT guys in corporate environments. Or something a guy that works with Red Hat would use at home.
Almost every other top distro for non-technical consumers is easier to install than Fedora.
I might have underestimated the difficulty but you demonstrated the point I was trying to make. Even a "user-friendly", more streamlined distro like Ubuntu or Manjaro would have the same issues to...
I might have underestimated the difficulty but you demonstrated the point I was trying to make. Even a "user-friendly", more streamlined distro like Ubuntu or Manjaro would have the same issues to a slightly lesser extent. Fedora could be called an extreme example, except for how it seems to be positioned in the community these days. Fedora is definitely more of a 50/50 of "just works" and "some assembly required."
I don't doubt some oversight on my part. I tend to use "harder" distros like Arch or NixOS just because there's less work for me to simply grab what I want. There's plenty of minor annoyances for "easy" distros as well as the weird blockers you mentioned.
For what it’s worth, it may be a good idea to give it another go sometime if you get the chance. I swapped to Linux Mint last year and it was fantastic. I imagine the Linux user experience has...
For what it’s worth, it may be a good idea to give it another go sometime if you get the chance. I swapped to Linux Mint last year and it was fantastic. I imagine the Linux user experience has improved a lot over the last decade.
Yeah. Our first experience with Linux was Fedora during Gnome 2 days. We were surprised with the vast customisation options for the desktop and office 2003 (OpenOffice) pre-installed. It was...
Yeah. Our first experience with Linux was Fedora during Gnome 2 days. We were surprised with the vast customisation options for the desktop and office 2003 (OpenOffice) pre-installed. It was really awesome. But we couldn't figure out how to install games and play music/videos. I think we had Linux for Dummies or similar book that talked about installing packages so we downloaded tar ball files and they asked for more missing packages.
Things vastly improved since then. But there's still some things that will require more work than elsewhere. Especially if you're very particular about the programs and games you wish to run.
Things vastly improved since then. But there's still some things that will require more work than elsewhere. Especially if you're very particular about the programs and games you wish to run.
This is exactly it. I'd say give it a shot again if you're at all interested as things are much easier now than six years ago, especially with stuff like Flatpak and Snap making a lot of...
This is exactly it. I'd say give it a shot again if you're at all interested as things are much easier now than six years ago, especially with stuff like Flatpak and Snap making a lot of applications work very easily.
EDIT: I had this in and wanted to phrase it more delicately: edge cases will still suck but there seem to be fewer of them, especially since a lot of the heavy lifting for proprietary apps is being done in Flatpak, and often in Snaps as well for Ubuntu users.
I got a sales job about a year ago for the biggest cell provider where I live. My job was selling phones both Android and iOS phones. For one of the first sale meeting I was in I brought my...
I got a sales job about a year ago for the biggest cell provider where I live. My job was selling phones both Android and iOS phones. For one of the first sale meeting I was in I brought my personal laptop and my direct supervisor was surprised that I was running Linux as she had never hear about it before and thought that the world was divided in to Mac and Windows machines.
I found the whole ordeal quiet funny because she was store manager and a pivotal part of the sales team, and part of her job was to sell Android phones just as much as iOS phones. Her whole setup was Apple all the way tho, and she rarely sold any android devices.
LibreOffice and InSync, a closed-source app that offers OneDrive functionality? I was using rsync to access my OneDrive easily fir feee but it requires an internet connection.
LibreOffice and InSync, a closed-source app that offers OneDrive functionality?
I was using rsync to access my OneDrive easily fir feee but it requires an internet connection.
The big difference this time around is we have Steam OS. Valve has done an incredible job with the Steam Deck. I haven’t found a single game that doesn’t run well in my collection. It makes me...
The big difference this time around is we have Steam OS.
Valve has done an incredible job with the Steam Deck. I haven’t found a single game that doesn’t run well in my collection. It makes me think Windows doesn’t have much, if anything, left to convince me to stay. Once Valve starts properly supporting Steam OS on PC, as they do on the Deck, I expect an exodus from the gaming community at the very least.
People say this, but it's not likely to happen unless SteamOS is rearchitected past being an appliance OS. The immutable nature of it exists to ensure Valve stays in control of it for...
People say this, but it's not likely to happen unless SteamOS is rearchitected past being an appliance OS. The immutable nature of it exists to ensure Valve stays in control of it for compatibility with its chosen hardware platform(s), and it is significantly more difficult to do anything with it beyond what Valve wants you to do with it: Install flatpaks and use Steam. In the future if they bring back Steam Boxes, or some other console, I'd wager it'll still be a closed platform you can break into, rather than something for general consumption.
EDIT: It's also riskier. Apparently SteamOS just uses a btrfs read-only flag to protect the system, nbd, but to then introduce rolling Arch packages to a game console is to ask for trouble, so again re-architecting and rebasing SteamOS would be needed for any wide-scale generic OS adoption with SteamOS.
What is additionally important, is that most of the games I play on my steam deck are also not steam games. For example, I can run GOG, Ubisoft, Epic Games, Emulators, and more on it.
What is additionally important, is that most of the games I play on my steam deck are also not steam games.
For example, I can run GOG, Ubisoft, Epic Games, Emulators, and more on it.
As a Linux user, I'm aware that Steam Deck can run anything Wine or Proton can run. However, again as someone that ran games on Linux, I wouldn't expect non-technical users to be able to figure...
As a Linux user, I'm aware that Steam Deck can run anything Wine or Proton can run. However, again as someone that ran games on Linux, I wouldn't expect non-technical users to be able to figure out how or have the patience to solve when things don't work out.
Even something like Lutris doesn't always work as expected.
I know people that won't get a Steam Deck because it's not enough of a console for them yet... I can't imagine them ever messing with Wine prefixes.
When this goes into effect, the overwhelming majority of unsupported hardware will be 8 years old. Support goes back to Intel's Kaby Lake (late 2016) and AMD's Zen+ (early 2018). While I don't...
When this goes into effect, the overwhelming majority of unsupported hardware will be 8 years old. Support goes back to Intel's Kaby Lake (late 2016) and AMD's Zen+ (early 2018).
While I don't think this is a great move from MS from a sustainability point of view, I don't think it will be a big deal for them in the long run.
It's possible your laptop or motherboard vendor needs to provide a firmware update to enable PTT. It's likely your system already supports this and you just need to turn it on, as the vast...
It's possible your laptop or motherboard vendor needs to provide a firmware update to enable PTT. It's likely your system already supports this and you just need to turn it on, as the vast majority of "Windows 11 support" firmware updates just change the default value of this setting.
Secure Boot also needs to be present, but not explicitly enabled. If you installed Windows 10 to an MBR drive, then you will need to convert it to GPT before Windows will recognize this, as MBR installations only boot in "legacy BIOS" mode rather than with UEFI.
A lot of PCs, possibly even the majority, will get tossed in the garbage or sold if a firmware update is required to upgrade to 11. Many users are naive, and just want the computer to continue to...
A lot of PCs, possibly even the majority, will get tossed in the garbage or sold if a firmware update is required to upgrade to 11. Many users are naive, and just want the computer to continue to function.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows changes the EoL schedule or support, they’ve done it several times with past products.
I love Linux but I've been a happy Windows 10 user for the past few months. Nowadays there's little you can't do on Linux, but it does require greater effort and now that I can game on PC being an...
I love Linux but I've been a happy Windows 10 user for the past few months. Nowadays there's little you can't do on Linux, but it does require greater effort and now that I can game on PC being an edge case can be tiresome at times.
Granted, I now have an SSD and 64GB of RAM, more than enough for Windows to eat with all its bloated processes. My processor was not approved so it didn't sneakily update to Windows 11 like my partner's machine. By 2025, I expect Window 11 to be battle tested enough to justify circumventing the processor issue.
I’m looking forward to Steam OS becoming more widely used on PC. It solved all of the struggles of Linux being complicated for gamers, while simultaneously allowing for advanced users to do as...
I’m looking forward to Steam OS becoming more widely used on PC. It solved all of the struggles of Linux being complicated for gamers, while simultaneously allowing for advanced users to do as they please at the same time.
From a UX perspective I agree, however the kernel underneath has improved substantially since then in terms of stability, security, and features. It's still wild to me that your entire desktop can...
From a UX perspective I agree, however the kernel underneath has improved substantially since then in terms of stability, security, and features.
It's still wild to me that your entire desktop can survive a GPU driver crash.
Well, looks like 2025 will finally by the year of the Linux desktop for me. I already use Ubuntu as my daily driver at work, but I have a number of Windows-only applications that have kept me a...
Well, looks like 2025 will finally by the year of the Linux desktop for me. I already use Ubuntu as my daily driver at work, but I have a number of Windows-only applications that have kept me a happy Windows user on my personal machine for years. The advertising can be stripped out, but you're going to pry my side-of-the-screen taskbar from my cold, dead fingers.
As documented on the Windows 10 Enterprise and Education and Windows 10 Home and Pro lifecycle pages, Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025. The current version, 22H2, will be the final version of Windows 10, and all editions will remain in support with monthly security update releases through that date. Existing LTSC releases will continue to receive updates beyond that date based on their specific lifecycles.
I just downgraded from Windows 11 last week, I actually installed it the day it came out but for some reason after a year of using it, it started to slow down considerably. Especially with...
I just downgraded from Windows 11 last week, I actually installed it the day it came out but for some reason after a year of using it, it started to slow down considerably. Especially with explorer.exe, they keep pushing updates that slows it down by a lot.
For those curious the current Extended End Date for LTSC 2019 is Jan 9, 2029, LTSC 2021 doesn't have an Extended End Date (yet) so just the Mainstream End Date of Jan 12, 2027. So if you have an...
For those curious the current Extended End Date for LTSC 2019 is Jan 9, 2029, LTSC 2021 doesn't have an Extended End Date (yet) so just the Mainstream End Date of Jan 12, 2027. So if you have an LTSC version you'll continue to receive the quality updates (bug fixes, feature improvements, and security issue resolutions) just not the annual feature updates as there won't be any.
In the past End of Support meant no more security updates. But they made exemptions in the past for particularly severe or widely exploited vulnerabilities.
In the past End of Support meant no more security updates. But they made exemptions in the past for particularly severe or widely exploited vulnerabilities.
I'm amazed that Microsoft are doing this, especially since a lot of PCs cannot run Windows 11. My current PC can but that's literally because I bought a new prebuilt gaming PC two months ago.
It's like they're begging people to switch to Linux at this point.
People say this every time a Windows OS hits EOL and there's never a large migration. They know they'll be fine.
Here's the thing... Microsoft have only discontinued OSes in the past when their latest OS has topped usage statistics.
Windows 98 SE and 2000 weren't discontinued until after XP was widely adopted, with ME being the commercial flop released in-between. The main reason why XP saw wide adoption was because it had far better multimedia features than its predecessors.
XP wasn't discontinued until after 7 was widely adopted. It was inevitable that 7 would be picked up by the masses because XP was becoming seriously outdated with many security vulnerabilities, while Vista was sluggish due to poor driver support and overbearing user account controls.
7 wasn't discontinued until after Windows 10 saw wide adoption, and the main reason a lot of people picked up Windows 10 was because actually having a Start menu was a clear upgrade from the Metro interface forced upon Windows 8 and 8.1 users.
We now have the unique situation where Microsoft have already announced EOL for Windows 10 in two years time, when Windows 10 has almost 80% market share and Windows 11 has less than 21%.. A big reason why 11 hasn't been more widely adopted despite it being a free upgrade is because the technical specs greatly exceed that of Windows 10, despite the actual OS and its features not really being an upgrade.
Microsoft were also foolish to release Windows 11 in the midst of a global pandemic and semiconductor shortage, and now in the face of a global recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russo-Ukrainian War, it feels foolish to tell people their hardware is going to be out of date when they likely cannot afford to replace it.
And Linux is nowhere near as convoluted or barebones as it was fifteen years ago. The fact that you can actually run a lot of games and Windows applications through Wine and use Vulkan graphics libraries like DXVK and VKD3D to get almost DirectX levels of graphical performance is astounding. The only problem Linux honestly has is anti-cheat support, but the success of devices like the Steam Deck are already spurring anti-cheat developers to support SteamOS (and by extension, Linux.)
It's been at least four years, and they announced a decade of support for it back when it launched, and has maintained its launch timeline. Maybe the argument is that in light of recent world events they should either extend 10's support or drop the firm TPM requirement, and I would agree that these events suggest they ought to extend the lifecycle or modify the new release.
Linux is great today, but the thing with adoption is that for most people they need to come with it with minimal, almost no friction, and non-coercively, and somebody just now aware of Windows 10's EOL meets neither of these conditions. Linux is at least 80% competent for most people after adapting many workflows, but this friction will send them back to their Redmond-based overlord because of that 20%.
I have installed and used many Linux distros. Fedora didn't strike me as super easy to install. In fact, I completely gave up on it. It feels like it's targeted at IT guys in corporate environments. Or something a guy that works with Red Hat would use at home.
Almost every other top distro for non-technical consumers is easier to install than Fedora.
I might have underestimated the difficulty but you demonstrated the point I was trying to make. Even a "user-friendly", more streamlined distro like Ubuntu or Manjaro would have the same issues to a slightly lesser extent. Fedora could be called an extreme example, except for how it seems to be positioned in the community these days. Fedora is definitely more of a 50/50 of "just works" and "some assembly required."
I don't doubt some oversight on my part. I tend to use "harder" distros like Arch or NixOS just because there's less work for me to simply grab what I want. There's plenty of minor annoyances for "easy" distros as well as the weird blockers you mentioned.
I tried using Linux when I first built a PC back in 2017. When I realized I had to be more techy than I actually was, I gave up and bought Windows.
For what it’s worth, it may be a good idea to give it another go sometime if you get the chance. I swapped to Linux Mint last year and it was fantastic. I imagine the Linux user experience has improved a lot over the last decade.
Yeah. Our first experience with Linux was Fedora during Gnome 2 days. We were surprised with the vast customisation options for the desktop and office 2003 (OpenOffice) pre-installed. It was really awesome. But we couldn't figure out how to install games and play music/videos. I think we had Linux for Dummies or similar book that talked about installing packages so we downloaded tar ball files and they asked for more missing packages.
Things vastly improved since then. But there's still some things that will require more work than elsewhere. Especially if you're very particular about the programs and games you wish to run.
This is exactly it. I'd say give it a shot again if you're at all interested as things are much easier now than six years ago, especially with stuff like Flatpak and Snap making a lot of applications work very easily.
EDIT: I had this in and wanted to phrase it more delicately: edge cases will still suck but there seem to be fewer of them, especially since a lot of the heavy lifting for proprietary apps is being done in Flatpak, and often in Snaps as well for Ubuntu users.
I got a sales job about a year ago for the biggest cell provider where I live. My job was selling phones both Android and iOS phones. For one of the first sale meeting I was in I brought my personal laptop and my direct supervisor was surprised that I was running Linux as she had never hear about it before and thought that the world was divided in to Mac and Windows machines.
I found the whole ordeal quiet funny because she was store manager and a pivotal part of the sales team, and part of her job was to sell Android phones just as much as iOS phones. Her whole setup was Apple all the way tho, and she rarely sold any android devices.
LibreOffice and InSync, a closed-source app that offers OneDrive functionality?
I was using rsync to access my OneDrive easily fir feee but it requires an internet connection.
The big difference this time around is we have Steam OS.
Valve has done an incredible job with the Steam Deck. I haven’t found a single game that doesn’t run well in my collection. It makes me think Windows doesn’t have much, if anything, left to convince me to stay. Once Valve starts properly supporting Steam OS on PC, as they do on the Deck, I expect an exodus from the gaming community at the very least.
People say this, but it's not likely to happen unless SteamOS is rearchitected past being an appliance OS. The immutable nature of it exists to ensure Valve stays in control of it for compatibility with its chosen hardware platform(s), and it is significantly more difficult to do anything with it beyond what Valve wants you to do with it: Install flatpaks and use Steam. In the future if they bring back Steam Boxes, or some other console, I'd wager it'll still be a closed platform you can break into, rather than something for general consumption.
EDIT: It's also riskier. Apparently SteamOS just uses a btrfs read-only flag to protect the system, nbd, but to then introduce rolling Arch packages to a game console is to ask for trouble, so again re-architecting and rebasing SteamOS would be needed for any wide-scale generic OS adoption with SteamOS.
It's important to notice that not all games are on Steam.
What is additionally important, is that most of the games I play on my steam deck are also not steam games.
For example, I can run GOG, Ubisoft, Epic Games, Emulators, and more on it.
As a Linux user, I'm aware that Steam Deck can run anything Wine or Proton can run. However, again as someone that ran games on Linux, I wouldn't expect non-technical users to be able to figure out how or have the patience to solve when things don't work out.
Even something like Lutris doesn't always work as expected.
I know people that won't get a Steam Deck because it's not enough of a console for them yet... I can't imagine them ever messing with Wine prefixes.
When this goes into effect, the overwhelming majority of unsupported hardware will be 8 years old. Support goes back to Intel's Kaby Lake (late 2016) and AMD's Zen+ (early 2018).
While I don't think this is a great move from MS from a sustainability point of view, I don't think it will be a big deal for them in the long run.
I have a Q4'17 Coffee Lake processor and Microsoft claims my system isn't supported.
It's possible your laptop or motherboard vendor needs to provide a firmware update to enable PTT. It's likely your system already supports this and you just need to turn it on, as the vast majority of "Windows 11 support" firmware updates just change the default value of this setting.
Secure Boot also needs to be present, but not explicitly enabled. If you installed Windows 10 to an MBR drive, then you will need to convert it to GPT before Windows will recognize this, as MBR installations only boot in "legacy BIOS" mode rather than with UEFI.
A lot of PCs, possibly even the majority, will get tossed in the garbage or sold if a firmware update is required to upgrade to 11. Many users are naive, and just want the computer to continue to function.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows changes the EoL schedule or support, they’ve done it several times with past products.
I love Linux but I've been a happy Windows 10 user for the past few months. Nowadays there's little you can't do on Linux, but it does require greater effort and now that I can game on PC being an edge case can be tiresome at times.
Granted, I now have an SSD and 64GB of RAM, more than enough for Windows to eat with all its bloated processes. My processor was not approved so it didn't sneakily update to Windows 11 like my partner's machine. By 2025, I expect Window 11 to be battle tested enough to justify circumventing the processor issue.
I’m looking forward to Steam OS becoming more widely used on PC. It solved all of the struggles of Linux being complicated for gamers, while simultaneously allowing for advanced users to do as they please at the same time.
Windows 7 was when excellence in windows development peaked out . What came afterwards was just advertising and narrative.
From a UX perspective I agree, however the kernel underneath has improved substantially since then in terms of stability, security, and features.
It's still wild to me that your entire desktop can survive a GPU driver crash.
Well, looks like 2025 will finally by the year of the Linux desktop for me. I already use Ubuntu as my daily driver at work, but I have a number of Windows-only applications that have kept me a happy Windows user on my personal machine for years. The advertising can be stripped out, but you're going to pry my side-of-the-screen taskbar from my cold, dead fingers.
I just downgraded from Windows 11 last week, I actually installed it the day it came out but for some reason after a year of using it, it started to slow down considerably. Especially with explorer.exe, they keep pushing updates that slows it down by a lot.
Something something pirated Enterprise LTSC, something something on the ethics of pirating Windows
LTSC is explicitly supported for a long period. The current version doesn’t even have an end date yet and the 2019 LTSC is supported until 2029.
If it's properly activated, it does.
For those curious the current Extended End Date for LTSC 2019 is Jan 9, 2029, LTSC 2021 doesn't have an Extended End Date (yet) so just the Mainstream End Date of Jan 12, 2027. So if you have an LTSC version you'll continue to receive the quality updates (bug fixes, feature improvements, and security issue resolutions) just not the annual feature updates as there won't be any.
Will Microsoft be providing security patches after 2025 like how Apple does with macOS Rapid Security updates?
In the past End of Support meant no more security updates. But they made exemptions in the past for particularly severe or widely exploited vulnerabilities.