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Linux or Landfill? End of Windows 10 Leaves PC Charities with Tough Choice
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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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How much ewaste has Microsoft caused just by wanting to sell more copies of the next version of windows.
It's not about sales, 11 is a free upgrade.
On a machine that can run it. If you have one of the machines that are the subject of this article, the only upgrade path is to buy a new one, for which Microsoft takes a healthy OEM fee for including Win11. You can easily see that cost on devices like the Legion Go S that cost significantly less for the SteamOS version.
They're the ones that keep making the requirements more and more unreasonable with every update.
Whether or not an older machine "runs well" is highly dependent on what you're using it for. I only very recently (like, after the new year) retired a 16-year-old laptop with 2GB RAM that was running Gentoo, when I got a good deal on something that would compile gcc in a reasonable amount of time rather than needing to be left to run overnight. However, most people don't need to compile large software on a regular basis, and the old machine was still doing okay in its role as a large-screen-coarse-resolution pseudo-video-iPod, ssh client, quick lookup device for Perl manpages, emergency Internet query device, and general backup/light-use system. Worthless for gaming and somewhat sluggish on the Web, naturally, but that wasn't what I needed it for.
I'd expect anything with 4GB RAM and 4 CPU threads to produce somewhat acceptable performace on most individual webpages (multiple Javascript-heavy sites might be a challenge, though, so stick to 1-2 tabs at a time), which would make the main issue most people would have with my old laptop disappear.
Linux runs just fine in 4. Or much less. It depends a lot on what you use it for. My 486 had a whooping 32 Megs of memory and ran Linux just fine.
Regarding MS, the main problem is the changing of the goalpost. And I'm not so sure there's even any point to the whole TPM thing anyway.
The TPM chip is the issue here, and not a requirement under Linux.
See that's where you're wrong though, because my computer does have a TPM chip and still can't run Win11. That's because Microsoft locked them down to v2.0 or newer ones and mine's only a v1.2 chip.
Why are you even in this comm in the first place?
My 8700k (from 2018) disagrees.
Windows 10 was released ten years ago. How long do you think they should provide support? For comparison, Redhat gives 10 years for LTS releases, and Ubuntu and Linux Mint give 5 years. Extended support beyond the LTS period requires a paid subscription, similar to Windows.
They said when they launched windows 10 it would be "last version"
The counter is that all of a sudden instead of windows 10 it was 10 from 2020, then 10 from 2022 and so on. Instead of only being the last version it became a succession of short lived versions that people still weren't upgrading.
Every OS just mentioned can be updated, no support needed? Just overlay the next kernel over the last and all these distros provide a pathway for that.
Moreover, Arch, Void, Gentoo etc are rolling, so no loss of support.
I figure a multi-million dollar company could do the equivalent of exactly that.
They don't need to support Windows 10, they just need to not artificially block the installation of Windows 11 on old hardware.
Is it an artifical block or is windows 11 just so bloated that it can't run correctly on older hardware?
both
It's more that the hardware requirements for 11 are pretty arbitrary and not based on how powerful it is. My old PC can't run it, not that I care to in the first place. But it's much more powerful than my work laptop that can and does run win11, though not by my choice.