Maybe this will convince more people to switch to linux.

Mines not even pointless. Lightroom and Photoshop are essentials for my side business, and there isn’t viable alternatives to either.

Linux works for a lot of things, but not everything.

i am primarily linux and i cannot completely tear away from windows/mac. there are some use cases where linux just isn't a good tool.

People will get use to some pointless tool which is not available for Linux and that's it.

Irfanview for me!

I'd debate calling it useless, but until irfanview works correctly on Linux (no, it doesn't under WINE) I can't change.

But isn't Microsoft just so evil for making it so their operating system doesn't function flawlessly on twenty year old hardware?

In this context an unsupported cpu would be an i7 7700K for example. Hardly e-waste and can perform quite well..

Or just... Stay on Windows 10? There's nothing wrong with it compared to Windows 11 (though Linux is usually a better choice).

Lol. Every Windows article gets spammed to death with yOu ShoUlD uSe LiNuX.

Seems like this is a constant spam on Lemmy and it’s starting to drive me away from the platform. So much Linux spam.

No, the issue is that Microsoft officially supports only two versions of Windows. And support of the older one is ending next year. They are forcing users that are using perfectly capable hardware to artificially switch to - for many - needless new hardware.

I would not count on all major distros maintaining support for processors as old as Core 2 forever.

RHEL 9 in particular (and by extension CentOS Steam, Alma, Rocky) already dropped support for all of the processors affected by this breakage since 2022.

Linux systems often group these CPU feature set generations into levels, where "x86-64-v2" requires SSE4 and POPCNT (Nehalem/2008 and newer) and "x86-64-v3" requires AVX2 (Haswell/2013 and newer).

Ubuntu and Fedora are already evaluating optimized package builds for both v2 and v3 but haven't announced any plans to drop baseline x86-64 yet; I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen within the next two years. Debian is a relatively safer bet for old hardware.

Honestly, it's easier to keep my Debian machine from killing itself than any Windows install.

It seems like Windows actively sabotages itself for no reason.

It's only CPUs lacking a specific extension. Nehalem or newer for Intel or Phenom or newer for AMD will still work. Those CPUs aren't even officially supported by their weird restrictions.

So this is anecdotal I know, but I work on a Mac, so I've only ever held on to Windows for gaming. (Sidenote: The Mac isn't my choice, either, but it has a terminal, and it does the job)

I've definitely tried to go fully Linux in the past, but it was always gaming that killed it for me. Wine was just never very consistent for me in this area.

Long story but, I recently lost my gaming machine, and was gifted a friends old one. Also a long story, but he ended up putting Linux on it for me. I figured I'd use it as is until payday before buying a key for Windows.

Holy shit gaming on Linux become has easy! Steam/proton is amazing!

I won't lie, it's not always as simple as install and run, but the tweaking that's been required has been orders of magnitude simpler than what it used to be. Click a box 90% of the time, Click a box and add a run parameter for another 5%.

The only games that haven't worked for me are Starfield and Cyberpunk (accounting for the last 5%.)

Starfield might just be too much for this old machine, but Cyberpunk I have no idea. Neither are a huge loss to me when Balders Gate, and Elite Dangerous are running fine. Also long standing favourites like Just Cause 3/4 work perfectly too.

I'm thrilled and a little shocked to say I think I'm finally done with Windows

Hard disagree. If this was the 80s or the 90s, you would have a case. But nowadays? 14 year old PCs are quite capable for many everyday uses.

The only people trying to convince you that you have to upgrade things every other year are the ones who sell them.

Or the year of grand piracy. "Someone I met" told me that while it is nearly impossible to purchase a legit copy, Windows 10 IoT LTSC is going to be supported until 2032. It is truly Windows as its meant to be without tons of bloat, telemetry, ads, and the option to decline feature updates. Scripts readily available on the web to activate the product, runs so cleanly and efficiently.

C:/> sudo dnf install fedora39-workstation-edition

Bad command or file name.

C:/>