Well, would you look at that, if it ain't the consequences of their own actions.

Linux Mint Gang!

Are we becoming "I use Mint BTW"?

I want to chain myself to this company but... Can I get a pink one? I don't really li-

MICROSOFT: "NO"

https://www.opensuse.org/

Linux.

I say this as someone using Win11. I'm okay with using it, but if you don't want to, then just go to Linux.

You can still do that, the article is fucking stupid. If you don't have the correct requirements you will never get Windows 11 officially. You can however create a custom install of Win 11 using tools like Rufus to bypass the TPM requirements.

The point of the change is that now if you install it on an unsupported machine, you won't get any official support; they're not stopping you from messing with the OS installer but you will still NOT get the upgrade officially and if you do upgrade and find some issue they ain't helping you.

IIRC they used to pester users with this unsupported setup to upgrade to a correct setup and they won't do that any more.

Many people are going to say Linux. It's probably annoying to hear, but its just the truth at this point. It probably seems daunting to switch over, but let me give you a very brief suggestion from a beginner on how to smooth over the transition.

Load up youtube and watch a few videos reviewing linux distributions for beginners just to see what's recommended. My personal recommendation is to stick with a distro that uses KDE Plasma as the desktop environment since it will be very familiar coming from Windows. Once you decide what looks best for you...

Check and see if your computer has an available SATA port on the motherboard. If it does, grab yourself a SATA SSD and put your choice of a Linux distribution on it. Once Linux is up and running, set your BIOS to boot into Linux by default. Use Linux for everything you can and slowly migrate your workflow over to the new OS. Keep Windows as it is on its original drive and boot into it whenever you encounter something that doesn't work or you haven't set up on Linux yet. Don't stress about rushing through this part. You have almost a year before Win10 is unsupported. Take your time and enjoy the process.

Over time, your Linux OS will become very useful for you as you uncover more ways to use it instead of Windows and Windows will be reserved for those infrequent edge cases where your needs are not met by Linux. This decouples you from the Microsoft ecosystem, making their enshittification less impactful on your life. I followed this exact path and I'm now a near full-time Linux user with Nobara as my chosen distribution and I could not be happier. I love my PC again.

The only thing I use Windows for now is sim racing games, as I haven't yet dedicated time to find out how to get the expensive sim racing peripherals I own working on Linux yet. Apparently it's possible and some people have had great success with it. This is something I will be actively working on over the coming year. Everything else I own runs perfect on Linux. I run a home studio so that means a lot of audio peripherals and specialized software. For 95% of my use case, Nobara just works.

The transition will take some work, but in the end if you can get yourself away from dependence on Windows, the options and freedom available to you expand like crazy. Its worth it just to show Microsoft that no, they no longer have a stranglehold on desktop PC users. The more we engage with non-mainstream options, the more the mainstream has to behave itself.

If you still need/want Windows, get an LTSC certain. 10 is supported through 2028 iirc, and the IoT version through 2032.

I haven't tried the LTSC version of 11 yet, so no idea if it's worth trying.

Steve Gibson's InControl probably a no research needed option https://www.grctech.com/incontrol/details.htm

I've been listening to the security now podcast for about 8 years, so my trust of him and yours might vary. The website looks like web 1.0 because it is.

Using something other than windows as your primary OS, and interfacing with windows through a virtual machine where necessary.

Not really a real solution, though, but some folks make it work pretty well.

Do not use Windows :D

It’s OS level DRM.

It's a way of tying an encryption key to the processor. Depending on how you look at it that's either a good way to ensure your disks aren't readable if they're separated from your machine or a vendor lock-in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module

TPM is still part of what they're calling "minimum system requirements" but they're allowing you to install without it. There will be big scary warnings though and they're threatening to not provide support.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-on-devices-that-don-t-meet-minimum-system-requirements-0b2dc4a2-5933-4ad4-9c09-ef0a331518f1

Time will tell what happens. I believe if they see a significant portion of Windows 10 users on legacy devices without TPM upgrade to 11 they'll continue to support it because the data they suck up is more valuable to them than the effort to support it.

That page does not mention tpm, and on the requirenments page TPM 2.0 is still listed:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-11-specifications

EDIT: OK I see it now, it says that the requirenments are still in place, but that they are not enforced. But it also notes that future updates may not be available to computers that does not fullfill the requirenments