Can’t upgrade your PC to Windows 11? Buy a new one, is Microsoft’s laughable solution
Can’t upgrade your PC to Windows 11? Buy a new one, is Microsoft’s laughable solution
My computer can't upgrade to Win11 and I am buying a new one, but I'm putting Linux on it.
I have parts on the way to build a new PC. Believe it or not, also Linux.
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 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
Or I could switch to Linux...
OH WAIT, I already did that, darn. Such a shame I can't ditch Windows twice.
I would've, but Framework ships with your choice of OS (including none) so I didn't have to switch twice!
You can, install it and uninstall it once again. Repeat until you're sated.
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.
idk, sounds like an ad for Linux to me
FTFY
New Shitty “Os”*
**(Legal Disclaimer “Os”* is actually malware)
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
Blizzard Microsuck: "Don't you all have bank accounts?"
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.
Just run windows 3.1 dual booted with Linux mint. Easily the most rational decision.
FreeDOS
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"upgrade"
Nope, the vendors see that as a win too. Go buy new hardware. Stop being a poor.
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!
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
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.
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....
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.
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?
One more year of dual-booting should be plenty of time to ween off the Windows teat.
They said that about XP too, but I never heard of anyone getting massively pwned after support stopped.
I hope you are joking...
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
just give contractors the option to sell their pcs without your bloatware for a hundred bucks cheaper or something
*ad supported Windows
*all windows
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:
you may not be able to install Windows 11
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
Get a new OS for free for your PC.
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.
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.
I think you’re massively underestimating the laziness of most people, and overestimating their level of concern. People. Don’t. Care.
Don't you mean 13 years and 3 months? At least, that's when the UNIX Epoch ends...
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?