They’re not trying to get me to upgrade my OS, they’re trying to get me to buy a whole new fucking system for no good reason. Every last one of them can die in a fire.
And that’s before we consider that Windows 11 is actually a downgrade.
I’m upgrading to Debian 13 instead, since 13 is bigger number than 11 so obviously it’s better
My elderly parents got the “your computer cannot be upgraded” and my somewhat tech-litterate mom asked me to move them to Linux.
Microsoft should’ve realised at some point that the only thing most people need today is a computer that can run a web browser and connect to a printer.
the only thing most people need today is a computer that can run a web browser and connect to a printer.
I cannot the life of me get my Linux laptop to use my fucking Canon WiFi printer. It detects the printer, says it’s connected, but it simply will not send a print job to it. Windows, iOS and android all use it just fine…but this fucking Linux machine just won’t, I’ve spent hours fiddling with drivers and nothing works, it’s infuriating!
Eh, my in-laws have the same problem… but on windows
Can u tell ur model of printer maybe I can help I had fight a bit with canon printer too a bit but in the end it started working
I’d have to look at it when I get home, I have no clue off the top of my head.
Yeah that sounds bad :/ All Brother here with no issues. Esp. Linux Mint just autodetects and sets everything up directly.
I’ve been trying to get my MIL’s printer working forever.
I can get mine to speak to my shitberg printer, but I went and bought bootleg ink cartridges and I have a half-day printer battle on my to do list to reset the ink levels and force the printer to accept non-HP ink into its heart.
It wasn’t canon in my case, but I found with other network printers on Linux that not bothering with “auto finding” and just putting the IP address in manually (give fixed devices fixed IPs on your router to make this kind of thing easier). Most desktop environments have a printer tool that should allow manually adding a printer.
I have to say with the work provided HP PoS I last had, it was equally as difficult to get windows to talk to it, to be fair.
Yeah I’ve tried the route of manually inputting a static IP, it will connect to the printer but it still fails to send jobs to the printer. I’ve resigned to just accepting that it’s incapable of WiFi printing with the HW I have, so I send documents to other devices for printing.
I sidestepped to Mint. Sorry, Microsoft, your shit’s untenable and disappointing.
That is what I am planning on doing as well. I am not going to install their ad-, bloat- and surveillance-ware.
Me too? I just switched a few days ago and I’m shocked how easy things have been.
Aside from some generic brand hardware I’ve got, most stuff just works. Main issue is not being able to use my Xbox controller wirelessly at the moment.
I did too on my laptop but on pc I’ll probably just stick with windows 10, I’d rather deal with security vulnerabilities then ai in my OS
Take their ESU extension to get one last year of W10 update. At least it gets you time to see if you can migrate on linux maybe.
Hmhm for sure
If you must use windows, and might want to upgrade to 11, lets say, for certain games, this project Flyoobe will help create a windows 11 install without all that bloat and ai
Thank you the link is much appreciated :D
But admit one of my major grips with windows 11 is it’s extremely ugly looking, and I don’t really think there is any way to remedy that
You can replace the default windows UI with an alternative shell like Open Shell (here’s a list). Not sure how reliable this works.
Mhmhmmmh I might try this thank you :}
Proton’s good, by the way. If gaming is holding you back, at least.
I tried but I should probably figure out how proton works and try that
so good that i actually get more fps than i did so on windows
Microsoft has given users fair warning, and said that users can get a year of updates for free but eventually the company will have to face facts and extended support beyond October.
We can’t recall a time where Microsoft has done such a thing but these are extenuating circumstances given that most users just aren’t budging.
WTF is this guy talking about? Far as I can tell this is the Win7 playbook all over again. Looking it up, this was the timeline:
Jan. 13, 2015: Microsoft ended Mainstream Support for Windows 7.
Sept. 6, 2018: Microsoft announced the ESUs for Windows 7. The ESU program is a paid service that provides critical security updates for legacy products for up to three years after Extended Support ends.
August 2019: Microsoft announced a year of free ESUs, but only for select users, including customers with an Enterprise Agreement or Enterprise Agreement Subscription with active Windows 10 Enterprise E5, Microsoft 365 E5, or Microsoft 365 E5 Security subscriptions. This was limited to only Government E5 stock keeping units.
Jan. 14, 2020: Microsoft ended Extended Support for Windows 7.
Jan. 10, 2023: The ESUs reached their end of life on the first Patch Tuesday of 2023.
That’s almost a decade of post-end of support updates. If anything, MS confirmed ESU before trying to shut down home user patches this time, so it looks less like terrified backpedalling. And as the linked article itself admits, the data they’re reporting on still shows a significant number of users still on Win7. The article waves it away as just “too many”, but the original report says 8.5%.
Because, as it turns out, the kind of people using Kapersky antivirus software and the number of people who would not upgrade from a 16 year old OS that has lost support half a dozen times over the past half a decade show significant overlap. On the Steam survey right now Win 7 is only 0.07%, for reference.
While we’re at it Win 11 is 60% vs 35% for Win 10. For all the headlines when Steam shows Linux growth you don’t often hear over here that Win 11 went up by 0.5% and Windows overall went up by 0.36%.
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep reality checking it: the Win 10 end of support process has been wildly overhyped, particularly among Linux-friendly circles. It is not meaningfully different to moves out of other “good” versions of Windows and it’s not a catastrophic crisis point for MS, for better and worse. They’ll keep support up for the people who need it for as long as they’re willing to pay and most legacy home users won’t even know their old Win10 is unsupported because it’ll just keep happily chugging along with all the same malware it already has until something breaks and they have to buy a new laptop with a preinstalled Win11 or 12 or whatever.
The most the Win10 death hype is doing to hurt MS is create a flurry of social media posts that can convince tech savvy, Linux-curious users who were previously held back by lack of gaming support to give user friendly distros a try.
Uh, sorry, we don’t allow sane takes here. Get out.
How much of this is people not wanting to upgrade vs not being able to upgrade because their PC isn’t supported?
I’m a sys admin in the public sector and the hardware requirements of W11 are a great blessing. I couldn’t have convinced thousands of workers to switch to Linux and get used to another GUI but this forces it on us because there simply is no money to replace all that hardware. Rolling out Mint clients and between this and mobile operating systems Microsoft is finally losing its monopoly on the OS market.
I have been called by friends, family friends, and their friends to help with this and so many have hardware that is not supported, and some are not able to afford a new PC right now. That’s my limited and personal experience about this.
I have reservations about installing Linux Mint/other for these people because I don’t have time to help right now and you do need sometimes help if you are slightly tech aware but not enough to be able to troubleshoot yourself or search for right info. For folks who barely touch any settings and just use it for docs + web it’s easy, but for others not always.
Microsoft is such an ass for doing this.
You can just bypass those hardware requirements fairly easily. There are a bunch of guides out there.
Here’s one from Tom’s Hardware. https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-requirement
It even shows how to make a install media that doesn’t require the checks so you can just install it no issue.
Though fair warning that some of those requirements they have are good for security purposes so your installs may not be as secure without them.
Win 11 is still pretty ass though and bloated to hell. I instead got myself a LTSC version of Win10 instead which will get updates until 2032 or something like that. That gives me enough time to figure out if I want to install Linux or IDK I’ll just die before that, either one is fine.
Thanks for the links. I recall reading that installing windows 11 with bypasses might break after some future update? I just didn’t want to offer a solution that might cause issues as well.
For some linux was a good option, but for some I said you can either get a new computer or pay for the LTSC. Thankfully I was able to find some affordable win11 compatible laptops for their usecases.
This was a really dumb idea to do just before tariffs
Makes me miss windows 7.
It convinced me to ditch dual booting and to go full Linux
Same, now I have Win 11 in a VM but when I boot it I just apply Windows updates so I am booting it much less frequently now.
Why not just use bottle or wine?
Read the room, Microsoft.
I got your upgrade right…
hereThis is one guy you don’t see palling about with Donald Trump.
Wait…
Excluding half of the active PCs or so from upgrade due to arbitrary hardware constraints didn’t push upgrading?
How can this be??? 😯🫢It’s not “arbitrary” I’d say. It’s part of a long term plan to probably push a fully trusted platform. Yes, so they can ID you by hardware etc but also lock down driver installs and maybe even software installs one day.
That’s exactly what arbitrary is. It’s not for a good reason, it’s so they can push bullshit later. The limitations were chosen arbitrarily because they’re not real limitations, they’re entirely imposed by a Microsoft for their own ends. A non-arbitrary limitation is like minimum graphics card requirements for a game - won’t run without it. What do you think arbitrary means?
Well, it’s for a good reason in their view. Also, pretty much everyone here is not the normal computer user. The normal computer user is only dimly aware they use something called windows. The use a web browser and perhaps 3 other programs on their PC. They’re going to be happy when they’re told that having a walled garden improves their computer’s security.
We are the minority.
No, they claim it is for a good reason to excuse it so they can get away with all the stuff they want later whilst hopefully (from their perspective) making more profit now. It’s the thin end of a wedge.
Stop defending corporations for anti-consumer behaviour. You do realise that YOU are a consumer as well, right?
I really feel like you should read my comment more carefully. I’m not defending them. I’m describing their rationale. My very last sentence should make clear I am not one of the normal users that will be happy and fine with this. I’m typing this, on Linux, right now.
Normal people don’t care, and they would be happy with the thin veil of extra security they will gain (and be told they’re going to gain), in exactly the same way the sales of the top tier mobile phones when they’re boot locked and sideload locked will not dip in any meaningful way.
You are misunderstanding their point. “Good reason” doesnt mean ethically good, it means there is a sound logical connection between the action they are taking and the outcome they want to happen. In that case Microsoft does have good reason to push trusted hardware, in the same way as a bank robber has good reason to buy a face mask.
This is why I hoard old computers
Funny how Kaspersky thinks what it comes down to are people who are afraid of change, when there’s also just people who are also not too happy with the direction Microsoft is taking their OS. And then there’s the fact that their stats only come from users who still use Kaspersky, which might be mostly businesses, instead of the average joe, skewing the data.
I moved to a linux-only system for about 5 years now, and it’s been great, as a daily-driver and a learning experience as well. Microsoft does so much hand-holding that it’s own users are not expected to care about security and privacy.
If they just sold a very simple lightweight barebone version of Win 10 for 30-40 usd with regular security updates for the next 200 years, they could make so much money for eternity. Just sell those Apps/Widgets as additional paid apps, that is all you need.
But the app/widget spyware is what they want you to run.
True
11 was fine until they forced Copilot Vision on everyone. That was the straw for me to finally bail to Linux
Nah.
It was never fine.
They did what now? I have no Copilot features turned on in my PCs, and I actually have a certified Copilot+ laptop.
This backlash prompted Microsoft to postpone its rollout.[2][4] Microsoft changed the feature to opt-in and provided instructions for how to remove it.
Not something “forced on everyone”?
Oh I thought Windows was discontinued after Vista failed miserably.
At least I haven’t used it since then, and it’s completely irrelevant to me.
Why others keep using it IDK, must be some kind of masochist tendencies.Yea, people don’t use windows these days anymore, they just use iOS and Android.
Seriously, no joke, my parents have never actually used a computer. They just have a glorified pocket social media machine basically.
