If you're still using Windows 10 and don't want to upgrade to Windows 11 any time soon you might want to sign a new online petition
Your Windows 10 PC will soon be ‘junk’ - users told to resist Microsoft deadline::If you’re still using Windows 10 and don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11 any time soon you might want to sign a new online petition
Why is that a “big worry”? Windows 10 was released in 2015. So 2025 would be over 10 years of support. That’s a more than valid amount of time to support an OS.
Windows 10 came out in 2015 and eighth gen Intel and 2nd gen Ryzen came out in 2018. So it would be 7 years of support unless you bought an older computer then.
It’s not when compatible chips started selling, it’s when you could still buy non compatible chips and computers. If I could go to Best Buy last year and buy a new computer that’s not compatible with Windows 11, then that’s 1+ 2 more years for a total of 3 years support.
So the question is: when could you still buy a computer that wasn’t compatible. That’s the support length for many people.
Good point, although by then we’re getting to variables that MS can’t control.
I know people have bypassed the spec check to get 11 installed, I think MS should just allow people to bypass it officially for a certain length of time. It’s a pain in the ass to support older machines and OSes, but striking a middle ground is good.
They can keep supporting windows 10. They made money when windows 10 was installed on that computer, so they should support it.
They have though. For ten years.
I’m sympathetic to MS trying to force updates along. One big problem especially in Enterprise is that the requirement to support ancient OSes and hardware causes unnecessary work, and holds back progress. Look at IE. Or Vista’s performance issues caused by underpowered GPUs.
The question is how long do you support and how forceful are you on requiring upgrades? Linux distros have LTS releases and generally do a great job on long term support, but even they will start deprecating branches.
You can use Rufus to install windows 11 and bypass the requirements. It does everything for you – downloads the latest win 11 service pack, removes the blocking requirements, and you can even tell it to automatically disable all of the telemetry and phoning home. You’ll still need a license key when you install, or run it on a machine that was running a valid win 10 install previously. But I’m running win 11 on an 8 year old PC with zero issues.
Comparing the level of effort to run windows vs Linux is a whole other thing I’m definitely not getting into. I use Linux for work and run it on two machines at home, but I also use my Windows box for games. You can use and enjoy both, it doesn’t have to be a religious war.
I highly recommend you attempt to run your games on a Linux box, as the experience has improved vastly. I also keep a Windows install around for the odd game that doesn’t work in Linux (basically just a couple competitive shooters that I enjoy), but the number of times I need to boot into my Windows partition are diminishing day by day. Definitely did not mean to be a zealot about it, but going through the effort outlined above just so you can get Windows updates from a company that clearly doesn’t care if they trash your machine forcing your upgrade seems foolish to me.
You couldn’t pay me to use Windows for development, sysadmin, backend services, etc.
But on the desktop? Hell no. We maintain a modern debian desktop environment for our users, and it’s a pain in the ass. Mediocre UX, mediocre integration of mixed-bag third-party apps, and too many workarounds and gotchas you need to Just Know About. I just don’t have the energy.
I use windows at home, and for my underlying work environment - and I just SSH into linux boxes for the actual tappy-tappy stuff.
Lmao. This article is junk. Yew I’m sure millions of people are going to suddenly dump their PC’s because they don’t get security updates. Most people don’t follow this at all and don’t care.
And no, they’re not going to magically jump to Linux as much as the Lemmy circlejerk loves to believe. If they know enough about security they probably already have looked into Linux and decided against it.
A bit clickbait’y. Windows 10 will still work just fine for another decade at least, even without support.
In the Enterprise we ran 10+ year old PC’s with XP still on them because the CNC program only runs on XP. No issues but of course you wouldn’t use the internet on that machine.
Does having support really make a massive difference, especially if you’re running AV anyway? A good AV suite will still be updated for years to come.
The government sector like hospitals etc will pay for extended support so not to worry.
It’s only Enterprise that might have an issue because they want patched systems but may not be able to afford Win 10 Enterprise.
Especially small to medium business.
As for the home user, it’s not a massive issue.
Personally I don’t care because I run Linux exclusively. I only gave win 10 running in a VM for printing. Canon said on the box that the printer supports Linux, then after I bought it, officially stopped all Linux support on their site. The original Ubuntu driver only support black and white. So I’m forced to use Windows in a VM for printing. But it’s not connected to the net so it will fulfill this role forever.
If you’re a regular home user and don’t use any special proprietary software like Photoshop, I highly recommend you try Linux Mint. It will also breathe new life into your machine
Not having security patches on a system you do things like go to your banking website on is actually a pretty big deal, and I don’t think it should be dismissed lightly. Also AV is mostly snake oil, and is in no way an adequate substitute for a properly patched OS.
It’s not as big a deal as you think because most banking hacks are done via browser vulnerabilities rather than OS vulnerabilities. The exception being if you’ve somehow managed to install a keylogger, in which case the issue is the user and a decent AV should detect and block the keylogger.
As long as you use a browser that gets the latest updates (Firefox, Vivaldi, Chrome), run a decent AV, and don’t install dodgy software you downloaded from some dodgy site, you should be ok.
AV is definitely not snake oil. I worked in Enterprise IT and a robust AV alongside other security measures is a must and does catch alot. More than the built in Windows security catches. Plus the AV normally incorporates a virus/malware removal tool which tends to be better than Windows built in tool.
Would you advise your enterprise clients that running Windows unpatched is ‘not a big deal as long as you have patched web browsers and AV’? Of course not. Because that’s dangerous advice and could even open you up to legal liability.
So why would you advise otherwise to home users, who are often more vulnerable in the first place?
Because my main server is running UnRAID and most things are ran in containers. I could probably do it in a VM, but it seemed like more of a hassle and it might have the same discovery issue the container had.
Throwing it in an old dying server as a package is what I ended up doing, but I’m not happy about it. 😅
I still had plenty of frustrations with it. I ended up switching to Linux finally last year when it became clear Microsoft was going to force my pc to update to 11.
I was fine with w10, but my god w11 has been a real pita for me. Had used Linux on laptops for quite some time before, but w11 was what finally pushed me into transitioning into Linux primarily on my main desktop PC as well.
My machine running Win10 LTSC is getting updates until 2029. I also have machines running Debian. There is no way I am installing the regular version of Win11. Its trash made to pander to greedy shareholders. If they take the garbage out for LTSC, I might run it.
There is no way they don’t offer extended support for Windows 10. Many PCs can’t get to windows 11. Imagine all the malware infected machines that will be out there.
I worked for a large computer company in the late 90s, early 2000s. When XP came out, they said there would be no site licensing. This meant we had to keep track of license keys for thousands upon thousands of systems, costing millions. This was before KMS or anything.
“Nothing we can do,” Microsoft said. “We have no gate key.”
Our server farms at the time were 40% Windows NT 4, 55% Sun systems, and 5% Linux. So we said, “okay,” and called Red Hat. In a year, our back end was 60% Sun, 35% Linux, and 5% Windows NT. We were already in talks to start switching to Linux workstations for desktops.
“Oh, you mean this gate key,” said Microsoft.
Asshats. They lost our server business, but let us use XP with a site license.
In line with many folks’ suggestions here, I’m ALL for switching to Linux full time after playing around with a few distros… BUT, I use dxo Photolab for photo editing which doesn’t run on Linux, yes, even through wine etc.
Also yes, I know the are a bunch of great Foss alternatives. I’ve tried them all. Nothing touches the results from my current program unfortunately.
I would be stoked if anyone could enlighten me as to how I could get that working.
I can highly recommend either using windows as a VM in virtualbox, or simply dual boot. I’m using Linux 99% of the time, but I still boot into windows occasionally for some firmware updates or software that does not work with Linux.
Have looked at dual boot before but it seemed like a ( admittedly fairly minor) pita. File sharing/ access across both systems is my main concern. Thanks for your response.
FWIW, I only needed to install one package to be able to read the drive that my Windows install is located on/a shared drive between my two installs. It has been very easy to access the Windows partition from my linux install, but I have not needed to access my linux partition from the Windows install yet, so can’t speak to the ease of doing this.
Yeah, just make a drive/partition NTFS, and it will be usable by both systems.
Please note that some Linux software doesn’t work well with NTFS, for example Timeshift (backup utility) and Steam Proton, so it’s best to have an ext4/btrfs drive for things you do exclusively on Linux and NTFS for common files of both systems (like documents, music, films, whatever)
Like others have said, file sharing works pretty well with NTFS. I’ve had some issues playing games on steam that are on NTFS drives, but most work well. Also some issues accessing files from Cura for some reason. Other than that I have had no issues sharing files between w11 and Linux.
If you can, I recommend getting a dedicated SSD to install Linux on, and I’d recommend getting PopOS or Linux Mint as your distro. Both are Debian/Ubuntu derivatives, but are even easier and just overall better distros than Ubuntu imo, and most hardware and software will be compatible ootb without any tinkering.
You have a W10 license, so just run up a VM, and install your software in that. Whilst it will be marginally slower, it will be 100% compatible and run on your host OS (this is not good for gaming in general, but if the VM software you use supports passthrough, mainly for GPU, then its pretty negligible).
Keep the Win10 VM off the WAN, and who cares how out of date it is and lacking in security updates.
Fun fact: Linux is so customizable that you can run a modern GUI and software on 46mb of ram and a CPU from 1989. Don’t let Microshit tell you to throw out your old PC, it’s truly surprising what’s possible.
I do IT support at my company. We are a small business, but we work on many government contracts. I’m personally not experienced enough on Linux to support it at a businesses level. Part of working on government contracts is that we have to be CMMC certified in the relatively near future, probably first or second quarter next year. I’d love to get off of Windows, but like I mentioned I don’t have the knowledge to get us there, and we’re pretty entrenched in Windows until at least after the audit. Maybe someday, but the Microsoft m365 business GCC High is built with that specific certification in mind. It would require changing everything about our business to switch, and I don’t care enough about the company to go through that.
You could just use the earliest version of Windows that the software works (Windows 7 usually) and then keep the VM air gapped (aka no Internet connection)
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I miss vista
Why the fuck does that petition site even have a “Zip/Postal Code” box when it doesn’t seem to allow postal codes?
Sounds like a good time to give Linux a try!
Dude I still have a windows 7 up and running.
i hope it’s not connected to the Internet
Why is that a “big worry”? Windows 10 was released in 2015. So 2025 would be over 10 years of support. That’s a more than valid amount of time to support an OS.
It’s the more recent computers that can’t run Windows 11. So that’s what 5 years of support?
Windows 10 came out in 2015 and eighth gen Intel and 2nd gen Ryzen came out in 2018. So it would be 7 years of support unless you bought an older computer then.
It’s not when compatible chips started selling, it’s when you could still buy non compatible chips and computers. If I could go to Best Buy last year and buy a new computer that’s not compatible with Windows 11, then that’s 1+ 2 more years for a total of 3 years support.
So the question is: when could you still buy a computer that wasn’t compatible. That’s the support length for many people.
Good point, although by then we’re getting to variables that MS can’t control.
I know people have bypassed the spec check to get 11 installed, I think MS should just allow people to bypass it officially for a certain length of time. It’s a pain in the ass to support older machines and OSes, but striking a middle ground is good.
They can keep supporting windows 10. They made money when windows 10 was installed on that computer, so they should support it.
They have though. For ten years.
I’m sympathetic to MS trying to force updates along. One big problem especially in Enterprise is that the requirement to support ancient OSes and hardware causes unnecessary work, and holds back progress. Look at IE. Or Vista’s performance issues caused by underpowered GPUs.
The question is how long do you support and how forceful are you on requiring upgrades? Linux distros have LTS releases and generally do a great job on long term support, but even they will start deprecating branches.
There has to be a middle ground.
Are you back to this again? We just went through it, if you bought a computer last year that can’t run windows 11, then no it’s not 10 years. It’s 3.
I mean, it won’t let me. Windows Update inists my PC doesn’t meet the minimum spec, and I’m not inclined to argue with it.
Mine doesn’t, either. Go go gadget 12 year old processor! Who knew being a cheapskate could be so beneficial?
#GleefulCompliance
You can use Rufus to install windows 11 and bypass the requirements. It does everything for you – downloads the latest win 11 service pack, removes the blocking requirements, and you can even tell it to automatically disable all of the telemetry and phoning home. You’ll still need a license key when you install, or run it on a machine that was running a valid win 10 install previously. But I’m running win 11 on an 8 year old PC with zero issues.
Here is a good guide that explains in detail.
I would like to point out that this is exactly the same difficulty of just installing linux, without freeing you from microserfdom.
Comparing the level of effort to run windows vs Linux is a whole other thing I’m definitely not getting into. I use Linux for work and run it on two machines at home, but I also use my Windows box for games. You can use and enjoy both, it doesn’t have to be a religious war.
I highly recommend you attempt to run your games on a Linux box, as the experience has improved vastly. I also keep a Windows install around for the odd game that doesn’t work in Linux (basically just a couple competitive shooters that I enjoy), but the number of times I need to boot into my Windows partition are diminishing day by day. Definitely did not mean to be a zealot about it, but going through the effort outlined above just so you can get Windows updates from a company that clearly doesn’t care if they trash your machine forcing your upgrade seems foolish to me.
Does windows 11 still require secure boot?
well, I guess I am staying with windows 10
Or just try linux. It’s pretty great
I work in a linux shop.
You couldn’t pay me to use Windows for development, sysadmin, backend services, etc.
But on the desktop? Hell no. We maintain a modern debian desktop environment for our users, and it’s a pain in the ass. Mediocre UX, mediocre integration of mixed-bag third-party apps, and too many workarounds and gotchas you need to Just Know About. I just don’t have the energy.
I use windows at home, and for my underlying work environment - and I just SSH into linux boxes for the actual tappy-tappy stuff.
Lmao. This article is junk. Yew I’m sure millions of people are going to suddenly dump their PC’s because they don’t get security updates. Most people don’t follow this at all and don’t care.
And no, they’re not going to magically jump to Linux as much as the Lemmy circlejerk loves to believe. If they know enough about security they probably already have looked into Linux and decided against it.
A bit clickbait’y. Windows 10 will still work just fine for another decade at least, even without support.
In the Enterprise we ran 10+ year old PC’s with XP still on them because the CNC program only runs on XP. No issues but of course you wouldn’t use the internet on that machine.
Does having support really make a massive difference, especially if you’re running AV anyway? A good AV suite will still be updated for years to come.
The government sector like hospitals etc will pay for extended support so not to worry.
It’s only Enterprise that might have an issue because they want patched systems but may not be able to afford Win 10 Enterprise. Especially small to medium business.
As for the home user, it’s not a massive issue.
Personally I don’t care because I run Linux exclusively. I only gave win 10 running in a VM for printing. Canon said on the box that the printer supports Linux, then after I bought it, officially stopped all Linux support on their site. The original Ubuntu driver only support black and white. So I’m forced to use Windows in a VM for printing. But it’s not connected to the net so it will fulfill this role forever.
If you’re a regular home user and don’t use any special proprietary software like Photoshop, I highly recommend you try Linux Mint. It will also breathe new life into your machine
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AV cannot fix it all, unfortunately. But Linux is the way.
Not having security patches on a system you do things like go to your banking website on is actually a pretty big deal, and I don’t think it should be dismissed lightly. Also AV is mostly snake oil, and is in no way an adequate substitute for a properly patched OS.
It’s not as big a deal as you think because most banking hacks are done via browser vulnerabilities rather than OS vulnerabilities. The exception being if you’ve somehow managed to install a keylogger, in which case the issue is the user and a decent AV should detect and block the keylogger.
As long as you use a browser that gets the latest updates (Firefox, Vivaldi, Chrome), run a decent AV, and don’t install dodgy software you downloaded from some dodgy site, you should be ok.
AV is definitely not snake oil. I worked in Enterprise IT and a robust AV alongside other security measures is a must and does catch alot. More than the built in Windows security catches. Plus the AV normally incorporates a virus/malware removal tool which tends to be better than Windows built in tool.
Would you advise your enterprise clients that running Windows unpatched is ‘not a big deal as long as you have patched web browsers and AV’? Of course not. Because that’s dangerous advice and could even open you up to legal liability.
So why would you advise otherwise to home users, who are often more vulnerable in the first place?
Because home users are not Enterprise users. They are not nearly as juicy a target.
Have you tried installing CUPS ? And setting up your printer using the web UI ? Worked for me perfectly for every printer I threw at it.
I could not get CUPS working in a docker container for the life of me. So now I have a stupid little CUPS server.
It does work great, even though it feels like they finished dev in 2003 and never revisited it.
Why docker and not a normal package ?
Because my main server is running UnRAID and most things are ran in containers. I could probably do it in a VM, but it seemed like more of a hassle and it might have the same discovery issue the container had. Throwing it in an old dying server as a package is what I ended up doing, but I’m not happy about it. 😅
Wait windows 10 was not junk before? Since when?
I think you’re probably in the minority on this one. It was generally accepted that Win10 was pretty good.
It was regarded as good in the beginning, at least in comparison to Windows 8. In the beginning it ran leaner than Win7
Then update after update it got more and more bloated and unstable, more crammed with ads, etc. Windows 10 aged very poorly imo.
Windows 10 LTSC for the win
I still had plenty of frustrations with it. I ended up switching to Linux finally last year when it became clear Microsoft was going to force my pc to update to 11.
I was fine with w10, but my god w11 has been a real pita for me. Had used Linux on laptops for quite some time before, but w11 was what finally pushed me into transitioning into Linux primarily on my main desktop PC as well.
My machine running Win10 LTSC is getting updates until 2029. I also have machines running Debian. There is no way I am installing the regular version of Win11. Its trash made to pander to greedy shareholders. If they take the garbage out for LTSC, I might run it.
Well, your best option is to switch to Linux
There is no way they don’t offer extended support for Windows 10. Many PCs can’t get to windows 11. Imagine all the malware infected machines that will be out there.
I worked for a large computer company in the late 90s, early 2000s. When XP came out, they said there would be no site licensing. This meant we had to keep track of license keys for thousands upon thousands of systems, costing millions. This was before KMS or anything.
“Nothing we can do,” Microsoft said. “We have no gate key.”
Our server farms at the time were 40% Windows NT 4, 55% Sun systems, and 5% Linux. So we said, “okay,” and called Red Hat. In a year, our back end was 60% Sun, 35% Linux, and 5% Windows NT. We were already in talks to start switching to Linux workstations for desktops.
“Oh, you mean this gate key,” said Microsoft.
Asshats. They lost our server business, but let us use XP with a site license.
In line with many folks’ suggestions here, I’m ALL for switching to Linux full time after playing around with a few distros… BUT, I use dxo Photolab for photo editing which doesn’t run on Linux, yes, even through wine etc.
Also yes, I know the are a bunch of great Foss alternatives. I’ve tried them all. Nothing touches the results from my current program unfortunately.
I would be stoked if anyone could enlighten me as to how I could get that working.
I can highly recommend either using windows as a VM in virtualbox, or simply dual boot. I’m using Linux 99% of the time, but I still boot into windows occasionally for some firmware updates or software that does not work with Linux.
Have looked at dual boot before but it seemed like a ( admittedly fairly minor) pita. File sharing/ access across both systems is my main concern. Thanks for your response.
FWIW, I only needed to install one package to be able to read the drive that my Windows install is located on/a shared drive between my two installs. It has been very easy to access the Windows partition from my linux install, but I have not needed to access my linux partition from the Windows install yet, so can’t speak to the ease of doing this.
Yeah, just make a drive/partition NTFS, and it will be usable by both systems. Please note that some Linux software doesn’t work well with NTFS, for example Timeshift (backup utility) and Steam Proton, so it’s best to have an ext4/btrfs drive for things you do exclusively on Linux and NTFS for common files of both systems (like documents, music, films, whatever)
Like others have said, file sharing works pretty well with NTFS. I’ve had some issues playing games on steam that are on NTFS drives, but most work well. Also some issues accessing files from Cura for some reason. Other than that I have had no issues sharing files between w11 and Linux.
If you can, I recommend getting a dedicated SSD to install Linux on, and I’d recommend getting PopOS or Linux Mint as your distro. Both are Debian/Ubuntu derivatives, but are even easier and just overall better distros than Ubuntu imo, and most hardware and software will be compatible ootb without any tinkering.
You have a W10 license, so just run up a VM, and install your software in that. Whilst it will be marginally slower, it will be 100% compatible and run on your host OS (this is not good for gaming in general, but if the VM software you use supports passthrough, mainly for GPU, then its pretty negligible).
Keep the Win10 VM off the WAN, and who cares how out of date it is and lacking in security updates.
Fun fact: Linux is so customizable that you can run a modern GUI and software on 46mb of ram and a CPU from 1989. Don’t let Microshit tell you to throw out your old PC, it’s truly surprising what’s possible.
I’ve switch my home computers to Linux. Unfortunately, at work, I have to maintain a Windows environment…
Did your job give you a work Laptop? If you personally own it then you could just run Windows in a VM.
I do IT support at my company. We are a small business, but we work on many government contracts. I’m personally not experienced enough on Linux to support it at a businesses level. Part of working on government contracts is that we have to be CMMC certified in the relatively near future, probably first or second quarter next year. I’d love to get off of Windows, but like I mentioned I don’t have the knowledge to get us there, and we’re pretty entrenched in Windows until at least after the audit. Maybe someday, but the Microsoft m365 business GCC High is built with that specific certification in mind. It would require changing everything about our business to switch, and I don’t care enough about the company to go through that.
But can I be fucked waiting 5 minutes for a VM to boot every time I need to use a Windows-only tool?
You could just use the earliest version of Windows that the software works (Windows 7 usually) and then keep the VM air gapped (aka no Internet connection)
Let me introduce you to Adobe. Single-handedly keeping Linux adoption in check.
Yeah but can it run signed drm in a way that the owner of the computer can’t read the keys? Checkmate atheists.