Next year Windows 10 goes End of Life. Microsoft will undoubtedly push windows 11 hard, but a lot of machines won’t support it leading to a few economic points of interest:
The demand for new machines will be high, driving up cost.
The supply of unsupported machines will be high, driving down the used market.
Are you all ready?
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We are trialing about 20 Linux desktops (10 Linux mint and 10 zorin OS) across 2 of our MSP clients.
So far, they have had zero technical tickets in 6 months. They did have double the average user training tickets compared to windows machines. Most of the questions were around how to work with editable PDFs and where is the document was they just saved (file manager questions).
Zorin OS seems to be winning on the usability metrics. Its very polished and more closely matching the UI of people coming from windows.
Are there any windows programs you’ve had to set up through wine?
Not in our case. We only take on clients that converted to browser based apps. Bit we are yet to convert the heavy excel users. The one we have converted are light Excel users and online excel is working just fine for them.
It’s my only hangup. I vba on the regular. Work forced win11 on me, but at home, once i can be assed, I’ll vm windows eventually and migrate completely, and scheme alternative languages for my spreadsheet wizardry lmao
Libre calc Scripting imo is more matured and better than excel. Better and far more popular language (python or javascript equally far better than vb)
I’ve heard good things but haven’t looked into it yet. Thing is, I got so good at vba that I got a promotion out of it lmao. As archaic as it is, my work is essentially hardcoded in windows for the foreseeable future, so I have to be able to dick around in msoffice.
If you want yet another promotion you know what to do next
Just using 10 LTSC which has updates until 2032 iirc. I would switch to Linux but my simracing hardware doesn’t play nice.
I thought that was only the IoT version that had support til 2032
simracing hardware
Hmm. Like, pedals, throttle, steering wheel? That was an issue many years back, but most of that supports USB HID these days. Like, OSes don’t normally need hardware-specific drivers or anything.
Unfortunately, that’s really not true for most sim racing hardware. Lower-end Logitech and Thrustmaster stuff usually works fine, but you’re pretty much screwed once you go beyond that.
Sounds like there are going to be a lot of machines running a fresh install of Linux next year. Microsoft really does ♥️ Linux.
Tbf they genuinely do.
They’ve invested heavily in Linux and are one of its major contributors. I think they were in the top 5 of contributors.
They realised years ago the Linux desktop isn’t going to take off with the average user. So there’s no need to compete directly.
Azure actually runs on their own custom distribution of Linux.
Yeah, people are just going to keep using it, they just won’t get updates. That means they will be vulnerable to any exploits that come along afterward but most people don’t care. M$ shot everyone in the foot when they decided to limit windows 11 compatibility.
When windows 7 came out I knew people who stuck with windows xp until they bought a new computer with 10 or 11 on it. The market will get a slight bump from EoL but it isn’t going to force everyone with windows 10 to run out and buy a new computer immediately.
Your machine needs to be around a decade old to be incompatible I think.
MS shot itself by being so backwards compatible.
The primary requirements are TPM, a security feature.
A few months back we just upgraded some school computers from Windows XP to Windows 7, so that checks out. They can barely run that anyway and get almost no use.
It’s mostly just to force the hands of businesses that will now have to upgrade to stay compliant with security standards
Which is probably the play. I’d doubt Microsoft really gives a flying fuck about home users buying licenses anymore, since their revenue model for consumer Windows is just ads and data harvesting now anyway.
Just get yourself a copy of the LTSC (long term service contract) versions, they will still be supported until 2027, and in the past have been extended by up to 5 years on top.
It’s the only viable alternative to Linux, for those who can’t switch for one or another reason. Windows 11 is pure cancer.
The first release of windows 11 LTSC is supposed to be out sometime this year too.
Much like the 10 version, I expect it to have most of the bloat removed and only require a couple tweaks.
Long term servicing “Channel”
Having used 10 and 11 interchangeably since 11 came out… meh.
I mean, maybe there are additional annoyances from the IT/sysadmin side that I just don’t bump into as a user, but besides some UX downgrades that don’t make sense (that taskbar… why?) it’s a pretty neutral change. Maybe I’m to grizzled by having been there in the switch to 95. I unironically had Windows Me on my computer there for a while. I even caved and did some Vista eventually.
But not Windows 8. Windows 8 was unusable.
The taskbar is one thing, but it’s horribly slow, even on a rather high spec laptop. The delay from clicking start menu icons to programs starting is very noticeable, and some programs freeze regularly. MS Office are actually some of the worst offenders. I tried it for 2 weeks and then did a fresh install of Windows 10.
I didn’t even mind ME, for me it was running pretty stable. I heard most issues came from people updating from 98 or 98SE to ME, a clean install was usually stable.
I skipped Vista though, went straight to 7. Still my favorite Windows. 8 was crap, 8.1 was not bad once you applied the taskbar fix.
Funny that this started with 10 in my experience. Our family laptop did an involuntary upgrade back in 2016, and its 2 cores, 4 gigs of ram and hdd just couldn’t handle it. And none in our family was savvy enough to downgrade to 7. Thankfully same did not happen to mom’s similarly weak one, it was saved from running an EOL system by Linux)
Hm. Not been my experience going back and forth between 10 and 11, but that’s always the case with Windows, isn’t it? Bit of a crapshoot in general.
Honestly, I have no idea how to evaluate real laptop performance these days. Most of the performance issues I have on battery devices are some unholy combination of horrific power management, bad software and semi-deliberate online weirdness with services throttling you out of adblocker spite.
People are out there telling you how well Youtube is meant to perform playing video and how long the battery is meant to run based on that and I don’t even know what they mean anymore.
I actually liked the full screen Start menu from 8/8.1 for the specific use case of my living room PC. You got a big 10-foot UI by default with nice large icons you could punch from across the room.
The whole put-your-mouse-in-the-corner-and-swipe for the charms menu was baffling, though. I get that this was supposed to be a tablet UI thing, but why make it mandatory for the mouse interface as well?
I just upgraded my work surface book 3 to 11 and for me it seems that program start faster, not slower 🤔
Windows 8, maybe. But Windows 8.1 was awesome. The optimization, it ran perfectly on a potato.
Yep. I get they wanted to pretend 8 wasn’t a complete bust, hence the 8.1 nonsense, but they should have called it Windows 9 and been honest about it. They certainly acknowledged it by the time 10 came around.
Nothing got named “Windows 9” because Microsoft feared compatibility issues with janky programs looking for the first set of characters in “Windows 95” or “Windows 98.”
Later this was changed by the marketing department to some blather about “wanting consumers to perceive a clean break from the previous version.” But then, Microsoft also claimed Windows 10 would be the Last Windows, and it would just have feature updates built on top of it forever as a service. So you sure as fuck can’t take anything they say at face value.
11 has artificial hardware requirements built in that will prevent it from installing on a lot of computers (possibly most computers deployed in the world, at this point) which is the main issue. All those non-technical home users who bought a brand name prebuilt PC in 5, 6, however many years ago that still works just fine will not be able to upgrade.
They will be left in the lurch unless M$ relents and removes those requirements (unlikely), they all learn to patch them out themselves (extremely unlikely), or they all go buy new computers with newer hardware (extremely annoying).
As me and others have said all over this thing, Windows 10 no longer getting updates doesn’t mean it’s mandatory to update. Most of the users you describe will not notice or care that security updates die out and they will just take whatever runs in the next PC they buy, as they normally do.
This mostly matters to power users and corporations. If that. I’m arguably a power user and have zero intention to upgrade my legacy Win10 machines for this reason, either.
Windows 11 is garbage:
- UI is garbage, from right click to the taskbar, its a alpha release being sold to as complete product.
- settings missing alot of control panel items and you cant go back in some cases for even simple things like sound device management, network management, all settings are far far from parity.
- Poor hardware compatibility, bsod on same hardware is common occurance.
- Privacy invasive spyware. From the search service to the telemetry. Its a data mining platform
- Security is terrible. Internet connected Services are on by default that shouldnt be like search and telemetry. Any on by default service, like telemetry can and are abused with zero days. Mandated cloud services as a bandaid to poor local account security. Security is a bandaid full stop, from the kernel to cloud services its not secure by design.
Agree on 1, mostly. I forget that’s the case because I have software installed to fix it, which is fairly trivial but shouldn’t be necessary in the first place.
2 is a day one meme thing that no longer holds. Sound management in particular is now much better than Win 10 in several key areas, IMO. Likewise with 3. Echoes of Vista and Win 8.1 dragging day one legit complaints way past when they were no longer an issue.
4 and 5 are the kinds of things that average users typically don’t know or care about (and mostly don’t have to) and are debatable from a power user’s perspective. If the argument is Win10 is reaching end of support and you care about the implications of that, then you are the type of user that can fix that problem. And if you’re the kind of user who doesn’t care about a supported vs unuspported Win10, you don’t care about this specific observation either.
Let me be clear, I’m not an active apologist for Win 11 or any other Windows, I just don’t have a preference. Win11 was a sidestep, the best I can say for it is that I’m kinda glad MS was semi-forced to keep it as a separate version rather than a patch to 10. But it’s also mostly just fine. A few people got really incensed about it early on and have tried to keep up a pretense that it’s a disaster iteration in the vein of some of the really bad ones, which using it day to day is clearly an exaggeration.
- Is absolutely still an issue expecially when manufacturers advise on disabling OS features for compatibility. Dont forget that user base you talk about, this is an OS upgrade so if its not stable, its not suitable. My god is it not stable, read kernal processor power management. Its a stability nightmare for general users.
So bother with all that mac imitation especially when the upgrade is not possible? Just buy the more power efficient, faster and improved value chrome book.
Wait, who is talking about ChromeOS? I thought we were talking about Win10 v Win11.
I through that in for bait ❤️ for the MS bros
I swear, the fact that people treat operating systems as if they were 90s kids arguing about Sega vs. Nintendo is exhausting and I have zero patience for it.
I use 10 at home and 11 at work and I can’t say I’ve really noticed a difference tbh. Apart from the start menu I guess.
Feels similar to what people said about 7 and 10.
If MS decides that my hardware is obsolete, I’ll just go full Linux 🤷♂️
My machine is 7 years old and runs fine on Windows 11. I don’t understand all these posts about Windows 11 not being supported. TPMs have been a thing for 10+ years now.
Same with apple, tho 😇
Apple is king of new OS doesn’t work on the old hardware though
Yes! Luckily the opensource folks are crazy and make awesome progress reversing m chips It matters to me because somday (maybe 10y) I’ll get the one of my mother for free 😂 like i got my other apple PCs (running Arch/endeavourOS)
Did that over 10 years ago so hope you join up soon. :)
Personally I use Linux Mint on my other machine and Windows on my main PC
Before Windows 10 goes EoL I’m going to get my NAS running a Windows VM for Fusion 360 and Lightroom and my main rig will be on Linux Mint as well
I just need a need to finish my NAS rebuild to get everything rolling at full steam
Unfortunately that means I need to stop buying car parts first
stop buying car parts first
Oof. Same, brother. Same. 🤜🤛
As your attorney I advise you to buy a motorcycle. Bikes and bike parts are cheaper. And then you can have more bikes than cars, and more bikes to buy parts for. Wait, where was I going with this again?
This was my logic.
Sell the BMW and get a Ducati and then a Honda Monkey….
Ooooh shiny new Rizoma parts!!!My account ain’t growing at all…!
If you wanted to get rid of windows in general, Darktable seems to be a good alternative to lightroom, for raw editing. There’s a learning curve, but there are plenty of tutorials available.
Not sure about Fusion 360 though… Maybe FreeCAD?
Unfortunately FreeCAD is not as featur e rich as Fusion 360
It’s getting closer but it’s not there yet
Do you game at all? Gaming on Linux has made great strides, be be fair, but for a lot of titles you still need to consider a dual boot of some form of Windows, thanks to over the top anti-cheat, DRM, and developer support.
Something to consider for the gamers out there.
The only titles that don’t work in Linux are the ones with invasive anti-cheat, some multi-player titles.
Virtually all single players game work. I’ve had games that don’t work on Windows due to crashes / performance but run on Linux.
Game pass games also do not work afaik.
Apex started acting up on pop a year and half ago which drove me back to my windows partition (that I hadn’t seen in almost 18 months).
I don’t know if my issue is: pop, proton, steam, apex, my hardware(bad ram?), flatpaks, the deb, or something else. In my opinion it’s one of the toughest part about Linux gaming–when something goes wrong you arent going to find a ton of help since there is so much fragmentation.
But anyway, I echo your sentiment. Windows is still a necessary evil for a lot of us if you are big into PC gaming.
ws2k12r2 is still getting updates, what w10? ;)
They are? Support ended and they stopped receiving updates.
Not really, but I have 18 months to migrate all my shit away from there. I’ve already moved a lot of my critical stuff to FOSS software running under win10 and I’m more than passing familiar with Linux. Shouldn’t be a massive deal.
I’ve switched to W11 on my main rig, since Linux doesn’t have the sort of compatibility that I can rely on for my work. I installed explorer patcher to restore W10 start menu, task bar, and right click menu. I combed through the settings to deactivate all the data collection settings.
On my laptop, I dual boot W11 and KDE Neon.
It’s the best that I can do given the circumstances
iirc, Microsoft had some significant investment in Intel.
this is perfectly rational monopolist-cartel-protecting-monopolist-cartel behavior.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=microsoft's+investment+in+intel&t=fpas&ia=web
I already use Windows Update Blocker to disable automatic updates of Windows. So Windows 10 going EOL won’t change much for me.
Why would you be blocking updates? Win10 is basically getting security fixes only at this point.
It is also getting increasingly annoying nagging screens for Windows 11
Corporations (the only people who actually care about their OS being in support) upgrade their machines every few years so they’ve already done that. Home users don’t know what that means and won’t care. The remaining 2% have already installed linux.
This.
Official OS support is a security concern. The machine I have in use at home that is running Win10 is doing so on deliberately old hardware for preservation and it will continue to do so indefinitely, just like my XP machine. I’m even a bit surprised myself by how few Win10 computers I have, considering I haven’t once upgraded one to Win11 on purpose. I thik I may have an older laptop that is still on Win10 and can happily stay there, since it doesn’t see much use.
But hey, corporate office PCs ARE likely to hit the used market in higher numbers at that point, and those are often a good deal for cheap DIY builds. It’s still a good date to track if you’re into that sort of thing.
Honestly I’m a bit excited for the amount of systems about to hit the used market
They’re just screaming for Linux
Lmao, I’ve been ready since 7 reached the theoretical end of life.
Air gap 7, use Linux on everything else.
Windows 7 will maybe work for a while.
There’s going to be a point where new Windows software won’t run on Windows 7, though.
Freezing the OS is one thing, but freezing the application library is another.
Heh, I only keep it for a limited use case. I have backups of the software, so I’m good until win7 won’t run on new hardware.
No need for any updates when what I use works perfectly for me.
music producer?
I’ve heard of some buying bulk macbooks and cloning their drives because knowing your workflow is the most important thing.
Atari Teenage Riot’s music is still produced on an Atari ST.
Yep, got my frenly window-smashing ball and a mug of pale eol ready.
