It’s been quiet for a few days since I’ve been sick, but I’m feeling a bit better since today marks the official end of my one month of using Windows 11 that you people donated for. An article about my experience is definitely upcoming, including whether or not I’ll actually stick with Windows 11 on my laptop or go back to Linux, but before we get there, let’s talk about Microsoft once again capitulating to the reality that a lot of people really don’t want to let go of Windows 10.
In a surprising move, Microsoft has quietly confirmed that it’s extending Windows 10 support until October 12, 2027, which is one full year beyond the October 2026 cutoff that home users had been planning around.
↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest
Hundreds of millions of people are still using Windows 10, and with the “AI” techbros buying up all the RAM and other chips for their pachinko machines – making this whole thing a bit of an own goal for prime “AI” booster Microsoft – buying new PCs that are actually compatible with Windows 11 isn’t exactly a fun prospect for the vast majority of us normal folk dealing with the cost-of-living crisis. As such, Microsoft really doesn’t have any other choice but to keep extending support for Windows 10. It ain’t much, but I’ll take any morsel of justice I can get.
While everyone else has to pay for getting access to these Windows 10 updates, users in the European Union get them entirely for free thanks to the Digital Markets Act. This additional year, too, can be partially attributed to the DMA, as the very same consumer rights organisations who pressured Microsoft into giving EU users truly free access to the Extended Security Updates also put pressure on the company to offer these for more than just one year.
Basic consumer protection legislation works.
This is great news
I have been holding off upgrading my gaming machine, which was a risk I had to take
A. Stay with Windows 10, which is stable, but no security updates
B. “Upgrade” to Windows 11 for a degraded experience
I still have not understood why they abandoned Windows 10 “feature updates”. Windows 11 could have easily been “Windows 10 2026 H2”
Perhaps because then they’d have another winxp at their hands, a ten years old OS they had to continue supporting?
cevvalkoala,
They could have avoided all these issues by continuing their previous stand.
Which is rolling updates to Windows 10, which was already pretty good.
Of course not, every now and then Windows requires a complete rewrite from the ground up to adapt to the new threats and highest standard of code security and stuff. That’s why Vista needed to replace XP, 7 replace Vista, 8 replace 7, 10 replace 7, and so on.
Because making a clear distinction between the kernel side and user applications doesn’t exists in Windows, hence upgrading the kernel like Linux does cannot work. How would you have added TPM 2.0 requirement to existing and fully working Windows 10 without setting a strict limitation ?
Otherwise we would be working with Windows 2000 25H2…
Kochise,
(Difficult to say whether satire begins, and serious ends)
Up until Windows 10, Microsoft used to sell the upgrades. So that made sense to do less incremental, but batch upgrades (2000 -> 5.0, XP -> 5.1, Vista -> 6.0). And sometimes they had to clean up their mistakes (8.0 -> 8.1)
However since they are already upgrading Windows for free, and have rolling releases, …
Actually what you said make sense TPM 2.0 is extremely important. Microsoft was justified to build a JavaScript based Start Menu and downgrade our user experience just for the important task of moving everyone to a much better digital restrictions system. Sorry… rights system.
Indeed, “Difficult to say whether satire begins, and serious ends”
In Linux, you do not have restrictions, you have fragmentations.
Obligatory you could upgrade to Bazzite or Cachy OS post. 😉
CaptainN-,
I think you meant “downgrade”
Dual booting with SteamOS is something I’m currently considering.. But given this is my gaming machine, and about half of my games don’t work on SteamOS (used to own a Steam Deck)… Windows will stay as primary there.
Just to be fair though….
This is not the fault of Linux based gaming distros, but game publishers being crappy about it.
It’s the fault of Linux based gaming distros for not supporting the de-facto standard, which either you like it or not is win32/win64.
Enough with this double standard where it was the fault of Windows Phone for not being compatible with de-facto standards (such as Android’s API and OpenGL ES) but Desktop Linux gets a free pass.
kurkosdr,
[ It is the opposite day I guess… So let’s support Windows… ]
Of course the game developers are at fault by wanting to make money. Linux offers them everything they need, twice over, or rather twenty times over.
Stable API like Win32 or DirectX?
We have plenty to choose from. OpenGL, Vulkan, Mesa, SDL, ALSA, Pulse, Pipewire, Jack, X11, Wayland. These are just the low level ones. There are of course many graphical toolkits, just like Windows had ATL, WTL, and MFC. There is GTK, Xt, Qt, FLTK, Motif, U++, and of course higher level game engines.
Forgot to mention, since innovation is standard here, none of them are source compatible with prior versions. So choose wisely, GTK2 will not work on GTK3. And GT3 won’t work on GTK4. And to make sure we keep you on toes, they are not binary compatible either.
Did I mention if you use ALSA for audio it won’t work if the user configured Jack? Ah, you use Jack? Then it won’t work on Pipewire systems.
Upgrade your kernel? Great, now we no longer support your nvidia card, you might want to start saving to buy a new one.
Or… for the lazy ones we offer Proton, which is actually Win32 in disguise. It really works, and is supported very well. But why would you write your game in Win32/DirectX anyway?
Windows 11 is a principally different, generally in user interface and other features and algorithms, it’s much better than Windows 10.
The story behind it is that developers are still struggling to make it better in full major version – that’s why there are so many updates, even security ones.
Like the task bar you couldn’t move around and the start menu at its center to mimic Apple’s dock ? Such an improvement a feature update couldn’t offer and requested you to switch to Windows 11 ?
I switched because the drivers are for Windows 11 and Windows 10 support will be dropped one day.
Also the user interface is just better that Windows 10: Windows 10 is monolithic while there are many effects in Windows 11, moreover it’s like responding rather than other operating systems with static graphics.
Also, the core in Windows 11 still remained same as in Windows 10 or other previous versions.
The new version of Windows is already planned ahead, thus, maybe Windows 11 had many problems and owners just switched to the new one.
There are problems sometimes in the development and now these are generally AI and faster Graphical User Interface (GUI) as well as other errors which are critical and Windows 10 just hadn’t them and will be still supported.
The best is Windows XP, but it’s very outdated.
So we are waiting for the stable new update or version of this operating system where there won’t be any serious problems – AI can be and all that routines in drawing and gaming.
By the way, there was a release of gaming Opera GX, so maybe this item will be also considered to perform better, but now, the more powerful hardware is required – this barrier should be passed definetely.
A few months before this AI bubble madness started its mega inflate phase, I bought 64GB of DDR4 ECC RAM for my thinkpad and 4x1TB nvmes for my classic Mac Pro (to quad boot Mojave, Haiku, FreeBSD and Windows 10).
I never thought I was making a financial investment.
Microsoft really failed on this one. The “security argument” for TPM 2.0 is questionable, but the CPU cut-off is just arbitrary. My ThinkPad W530 with 32GB of RAM runs Windows 11 perfectly, including NVIDIA Optimus, external displays, fingerprint reading, the retrofit W520 keyboard, etc.. It was just a matter of installing the correct drivers, all available from Lenovo. Yea, yea, newer laptops are more power efficient but how much electricity would I need to “waste” to compensate for all the production process of a new laptop, from raw materials to delivery?
Once you get people struggling with expenses to do a high capital expense out of your caprice, don’t be surprised if they start looking for a way out. If I didn’t have to run old film scanners or really liked to play flight simulator, I’d have no use for Windows at all. My dad has been using Linux for 10 years (rocking a Core2Duo laptop with 4GB of RAM – enough for banking and youtube) and my grandpa has a mid-2007 iMac with 3GB of RAM happily performing youtube+banking duties with Debian. And it boots faster than his 2015 Mac.
I agree that MS really dropped it on this one. I have a t550 and t460 that run Windows 11 just fine, along with a pair of 2011 iMacs (the thick-body ones that still have CD drives). All it takes is a little bit of hackery i.e. disabling CPU and TPM checks, and tweaking the sound driver for the iMacs.
They are all perfectly good machines for doing homework, browsing the internet, and playing anything other than new AAA games. Even something like Little Nightmares runs just fine, and Windows 11 doesn’t run any slower on them than on our much more powerful gaming/CUDA rig.
I think MS wanted to do the whole “force a hardware upgrade with the Windows 11 upgrade” deal they usually do and for whatever mystery reasons they usually do it, and were just genuinely surprised that supply-chain issues made hardware upgrades too expensive for most people to justify. I would love to see them embrace that mistake and release a version of Windows 11 for low-powered or legacy devices (rather than continuing to extend support for Windows 10) but of course that’s not going to happen.
They were not always like that.
386SX with 4MB of RAM as minimum requirement for Windows 95 was really a stretch (try on 86Box). And I also remember one of the versions of Flight Simulator requiring Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000 or XP. Seriously… after Direct3D, Flight Simulator on Windows NT was just a blocky mess. I know, I’ve tried. But they wanted to make sure their software ran eVeRyWhErE.
Now they are trying to extract rent from us, like everyone else, and provide no service. Crosswanking with the manufacturers and we come to this mess.
I don’t get how they don’t go under. My CEO always tells us “they are the standard for a reason”, willingly or unwillingly ignorant to all the scams that they pulled to be at the top. It’s like they are doing us a favour for providing the services we pay for and we should be grateful for that.
Migrating platforms and reinstalling OS and all the crap is also a huge waste of time that I don’t get paid for. People with more complex workflows suffer whenever they need to migrate computers, reinstall or go to another platform. I got really hurt when Apple discontinued Aperture. Dropping FireWire from the kernel is hostile – what is the problem in keeping support there? There is simply NO SUBSTITUTE for some of the hardware I have. Then what?
We pay for professional tools and even Lego gives better support to their products.
And I am really tired of paying top money for low quality back, never being able to get a refund, and forcing myself into new hardware every couple of years. Nah, I’d rather retire one day.
I still use daily a HP Jornada 720, my phone is a Librem 5 and I only got a “new” computer recently because it was a good deal and I really wanted a laptop with ECC RAM. If my bank ever forces me out of my Librem 5, I am paying my bills at the teller.
Enough.
Just out of curiosity, how do you use your Journada? I got one maybe 20 years ago and while it was a neat machine I never found Just The Right Thing to do with it.
I run my own email/caldav server, so I have a Windows XP VM with Outlook and ActiveSync that syncs to it internally (I allow older security on the LAN), so I get emails there. I usually don’t email, though, but there’s the option. I talk to some of my more remote friends via email, let’s say one longer message per month, and that’s my way to reply in case I am in the train or so.
In general, I don’t like to do any kind of data input on my Librem 5 (or any smartphone), because I find touch screens very imprecise. I either type fast but then get frustrated by constantly having to hit backspace. Also, for example, to use a spreadsheet on a smartphone is an exercise in madness: set keyboard for specials chars, hit equal, write SUM, set special keys, open a parenthesis.
The PIM on Windows CE Handheld is the best yet. Direct interface, all you need, follows the caldav standard nicely. I track my tasks there (and they get synced to my Librem 5 via my server), writing to the calendar is also done there and I track my day on it. The Jornada is docked next to my monitor and I just need to hit the power button to have my day and my tasks on the screen immediately (HP has an application that shows both calendar and tasks on the same view).
Other uses: I track my workouts in Excel. Pocket Excel allows you to save in the full Excel format and not only Pocket Excel, so I can just open it on libreoffice fine. Since Pocket Excel is so simple, nothing that I do in libreoffice breaks the sheet. So it goes to the gym with me in the gym bag.
Large format photography is also done there on Excel. When I am on the field, I track all the parameters to the shot: the usual settings + how I did the metering and how the processed photo looked like (over, under exposed) and bellows extension, so when I am taking a new photo, I can do a quick Excel filter and avoid mistakes from the past.
The puzzle games are also fun and the keyboard is excellent. No double typing or ignored input (like the Cosmo Communicator) and the usual classic good keyboard shape: the keys are concave, F and J have the small dot to help finding them by touch.
And, of course I have Doom.
Oh no a month of Windows made you sick?
Fiat currency theory sounds good, but the reality is it needs strict controls like forced yearly increases to the minimum wage, and a cap on maximum wage so it doesn’t become just printing out more money to prop up bad economic policies and make the rich into the super rich. That’s how we got here, and how a few companies can buy up entire years of ssd and memory manufacturing while losing tons of money on AI indefinitely.
Fiat money exists to fund the state, if someone gets rich from it, is just a side effect.
NaGERST,
I would say that “side effect” is also under purview of state right now.
This entire bag of shenanigans was funded by essentially circular billing and speculation that would otherwise put a lot of people into jail
But they needed to fund that TikTok purchase.
(Look up the details)
And all of us suffering for it.
I still remember I ran Windows 10 Home Premium on 4Gb Intel Atom and it was fine, now developers are raising minimum hardware requirements definitely, while AI booms is still in pace.
That means that the world will end in 2027…. since Windows 10 was considered to be the last Windows at all.
The world ended in June 24, 2021, we all died from COVID-19 and the memory was erased. This is purgatory.