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?
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.
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.
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.