Microsoft officially recommends a new PC and OneDrive to update to Windows 11
Microsoft officially recommends a new PC and OneDrive to update to Windows 11
I once ran the windows Troubleshooter to get an old scanner working, and the final page told me to but a new scanner!
I plugged it in to a mini PC I use as a backup server and the scanner worked fine with Linux.
And another recommendation issue: I noticed that my Windows laptop has a "reduce your carbon footprint" settings section that tells me to reduce power settings, screen brightness etc. but it's completely lacking a "stop giving me AI search results in Bing" section.
Switching from Windows to Linux on my Framework laptop makes my battery last 2-3 times as long. They should just have a switch to Linux recommendation to reduce your carbon footprint.
Win11 also says that showing seconds in the taskbar "reduces battery life"/"increases power consumption"
The only time that would make a difference is if you're staring at a blank page and the only thing causing the screen to update is the clock. Theoretically the GPU could go completely to sleep, except for having to draw the updated clock every second.
But there's a reason battery life is commonly measured as "hours of video playback". If the laptop's not actually doing anything you may as well turn it off and get weeks of battery life.
My god. It really does!
Oh no! I left notepad.exe open. That cursor was flashing on and off for hours! I'm sorry everyone!
Are you saying you use Bing for searches? If you don't want that then why not use a different search?
Big company recommends users turn functional hardware into e-waste so they can boost quarterly profits.
when microsoft feels threatened by the recycling community being noticed, they add more technical constraints. Chromebooks are the gold standard for an intentionally non recyclable machine, neck and neck with apple.
The bullshit of chromeOS to be capable of running on the shittiest hardware but having an artificial lifetime for devices is stupid. To google's credit, they did increase that limit to 10 years, but that was only recently.
Yes, and they’re encouraging people to throw it out. At least some users think to sell on the secondary market, but third party buyers can only get so much out of EOL Windows machines and there are only so many linux users with an interest in buying up old hardware.
I myself have a couple of used laptops, but don’t need any more hardware for a while, so it’s not like I’m able to buy up any. I fear much of it will rot in a landfill.
yup, its an "oh, you concider it garbage? oh well, more for me then!" situation.
"and OneDrive". Yes, it is essential to have OneDrive.
And it's essential to have a always on network connection 24/7 if you turn it off we will delete all your data/j
My PC is getting old and I might replace it in about a year whenever I can get an OK GPU for a reasonable amount of money again.
I've built my own PCs since the late 90's and this will be the first time I will not install Windows on a computer I built. Get fucked Microsoft.
I already did this 2 years ago and I still don't miss Windows. I want my OS to just work, and that means not having big companies intentionally blocking updates and bullying consumers just so they can profit from artificially induced OEM license sales. It's pretty wild how quickly Linux has fit the bill in recent years, and how Windows no longer does.
Only hurdle on Linux right now is the transition from X11 to Wayland. Proton doesn't have good support for it yet so I occasionally have to load an X11 session for some games to run. I can imagine that getting worked out eventually.
Microsoft could have simply dropped official support for older machines and then literally done nothing and that would have still been better than what they did. At least then those machines would still receive security updates beyond next year, provided they could still run the latest version of Windows.
For the record, if the arbitrary CPU block is bypassed, then it's possible to install Windows 11 23H2 on a Prescott era Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. The true requirements did change for 24H2, but even then you can install that on a 1st gen Intel or a Bulldozer era AMD system. Microsoft can go suck a dick.
I'll also add the audio stack in Linux at the moment is a hot mess. I'm currently trying to resolve a problem that seems to exclusively plague the rear mic input on my system and nothing else and this shit is fucking obtuse. It's ridiculous how many competing audio frameworks there currently are.
Wine (which Proton is based on) has had support for Wayland since version 9.0 (about half a year old). Admittedly it’s not even enabled by default, but it works and I’ve played Path Of Exile through wine’s Wayland backend. There’s talks to ship the Wayland driver along X11, but not enabled by default yet, since there’s still some issues before they consider it on par with X11 backend. Proton might take longer, since I don’t think Valve will enable that before they add Wayland support for the Steam client.
Devices running an unsupported version of Windows will still function, but Microsoft doesn't provide the following: Technical support of any issue
Oh, you mean the support forums? I don't think those have ever helped anyone
they helped me learn how infuriating it is to try and go back in my browser history after visiting a microsoft help link
Oh man, fuck that shit into the sun.
Literally no one in those forms ever actually works for Microsoft anyway so you're just talking to people who you could talk to anyway on any other forum.
Man I really don't want to switch to Linux but Microsoft has ended things forever with Recall. There's just no way to stay with microsoft long term.
Just go for it! Did it recently and the overall experience is actually getting impressed multiple times.
why dont you?
Effort
I just installed Windows and never saw anything about recall. Use at least 3 different Windows machines a day and never seen recall. Maybe I'm just a lucky one?
Its not fully released yet and also, it will only be on a select set of PCs to start. But eventually over the years it will be on most new windows PCs.
Companies promote their recent softwares. Is this a new thing?
"Promote" here masking what they are actually doing ...
Fixed it for you:
Company renders 60%+ of computers running current software incapable of running new software due to niche hardware requirement, abruptly ends support for current version next year, and tells users to throw away their computers and buy new ones.
Oh, and they're promoting their cloud storage option. Which may or may not have anything to do with their data harvesting? I don't really know on that one.
How is it an upgrade/update if you need to replace the hardware?
I still for the life of me can’t figure out what’s so great about secure boot and tpm. All it’s ever done for me is prevent me from booting a legitimate OS, or a bootable flash drive with iso images on it (like ventoy). It’s also pretty good at giving me a headache trying to figure out how the keys work and how to register them.
I just turn them both off and live in ignorant bliss.
Secure boot and TPM are tools for (among other things) making sure nobody (E.G. a virus or worm) has tampered with your OS and bootloader. You can for instance use both on Linux, it's just by default they come preloaded with Microsofts configuration for loading Windows, and the technical knowledge for how to reconfigure it is a bit arcane.
It's an excellent security tool, it's just abused by Microsoft to discourage competition.
Until the next security hole you can't fix with an update.
It's not for you, it's for them. Secure boot means it only runs their operating system, not yours. Trusted enclave means it secures their DRM-ware from tampering by the user who owns the PC.
Secure boot means that only the intended bootloader runs, it can be any one, but it just needs to be the intended one.
Secure boot works with Linux.
What do you mean? I remove all vendor keys and enroll my own secure boot keys. This way only my install with my bootloader signed by my keys will boot.
If I upgrade my machine, I am keeping TPM disabled. I don't want Windows 11.
First thing I did when I heard it was required for win 11.
Don't TPMs just deal with cryptography code the same way a SIM card does for a phone? If you have one, What's wrong with using it?
Platforms like Windows and Chrome can also use it for remote attestation, i.e., verifying you haven’t bypassed security controls and locking you out if they think you have.
I keep mine enabled because it’s good for secure boot and secrets handling.
You can use them with Linux to Auth as well
Because people aren’t broke enough.
You still have room on that credit card. Stop eating avocados!!!!
/s
meanwhile you can run linux on a potato
✋ no thanks
I think this is the year. One of my long time Windows friends has recently decided to install Manjaro GNU/Linux after being fed up with forced reboots, updates that seem to overwrite settings, and constant bluescreens of death.
This website is cancer, you can't even use it on mobile, without adblocker in Firefox.
My PC met everything except processor. Did a registry hack and updated anyway. All is well, for now. I don’t feel like building another PC at the moment.
Last week, I installed Debian on a 20 year old 32-bit IBM Thinkpad and it's going strong.
I'll keep 10 then.
Atleast windows 10 still gets security updates for 1.3 years
Did they add a few months? I thought protection ends in October, 2025 unless you pay to extend it.
Ohh yeah, forgot you need to pay for it.
New bits of info in this support guide, which is also meant as an FAQ, include recommendations for a new PC as well as OneDrive that should help users move over easily as they upgrade to Windows 11.
The article also discusses general information related to what exactly the "end of support" for a Windows OS means and whether users can upgrade for free to Windows 11.
This seems extremely reasonable. If they were a non profit, maybe they could advertise Linux conversion, but any company selling software is going to tell users how to get the latest.
The one drive bit is just to demonstrate the ease of transferring your files
Windows resource demand is plain stupid compared to Linux, but this article targets Windows users.
Not that they'll ever convince some to replace something "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
DuckDuckBuntu?
Ubuntu is actually falling down the ad hole lately. It’s not great, even if you leave out the technical issues that the distribution leans into these day (snaps, amongst other things)
Not sure I'd want to see that, tbh. It would only introduce more avenues for DDG to make questionable choices when they're already on thin ice.
Mint or Fedora. KISS.
DuckDuckMint
Actually to find a good distro and instructions on how to install them i recommend using an ai chatbot.
Majority of people have never created a bootable media but its easy enough ai can guide them step by step.
Or just use one of the hundreds of guides the AI was trained on.
https://www.wikihow.com/Install-Linux
Eh, just look up a reputable YouTube channel and guide. Chatbots can randomly make dumb mistakes that a total newbie won't recognize, potentially causing them a lot of headache.
And no, I'm not one of those diehard anti-AI people. My work has its own custom GPT model and I utilize it almost daily for menial tasks. But even having it generate script boilerplate and whatnot, I sometimes notice it writing stuff that won't work and/or does it in a really verbose/weird way.
Do chatbots provide accurate and safe instructions for all steps? Or will it mix different instructions for different scenarios?
Ai is not that good unless it's like hugginchat where it scraps sites for info and stuff
Don't worry, everyone else does
Can you run windows games on linux without it being resource intensive like using a vm or something?
Gaming in Linux on a windows VM isn’t viable for most systems. Most games run really well through proton with little to no effort. Some even run better on Linux than on windows. You just can’t play a lot of the most popular competitive online games because it flags their anti cheat.
Most of the time, yeah. Check ProtonDB for the particulars regarding any particular game. Games with intrusive DRM or anticheat probably won't work though.
Yes, some on steam, others on wine/bottles/lutrix/etc
Many distros nowadays have decent support forngaming accessories and a mix of Lutris and Steam/Proton have given me a near seemless experience on Linux. Smooth enough for my partner to hop ship to Bazzite for their ROG Ally.
Sometimes there are small quirks, like controllers on Bazzite just work™ but on Vanilla OS 2 my xbox controller wouldn't be recognized by Steam or games wirelessly (wired worked) but my DS5 controller worked flawlessly (including the trackpad that I never got to work on Windows).
Most of the Steam library will work well and ProtonDB is a great resource for compatibility. Furthermore there are Decky plugins for setups like Bazzite and Chimera that embed the ProtonDB rating into the Steam game page.
DuckDuck OS