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Linux or Landfill? End of Windows 10 Leaves PC Charities with Tough Choice
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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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How much ewaste has Microsoft caused just by wanting to sell more copies of the next version of windows.
Windows 10 was released ten years ago. How long do you think they should provide support? For comparison, Redhat gives 10 years for LTS releases, and Ubuntu and Linux Mint give 5 years. Extended support beyond the LTS period requires a paid subscription, similar to Windows.
It's more that the hardware requirements for 11 are pretty arbitrary and not based on how powerful it is. My old PC can't run it, not that I care to in the first place. But it's much more powerful than my work laptop that can and does run win11, though not by my choice.
Every OS just mentioned can be updated, no support needed? Just overlay the next kernel over the last and all these distros provide a pathway for that.
Moreover, Arch, Void, Gentoo etc are rolling, so no loss of support.
I figure a multi-million dollar company could do the equivalent of exactly that.
Windows 10 can be updated for free to 11. This is only impacting the ewaste laptops that some vendors sell. Like the ones with 64 gb storage or 4-8 gb of ram or no tpm chip... All of which are roughly as shit as each other.
This also affects laptops with anything up to a 7th gen i7 and any amount of RAM and storage. Even if they have the correct TPM version. On a technical level, these devices are absolutely capable of running Windows 11, Microsoft just didn't wanna.
They said when they launched windows 10 it would be "last version"
The counter is that all of a sudden instead of windows 10 it was 10 from 2020, then 10 from 2022 and so on. Instead of only being the last version it became a succession of short lived versions that people still weren't upgrading.
They don't need to support Windows 10, they just need to not artificially block the installation of Windows 11 on old hardware.
Is it an artifical block or is windows 11 just so bloated that it can't run correctly on older hardware?
both
It's not about sales, 11 is a free upgrade.
On a machine that can run it. If you have one of the machines that are the subject of this article, the only upgrade path is to buy a new one, for which Microsoft takes a healthy OEM fee for including Win11. You can easily see that cost on devices like the Legion Go S that cost significantly less for the SteamOS version.
The technical requirements for 11 were reasonable when it came out and even more so today. Laptops being ewaste when they were built that way isn't Microsoft's fault.
My 8700k (from 2018) disagrees.
They're the ones that keep making the requirements more and more unreasonable with every update.
What is unreasonable about 4 gb of ram, a processor made in the last decade, and a tpm chip? Even Linux doesn't run well under 8, let alone 4, because linux's memory management and handling of low memory is a catastrophic embarrassment. (Yes it uses less idle, but you get to 80% and the system will lock up)
The TPM chip is the issue here, and not a requirement under Linux.