Microsoft cuts off Windows 10 support early for some PCs
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
The install base of this hardware is fairly low as the hardware already barely was usable, that it apparently wasn't deemed worth the engineering effort to work around this type of flawed driver.
Of course, this article completely ignores that information, presumably to cause typical baseless Microsoft hate.
I wonder how the gma500 driver fares these days.
The old Intel drivers can be patched to run on newer kernels, you also need to run an old version of X.org.
AKA the OEMs could get it super cheaply and throw it on entry level netbooks for max profit.
This isn't Microsoft's fault. All the blame is on the OEMs here for using hardware that was known to be at EOL stage.
Windows 8.1 on these devices is still supported until 2023 as far as I can tell.
That's a bit disingenuous of Microsoft - they've been parading the 'as-a-service' model as a security feature so that users get constant patches.
Or they could require that all the kernel-mode source code is public.
A line needs to be drawn somewhere.
And to add, a machine released in 2015 (less than 3 years ago!) that no longer gets security updates is hardly the right place to be drawing the line you speak of.
Conceivably you've cut your support from 10 years to 2 by upgrading to Windows 10.
1607 is going to receive updates to 2018, and the Acer quote says "Microsoft is working with us to help provide compatible drivers to address this incompatibility", and I can see no official statement from MS saying otherwise.
The "Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC" message, then, could be explained by simple "if (!systemsupported()) { show message }" that does not properly take into account that support could still be added in the future.
In other news, water is wet.
The problem isn't with the actual CPU cores but with the graphics drivers. Unlike all other Intel chips, these Atoms have PowerVR GPUs that have been EOL'd by the manufacturer. The existing GPU drivers won't work with the new Windows 10, and reverse-engineering them without manufacturer support would be too much of a pain (there aren't even good Linux drivers for these GPUs, TBH).
(Disclosure: I worked for MS from 2008-2011.)
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/16/10780876/microsoft-window...
We may need at least another data point, but it does look to me that Microsoft has gotten much more aggressive about dropping support for older hardware. It probably a result of Nadella's cut of the Q&A team. If the Q&A team is cut, it makes sense that less hardware would be support, and that you'll also see more bugs in the operating system.
> Despite being Microsoft’s newest and ‘most secure’ operating system, Windows 10 was found to have the highest proportion of vulnerabilities of any OS (395), 46% more than Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 (265 each).
https://www.avecto.com/news-and-events/news/94-of-critical-m...
It sounds to me like all of those anti-exploit mitigations that are supposed to come to Windows 10 will be needed just to make it as "secure" as previous versions.
Also, an update to the OS to make it compatible could potentially be sufficiently high-impact that it could break user applications, existing hardware functionality, or other potential concerns.
The problem here lies within the graphics driver for the PowerVR GPU - which was never really supported under Linux either.
There is an experimental 2D driver [0] which is unlikely to receive any mayor updates, I don't know how stable it is at this day and age.
You won't get any 3D or video decoding acceleration though unless you use a now as well unsupported release like Ubuntu 11.10 [1]
[0] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
The Ubuntu Wiki on this is horribly misinformed and out of date.
The gma500 driver included in Linux also works very well, but lacks the accelerated features.