Windows 11 will create heaps of needless trash | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11 will create heaps of needless trash

nbailey.ca

293 pointsyabones335 comments

This shouldn't be too surprising, given that Microsoft is also against right-to-repair...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318882

..."because security". Securing what, exactly? Their profits and control. They don't want you using older systems because they have less control without a TPM and all the other horrors of Trusted Computing that come with it, such as remote attestation.

It sounds almost conspiratorial, but I think this move by MS is just another step towards the "you will own nothing" trend of companies slowly herding their users with more and more restrictions and "beating them into submission", so they can extract more profits from them.

I have zero "smart devices" in my home. My decades old car and other appliances listen only to me, are simple and easily repaired, and last a long time. My PC is slightly over a decade, but it's plenty fast for what I need to use it for. Others have made the safety/security argument to attempt to get me to replace them, and those arguments have likely convinced others, but I know what they're trying to get me into --- and very, very strongly oppose.

I don't understand this logic. The vast majority of people don't care what version of Windows they're running. They'll just keep running Windows 10 without a care in the world. Just like they keep running Windows 7.

Security fixes and support.

Most users don't care about that.

Users care: so much so that they pay money for antivirus.

They just don't understand the consequences of some of their actions or inactions, because they are not security professionals.

You still get 4 years with 10.

The Intel 8th gneration was introduced in 2017. So people who bought a computer in 2016 can still push it to ~9 years of service life, which is pretty good for an average Windows computer if they manage to do it. I imagine your average Windows consumer will have replaced a computer once already in that span once all the installed crap has stalled the computer to inoperable speeds.

This honestly doesn't really strike me as a major issue. Especially since smartphones have like less than three years of security fixes on average.

>This honestly doesn't really strike me as a major issue.

You're saying this from a position of privilege. There are a lot of people that don't enjoy the same financial security that you and I do that will be affected immensely by this. I know a few and this is not news in their favor.

Working in PC repair, a majority of my customers can't just up and buy a new PC just because Microsoft arbitrarily decides that whatever they have isn't good enough, even though it has sufficient performance.

And they don't have to. They can keep using the PC they have until 2025. After that, there's always Linux Mint.

New Thinkpads in 2017 (T470/X270/etc.) were still using 7th generation Intel chips, so it is for some users a forced update after eight years.

That said, people have hacked the leaked OEM version of Windows 11 to install on to 2010 or 2011 vintage computers, so there’s a reasonable chance Microsoft will not make 2018 era computers a hard cutoff for Windows 11 installs. Even if they do, there will probably be workarounds around allowing it to be installed it on Kaby Lake and older CPUs; we know right now Windows 11 will install on an older computer without significant issue (with some hacking, depending on just how old the computer is).

For the record, I find the three year lifecycle for Android phones very annoying. I may have my next phone be an iPhone (they can have 5-6 year support lifetimes, if I get a brand new model when it comes out) or hope the Fairphone becomes available in the US.

I don't think Microsoft would want to make that same mistake again. I would expect Microsoft start pushing Windows 11 automatically through Windows Update for anyone on Windows 10, or at least start pushing heavily through popups/notifications to start the update like they did with Windows 10.

We're talking about computers that (officially) cannot run Windows 11. Obviously they won't be auto-upgraded.

I'm sure they'll loosen the restriction of having TPM enabled. That seems to be the only limiting factor.

Or they could perhaps find a way to build a piece of software that will enable it automatically...

So what is the point of a restriction that they will later loosen?

> I'm sure they'll loosen the restriction of having TPM enabled. That seems to be the only limiting factor.

They've added restrictions since: 8th gen Intel Core or 2nd gen AMD Zen required.

That's just some list in the documentation, mostly intended for OEMs building new computers with pre-installed Windows.

NO WAY there will be literal cpuid checks excluding earlier processors.

This is not the Windows Logo program, which is intended for OEMs.

There do not need to be any CPUID checks to exclude processors; just a random update will not work and Microsoft will shrug it off, well, that CPU is not on the supported list anyway.

That wouldn’t work if the person’s computer doesn’t support Windows 11, though, which is the entire argument the blog post is making. That because windows 11 won’t work people will just throw away their computers and create more electronic waste.

"computer locked, you need to buy a new one to keep enjoying our stuff"

Microsoft isn’t going to do that.

...yet.

Remember all the talk about "Windows as a service"?

Given what's happened so far, I fully expect them to try something like that at some point. "We only offer subscriptions of the latest version, and your current hardware doesn't meet our minimum requirements, so you'll have to replace it to continue using Windows." Maybe it'll trigger a mass exodus to Linux --- or perhaps more likely, back to older and cracked pre-subscription versions of Windows.

> "Windows as a service"

A computer able to run only a RDP client able to connect only to a Windows VM licensed to you, running on Azure with every autoupdate turned on /s

A similar scenario is not impossible. Somehow it has become acceptable to use a always-online workflows. There are complete lines of products that won't work at all if you're not online, and some will switch off after a certain time (like Adobe). There is an enormous push in that direction from all industries. People give in without any resistance. It's become normal and acceptable that pieces of code on all your devices connect to different services and send data you have no idea about. If an app stops working because you lose the internet connection, somehow it's not the problem of the app but yours. So I can imagine a scenario similar to the one you describe in a decade or two.

I think at the end of the day, they are happier with an illegitimate Windows user, than a non-Windows user. They'll nag, push, try everything to annoy, but they won't lock you out completely, because that could mean losing you for good.

Of course, I can only infer this from their past behavior.

Soooo, the people who can't install Windows 11 will continue to not care?

I don't understand the logic of your response. It's not like Microsoft will brick machines not eligible for Win 11

They will drop support in 4 years though (or so they say) which is very short notice for desktops OSes.

I'm going to confidently predict right now that there's no way security updates for Windows 10 will cease in 2025.

By cutting off at 8th Gen and TPM 1.2+2.0, they’re cutting off a lot of current and high end systems built by enthusiasts, while supporting far slower and inferior PCs.

That’s the problem. No one’s arguing they’re chasing off cheap Celeron, they’re trying to get rid of even some Threadrippers and multi-socket setups, that could have 128GB or more of RAM, for “performance”.

So, what's in those generations that might actually matter to Microsoft? As you say, it's unlikely to be about performance. Is it some instruction set, or feature flags? It's unlikely to be about virtualization capabilities, as Intel still happily sells the newest chips "differentiated" to be virtually challenged. Did those generations introduce some crypto algorithm/primitive that Microsoft doesn't want to go without? A new system management mode? On-die microphone?

Intel sales is desperate to stop brand loyalty vanishing, processors losing relevance, while Microsoft is trying to recuperate costs on cancelled Windows 10X code. Those are suspicions I have.

The “only the latest Intel enable $use_case” cliche is their default marketing narrative. Microsoft or AMD or NVIDIA normally don’t do that.

> they’re cutting off a lot of current and high end systems built by enthusiasts, while supporting far slower and inferior PCs.

No they don't. All those systems may not have hardware TPM, but they support firmware TPM, which is enough to check the checkbox.

So your issue is that MS will force the upgrade onto machines they have explicitly said can't be upgraded? Is that really your concern?

> I don't think Microsoft would want to make that same mistake again.

The mistake of not pushing it? I still remember the uproar when people needed to Google how to say "no" to the upgrade dialog - if it did not simply install without asking, that is. I honestly can't see how they would push Windows 11 any harder.

Win10 is fine for most people, and each benefit of Win11 can seem a little "niche", but lots of people will fit into at least one of those little niches. Gamers in particular, who have gotten perfectly acceptable performance out of e.g. Ryzen 1x00 CPUs, will need to upgrade to get the most out of their fast SSDs or other features like Auto HDR.

For an example of just how many people don't care about EOL'd operating systems:

Microsoft's mainstream support for Windows 7 ended in January 2015 (and paid "Extended Security Updates" service ended in January 2020) and yet 21% of Firefox users are still running Windows 7:

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware#goto-os-and-arch...

I think Firefox users are much more likely to be contrarian with their software decisions. I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to extrapolate from from data on Firefox users to the general population

You think Firefox users are going to be more likely to use an EOL-ed OS?

Perhaps, because win7 is known for being "the last good windows" with some privacy. It may or may not be true, but a lot of people are adamant about not using linux while also trying to maintain privacy, hence they use win7. I imagine such users would probably use a browser like firefox.

I remember when win2k was "the last good windows" and then windows xp after it. I $CURRENT-2 is always going to be considered "the last good windows".

Windows 8 will never be considered "the last good windows"...

Neither was Windows ME (Millennium Edition).

Windows 8.1 is heavily underrated. It's the final desktop Windows without rolling release model. (Except LTSC because its license is very limited.)

Nah there was definitely some kind of fundamental qualitative change from 7 to 8/10. I dont think the post-7 versions of windows will ever be loved like 7

I don't recall anyone describing Vista as "the last good Windows" back in 2013.

I still think Win2k was the last good Windows. XP was buggier and 7’s classic theme didn't look right.

Win2k WAS the last good Windows.

Dave Cutler was still in charge, and his attitude towards stamping out bugs is sorely lacking today.

No, Microsoft reserves odd numbers for good versions. That's why there was no 9. 11 will be brilliant! ;)

When Windows XP PCs started to become obsolete, one way to extend their life (at least for people that only used them to browse the web) was to install Firefox. I've actually helped someone do this when their freemail provider stopped supporting IE 8. There's people for whom a new computer is an expensive purchase and they will use it until the wheels fall off.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-support-windows-xp-...

Only 1.97% of steam users use windows 7, so I don't think we can assume either demographic is a fair representation of all users

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Steam users are not a "fair representation of all users" either. The gamer demographic is biased towards newer and faster hardware than the average user, and the newest greatest hardware is only going to be supported on the latest OS version(s).

I agree. I claim that both sets are biased, whch is why we can't use the steam charts or Firefox usage data to draw any conclusions about the broader population

I left my laptop, that ran Windows 7, running for a couple of hours, and came back to see a notification that says welcome to Windows 10.

Not sure how that’s relevant to someone who can’t upgrade because of unsupported hardware. You can’t get autoupgraded to an OS your hardware doesn’t support. And most such people would happily continue using Windows 10 without caring (or knowing, most likely)

The fact you can get auto upgraded from 7 to 10 at all is concerning

Consider yourself lucky it only took 2 hours to install.

I prefer Windows 7. I like it's UI better. MS' ideal world would apparently not include any OS besides Windows 10 and 11, which is a great shame because i think there's so many great UI features in older Windows.

The most dislikable thing about Windows 7 is the limitation of clear text SMB2.

It's a good trade for local accounts and a superior ui to what followed.

A lot of people are probably happy to not have their computer taken away for an hour every other week.

Microsoft is late to the party here. This has been core to Apple's business model for years. Here's an example of OS support for the MacBook Air:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Air#Supported_macOS_re...

The arbitrary cadence of abandonment is amazingly consistent and has no basis in hardware capabilities.

Exactly. I think part of this is driven by changes in Microsoft's business model.

Previously every couple of years they'd come out with a new paid upgrade. But since they basically made Windows 10 a 'rolling distro', they've been losing a lot of income on this side.

As Windows 11 will be free for existing PCs but new PCs will have licensing included in the price (as they did with Windows 10), they have a strong incentive to have as many people as possible buy new PCs. Just as Apple does. After all, macOS mainly exists to sell Apple hardware, not the other way around.

It's no wonder their support model is changing, but I think it's sad they are dropping models so young. Windows used to be great at very long term support on hardware. Probably the best of the commercial OSes.

That's true, but if you compare the resale value of PCs and MacBooks, you'll find that MacBooks(even with outdated OS) have higher resale value. Therefore, this is a bit of a tricky situtation for PCs since they can't be sold for much.

It's a tricky issue. Supposed I want to buy an used MacBook now, for a good price and still running the newest macOS. I'll find lots of 4GB or 8GB MacBooks from 2015 for example that can't be upgraded. Or... I could move back to 2012 and upgrade RAM to 16 GB and insert 2TB SSDs. 4GB MacBooks are practically unusable for any non-trival task so that fact that you can run the newest OS and enjoy security updates means very little if you can't do any real work.

I’m not sure that’s a problem. I usually thoroughly wear them out before they go obsolete and quite frankly I don’t want to use a 7+ year old computer. They’re pretty awful.

Really? I still use my now over 8 year old Thinkpad (upgraded screen, hdd, ram and replaced the keyboard after an orange juice 'incident') and it feels as quick as my 2 year-old work laptop.

Moore's law is long dead for consumer perception of speed, even other components have stagnated lately. RAM size and HDD space has not really moved much in the last 5 years for a regular laptop; CPUs have gotten a bit faster but the average user will not notice the difference in their every day workflow.

Thats just ignoring a lot of the market. We've gone from dual cores to 16 thread laptops since then. 5400 rpm drives to many GB/s nvme ssds, etc.

I’ve got a T440 here but I don’t use it because it’s slow. It’s for an SSD and 12Gb of RAM in it. The removable battery will no longer work due to a problem on the motherboard. The plastics are having worn.

I don’t want to use it any more so I don’t.

I’ve got a T495 Ryzen but I mostly use a M1 MacBook Air. If you think that there is stagnation in the last 5 years then you need to reevaluate that. These things are stupid fast.

Based on that article, every MacBook Air released since 2008 will receive a patch update and every MacBook Air released since 2015 will support OSX Monterey. Is that not reasonable?

I believe the patches are all community sourced. They tend to be well made but they're not something the average consumer would use. It's hit or miss as to whether they work with your particular model.

I think the patches are Apple’s security updates, not a community OS hackintosh thing

No, you are mistaken, the patches are prepared by dosdude1 (who should receive a medal for saving the planet a lot of e-waste from Apple products).

You forgot that every MacOS release gets 2-3 years of security updates after the next version comes out. So just because you can't update to the next release doesn't mean you are unsupported yet.

How is that any different from Windows?

I will once again register my hope that this causes at least a significant portion of windows subscribers to consider non-proprietary alternatives. Linux distros are fundamentally more useful computer systems, open source communities have done dizzying amounts of work to produce mostly-working interop with windows-exclusive software, as well as numerous FOSS alternatives to popular products. I'm not going to lie and say there's no switching cost at all (After all, a multi-billion dollar industry works tirelessly to ensure that it's as high as possible), but some linux distro or other has served as a good daily driver for a myriad of non-technical users across the globe, and technical support is readily available on the internet and in most cities. Good for your wallet, good for your freedom, good for the planet.

> Linux distros are fundamentally more useful computer systems

Last I checked I can’t play 1080p Netflix on them so I’d say the above is questionable for the average user.

Big fan too but the year of the Linux desktop is still a way off

I'm pretty sure that is because of DRM, right? It's not that you _cant_ do it, but they _wont_ allow you. Ofc, there are otherr ways to achieve your goal.

>I'm pretty sure that is because of DRM, right?

It is yes. Doesn't matter for the average user though - it either works or it is broken.

Technical users might give it a pass on freedom & principles grounding, but not average users.

Are you serious? My debian and ubuntu computers can play 4k streaming without problems! (youtube, twitch, etc). I don't see a reason why linux can't play 4K. Could you please elaborate?

You can't with netflix content because of DRM.

huh?

I've been using Netflix without a care in the world on Firefox for ages. DRM allowance is up to the user.

Take a look: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444

4K Ultra HD on a computer

Netflix is available in Ultra HD on Windows and Mac computers with:

    Microsoft Edge for Windows

    Windows 10 App

    Safari for MacOS 11.0 or later

These computers require a 60Hz monitor to play Ultra HD content.

The average user won't notice the difference in a laptop screen unless told. What's more, they won't be using a laptop (let alone desktops) on the first place, they'll use a smart TV or TV stick.

For whatever it's worth, they don't support it on Windows for most of the users who do watch it there, since you need to use Edge or the Windows Store App on a 7th gen Intel CPU on an HDCP 2.2 compliant setup, and I'm pretty sure most people watching Netflix on the desktop don't check all of those boxes.

I for one bought a Fire TV Cube as solution. But I've also managed to watch Netflix 4k content on my Linux laptop with less effort than it takes an average user to determine if their computer can run Netflix 4k on Windows, don't ask me how.

You don't need HDCP 2.2 / specific CPU for 1080p but Edge is the only requirement.

Not the person you’re responding to but there def was a HDCP of some sort - might be for 4K

And even if you do happen to need Windows for the odd application every now and then, it generally runs just fine as a virtual machine guest under QEMU+KVM. Interestingly, for Windows 11 Microsoft even seems to have explicitly removed all these awkward hardware requirements when the system detects that it is running as a virtual machine guest [0], making such a setup (Windows as VM guest only) even more worthy of consideration here.

[0] Section 5 from https://download.microsoft.com/download/7/8/8/788bf5ab-0751-...

It said that they won't check for VMs, but still follow the same minimum hardware requirements. I can't find any hypervisor supports DX12 without hardware acceleration. I wonder is DX12 really requirement.

PC Gaming is still windows main advantage. There is wine, but how does it compare for performance? Plus Nvidia's drivers are still a mixed bag?

Nvidia drivers have never been a mixed bag when it comes to performance or stability, they only lag in feature support for things such as Wayland compared to upstream drivers like AMD's or Intel's. Being an out-of-tree driver also means that your distro must give special support to it.

Performance will depend on the title, there will be some 5-10% average loss in performance for titles running in DXVK (DirectX to Vulkan translation layer). Vulkan titles should see no difference, and Doom famously runs better under Wine than natively.

Here are a few comparisons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE5WyObAFtk

The biggest problem with Linux gaming with Wine nowadays is just lack of support for games that depend on rootkits or other such malware to run, like some forms of client-side anticheat that run in-kernel, but there's been a lot of progress in that front. You might've seen the Roblox news that hit front page a couple of days ago IIRC; and some people have been able to temporarily get anti-cheats like EAC to run, until an update changes something and the pile of hacks fall apart.

Plus anti-cheat will remain a impediment.

I get the frustration with the requirements, but it is a little dramatic to say those machines who don’t meet the requirements will go straight in the trash. Those machines can still run Windows 10, and a lot of people will just keep using it. Why would people who don’t feel the need to upgrade to the newest hardware as soon as it is out feel the need to upgrade to the newest OS as soon as it comes out?

Because Windows 10 support eventually ends, and because of the proprietary nature of the software, independent individuals can't patch their own computer like an official Windows Update can. So those individuals who keep using a W10 machine beyond the end of extended support will be vulnerable to any number of threats if their machine is not air gapped.

Yeah, and hardware support also ends.

Windows 10 is to be supported until 2025.

and because of the proprietary nature of the software, independent individuals can't patch their own computer like an official Windows Update can.

At least for older versions, there have been plenty of unofficial patches for various things, and many of those are open-source too.

Patching binaries has been a long tradition in the DOS/Windows world, going back decades.

I think the article makes a good point about the arbitrary red line drawn between two CPU generations with no justification whatsoever, but "heaps of trash" isn't the strongest argument against this. Arguably, Intel releasing new CPUs causes that even more heaps of trash, probably orders of magnitude more than Windows. It's a silly argument IMHO.

I don't think it's a silly argument at all. Windows 10 will meet its EOL in 2025, meaning that our computers only have 4 more years left in them (or you switch to something like linux, but that's not really an option for most people for obvious reasons). This will make the computers unattractive on the second-hand market. IMO a computer should be serviceable for longer than 7 years.

>IMO a computer should be serviceable for longer than 7 years.

How many Windows PCs are actually getting security updates for less than 7 years? Your CPU will have to be like 8 years old when you stop getting security updates for Windows 10 and you can't upgrade to Windows 11.

>Your CPU will have to be like 8 years old when you stop getting security updates for Windows 10 and you can't upgrade to Windows 11.

Yes, and I'm saying that's unreasonable. Look no further than this very thread and you'll find plenty of people using 10-year old computers without issue.

Releasing new CPUs doesn't make older ones unusable; making an OS incompatible with them without good reason does.

The article wording might not be the best, still it's spot on: users whose software will require Windows 11 (or simply who won't feel like going back after upgrading) will be forced to ditch their system, which in a world dominated by Windows, therefore many users with the same problem, is a lot more likely to turn into trash rather than sold as used.

>Releasing new CPUs doesn't make older ones unusable; making an OS incompatible with them without good reason does.

All those Windows 7 computers didn't become unusable once Windows 8 came out.

That's because Windows 8 wasn't incompatible with the same hardware that could run windows 7. You're making my point.

The article criticizes Windows 11 insane hardware requirements, not Microsoft for making a new version of Windows.

>That's because Windows 8 wasn't incompatible with the same hardware that could run windows 7.

That only matters if people actually upgrade their Windows 7 installs to Windows 8 installs. And since it was a paid upgrade to an OS that was arguable worse than what people had, people probably skipped out.

How Windows upgrades worked before Windows 10 was that you upgraded to a new version of Windows when you bought a new PC. Every other means of upgrading was minor at best, since it wasn't available through Windows Update for free.

They became unusable, practically speaking, when support ended (unless they're off the grid, or if you don't care to be part of a botnet). Microsoft now says support for Windows 10 will end in 2025; all those unsupported computers became landfill at that point, even if they still run perfectly fine.

It hasn’t in recent years, PC fleets have been aging forever. 36 month refresh cycles are more like 50 months these days.

This is straight up a way to keep intel alive.

>the arbitrary red line drawn between two CPU generations

I've seen people theorize that it's because of the availability of UMIP instructions

According to WikiChip, UMIP got added in Zen2 (Ryzen 3000), while MS supports Zen+ (Ryzen 2000).

I don't believe that's the case, but I might be missing something. UMIP makes a system more secure, but it isn't a hard requirement for any feature-wise assurance? For example, TPM+UEFI+Secure Boot is required if Microsoft wants everyone to have full disk encryption by default, which makes sense. UMIP, not so much.

Can't be true as Coffe Lake doesn't seem to support it yet win11 will work on that

Is it abritary? I was wondering if limiting to new to newer CPU's would enable them to stop supporting/rip out a load of legacy code?

Also, is this actually a good opportuinty for Desktop Linux?

I'm sure it's not arbitrary, but they haven't provided an explanation either. That makes it practically arbitrary, and creates rightful frustration.

I think 64-bit requirement already lets them to strip down a lot of legacy stuff. Perhaps they just want to compile Windows with certain optimizations on, but I don't know that either.

The CPU minimums seem to be some collusion with hardware makers. The 8th gen is really 6th gen Skylake with some tweaks as is the 9th and even 10th gen. I think the line being drawn at DDR4 as the minimum requirement would actually make sense.

I just hope that some of that needless trash enters the secondary market rather than going directly to recyclers. First of all because Win10 will stay useful for most people for quite some time yet, second because these boxes/laptops make great Linux machines!

Most recyclers repurpose stuff like this...

I for one would take a Ryzen 1st gen out of the trash! I would absolutely use those "trash" machines, and I really hope to see prices go to the ground.

The requirements list will be most likely eased later on - IIRC it was also the case for virtually all major versions of Windows. The reason of this strictness is usually lack of testing or some compatibility features not being completed by the date of first release.

My guess is that they don't want people to blame the OS for their slow machine... I seem to remember reading years ago that vista was a victim of this (no way I can find that reference now though).

This is going to kill adoption of the new gaming features. I am really excited for Direct Storage on windows, but what incentive do the developers have to support it if only a small subset of their users have machines new enough to run it. This is exactly the same as the DirectX 10 disaster on Vista. It took a long time for developers to switch from 9 to 10. Most skipped 10 for 11 because it had the same windows support. And direct storage is locked to windows 11. Microsoft, you want to be a gaming powerhouse? Maybe listen to developers and stop listening to your executives that don’t understand. Games ported from Xbox Series X will be unable to run on Windows 10 if they require direct storage support.

Maybe I'm getting old, but it's mental to me that a regular SDD over SATA3 is now regarded as slow, and you need an NVME SSD to run things quickly.

I have a gaming PC and really can't tell the difference between games loaded between the two.

Because the games don't take advantage of the higher bandwidth. In fact, they probably don't even take advantage of the SSD, because games are still built so that they work when installed on spinning drives. The advantage of SSDs is the random access time, but if you are streaming continuous data, it's only about triple the speed of an HDD.

A NVME PCIe 4.0 SSD can be up to 15 times faster than a SATA SSD. The difference is much much bigger.

Get off my lawn ;)

Your argument doesn't make sense, a triple speedup is still a LOT and should easily be noticeable.

It is noticeable, but that's not the point. A SSD-only engine can avoid some asset duplication and achieve an effective 4x speedup over a HDD equivalent, but that is still slow in the grand scheme of things: you could have a bigger or a more detailed environment, but that's about it. A PCI 4 NVME coupled with the latest compression tech means you can renew all the data in RAM in less than 2 seconds. That's the big deal.

That’s because games aren’t designed to take advantage of NVME drives. Direct storage basically connects the ssd to the gpu for fast asset streaming. You will notice when games made for the Xbox get ported to windows 11. It’s seriously an amazing leap in game technology.

I think it's going to be a little bit more challenging as the consoles are ahead with the storage capabilities as a baseline. Back in 2006 the consoles were (roughly) DX9 levels, so there wasn't really much incentive to push ahead unless your studio was a trailblazer. Now studios making games need to think on which audience they prioritize.

To a certain extent I anticipate it could be "a storm in a teacup", the new consoles have strong CPUs so that would naturally drive people gaming on PC to upgrade anyway. There's no games coming out (that I know of) with an imminent need to utilize direct storage, but I'd guess late 2022/2023 onwards is where it becomes strongly encouraged.

It will make games like cyberpunk run faster. Their world streamer is a chugger.

This assumes that owners of functioning Win10 machines will decide to throw them away just to get Win11.

I don’t think that’s a reasonable assumption for the large majority of users. If someone cares enough about having the latest (if not greatest) version, they are likely also upgrading their hardware frequently already.

> A modest Intel Skylake laptop from 2016 meets all the core requirements. It is 64 bit, supports UEFI, and even contains a hardware TPM 2.0 module on board.

Is anyone suggesting Win11 won’t run on a 2016 Skylake?

That Microsoft says it’s not supported doesn’t necessarily mean that. It would be extremely surprising if windows effectively checked the cpuid and arbitrarilily rejected a processor with the necessary features.

> Is anyone suggesting Win11 won’t run on a 2016 Skylake?

Yes, Microsoft is suggesting exactly that: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min...

This is what kills me most. Not the TPM part, as I can (and have) bought an external TPM module for my motherboard for like $10.

But this would basically require of me to build a brand new PC, while this one still does a fine job for gaming, development and audio editing.

You misunderstood me: are we assuming that the Microsoft list of supported processors represents all the CPUs that can run Windows 11, rather than the list that Microsoft supports (meaning they promise it works, promise it will continue to work) These at least to me seem like completely different things (and have been in the past).

As an example: Windows 10 is not officially supported on Sandy Bridge CPUs like the i7-2600K but it runs just fine.

This looks like a list of processors they *approve for OEMs* that build *new* computers with Windows pre-installed.

Everyone is acting completely ridiculously thinking that there will be actual cpuid checks.

> The specification defines the Windows minimum hardware requirements necessary to:

> Boot and run Windows

> Update and service Windows

> Provide a baseline user experience that is comparable with similar devices and computers

It says nowhere that it is for OEMs, this is not the Windows Logo program which is for OEMs; and in fact, some of the CPUs mentioned are not on the market anymore.

The equivalent list for Windows 10 is missing many CPUs that run Windows 10 just fine... so yeah I don't think this list means anything for the actual consumer.

It’s something they can guarantee to some extent at least. Perhaps they want to have an out in order to deprecate support in the future. But just like Win10 doesn’t run CPUID and show a “sorry” dialog on your Sandy Bridge 2600K, I doubt it will for a Skylake in Windows 11.

They are literally doing cpuid checks.

I do not plan to replace my computer until I need to. I still use screens from 2008, they are working perfectly fine and might live an other 12 years.

If I can't install Win11 on my computer, then I'll simply won't install it before a long time.

We're not in the 90s anymore.

I hope the public backlash against Microsoft is large enough that they revert there ridiculous system requirements. Requiring TPM 1.2 is sort of reasonable I guess. But TPM 2.0. You've got to be kidding me.

Also enabling secure boot is a pain in the ass for users that dual boot, because in Linux, to load a custom compiled kernel module you have to sign it first and do a whole lot of mumbling around to get it working. Just try to install Virtualbox with secure boot enabled. I get the security concern, but why not let users install whatever they want on whatever hardware they want? Come on Microsoft, it's not like you don't already have a working kernel with arguably the best support in terms of drivers in the whole personal computing market.

Also their "supported CPUs" list is a fucking joke. Why would they cut off first gen AMD Ryzen, for example when all Zen CPUs have full TPM 2.0 support built into the AMD PSP. The Ryzen 2000 chips they list as a minimum are basically the same in terms of features and very similar in performance to the previous gen. Zen+ is a slight improvement over Zen that didn't introduce any groundbreaking features to warrant such a cutoff point. Or are you gonna tell me that an Athlon 3000G will run Windows 11 better than a first gen Threadripper?

Get your head out of your ass Microsoft, otherwise you'll be stuck with another Windows Vista.

While overall agree, Windows 10 will be supported until 2025. By then any device without TPM 2.0 support would be at least 10 years old, right?

“There’s this cheap stuff for non-customers, go figure”

I think I’ve seen a eerily similar remark on Xbox 360 when XB1 launched so… is that a part of Microsoft ethos? That time the guy said that was instantly cancelled though.

Considering how unexciting new CPUs are nowadays I'd wager that a 10 year old computer in 2025 will still be perfectly usable for basic tasks such as email and web browsing. Something like an 8 year old i7 2700k is still very usable for a lot of home users. It might not be a beast when it comes to crunching numbers, but a big portion of the population would be happy using such a chip if you pair it with at least 8GB of memory and an SSD.

I'm not a big fan of generating unnecessary waste, and computers that get replaced because of artificial cutoff points in software isn't ideal. What I like about Windows 10 is that you can boot the installer on a Core2Duo if you want, and it'll install just fine. It'll probably run like crap, but that's for the user to decide whether they want to use it or not.

I have (a secondary) Thinkpad T430s, which is going to be 9 years old later this year. Since it is i7, with 16 GB RAM and 500 GB SSD, it is still a better computer than a median laptop sold today.

I have an old 2012 Asus G75VS gaming laptop with Core i7 upgraded to SSD and 32GB RAM. It works like a charm and beats modern cheap laptops to submission as well. However I do not really care if it can be upgraded to Windows 11. It runs few particular applications, is air gapped and will stay this way until it dies in order not to get some unwanted update/upgrade.

But if it was something like my spare development laptop I'd surely be pissed off at Microsoft. The way this laptop runs

One of the ironies of this situation is that Windows 11 does well on the Core2Duos. At least the ones with 8 gigs / SSD, based on what I've seen people post online. I've seen people claim the 11 leak is performing better than 10, and 10 was running decently well on the C2D's.

They did the work to make it even faster on older hardware, and now they're just going to throw it away? I could understand if the older machines didn't get the Android compatibility layer or if certain desktop animations were disabled, but seems odd to just block them entirely.

Are you sure that they are blocked entirely?

A "hard floor" published earlier this week implied that only TPM 1.0 with a dualcore and 4gb of ram is required, although news emerged that the hard floor was revised up.

Microsoft is not handling the hard floor question well at all.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3623013/why-windows-11-requi...

I guess that's part of the problem. No one outside of Microsoft is sure. The uncertainty has completely overshadowed the launch. One minute, they're talking about "soft floors", and the next they're saying it will refuse to install.

Makes me wonder if a power struggle is going on. You'd think they would have a coherent message put together before launch. Recommended system requirements + minimum system requirements, and the justifications for both. That's what's expected from any major software launch.

The ol' fishing for outrage. Let's just toss this out there and see what bites. "We'll adjust our strategy based on what we hear."

Kinda wonder, how much of this is "we asked and never got a legit response" vs. "haHAA, gotcha bitch! NOW THATS MEANINGFUL FEEDBACK!"

i7-2700K is not just usable, it’s faster than Pentium G5600(8th Gen) and on par with i3-8100(8th Gen) in most benchmarks without overclocking.

i5-2500 with 8GB-16GB RAM (hooray for upgradable RAM) even with is integrated graphics still is winning platform for all important non-gaming consumer applications.

i bought an i5-2500k in 2011 and it runs games and everything else very well. this is the fastest “10 year old computer” i’ve ever had

Yep on games if you have a discrete GPU.

To strengthen rather than diminish your argument, the I7 2700K is over 9.5 years old. Source: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/61275/i...

I run a i5-2500 and still game on it via VFIO (that is, in a VM) and I can't complain about the performance. Sure, the GPU is new-ish (GTX 1070) and I don't play bleeding edge titles, but I can play everything at nearly max settings.

Still using an i7-2600 as my main workstation at work, since 2012.

Ditto. I had a 2600k until about a month ago, where my motherboard died and everyone on eBay was asking $100+ for a replacement.

Ended up buying a whole Ryzen gaming rig and selling off the parts I didn't want. Out of pocket costs were actually negative when once the old PC's parts were gone.

Was coming to respond the same thing. I used a processor from the same generation (2500k) from May 2011 to May 2021, including for gaming. Upgraded to an SSD at some point and the video card, but the processor was still fine. I would've kept it another couple years but I was having some issues (I think a ram stick had gone bad) and the easiest solution was $500 canadian for a new processor (10400F), motherboard, and ram

I'd take the argument farther - I suspect the hypothetical 2015 computer referenced would be fine for most users (with non-processor upgrades) until 2030.

To strengthen it further, the 2700k is just a refresh of the more popular 2600k, which came out in Q1 2011 (same as the even more popular 2500k).

If you want to go back further, the Q6600 came out in Q1 2007 and still offers a great W10 experience when paired with an SSD.

I’ve got a black MacBook 4G duo that seems pretty good still. It’s dated in the UI and the lcd is garbage but with an external mouse and keyboard it might be ok. I’d like to keep OSX on it but Linux would be fine or windows.

Exactly. I have a both of these actually lol.

Old HP Compaq 8200 that I use as a NAS, media server and to host an occasional Linux VM, with an i5-2400. Running Windows 10 it receives all important security updates and runs absolutely fine, despite being 10 years old. I have plans to replace it by 2025, because.....why would I? It doesn't need any more power to do any of these jobs that I mentioned.

And I actually have a Core2Duo laptop running Windows 10, with an SSD and 8GB of ram it runs "ok". Not amazing or anything, but fast enough to basically work as a browsing/YouTube machine.

First-gen Ryzens and Threadrippers, while they do support fTPM, are not supported in W11 and they won't be 10 years old in 2025.

This really gets me - my Ryzen 5 1600X and my wife’s Ryzen 5 2600 are still extremely capable chips, even if they’re a couple of generations old at this point. It’s only been 3 years since I built my rig, and two since I built my wife’s. I can almost accept the i5-4570 my daughter inherited not being compatible - but hardware just over 3 years old not making the cut is unacceptable.

That i5-4570 is at least twice (single thread) as fast as some supported cpus.

But who wants to be stuck on an older OS? It's still a big reason to upgrade before it would have been technically necessary.

Everyone who isn't the sort of "rabid trendchaser techie" that MS is trying to convert more of its users to... fortunately, the majority of slightly-computer-literate people I know are not. They use their computers to create documents, email, browse Internet, and complain about the constant churn of the tech industry. They are constantly irritated by UI changes and other updates that had zero or negative impacts on their daily use. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the norm, not "What's the latest and newest? I must have it!"

Ok true, but this is hacker news of course. I would expect most people here to be exactly that sort of "rabid trendchaser techie" :)

And of course, the question is how hard is MS going to push Windows 11. They pushed the upgrade from W7 to W10 pretty hard towards end users.

Even the most die-had MS user is not excited about Windows and hasn't been for the last decade.

Operating systems are finished products at this point.

People say this all the time, but it certainly isn't true.

I for one, I am excited about Windows 11 because its finally things coming together. 64bit only, dropping old cruft, making the UI consistent/cleaner..

If you like tech/gaming - there is a lot to be excited about. PC and Console gaming with Game pass ultimate is a hell of a deal... Plus WSLg, Android apps ... i mean come on, its pretty f'n cool.

Agree, plus some techs that were only available for their console are coming to desktop which would gain quite a lot of performance boost for low to mid tier budget desktop.

UI change is icing on the cake but more or less it's huge update for consumer OS. Obviously folks here are pretty much isolated from mass market though.

None of those things are changing the daily use habits and the usability of an OS that I've been using to do the exact same things for the past 20 years.

The internal cleanup is great; good for them, but it doesn't map out to any subtantial change in the apps you're using.

The UI, thanks for it being clean, but as far as I'm concerned everything after Windows 7 has not improved desktop app usability much if anything. We used to have compact UIs that maximized screen usage. Now every single UI element has tons of padding, tons of vertical screen usage in a world where everything is widescreen. The compromise of desktop OSes for mobile-like use cases has not improved the desktop story at all and judging from the videos of Windows it's more of the same.

Android apps? Every app I've ever wanted already exists on Windows or the browser. I'm sure a minuscule amount of people will want that, but I want native desktop apps, leveraging native OS features.

Game pass is great, I use it for the Xbox, but it's not a core OS feature. Anyone can implement this, it doesn't require Windows 11.

Ok, so for you, stay with windows 10. I don't see what the problem is. It's supported until 2025 at least.

Game pass already works on Windows 10. It's not in any way a plausible Windows 11 feature.

It is when the store experience is much improved and the performance is better because all the old !64bit cruft is removed.

I don't mind using an old thing at all. Unless there's a specific reason to use the new thing. I haven't heard one yet.

Presumably Microsoft will aggressively push developers to use Windows 11-only APIs to encourage adoption. I hate it, but it seems likely.

Similar to how it tried to aggressively push UWP? No doubt some developers will get sucked into the hype, but I bet the majority of Windows developers that have stayed on Win32 are not going to change. If MS tries to deprecate Win32, they will lose all their big business customers too. And WINE is so good that it got attention from MS' lawyers.

As a long-time Win32 developer myself, I like the fact that my work is usable on anything from Win95 and up. Backwards compatibility has long been the key strength of MS, so them doing stuff like this recently is playing with fire.

I'm wary of "the New Microsoft" far more than the old.

Yeah-- I think it'll be like UWP. I just hope it fails the same way. Pretty much 100% agreement with everything in your comment. The "new Microsoft" is really, really suspicious to me.

Since 2015 or so when proprietary OSes implemented all needed features and switched to adding user-hostile advertising and spyware to raise money.

Even for tech heads, Win 7 was plenty good until security patches stopped.

I've got a 10 year old PC right now using decent but not amazingly high end hardware (at the time), other than a slightly limited memory capacity it's still on par with my current (mid/high-end-ish) laptop.

I'm still using a 2013 Macbook Pro (dual boot), and honestly, I could see that being useful for another 8 years. I won't be playing games on it, but it has enough GPU to render High DPI screens just fine. (Granted I feel no urge to upgrade to windows 11 either, so I'm pretty fine leaving it on windows 10 for the next few years.)

MacOS Monterey is dropping support for the 2013 Macbook Pros...

Windows 10 will be supported until 2025 so that is a hell of a run tho!

I only just retired a machine I built in 2011, with 2009-era parts. CPU advances have not been impressive over the last decade or so.

Just checked Newegg. I built my current PC in November of 2010. It has a Core 2 Quad. Runs great.

They require an 8th generation Intel CPU. Intel was still taking orders from oems for said CPUs until April 2020 and there are computers sold new in box today that won't be supported.

I know someone that had to replace a Ryzen 1xxx (1st gen) chip recently because games and other things kept crashing. They realized this was the case shortly after the warranty elapsed.

As a supposition, it might be the previously reported "Linux specific" issue for (pre week 30?) batch Ryzen 1 CPUs affecting Windows at last as well.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-Se...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=new-ryze...

The second link confirms this instability was present in Ryzen 1 units from week 25, and speculation is that week 30+ are safe. Further complicating matters, there's no reported way of examining this data short of visually inspecting the top of the thermal interface: with thermal paste removed.

what's even more strange is that ryzen 1st gen chips in fact do have a tpm v2.

I think you might be mixing up segfault issues on Ryzen 1000 and RDRAND bug in Ryzen 3600. The latter affected games(and yes it’s Zen 2).

I recall that affecting SystemD, it is a different issue.

Generally at least the Linux kernel does not use RDRAND, even on Intel systems. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAND#Reception )

The third party that had this issue only mentioned problems with their Ryzen 1 chip and replacing it (I forget if it was with a 2000 series or 3000 series chip) which resulted in those issues finally ceasing.

I just noticed that my Threadripper 1950x isn't "supported". Completely ludicrous. I'd love to see the technical justification for that.

https://i.imgur.com/wHtf0PF.jpg

Do they actually earn that much from this? They were basically throwing Windows 10 at people for free and they are not in the hardware market at all.

How does limiting the number of machines that can run it make money for Microsoft? I won't be paying for a Windows 11 upgrade (I assume it's not going to be free this time) until I need to replace my machine, which will be quite some time.

Windows 11 is a free upgrade if you have a Windows 10 license. You can't sell operating systems to consumers anymore, you have to sell OEM licenses to manufacturers, who in turn sell you a new computer with the new OS.

TPM 2.0 isn't supported on your chipset.

Yes it is. It's enabled in the firmware (fTPM) and shows TPM 2.0 available in the tpm.msc snap-in.

Dunno then, ask your motherboard vendor why it's not supported.

I don't know what they'd have to do with it. It's the CPU, not the motherboard, that's being blacklisted by Microsoft. I could upgrade to a Threadripper 2950X without changing anything else, and it'd be supported. I just don't think a "free" upgrade to Windows 11 should force me to spend $800 when there's no technical justification for it. I have a 3-year old enthusiast/gamer system, it seems crazy that a high-end CPU introduced less than 4 years ago would be unsupported.

It's not a TPM issue - TR 1950x has TPM2.0. Microsoft currently has a list of qualified CPU's which the 1950x isint on thats the issue. Seems anything 3.5 yrs. and older is getting left behind regardless whether it qualifies (hence the list) BUT this might only be applicable for the beta testing and not the actual release. WHich makes more sense that MS is focusing testing on only the latest hardware. The Windows Health Check tool that people were using was pulled down a few days ago (dont know its current status).

Stopping trash talking about Linux was the embrace phase. WSL was the extend phase.

Not sure how not supporting old devices is extinguish for Linux but okay.

I work at MS so I have some background, but even I was vocally opposed to this.

The real pushback for hardware floor came from IHVs and PMs. IHVs don't want to support your old hardware beyond 2-5 years thanks to what they're seeing in phone market. We've had multiple user impacting bugs that graphic vendors I won't name would not fix because that version of chip is NLA. I'm still unsure why PMs pushed for this, but it was something about mix of consistency, security and performance - whatever that meant.

Check how more complicated it is to install linux and your own compiled kernels with secure boot enabled and a tpm 2.0 chip.

I did a quick bing (hah, jk I used google) but didn't find anything other than having to install some tpm2 packages to use the module.

Also, if tpm2.0 is as redundant as people are making it out to be, couldn't they just disable it in BIOS along with microsoft secureboot keys?

For BIOSes that allow such a thing, maybe... IIRC, at least for windows 8 on ARM, this possibility wasn't required or even desired: https://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/1/16/2710502/microso...

I could see this as an ecosystem thing; Microsoft is maybe trying to push OEMs into using "more capable" hardware for some definition of "more capable"?

Reminds me of the issues Vista had where it seemed to implicitly require higher spec devices. This could be a different approach to the same kind of pressure.

Not really, or at-least as far as I'm aware.

With Vista, they wanted to deprecate GDI and introduce WDDM with a desktop compositor so display and memory requirements were quite intensive for the day. No such major change with 11 AFAIK. The low-end hardware still runs just as smooth. As I said originally, it is more related to the unwillingness of IHVs to support hardware for as long as Windows does.

I really don't see why they limit to 2.0 rather than 1.2 They could support both easily but choose not to.

This could be their way to lower the amount of testing they have to do, but for a company the size of Microsoft that's inexcusable.

That fact the 7th gen Intel (like the 7700k that has TPM 2.0) or first gen Zen aren't supported is bad enough but that Microsoft is silent about it and even their PMs and Security employees on twitter just brush it off as "There are more requirements" is pure BS.

> This could be their way to lower the amount of testing they have to do

Given the amount of testing they currently do, this is hardly an argument.

I think the CPU list and the S states are related to https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/bitlocker-sleep-mode-vuln... in some way.

I seriously hope the EU becomes aware of this and forces MS to change this crap. It's actually insane from a sustainability standpoint.

It would be unreasonable to force MS to list old hardware as compatible in any case, especially given that 10 is officially supported until 2025.

Fun fact: Microsoft will happily sell you today a $3500 Surface Studio 2 with a W11-unsupported i7-7820: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-studio-2/8sbjxm0m5...

Fun fact: the Surface Studio 2 is fully supported until October 2, 2024 with no need to replace the OS!

Not bad for a niche device released in 2018.

Selling an extremely expensive piece of hardware while acknowledging that you intend on making it obsolete in 4 years time, for arbitrary reasons sounds pretty bad to me. And who cares if it's niche.

Microsoft has made no secret of how long its hardware support lasts. If anything, the total of six years is longer than the Surface average of ~5.

The Windows 11 announcement changes nothing in this regard.

Edit: The first gen Surface Studio was also about five years (2016 - 2021).

It still absolutely terrible.

Ok but Microsoft's 4-6 years of support for their hardware has nothing to do with Windows 11.

Given Microsoft's track record, Win 11 will be a trainwreck.

Win 12 is what you'll want to wait for anyway.

Just renew support for Windows 7, and maybe update it a little bit. I will be dragged, kicking and screaming to Windows 12.

That's kind of every single android phone on the market though. If security updates matter.

> do a whole lot of mumbling around to get it working

isnt that the whole point of Linux?

The whole point of Linux is to be able to liberate yourself from corpo-dystopia like: https://youtu.be/o6QiN4Frl-g

If its masters made that harder, that sucks.

>sort of reasonable I guess

What part of that is reasonable exactly? As far as I can tell the TPM only weakens security by storing the keys in a separate computer, once there's an exploit with that someone physically attacking your computer could easily exfiltrate keys where they couldn't if you're just typing a passphrase into EG cryptsetup.

>Requiring TPM 1.2 is sort of reasonable I guess. But TPM 2.0. You've got to be kidding me.

2.0 hardware has existed for a long time. Why would you prefer that they support 1.2?

Sorry for the aside, but do these TPM 2.0 modules actually guarantee any additional security?

A TPM does provide security, but unclear if it'll actually matter for the Windows use cases.

An encrypted hdd/ssd will help of someone steals your computer, removes your drive, and tries to read it from another computer in order to bypass your passwords. It won’t do shit for ransom ware. Ransom ware runs as a user land program and does encryption from within your OS where you data is live and unencrypted. The end result will be a hard drive full of encrypted files that is then reencrypted by bitlocker.

If someone steals your computer, they also have the TPM, which has the key, right? What am I missing about what TPM does that is so secure?

The TPM combined with secure boot will only unlock the disk if nothings been tampered with, meaning your OS security is intact. If you switch off secure boot or mess with the kernel or boot loader it’ll just refuse to unlock.

I would guess extracting the keys from the tpm in other ways is not impossible, but probably sufficiently hard to be not worth it in most situations.

So if you modify any components in a laptop, say RAM or a video card, or you you mess with any BIOS settings, it won't boot?

is this for real...?

No, you misunderstand. The TPM verifies the bootloader and the operating system kernel, etc: that those components haven't been altered.

No, I think you might be mistaken. I have been bitten by this when doing a simple BIOS reset for a computer that was having charging/battery issues. Resetting the BIOS tripped Bitlocker, which I did not configure or enable, it was enabled after doing the initial Windows 10 setup.

Since the account was a local account, not one signed into a Microsoft account, the Bitlocker keys were not backed up an all data was lost. I was stunned, I've been doing laptop repair for almost 10 years and I've never seen something this stupid.

The TPM gets the measurements of the state of the system during different phases of the boot process, and only releases the key if those measurements match.

It's also designed to not be able to be able to extract the key material out of it.

Measurements of what? What if swap out my GPU? Or RAM?

One of the response comments to my original comments seems totally on point. This seems like a totally insane DRM scheme. [0] [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27655320

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27656144

Can someone on the inside confirm that my using a new chip won't make me unable to boot into my Windows 11 install "Sorry you need your double secret trusted components to use them with our TPM modules, and thus your* software install."

* "Your" meaning ours, licensed to you until we decide to change the license.

The measurements are of system firmware and bootloader stages + configuration. If you change any of those...

Then, in the case of full drive encryption, you'll be asked for the BitLocker recovery key at bootup.

If you used Windows Hello for authentication, that option wouldn't be available - making you have to use your password instead to login.

The only thing TPM based disk encryption protects is the kernel and the login screen. Without disk encryption somebody could modify your kernel or boot sequence and inject something nasty. Likewise they could do the old utilman.exe hack[1] and get admin by replacing one of the programs on the login screen with a shell.

If the device can boot without a password or PIN, there are some surprising ways to get into it just by switching networks (if network drives are mounted it will sometimes send NTLM hashes), or by good old brute-forcing.

[1] https://blog.kaniski.eu/2020/12/utilman-exe-to-cmd-exe-and-b...

As ever with security questions, the answer to that depends a lot on your threat model.

Microsoft say that the main features of TPMs are that they [1]:

> Generate, store, and limit the use of cryptographic keys.

> Use TPM technology for platform device authentication by using the TPM’s unique RSA key, which is burned into itself.

> Help ensure platform integrity by taking and storing security measurements.

One can, in principle, imagine situations á la Apple's T2 chip whereby this could be very useful to the end user -- for example, in hardware rate-limiting whole drive encryption decryption requests. Microsoft don't actually state this as a potential use-case. They go for the rather more prosaic

> Antimalware software can use the boot measurements of the operating system start state to prove the integrity of a computer running Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016. These measurements include the launch of Hyper-V to test that datacenters using virtualization are not running untrusted hypervisors. With BitLocker Network Unlock, IT administrators can push an update without concerns that a computer is waiting for PIN entry.

The rest of the page then goes on about hardware attestation. In reality, I am increasingly convinced that this is all an elaborate DRM scheme, similar to what they integrated in the XBox, with its on-chip crypto. I think we will see increasingly user-hostile, but more "transparent" DRM schemes based around this idea, and continue the cat-and-mouse game of "you are running this code in a VM and that is unauthorised for $MONEY_REASONS".

I'll stick to Linux, thanks.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/informatio...

I'm worried that pushing whole-disc encryption at people who aren't aware of the consequences is a huge risk.

I suspect for most consumer and small-business users, the risk of "a power surge blew out my motherboard and TPM, but I can take the surviving SSD and plunk it in a new PC and salvage my data" is a much more important use case than "someone might steal my PC and get at my valuable unencrypted data." I know we've heard people screaming about this on the MacOS side, but thereit's intertwined with the unrecoverability of a soldered storage subsystem.

Large and technical organizations who might need the encryption are hopefully more likely to have IT staff and policies for backups and recovery, so they'll be able to handle that emergency better.

Yes this. I've scraped my SSD for data after it blew up :)

The data wasn't that valuable otherwise I'd have had it backed up. The problem is it's my game PC. I don't want to constantly backup and sync all my game files as I can easily re-download them anyway and they take a ton of space. The savegames I do want backed up ideally but they're all over the filesystem. So, I recovered some that way. It was educational too, trying to scrape stuff off a broken NTFS image.

But I certainly don't need or want my desktop PC encrypted. I only use my Windows box for gaming and I don't want to waste performance on it.

In Windows 10 today, enabling BitLocker backups the keys to your AAD/Microsoft Account (depending on Home or Pro). If you hook the drive to another Windows machine you should be able to decrypt it with not a lot of trouble (you might have to log into the Azure Portal to pull the keys out if you are in a corporate environment, but that's it).

Doesn't this defeat the purpose (at least partially?)

I assume law enforcement can request those keys from Microsoft if they're backed up to the account.

I think the threat models of the overwhelming majority of individuals would prioritize scenarios that involve lost or stolen laptops/desktops over law enforcement. So Microsoft defaulting to protecting the security needs of the common man over criminals seems entirely reasonable to me. Criminals (or the security/privacy conscious) can organize their enterprises to make sure that their BitLocker keys aren’t stored where law enforcement agencies can get them. And I say that as someone who really does have concerns about the possibility that this can be abused, but I still believe it’s a reasonable default.

I don't get it. Most users don't upgrade the Windows OS version installed on the existing hardware.

Also, TPM and storage encryption won't protect you from ransomeware if you let attacker allows storage access.

Could you not argue the exact opposite point with the same underlying facts? Meaning “requiring modern low power CPU’s is a great thing for the environment”?

And how reasonable is it to say these PCs will be immediately trashed? Seems like a straw man argument - I know plenty of schools that will happily run Win10 until 2030

Meaning “requiring modern low power CPU’s is a great thing for the environment”?

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2229029/computer-factor...

"Study finds 70% of the energy a typical laptop will consume during its life span is used in manufacturing the computer"

Also, at least on the performance/gaming side, Intel's latest chips are huge, hot-running power hogs. Since they are so far behind in process technology, they've been compensating by making huge dies and pushing the TDP. It's pretty bad.

I believe you and tend to think that myself (my newest PC with ~2 year old parts has a noticeable impact on my home energy usage).

I suppose my critique was more to prove a point that the news can be slanted either way and I find that frustrating.

Microsoft has spent a ton of time lately bolstering their green credentials--such as this recent pledge to be carbon negative by 2030. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b... But then they show that those pledges are all windows dressing when it comes to obsoleting perfectly acceptable computers with Windows 11...

"After all, security is all about feelings rather than safety."

Really? I'm supposed to take someone seriously that makes a statement like this?

Reading the preceding and following sentence: You have encountered sarcasm.

The "will create trash" reason is why Apple refused to switch to USB-C on the iPhone. They claim this while bundling USB-C to Lightning cables with the iPhone 12 which is among the most junk-worthy, limited-use types of cable I could imagine. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51208912

Most consumers don't purchase OS updates. Consumer licenses for Windows are miniscule, so very few people will buy a new computer just to get Windows 11.

Corporations may upgrade more regularly, but if they have to buy new hardware to do it then they will probably just wait until their next hardware upgrade cycle. That may achieve the opposite of what the author fears.

I wonder how many will be convinced to install Linux, especially given the increasing move for Operating Systems as a browser shim.

Probably zero.

If Windows 10 didn't convince you, nothing will.

Zero. Maybe some tens of consumers will have their computer converted into a Linux box by a nephew.

I remember reading some blog posts from people switching to Linux because they disliked Windows 10 for various reasons (mostly privacy concerns and forced updates), but I think those were fairly tech savvy already.

Most people will just use whatever Microsoft releases, either because it comes preinstalled on their PC, because it's what they know, or because they need Windows because of some application or piece of hardware.

The year of Linux on the desktop will have to wait for a while, I'm afraid.

(On my desktop it's been year-of-the-Linux-desktop for the past 20 years, fortunately.)

Me too! September 2021 marks my 20th year.

It and all of FOSS have brought me more joy than I can ever repay.

YOTLD is defo one of those silly "jokes" thats had staying power. I'd argue that Chromebooks and Android are probably about as close as we're gonna get.

I've been using FreeBSD as a primary desktop since about 1997 or so, and while I did spend a lot of time using it as a remote display for my Solaris and SGI machines, its held up well. I've also used the same window manager forever so I guess I like the anachronism :)

By the same logic, what's wrong with sticking with Windows 10 as a browser shim?

I know someone who asked me to install Ubuntu on their machine when W7 support ended. Within a few days I got another phone call asking for help switching back to Windows.

There were just too many little issues - print quality being bad, WiFi cutting out etc. etc. I did the same once I started working from home.

Until the Linux community prioritises jank reduction and QOL improvements over solving sexy academic problems, it will not get long term mainstream adoption.

Is there an actual risk of "heaps" of "trash"? If Windows 11 will not be an involuntary, forced update then woudln't existing hardware continue to run as it does today?

I've never seen this site be so aggressively crying about their machines not supporting Windows 11, after a decade plus of crying about Micro$oft in general. No matter what they do, they're always wrong. It's time for you to install Linux Mint. The suffering of HN must come to an end.

To change requirements, a new version was necessary. They can't cut off support on Windows 10 from old hardware which has until 2025, so this is how it has to be. I have a new i9-11900K build that's the snappiest thing I've laid hands on, and I'm eagerly awaiting Windows 11. Microsoft has done far too little of this type of cutting off of old hardware, and no one here knows the exact details on why they chose those generations of chips. There's more to it but no one at MS is going to sit and debate with you, it's just the way it is.

Whenever some “reason” is given to make a major foundational break from X to Y, it almost certainly does not apply to 90% of the things in the bundle. Various apps, system frameworks, etc. do not need to be held to the same minimums for hardware; they just are.

We need to push for more modularity in the systems that serve as a foundation. Or, at least push for open-source or flexibility in the things that are not strictly foundational (and theoretically much more portable), such as bundled apps.

Suppose for example there is a nice improvement to some bundled app in the next OS; in all likelihood, that change could be back-ported to several older versions and be usable on almost any hardware. It won’t be, because it is bundled to something that wants to break everything.

Just to put it in a perspective: an iMac bought in January 2019 (kaby lake) is not supported by Windows 11.

That’s just crazy.

If Microsoft will continue like that, Windows will be the new Android and you can’t invest into new hardware, as it may be garbage already two years later.

Ahem.

You can buy an Intel iMac today, new from Apple, that will not run Windows 11.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-imac/21.5-inch

Yes, Apple still sells an iMac with a 7th generation Dual-Core Intel i5. For $1099. No, you should not buy one, but... there it is.

According to Microsoft’s own Health Check app the 16” MacBook Pro isn’t supported under Windows 11. I suspect this is because no TPM is presented from the T2.

This is the implicit deal Microsoft has with the hardware manufacturers.

“We make new Windows, you back it and you’ll sell new machines.”

It’s a very deliberate move because it absolutely requires purchase of new machines.

It’s not an oversight or an accident, it’s a lever.

Windows 10 support goes through 2025. And they will prob do a forced security patch so you should be good until 2027ish.

ok new title: "Windows 11 will create heaps of needless trash, in 2027"

There is nothing new here. Any new Windows version has transformed the previous generation of PCs into trash since people moved from DOS as a main user interface to Windows 3.

And people say "my PC is slow because it is getting old"... Even if the hardware has the exact same performance and almost the same usage like in its first day.

Why should they stop when customers comply and give them money? ... for ethics? for the environment? Who believes Microsoft has such concerns?

> Any new Windows version has transformed the previous generation of PCs into trash since people moved from DOS as a main user interface to Windows 3.

The difference is that earlier hardware upgrades were important and did improve performance heavily. 2001 just saw the advent of 1 Ghz CPUs [0]. In 2011, quad-core CPUs at 3.5 Ghz were the standard, probably a performance upgrade of an order of magnitude, at least. But since then? The i5 2500 does still hold a bit of water to the Ryzen 5 5600 [0]. Sure, it has more cores and more single-core performance, but it's nowhere near that much of a difference. Windows 10 still runs perfectly fine on this hardware, even better than Windows 7 did - and not by accident, MS did optimize that!

This is absolutely a new low for Microsoft.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_microproces...

[1] https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500-vs-... (yes, I know it's MemeBenchmark, but the general values should be solid enough)

I think this article misunderstands the list of supported processors. The Microsoft page is for hardware developers, e.g. laptop and desktop manufacturers. They shouldn't be using CPUs that aren't currently manufactured/supported anyway. I don't think it restricts anyone running Windows on their existing older hardware.

I'm still on an i7 4790K, and it's not listed as a supported CPU in the lists for Windows 10.

Microsoft: Keep VB6 and WIN32 support, you get a pass. Sometimes shit just needs to get done.

Mandating TPM2 is somewhat looks reasonable, but killing Skylake/Zen1 is pretty weird. Difference between Kaby/Coffee and Zen1/Zen+ is very small. Killing Broadwell/pre-Zen looks a bit reasonable. (even still not good)

If you are a gamer and think you can stay on Win10 think again. Microsoft already announced DirectStorage arbitrarily Windows 11 exclusive. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/06/gaming-on-windows-11-...

There is a slight chance they might back down, like they did with DirectX 12 on Windows 7 support after huge backlash and pressure from Blizzard. That one took 4 years of slow win10 adoption (2015-2019) and angry game studios.

Our entire society functions on the idea that consumption is good. And our desire for more crap is destroying our planet's ability to sustain us indefinitely into the future.

So whenever I hear all these complaints about companies acting in their interests - rather than for the common good - I wonder what planet I'm living on.

Until we accept that governments not only have a right, but a duty, to force us to reduce our consumption - rather than encouraging it - we're going to continue down the drain. Market forces and greed will not fix this problem.

I've been using a late 2011 MacBook Pro with Ubuntu Mate. From my experience, not only are operating systems becoming over demanding in hardware specifications, but so are dynamic web pages and the internet as a whole.

It's almost impossible to browse the internet with a 10 year old pc. Something that was a lot more forgiving with older hardware 8 to 10 years ago.

Future generations are growing with TikTok, Instagram, and all these apps that demand complex rendering tasks and large streams of video data. This is raising the bar on hardware requirements.

> We should be extending the lives of existing machines as much as possible right now, encouraging people to purchase new computers right now is irresponsible. Not just now ..., our entire economy is based on shoving perfectly fine hardware into the trash. Microsoft is just a small part in this game. Also everyone talks about "eco friendly" and at the same time things like that happen: "you want the new operating system - buy complete new hardware - its just slightly better then the old one".

I fail to see any mention of or link to the detailed requirements talked about. To save y'all from yet another search engine visit, they are basically Intel 8th Gen Core upwards and comparable AMD CPUs. Here you can find the lists: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min...

Thanks! I updated the OP to reference this for people who may not have been 'in the loop' and need this context.

> If Microsoft truly believes that encrypting your drive is going to stop Moldovan teenagers from hitting your PC with ransomware, maybe a TPM is the solution. After all, security is all about feelings rather than safety. If “encryption at rest” makes consumers feel at ease, so be it.

Tangent on this point: the TPM is obviously useful for corporate users who want hassle-free encryption at rest, but also massively lucrative for software publishers seeking to implement DRM.

People have voted... with their money.

Microsoft can't longer afford being yield back by deprecated processor technology. And the bad publicity of doing so.

By not bumping the requirements a lot of security and speed improvements can't be done.

This is even more visible with the Apple M1 release. Because of it Windows looks like insecure, insufficient and unoptimized.

People have chosen that they don't care about openness neither about supporting legacy hardware and Microsoft is listening.

What deprecated processor technology? The cutoff is not based on CPU capabilities or processing power. They just choose a point in time and only support CPU's newer than that.

you're right. I was expecting that 10th+ intel gen had a lot more hardware extensions, but looks like there's none

s/CPU's/CPUs/

Why do people always complain?

If someone sells something with requirements - it is their choice and not down to people whinging because they want the latest thing but can't due to XYZ. This world doesn't owe you squat.

Note - my personally built PC doesn't have a TPM, but when I get round to it I may purchase one and then upgrade - and I won't friggin' moan.

It will create heaps of machines which haven't been upgraded to Windows 11. I don't see why these are "trash".

The hype train is already starting RE: "people will switch to Linux, etc etc". MS for once abandons the backwards compatibility obsession, albeit in an understandable but not user-facing, palatable way as with a unified UI - and is dammed to Techlord Mordor. Poor strategy aside, MS just can't win with everyone, the divide is particularly stark for their user base. IMO though they should never have been remotely as lenient over the control panel UI and such, or should've launched a reworked OS dubbed "tileOS" that cleaved off cruft, nix-based with a unified touch & a great package manager, terminal for the backend.

It feels to me like the current strategy splits too many hairs. Apple understood this, which is why they haven't launched MacOS RT/10X then scrapped it or some jazz. (And to be clear the issue with 10X is it that it wasn't really approxmating a cleaned up version of Windows - just a ChromeOS competitor for low-cost garbage)

Oh, but as for Linux on the desktop - the only way that happens is probably MS throwing in the towel (which is a poor phrase given the context would almost certainly be a boon to most everyone) adopting the Linux Kernel or some FreeBSD core, with a compatability layer for Win32 bullshit.

But their backwards compabitility obsession is not seen as a drawback by everyone. In fact I personally think Apple is taking things too far.

The people that would complain about the backwards compatibility are probably not the same people that are complaining now. Those people would already be using their fancy UWP Metro apps :)

By the way they are dropping the live tiles in Windows 11! So tileOS would be a misnomer. I'm personally very happy about that, I always spent a while cleaning up the start menu of all that crap after every install. I never liked the idea of them but admittedly I'm a pretty traditional user (and a power user at that).

One thing I do really like in Windows 11 is the new pane system. I haven't yet tried it but it sounds like an interesting compromise between a traditional and a tiling window system. And the good thing about it is that it doesn't have to break any backwards compatibility (after all, neither do tiling WMs on Linux)

Haha I realize that re live tiles. I do think the tiles lost their allure over time, but at the least the functional UI within menus and such that MS has been evolving at it's best looks great or superior to others of the day then/now (metro, fluent).

Likewise re cleaning up the start crap, I'm not wedded to the tiles haha! As a reluctant recent MacOS user though, I really love the functionality of the start menu's easy-to-access list of my software suites/programs. I just strongly feel the Dock + Launchpad is a poor substitute for the Taskbar + Start Menu. Much easier to shove my programs in hiding, or to access.... Windows/instances for that matter in Windows (because all instances remain visible within a scrolling glance of an alias/icon, on Windows - it's something truly bizarre to me in that MacOS users don't mention this flaw - the dock is so easily cluttered and the setting to minimize instances into an icon do not offer an easy glance as with Windows).Anyways, I'd still really like them to unify the UI - it's just a deadweight loss for everyone right now IMO. Even the legacy IT managers... At some point asking them to tolerate UI adjustment isn't insane.

RE: Apple: I do agree Apple have gone too far at times... I mean, I think dropping 32-bit support was for the better right now, not too many regrets as I write this on my M1 MBA, though having to dual boot for a class was a PITA last year with Catalina's lack of 32-bit support (and I am opposed to the use of V*rtualbox). IDK, I guess my only real quibble with Apple other than embracing iOS7 design is the direction they're hellbent on leading the charge for with iOS' software model. OTOH, where I part with some here is that I just don't think MS is really out to stop people from installing Linux via TPM - I think this is just usual poor PR and poor strategizing. Looks like they're determined to further muddy the waters lol: https://tinyurl.com/srk9zm7e

I use Mac a lot too (I do use pretty much all platforms every day). But I don't use Launchpad for the same reason. I don't find it fits well on my big 24" screen. I don't want huge icons spread out over the whole thing, same issue I had with Windows 8.

Instead, what I do is I add the Applications folder to the dock and set it to pop-up grid mode. That way it provides a nice start menu. Incidentially this was pretty much how 'things worked' in earlier versions of macOS. In the oldest versions you'd just get a finder window with your apps, and when Stacks came in Leopard (IIRC) this became the de facto 'start menu'. They later introduced launchpad as a unifying thing with the iPad but I just don't think full screen interfaces work well on large screens.

Also using spotlight is a handy way of launching apps. I use both together a lot.

And yes I totally agree that the minimised windows are hard to spot on macOS, and so is the dot to see which program is running or not. Apple has been tuning down this dot a lot over the years because they don't want users to care about it. It used to be a perfectly serviceable triangle in Tiger and went downhill from there.

And yeah I don't think the point is them preventing Linux either. Even if you have a TPM you still retain full control and can still add your own secureboot keys if you want to.

Holy hell, how did I not realize that re: app folder. I think maybe the qualm I had was that the placement is centered to the right, and I can't replace Finder app's position with it? I know I tried alias folders and hated it for some reason. Thank you for that, it's an improvement :). And yea launchpad is just my nightmare, I actually don't mind blowing things up with some padding, I use the scaled 1280X800 on my MacBook at the moment - and even then launchpad just disturbs me because of the effort required to navigate, and lack of real customization.

On the other hand, MS consistently seems to develop the most attractive (at least, in principle with the bordering and sidebar menu for navigation with highlighted selection - all very cognitively "native" if you will) ways of striking a balance between aesthetics and function. Frankly I think it looks better than MacOS due to the contrast, but the typography feels off IMO.

See here:

https://46c4ts1tskv22sdav81j9c69-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

Now in fairness re consistently: I do think the old settings app of W10 was bad, I often forget how horrible navigation is - one feels much more "trapped" if you will than in their W11 version. W11 version should scale well, too.

I am still curious how their ARM64 efforts will shake out. What're your thoughts there? MS have to hedge between architectures so the chicken and egg issue is certainly salient unlike with Apple for whom the success was all but guaranteed.

“ Requiring TPM 1.2 is sort of reasonable I guess. But TPM 2.0. You've got to be kidding me.”

I disagree here. There is no reason (IMO) to require TPM for home machines or gamer/enthusiasts.

Microsoft should instead fully support TPM 1.2 and 2.x so that in work/enterprise situations can fully utilize TPM when/if needed.

I'm fine with Microsoft requiring TPMs for Windows 11 installs on new build OEM machines - that's fine. Requiring it on existing hardware is asinine, there's no clear technical reason to do so.

It's not just the TPM. It's requiring 8th generation or later Intel processors and the equivalent for AMD. Microsoft still sells machines with incompatible processors for Windows 11. Yet we're all going to be losing support for Windows 10 in a few years. That's the main problem.

This article doesn't explain why it will create the waste? What changed in the spec, is it enforced?

Win 11 won't support a bunch of recent (3 year old) perfectly good hardware because demands for TPM like features.

So the owners of that hardware will continue using Windows 10.

Or, if they desperately need Win 11, the resale value of "good enough to do homework on" computers is still pretty good.

But judging by the Win 10 rollout, the people who care enough to have the latest Windows to want it are a very small minority who have recent hardware anyway.

I would bet it's a marketing choice, to ensure the the rollout is smooth and people like the experience. The specs might be a deliberate overkill to ensure that the first users have more than enough hardware (which probably was tested well enough), and are more likely to be computer enthusiasts who want latest-and-greatest.

It has nothing to do with performance. It is almost certainly either due to malware concerns or DRM protections.

Windows 11 benchmarks have shown improvements over windows 10 - i'm sure we'll see more starting this next week as the insider build gets out in the wild

I have a perfectly good PC from 2015 that has a Gen 5 Intel processor. It is 64-bit, 6-core, supports TPM 2.0, and supports the virtualization instructions, UEFI, etc.

I have 64 gigs of ram in this and other upgrades, it works great, but it will die with Win 10 because the CPU isn't on Microsoft's list. When Win 10 support is done, so is my PC that I've invested a lot of money in. So yeah, it's going to become trash or a Linux box I haven't a need for.

Can't you recycle every component except the motherboard?

Given a few years of time passing, generally motherboard upgrades require changing the physical format of the CPU and RAM interfaces, which means everything's wasted.

Sure, but the NVME sticks, GPU, cooling system, PSU are all still good and some of those are pretty expensive too.

Why do you think that there will be actual checks for this list. This is just a list intended for OEMs that build new machines. NO WAY there will be cpuid checks to exclude your processor specifically.

Microsoft's PC health check software checks this, why wouldn't the actual OS installer?

For the record, none of my PCs support Windows 11. My desktop has no TPM and too old of a CPU. My laptop has TPM 2.0 but it's CPU isn't supported.

> This article doesn't explain why it will create the waste?

I was similarly confused by the article's lack of actual information. As it stands it tells me there are arbitrary CPU specs and a bunch of common hardware meets those requirements. But then apparently the situation is terrible, people will need to buy new hardware and the majority of consumer hardware is deprecated.

Windows 98: good then.

Windows 2000: not great.

Windows XP: pretty good.

Windows Vista: not good.

Windows 7: pretty good

Windows 8: not good.

Windows 10: pretty good.

Windows 11: _guess?_

Can you fill in the pattern?

Microsoft’s history speaks for itself.

Older HN members can probably comment about Microsoft’s earlier history and see how far back this pattern goes.

Even 2 year old $1-$2k 18 core 9980XE's aren't compatible. That's crazy.

I built a new desktop PC 2 months ago. I bought the only Ryzen APU (new, not used) I could find online here in Brazil. Ryzen 2200G, Zen 1st gen. Released in 2018, still selling worldwide.

Brand new machine. Not supported by Windows 11...

Supported by Windows 10 until at least 2025... i don't see the problem here

To think that all of this Microsoft bullshit could be the propeller for Linux adoption, if only Linux developers had good taste and had developed something worthy of replacing Windows for the average user.

What exactly is wrong with Pop!_OS? I put it on my GF's laptop after she kept complaining about the machine slowing down and she's been very happy with it. The Thai IME even worked out of the box.

or if linux devs would work together instead of all trying to make their own thing. that said, i think the devs that work on elementary os have good taste by the looks of it. pop and zorin as well

I switched to Linux for my workstations three years ago and never looked back. If Microsoft had developed anything worthy of replacing XFCE, bash and the Linux kernel... well I probably still wouldn't switch back because I just don't trust Microsoft with my work machines anymore.

I still have Windows machines for games and streaming, but those are just my toys. I can take or leave them.

What an utter weird comment. I've been using both OS-es, and gnome on Linux is miles ahead of windows in terms of UX and general usability. Windows feels clunky, there are always two ways to configure any one thing. The only thing that is better on Windows is certain software availability, which has very little to do with Windows itself. People really think Linux is a bad experience, when it hasn't been true for the past 5 years.

I read the whole thing twice, but don't see where the author details which HW reqs are problematic.

It's the CPU requirements. Windows 11 only supports Intel 8th gen (launched in 2017), Ryzen 2000 (launched in 2018), and newer CPUs.

New macOS is similar, where it seems like they are dumping support for any Mac that has an nVidia GPU.

I don't believe there is a shortage, when only few companies have a strong hold on their supply.

Windows is a stinker, basically corporate spyware at this point akin to Amazon Echo

i'll panic when my 2014 laptop bricks after windows 10 tries to update to win 11, but I believe that won't happen and I always backup my valuable data anyway.

Do people on Hacker News even use Windows? Seems like a bunch of MacWorld and LinuxJournal posters come here to talk trash.

or better still, maybe its windows 11 that ends up in the garbage. give fedora a try :)

I'd do once anti cheat works for online multiplayer games

Ubuntu and by extension the broader Linux and open source ecosystem will benefit greatly from this decision.

Couldn't MS just open source W10 around then so the community can support it indefinitely?

So will 5G…

Modern Tech / Cheap Prices / Stewardship. Pick two.

Or people just don’t upgrade Windows, like when they skipped Windows ME, Vista or 8 etc?

people are forgetting w11 will be the useless windows version.

everyone knows that between actual windows versions (3, 95, vista, xp, 10) there are the BS money making by selling flashy badges to PC OEM manufacturers (98, me, forgot the name , 8)

so obviously w11 can be safely ignored by everyone.

Microsoft can't afford to have a useless version, there are now viable alternatives to Windows.

Isn't Vista the arch nemesis of 7? Also 95 is not too great but 98 is definitely not the bad cop, especially SE. Windows ME on the other hand...

2000 is also pretty cool, but didn't show up on the list, and not sure where the NT releases 3 and 4 would go.

I thought 95 was better than 98 - faster and less bloated. Just the USB support was lacking but OSR2 fixed that mostly.

2000 was definitely better than XP in my book. Of course ME was a complete and total turd. But it was only built in a couple months after MS changed their mind about Windows 2000 personal edition.

But really in my book XP was Windows 2000 Bloatware Edition. Same with 98 over 95.

With Vista it went the opposite way though, Vista was all glossy/bloaty and Win7 fixed that. And don't start me on Windows 8, that was just a terrible POS on the desktop, with its huge start screen. Nice idea on a tablet, terrible on the desktop.

The basic problem:

Windows is forcing hundreds of millions of devices into technical obsolescence, for no good reason other than another incremental upgrade to its operating system.

Human civilization has existed for approximately 10,000 years. The main purpose of a society is to survive indefinitely into the future. I would like human civilization to exist in 10,000 years, in 100,000 years.

If Microsoft changes its operating system every decade, we're looking at 10 000 iterations of Windows in the next 100 000 years. 10 000 cycles that, if current trends continue, will each render hundreds of millions of electronic devices obsolete, representing billions of pounds of plastic and metals each. To put it plainly, there are not enough petroleum resources and metals in the upper crust of this planet to manufacture the hundreds of millions of brand new electronic devices that successive wave of consumers will demand every few years.

The author is right. The fact that Windows 11 will be available as a free upgrade to devices already running W10 doesn't change the fact that many, if not most, of them won't meet Microsoft's specs.

I am very concerned about the environmental cost of electronics, and I'm afraid we're not taking the issue seriously enough. We're somehow trying to transition our way into a digital utopia the likes of which exist in science fiction, without the infrastructure or the resources to support it.

One of the most popular PC games of all times is Age of Empires II, a game that originally came out in 1999. The original game can practically run on a toaster, and still enjoys a large and vibrant online community.

Why can't we... settle on the same operating system for a few centuries? (I realize that Microsoft would not do this on its own, and that it would require government intervention in the market, if not an outright public takeover of Microsoft, but I'm throwing ideas into the wind here) Now I'm glad we're not still using Windows 95, but will OS's in 25 years be that much more advanced than 2021 OS's compared to 1995? I don't think so. I think Windows 10 is good enough for a long, long time. Microsoft's concept of W10 as the final version of the product was right, and I'm disappointed to see it go.

Maybe the long term solution is for the government itself to start selling, if not mandating, its own operating system software to consumers and businesses alike. Government doesn't have to meet quarterly profit goals, which is a plus in favor of long term sustainability.

Its grimly humorous that we need to upgrade hardware security because of ransomware - enabled by cryptocurrency.

But we can't do that - we have widespread shortages of new chip components because so much capacity is being dedicated to cryptomining!

Instead of tying ourselves in knots, why not just regulate and ban the base source of the problem (crypto exchange for fiat) instead?

It IS a heap of needless trash!

Oh noes! My thrasherinos! Think of environment!

Just because there's a new version of windows, PC is not turning into pumpkin. It can run forever on old Windows version or converted into Linux machine.

Personlly, I'm just disappointed windows 11 isn't a Linux fork. No way I'm throwing out my Mac or Linux boxes for the trash they just demonstrated. (and its been 2 years since I had anything more than a win 7 VM now)

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