Windows 11: Half of enterprise workstations don't meet the system requirements
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
At the Windows-centric companies I've worked for it was mostly just running Outlook that was the thing we all absolutely had to do every day, with only occasional use of Word.
So many businesses now have replaced Windows native business apps with either web based ones or (less and less) Java apps. Both work on Linux.
Question: How good is Thunderbird nowadays as an alternative to Outlook, from a business decision maker perspective? (Or is there better than Thunderbird for businesses deeply entrenched in Outlook?)
- The cost of retraining users
- The cost of evaluating whether, for each use case, the Linux distro has feature parity
- The cost of transitioning each old PC
- The dissatisfaction among the employee base about having to re-learn a system, even if the necessary features are there
- The fact that most business with 10k+ users are going to have business-specific apps that barely run on Windows 10, with no equivalent on Linux
- The risk to the decision-makers if it doesn't pan out -- it's the opposite of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"
- The fact that all of the back-end infrastructure--active directory domains, security, etc--is going to have to be transitioned too.
- The likely costs to the business itself in terms of lost opportunities, errors, and so on while the transition occurs.
The hardware itself is relatively cheap compared to the cost and logistics of getting that hardware set up and training users. My guess is that basically every business with that quantity of users would choose to just buy new hardware and keep their existing infrastructure and training over the alternative.
I think the bigger problem might be the CPU compatibility list, but that isn’t being enforced to my knowledge.
Are VMs that prevalent? I use them all the time, but I always assumed that was because I'm a weird nerd.
Mandating an upgrade by obsoleting the OS is going to add to our environmental disaster, the newest IPCC report says probably +1.5 C more by 2040 at current trajectories. I wish influential environmentalists would start shaming Microsoft.
Which isn't to say that modern apps and websites would run well on ten-year-old hardware—but there are equivalent apps and websites that would have run fine. In other words, the only thing you're getting with new hardware software bloat...
I agree that phones that are 4 years old are fine for most of the daily stuff, and even haswell PCs are still perfectly OK for the office, but this segment is a bit different and depending on the use case even earlier updates might be useful (like switching to pcie4/5 etc).
btw since I meant 4 years from now it also means that those unsupported workstations are not even new today, they could be running 2+years already, and 6 years upgrade cycle is not that bad
a) cheaper to replace
b) see updated answer - if these will be running for 6+ years at that point, it's mostly ok to upgrade them
The thing I don't like is that even with better hardware, Windows will still find ways to enable telemetry and then exploits to that data. So, even once you upgrade your hardware, attackers will still find a way in thanks to Microsoft.