Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Can I use this thread about Windows to vent a bit? I don't use Windows but what a gigantic clusterfuck of a turd. Mother in law now wants "two monitors instead of one". Whatever... I took a PC with Windows 8.1, bought a DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter (GPU has got two output but her monitors are only HDMI) and it's kinda ok but then "Windows 8.1 support expires on 2023-jan-10". OK, let's buy Windows 11. I try to install Windows 11, had to create a boot disk or something (because why not) using Ventoy in wich I put the Windows .iso (just dd'ing the .iso as with Linux won't be sufficient apparently) and I happily launch the install. Hardware not supported by Windows 11.

OK, I'll give my mom in law my AMD 3700X and install Windows 11 on that one instead (and I'll buy myself a 7700X). Same thing: "Hardware not supported by Windows 11'. WTF. That 3700X is a recent machine. And the error message it totaly uninformative: it just says "hardware not supported".

Well, good thing a few years ago I made her switch her SME to Google Workspace / GSuite only. She and her employees are doing everything from the paid version of GSuite (something like 50 EUR / employee per year).

Guess what's installing atm on that 3700X for my mother in law? Ubuntu.

I dd'ed the .iso and the install starts just fine.

It's insane: you want to give 145 EUR to Microsoft for their ad-ridden and keylogger infested spyware of an OS but they don't let you. Unhelpful error message. Instead of saying what is not supported, they just say: "Hardware not supported".

So now it's going to be Ubuntu everywhere at her little SME and OS X laptops for when they're on the go.

Why didn't you install Ubuntu to begin with? It looks like you already knew Windows was "ad-ridden and keylogger infested spyware".

Hint: you gotta enable TPM

This is the first result when you google Windows 11 requirements. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...

All the rest of your complains boil down to being upset that Microsoft doesn’t support old stuff forever… guess how long old versions of Ubuntu are supported? (Hint it’s not forever)

Also I could be wrong but pretty sure windows 8 still gets a free upgrade to Windows 10/11. They don’t advertise it, but the licensing server still accepts old licenses.

Also if you want you basically can do the iso onto a usb…

But the error message is completely optuse. How can you be so sure it's because of the TPM? The message says nothing but fuck you user.

Also modern version of Ubuntu (and linux distribution in general) have no issues on decade old hardware (I have a couple machines that old).

The secret to Windows is that you skip every other version. Microsoft knows people know this, so Windows 11 is kind of one of those things that only new computers and super fans install. The weird TPM requirement seals the deal for many enthusiasts.

I have no idea what you do if you're on Windows 8 though. That was one of the ones you were supposed to skip ;)

People were complaing about how upgrade to 10 happened without consent. So 11 requires TPM, if you disable it, they definitely probably won't upgrade you to 11 when you close the notification.

Forced TPM is the single-most asinine decision Microsoft has made in the last few years.

Consumers DO NOT want this, maybe your business does, but slapping a Win11 install on my nan's fucking toaster shouldn't be blocked because I can't cryptographically sign my left nut to Microsoft.

It also doesn't support very common CPUs like the Intel i5 that are still being sold today and included in new PCs.

Maybe not state-of-the-art top-of-the-line PCs, but PCs that people are buying today. PCs people will be getting for Christmas. That's not a question of 'supporting old stuff forever'.

If it was an old Core2 Duo, discontinued in 2012, it kinda makes sense that they might not bother to support that past Win10. But a PC can easily last 10 years, and still work fine if you've got enough RAM and drive space. So there are new PCs being bought today that may be stuck on Windows 10 for the next decade or more (unless 12 fixes that).

Which model of i5 would that be and when was it released? Intel has been releasing processors under the i5 moniker since 2009, obviously not all of them are supported.

Mine is an i5-6500, which was a hot new thing in 2016 when I built the PC, and still works excellently. Typical utilization with tons of windows open and running is 20% or less (usually much less). It never breaks a sweat playing games or doing anything that normal people would do. It's maybe 7 years old at most, not archaic tech at all.

I know back in the 90s, when we were going from 8088s to 486s to pentiums, things were rapidly changing with noticeable improvements every year. But that era is long past. Even a rinky-dink CPU by today's standards is way more than enough for normal use and will never get close to stressed unless you're doing experiments with CPU-heavy algorithms or something. And they've been that way for a long time now.

They can fill their purpose perfectly well for a decade or more. In fact, my previous PC had a 2006 CPU which still handled everything just fine in 2016, the upgrade was only needed due to RAM (which required a new motherboard and thus a new CPU). To consider a CPU 'not good enough' just because it's a few years old makes no sense now. I would understand if they didn't support that 2006 Core-2 Duo any more. But to not support a 2016 i5-6500 in 2022? That does not make sense.

> I know back in the 90s, when we were going from 8088s to 486s to pentiums

80286 to 80386 to 80486 to Pentium. 8088 to 80286 was in the 1980s.

The 80386 introduced in the 1980s, IIRC, but became more common in the 1990s.

(And don't forget the 80386SX -- a 386 with the 286's 16-bit interface! :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com