Plan for Windows 10 End of Support | Hacker News Reader

Plan for Windows 10 End of Support

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I would have updated if it wasn't for Windows 11 requiring a specific hardware. I'll stick to Windows 10, when it dies, I'll probably force myself to switch to Fedora or something.

You don't need specific hardware, it will run on non-TPM devices as well.

I've also noticed that if you build the ISO yourself via UUP dump[1], instead of using the official ISO from Microsoft, then you get a bare start menu with no bloatware or ads, just Explorer and Edge. Nice.

[1] https://uupdump.net/

> You don't need specific hardware, it will run on non-TPM devices as well.

Oh, because the update button in the settings says my hardware does not meet the requirements.

I meant if you do a clean install via UUP dump generated ISO or a Rufus modified ISO, then it bypassed the TPM check.

Updating an existing install on non compliant HW via the official update button obviously doesn't work (unless there's some hacks for it that came out, I don't know I always do a clean install between major versions since I don't want all the years of cruft and changes from one version to be carried over and maybe mess up something).

> Updating an existing install on non compliant HW via the official update button > do a clean install via UUP dump generated ISO or a Rufus modified ISO, then it bypassed the TPM check

I'll have backup my stuff before a clean install then, not ready yet but thanks for the guide! I'll do it when I get the time.

BTW, IIRC if you go the UUP dump route, then you should also be able to run the windows 11 installer directly from windows 10 after you mount the generated ISO so maybe you can indeed run the update instead of clean install. I did the update that way on a tablet, but that had TPM but no official Windows 11 support.

Some third party userspace apps may still silently crash due to missing TPM.

Like which apps?

> You don't need specific hardware, it will run on non-TPM devices as well.

The article says that if you don't buy a new computer with TPM 2.0 then you have to migrate to "the cloud" in order to use Windows 11. What the flip is a Cloud PC? How much a panopticon for spying will that make my daily life working in PuTTY?

Just run it anyway? Even 23H2 works on an old Intel i5-6500 I put it on for shits and giggs. Had to download an “enablement package” to get it to upgrade in-place from 22H2 but there’s a big community of people doing this and it was as difficult as “click this link which downloads the exe direct from Microsoft.”

You can run Win11 on non-compliant hardware. Check out Rufus.

Can vouch for this option. Works reliably but still worth disconnecting internet to make sure local account creation is easily available.

That won't do it any more. Now you have to invoke a command prompt on setup and run some commands to bypass online account requirement. Until they close that loophole also. Absolute turd of an OS. In only have it on a separate partition for games that wont run on Proton.

Setup /product server

i'm hanging to w10 too and plan on switching to linux

I would have updated if it wasn't for Windows 11 having the option to ungroup tasks removed. I heard the rumor they would bring it back one day, but this day hasn't arrived yet.

This arrived a couple months ago.

Do you have any source for that? Because I check every update my org rolls out and it still hasn't arrived on my Desktop. I only heard a rumor a few months ago they enabled in some development preview so hopefully it will go mainstream one day.

EDIT: it seems it's half-baked:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-11s-...

And we all know this a limit made on purpose (by a marketing team?). They probably could use this additional hardware everytime it's available on new PCs and allow a kind of legacy mode for Windows 11 on old PCs. But hey, some marketing genius came up with the idea to sell Windows 10 ESU (Extended Security Updates) membership to end consumers this time.

Windows 11's hardware requirements were made to coincide with CPU's that had hardware mitigation for Meltdown and Spectre attacks, as part of their attempt to push the general baseline of security for average users

I've seen this argument from Ms a lot but let's be real, of the ways typical home windows users are compromised spectre isn't a thing, and isn't hasn't done a thing about, for example, how readily windows let's attackers make a script look like an image .

But I couldn't possibly care less about Meltdown and Spectre. It's not clear why anyone does, unless they are running a cloud provider.

In fact, history suggests that the malicious actor who is most likely to hose my PC or otherwise interfere with my workflow is.... Microsoft.

And a lot of other users "couldn't possibly care less" about downloading MP3.EXE files off Limewire

other users today "couldn't possibly care less" about keeping their systems updated let alone running any kind of Anti-Virus

Unfortunately throwing its hands up and saying "nobody cares so why bother" isn't really a great look for a software vendor

Show me a single Meltdown or Spectre exploit that has affected real users.

Can't? Then you're just selling tiger-proof rocks. Expensive ones.

"Everything is working, what do I even pay you for!"

Also meant to call out the irony of your "MP3.EXE" example earlier. Whose bright idea was it to use DOS-era file extensions to drive executable functionality, then hide those extensions from the user by default? That would be Microsoft. The bad guys just took advantage of their lack of actual cybersecurity horse sense.

The paranoid stupidity surrounding forced Spectre and Meltdown mitigations, whose carbon footprint is probably getting close to that of Bitcoin at this point, is just another example.

I moved from Windows 10 to Linux at the end of 2021 and don't miss it a bit. Except for Steam, Reaper, and Discord, all other software I use is FOSS, and it's so dang good! I feel bad for the people who have to stick with Windows because they need to use Adobe or Microsoft products.

Desktop Linux is in such a good place right now, and it's only getting better thanks to all the great developers.

How's things like sleep, hibernate, system wide touchpad gestures, HW video decode and fractional scaling working in the land of linux these days?

I know if you can live without those then Linux is daily drivable for a long time, but I need all of them to work flawlessly, and every time I try Linux on my bare metal laptop a lot of those features are still missing, janky or require research and tinkering.

I really want to make the switch but I also need 95% feature parity. I don't game much so I don't care how many Steam games now work on Linux via Proton if the basic features of an OS that I mentioned before are not there out of the box.

> How's things like sleep, hibernate, system wide touchpad gestures, HW video decode and fractional scaling working in the land of linux these days?

I use a ThinkPad, so I prefer the TrackPoint and rarely use the TrackPad, but everything else works excellently, especially with KDE.

>but everything else works excellently, especially with KDE

Everything else? Including Wayland, fractional scaling on non-Qt apps, sleep, hibernate and HW video decode?

Yeah, I know if you have very common HW and restricted use cases, like track-point, USB mouse, display without fractional scaling, not using sleep/hibernate etc, then everything just works but those also "just worked" on Linux for the past 20 years.

I need linux to work on modern HW with modern quality of life features enabled that all the other OSs have out of the box, not to have to go back in time on how we used PCs 20 years ago just so Linux can feel at home.

If stuff like hibernate or mixed-DPI fractional scaling is still a foreign concept to it, then it's not year of the linux desktop for me.

Almost all my applications are Qt; I have a new ThinkPad with an AMD 7840U and, yes, everything Just Works. Linux will always require more tinkering than Windows or Mac, and this machine didn't Just Work for the first two months that I had it as the BIOS needed updates and the Linux kernel needed them too, but I'm golden now.

GTK3/4 don't have proper fractional scaling anywhere, as far as I know. Also pretty sure it's not planned before GTK5.

Hence my annoyance.

As always, everything just works on Linux with the caveats that as long as you stay on the very fixed beaten path, never stray from it, only use X,Y,Z and avoid A,B,C, then everything just works, sure, but I'm not a college student anymore and my time is too valuable to tinker and find that new specific Linux path where everything just works in order to get the same desktop usability that Windows has out of the box with zero time investment.

It is what it is.

Touchpad gestures - improved a bunch around 2021 thanks to efforts mentioned in https://linuxtouchpad.org/ .

Sleep/Hibernate - I remember hearing about some issues a couple years ago but haven't seen them lately, I think Intel has finally fixed some issues https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-S0ix-Linux-Failure-Hot

(Bias: went from being fairly attached to macOS to switching to Linux a couple years ago)

No issues with sleep running Ubuntu 22.04 with GNOME; I never shut down my PC.

As for touchpad gestures, both GNOME and KDE have 1:1 gestures if you are running a Wayland session. If you are not running Wayland, you can install something like Touchegg or use another distro with built-in gestures. Linux Mint and Elementary OS both have great gesture support.

Hardware acceleration works great! Before I switched, Firefox didn't have it and in Chromium, you needed to turn on an experimental flag.

I can't comment on fractional scaling because I use two 24", 1080p monitors.

>No issues with sleep running Ubuntu 22.04 with GNOME; I never shut down my PC.

Ubuntu, and most other distros don't natively support hibernate. Sadly, that's a no go for me until they fix this (probably never) as I put my laptop in hibernate on longer journeys or over the weekend.

>I can't comment on fractional scaling because I use two 24", 1080p monitors.

Also need mixed DPI fractional scaling for my laptop and monitor combo.

If you want to be 100% sure these things work, a number of companies are selling computers withnlinux preinstalled.

Support is also usually easy to check beforehand with a web search.

What does the support of fractional scaling or touchpad gestures have to do with the laptop you're running on? Either the OS supports them or not, no need to buy a new Linux laptop for that, that's crazy.

Fractionnal scaling and touchpad gestures have been supported for years. But obviously it depends of the desktop/wm used.

Supported YES*. Working flawlessly out of the box, NO.

Don't forget HDR on monitors and gesture support on trackpads.

Out of your combined lists, HDR is the only one that would cause issues. Although it really depends on the distro.

Yup, and I fully expect that to be solved by end of 2024. I have already fired up Halo Infinite on NixOS with a patched kernel and have seen HDR working via gamescope. Just a matter of ironing out kinks, KDE is already in progress, I expect Cosmic to start supporting soon, too.

Are you saying all the sleep/hibernate, touch-pad, wifi, etc. issues that have plagued linux on laptops for decades at this point have now been resolved?

I haven't had issues with any of that stuff (using Debian) for years. YMMV, of course.

It did vary, last time I checked, but I'm not up to date.

Maybe time to try again.

With Debian, the key thing is that you usually have to install the non-free-firmware package to make things like WiFi work (anything that needs a proprietary blob). This isn't done automatically.

Yes, Over the years I've been through that (and other distros versions), downloaded/built alternate drivers etc.

Last time I tried a few years ago, it still seemed pretty hardware dependant as to whether you could ever get it all working quite right.

Now that I think of it, there have been two times relatively recently that I've not had something work "out of the box".

One is for a WiFi dongle: it needed a driver that wasn't in the non-free-firmware package, and the manufacturer's Linux driver was too old to work with modern Linux. Fortunately, someone had written a replacement driver that I could get from github. That involved compiling the driver code, though, and the process wasn't something a non-geek could be expected to do.

The other wasn't for a laptop at all, but a tower. I'd installed a WiFi card in it that didn't work out of the box -- I had to copy the firmware from the CD that came with it onto my machine to make it work. That was easy enough to do, though, that my grandma could have done it without a problem by following the readme on the CD.

That said, I run an abnormal number of Linux machines, and two hiccups out of a dozen or so seems like a decent track record to me.

> and two hiccups out of a dozen or so seems like a decent track record to me.

certainly better that the good (bad?) old days! At one point with laptops at least it seemed to be no better than chance. Maybe worse.

Never used hibernate or touchpad gestures since touchpad sucks on my thinkpad, but sleep and hw decode works fine (i'd say sleep works much better since my windows install randomly started up the machine for updates until i killed all the scheduling tasks and did some gpo stuff to prevent all this nonsense). To be honest, I consider sleep to be completely broken on windows. I am using 1080p display, so i dont use fractional scaling (also still running x11) on popos 22.04

What did you do about Reaper? I'm in a similar boat and I'm not super excited about moving to another DAW.

EDIT I didn't realise there's a linux build for Reaper now! I guess I'll still have to sort out how to run my VSTs but that's probably a case by case thing.

I feel bad for the people who have to stick with Windows because they need to use Adobe or Microsoft products.

I don't how good it is, but Google literally forced Microsoft to create a web version of office, so now Linux users have excel?

So I have about 2 years to prepare to run some flavour of Gaming Linux on my desktop, cool.

Thankfully, Valve's continued and dedicated support for the Steam Deck has made this a very easy alternative to consider.

Been a Windows Main my whole life. Bought the steam deck a year ago and it was awesome. Bought a new pc couple of weeks ago and installed linux mint. Few minor issues, resolved in net 2hours. Since then it has been a breeze. Developing, gaming, even running Windows apps is no problem anymore.

What email client do you use?

Seems like there's a bunch of us with the same idea. Once W10 is end of life my plan is to build a new PC and run Linux on it. Gaming is my only reservation but hoping mostly a non issue by 2025.

Many of us have jumped ship years ago. It's been largely a non-issue for years now, but especially so with the introduction of the Steam deck in recent times.

If I recall correctly, when Windows 10 was released, it was touted as the last version of Windows, the evergreen version with incremental updates. It took Microsoft less than a decade to break that promise.

Less than a decade? You give them too much credit. Try six years.

But then people would just have continued to use their old hardware for many, many years, saving money and resources. Luckily that horrible future with diminished revenue for the PC industry was averted. /s

"Enable workers to get the most secure Windows ever with Windows 11. It’s AI-enhanced and easy to use with a 250% ROI."

Wtf is this even supposed to mean. 250% ROI, AI enhanced ?? What ?

Lots of us got Windows 10 as a free upgrade back when it was going to be the last version of Windows ever.

My ROI has been pretty good on that $0 purchase.

I've planned for this by migrating to Linux; I received a new machine with Windows 11 and was so abhorred by what an abomination it is that I switched my OS after using Windows for what feels like forever. Maybe 2025 will be the year of Linux on the desktop and we'll have Microsoft to thank? I know I have Microsoft to thank for opening my eyes to a Linux desktop.

Yea someone just posted similar thoughts the other day. Microsoft making windows worse is making linux desktop environments look much better.

I am a fan of pop_OS.

I've done the same. I've used Linux for 15-20 years for various things, but never on my main desktop because of games. But now Steam on Linux makes running games very easy. Not every game works, but there are a lot that do, and I rely on Windows less and less for gaming. Hopefully one day I can blow away my Windows partition.

Do I get this right?

Windows 10 end of support will push many, many people to modern hardware?

Seems like HW companies will have very good year 2025/2026

brb purchasing stocks

Yes and No.

A lot of folks will go with newer hardware due to lacking TPM, etc. support, but those people were likely to upgrade at 1-3 year intervals anyway.

A majority of users will just keep running Windows 10, with or without sec updates until they can no longer buy a system with 10.

There are still Windows 7 and Vista installs out there, running every day, and I don't mean outliers. I know a clinic that runs Windows 8.1 on everything. Not because it's a great OS, but the Doctor handles his own IT, has the media handy and knows how to install it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As another example, in the microlab of the 3rd hospital I was Director of IT for, I found....a Windows 3.11 machine. Literally, Windows 3.11, with a CRT touchscreen monitor. I reached out to the vendor and suggested that maybe...just maybe...it's time to replace this unit with one a bit more modern.

If neither the Windows 8 machine nor the Windows 3.11 machine are networked with any path to the internet, they can limp along for quite some time without replacement. The bigger worry is this ancient hardware blowing a cap and leaving you unable to complete some vital function for the week.

If they were isolated, I wouldn't care much. Luckily the 3.11 machine was NOT public facing.

In all fairness, Windows 3.11 is so ancient that it is probably immune to (or overlooked by) most modern threats.

You're also pretty limited in what you can do and who you can communicate with on an older OS.

For example, Windows XP doesn't support modern and commonly implemented TLS.

Windows 3.11 didn't come with TCP/IP stack, just IPX/SPX and NetBEUI. You had to install TCP/IP separately.

Yeah I remember. There were 3rd party winsocks and they had compatibility problems. I remember upgrading to 95 and trying to run 3.1 winsock apps. It worked. But it had lots of issues.

I was just pulling out the XP example (a decade newer than 3.1) to illustrate the scale of difficulty one would have. You could literally have the same SChannel binary run on Win11 and WinXP... And the XP one wouldn't be able to talk to the modern internet due to TLS. Obviously the further back in time you go, the more of this type of problem you would have.

Trumpet Winsock anyone?

EICAR incoming!

> brb purchasing stocks

AAPL and ARM? ;)

I thought about Amd and Intel

Tell that to the share of computers still running XP :)

Well, let's go with Linux then.

Looks like this will finally lead to the Year of the Linux Desktop.

I think the point is that even though one could do all the hacks required to disable the hardware checks that Windows 11 unnecessarily imposes, subsequent updates and re-patching tend to be painful for end users.

I think that Linux w/ LTS for the next few years may be the sane option for the next decade.

For most people, beyond that timeframe - there may not exist a dedicated gaming PC at all if the purpose is to play games or even get basic productivity work done.

For people like me, I will always embrace the openness and upgradability of a PC though.

My N-2 is a 6850k CPU based system, ie Broadwell-E. I'd love for Microsoft to allow it to run Win11, on paper it meets all the requirements, and I also bought the hardware TPM module.

Crazy annoying. Also, this was from a time when Intel went through chipsets like single use underwear - after this I moved to AM4, couldn't have been any happier! (3900XT to 5800x3d!).

I still have a 2600k in play (the N-3); I like my PCs to last a while. I understand the (4.4ghz on air) 2600k don't meet the requirements and it needs to be updated, but the 6-core 6850k was one I really hoped to keep around for a while eg for my now 5 year old daughter. (I use Windows predominantly, and Ubuntu through WSL2.)

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/94188/i...

I run Windows in VM only for gaming (vfio videocard passthrough on Linux). So couldn't care less what's inside - win10 or win11.

Strange, I thought Windows 10 was the last major version ever[1] and you'd never need to do anything but small updates from then on?

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/205320-microsoft-windo...

That one guy from Microsoft said it at ignite in 2015 and it ran through the media cycle despite Microsoft only ever confirming in follow ups Windows 10 would receive regular updates with no commitment there would never be new branding in the future. With how often people only remember the quote and none of the context I'm starting to wonder if it'll be like the 640k quote someday.

This image of the windows 10 airplane still makes me giggle: https://imgur.com/qFcVLYY. Sad thing is, it would look even worse today.

All I know is that I'll be jumping from Win 10 to Win 12. The Linux desktop sits with Windows 11 as a non-starter. Apple is also a contender, but I have no desire to get locked into Apple's walled garden environment.

So now I know when I'll forced off of Windows, and lose access to WikidPad as a result... October 14, 2025. Choices are to fix WikidPad by then, or migrate all the notes to NotePad++, etc.

Oct 2025, by that time Windows 12 will come out and we can continue the skip every other Windows OS cycle.

Or it will all be Windows 365 subscription only.

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