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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft literally chose to make Windows 11 refuse to install on the majority of PCs [1], so that's hardly surprising. They also chose to make one of the most fundamental interface elements, the Start menu, worse in every way.

There are some nice features too, and I'd probably upgrade another PC or two if they would let me.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3657628/more-than-half...

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Windows 11 doesn't actually need a TPM or secure boot functionality to run at all, which is why Microsoft introduced an exemption commonly used in lab/school environments. When you get the “This PC can’t run Windows 11” error message during installation:

-Press Shift+F10 to open a command prompt and run regedit.exe to launch the Registry Editor.

-Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup

-Right-click on the Setup key in the left pane and choose New -> Key. Call this key LabConfig.

-Right-click the LabConfig key in the left pane and choose New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value. Call this value BypassTPMCheck.

-Right-click the LabConfig key in the left pane and choose New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value. Call this value BypassSecureBootCheck.

-Double-click both the BypassTPMCheck and BypassSecureBootCheck values and change the Value data from 0 to 1.

-Close the Registry Editor and command prompt windows.

-At the Windows setup screen with the error message, press the back button in the upper left and then click Next to continue installation normally.

After installation, the Windows Security Center will display a warning indicating that your system doesn't have a TPM, but you can choose "Dismiss" and you'll get a green validation checkmark next to that section from that point onwards.

Meanwhile Linux just installs, updates, and runs without having to trick the OS and performing 9 obscure steps.

Yet I continue to lose at least one whole day of my life per year trying to get some random wireless card working.

How many cumulative days per year do you spend fighting Windows updates. Clicking through the marketing campaigns for Windows 11, updating registries, etc.?

Zero - I run a script when I install the OS and it kills all of that. I've never once had a Windows Update break anything on any of the computers I own. I definitely shouldn't have to do set a load of regkeys to make the computer do what I want it to do but it certainly beats the experience of Linux on a desktop.

Except you (or whoever you took it from) had to make a script to accomplish it in the first place. Something an average user on old hardware won’t be willing to do on Windows. Not sure what’s wrong with the Linux desktop experience that you’d go to such great lengths. My DE has been stable and feature full for 6+ years now.

And considering most people just run a browser most of the time now, Linux looks even better than the restricted non-user friendly marketing platform that Windows evolved into.

I never fight windows updates personally. Have not had an issue for several years at least and I use windows for several hours a day at least (without any custom scripts or modifications).

Unlike the other person who replied to you, I don't have a script to disable anything. I spend zero cumulative hours thinking or worrying about updates, it's just always up to date.

While I recall registry exploring in the 2000s, I haven't needed to do that in 10+ years.

None?

That's amazing! I found the time-traveler from 2005. NDISwrapper is tricky, but trust me in a few years it gets better, and kernels will come pre-stocked with most chipsets and blob-firmware packages will be available from the package manager.

I haven't had to worry about wireless cards working in Linux in 15 years or more. What sort of hardware are you seeing these issues with?

Laptops and NUC style devices usually.

Which versions of linux cleanly update? What do I do with an old Centos 7 system?

Plenty of Linux flavors update seamlessly. Update it or migrate to a new flavor. You might like Debian if you liked CentOS enough to keep a machine running it.

Ubuntu does. I do a fresh install of Kubuntu every couple of years, and in-place upgrades in between. With fresh installs, I make a file image of the old OS partition with dd and mount it from within the new system to copy across /etc files and settings (and I keep track of all of that in a text file to use as a manual script next time). The separate /home partition doesn't get changed at all.

For how many years have you had the same server running Ubuntu? Which version did you start with? LTS upgrades only? I don't want to update but once every 5 years or so.

The PC I'm on is from 2012 (well, its motherboard and CPU are; everything else has been upgraded at least once, and I plan to do a new build from scratch this year), and has been running Kubuntu the whole time, as did my previous PC. I don't stick to LTS releases, as sometimes I want updated software from newer ones. If you do update to non-LTS releases, you have to keep updating, as the non-LTS releases stop getting updates and security fixes after a year.

I set things up in a way that makes a fresh install (rather than an update) pretty painless anyway. I always have a dedicated /home partition, which stays untouched by any update or reinstall, so all app settings are just carried through. Before I moved to a more space-limited SSD for the OS partition, I had multiple OS partitions available, so I could leave the old OS intact on one, but I pretty much never booted the old one, so an image in a file does the job just as well. I document all my setup steps in a text file and follow that, updating it as I go, for the setup of the next fresh install.

I wouldn't recommend going 5 years between updates, for security reasons, but every two years between LTS releases would be fine. You could look into distrobox for running more up-to-date apps - I've done that a bit.

Fedora cleanly updates and is nearly identical to CentOS. It's also the distro that Linus Torvalds uses on his personal systems because it stays very current with regards to the kernel, and he doesn't have to worry about the small stuff because the Fedora project team members do a stellar job.

> Which versions of linux cleanly update?

Most of them, these days.

> What do I do with an old Centos 7 system?

Compare apples to oranges, since CentOS was discontinued, and then move forward anyways because https://almalinux.org/elevate/ has you covered.

Debian does, it is one of the reasons why I eventually made it my default choice for new long-term installations. Before I used Debian I tested SLS, Slackware, Yggdrasil and Redhat. I have run Caldera, Ubuntu and Mint as well as a bunch of special-purpose distributions (Raspbian, Puppy, LTSP on iOpeners, OpenWRT, etc.) but Debian is where it is at if it has to run for a long time spanning several upgrades.

Are they providing assurances that these machines won't break through an update?

Oh, yes, install Windows 11 with these simple steps.

Honestly if I have to open PowerShell and mess with the registry just to install an ad-full upgrade of my OS, I'd rather install Gentoo. At least I'll learn more and won't get ads by building from scratch.

I was going to say, if their goal was to escape the shadow of Windows 10 instead of doubling down on it, they did a poor job.

Apparently the thing making it to refuse to install is "TPM 2.0".

I'm not a Windows user but a Linux user, and this simply makes me wonder: will TPM 2.0 in any way make PC hardware impossible to install Linux on? I remember there was a windows TPM related thing that would lock in the hardware to only boot windows, is this it?

You’re thinking of secure boot, tpm is wholly unrelated.

As far as I know, TPM can be disabled in the BIOS. Perhaps not on every motherboard, but I have yet to encounter one like that.

I run Linux fine on systems with TPM 2.0 (with Secure Boot enabled).

No, that was the Secure Boot scare. TPM is unrelated to that particular matter, though it can interact with Secure Boot (as part of Measured Boot).

Both technologies apply to any operating system and provide important software security benefits.

The TPM 2.0 scare was a different one: that websites would start requiring the use of TPM 2.0 to prove that you're running unmodified Windows, which would make Linux users unable to access these websites (and even running legitimate Windows on a virtual machine wouldn't be enough, these websites would accept only Windows running directly on the bare hardware).

That is, the use of TPM 2.0 would not lock the hardware to only boot Windows (it's SecureBoot that would do that, once Microsoft stops signing Linux bootloaders and starts requiring that OEMs forbid disabling it, like they already did for ARM laptops), but the use of TPM 2.0 would lock Linux users out of important services, in practice forcing them to boot Windows.

Remote attestation is absolutely part of the feature set of TPM. That is isn't used is because of the poor adaptation. So I wouldn't say it 'was' as scare. Of course there are different threats too.

Actually it is quite a current topic, because tech companies are interested in this for very obvious reasons that is not referring to your evil maid. Web integrity comes to mind.

Which features seem nice to you?

Good touch gestures for window and desktop manipulation, multiple desktops easier and better, tabs supported in more places (e.g. File Explorer and Notepad), better behaviour when connecting and disconnecting external monitors, some nice window positioning, better WSL integration, etc. Nothing huge, but lots of little improvements.

The monitors is actually broken for me. Windows disconnects my monitor even for something as small as alt-tabbing from a fullscreen game and refuses to reconnect it till I unplug the monitor and plug it back in.

Proper HDR support. What's the point of fancy OLED screens when you can't use them?

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