Microsoft begins cracking down on people dodging Windows 11 system requirements | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft begins cracking down on people dodging Windows 11 system requirements

xda-developers.com

42 pointstaubek94 comments

I have trouble understanding the point of this move from Microsoft's perspective. You actively stop people from re-using older hardware to run windows 11. Those users have 3 options. Continue running windows 10, install alternative OS or buy new hardware.

I cannot see how they would want option 1 or 2, then I have to deduct that they want people to buy new hardware to run the latest OS version. Do they want to force the increase in TPM 2.0 share in the PC market quicker? Do they want to increase hardware sales because they get more money from those than from older licenses?

Sure, it's motivated by a bit of license turnover like you suggest. But mostly it's a case of securing their OS against adversaries (including their users). You can lock down the system a lot more with TPM on your side: Now you can keep secrets away from users reliably.

I think we are seriously nearing the point of no return. Once you have manufacturers start implementing TC, that will really hamper reverse engineering efforts. Over time, the side channels will get ironed out.

Enforcing TPM requirements isn't about making users make changes, it's to scare OEMs into including TPMs by default so they don't get complaints from users. Microsoft wants a more controlled hardware environment like Apple does, because it's more profitable for a variety of reasons.

> Enforcing TPM requirements isn't about making users make changes, it's to scare OEMs into including TPMs by default so they don't get complaints from users.

Would any OEM dare to use workarounds to install windows 11 on not officially supported hardware? I feel like most OEMs would simply upgrade the hardware no questions asked. Simply because should any problem occur, Microsoft would just tell them your problem not ours.

> Once you have manufacturers start implementing TC, that will really hamper reverse engineering efforts.

Doesn't 90% of the push for this come from Media companies to implement DRM?

> Would any OEM dare to use workarounds to install windows 11 on not officially supported hardware? I feel like most OEMs would simply upgrade the hardware no questions asked. Simply because should any problem occur, Microsoft would just tell them your problem not ours.

Well on a basic level, if the consumer buys your motherboard or laptop and it doesn't work out of the box (but your competitors do) then you are going to have a massive customer satisfaction problem.

> Doesn't 90% of the push for this come from Media companies to implement DRM?

I don't think so. DRM is an old lens of understanding the problem from the last generation. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg . The new methods use a softer approach. Consider something like iOS where the developers can just make it very uncomfortable to do something like download a video and watch it. There's no bittorrent app or p2p file-sharing, there's no real filesystem, and there is no real standalone video player. So users rely on streaming services to do this for them, and you can charge money to middle-man that service.

You don't need to strictly enforce copyright like with DRM, just use trusted computing so that the entire system discourages general computer-like operations (including copying files, running programs, etc.) and encourages acting like a thin client to some server. This is a much better model because some small fraction of users still DO need to have general-purpose computing to make consumables in the first place (for example, video editors or musicians, writers, programmers) but the majority of the user-base is discouraged for a variety of reasons. The more you can separate the creator of information from the user of information, the more you can charge the user to access the creator.

You can't replace the OS or any of the parts of the machine because of trusted computing, so you cannot really use reverse engineering to simply break the system (and if you do, it may break the trust chain you now need to access now-networked services). Another example is that on a lot of phones and laptops these days, you can't add removable storage, so you are heavily encouraged to use cloud storage. And you are discouraged from using cloud services from any third party (usually on an API level, as services provided from the OS vendor can integrate better with the system). Consider how Apple pushes iCloud and Microsoft pushes OneCloud.

> Well on a basic level, if the consumer buys your motherboard or laptop and it doesn't work out of the box (but your competitors do) then you are going to have a massive customer satisfaction problem.

Ah I see what you mean. I over-focused on the full integrated system with pre-installed windows.

> I don't think so. DRM is an old lens of understanding the problem from the last generation. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg . The new methods use a softer approach.

Thanks for the link.

Once you have manufacturers start implementing TC, that will really hamper reverse engineering efforts.

Imagine the possibilities of capturing the non-Microsoft market be allowing the TC to be turned off, or by not including it.

When it comes to Microsoft, there is an old business saying: "Never turn away a paying customer", because you will not only lose this sale, you will lose all future sales too.

It also wouldn’t be Microsoft if they wouldn’t ceaselessly harass those users to upgrade to Windows 11, even if they’re using a non-upgradable laptop that will never see a new mainboard. It’s so braindead, I’m convinced at this point that Windows has been degraded to a mere sales funnel that is to be monetized at any cost.

Exactly. They could just add a check before the ad: is there a tpm2 device there? But no, it is 13 story points, we don’t have time vs some other knife into the back Of our unsuspecting cow (user)

Apple has a very good rate of people using the newest OS, they became envious. … wait what

I dunno what the "wait what" is for to be honest, because you have a good point and / or a sore spot for Microsoft; MacOS users (generally speaking) trust Apple, they have a great track record with gradual OS updates and minimal surprise even when they do major overhauls, with minimal or gradual updates to their visual design over the past 24 years (Aqua with OSX, then slowly dropping the skeuomorphic / Frutiger design language for flat design over time.) They're claiming 2020's Big Sur was their biggest visual overhaul, but it was a smooth transition.

Compare Microsoft that tried various different visual overhauls in the same period, first with Windows XP (2001) leaning into the Fruitiger asthetic, then Windows Vista and 7 (Aero design), Metro (windows 8, windows mobile) and now Fluent (windows 10 and beyond). While trying to add more monetization via ads and office365 integration.

I'm not saying Apple is not guilty of the monetization, they've had three different incarnations of their cloud offerings before iCloud settled things (iirc) and they do promote it within MacOS, but it doesn't come across as cynically as MS's offerings do.

They're jealous of the platform Apple has created where they can sell the users rather than sell software to them. This requires cryptographic hardware like the TPM.

Obviously it's not going to work because the only advantage Windows had was being the last popular platform that didn't work this way^ but the admins in charge of the decisions probably don't understand this.

^There also used to be compatibility with early y2k apps and familiarity of users from school but both of those have been quickly eroding.

EDIT: Out of replies

Trapping 20% of tech illiterate users would be a loss considering they currently have upwards of 80%.

> Obviously it's not going to work because the only advantage Windows had was being the last popular platform that didn't work this way^ but the admins in charge of the decisions probably don't understand this.

If they can trap 20% of tech illiterate customers into their garden would that not already count as a win? Now they can extract more money from them than they could before.

Option 1 is arguably not an option in a lot of people's minds with the EOL date for W10 coming up, and threatening/pushy notifications from MS on all W10 machines telling people to upgrade to W11.

Option 2 is a non-starter for a lot of people - can't afford a Mac, would never be able to work out Linux. ChromeOS is an option but if you're going to buy new hardware, why not just go with option 3 and get a new Windows machine.

Option 3 is MS's favourite; they shift more unit of their own hardware, failing that they shift more licenses from OEMs, they lock more people into W11, then progressively upsell them stuff from within the OS itself, and finally make more money off of advertising from 3rd parties in the OS itself.

I'm also inclined to think that by creating a generational gap with hardware like this, MS is making their own lives easier by only having to test W11 on modern hardware - no legacy users to support. So they make more money, potentially for less effort.

I currently use various Ubuntus, Mac OS, Windows 10 and Windows 11 more or less evenly. Windows 11 is by far the most hostile and frustrating of these.

I quite like Windows 10. It's unassuming and everything more or less works. I was somewhat shocked at how much worse Windows 11 is, despite not looking that different at first glance.

Windows 10 was fantastic. Unfortunately some nice features (maybe critical depending on your needs) are limited to Windows 11 only. Such as WiFi 6e/7 support and WSL 2 graphics/cuda support.

> Windows 10 was fantastic.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Windows 7 was fantastic. Windows 10 was... OK at best.

I'll never forgive MS for what they did with the UI from Windows 8 onward.

I think I can install windows 7 these days and marvel at the amazing upgrade it is from win 11. It’d be like they completely corrected course and fixed all their mistakes.

WSL2 graphics support was backported and supports Win10. I’m not sure about CUDA though

I've been assuming that Windows 11 incompatibility was a gift from above, since my system has stopped bothering me about updating.

And why aren't more people switching to an OS that respects them (like Linux)?

Because for most users the costs of getting used to a new OS outweigh the benefit of switching.

No, it’s because people approximate the costs badly. Pretty much everyone I know is biased towards inaction even if the action provides immediate as well as long term benefit. Especially when it comes to technology. Even the technology oriented people.

What was that about respecting users?

> No, it’s because people approximate the costs badly.

"Why doesn't everyone switch to Linux? They must be stupid" is just as short-sighted now as it was 30 years ago.

Linux is great, but there are and were plenty of good reasons why it's not optimal for the average user. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41283651

I didn’t say it’s stupid. Everyone’s assessment is inaccurate every once in a while. Or pretty much always, when it comes to certain biases.

You say “average user” and then point to a comment where someone’s disappointed that they can’t get their professional software to work. The average user these days needs a web browser, and doesn’t care which one.

> I didn’t say it’s stupid.

You're claiming that the main reason most people don't switch to Linux is some sort of deficiency of judgment rather than anything practical, and that's not true and it's never been true.

You dismissed the costs of getting used to a new OS right off the bat, and that's a real thing. In my link that you dismissed, the first sentence ("while Windows is very hostile ... to its users, it's rarely broken or buggy") is relevant to most users. Professionals may have trouble getting their apps to work, gaming has gotten better but still has the same problem. If user literally only cares about running a web browser, then yeah, Linux would be fine; but Windows is already fine, so why bother switching?

I like Linux. I've used it at home and professionally. I'm a huge fan of FOSS principles, and I think it would be better for everyone if more people used open systems. But Windows works well enough to satisfy most people, and they're not going to change purely for ideological reasons. Maybe it'd be a better world if they did! But it's not reasonable to expect them to, or to cast that as a failure of judgment.

If we're talking purely about the average user it's perfect for them. They use a browser primarily, which work great.

The trouble is the slightly above average user who is not technical. They think they know computers because they can click around in some random Windows GUI and get something to work. But they don't actually know much in a general "how stuff works" way.

And then there's the highly technical like SWE who thrive under Linux.

So really it's just the weird middle ground that struggles. You know, your MBAs who can use Excel but get scared at plaintext files.

I am not sure how you can be so certain that it would be an immediate benefit to those users… how are you measuring the cost of having to learn something new and the benefit of knowing how everything works?

Because a lot of the software that people are used to or want to run don't work on it. Gaming being a huge one.

Lutris. Fedora Bazzite + Flatpak = problem solved. Libreoffice? Flatpak. Updates? Seamlessly. Anything fails? Rollback.

Agreed. There are plenty of good solutions for gaming on Linux today.

But these solutions are lot more complex than the default windows experience of download steam, install game, play. Many people don’t want to tinker, they want to play their game, not the operating system.

Many games written for Windows run faster on linux now, but the biggest limitation is anti cheat for some of the larger titles. Fortnite, despite all its open platform push, probably holds linux back the most.

Apparently Fortnite has two different anti-cheats, and one of them works on Linux.

Both of them (EAC and Battleye, with EAC being Epics own product) can work on Linux if the developer integrating them chooses to allow it, but Epic has chosen not to allow it in Fortnite citing them being less secure when running on Linux. Which isn't an unfounded concern, judging by the state of cheating in Apex Legends ever since they started allowing Linux clients, nearly every cheat chooses to attack the Linux version now despite the vast majority of Apex players in general being Windows users. Most cheaters dual boot Linux for no reason other than to cheat.

> citing them being less secure when running on Linux > nearly every cheat chooses to attack the Linux version now despite the vast majority of Apex players in general being Windows users.

Did they give any more details as to why? It could come from cheaters preferring developing for one platform than the other. I would like to know which features windows has that makes cheats harder that they miss on linux.

The anti-cheats run in kernel-mode on Windows and user-mode on Linux, so it is significantly easier to hide a cheat on Linux. The Linux ACs can't see anything outside of the standard process isolation sandbox.

And to get the same for linux they would have to build a kernel module for all major distributions or open source the module and have users compile it themselves. I can see why both dont make sense for them.

Thanks for clarifying.

Sure with higher overhead of support. Running Windows on my gaming rig means all my games are capable without fail. On Linux, I have two recently played games which would require a ton of work to get them working. MSFS and WARNO.

>Many games written for Windows run faster on linux now

Is this really true? I find it _really_ hard to believe.

Steam Fossilize

As someone else reviewed the other day (in the 9590X review thread), Linux gets better worst-case performance, while Windows will likely have higher highs and lower lows

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269996

For things like getting into the game, look at windows defender CPU usage during startup...

At least most stuff puts everything in a single .pak file and uses sqlite databases to avoid most of the windows filesystem overheads I guess.

I'm pretty sure Epic Games' "open platform" push has nothing to do with FOSS or antitrust and everything to do with money.

Tim Sweeney's tweet comparing computer users moving from Windows to Linux to "moving to Canada" comes to mind.

Also, a major way that the Epic Games store was funded was via double-digit stock investment from Tencent, one of the largest gaming monopolies and also tech monopolies. Imagine if Facebook, Paypal, Disney, and Microsoft's gaming division merged into one company, and you start to describe Tencent.

Tencent is using Epic Games to drive a wedge in the US-based tech companies and raise anti-trust concerns with them.

They are legitimate concerns. The 30% fees on the gross amount to more than half of the profits going to platform holders even after subtracting their payment processing and bandwidth expenses. And then they charge you for marketing within the store on top of those fees, driving it way above 50% of net profits on titles that want to be seen (organic visibility based is intentionally undermined by the in-store ads system).

Of course it doesn't, despite all the talk, Sweeney happily kept having his games published by Microsoft and Epic Games store released without Linux support.

Steam deck made gaming work really well, sometimes better than windows with the same hardware. It isn’t 100% compatible of course, but it does work for most things.

Not being 100% compatible makes it a non-starter. I only use Windows on my gaming machine, and until I can play all the games I play with no performance hit, I am not going to switch.

You’re confusing 100% compatible with all the games you play. All the games I play are 100% compatible, I’ve already switched. If the ones you play aren’t, of course you won’t switch. The question is whether you checked or just assumed they don’t work.

I have checked. They aren't all compatible.

I recently tried. After hours of trying my xbox controller still can't connect. Steam doesn't detect my Gullikit controller and frankly, I have to literally decide to go down this pain again to hopefully maybe switch one day.

Strange, my PlayStation 5 controller just works on openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Don't have one of those (and really don't want one, AA ftw in a controller tbh), from what I read during my journey is that the xbox controller uses some weird DRM in their chipset but I have honestly no clue what that means in the context of bluetooth.

I'm not surprised microsoft would make linux compatibility with their controllers difficult. A shame, though.

Odd. Are you sure it's Linux? Or at least totally Linux? I've had no issues pairing MS Series X controllers (or Xbox One) over Bluetooth to my Steam Deck or Linux PCs or using them plugged in. Maybe the Gullikit controllers don't operate quite the same as the MS versions that the drivers don't play nice?

Honestly I connected it to both macOS and windows before. I recently got a new WiFi card so I'm thinking it just has a crappy chipset in terms of Linux support (Asus PCE-AXE59BT is all my store had at the time). Playing around with Mint and tried the xpadneo kmod.

That's really weird, I also have a Gullikit controller (the one with the hall effect sticks) and it works perfect OOTB on my desktop & laptop, both running Linux. Maybe try switching the mode on the controller to Windows/Android instead of Nintendo Switch?

Linux is still a hard sell if you don't have easy access to people who know it well. Even things like adding an app to the app bar can require editing a text config.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and my kid uses it, but it's STILL more painful than Windows for a lot of things.

Right click -> Pin to Task Manager?

If you're using something like i3, sure, but you know what you're getting into. If you're using something like KDE, it just works.

Decision making like Gnome’s “you can’t put things on the desktop, why would you want that anyway, you’re using the desktop wrong” don’t do it any favors with getting people to switch from Windows or Mac.

I know you said Linux, and maybe have the same opinion of Apple, but if the OS does actually require TPM 2.0 (and much of MSFT's stuff tries to degrade decently, for all their faults, so this might not be immediately obvious), it's not much different than the hardware requirements Apple imposes (which to be fair, some people also see as arbitrary, and in some cases, I would agree).

Because half the shit I use only works on windows. And no I can’t change it because I have to work with other people who’s shit only works on windows.

For me, it's touch screen support. I try it out periodically to see if it's improved.

Battery life is the second issue.

Touch screen support depends on your desktop environment, I'd recommend giving a modern GNOME + Wayland setup a try. As for battery life...yeah, that's hit or miss. There's some management tools that can help sometimes.

My personal experience is that while Windows is very hostile (and getting worse) to its users, it's rarely broken or buggy. The system lets me get work done and not fidget with the system itself.

Linux-on-the-desktop has made great strides. But I still get screen tearing when scrolling in my browser. I still tend to find that I need 0.5 to 1 generation old hardware for the drivers to work. I don't get good battery life on laptops unless I spend way too much time fiddling with things.

And of course, a lot of professional tools don't work on Linux at all. I'm an electrical engineer and while I'm not a designer for my day job any more, I do still use professional-level tools for personal projects. They run in Windows, and Windows only. So basically no matter how much strength of will I have, those tools ultimately keep me on Windows as my daily driver.

I love a lot of Linux command-line tools and always have WSL w/Debian on my Windows machines. No more dual-booting.

Yep, all this. I've tried linux half a dozen times over the last couple decades, several times it even seems to work out of the box - then a day or week later, I realize my printer doesn't work, or I unplug the ethernet and realize the wifi doesnt work, or something that had worked great suddenly stops because of some update. All problems relying on searching through decade-out of date forum posts, hoping someone else's commandline solution fixes my issue. It's too much work, so I use windows 10.

>All problems relying on searching through decade-out of date forum posts, hoping someone else's commandline solution fixes my issue

I've been fortunate that Claude 3.5 Sonnet has been an excellent troubleshooter for my problems so far.

Because for the vast majority of normal people a computer is equivalent to Windows. Many of them don’t even memorise concepts, but areas on the screen where to click, in the order required to achieve a specific outcome. Those are stumped when Microsoft modifies the layout of the task bar or a context menu.

And now someone tells them to install Linux, on a separate partition perhaps, with a shared boot manager, migrate their data from NTFS to ext4 into the correct folders, install their apps or equivalents in the package manager, and get used to a myriad of different interface design approaches? This is just not going to happen, unless the onboarding experience is improved by a few orders of magnitude, and desktop applications use a single, consistent, UI framework.

I'd say that for most users the main blocker is the inane (from Windows point of view) Linux partition setup and management.

The whole system setup is just borderline arcane. Tell my girlfriend to do that or hack the government, it will be on the same level of impossible to her. And she’s a smart, digital native.

And that comes before all the user interface struggles mentioned above.

"Digital native" is more a marketing term than anything else, and because of the age group it referred to, it ended up meaning the opposite of what was originally intended: it's people who didn't experience technology's growing pains, only the simple slick interfaces, and so don't really understand how it works.

There’s a difference to prior generations, though. My parents grew up with machines being brittle; you could break something permanently by operating it the wrong way. That is fundamentally different with computers: Younger people I like to refer to as digital natives have been raised on software and usually just mess around until something works. That doesn’t mean they really understand it, but the mindset around human-technology interaction is fundamentally different, and devoid of the angst of breaking stuff older people tend to show.

So my point here is that even people open to experimenting with technology will be absolutely helpless in setting up and using a Linux distribution, because the onboarding experience demands so much implicit knowledge.

> she’s a smart, digital native

I mean... I don't want to say anything mean because it's not her fault, but I wouldn't say this.

A digital native 30 years ago was writing SQL queries to make reports for their boss. And they were a secretary making hourly pay.

Digital natives today can barely run their goo goo ga ga phone software. Systems have gotten so abstract that complexity is completely hidden from users. So users don't actually know how to do anything.

I mean, I've had friends, digital native friends, who can't explain what a filesystem is. They don't know what a directory is. They don't know what different types of files are. They don't know what an Excel workbook is versus a text document or what .md means or whatever.

Point being, the problem isn't the complexity or "arcaneness" of linux (side note: linux isn't even arcane, many workflows are much more modern/faster than in Windows land). The issue is that nobody knows how to do anything anymore.

I just spent a week trying to share a new hard drive via samba and failed completely. "Respects them" my ass.

I can only think of one reason: gaming. Gaming on Linux is much better now, but still nowhere near as good as gaming on Windows.

Yeah, definitely for multiplayer. Love what Valve is doing though, hopefully more companies will follow suit.

Linux respects everything except for the user's time

Idk, I think most beginner distros are fine. If my dad (who primarily uses Apple products, browses the web, checks email, that's it) can figure out Fedora + GNOME, I think anyone can.

Perhaps they could stop everyone using Windows 11 and make the world a better place.

They still provide directions on downgrading the TPM check from 2.0 to 1.2: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/ways-to-install-...

I discovered that in a weird limbo: I updated to Windows 11 on an "old" XPS 13, and never used that device again in Windows. Several years later tried to use Windows 11 there for a specific purpose and it says that I don't have the required hardware.

It is interesting that around this time (COVID age) I started using the MB Air M1 and couldn't connect many external monitors while my "old" XPS 13 could be plugged to any Thunderbolt dock and works incredible well, even without configuring anything special in Linux.

I don't think this is a benefit for a Microsoft strategy but that many people there should be layoff. It is completely contrary with their current developer strategy. Also, privacy-wise you cannot now for sure if they are sending your keystrokes via telemetry... as a negligence.

I don't think the title is accurate. The article says that the trick of adding "/product server" no longer works in the Canary branch, but its pure speculation that this is a "crack down".

I am one of those people. I keep a Windows partition around only for gaming. Looks like I’ll have to replace it with a Linux partition.

Essentially all I need is Steam and discord. Let me know what Linux distributions is most suitable?

FreeBSD is my daily driver but I’m well familiar with the entire OS jungle by now :-)

Most of them, really. Both steam and discord are readily available in package managers.

How do you "enforce" system requirements? Either the machine will run the software or it won't. Is Microsoft actively blacklisting hardware specifications to force people to buy new hardware even if they don't need it?

Why in the world would anyone continue to rely on this company?

Windows 10 LTSC for my testing machine, MacOS for me and ChromeOS Flex for the friends and family Thinkpads. This pretty much solves our personal computing needs. Throw in a few vintage Brother laser printers where needed.

At this point, Windows 11 is the Vista of this generation. I wonder how longer I can stay on 10 until they either fix it with Windows 12 or I'll get used to native Ubuntu with KDE.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41278379

the more people trying out alternatives OSes, the better thanks, msft

So now what? Have to install Windows 10?

Edit: this is for the installer of the latest (canary) branch. Not sure if it will be an issue for updates on existing installs.

that site xda-developers has one of the worst GDPR interfaces I have ever seen?! You scroll through 1974! (2000..) list items to uncheck them all.. after 25%, I gave up and left

You can block third-party cookies in browser and install extension "i still don't care about cookies". (not sure if and how it works on mobile)

I recommend the Consent-O-Matic plugin. It automatically rejects consent on almost all sites I interact with on a semi-regular basis.

uBlock and nothing bothers you (at least not on this site)

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