Microsoft extends free Windows 10 security updates into 2026
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
53% is huge mere months away from the end, and actually means that the efforts have resoundingly failed.
Compounded with general upgrade procrastination...
For instance Enterprise LTSC version of Windows 10 is officially supported until 2031.
A ton of the devices inside these 53% have no need to move away from win 10 in any urgent way.
On OS updates I'm willing to give them a pass, but that kind of split and "foot in the door" pushiness is so typical.
53% is a huge failure on MS part, but that's what happens when you design OS to be a bad copy of your competition.
Seeing how much better my friends apple computers ran than my modern windows computers, I just went full Linux. Loving it. Telling my parents and friends to consider it instead of buying a new computer to replace the 'slow one'.
Also yeah, I could do without paying just fine and work as basically a Windows engineer so I can Google stuff but I'm just over trying to deal with getting Linux working.
I do also have a steam deck and gaming is stellar on Proton but you still need Windows for DRM triple a games.
We're down to just three Windows boxes (four if you count the Xbox Series X) in our household, and are likely to winnow that down further following the resounding success of a Linux gaming box on old Sandy Bridge CPU + GTX 970 GPU + HDD. The eldest gamer in the household is so sick of Microsoft's nonsense that the only reason they're not fully on Linux already is because their production box is reliant upon Intel RST, which makes dual-booting a dangerous game.
Including the rest of my family, we have but one other Windows box amongst an extended family of ~dozen folks. Everyone else has moved to macOS or Linux.
Speaking from an IT perspective, I've also seen more organizations court macOS as a standard machine in lieu of Win11, especially with Microsoft's shift to InTune and away from Group Policy. Microsoft thought inertia would carry their customers into the cloud, but the costs involved posed enough of a speed bump that customers are reconsidering their Microsoft estate, provided they weren't already in Azure and/or didn't have M365 E5.
It's a bloodbath. Microsoft extending free support is tacit acknowledgement they s*t the bed and have no other gameplan ready to go right now.
If we want to talk about disaster it's that Microsoft lost the smartphone battle. The real future of computing.
I guess my concern is where are the gradual on-ramps for getting people into that desktop PC (windows or otherwise) environment so they can explore and discover what it enables for them? There's no trouble if you already know you're an enthusiast, you can make an informed decision if the bill of parts is worth it, and I don't see professional-workstations going away as a tool.
So I guess I’m banging my efficiency and optimization drum again, is what I’m saying.
Ubuntu had weird quirks that almost always turned out to be related to my using a snap package. Of course I wasted countless hours getting to the point where I realised that was the issue.
Mint stopped booting once for unknown reasons on modern hardware and I had to reinstall. Another time I wasted half my day trying to get my whatever-the-distro-calls-taskbar to reappear when it decided to disappear. Debian was stable but every time I had an issue I had to battle through advice that was too new to apply.
Linux is great at making me feel like I’m crazy - I must have wasted 2 hours trying to figure out how to get an app image to run nicely from the whatever-the-distro-calls-a-start-button. Everything seemed so complex and backwards compared to Windows. I have to configure the icon myself?! This was automatic in Windows 3.1. I wasted so much time thinking I was missing a better way only to realise, nope, this is the way. It was bizarre that everybody was happy to run a random 3rd party GitHub app to solve this. Unbelievable that in 2025 downloading an app and getting an icon to start it involved so much complexity (appimage vs flatpak vs snap vs gz vs sh… who the hell has time to figure this out?!).
Eventually I decided I’d had enough and don’t want to spend the rest of my life messing around like I’m a teenager with all the time in the world, and switched everything over to Apple, which is working out great.
Virtual Desktop is broken. You can't quickly move a window both on a different screen and virtual desktop at the same time. You need to do it in 2 steps. There are some type of windows (like auth ones) that will appear on all virtual desktop regardless of your wishes.
Windows updates that don't go through with obscure, non informative, codes. When you use a search engine for it, you are led to Microsoft Community with absolutely zero solutions. Sometimes after a random amount of days failing and random reboots, they end up going through.
Hitting win key and trying to search for an app or document randomly freeze. The popup menu appears but you can't type anything. Badically if you don't put apps icons in your taskbar you are never sure you will be able to start it without opening a terminal and starting it from powershell.
There are various stupid stuff, like why can't I create a symlink in my own user directory without being an administrator?
I can't put the taskbar wherever I want. I am fairly sure that last time I used a windows 10 years or so ago I could have the taskbar at the top or on the side. In win2000 and XP too.
UI is super slow all the time.
Peoole complain about appimage/flatpal/snap, this is worse on windows where you have random exe installer, winget, chocolatey, scoop and the windows store. Worse even when winget you seem to still have to go through the interactive installer. If I am using the command line, that's because I want a modern package installation and the app ready, not having to click next n times.
It also took my IT 2 weeks to solve an issue where whatever security tool they are using was complaining that my brand new computer was infringing a number of security policies and my access to some resources online would be limited.
And I am forgetting a lot of other frustrations but basically it feels like you are fighting the OS all the time and an insane amount of time is lost doing so. It doesn't help that I am not allowed to install WSL.
Is that similar? That would make it the last version you'll have to pay for. At least for most people.
Some conditions may apply:
* hardware compatibility permitting
* until we decide otherwise
* unless “the numbers” stop climbing
* until AI suggests so
* hardware compatibility permitting
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-ve...
> We aren’t speaking to future branding at this time
It might not have come in a press release, but it came from marketing and wasn't taken back for quite some time.
IMHO, everybody was happy with version 10 forever, but then Apple decided 10 wasn't good enough, so Microsoft had to copy them.
But that can be easily removed using tools like Explorer Patcher and Open Shell.
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
The thing that made me switch to Linux is Microsoft's pushing AI into everything. I do not want their AI constantly looking over my shoulder.
They assume existing windows users are a captured audience and are trying to capture the Mac market without realizing that they're instead making everything much worse.
Though now ironically with Apple going the whole 'glass' detour people using Macs may be more familiar with Windows. Could be a win for the Microsoft fast follower strategy - so what do I know. I wouldn't have bet on Apple fumbling but here we are. I still prefer Linux to both Apple and Windows.
What?!
On the other hand, for whatever reason Windows 11 right now refuses to install updates (I think the logs complained about their own web view components being unavailable last I checked, which is wrong because they definitely are there), which is kind of embarrassing.
With news of many games also performing better on Linux distros nowadays like https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s... it feels like vendor lock (certain anti-cheat and software not running on anything else) and familiarity is increasingly what's keeping folks on the platform.
While I've also seen my friends struggling to get an Arch install just right, it's nice to know that if I'm willing to say goodbye to some games (e.g. looking at https://www.protondb.com) and software (I actually like the Windows version of SourceTree and tools like WinSCP and MobaXTerm and even Notepad++), then I could go back to using Linux Mint with Cinnamon as my daily driver again - pretty pleasant setup.
Time and again they keep changing the default browser, throwing ads into Start Menu, blocking specific applications (such as Chrome etc. Bad example because Chrome is an evil junkyard. Imagine them blocking Google Drive one day because they want you to use OneDrive).
In general WSL is great but the entire Windows system feels so outdated and full of duplicate layers thrown upon each other with modern UIs on top of old APIs with the old UIs not even deleted and taken care of.
The productivity and cleanliness of OS X keeps convincing me again and again to stick to the Macs as a platform - in my POV this is one of the few things Apple has gotten right (with Apple CPUs), after decades.
My main pain points:
* Keyboard combinations, can't 'theme' them to just work like every other popular platform.
* Docking stations + Multi-Monitors. TONS broken here. Worst of all is how there's no way to just FIX the dock to a single screen's bottom. Though if you pick Left or Right it'll stay there and not jump between screens.
* Per task focus / lists / menus. I like the WM to fuse the taskbar to each 'parent' level task window, NOT a screen edge. Similarly, the WM shouldn't group window switching per task (which makes work among a group of tasks super tedious).
PS: if there's a good way of fixing these on a corp-managed device please let me know. I've failed to find some obvious search result with ~15 years of web search history of others having the same pain points. With any 'solutions' now obsolete as internal component names / control schema completely renamed / redesigned over time, while seemingly not fixing any of the pain points.
Note that the items below are based on my personal opinion only:
1. Finder always seemed to suck ass - been the same for 10+ years lol. I use QSpace Pro as my full-time file explorer/manager.
2. Alt-Tab behavior also sucked for me -having to hold down controls and no thumbnail views....fixed with the AltTab app.
3. Can't control system volume when connected to an external monitor not made by Apple. Fixed with an app called SoundControl
4. Spotlight is lame and slow as hell - fixed with Alfred
5. No clipboard manager built-in - I use an app called Copy'Em Paste for this.
A lot heavier than not at all, of course, and webview felt heavy handed back then like election for OS components feels now, I feel a lesson has not been learned…
After getting a new W11 laptop at work and discovering the removal of vertical taskbars (ridiculous on 16:9 monitors), that particular loss is specifically what keeps me from "upgrading" from W10. Windows Updates warns me that "certain features aren't available on Windows 11" without specifying which ones; finding that sane placement of my taskbar is one of them means I'm plenty willing to pay $30 for another year of security updates to get to keep W10.
Same story with navigating the file system--the new implementation has a multitude of issues, including getting into a state where clicking files to select them only works below a certain invisible horizontal line in the window, windows not refreshing when files have been added/removed, trying to rename a file you just copied being an exercise in frustration with the view refreshing and exiting the rename state 5 - 10 seconds after the copy, the address bar breaking in about a dozen different ways... it's really frustrating software that's a full few tiers down from the quality standard set by Windows 10 and previous versions.
It's gotten slightly better since the initial Windows 11 release, but it still feels like pre-release quality software. I was hoping they'd get it up to release quality and add the important features back by the sunset of Windows 10, but it looks like Microsoft really doesn't care about the quality of the experience of using their UI.
If it were only missing the vertical taskbar as a design decision that would be one thing, but instead it's the very obvious tip of an iceberg of lack of user focus, care, quality, resourcing, and skill. They don't add it back because they know in their current state they're not going to do it well, and the money's in dreaming up new ways of force-feeding trash "news" and promotions anyway, not in helping you get things done and providing a well-functioning tool and bicycle for the mind. What if someone put the taskbar on the left side of the screen, it interfered with them seeing the clickbait brainrot of the widgets "feature", and Microsoft didn't get its average $.0003 for each interaction?
Ha, yeah, was amazed to see basic layout fails in such a core component! Web tech is eating the world, bringing all its sloppiness with it...
Updates failing and the horrible troubleshooting process is the main reason I’d love to ditch their abortion of an OS. As it is, the most powerful computer of my many is just used for gaming.
Have you tried this awesome mod app?
It’s interesting/unsettling to extrapolate a dystopian future from these moves. Keiichi Matsuda’s short film “Hyper-Reality”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
Manipulating our behavior to develop familiarity with a product by seeding the habit of using it as an ad-clicking serf and nurturing that habit by drawing it out across a series of days as the means of acquiring security for our tools and information is a coercive and corrosive exchange.
It's designed to seem like such a small thing that it's benign, as if attention is worth infinitely less than money. By changing us, forming new and often bad habits, and extracting ongoing attention interest payments without us noticing, the cost can end up being far greater.
It's astonishing this corporation exists.
This has been patched out[0] of newer builds but a 24H2 install media will still work for an in-place upgrade.
[0] https://winaero.com/microsoft-has-patched-the-product-server...
The upgrade to windows 11 is not free in so far as it doesn't support the hardware that people have.
It was just that - marketing! To get a load of people to migrate to it, right? "Do it guys, it's the last one you'll need to do, we promise"
Trust Microsoft? Not even once
If that impression gets out and is not countered then it’s a tacit acceptance.
MS burns people all the time so we figured it would be another example of that. Just this time it’s more regular people and not just devs and partners.
Some people internally and externally legitimately believed that people would pay $100 p.a. to use windows. Had that worked they might have kept the subscription model going. Office 365 is an example of that model working.
It was also part of the billion devices push to make the case for the Microsoft App Store which we knew was in trouble, it seemed like a deliberate attempt to sacrifice long term trust for a short term gain.
Which is a real product they really do sell so yeah that makes sense.
Allowing forever upgrades without a subscription would mean that Microsoft would basically be giving up most of the money on the low end market segment, which would have been a nice principled thing to do. There are strategic reasons why this could be a good thing to do but it's hard to say no to giant piles of money even if you already have giant piles of money so we were certain Microsoft wasn't going to stick to this principle.
It was meant to convey the change in delivery model for Windows updates.
Windows 10 and 11 are the same kernel from a CI/CD perspective, just run winver and see for yourself. The Win10 and Win11 paint jobs are not something the engineers have any power over.
https://globalnews.ca/news/2135677/what-you-need-to-know-bef...
No. He was in front of a crowd of developers in a developer training seminar and trying to overhype the buy in of live tiles to suggest they wouldn't be deprecated.
a) That's absurd, that's clearly still a reason they should be bound by it
b) That it wasn't in front of the the is clearly false given press widely reported on it, if it wasn't in front of the press they couldn't have reported on it.
c) That it wasn't intended to convince people to use windows is clearly false given Microsoft's simultaneous purely public facing marketing of windows as a thing that would be supported for the lifetime of the device... Microsoft's continued endorsement of the sentiment behind the quote, and Microsoft's decision to not disavow the quote when journalists no doubt asked about it.
Substantially the same quote is available elsewhere, it's a newspaper repeating an official position.
A newspaper repeating an official position that can't be found anywhere else other than a guy giving a talk about live tiles and other news sites like this. And yet we don't care about that he also stated live tiles weren't going away and yet that clearly wasn't true either.
And in the end even if we take an article written by someone unaffiliated with Microsoft as a contract that now binds Microsoft forever, what's "the life of the device"? The warranty period? Two years? Five years? One hundred years?
Where are my pancakes? I saw someone wrote you were going to give free pancakes. After all we have to hold people to things they never officially stated just because other unrelated people keep repeating it.
The same statement as quoted by the newspaper (note: not a blog) globalnews can in fact be found elsewhere, quoted by other press sites. I didn't find the original - perhaps it was taken down or only made in a press release - but since e.g. arstechnica includes it in literal quotes I have no doubt that this is a literal quote of an official microsoft position..
Considering your continued bad faith arguments, and apparently deliberate mistatements of facts, I will now stop responding to you.
> and apparently deliberate mistatements of facts
Yeah, you should stop misstating facts like "Microsoft employee tasked with public relations declaring it so at a Microsoft event in front of the press is Microsoft marketing it that way", because that's not what happened.
> as proved by the press quoting it.
The quotes you see are from the recordings of the event. Are Netflix movies also statements given to the press? You can go watch it today. Instead you'll ignore actually looking into it and say I'm just making misstatements despite you not even knowing the source and the history of it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211014012149/https://www.pcwor...
People rag on a company that is trying to force you to use an online account to log onto your local PC?
Doesn't using Windows Backup to qualify for these extended Windows 10 security updates require that you purchase more than the default amount of cloud storage too?
I wish. I have a completely capable machine that won't accept the upgrade, due to some completely artificial requirements MSFT built in.
My very expensive tower PC can't "up"grade because it doesn't have a TPM 2.0 module. So unless Microsoft plans to give me a new CPU (and new mobo) it's not free for many users.
And no one said the situation with Android devices is great.
In other words continue to supply the proprietary software that runs on my hardware.
How about, if you can't or won't "support" your product anymore, you are required to give away the source code.
We should be done holding users hostage.
I don't want to generate electronic waste, what would you recommend? Installing Linux Mint?
Note: I'm far from my parents so can't do IT support.
Edit: also occasional HP scanner/printer usage.
Bypass instructions are on YouTube, Reddit, Github, tech blogs, etc.
then GP parents' machine will just bluescreen at boot with illegal instruction
7th gen came out in 2016. Why did you buy your parents a system with a 3-4 old CPU? Nothing wrong with buying old stuff if that's what you're into or what you can afford, but then you have to take into account the risk of less SW support when buying old HW, since now that CPU is 9 years old and no HW gets supported forever. Hence the saying "you buy cheap, you buy twice". Just install Linux on it.
Much of the recent additions have been more about user information and chaining to cloud, than they have been solid improvements.
For example, in order to to create a botnet.
Other than that it's just the normal understanding that you shouldn't run virus.exe or virus.pdf.exe, and if you do, you'll have less protection versus on Windows 10/11.
https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobi...
My gaming Windows 10 LTSC will stop get support at January 12, 2027. I will probably hold out until then, and see what the landscape is then.
Sometimes I wonder how far they'd have to go before people stopped putting up with their bullshit. This reads like something out of The Onion.
No way I'm tossing it since it works fine (even battery is decent still). But no way I'm spending time with Linux if Win10 will still get updates.
If I will really need another Windows device though, I'll just buy a cheap N100 device.