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Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly still shocked there isn't some kind of lawsuit or federal investigation on how Microsoft is able to get away with dropping support for CPUs that are only a few years old. Thus forcing unknown millions of people worldwide to upgrade an ENTIRE CPU and Motherboard just for the next version of Windows. What are we supposed to do with all that e-waste?! People who spent thousands on a 32 core threadripper from 5 years ago are now suppose to just... throw it away and buy another 32 core threadripper?!

None of the 7 computers in our house have processors that are supported. Just the AMD Threadripper 2000 series and earlier that launched in 2018 (just 7 years ago) are not supported. That's a massive amount of CPUs about to hit ebay probably at huge discounts.

I'm hoping the Linux community takes advantage of this moment and focuses heavily on converting Windows users to Linux + Bottles.

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If you’re talking about Threadripper 2000 series, just grab the official ISO and install it. Should work despite not being on the officially fully supported list.

> I'm honestly still shocked there isn't some kind of lawsuit or federal investigation on how Microsoft is able to get away with dropping support for CPUs that are only a few years old.

There is no law that requires a company to make their new product compatible with a different company’s 7 year old hardware. I don’t know why you’d expect this to become a lawsuit or federal investigation.

I’m honestly surprised that anyone with 9+ year old hardware would want to run Windows 11 at all.

This kind of user isn’t exactly jumping on the latest Windows version. They’re going to be using Windows 10 until their hardware dies and they’ll “upgrade” when their next machine comes with the current Microsoft OS.

I personally don’t think the end of “support” for Windows 10 will have any meaning. There are too many users still using it for Microsoft to stop patching it. The “unsupported” status will only matter to companies who want to pass audits.

Haven’t seen anyone mention it yet but 11 runs perfectly fine on older provided your CPU has POPCNT - which apparently was introduced in 2008.

Rufus can create a bootable USB drive with the 11 installer modified* to bypass the other artificial requirements like TPM and bypass the stupid “need internet access to force you to make a Microsoft account” requirement too.

https://rufus.ie/en/

*change some flags in the installer

>dropping support for CPUs that are only a few years old

Isn't it only 2017 CPUs and older? So that's at least ~9 years of free updates (free updates stop at the end of 2026 with the extension), which is frankly better than most other OSs.

If you include paid ESU updates it's at least ~11 years and if you include LTSC it's even way longer than that.

There are many things we can complain about when it comes to Windows, but I wouldn't say long term support is one of them. It's generally better than macOS or Linux distros, not to mention smartphones.

> Isn't it only 2017 CPUs and older? So that's at least ~9 years of free updates (free updates stop at the end of 2026 with the extension), which is frankly better than most other OSs.

That's the indictment of the industry, not a praise for Microsoft.

AMD themselves ended support for these CPUs a year ago, so it is reasonable for third parties to also do so.

Unsurprisingly, my point still stands

> Isn't it only 2017 CPUs and older?

MSFT lies to our face about not supporting Kaby Lake, except the one single CPU that was sold in Surfaces when W11 was announced. What an coincidence.

"Thus forcing unknown millions of people worldwide to upgrade an ENTIRE CPU and Motherboard just for the next version of Windows"

I don't know why you must come conclusion at this point, no one force you to upgrade into next version

as far as I know, when you buy windows 10 license, you tied into certain edition that would work for that edition. nothing mention next OS (in this case windows11) should backward compatible with last edition

if you think 7-8 years is bad, think how much smartphone that not receive update for years, most often that this phone didn't receive update at all

and google and apple literally making new edition of android/ios that break depedency every year

Windows has always been backward compatible with old hardware. There has never been a big problem where you couldn't just upgrade to next version on the same computer. This big jump is not a good one for MS, it is locking out a lot of people that would be customers and are now getting Linux Mint instead. I have several friends that are non-techies and installed Mint on their own without any problems. No support needed even, nothing close to how they need support for Windows. They have dualboot so their old games work on Windows and everything else on Linux. Sooner or later that will be gaming on Linux and Windows never get booted again.

"Windows has always been backward compatible with old hardware."

mac os always have been backward compatible with old intel hardware, nothing changes or stopping you to still use your old intel mac either

"Sooner or later that will be gaming on Linux and Windows never get booted again."

that never gonna happen

> I don't know why you must come conclusion at this point, no one force you to upgrade into next version

Security updates are necessary and regular Windows 10 users won't get them anymore.

This.

The worst death is from fright. So let’s keep calm. Because Win 10 will work after October 2025.

I wonder if MS will extend the deadline, especially since there's unofficial tools bypassing their restrictions.

I remember last year when they announced removing a major MS Teams connector around webhook integrations.

In July 2024 they said in August 2024 this feature would be disabled for new apps and then in October 2024 all integrations would stop working. This would effectively break a ton of 3rd party integrations. Think how crazy that is considering their top market is enterprise companies being sold on Teams through O365 licenses.

For context, this would be the equivalent of Slack saying they are going to remove all OAuth / webhook integrations and replace it with something else when "something else" wasn't even properly documented with practically no notice.

A few weeks after that announcement MS decided to extend that deadline to December 2025. I don't know the current state of things since I no longer work at the place using Teams.

MS will absolutely extend the deadline, or otherwise make it meaningless. The install base of windows 10 is too high.

My prediction is that instead of extending support forever like XP and 7, Windows 10 will be “unsupported” but it’ll still get security patches for a long time.

The “unsupported” nature of the OS will only matter to corporate auditors. Consumers will be using Windows 10 for years longer.

That's me, I stayed on Win 7 at home out of principle against enshittification. Worked as beautifully as ever for light browsing and gaming. Then Chrome support stopped, including Steam. Can't upgrade any Electron app, either. Still holding out but soon I'll relegate it into a box running under linux. Well, it had a good 30+ year run.

Firefox is not updated for W7 too. Brave seems to be supported. And Chrome has annoying note that I need to update system.

Linux Mint is said to be good for usage.

But what I will miss is Outlook tuned to perfection. I don’t know how to transform 30+ GB pst file to something different. :)

Those older CPUs don't support Virtualization-based Security[0] which is a significant upgrade in the Windows security posture.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

It sucks but it's not illegal? Private business has made the choice to not support a set of processors on their os.

Run Windows 10 ltsc or move to Unix or Linux if that's an issue

I'm honestly still shocked how much of this malarchy users will just lay down for.

the way MS gets away with it is by making people think they have no other choice.

just for the next version of Windows

...which you probably didn't need either, so just refuse to upgrade and start pushing back that way.

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