Your Windows 10 PC will soon be ‘junk’ - users told to resist Microsoft deadline::If you’re still using Windows 10 and don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11 any time soon you might want to sign a new online petition
My machine running Win10 LTSC is getting updates until 2029. I also have machines running Debian. There is no way I am installing the regular version of Win11. Its trash made to pander to greedy shareholders. If they take the garbage out for LTSC, I might run it.
Well, your best option is to switch to Linux
As an individual, how do you get the LTSC version legally, and how much does it cost?
You can’t unless you form a small group like a non profit organization or a business. You can cheat the system legally going the NPO route as long as you find a way to fulfill legal requirements, but you need friends (it helps to know someone in law school too) and you have to do the legal paperwork and share all the cost. You could make a gamer NPO for example. The price to do this will vary depending on where you live. The price for the volume license can vary a lot depending on where you get it from. Where your group is located effects this. In my local it is about $200-400 USD per person.
Your other alternative is the grey market. Its grey because it is legally ambiguous.
Imagine trying to get Windows legally lol. This provides a much better solution.
Can you ping me if they tell you? I would also like to know
I guess there is no legal option for individuals because Microsoft only provides LTSC option for orgs. Most guides I saw in the internet just tell you to download some iso from google drive link. You might be able to download it from Microsoft here but I haven’t actually tested it because it asks you to register your info before proceeding. Then you’ll activate it using activator scripts such as MAS or buy some grey market keys on some keys site.
Or just try linux. It’s pretty great
I work in a linux shop.
You couldn’t pay me to use Windows for development, sysadmin, backend services, etc.
But on the desktop? Hell no. We maintain a modern debian desktop environment for our users, and it’s a pain in the ass. Mediocre UX, mediocre integration of mixed-bag third-party apps, and too many workarounds and gotchas you need to Just Know About. I just don’t have the energy.
I use windows at home, and for my underlying work environment - and I just SSH into linux boxes for the actual tappy-tappy stuff.
If only there was an OS with an excellent graphical user interface and a direct UNIX pedigree, where you can drop into a full zsh and POSIX user land directly after install at the touch of a button.
If there’s one thing that both windows and Linux users agree on, it’s how weird and annoying macs are.
I’d wager that’s because “we know better what you want” in mac is even stronger than in windows. It’s all good while you are an average Joe, but other than that you either pay, or get a lot of issues setting things up.
“we know better what you want” in mac is even stronger than in windows
At least macOS let’s you change your default browser without showing you 5 million popups that look like fucking malware saying “Please switch back to Microsoft Edge, we know that it sucks ass but please use it”
As a Linux user, I’d use a Mac over some garbage Windows PC any fucking time of the day. Nearly every operating system under the sun uses some kind of Unix implementation under the hood, well, except for Windows. Running anything in a command line environment under Windows is a huge pain in the ass… Not even having GNU coreutils, BusyBox or the BSD equivalent is just horrible. Just like PowerShell. And don’t even get me started on this antiquated piece of shit called
cmd. Every time I see a CLI under Windows I just want to take the computer that it’s running on and throw it in the trash. At least macOS offers some standard CLI utilities and is basically out-of-the-box compatible with most Linux CLI tools. The filesystem structure is also kinda similar to what you would find on a Linux or BSD operating system. Oh, and recent Mac hardware is pretty awesome whereas Windows on ARM is unusable. And macOS at least looks visually consistent because unlike Microsoft, Apple can actually decide to use one single UI framework for all of their stuff. You can block all of the Apple spyware with a good firewall like Little Snitch and Homebrew fills the gap of the missing package manager. And unlike Winget, Homebrew actually works and is worth using. I can also set up macOS declaratively through Nix, something that won’t ever be possible on Windows either.
Mediocre UX, mediocre integration of mixed-bag third-party apps, and too many workarounds and gotchas you need to Just Know About.
You’re talking about my Windows 10 experience? The european, less spying/advertising version, mind you.
I love Linux. I have it installed on 3 machines, have been using it for over 3 years, and would install it right away if I ever got a new computer.
A couple weeks ago, I was feeling pretty exhausted and just wanted to play a game thru Proton on my laptop. I got it running, but it was unplayable because it was using my integrated GPU instead of my discrete one. I spent the night switching compositors, cables, and drivers, but none of it fixed the issue.
The next day, feeling exhausted from fruitless debugging, I tried to launch another game via Proton that I knew had worked in the past, but it crashed on launch. I spent the whole day going thru the same steps I did the day before, but also consulting ProtonDB and trying software that would force usage of the dgpu.
The next day, I installed Windows 10 to an external hard drive and spent the day debloating it. Drivers got installed automatically, I downloaded both games on Steam, and they just worked. So I guess I now dual-boot Windows just for the games that don’t work thru Proton. Loading game worlds and booting up take ~75% longer, but that’s to be expected because it’s running on a 4 year old HDD connected over a USB cable.
As mentioned earlier, I love Linux a lot, and if all games had native binaries or Proton worked 100% I’d format that god-forsaken hard drive. But when real life has got me down, I don’t need Linux to get me down further. I don’t like Windows, and I feel incredibly dirty whenever I press F7 on boot to get to Windows. But when my choices are “spend 8 hours on fruitless quest to get >2fps” and “press play button”, I’m going to take the path of least resistance.
That’s the thing. I love to use Linux for work, but when I don’t want to tinker it sometimes sucks for gaming.
iGPU+dGPU, esp with Nvidia is pretty bad on Linux. It’s pretty flawless these days if you’re using only one vendor and it isn’t Nvidia.
Don’t know what you are talking about. I use an Nvidia GPU with a Wayland compositor/Window manager (Hyprland to be exact) and I’ve never experienced any issues whatsoever.
I have an external monitor that runs at 144Hz, but a while ago I realized because it was connected over HDMI, it was limited to 60Hz (for some weird reason). So I bought a DisplayPort cable, and after plugging it in the screen was flickering/artifacting in some weird way that I haven’t seen it do on X11 or Windows with the same cable. So as a result I’ve had to reluctantly switched back to i3 for daily use
Sure, use whatever works for you
What game was it?
The first game mentioned was Bille Bust Up. I liked the demo that was off of Steam (and it ran fine using the proton-call command), so I subscribed to the developer’s Patreon (which gives a Steam key) and it wouldn’t use my dgpu.
The second game was A Hat in Time.
Nvidia laptop by the sounds of it?
Anything with an AMD GPU is going to have a better time (or even just a dedicated Nvidia GPU in a desktop).
Thanks for sharing. I’m sorry to hear you had trouble. Both games are rated as gold on ProtonDB. So, I am surprised you had trouble with them.
My experience has been the opposite. Everything has worked surprisingly well. Do you by chance use an Nvidia gpu?
Yep, Nvidia gpu. At the time I bought it I wasn’t aware of their reputation for Linux support, and I bought my laptop from System76 (with Pop!_OS, because Nvidia drivers are more “just works” on it). I’ve had a fairly good experience with all of it, but the next computer I buy will definitely have an AMD GPU.
I think this is the first time I’ve been fully unable to get the dgpu working. Every other time it’s just worked or worked with tweaking
Yep. And then there’s gamepass. I vastly vastly prefer working and using Linux day to day, but games, man. Man’s gotta be able to game after a long day at work and I wasted literally a week of after work hours trying and failing to get Starfield to run on Proton.
I would probably rather get a gaming console for the TV to game.
Tbf that really depends on the kind of games you like playing.
Why not a steam deck?
I love my steam deck but there’s enough games from my library that won’t run at all or only run after some manual trickery in desktop mode.
Sure. As soon as Linux doesn’t require memorizing hundreds of commands for basic use, and actually runs the software you need to use, I’m sure it will become very popular.
If you haven’t checked out linux in 5+ years, I recommend that you check out something user-friendly like Mint. No commands needed!
Been using it for the last 2 years. That’s how I know.
Sure ok, can you give us some examples from the hundreds of commands you need to memorise for basic use?
The time is now then!
Hundreds of commands is just not true with many distros. Everything is gui based these days. The command line is worth getting familiar with, but it’s not necessary.
Hasn’t been my experience. Usually needed at the bare minimum just to install and uninstall the few programs that do run in Linux.
So… today?
I’m a Linux user. Been one for a long time.
When I’m doing dev-work, shelling into remote VMs and stuff yeah I have to get nitty-gritty with the command-line.
But on my regular daily-driver OS? I only use the terminal because I want to; or sometimes I think it’s more efficient. But I haven’t absolutely needed to for a long time now.
Linux GUI has really come a long way. It’s not at MacOS level (yet), but it’s very functional and aesthetic. Give it a try.
I’ve been “trying” it for years. Moreso because Windows became truly unbearable than Linux got more useable.
Yeah, I hear you. I still run an old MacbookPro with MacOS for personal computing stuff. I just don’t always want to tinker. It’s been a living meme: “the year of the Linux desktop” for years on years now and yet we still comprise like 0.3% of the desktop market.
But I really do see a tide shift now. Microsoft is doubling down on the enshittification of Windows. Apple’s hardware is still—as always—prohibitively priced. Steam OS on the Steam deck. The Indian government officially adopting it—and its FOSS office application offerings. Companies like Pop!_OS and Framework are making real headway for popular adoption. HP, Dell, Lenovo all offer Linux-default laptops now, that aren’t just “Pro-Dev” offerings.
Linux is not as polished as the for-profit offerings. Perhaps it never will be. Perhaps that’s also its appeal.
I don’t think not being polished is an appeal for anyone. For me it’s just being able to control it. Like Apple wants to control your hardware (and also your software on mobile) and Windows wants to cram whatever bullshit on your computer that they can and load it down with all sorts of bloatware and spyware. What’s my other option? I’d rather deal with an unpolished system than that bullshit any day.
There are a few distributions out there that are genuinely trying to abstract the nitty-gritty away and bring a polished Linux to the masses. ElementaryOS, for one. Yet, it is still Linux at its core and all the poweruser functionality isn’t far away.
But to face a bit of harsh reality, the average computer user doesn’t want that. They resist change and learning something new, they want it to “just work” and “work for me the way [company] says it should” even if that means gross (often implicit) violations of privacy, control, agency. They just don’t care. Or maybe they don’t know. It’s amazing how hard it is to “degoogle” oneself, let alone “demicrosoft” or “deapple”. As I type this on an iPhone…
There will always be bleeding edge computation environments. I just hope that we users can force Big Tech’s hands to respect data privacy and agency. We had a big win with Google conceding web-DRM, but it won’t be the first nor last attempt and their patience is immense.
Tron: “I fight for the users.
Hell, I’m still running windows 7 on a machine. 10 is my newest and I just installed that a couplemonths ago.
I recently learned there are unpatched vulnerabilities in Paint 3D in versions of Windows 10. Christ knows what they’ve neglected to patch on Windows 7.
Have you tried a Linux desktop distribution on that windows 7 box? I can’t imagine you’re gaming on it.
For the love of god I hope that isn’t connected to any network
My music box is win7. Only reason it doesn’t run on a Linux distro is the shitty lack of good audio under the hood of linux, and the annoyances of getting musicbee working right.
It’s the only thing keeping anything of mine on windows. Wellllll, I did set up my laptop dual boot, and it came with 10 pro, but I haven’t actually booted into that in ages.
And yes, for whoever is thinking “I hope that win 7 box is air gapped”, it is. Transfers are from an external hdd.
I’m not an audiophile pro, but Jack and PipeWire were supposed to bring high-quality low-latency audio infrastructure to the Linux desktop, maybe check that out?
Yeah, it’s acceptable, but it still suffers in comparison to either the usual options on windows, or even the standard android audio. Can’t touch a solid dedicated DAC, though not much can, in truth.
Your PC will soon be be junk if you do not want to try out Linux.
Your PC is already junk if it runs Windows. But you can easily fix that by installing Linux.
Just in case you don’t want to go to the tabloid hell that is the Express Petition Link pirg.org
It’s such an awful site, and always surprises me when I see it being used/shared. Surely when it comes to tech there are better resources than a tabloid for it.
I mean, it won’t let me. Windows Update inists my PC doesn’t meet the minimum spec, and I’m not inclined to argue with it.
Just follow this guide and all of your problems will be gone
You can use Rufus to install windows 11 and bypass the requirements. It does everything for you – downloads the latest win 11 service pack, removes the blocking requirements, and you can even tell it to automatically disable all of the telemetry and phoning home. You’ll still need a license key when you install, or run it on a machine that was running a valid win 10 install previously. But I’m running win 11 on an 8 year old PC with zero issues.
Here is a good guide that explains in detail.
True, or I could just not.
I would like to point out that this is exactly the same difficulty of just installing linux, without freeing you from microserfdom.
The problem for me is that I basically only use my PC for gaming and YouTube.
I know SOME games work, but I don’t want to add to the list of games I can’t play because they’re console/windows only. :/
We’ve long since transitioned into the “most” games work territory. Basically apart from anything with rootkit-like anti cheat, you shouldn’t have any trouble playing games at all.
I have the exact same use case for my PC and have no issues gaming on Linux for the vast majority of games. The caveat, however, is that anti-cheat can be problematic, so if you exclusively play games with anti-cheat that could be a problem for you. The only titles I have issues with are competitive shooters.
Comparing the level of effort to run windows vs Linux is a whole other thing I’m definitely not getting into. I use Linux for work and run it on two machines at home, but I also use my Windows box for games. You can use and enjoy both, it doesn’t have to be a religious war.
I highly recommend you attempt to run your games on a Linux box, as the experience has improved vastly. I also keep a Windows install around for the odd game that doesn’t work in Linux (basically just a couple competitive shooters that I enjoy), but the number of times I need to boot into my Windows partition are diminishing day by day. Definitely did not mean to be a zealot about it, but going through the effort outlined above just so you can get Windows updates from a company that clearly doesn’t care if they trash your machine forcing your upgrade seems foolish to me.
#GleefulCompliance
Mine doesn’t, either. Go go gadget 12 year old processor! Who knew being a cheapskate could be so beneficial?
Is it the UEFI security thing?
TPM. Probably switched off in the BIOS or something.
Don’t care, don’t like what I’ve seen of 11, happy to wait until I’m forced to change.
That just means more cheap, used hardware available for us Linux users in a couple years.
…and then a complete absence of it a few years after that, once Microsoft finally finishes boiling the frog to cryptographically lock new hardware to run only Windows.
… until the EU and maybe even the US rolls around and slaps Microsoft with an antitrust lawsuit. Sounds like a best case scenario :D
I miss vista
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With is default blank admin password, ahh these were the days.
But windows ME, that’s where it was at!! /s
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@tsonfeir @confusedwiseman I did something similar, when I gained the right to vote on what my computers would run. Then there came backward compatibility issues, purchased from AppStore programs stopped working, 3rd party programs like Safari (checks some notes…), make it in house programs, stopped working etc. I switched Mac Mini almost immediately to a Linux. Air unfortunately had HW incompatibilities like hinge and camera, so it stayed with Mac OS till it managed to bust charge controller.
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At this point I’m mainly still on Windows because it is the easiest thing to do - I know how to use it and it is already installed on all my PCs. At least 3 of my PCs are eligible to upgrade to Win11 (2 are not), but I have no plans to ever upgrade. So, when security updates stop, that will be my motivation to give Linux another try.
That petition and a nickel is worth about 5 cents. Go get a better OS.
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Wait windows 10 was not junk before? Since when?
I mean, when you compare it to Windows 11…
I think you’re probably in the minority on this one. It was generally accepted that Win10 was pretty good.
It shouldn’t be accepted that any version of Windows was good
I still had plenty of frustrations with it. I ended up switching to Linux finally last year when it became clear Microsoft was going to force my pc to update to 11.
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It was regarded as good in the beginning, at least in comparison to Windows 8. In the beginning it ran leaner than Win7
Then update after update it got more and more bloated and unstable, more crammed with ads, etc. Windows 10 aged very poorly imo.
I know I’m the weird one but I liked 8 and Vista more than 7.
Windows 10 LTSC for the win
MS, over the course of the life of Windows 10, transitioned from a software company to a data brokerage, and Windows 10 has reflected that. But it’s nothing compared to W11 that is full-on spyware.
God damn it, my dads computer is very old actually and he is running windows 10. There is one program which is not available for Linux which he uses to access his CCTV cameras so moving him to Linux might be difficult because of that.
Have you tried running the CCTV software in Wine? It doesn’t sound like it’s likely to be a particularly complicated bit of software, so hopefully Wine will have it running with a couple of clicks.
(I’m EXTREMELY green with Linux)
Could it be run inside of a windows VM?
Yeah, you can basically run anything in a Windows VM. I even use a Windows VM with GPU and storage passthrough for gaming, works surprisingly well.
My dad lives in Germany and I do in Korea. The really good thing about Linux is that it’s easy to remotely administrate it. The bad part is that we live in very different time zones so if something doesn’t work it would take a lot of time before we both have time at the same time so I can show him how to do things.
Nah fuck you, I’m staying with 10 as long as I can, then I’m switching to linux
Hahaha, no you’re not
Yes I am
I made the switch to linux when Win7 died, cause Win10 is a giant PoS and I refused to ugrade to it, lol.
Hopped a few Distros before settling on Nobara, which has given me the best “It just works” gaming experience.
I’ve been using linux on my secondary machine for a couple of years now and I don’t really feel the need to use Windows anymore.
all of my software just works and my workflow is cross-platform (I don’t really care about which os I’m using, i can get things done regardless); but as a software developer I’d much rather use linux than spend my time managing like 6 virtual linux/unix-like environments on windows. (wsl, msys2, etc)
All of the games I care about actually work slightly better on linux than on windows. (and a single click away from installing and launching from steam); also Steam Big Picture mode and gamepad support (dualshock 4) is much better on linux than on Windows 10, on windows some features only work over Bluetooth.i use arch btwI made the switch to Linux Host OS 5 years ago and haven’t looked back. Plus the fact that Cyberpunk 2077 works with an RTX card and wireless game controller out of the box is enough to keep me interested for now.
Tf do you know about anybody, especially on a FOSS-leaning network?
i know that basically everyone on here is a pussy
First of all fuck you. Second of all I laughed my ass off at thst. I’m not sure why. Good job.
you’re welcome steven
Especially you
Nutsack and CaptainVaqina calling each other pussy.
I just made this exact switch a few months ago, so, yeah, it happens.
And I’m halfway there, laptop on mint, pc still on windox.
And I did it 18 months ago!
(Spoiler: it turned out fine)
Almost a year here! Working great! (No, for real, modern desktop Linux experience is surprisingly refined, it’s more stable and performant than Windows!)
Yeah but I use my pc to play games. And to read all the Linux coping strategies to run modern games with software bypasses or strategies… I don’t need to jailbreak and run through 150 pages of forums and guides so I can play my steam games.
Majority of games are launched as easy as pressing play in steam, or even just launching the .exe with regular Wine. Software bypasses are mostly a thing of the past. I’m saying this as a gamer.
Is Starfield one of them? I installed Ubuntu next to Windows 10, and like it just fine, but I’ve read that getting Starfield to run on Ubuntu is not possible yet? If not for Starfield, I’d be 100% Ubuntu now.
I have ~200 games in my steam library, all of which run by pressing “play” in steam. I may just accidentally like games that run on linux, but running through 150 pages of forums definitely isn’t the norm nowadays
And I never did. I just started with Linux Mint when I got my first laptop.
But I do see the perspective of Windows users, perhaps. I did briefly try using Windows, but it was frustrating. I don’t know how to set anything in there. For some reason there’s 2 setting apps (control panel and settings), each only being partially usable. My Wi-Fi kept dying, the only solution was replacing the Intel Wi-Fi card for one from Qualcomm. Bluetooth only worked randomly like every 20th restart. Drivers for my 20 year old printer didn’t work in either 10 nor 11. Only up to Windows 7.
Painful experience.Wow, a real Linux native here! Wonderful to know.
Yes, I gotta say after running Linux for like a week I seriously couldn’t think of coming back to Windows. I just began to understand how much of a trash Windows systems are.
Yeah, when they went from 7 to 10 (there’s no 9 for horrible hacky reasons, and 8 was the mandatory half-baked test-run of the next proper version), they tried to redo the aesthetics of those systems to be more touch-input styled, but they only half-did it. If you want anything more advanced than the settings app gives you, you need to dig into the control panel. Then there’s the deeper settings - device manager, computer management, startup services, firewall, the registry, and on and on, all of which are designed entirely differently and many of which haven’t seen any update since windows 2000 at least. I wouldn’t be surprised if some went back further. It all speaks to ancient legacy code nobody wants to touch and the unfathomable depths of technical debt that implies. I get the sense the settings app change is another in a long line of updates that became legacy and added yet another layer to this byzantine system.
Then there’s the lovecraftian user permissions system that seems like it layers three levels of abstraction that you have to utterly master to get literally anything done and which I have given up trying to understand. If I need permissions, I run a third party batch file that assigns complete ownership of everything in a folder to me, and then I don’t think about the consequences.
I really want to move to Linux, but I’ve gotten burnt out on attempting and not being able to do all of the many things I’m used to on Windows. I’ve been hearing good things about it lately and I may just have the energy to try again soon.
I wish you a good luck! And don’t hesitate to ask - often times it’s very simple, actually!
My PC doesn’t hit the requirements for windows 11. Yet it kept asking me to update. Been running Ubuntu ever since
Same here, but I moved to Arch because I wanted the latest drivers, at the beggining with GNOME, but then moved to KDE to get the newest Wayland stuff related to Gaming.
What about MiniOS or Linux?
There is no way they don’t offer extended support for Windows 10. Many PCs can’t get to windows 11. Imagine all the malware infected machines that will be out there.
Microsoft products are all about getting infected with malware. That’s the whole point of this company.
I assume eventually they’ll drop the UEFI security requirement, which is why 90% of the “can’t” cases occur.
My Windows install is still in compatibility mode. It’s the sole reason I can’t upgrade to 11, not that I want to. I can’t be bothered to reinstall Windows on UEFI when there’s no point anyway. I’ll happily stick to 10.
Uefi isn’t the push, the push is tpm 2.0, which I think is a much much larger percentage of “incompatibilities”. tpm allows for drm that is much harder to bypass, since the random number generator operates securely in hardware. It’s for their benefit not yours.
Precisely why I’m in no rush to “upgrade”.
I worked for a large computer company in the late 90s, early 2000s. When XP came out, they said there would be no site licensing. This meant we had to keep track of license keys for thousands upon thousands of systems, costing millions. This was before KMS or anything.
“Nothing we can do,” Microsoft said. “We have no gate key.”
Our server farms at the time were 40% Windows NT 4, 55% Sun systems, and 5% Linux. So we said, “okay,” and called Red Hat. In a year, our back end was 60% Sun, 35% Linux, and 5% Windows NT. We were already in talks to start switching to Linux workstations for desktops.
“Oh, you mean this gate key,” said Microsoft.
Asshats. They lost our server business, but let us use XP with a site license.
