While this article is about upgrading to Win11, not necessarily a clean install, I found the best way to bypass the requirements is to make an autounnatend with Schneegans.de . Make a Win11 installation USB, generate an autounnatend to bypass the requirements, remove bloat, allow offline install (local account instead of Microsoft account), and a couple other little tweaks like dark mode etc. Drop the xml on the root of the flash drive, and boom.
Or... You know... Install Linux.
- Rufus can do this too

The update claims that Windows Defender now identifies the app as potential malware. Flyby11 is a popular third-party tool that allows people to dodge the TPM 2.0 requirement and install Windows 11 on any machine, so Defender suddenly taking a dislike for the app does raise a few eyebrows.
Well, it was only a matter of time until MS abuses their malware scanner for software they don't like.

I guess it's a good thing I am switching to Linux.
- Mint. There you forgot to finish your sentence.

The year of the Linux Desktop is coming!!!
- Soonish™
  
  😂

Making Win 11 even harder to install is a bold move from Microsoft. Most average users are content with using the OS that comes with their PC and upgrading it when necessary. But if the option is to either buy a new PC or fiddle with registry settings in hope that Win 11 will work, I think a lot more people will start looking at Linux instead.
- Nope. Brother in law is upgrading all the family PCs (a total of 3) so he can carry on with 11. Only nerds like everyone here and myself will switch to Linux because we know upgrading your PC just to support the OS is ridiculous.
  
  Two sides of the same coin though. For every ten people not switching even if there is one, it's good just for the push alone
- Should they really though?
  Been daily driving Linux for 15+ years now.
  I recently got a computer that officially supports Linux (framework 13). Running Fedora, an officially supported distro.
  Had to literally compile C code just to change my touchpad scroll speed.
  I love Linux and it's improved a LOT over the years but there are still things that IMO make it not quite ready for average consumers.
  
  That is most likely not a linux issue, but a driver issue, if the driver was as bad on windows as it is on Linux, you would need to do the same to achieve that with that hardware. 🤔
  Or, if handled by window manager, it may be, that there are different implementations for different managers, and yours happened to not support scroll speed change🤔
  To be fair, most common user do not change scroll speed.
  But I agree, most will just continue using unsafe windows 10
- Let's not kid ourselves, most people will not start looking at Linux. They should, but they won't. They'll continue to use the version of Windows their machine came with, becoming a botnet petri dish in the process, forever, until it breaks or becomes unusable. If Microsoft actually forces their machine to become unbootable they'll rush off to the mall and replace it with a Mac.
  And in the meantime they'll click off any nags and warnings Microsoft sends them without reading them.
  Just like happened with XP.
  Just like what happened with Vista.
  Just like what happened with 7.
  Etc.
  Most users are clueless, barely understand how to use their computers except by rote, and therefore are extremely afraid of change. Microsoft could offer a free puppy with your updrade to Win11 and I think about 75% of users would still refuse to take it.
  
  Most users won't. Users that are happy to fiddle with registry settings might be a little more likely to though
  
  I work in IT, run Mint on my travel laptop, and yet at home use the desktop I got 10 years ago, still with Win 8.1. And I use my current desktop quite extensively. There's still a lot of perfectly fine hardware with outdated OS floating around, and I'd argue that a significant portion of it is used by people experienced enough that they know what they are doing. Much of that will shift towards Linux. Not most of it, I'll grant you that, but more than people expect.
- Nah, just us tech heads that are willing to put in the effort (and I'm not, Linux on the desktop has a long way to go, and I use Linux for all sorts of services).
  99% of users can't be bothered to understand the concept of a web browser, and that there are different ones. Switch them to any Linux distro and they'd freeze like deer in headlights.
  Source: decades of providing support.
  And yes, dumb move my MS, not sure what they're trying to do here.
  
  Linux on the desktop has a long way to go
  What do you perceive is missing? I've been using Linux exclusively since 2006 (while supporting Windows users at work), there's never been a time when I felt like I was missing a particular Windows feature. Mostly I just find Windows' lack of user-friendliness to be extremely maddening.
  
  Switched my mum to Mint, and encouraged her to attend outreach meets put on by local Linux groups. She's well pleased with it and has been recommending her friends to switch.
  
  not sure what they're trying to do here
  Maximise profits and minimise losses. My guess is that someone important at Microsoft thinks that this will do just that, and if not that, will make them, personally, a lot of money. That person has no-one who will dare challenge their authority and so we go down this road.
  They (that individual or Microsoft as a whole) almost certainly have a stake in the companies that provide newer hardware, and if they didn't before this decision, they will have by now.
  It theoretically makes Micosoft's job easier too. A huge chunk of backwards compatibility maintenance goes out of the window, if you'll pardon the pun.
  "Oh you have 5 year old hardware? We don't support that."
  Sounds fairly similar to Apple's business model if you think about it that way.
- It’s like they forgot that their monopoly is ensured by their lenience towards piracy and industry leading backwards compatibility. Being consumer hostile this way is unusual from Microsoft but I guess they hope to make it up by making Windows subscription based in the longer term.
  
  Tbh I thought they would have already gone subscription by now. When they announced win11 after saying 10 was the last I was very surprised it wasn't either free or subscription based. Now I wonder if they will at some point release win12 with AI tools behind pro and make that subscription only.
  I use Linux so I won't be touching it but will see how it goes. Usually end up having to know at least a little about this as people ask me to fix their windows PCs

And here I am with windows 11 compatible hardware refusing that upgrade. I'm primarily in Linux on my desktop these days, but it dual boots into windows 10.

How is this cracking down? The article says the documentation for the registry edits have been removed and an automated approach of removing restrictions is now a false positive for windows defender.
I'm assuming the registry edits still work (article doesn't say) in which case where am I meant to point my outrage?
Now if they block windows 11 from running and the registry entries do nothing, that would be a worthy news article.

This isn’t the story. All that’s changed is that a 3rd party script is being flagged my Defender as malicious. You can still update unsupported machines like always.

This is just going to push people who aren't locked into Windows, away from Windows, and Linux is making a pretty good argument for itself as a viable alternative atm, particularly for gaming.
Although another option would be to virtualize Windows on a Linux host too, that's what I'm doing right now /w Win10 LTSC for general apps that aren't entirely WINE-friendly, and then Win8.1 for some older games that aren't entirely WINE-friendly, and the Win8.1 VM has my R9 270 being passed through to it over vfio-pci for graphics for that reason.
The Win10 VM is using VirtIO paravirtualized graphics because its intended use case doesn't need anything more than basic acceleration as it was spun up mainly for running CUETools on for the things that app can't do in Mono, eg. like transcoding FLAC images to Vorbis or Opus.
As for gaming beyond the few edge cases that don't run well in WINE that are due to just being old code, I don't play anything that has an anticheat so 99% of my gaming is easily doable in Proton.

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