Are you prepared for the ramifications of windows 10 EoL?
Next year Windows 10 goes End of Life. Microsoft will undoubtedly push windows 11 hard, but a lot of machines won’t support it leading to a few economic points of interest:
The demand for new machines will be high, driving up cost.
The supply of unsupported machines will be high, driving down the used market.
Yeah, people are just going to keep using it, they just won’t get updates. That means they will be vulnerable to any exploits that come along afterward but most people don’t care. M$ shot everyone in the foot when they decided to limit windows 11 compatibility.
When windows 7 came out I knew people who stuck with windows xp until they bought a new computer with 10 or 11 on it. The market will get a slight bump from EoL but it isn’t going to force everyone with windows 10 to run out and buy a new computer immediately.
With Valve pumping all that development money and effort into proton, I will finally be able to go full Linux before Windows 10 ends it's life. I only needed it for gaming, but those days are finally gone! Thanks Valve! _
Just get yourself a copy of the LTSC (long term service contract) versions, they will still be supported until 2027, and in the past have been extended by up to 5 years on top.
It's the only viable alternative to Linux, for those who can't switch for one or another reason. Windows 11 is pure cancer.
We are trialing about 20 Linux desktops (10 Linux mint and 10 zorin OS) across 2 of our MSP clients.
So far, they have had zero technical tickets in 6 months. They did have double the average user training tickets compared to windows machines. Most of the questions were around how to work with editable PDFs and where is the document was they just saved (file manager questions).
Zorin OS seems to be winning on the usability metrics. Its very polished and more closely matching the UI of people coming from windows.
Already got my NEW 12-core machine before prices go up, running Debian 100%. With my 25 year history of using Linux and pirating Windows, MS never saw a damn penny from me, and I'm proud of that fact. Not even an OEM license (all my laptops I ever had were work supplied and I build my own PCs)
Corporations (the only people who actually care about their OS being in support) upgrade their machines every few years so they've already done that. Home users don't know what that means and won't care. The remaining 2% have already installed linux.
Using rufus it's pretty easy to install windows 11 without meeting their bullshit requirements.
Did that for my work laptop, which is getting old but runs just fine. Including windows 11.
Plenty of reasons to switch to Linux, but this can be circumvented. And anyone who doesn't know how to, because it is too complicated shouldn't really switch to Linux anyway IMO, because they will already run into trouble with finding compatible printers, getting software for proprietary hardware they are using, etc.
Yeah it will drive up cost, because all my future machines will have to be specced to be able to run Linux and Windows (in a KVM in Linux) properly at the same time with good performance.
I'm seriously considering making Tiny11 my daily driver on my gaming desktop.
I'm about to start a prolonged test run on my new to me secondhand laptop as soon as my ADHD brain lets me remember at an opportune time to actually do it 😄
Not really, but I have 18 months to migrate all my shit away from there. I've already moved a lot of my critical stuff to FOSS software running under win10 and I'm more than passing familiar with Linux. Shouldn't be a massive deal.
Finally I don't need my computer for working, they provided us with company laptops, so I don't need to worry about compatibility and windows only programs anymore.
So you know what I'm going to do once windows 10 reaches eol.
For my it will certainly be the year of desktop linux.
The only thing that hold me back full-time linux daily driving due to workplace uses M$ suites (Office, Teams, Outlook and so on) and CAD program (Freecad pita for me, haven't tried Ondsel addon).
I don't think they would just abandon the support overnight (unless they're being greedy af and want to drive the failed "Windows 11" adoption very fast). The fact that they only make "sudo" utility only for Windows 11 is disguting (though you can do it yourself on windows 10 too), pretty sure they will keep giving security patches just like XP and 7 being legacy system.
I don't know. I have a 7th gen i7 and it works fine, I want a new PC but can't afford it, but even if I could I wouldn't touch Win11 with a barge pole.
I fucking hate it. I don't want to move to Linux. Probably just pirate the updates for the next 3 years and then deal with the security risk.
Need to petition the EU to shop this shit and force them to extend life due to the insane amount of e-waste it will cause.
I've switched to W11 on my main rig, since Linux doesn't have the sort of compatibility that I can rely on for my work. I installed explorer patcher to restore W10 start menu, task bar, and right click menu. I combed through the settings to deactivate all the data collection settings.
On my laptop, I dual boot W11 and KDE Neon.
It's the best that I can do given the circumstances
I used to take pride in that I could fully set up, configure, secure, minimally provision (with software) and neuter the more egregious aspects of Vista/7/8/8.1 within a 16hr time frame.
With Windows 10 this increased to 20 hours, and with my own Windows 11 install I am currently clocking in at 24hrs - three whole work days. The last day of which is spent in the Registry and doing multiple reboots to ensure the new UI fuckery has been appropriately castrated.
I have a handful of programs, both current and vintage, that are either inadequately or completely unable to be serviced by Wine. With that said, I am now down to only two rigs on Windows, the remainder being various flavours of Linux or BSD.
My job in the a non technical field relies on a laptop to run a label printer, the laptop is ancient and I already had to install revOS on it so that printing labels isn't horribly bogged down waiting on the laptop to load the simple printer program. Is there anyway that proton would be able to run that program? Probably not because of all lack of driver support, if anyone has any ideas I'm all ear, even just pointing me in a direction would be appreciated!
Got a well specced 4th Gen i7 that does everything I need so unless it blows up, I won't be upgrading. Started working on the plan this week. Been using Mint on my secondary (non essential laptop) but never had the stones to take the plunge on my main rig.
Watching MS stepping into the enshittification trend and AI with Win11 means this is the last straw, particularly now I don't need to rely on keeping up with windows for work. Currently bashing on Linux Mint DE in a VM to test what I need and have working to be happy:
Outlook/Office - Thunderbird is good but it's been a while since I've used Libre Office but didn't have much luck with it in the past - trashing the formatting when bouncing between LO & MSO. Hoping the more recent versions are better else office web will have to do for those documents that don't play nice.
Steam - make sure I can get it going, several key games. This is the least of my worries after seeing what others have said. NVIDIA graphics may be a bit more painful.
RDP - I still have another headless win10 media box. VNC as backup. This box will be the next on the chopping block if all goes well.
Backup - this is the big one. Currently use Backblaze for unlimited backup and love the set & forget nature. No native Linux client so would require moving to their B2 platform with a third party interface - do-able, just need to get off my butt to work it out :p
File structure - always struggled with this in my playing with Linux, need to become more comfortable with where files live and general directory structure.
Will slowly pick those off over the next couple of weeks and then I should be good to go.