I got rid of the final Windows 10 installation in my network last weekend. That was on my gaming machine. It has been replaced with Bazzite and runs very nicely.

This is a move I should have made a long time ago.

@may_i

"It has been replaced with Bazzite and runs very nicely."

I looked at Bazzite for mine too but in the end went with cachyOS, it runs pretty good too for games. How is yours? At some point I need to mess around with some multidisk installs (old games) but I got a good few steam ones going.

I am irritated I cant get Rainbow Six Siege to multiplayer on linux but it had serious problems on windows making it unplayable too.

All my Win10 capable PCs are signed up for the free ESU, so I'm doing nothing.

There is no way I'm going to junk perfectly good hardware I use at home just because they stop supporting Win10.

At worst after the end of the free ESU, I'll just run them with third party firewalls and anti-virus. Some I might convert to Linux over time, probably Debian.

I'm not planning to buy another PC, as they don't do anything I can't do with other hardware, like a Raspberry Pi, and I'd probably buy a Pi 500+.

The reign of Wintel is over.

"The Age of Men is over. The Time of the Orc has come." ?

(Sorry, couldn't resist, and that's me writing as a Linux user myself! I guess I'm more of a hobbit myself, although there are probably some users perhaps rather more easily compared to orcs…?)

To mark the end of support for Windows 10 my employer gave me a new laptop with a 2.1GHz Core i7, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and a fresh install of Windows 11 24H2. The battery runs out in less than 3 hours, the fan never stops spinning.

To be fair to Windows (ugh. Sorry. I just threw up in my mouth a little) that sounds more like the typical corporate image bloat. I have a similar-specced machine from my employer and by the time the corporate stuff had been added on (VPN client, endpoint management, watchdogs, etc etc) it was brought to its knees - the fan whines constantly and the battery now lasts a comparable time to yours.

By comparison, I have a couple of slightly lesser-spec Thinkpads running plain unpolluted Windows 11, and they're as snappy as Windows 10 and get 8+ hours on battery.

I'm sure the compulsion will be escalated as necessary.

Popular operating system much more sticky than Windows 7 was during its EOL

You could upgrade Win7 to Win8.1 after Win7 went EOL.

In many cases, you cannot upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 11 because only a 8 core/16 thread PC with 32GB of RAM not on the supported list is no longer enough to run a Windows OS.

All of this perfectly task adequate equipment therefore either needs to stay on Win10 unsupported, have somebody jump through an awful lot of hoops to make the installer install despite not meeting the nominal requirements, or switch to another OS.

It's a good writer that saves the most pertinent advice to their last sentence. You, sir managed to do it in the last four words.

Nobody can answer this question: What benefits, other than "support", does Windows 11 bring to users compared to Windows 10?

The problem is that there aren't any, at least not obviously. Instead it's more enshittified and more bloated with spyware. It's a downgrade, not an upgrade. Windows 10 is pretty stable (so was 7), so not getting support doesn't mean much, at least if you take reasonable firewalling precautions and don't click on spam attachments.

So I'm sticking with 10

Yes and delighting in no regular interruption to service that win Updates always were, with the risk of bricking your machine at every update, hence needing to ensure you've backed up first.

I have put non-MS anti-malware on the machines, so they are a little slower to boot but hey.

The problem is that there aren't any, at least not obviously. Instead it's more enshittified and more bloated with spyware. It's a downgrade, not an upgrade.

From my point of view it's worse than that - they are actively removing features I use. Windows Mixed Reality (as used by my HP Reverb G2 VR set) has been forcibly removed from windows 11 after I think Q2 this year(?) so "upgrading" to W11 will render this useless. And while I have discovered there are a couple of Linux projects designed to support it, the main thing I use it with absolutely does not support Linux.

So W10 is staying.

I have a laptop that works perfectly well with Win10 and Linux (dual-boot). It won't run Win11 and I don't see why I should ditch a perfectly good laptop because of some arbitrary MS requirement, so no Windows 11 there.

I did discover that my main desktop machine, which runs Linux but is also not good enough for Win11, will actually run it in a VirtualBox VM. No doubt MS will break that at some point, but I did take a snapshot of the Win10 image before upgrading it, and I did take a snapshot of the working Win11 image once it was done, so hopefully I'll be able to keep something running. It only exists because I have one Windows-only piece of software I have to run once or twice a year and it's insisting on Win11 now.

As many people will no doubt post, they've switched to Linux (or MacOS, or in a few cases, BSD). That's fine for individuals, but it doesn't help the larger problem.

I switched all of my machines except one almost two years ago, and the one remaining machine is not connected to the internet.

While we may not have to worry about our insecure machines being attacked, unpatched Windows 10 machines are botnet nodes waiting to be exploited, which is still going to be a pain. DDoS attacks are already a pain; this is going to make them a lot worse.

I'd like to think some enterprising people will offer third party security updates (like 0code) to Win10 holdouts, but even if it's free, I doubt most users will take advantage of it.

We have two computers in the office at home for web browsing, homework, etc.

The newer one (2 years old) upgraded itself to Windows 11 last year. The older one (6 years old) Windows Update tells me is not compatible with Windows 11 because the CPU is too old. The only thing it can offer to do is refer me to places where I can buy a new computer.

Of course, we know I could do a fresh install of Windows 11 bypassing the CPU check, but I've been too lazy to figure out how to jump through the hoops to do the update.

How to upgrade from Windoze 10:

https://xubuntu.org/

My discussions with friends and previous customers (now retired) is that they won't buy a new PC, since they don't need it any more.

Local E-mail (not webmail), web browsing, web banking, writing an odd document here and there and printing sometihng out once in a while is all they want to do.

Some have old apps that are Windows only which need to be kept around for a bit - old CCTV clients and the like. There is virtually nothing that people NEED windows for any more, particularly as most spend all day on their phone for messaging and the like.

I've updated a number of machines to 11, where they were prevented deliberately in the BIOS to not have 11, no TPM here for example. Others were under the claimed minimum specs and helped along to overcome that. Several others have just gone Debian or Mint and dumped Windows alltogether.

It does seem a lot slower than Win10 on the same hardware with no gain in anything that people care about, even with some of the cruft turned off via WinAeroTweaker.

Its important to note that none of them decided to go and buy a new PC, none of them give a rats ass about AI.