Alternative OS it is then!

Luckily I've been using Linux Mint for years and years.

Well done you. Obviously you don't need to use anything a business needs to run in the real world, or games.

I suspect you'll find the majority of businesses dont need anything beyond Libreoffice.....and for gaming Steam has you covered.

As a Linux user of 18 years...

The only thing I can't do on my Linux laptop is have it display a screen of "Installing Updates" and take an hour to do it, blocking me from doing any real work.

So in that respect, yeah. Windoze has us licked for an excuse to not do any work.

Or BSOD. But I agree, after 18 years it's possible to forget BSODs.

I've been running Windows at home for the past 30+ years, because, well, easy. But there's no way in a gazillion years that I will let M$ force me to bin perfectly functional hardware.

So, yes. When the time comes, it'll be a new OS. No question.

Looks like you are doomed! Just pay the man, man.

"Obviously you don't need to use anything a business needs to run in the real world"

Good lord, have you seen how much stuff is done via a browser these days? Less & less of my daily workload is running locally on my endpoint.

Looking at the Taskbar on my PC right now, everything I have launched could be done on Linux with a browser. I actually didn't realize that and make that connection until just now. I wonder how many other corporate users are in the same situation.

"Good lord, have you seen how much stuff is done via a browser these days?"

Quite a lot, but by no means all - especially where businesses rely on specialist software which has been around for a while.

There is also the user training issue (which probably applies as much to Libre Office or whatever than it does to the OS itself). The fanboys always ignore this. They are also oblivious to the point that it's very tedious having 'just use Linux' or similar posted on nearly every thread about something Windows-related. There is probably nobody who regularly reads this forum who hasn't used Linux, and many will have a lot of experience of it (enough to know that a blanket approach of 'the answer is Linux - now what's the question - is not sensible).

Perhaps those who work in the real world should start to post on all threads about Linux 'Just use Windows'...

"There is also the user training issue (which probably applies as much to Libre Office or whatever than it does to the OS itself). The fanboys always ignore this."

So, I suspect, do Windows shops. They just assume everyone "knows" Windows. Or they let users train each other which amounts to passing on each other's bad habits. That explains a lot, from Comix Sans in serious documents upwards.

I, in my self-trained LibreOffice way, have edited a few books written in Word. Tables laid out with tabs and spaces. Tabs and spaces to put text down the right-hand side of an image. Images "cropped" by Word which are full-size but just masked off* so in one case the image was not only full size in the file but also duplicated because it had been inserted a second time to crop down to a different face. Yes, you don't need to train users because they "know" Windows (which obviously includes Office).

* Admittedly LO duplicates this misfeature but nobody trains authors to edit their images properly before inserting them.

you have WIndows 11 running happily on an old PC and then Windows 11 decides to auto-update itself to the latest build?

It will boot straight to a blue screen saying that you have unsupported hardware.

My guess would be it won't boot?

As the article says, if you are masochistic enough to run w11 on a pentium 3 then you'll soon be out of luck.

Chances are this won't affect many people.

Those it does affect can turn off updates, install win 10 or some flavour of Linux. Or spend money to replace the computer.

So you're perfectly fine with a vendor forcing you to spend money to replace a perfectly working computer just because the vendor says so ?

No wonder Borkzilla & Co are making mint.

I think that's the Microsoft version. Others may disagree.

Ahh this one.

No they are not asking you to replace your perfectly working computer. They are telling you that they will no longer support their software working on certain hardware after a certain build.

You are free to run the old builds of the OS, how you have Win 11 working well on such slow hardware; I'd hate to feel that pain, is another question. You are also free to install another OS of your choice.

Why do people equate the OS to the Computer. You are on the El'Reg, you must know that we are not in Apple land.

They tell you you shouldn't have been running it on an unsupported system to begin with...

I'll be honest here, and this may be a spicy take, we needed this. Minimum specs for Windows haven't went up since the Vista era. Either folks need to stop complaining that Windows is a bloated mess of an OS, or they need to stop complaining that it's not going to work on their 386 anymore. You can't have it both ways. If you want it to move forward, it needs to let go of some of the ancient BS it's still dragging along, if you want it to be frozen in time, then don't expect it to be new and exciting.

But for Microsoft's /real/ customers, enterprises, we haven't had a major leap in functionality since Vista, because we haven't had a minimum-spec jump since then. And at the dayjob, we threw out almost everything that doesn't support 11 already, and the few machines we have floating around with unsupported 6/7th gen CPUs need replaced by next year when 10 goes EOL anyway. This isn't a change for the consumer, it's for the enterprise. And the changes aren't particularly unreasonable (so far) in that space.

As someone who uses 5 different major OSs/Kernels at least weekly (MacOS, Windows 10/11, a few flavours of Linux, Haiku (BeOS), and FreeBSD) I'm fully on-board with this. It's giving the other guys a chance to show consumers there are other (non-Microsoft, and non-MacOS) options out there that are actually usable for 95% of what they do on Windows (or more if they only use a browser) and most of them are FREE!

At the same time, as someone who supports a Windows environment at work, I'm /also for it there too/! It allows us to have better security, and guarantee that every system in the fleet will support newer software that the business decides we need, and we can more easily and confidently say "yes this will work on any system that we support"

That's a very spicy take, it's been retroactively unsupported two and a half years after release.

> "Either folks need to stop complaining that Windows is a bloated mess of an OS, or they need to stop complaining that it's not going to work on their 386 anymore. You can't have it both ways."

Errrr, those are the same ways.

I assume something like this will only emerge from insider builds with the next annual release - and those don't install anyway if the hardware requirements aren't met (well, not without workarounds which may end up as extreme as a reinstall).

Meanwhile, W10 machines which don't meet the requirements are now getting windows popping up helpfully warning them of the end of support in 18 months and encouraging the user to buy a shiny new Windows 11 computer (the annoying window even has a screenshot of the W11 start menu and taskbar). My W10 machine has had two of these in the past few weeks and there is of course no 'fuck off permanently' button - only 'remind me later' and 'learn more'.

Why do you have [1]KB5001716 installed?

The clue is it has its own entry in Add/Remove Programs. It's not a security update or a feature update.

[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2024/03/07/microsofts-sneaky-kb5001716-windows-10-update-pushes-windows-11/

Ta - wasn't aware of the KB. I will have a look now!

I don't think it is too big a deal.

A 10 year-old computer is very usable and there is no reason why Windows 11 can't run on it, if you have sufficient RAM and boot from an SSD.

15 year-old computer is pushing it.

Is it?

My 2007 iMac is still perfectly fine and there's no need to throw it out. In three years time it'll be 20 years old.

You are not going to be able to run Sonoma on it though. I guess with a period-appropriate OS and a suitable chromium/firefox build, it should be usable though.

You are not going to be able to run Sonoma on it though.

Is that the OS where they took Snow Leopard and scribbled over it with their crayon set for about 15 years?

Acer 1810TZ built in 2009 still running fine with Linux here. First thing I did when I got it was check that Linux would run, then ripped out the HD and replaced it with a 64GB SSD, Windoze free. Runs flawlessly.

My current machine is over ten years old. i5-4440 CPU and 32GB RAM and it runs the latest Linux Mint quite happily. It won't run Win11 though, and while it's working I see no need to upgrade it.

Surely the instruction is POPC U NT, no?

to have 2 different repositories, each compiled with different CPU version flags ? Or perhaps run time detection of what is supported and run different code ? Those running older CPUs might get a performance hit but better that than not running at all.

Maybe there are back room deals with hardware vendors to encourage buying or new machines.

Not that it affects me: 100% Linux chez moi.

It's possibly beyond the wit of Microsoft but they're more interested in kicking passengers off the bus half-way through the ride and making it a precedent and it seems many other passengers are okay with that. Those who were kicked off are supposed to just shrug and buy a new computer with the same operating system.

popcnt is a very useful instruction... it returns the number of bits set to 1 in a word of memory. This sounds trivial, but it's a huge perf boost since this is a very common thing to need to do, and the obvious for loop alternative is fast... but not as fast. You _could_ dynamically detect it, there is a CPUID bit that indicates if it is supported, but then you would have to dynamically replace every possible location of it with a call to some other routine, or somehow trap an exception, retry etc. It's just not practical to dynamically support using it since the effort to do so negates the performance advantage of the instruction.

All that said, the min CPU spec is really about security and the colossal screwup that is meltdown/spectre. Forcing out chipsets that bleed information due to meltdown/spectre/etc and can't really be effectively mitigated, or worse the mitigations further drag down performance is required to have basic security guarantees. SSE4.2 just comes along for the ride. Sure, use the older machine for something by running linux on it... just make sure it isn't anything important.

Microsoft has done a really _terrible_ job of actually explaining the hardware motivations here. Simply terrible.

I suspect they don't feel the need to improve that communication, since:

- Decision-makers for their enterprise customers will either blindly accept the requirement, or figure out what you stated on their own

- Most of the individual power-users who could possibly comprehend their explanation won't believe them anyway.

That's the advantage of source builds. You don't have to detect and code around features at run time, you can let the compiler do it.

In fact, there is no reason that MS doesn't release a non_popcount compiled version for older computers.

oooh and do the latest versions of those run on ancient hardware?

No.

It's clearly in the interests of hardware vendors to promote the use of the latest changes in technologies as it perpetuates sales. It's less clear why software developers follow suit with such alacrity. Good engineering practice dictates that the simplest and most universally applicable solution to any problem is usually the best for the customer. But instead we are constantly forced to "upgrade" to carry on doing the jobs we were perfectly able to do yesterday. For example, I've encountered several business-significant web services that refuse to run on Win7 even in the same browser they run happily on in Win10. There seems to be no good reason for this, except possibly for the CV of the dev ("look, I'm at the bleeding edge"). But it's a bloody nuisance for the customer.

> It's clearly in the interests of hardware vendors to promote the use of the latest changes in technologies as it perpetuates sales. It's less clear why software developers follow suit with such alacrity.

You've got cart-before-horse. Each new version of Windows requires new hardware and gets the OEMs even more locked into the Microsoft ecosystem.

Laptop with 1920 x 1080 screen

Intel i7

AMD GPU

16 G RAM

Doesn't meet HW requirements for Win11. I have a version of same model with i5 and no GPU and 4 G RAM. Boots and runs Linux Mint 21.3 (current version) 64 bit, faster than Win10 on higher spec laptop.

The problem isn't Linux but about half a dozen companies that only do Windows versions (some have Mac versions) of their software. It's deliberate.

Adobe & MS have Android versions of some of their SW.

MS even has Edge for Linux.

Amazon's Kindle and servers run Linux, but desktop SW is Windows / Mac.

MyWrite

Autodesk's Eagle ran on Linux (but they bought that in), other Autodex SW, not.

Various UK Payroll and Accounts.

SW that does run on Linux and Windows:

wget

The Gimp

Steam

Filezilla

Libre Office

Most browsers inc MS Edge.

Thunderbird

Calibre ebook Management

Audacity Audio Workstation

There are better PDF SW not by Adobe than Acrobat. You don't need the same package on different OS

Brother MFC/Printer/Scanner drivers

Very many USB peripherals work better now on Linux than Windows. Some only need drivers downloaded for Windows.

Viber

Telegram

Signal

In 2004 a 10 year old PC would be junk. But now a 15 year old PC (especially desktop)/ laptop is still fine. A 32Bit cpu would still often give enough performance, but you'd have difficulty with current versions of SW due to the libraries and FW causing them to ditch 32 bit. Also last 32 bit Linux Mint is 19.3 which might be ending support about now.

Exactly what are MS trying to prove and why should they want you to update HW, or even OS, if their aim is to sell Cloud services?

Software vendors forcing hardware upgrades. Hardware vendors only supporting new drivers for so-called 'modern' operating systems.

Along the way, subscription licensing is enforced to get a direct siphon to the user's pocket. Mix in a requirement for a Microsoft account so the user can be tracked, monitored, and monetized long-term.

Just commenting.....

you also need AppleID, Google Accounts and so on. There is not the same ranting about those.

Many will already have a Microsoft account if they use X Box, or have an Office365 subscription.

As far as the other two go I fail to see what the difference is between then an MS.

Last I checked, an Apple ID isn’t mandatory to use macOS

I noted a comment above about real Enterprises use Windows because that's what's compatible with the software - very much business area specific I'd suggest.

Our future requirements are very much being drawn around the UI being delivered via a browser for the big eye wateringly expensive toys and for things like Office - well it's trending towards we generate less and less of that sort of content in the first place (certainly Word docs.) because it's just a huge document management PITA. The new Outlook is just a reskined web browser so there's a direction of travel there.

The biggie is Excel which the business consume more of than various illegal narcotics and have a similar dependence on but I suspect other factors around data controls may start to kick in which forces cold turkey whether they like it or not.

Now I know somebody is going to mention CAD/CAM and that's fine - horses for courses, your enterprise is not my enterprise but we are steadily heading in a direction where Windows on the desktop is becoming less of a hard requirement.

"I noted a comment above about real Enterprises use Windows because that's what's compatible with the software - very much business area specific I'd suggest."

You are most likely to find Linux desktop use in hardcore science and engineering businesses, where the staff are mostly technically-minded anyway. Graphic design businesses frequently prefer Apple.

Outside of those niches, it's mostly going to be Windows.

Good heavens, who is still running Windows and thinking it's the only option? The number of Linux end user devices absolutely dwarfs Windows these days. Yes I am including Android because the point is you do everything through a browser now.

I assume you don't work in the general IT field? Because the harsh reality is that Windows IS the only realistic option in many cases.

Anrdoid is a heavily customised commercial Linux, with bulk management capabilities built in (it can be managed through Intune and other MDM solutions). Similar sitation witth ChromeOS. It is in no way comparable to the wide array of desktop distros.

... and you find them not being your customers anymore, eventually.

So, they're taking the same path that Linux distributions like RHEL/Fedora and Suse have already taken - bumped the Microarchitecture level to x86-64-v2 or so.

(Yes, I know Windows doesn't think about hardware support in terms of Microarchitecture levels the same way, but that's what it effectively is.)

At least in the open source world you can jump to a different distribution, or build it yourself. Although the pressure to bump the required baseline is building across the board, as more and more applications start to require features like AVX.