Windows 10 end-of-support (and Windows 11 entry)

[TimC]

I'm hearing rumours that MS is proposing ending support for Windows 10 after the 2022H1 update, I'd previously understood that Win10 would be supported until Oct 14 2025 (ie 2025H1). I've noticed that MS is getting more aggressive about withdrawing support for earlier builds of Win10 - 1909 has just fallen off the supported list. Anyone in the industry have any substantive info?

Win11 now looks like it will be available for manual installation into unsupported computers, but it will not receive update support on those devices. MS have confirmed that you'll need at least 8th-gen Intel CPUs (with a couple of exceptions), or 1st-gen Ryzen, to run Win 11.  If the revised Win10 -out-of-support date is correct, there's going to be an awful lot of computers junked next year!

[Ham]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-home-and-pro

[Feanor]

For me, the lack of TPM modules on my older boxes will be the limiting factor.

I expect I'm not the only one.

[woollypigs]

I'm looking at going back to Linux, just because why not.

Though I might just run Win10 until the end on this machine, be that hardware or software that goes first. This PC is coming up to 5 years old, but is still going strong. And if it can do another 4 before win10 ends I will be happy.

Then when upgrade time comes look into TPM and other things that have come out in the last five years to see if I can get my head around that. Took me 3 months the last time to figure out what was what and what was needed for my use

(I don't game or render high end video/CAD, so knowing if this new shiny gizmo with 10% MORE (of what ever they are selling) is something I really need, does take some time to figure out)

[mzjo]

I thought "they" had said when W10 came out that it would be the last Windows and that it would be regular updates from then on in. I naively assumed that this meant it would go for ever. Now even happier to have a Linux laptop! Given the hassle installing Ubuntu on this one (involved changing the ssd to get round an Intel thing that stopped Linux installations) expect to see a whole raft of new stuff on which anything other than W11 is blocked!

[Ham]

I should have added, I am in the industry and OS currency is a hot topic, creating solutions to migrate and/or modernise customer environments ranging in size from 50 to 50,000 servers is my day job. The W10 published support cycle is relied on by businesses that MS relies on for their revenue. There would be no precedent to bringing forward support end date and it would herald a tsunami of moves away from MS. Currently, MS Azure are achieving some substantial success in reducing the move away from MS platform by providing extended support for W2K8 server, available nowhere else. Reneging on a published support schedule would be unprecedented and not be received well, to say the least. In my view, what you have is a rumour that has no sbstance.

[TheLurker]

I can't see there being a mad rush by businesses to upgrade to W11, https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/30/windows_11_workstations/

We, $transnational_bigco, only migrated to W10 in late 2019 and that was ooh lots of fun.

At the risk of turning this into Linux advocacy thread, it has got to the point that if you want something at home that lets you do all yer web browsing, word processing (Libre Office is really rather good) and a bit of image and video editing without badgering you with uncontrollable updates then the more user friendly less user hostile distributions are not unlike using Win7 or XP, which is a Good Thing(tm) in my estimation.

[Kim]

Yeah, Windows is pretty good these days, but it's still not ready for the desktop.

[TimC]

I should have added, I am in the industry and OS currency is a hot topic, creating solutions to migrate and/or modernise customer environments ranging in size from 50 to 50,000 servers is my day job. The W10 published support cycle is relied on by businesses that MS relies on for their revenue. There would be no precedent to bringing forward support end date and it would herald a tsunami of moves away from MS. Currently, MS Azure are achieving some substantial success in reducing the move away from MS platform by providing extended support for W2K8 server, available nowhere else. Reneging on a published support schedule would be unprecedented and not be received well, to say the least. In my view, what you have is a rumour that has no sbstance.

Yes, that makes sense to me. I'm following it up with the rumour source, as I think it's a fairly irresponsible bit of scaremongering (much like the BBC's fuel crisis).

Linux is pretty much a waste of time and effort for those who need industry-standard software. It's a backwater for nerds and tinfoilers, frankly. I appreciate its enthusiast appeal, and I have run Ubuntu and Mint in the past just to see if they were practical. They weren't.

[Ham]

Worth pointing out that my direct experience is with Windows Server, but the same holds true: shorting a support cycle would result in a huge loss of confidence (and likely, in the states, lawsuits for  big $$$)

[ian]

Having used Windows 10 and MacOS back-to-back for a couple of weeks now, I can say that while Windows gets the job done, it's a hot fucking mess.

Come on, they just layered a bit of UI over the top of Windows 3.1 didn't they?

I will credit Microsoft with the Windows 95 start-up bong, which is still the best start-up bong ever.

I like the way Windows, having failed to recognise my fingerprint this morning, advised me to try another finger.

[TimC]

I like the way Windows, having failed to recognise my fingerprint this morning, advised me to try another finger.

I'd suggest that's Dell's crappy fingerprint hardware.

I use both Windows and MacOS. Quite happy with both, but I recognise that Windows is (obviously) quite a bit more vulnerable to hardware variations. Its main advantage is that I can get the desktop power I need at around 30% of the cost of an equivalent Mac. The price difference is less marked for laptops, but still very significant. And modern games basically don't exist on Mac.

[ian]

That it might be, but it tickled. Also, I was using the wrong finger, so technically it was right.

[SoreTween]

Linux is pretty much a waste of time and effort for those who need industry-standard software. It's a backwater for nerds and tinfoilers, frankly. I appreciate its enthusiast appeal, and I have run Ubuntu and Mint in the past just to see if they were practical. They weren't.

Depends entirely on the application.
Yeah if you want to run an industrial grade scada forget linux. There's promising upstarts that may be viable for small installations and perhaps something bigger in a decade. Does anything exist in the Mac world at all in this field?
In the middle you have video editing which is every bit as well supported in all platforms.  This after Mac stole the show and then Microsoft put a huge effort in to catch up. Linux conversion was a no brainer for the Mac developers once the os bubble was burst.
At the other extreme is image processing. Gimp wrote the book. Blender wrote another. And so on.

Horses for courses.

[Ham]

Linux is pretty much a waste of time and effort for those who need industry-standard software. It's a backwater for nerds and tinfoilers, frankly. I appreciate its enthusiast appeal, and I have run Ubuntu and Mint in the past just to see if they were practical. They weren't.

Depends entirely on the application.
Yeah if you want to run an industrial grade scada forget linux. There's promising upstarts that may be viable for small installations and perhaps something bigger in a decade. Does anything exist in the Mac world at all in this field?
In the middle you have video editing which is every bit as well supported in all platforms.  This after Mac stole the show and then Microsoft put a huge effort in to catch up. Linux conversion was a no brainer for the Mac developers once the os bubble was burst.
At the other extreme is image processing. Gimp wrote the book. Blender wrote another. And so on.

Horses for courses.

Nay

[TheLurker]

Linux is pretty much a waste of time and effort for those who need industry-standard software. It's a backwater for nerds and tinfoilers, frankly. I appreciate its enthusiast appeal, and I have run Ubuntu and Mint in the past just to see if they were practical. They weren't.

You don't say how far, "in the past".  It's taken me 20 years and two previous "visits" at 10 year intervals to make the switch for home use because what you say was very definitely the case.  I don't think that it is now, for *some* distros.  For a bit of CAD & drawing stuff stuff for the toy aeroplanes (LibreCAD & Inkscape), WP (LibreOffice),  some simple video editing and (the nearest I get to being a nerd these days) a little light programming using .net core it's been as easy or easier to set up and use than a WinBox. 

[Mr Larrington]

Having used Windows 10 and MacOS back-to-back for a couple of weeks now, I can say that while Windows gets the job done, it's a hot fucking mess.

Come on, they just layered a bit of UI over the top of Windows 3.1 didn't they?

I will credit Microsoft with the Windows 95 start-up bong, which is still the best start-up bong ever.

I like the way Windows, having failed to recognise my fingerprint this morning, advised me to try another finger.

Up to and including Windows 9x it was more or less a GUI crudely bolted onto MS-DOS, but the underlying OS was pretty much replaced in its entirety with Windows NT, which unsurprisingly had more than a little in common with VMS.  Microsith lured Dave Cutler, one of the software engineers responsible for VMS, away from DEC in the late 1980s to lead the NT project.  Mr Cutler doesn’t like Un*x either

[Kim]

Linux is pretty much a waste of time and effort for those who need industry-standard software. It's a backwater for nerds and tinfoilers, frankly. I appreciate its enthusiast appeal, and I have run Ubuntu and Mint in the past just to see if they were practical. They weren't.

You don't say how far, "in the past".  It's taken me 20 years and two previous "visits" at 10 year intervals to make the switch for home use because what you say was very definitely the case.  I don't think that it is now, for *some* distros.  For a bit of CAD & drawing stuff stuff for the toy aeroplanes (LibreCAD & Inkscape), WP (LibreOffice),  some simple video editing and (the nearest I get to being a nerd these days) a little light programming using .net core it's been as easy or easier to set up and use than a WinBox.

Normal people (ie. not OS developers or unisex spaceadmins) don't use OSes, they use applications.

An awful lot of people barely use anything more than a web browser these days, so the OS really doesn't matter.

Many applications are cross-platform, particularly open-source ones.  Linux is mature, free and well-suited to embedded systems and server tasks that rely on such software.  It's a reasonable platform for writing code on, if you don't need proprietary tools, but so is OSX or even Windows.

Sometimes, you need Real Excel.  Sometimes you need to use a piece of hardware that only comes with Windows drivers.  Sometimes you need accessibility tools that tie you to Windows or MacOS.  Sometimes you need a specialist application that's only available on a particular OS for no reason other than the developers can't be arsed porting it.  Sometimes you need IE fucking 6.

Sometimes you have conflicting needs, which means running more than one OS.  You probably don't run Windows on your smartphone...

[Jaded]

An awful lot of people barely use anything more than a web browser FaceAche these days, so the OS really doesn't matter.

[Mr Larrington]

Sometimes you have conflicting needs, which means running more than one OS.  You probably don't run Windows on your smartphone...

My grate frend Mr Woolrich has only recently binned his Windows phone, because Microsith stopped supporting it in early 2020.

[TimC]

Linux is pretty much a waste of time and effort for those who need industry-standard software. It's a backwater for nerds and tinfoilers, frankly. I appreciate its enthusiast appeal, and I have run Ubuntu and Mint in the past just to see if they were practical. They weren't.

You don't say how far, "in the past".  It's taken me 20 years and two previous "visits" at 10 year intervals to make the switch for home use because what you say was very definitely the case.  I don't think that it is now, for *some* distros.  For a bit of CAD & drawing stuff stuff for the toy aeroplanes (LibreCAD & Inkscape), WP (LibreOffice),  some simple video editing and (the nearest I get to being a nerd these days) a little light programming using .net core it's been as easy or easier to set up and use than a WinBox. 

Yes, true - it's 10 years since I last used Linux. Windows was at v7, and OSX was... Snow Leopard, perhaps? My main uses are music, 3D artwork for computer flight sims - and using the flight sims themselves to test the completed work, 2D artwork for print work, and a few other things. I'm aware that Linux runs Blender and Gimp, but it certainly doesn't run Prepar3D or Microsoft Flight Simulator, or any of the 20+ specialist apps that I use in scenery construction. MacOS is great for the more mainstream stuff, but again it's useless for the flight sim apps. These days, I can fire up any of my Winboxes and work on anything I was working on on any of the other Winboxes - and quite a few things from my MBP too. And I don't need to learn anything new to do it!

[pcolbeck]

Horses for courses isnt it ?

Linux is everywhere these days but you just don't notice it. Nearly all network appliances  (load balancers, firewalls, management boxes etc) these days run Linux but you just don't see it its under the hood with a custom GUI bolted on the top. Your ISP mail server is probably Linux as are its DNS and DHCP servers. Increasingly switches and routers are actually running Linux, granted once they boot they download custom firmware to the ASICs that do the heavy lifting but the management plane (SSH console, NTP logging etc) is Linux. All Cisco datacentre stuff works this way now it just loads a custom CLI console instead of bash or whatever. A huge percentage of the web servers out there are Linux.

For anyone doing web development or the like Linux is great.

For corporate desktop use well not so much for two reasons. One Microsoft have a lock in on the common corporate apps Word, Excel etc. Secondly there really isn't a good cross platform equivalent of Active Directory.  People have tried to push open source LDAP alternatives but Active Directory still wins (up to now everything changes eventually).

Pick your use case which is based on apps and management then pick the OS and support services that match but the idea that Linux is just for nerds and tinkerers these days is simply not true.

[fruitcake]

Bring it on. Windows end of life is a great time to buy a used Windows box for Linux installation. Alas it's terrible for the environment with businesses disposing of usable computers.

[TimC]

Yes, I’m aware of the ubiquity of Linux in back-office applications. And that’s great, but it doesn’t alter the fact that - as for a lot of people - it can’t offer me as a nearly-end-user the functionality I need. At the consumer PC end of the market, I don’t think it’s unfair to call it a niche product used mostly by tinkerers and nerds! No disrespect intended; I qualify on both counts, but I can’t indulge my tinkering and nerdish preferences via Linux.

I also don’t have the pathological hatred of MS that is common in Apple and Linux communities, and I never have. I was a mostly-happy MS customer back in the days of MS-DOS (and remember the iPhone-like hype that accompanied each new release), and - with the exceptions of Vista and Win8, which prompted a partial move to Mac and experimentation with Ubuntu and Mint - I’ve been pretty happy with them ever since.

[chrisbainbridge]

I also don’t have the pathological hatred of MS that is common in Apple and Linux communities, and I never have. I was a mostly-happy MS customer back in the days of MS-DOS (and remember the iPhone-like hype that accompanied each new release), and - with the exceptions of Vista and Win8, which prompted a partial move to Mac and experimentation with Ubuntu and Mint - I’ve been pretty happy with them ever since.

I use Mac and Win10 totally interchangeably.  I have word, powerpoint, keynote, safari, chrome, endnote working across both of them.  With dropbox or one drive and Splashtop to get access to the office I just do want I need to do.  I prefer the look of my Macbox and my wife does not crash the iMac with her natural electricity like she crashes windows machines but otherwise they just work these days.