I still wonder if Microsoft is going to blink with the whole Windows 11 requires TPM + modern(ish) CPU requirements vs the EOL of Windows 10.
I have a lot of hardware that will not run Windows 11 without hacking the installer to bypass the TPM/CPU checks and even then the end result is something that would be unsupported by Microsoft. If I move these machines to Windows 11 I'll be at risk of a future update hosing the install because it relies on newer CPU instructions or non-existent TPM.
I'm not going to retire those systems - I'll just migrate them to Linux instead.
I sold your city a bridge that has an engineering flaw, such that it collapses when a purple van followed by an orange scooter drives over it.
It also has thousands of other serious engineering flaws, for other combinations of vehicle and foot traffic.
I keep the bridge blueprints secret, so that only I can make patches for the engineering flaws.
But I'll slowly trickle patches to some of the thousands of engineering flaws. (Mainly when they result in collapses to bridges I've built in other cities.)
Each time, I'll act like I'm doing you a favor, patching some of the bridge engineering flaws that I made negligently.
And I'll start bundling concessions and invasiveness with these patches.
The patch for the design flaw that makes the bridge collapse when green polka-dot truck drives over it-- comes with a garish billboard that I control.
The patch for the design flaw that makes the bridge collapse when a convertible with the windshield wipers on drives over it-- gratuitously requires that everyone driving over it lets me copy all their documents and photos.
It doesn't help that your city has some really jerky enemies, who like to make bridges collapse, and have lots of time on their hands. (Maybe you should've thought of that when selecting an engineering firm for your bridge.)
Somehow, I don't get jailed for shoddy bridge engineering, nor lose my bridge engineering license, nor even have to pay compensation for any of the collapses of bridges that I sold to other cities.
This bridge is under 24/7 hacker attacks from all parts of the world. Some of them try to unscrew bolts, some dig around the foundation, some remove a brick or two here or there or cut suspension cables.
In absence of these hackers bridge could be used without any modifications for any number of pink or orange vehicles. It supports any kind of traffic requested in specification. So it's not really a problem with any kind of regular use, it's a problem with huge number of adversaries who try to find a weak point and then actively exploit it.
Flawled analogy aside, is there an example of an OS which is actively used on open internet and doesn't require security patches or bug fixes? Or any other significantly complex software? Why should we expect from Microsoft what was not achieved anywhere else in our industry? It could be that software development is more complex and more error prone than bridge building after all.
The analogy intentionally focused on the negligent engineering flaws that let anyone with a couple cans of spray paint trigger collapse.
I didn't get to the somewhat trickier question of which parts can fail (due to time, use, nature, or sabotage) before collapse. Though I guess that might also be answered by the engineering design, and traceable to requirements and applicable standards.
The analogy (being only an analogy) doesn't explain what negligent engineering flaws you're referring to, you simply imply they exist and expect everyone else to nod along.
Are the security flaws in Windows notably worse than the patches that any other major OS needs? Or are there simply more of them that are discovered because a Windows vulnerability is a much juicier target?
Workaround is to use products which are already out of support. Eg. I'm still rocking Word and Excel 2003, and prefer them in most cases over the subsequent Ribbony-versions (despite having both installed).
As a nice bonus I'm immune from random updates that overhaul the UX, break features or move my cheese. There are effective ways to mitigate the security concerns.
> Don't forget Microsoft backed down from removing Paint from Windows after some minor backlash.
A more relevant example might be that they extended the life of XP because there was demand for the netbooks of the time that there was no way Vista would run on acceptably. In that case, as with being forced off Win10, Linux was the main alternative.
Large companies will be forced to milk for extended support agreements if they can't upgrade to Windows 10.
Domestic and small business users will be left in the dark, but not before Microsoft extends support for one more year or two just at the cusp of the deadline so they can show they were generous in case they are met in the future with some class action because windows 10 users were targeted with malware due to the lack of security updates.
The new paint is massively improved compared to the old paint. Layer support for PNG finally, if the only improvement, makes whatever tradeoffs are in the app (I haven't found any downsides personally) worth it.
I am, for two. I bought the flagship Intel cpu the generation before support for win 11, and when I get done with it, I will switch it to Linux and have an awesome computer.
The main blocker is the requirement for TPM 2.0. It requires a minimum chipset (motherboard) version, which is only compatible with a minimum CPU generation. I'm not sure how much is implemented on the CPU die vs the mobo chipset, but you effectively need both.
So I think you're right, saying it's a motherboard thing may be slightly more accurate :)
This really is a place any climate-concerned country should find a way to legally intervene. Speaking of my ten year old gaming PC which still runs modern games fine, forcing me to replace it is just straight carbon waste.
Maybe there should be some sort of licensing. Single appliance like phone or laptop per person. You can not get new one until you have proven that you have tried to get device repaired. And accidental or intentional damage like dropping or water would result in permanently losing right to that device for some reasonable period like 10 to 15 years from purchase date...
Are the same people making a stink about Microsoft doing this also making a stink about Apple doing practically the same every time they release a new MacOS version?
How long should hardware be supported? Indefinitely? Should Microsoft still target 286's? Pentium III's?
> Are the same people making a stink about Microsoft doing this also making a stink about Apple doing practically the same every time they release a new MacOS version?
Yes, some of them. Though of course there are people who make stink about Microsoft and not Apple because they don't use Apple products.
> How long should hardware be supported? Indefinitely?
Yes. Or at least approximately as long as Linux does. Especially since it's no longer the 80s/90s and we're not seeing anywhere near the kind of rapid and significant hardware improvements the PC industry saw back then [1]. Microsoft is an extremely successful company with 221,000 full time employees, they have the capacity to do this.
[1] Over the last couple decades, I've declined scheduled PC refreshes a couple times after checking the specs, because the "refreshed" PC was literally almost the same as my current one (like a small CPU bump and a bit more memory). For completely selfish reasons it made more sense to just keep the old one and maybe buy some more RAM than go through the trouble of migrating my stuff.
Problem is mid-high end Windows PC from 10 years ago with SSD and enough RAM is indistinguishable from 2024 PC for many, many workloads. Btw. I'm alternating between 2012 i7 and 2023 i7 on a daily basis and wish difference would be larger for me but it's not. It's not like a situation with 286/386/486 at all. There are zero benefits in upgrading these machines for majority of users. Sure, if you do video encoding or something similar difference can be huge. But for general development, document editing, multimedia/browsing, it's all the same. That's why this forced upgrade stinks.
And Apple stinks too, but we're not arguing that here.
Like it or not Microsoft has built a reputation for itself as supporting devices for a very long time. A reputation Apple definitely doesn’t have. So, no, I don’t think the same level of stink is warranted because people know what they’re getting with the Apple ecosystem when they sign up.
> How long should hardware be supported? Indefinitely? Should Microsoft still target 286's? Pentium III's?
One obvious cut-off point is support for 64-bit software (the AMD64 ISA). Another is a minimum speed and memory capacity.
People are complaining because, in many cases, these "no longer supported" CPU models are faster than the allowed CPU models, and they accept more than enough RAM.
> One obvious cut-off point is support for 64-bit software (the AMD64 ISA)
But there are still millions of 32-bit CPUs out there which could be used but are landfill fodder now. Think of all the e-waste!
> these "no longer supported" CPU models are faster than the allowed CPU models, and they accept more than enough RAM
There's far more to hardware requirements than clock rate and memory capacity. If the hardware doesn't support some feature deemed important adding another stick of RAM won't solve the problem.
32-bit CPU is not a good example because it's obsolete in a realistic sense, not by some artificial requirement. It doesn't support enough RAM not to choke when few browser tabs are opened. Perhaps sadly that modern web page requires that much RAM, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
Windows supported more than 4GB of RAM for some editions of 32-bit Windows. Windows Server Enterprise 2003 supported 64GB of RAM on 32-bit processors supporting PAE.
IMHO, until there's a good reason to depend on a feature they don't have. For cpus, that's usually an instruction that makes things possible or much more efficient.
286s were obsoleted by the 386's 32-bit and virtual modes.
Pentium III was obsoleted by 64-bit mode, if not some version of SSE.
It looks like the 24H2 release of Windows 11 is going to require SSE 4.2, POPCNT is nice, and I guess they want to depend on it. Seems ok for an instruction that's been in processors for over a decade.
Personally, I don't find the TPM requirement essential, especially since windows seems to work fine without a tpm; whereas I'd bet the builds that rely on POPCNT won't work without it. One could hook the bad instruction exception and backfill with a software implementation to count bits, but I think it's ok to skip.
Well sure, it took time for there to be a large enough installed base of 386s to be willing to release software that wouldn't run a 286. And time to write software that made use of the new modes.
But when you had to retire your 286, it was because it couldn't run 32-bit software. Or because you really needed to multitask some dos stuff.
Just saying "I've got this many CPUs and this much RAM" means nothing if the processor just doesn't support some feature deemed important.
I've got multi-socket, multi-core, many-gig-of-RAM boxes that can't run modern Linux kernels (and thus most modern Linux distros) due to lacking CPU features required these days.
Could be worse. They actually gave us plenty of info. 8 core first gen Ryzen is very specific. Windows 11 probably doesn't like it because no TPM (most likely the motherboard has a port for one, but parts may not be available). There's a small list of processors that could be: Ryzen 1700, Ryzen 1800, with or without X/Pro, or maybe a Threadripper 1900X.
Much better than "I've got an i7 why is this slow" "I don't know, it works great on my Pentium", where the first person has an i7-620UE, a 2.13 Ghz 2 core Arrandale (Westmere?) from 2010, and the second person has a Pentium Gold G7400, a 3.7Ghz 2 core Alder Lake from 2022. Turns out 12 years of improvements and moving from mobile to desktop makes a huge difference. Of course, someone with a pentium could also have a processor from 1993-2022, so that's a much worse name without qualifiers.
The sibling comment had it right, it's a Ryzen 7 1700X. The BIOS has been since updated to support fTPM, and that seems to enable upgrading other machines I have.
That Ryzen CPU launched in 2017, which means it existed 4 years before the newest Windows wasn't supported. Really, it's this time frame that surprised me.
What do we consider a modern kernel? Debian is still shipping a i386 port that should run on a Pentium II. It's old enough to order a beer at a restaurant.
"Nearly all x86-based (IA-32) processors still in use in personal computers are supported. This also includes 32-bit AMD and VIA (former Cyrix) processors, and processors like the Athlon XP and Intel P4 Xeon. However, Debian GNU/Linux bookworm will not run on 586 (Pentium) or earlier processors."
It is a dual socket Pentium III machine. I forget if I tried to run Debian on it or not but trying several other distros with a i386 version a few years ago only ever lead to boot issues complaining about some CPU feature missing and it wouldn't boot even after hours of me searching and trying to reconfigure grub settings.
"In March 2021, we confronted a serious reality: state sponsored threat actors were targeting on-premises Exchange servers."
That totally joke excuse to just say that they think that they can milk their users more with a saas business instead of selling permanent licenses.
Also I find it very funny that Microsoft use the security of on-premise as an excuse when you see how insecure was their own IT with most of the public exchange was probably vulnerable to leak multiple times and for a long time...
You cut the part of the paragraph that gives the actual context for the quote:
> In 2022, Microsoft said the next version of the server would turn up in the second half of 2025. It was originally planned for 2021, but Microsoft said: "Unfortunately, 2021 had other plans for Exchange Server. In March 2021, we confronted a serious reality: state sponsored threat actors were targeting on-premises Exchange servers."
They're not trying to use the incident as an excuse to push people off of Exchange, all they're saying is that the 2021 release was delayed because of the security incidents.
Here's what Microsoft actually said in the blog post (emphasis theirs) [0]:
> We will maintain the current support dates for Exchange Server 2013, Exchange Server 2016, and Exchange Server 2019; however, we plan to support the next version of Exchange Server beyond October 14, 2025. We are moving the next version of Exchange Server to our Modern Lifecycle Policy, which has no end of support dates. We plan on continuing to support Exchange Server as long as there is substantive market demand.
> Also I find it very funny that Microsoft use the security of on-premise as an excuse when you see how insecure was their own IT with most of the public exchange was probably vulnerable to leak multiple times and for a long time...
Azure is by far the worst public cloud in terms of security. It was so bad, the Bing homepage could be edited by any logged in user, and that's just one example.
Businesses can turn to new AI powered features and applications, such as Microsoft Bing and ChatGPT to replace these legacy systems. AI powered Bing and Microsoft 365 provide engaging and immersive experiences, powered by generative AI and ChatGPT. These tools allow businesses to move at the speed of 365, and get more done, more securely and more efficiently than ever before with the help of AI.
I don't have any thoughts on any of the other stuff, but I am sticking with Windows 10 until the Windows 11 LTSC version comes out later this year. Especially with a lot of the crap that Microsoft keeps adding too Windows 11 recently.
I refuse to run a non stripped down version of Windows. Windows 10 LTSC has been amazing for gaming, particularly on my Steam Deck.
That being said, almost a year and a half away doesn't really seem like a time to start panicking unless I am missing something?
I'm using Nod32 (or whatever Eset calls it these days) for more than a decade and it's mostly not noticeable. I can recommend it over Defender from performance point of view - since I noticed slowdowns on machines where Defender is used. It's hard to know which one protects better, didn't have any kind of "infection" since started using Nod.
If you are not doing much on that PC, Defender and Windows Firewall is enough. Of course, that's assuming Microsoft continues to provide Defender intelligence and engine updates after 2025.
It is interesting that Google gets a lot of flak for canceling products, while Microsoft effectively cancels products all the time through EOL, but it doesn't register the same because they will sell you the next version (which is NOT the same as the old version only better).
With Microsoft they tell you years in advance when the product will reach EOL, so you have plenty of time to prepare
On top of that, most of their products are software running on your desktop and will still keep working after EOL
And if you're a government or enterprise with spectacularly big wallets, you can choose to pay Microsoft big $$ to keep shipping you additional security patches
They just released the beta of Office 2024, so no. However, they have drastically shortened the support lifecycle for offline editions which has made it a lot more expensive to use non-subscription Office. Office 2016 was supported for ten years, Office 2021 is supported for five.
With a three year release cycle, you used to be able to skip up to two versions of Office and still get security updates. Now you can't skip any because five years of support is too short to get you to the release six years out.
The community has actually come up with some very useful mods to XP, like drivers for newer hardware and backported patches for APIs which originally were only present in newer versions of Windows.
> Would they keep running forever without updates?
> > Yes they will work indefinitely. Why wouldn't they?
Because the computer clock advanced past a date which triggers bugs or limitations on some component, and it cannot be adjusted backwards without a full reinstall, or it's talking to networked services which expect the clock to be close enough to reality. It might be possible to fix with third-party updates, but that's no longer "without updates".
And if you need a reinstall, the online account requirement and/or activation servers being turned off might make it hard without third-party modifications. (It's been a long time since I last installed Windows anywhere, and that was before the online account requirement; how hard is it to install Windows on a completely offline computer nowadays?)
>Because the computer clock advanced past a date which triggers bugs or limitations on some component, and it cannot be adjusted backwards without a full reinstall, or it's talking to networked services which expect the clock to be close enough to reality. It might be possible to fix with third-party updates, but that's no longer "without updates".
This is possible with any piece of software. I don't know if Windows 95 will work after the year 9999, nor do I think it's a scenario we should really worry about.
>And if you need a reinstall, the online account requirement and/or activation servers being turned off might make it hard without third-party modifications.
The online account requirement can be bypassed with a command line option during setup. It does also have some fail safe processing that catches if the online account login fails, falling back to an offline account option.
In terms of activation, you can use Windows 10 or 11 without activating it, but you'll end up with a watermark on the desktop.
Windows XP was the first Windows version to use activation, and it's still possible to activate it via the telephone 22+ years later, so it's likely the activation process for Windows 10 and 11 will continue for some years.
The first part of your comment is an extremely vague theoretical that pretty much applies to any piece of software, not Windows in particular. It is not based on any actual evidence that such a thing will happen. You might as well bring up the possibility of a massive solar flare completely wipes out all computers preventing people from running Windows indefinitely, it is also a possibility preventing users from running Windows 10 forever.
The second part isn't based in reality at all. Windows 10 can be installed entirely offline.
I'm not going to link to any of it here, but there's also loads of cracked slmgr.vbs scripts out there that will easily activate your Windows install offline.
Microsoft has good backwards compatibility in general, but saying "you can't use Google Wave in any shape or form" isn't really true in spirit.
Much of the advance of Wave went into other products. Wave itself did not take off, but we have better chat, better email, better docs, all because of things pioneered in Wave. This is often the case with Google products disappearing, it's often because they've served their purpose and the technology has become normalised in other places.
Google Play Music is a good example of this. It was a technically capable product, but missing the market (in my opinion), and was turned into YouTube Music, a much better fit (again, opinion). Many product "deaths" are actually just a migration, or a recognition that the product is no longer necessary, and are better for it.
Microsoft tells you in 5-10 years this product will be unsupported, you almost always have the option to buy extended support and sometimes they push back the EOL date. And the solution to the EOL is to upgrade to the new release.
Google randomly kills products with 30-60 days notice, and no upgrade path to a different product.
It is interesting that Google gets a lot of flak for canceling products, while ~~Microsoft~~ Canoical effectively cancels products all the time through EOL, but it doesn't register the same because they will sell you the next version (which is NOT the same as the old version only better).
That's really a stretch to equate cancelling products to product EOL. I don't think I need to explain it -- anyone who ever looked at the release cycle of Python, Ubuntu, Django, Node.js etc understands why it is common and makes sense to have a well-defined support timeline.
I have a lot of hardware that will not run Windows 11 without hacking the installer to bypass the TPM/CPU checks and even then the end result is something that would be unsupported by Microsoft. If I move these machines to Windows 11 I'll be at risk of a future update hosing the install because it relies on newer CPU instructions or non-existent TPM.
I'm not going to retire those systems - I'll just migrate them to Linux instead.