Windows 10 end of life could prompt torrent of e-waste
Just because it's "unsupported" doesn't mean it won't continue working.
The realisation of that fact is the key to avoiding planned obsolescence and rejecting the mainstream narrative of corporate authoritarianism.
Ideas of how to intercept "scrapped" machines of this nature? I'd love to have a hobby of installing newbie-friendly Linux distros on machines like this and giving them away.
Come to think of it, I know some folks who run IT departments I could probably ask.
The law should be that if you end support for hardware you have to open source all its software including any services needed for it to run.
> Minimum system requirements for installing Windows 11 on a PC mean users must have a processor of at least 1 GHz or faster along with a minimum of 4GB RAM. Storage requirements are also set to a minimum of 64GB.
That will barely run Vista. People are not going to chucking Windows 10 PCs in the trash because of these requirements.
Apple does the same thing with its Macintosh series, newer versions of MacOS don't support some older Macs. Been like this with MacOS for a long time now and nobody seems to care that Apple does it. Install Linux on the old Macs to keep them alive, the same with old PCs.
From 55 days ago:
Do not go gentle into that overflowing landfill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38036151
The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has delivered a petition to Microsoft calling on the company to rethink the impending abandonment of Windows 10 in the face of millions of PCs potentially being rendered eligible for landfill overnight.
The Register link: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/27/microsoft_petitioned_...
https://pirg.org/media-center/20000-call-on-microsoft-to-sav...There are now less than two years until Microsoft is due to cut support for Windows 10, and at current estimates, 400 million PCs can't make the jump to Windows 11. The petition, addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, criticizes its plans and states that customers expect their devices to last rather than be rendered obsolete by an arbitrary decision. PIRG warns that tipping that much hardware into landfills is somewhat at odds with the company's stance on the environment.https://pirg.org/take-action/tell-microsoft-dont-leave-milli...
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More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11 (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33150186
It made me think that Microsoft's Certified Refurbishers actually take a large hit on these, they are the most likely to have inventory that all of a sudden take a sharp loss of value, just because those didn't make the cutoff.
Is there a way to speed up the Windows 11 UI on unsupported hardware? It works fine, but the responsiveness is much worse than 10.
Ten and a half years of support is quite decent, no?
Good chance to remind everyone how easy it is to install Chrome OS Flex (https://chromeenterprise.google/os/chromeosflex/) on a huge variety of different "obsolete" hardware and quickly have a simple, secure, evergreen setup.
It's pretty hard to be mad at Microsoft here. They supported Win 10 for a full decade, and anything newer than Coffee Lake CPUs (2016-2017) likely had the option to upgrade, for free, to Win 11. The biggest roadblock is usually lack of a TPM 2.0, which Windows requires to improve security for boot, bitlocker, and passwordless auth.
It's really a testament to how speedy computers have gotten now that a 10 year old device is still usable: I type this on my circa 2013 Thinkpad which failed a forced upgrade to W11 due to unsupported hardware drivers, while a Skylake SFF machine runs Proxmox and almost a dozen containers/VMs in my basement.