Microsoft officially recommends a new PC and OneDrive to update to Windows 11
Microsoft has officially recommended a new computer and OneDrive for anyone looking to upgrade to Windows 11 from an unsupported version.
As all the cool kids keep saying, now is a great time to try out Linux.
No, I’m not recommending a distro for you, that is what DuckDuckGo is for.
DuckDuckBuntu?
Not sure I'd want to see that, tbh. It would only introduce more avenues for DDG to make questionable choices when they're already on thin ice.
DuckDuckMint
No, I’m not recommending a distro for you
Don't worry, everyone else does
Can you run windows games on linux without it being resource intensive like using a vm or something?
Gaming in Linux on a windows VM isn’t viable for most systems. Most games run really well through proton with little to no effort. Some even run better on Linux than on windows. You just can’t play a lot of the most popular competitive online games because it flags their anti cheat.
Most of the time, yeah. Check ProtonDB for the particulars regarding any particular game. Games with intrusive DRM or anticheat probably won't work though.
Yes, some on steam, others on wine/bottles/lutrix/etc
Running software designed and compiled only for XYZ system is always going to incur overhead when translating or emulating to ABC system.
Game authors and publishers who only build for Windows are giving users a big middle finger and essentially saying "You must suffer through Windows in order to enjoy our product hassle-free lol".
What worked for me (which may or may not work for others) was to wean myself away, at first with only playing games that were built natively for linux.
Then moving the line in the sand to only DRM-free native linux builds.
Then advancing to only open source games.
These days, I just don't even play games and I find that it really frees up what kinds of things I want to do on my computers, such as daily driving exotic CPU architectures (and also I have so much more free time for actual meaningful pursuits like learning new skills).
Many distros nowadays have decent support forngaming accessories and a mix of Lutris and Steam/Proton have given me a near seemless experience on Linux. Smooth enough for my partner to hop ship to Bazzite for their ROG Ally.
Sometimes there are small quirks, like controllers on Bazzite just work™ but on Vanilla OS 2 my xbox controller wouldn't be recognized by Steam or games wirelessly (wired worked) but my DS5 controller worked flawlessly (including the trackpad that I never got to work on Windows).
Most of the Steam library will work well and ProtonDB is a great resource for compatibility. Furthermore there are Decky plugins for setups like Bazzite and Chimera that embed the ProtonDB rating into the Steam game page.
DuckDuck OS
Actually to find a good distro and instructions on how to install them i recommend using an ai chatbot.
Majority of people have never created a bootable media but its easy enough ai can guide them step by step.
Or just use one of the hundreds of guides the AI was trained on.
Eh, just look up a reputable YouTube channel and guide. Chatbots can randomly make dumb mistakes that a total newbie won't recognize, potentially causing them a lot of headache.
And no, I'm not one of those diehard anti-AI people. My work has its own custom GPT model and I utilize it almost daily for menial tasks. But even having it generate script boilerplate and whatnot, I sometimes notice it writing stuff that won't work and/or does it in a really verbose/weird way.
Do chatbots provide accurate and safe instructions for all steps? Or will it mix different instructions for different scenarios?
Ai is not that good unless it's like hugginchat where it scraps sites for info and stuff
I once ran the windows Troubleshooter to get an old scanner working, and the final page told me to but a new scanner!
I plugged it in to a mini PC I use as a backup server and the scanner worked fine with Linux.
And another recommendation issue: I noticed that my Windows laptop has a "reduce your carbon footprint" settings section that tells me to reduce power settings, screen brightness etc. but it's completely lacking a "stop giving me AI search results in Bing" section.
Switching from Windows to Linux on my Framework laptop makes my battery last 2-3 times as long. They should just have a switch to Linux recommendation to reduce your carbon footprint.
Win11 also says that showing seconds in the taskbar "reduces battery life"/"increases power consumption"
While it sounds ridiculous, there is a reasoning for this even nowadays:
Any periodic activity with a rate faster than one minute incurs the scrutiny of the Windows performance team, because periodic activity prevents the CPU from entering a low-power state. Updating the seconds in the taskbar clock is not essential to the user interface, unlike telling the user where their typing is going to go, or making sure a video plays smoothly. And the recommendation is that inessential periodic timers have a minimum period of one minute, and they should enable timer coalescing to minimize system wake-ups.
Found 1 test that seems to confirm battery life is slightly worse (2%) with seconds enabled. But this is true only when nothing is going on on screen. If you would actually work on PC, I imagine difference would be practically nonexistent.
All that said, I use seconds on my private and work PC. Was pissed when MS initially removed this as an option.
The only time that would make a difference is if you're staring at a blank page and the only thing causing the screen to update is the clock. Theoretically the GPU could go completely to sleep, except for having to draw the updated clock every second.
But there's a reason battery life is commonly measured as "hours of video playback". If the laptop's not actually doing anything you may as well turn it off and get weeks of battery life.
My god. It really does!
Oh no! I left notepad.exe open. That cursor was flashing on and off for hours! I'm sorry everyone!
Are you saying you use Bing for searches? If you don't want that then why not use a different search?
Big company recommends users turn functional hardware into e-waste so they can boost quarterly profits.
when microsoft feels threatened by the recycling community being noticed, they add more technical constraints. Chromebooks are the gold standard for an intentionally non recyclable machine, neck and neck with apple.
The bullshit of chromeOS to be capable of running on the shittiest hardware but having an artificial lifetime for devices is stupid. To google's credit, they did increase that limit to 10 years, but that was only recently.
It's still functional hardware though...
Yes, and they’re encouraging people to throw it out. At least some users think to sell on the secondary market, but third party buyers can only get so much out of EOL Windows machines and there are only so many linux users with an interest in buying up old hardware.
I myself have a couple of used laptops, but don’t need any more hardware for a while, so it’s not like I’m able to buy up any. I fear much of it will rot in a landfill.
yup, its an "oh, you concider it garbage? oh well, more for me then!" situation.
Microsoft recommends you remain ignorant about how awesome Linux is.
Linux sounds good but I never see it discussed on this website. How am I suppose to use Arch if nobody else does?
As long as you tell everyone you use it. That's what counts.
I use EndeavourOS. I know quite a bit about Arch, the only thing I don't really know how to do is install it manually.
Ppl that still use Windows even after all this shit has been rammed down their throats will not have a good time on Linux. You still need to be able to do basic trouble shooting. I installed win 11 a few months back and it took me three tries on installation to get all the garbage out of it.
I think the best bet is an entirely new system from the ground up that has an open architecture that every company can equally implement that from the ground up and is as simple as possible. Like the computers we had in the 80s, but with better graphics. You want to play a game, you boot into it and it's the only thing running. No anti cheat needed.
... And FreeBSD! Hardware support is rather fine except for wifi, and that can be set up using wifibox packages (technically it's running a lean Linux VM with wi-fi passthrough, but by today's measure the footprint is negligible).
So clean, orderly and patient.
I can't use facts and logic on what is optimized for what, but it feels more responsive than Linux too, with the same desktop setup. I guess Linux with a different scheduler would solve that.
"and OneDrive". Yes, it is essential to have OneDrive.
And it's essential to have a always on network connection 24/7 if you turn it off we will delete all your data/j
My PC is getting old and I might replace it in about a year whenever I can get an OK GPU for a reasonable amount of money again.
I've built my own PCs since the late 90's and this will be the first time I will not install Windows on a computer I built. Get fucked Microsoft.
I already did this 2 years ago and I still don't miss Windows. I want my OS to just work, and that means not having big companies intentionally blocking updates and bullying consumers just so they can profit from artificially induced OEM license sales. It's pretty wild how quickly Linux has fit the bill in recent years, and how Windows no longer does.
Only hurdle on Linux right now is the transition from X11 to Wayland. Proton doesn't have good support for it yet so I occasionally have to load an X11 session for some games to run. I can imagine that getting worked out eventually.
Microsoft could have simply dropped official support for older machines and then literally done nothing and that would have still been better than what they did. At least then those machines would still receive security updates beyond next year, provided they could still run the latest version of Windows.
For the record, if the arbitrary CPU block is bypassed, then it's possible to install Windows 11 23H2 on a Prescott era Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. The true requirements did change for 24H2, but even then you can install that on a 1st gen Intel or a Bulldozer era AMD system. Microsoft can go suck a dick.
Wine (which Proton is based on) has had support for Wayland since version 9.0 (about half a year old). Admittedly it’s not even enabled by default, but it works and I’ve played Path Of Exile through wine’s Wayland backend. There’s talks to ship the Wayland driver along X11, but not enabled by default yet, since there’s still some issues before they consider it on par with X11 backend. Proton might take longer, since I don’t think Valve will enable that before they add Wayland support for the Steam client.
Devices running an unsupported version of Windows will still function, but Microsoft doesn't provide the following: Technical support of any issue
Oh, you mean the support forums? I don't think those have ever helped anyone
they helped me learn how infuriating it is to try and go back in my browser history after visiting a microsoft help link
Oh man, fuck that shit into the sun.
Literally no one in those forms ever actually works for Microsoft anyway so you're just talking to people who you could talk to anyway on any other forum.
Man I really don't want to switch to Linux but Microsoft has ended things forever with Recall. There's just no way to stay with microsoft long term.
Just go for it! Did it recently and the overall experience is actually getting impressed multiple times.
why dont you?
Effort
I just installed Windows and never saw anything about recall. Use at least 3 different Windows machines a day and never seen recall. Maybe I'm just a lucky one?
Its not fully released yet and also, it will only be on a select set of PCs to start. But eventually over the years it will be on most new windows PCs.
Companies promote their recent softwares. Is this a new thing?
"Promote" here masking what they are actually doing ...
Fixed it for you:
Company renders 60%+ of computers running current software incapable of running new software due to niche hardware requirement, abruptly ends support for current version next year, and tells users to throw away their computers and buy new ones.
Oh, and they're promoting their cloud storage option. Which may or may not have anything to do with their data harvesting? I don't really know on that one.
Not here on Lemmy where you should be able to run it on a tamagotchi for free.
You should.
How is it an upgrade/update if you need to replace the hardware?
Because people aren’t broke enough.
You still have room on that credit card. Stop eating avocados!!!!
/s
I still for the life of me can’t figure out what’s so great about secure boot and tpm. All it’s ever done for me is prevent me from booting a legitimate OS, or a bootable flash drive with iso images on it (like ventoy). It’s also pretty good at giving me a headache trying to figure out how the keys work and how to register them.
I just turn them both off and live in ignorant bliss.
Secure boot and TPM are tools for (among other things) making sure nobody (E.G. a virus or worm) has tampered with your OS and bootloader. You can for instance use both on Linux, it's just by default they come preloaded with Microsofts configuration for loading Windows, and the technical knowledge for how to reconfigure it is a bit arcane.
It's an excellent security tool, it's just abused by Microsoft to discourage competition.
Until the next security hole you can't fix with an update.
It's not for you, it's for them. Secure boot means it only runs their operating system, not yours. Trusted enclave means it secures their DRM-ware from tampering by the user who owns the PC.
What do you mean? I remove all vendor keys and enroll my own secure boot keys. This way only my install with my bootloader signed by my keys will boot.
It greatly raises the cost of exploring competing software for the average person.
If I upgrade my machine, I am keeping TPM disabled. I don't want Windows 11.
First thing I did when I heard it was required for win 11.
Don't TPMs just deal with cryptography code the same way a SIM card does for a phone? If you have one, What's wrong with using it?
Platforms like Windows and Chrome can also use it for remote attestation, i.e., verifying you haven’t bypassed security controls and locking you out if they think you have.
I keep mine enabled because it’s good for secure boot and secrets handling.
You can use them with Linux to Auth as well
meanwhile you can run linux on a potato
rpi can be a good potato ; also runs freebsd
Boo hoo, I need a TPM, recent SIMD instructions, and DirectX12 support to be able to boot. Please help!
Boo hoo! 🎻
Again: install Linux. Yes, there are a few edge cases left where you're screwed and must rely on Microsoft (and even there, most of yhose can run in a VirtualBox environment) but most work you can get done under Linux. Why suffer I der Microsoft bullshit?
I think this is the year. One of my long time Windows friends has recently decided to install Manjaro GNU/Linux after being fed up with forced reboots, updates that seem to overwrite settings, and constant bluescreens of death.
This website is cancer, you can't even use it on mobile, without adblocker in Firefox.
✋ no thanks
I'll keep 10 then.
Last week, I installed Debian on a 20 year old 32-bit IBM Thinkpad and it's going strong.
My PC met everything except processor. Did a registry hack and updated anyway. All is well, for now. I don’t feel like building another PC at the moment.
Atleast windows 10 still gets security updates for 1.3 years
Did they add a few months? I thought protection ends in October, 2025 unless you pay to extend it.
Ohh yeah, forgot you need to pay for it.
0patch makes microcode patches for out of distribution OSs. My win7 PC's been running it for years, zero security issues.
/yawn
New bits of info in this support guide, which is also meant as an FAQ, include recommendations for a new PC as well as OneDrive that should help users move over easily as they upgrade to Windows 11.
The article also discusses general information related to what exactly the "end of support" for a Windows OS means and whether users can upgrade for free to Windows 11.
This seems extremely reasonable. If they were a non profit, maybe they could advertise Linux conversion, but any company selling software is going to tell users how to get the latest.
The one drive bit is just to demonstrate the ease of transferring your files
Windows resource demand is plain stupid compared to Linux, but this article targets Windows users.
Not that they'll ever convince some to replace something "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
FUCK LINUX
