...What does the writer think support end means? Microsoft bricks the PC as soon as the support period ends?
They're going to just keep using Windows 10, security be damned. Probably a good number of users who weren't keeping their PC up to date even when Microsoft was forcing updates on them.
I work in the behavioral health field as an IT security admin and network with hospitals/health clinics all all the time. The amount of them using XP and 7 in some capacity should scare everyone. The other security admins know it’s an issue, but they just laugh it off.
I tell them if I were an immoral man, their company would be compromised just based off of that information.
Yeah I work for an emergency management SaaS company and we block outdated OSs and browsers and it’s wild how we will occasionally get pushback from potential new customers who are surprised we don’t support their outdated IT infrastructure due to the security risk
This. A lot of our lab’s instruments are proprietary garbage. I wish the people buy these extremely expensive instruments would actually research if there’s open source alternatives or help pressure the government’s into forcing the code to be open. A lot of (public) spending for research is due to this sort of bs “instruments which only works with its own proprietary software” btw. The other good portion is eaten up by scumbags like Elsevier and other publishers.
As long as that machine is disconnected from the internet it’s OK but as soon as you connect it you are cooked.
It’s been getting absolutely worse and worse with hardware as they shovel crap at you and then also expect you to buy subscriptions to make it usable. Keysight/agilent/ whoever they are had been really annoying about this.
I tried to use XP in a vm a while back. The latest browsers that would run on it could barely view most websites. web standards are insanely different compared to 2005 or whatever, and a lot of sites weren’t even usable
Firefox I remember. I feel like the newest version that would install on XP was like v7 or something. an incredibly old version, whatever it was. I think I tried chrome too and maybe couldn’t even find an installer that would work. Can’t remember for sure.
Probably meant that Linux wouldn’t be appropriate for whoever’s needs. That can be true for some cases, not really for casual browsing use cases when pretty much 99% of all the major players in the browsing industry maintain a Linux port.
not really for casual browsing use cases when pretty much 99% of all the major players in the browsing industry maintain a Linux port.
Those users couldn’t care less about if Windows is supported or not. They wont send their 240 million computers to the landfill, they’ll just keep using them.
Either way, Windows 10 22H2 EOL is set to 14 Oct 2025 and Enterprise LTS to 12 Jan 2027. I’m sure Microsoft will cave around January 2026 whenever the first 0-day for Windows 10 22H2 Pro goes into the wild and extends support for the Pro version to 2027 as well for no extra cost. For them this makes way more business sense than having 240M machines infected giving a poor image of Windows.
For 240 million devices I think there would be some Linux can “cut it”. And second, no? My computer is 13+ years old and I am using it with basically no lagging, developing a couple of apps. Truth is all medium-tier computers made today and in recent years have reached the point where for normal use (that is daily tasks like communication, content consumption and calculations) only limiting factor for daily driver is software optimization.
I’m about to abandon/relegate my old Windows 10 PC to a backup, and replacing it with a raspberry pi 5 running Mint. I’m trying to run quieter with less power consumption.
Because the hardware is being made obsolete for a reason. They are inefficient compared to modern hardware, consume way too much power and there are cheaper and more powerful options available.
A modern ARM-based computer like the Raspberry Pi 5 can outperform most computers and laptops running Windows 10 and have a smaller environmental footprint.
The problem is that the obsolete hardware is not cost effective to decommission and recycle. They have not been designed for an environmentally conscious world.
My laptop is a cast off from a member of my staff who said it was too slow - a (dmidecode) - Product Name: HP 255 G6 Notebook PC. It now runs Arch (actually).
It previously slogged along with Win 10, Outlook n O365 n that. Now it does Libre Office, Evolution and much more. I use KDE, which isn’t known for a light touch on the resources. I also do light CAD and other stuff.
My office desktop is even older - it was a customer cast off, due to be skipped around six years ago. I did slap a SSD into it and I think I upped the RAM to 8GB. Its a (ssh, dmidecode): Product Name: Lenovo H330 and the BIOS is dated from 2012! I run two 23" screens off it and again, it runs Arch (actually) and KDE for pretty stuff. I run containers on it - at the moment a test Vikunja instance. I have apache, nginx and caddy fronting various experiments backed up with postgres and mariadb.
Both devices are “domain joined” and I auth to Exchange via Kerberos, via Samba winbind. File access (drive letters for the Windows mindset) is currently via autofs. I have a project on at a member of staff’s request to switch from Windows to Linux. I’m going to take my time and get it right. My current thinking is the Fedora KDE spin and this: Closed In Directory
If you have an old laptop or PC why not give it a go? You could start here: www.linuxmint.com Another option is to install something like Virtual Box on your existing machine and try out running it as a virtual machine or two. 2 CPUs, 4GB of RAM and 20GB of virty disc will work for any Linux distro as a VM to start off with. There’s also VMware Workstation - there’s a free version. Do discover the joy of snapshots/checkpoints which allow you to roll back failed changes!
25 years ago the options were rather more limited. I started off dual booting Windows and Linux but I don’t really recommend that these days, unless you want to run a gaming rig with both. Few people can afford two lots of top end hardware! I left Windows behind completely around 2004 or 5.
It depends on the definition of "support ended". Like, there are various forms of extended support that you can pay for for versions of Windows, and some companies do.
Support for the original release of Windows XP (without a service pack) ended on August 30, 2005.[4] Both Windows XP Service Pack 1 and 1a were retired on October 10, 2006,[4] and both Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 reached their end of support on July 13, 2010, about 24 months after the launch of Windows XP Service Pack 3.[4] The company stopped general licensing of Windows XP to OEMs and terminated retail sales of the operating system on June 30, 2008, 17 months after the release of Windows Vista.[114] However, an exception was announced on April 3, 2008, for OEMs producing what it defined as "ultra low-cost personal computers", particularly netbooks, until one year after the availability of Windows 7 on October 22, 2009. Analysts felt that the move was primarily intended to compete against Linux-based netbooks, although Microsoft's Kevin Hutz stated that the decision was due to apparent market demand for low-end computers with Windows.[115]
So for those, we're all definitely a decade past the end of normal support. However, they have their extended support packages that can be purchased, and we aren't a decade past the end of those...but most users probably aren't actually getting those:
On April 14, 2009, Windows XP exited mainstream support and entered the extended support phase; Microsoft continued to provide security updates every month for Windows XP, however, free technical support, warranty claims, and design changes were no longer being offered. Extended support ended on April 8, 2014, over 12 years after the release of Windows XP; normally Microsoft products have a support life cycle of only 10 years.[118] Beyond the final security updates released on April 8, no more security patches or support information are provided for XP free-of-charge; "critical patches" will still be created, and made available only to customers subscribing to a paid "Custom Support" plan.[119] As it is a Windows component, all versions of Internet Explorer for Windows XP also became unsupported.[120]
In January 2014, it was estimated that more than 95% of the 3 million automated teller machines in the world were still running Windows XP (which largely replaced IBM's OS/2 as the predominant operating system on ATMs); ATMs have an average lifecycle of between seven and ten years, but some have had lifecycles as long as 15. Plans were being made by several ATM vendors and their customers to migrate to Windows 7-based systems over the course of 2014, while vendors have also considered the possibility of using Linux-based platforms in the future to give them more flexibility for support lifecycles, and the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) has since endorsed Windows 10 as a further replacement.[121] However, ATMs typically run the embedded variant of Windows XP, which was supported through January 2016.[122] As of May 2017, around 60% of the 220,000 ATMs in India still run Windows XP.[123]
Furthermore, at least 49% of all computers in China still ran XP at the beginning of 2014. These holdouts were influenced by several factors; prices of genuine copies of later versions of Windows in the country are high, while Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences warned that Windows 8 could allegedly expose users to surveillance by the United States government,[124] and the Chinese government banned the purchase of Windows 8 products for government use in May 2014 in protest of Microsoft's inability to provide "guaranteed" support.[125] The government also had concerns that the impending end of support could affect their anti-piracy initiatives with Microsoft, as users would simply pirate newer versions rather than purchasing them legally. As such, government officials formally requested that Microsoft extend the support period for XP for these reasons. While Microsoft did not comply with their requests, a number of major Chinese software developers, such as Lenovo, Kingsoft and Tencent, will provide free support and resources for Chinese users migrating from XP.[126] Several governments, in particular those of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, elected to negotiate "Custom Support" plans with Microsoft for their continued, internal use of Windows XP; the British government's deal lasted for a year, and also covered support for Office 2003 (which reached end-of-life the same day) and cost £5.5 million.[127]
For the typical, individual end user, one probably wants to have been off Windows XP by 2008.
There’s software for that. Honestly, i prefer that over the ‘whole package or nothing’ approach in Flatpack, which still has ~/.var for packages hardcoded btw.
Can you elaborate on update system? AppImage is just a format, right? Whereas flatpak is a format and an entire toolkit for downloading and running flatpaks.
You already said it. Flatpak and Snap both include an entire system around updates and rollback which provide some pretty strong guarantees for update success. AppImage does not. It’s got some libs available that an individual developer could use to implement their own update mechanism but isn’t a built-in. And besides, without a system-level component that manages install/update/rollback, you can’t have any guarantees about the update process. You’re back to the Windows-world per-app update.exe paradigm (or update.sh in Linux).
Flatpak provides updates, management tools, an ecosystem of common components that don’t need to be repackaged with every executable, dependency management, cleaning up unused dependencies, warnings when you are using obsolete packages, and so on
One of the 240 million would’ve possibly been my friend’s “old” gaming PC with a Ryzen 9 3900X, that he said could not upgrade to Windows 11. He sold it to me for cheap and I put KDE Neon on it. So far, it’s running smoothly except for the challenge of trying to automate mounting a RAID 1 set of drives.
I feel like most of these computers are underpowered and worthless to most people outside of a web browsing machine. Which is fine I guess if you don’t have a computer at all. But when some of us are rocking six or seven computers in our house, do we need anymore?
This isn’t a new thing. Free Geek has been refurbishing computers and installing Linux on them for over two decades now. It started in 2000 in Portland, Oregon and has since spawned affiliate locations elsewhere, including in Oslo.
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