With support ending for Windows 10, the most popular desktop operating system in the world currently, possibly 240 million pcs may be sent to the landfill. This is mostly due to Windows 11’s exorbitant requirements. This will most likely result in many pcs being immediately outdated, and prone to viruses. GNU/Linux may be these computers’ only secure hope, what do you think?
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 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.
If the bottom laptop is a Dell Latitude I think they don’t recommend stacking them at all, but with HP Elitebooks I think we got away with stacks about 15-20 high before we had the risk of getting damaged screens. Probably 10x that before structural failure, but they’d more than likely compress down instead of one side before the other.
If you assume they're all 13" wide laptops and stacked them on their side to get maximum height per unit, you'd still fall 305,752 km short of the average lunar distance. You normally only see this level of hyperbole in the estimated street value cops give for drugs they seize, pretty impressive.
I get the reason for hyperbole, I just hate when it’s so clickbaity. I wish they would just be more honest with us. If you assume they’re all small form factor Dell Optiplex 3070 desktops, you could make a cube of computers as tall as the Burj Khalifa.
So you pretend that what was running on windows to run in Linux?. Dafuq people are naive af. We are talking mostly enterprise machines, most corporations didnt migrate to windows 11. So its not just installing steam lol
No, those computers can go to underprivileged communities so ppl can have access to word processor, programming, web dev, etc. They would be running Linux and be secure and functional.
It’s clearly a move to gain control of what people’s computers will be allowed to run and what information they’ll be allowed to see.
There were already attempts to implement this at the start of the consumer internet days by Microsoft and others, which failed then because many early internet users were paying attention and knew what was being attempted. This time I’m not sure that we’ll be able to stop it without structural changes to society.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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