https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise...
> does Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 have access to WSL2 Sorry, I can’t help with this. Please make a new request or share your feedback.
What is the point of adding an LLM to docs if it can't even produce anything correct?
The point? Raises, acquisition of new headcount, resume food, etc. Huge amounts of change in software seem to be completely unrelated to user needs.
If you want to save a buck or are going to pirate the OS anyway, stick with the normal Windows 10 updates first and then downgrade to the stripped-down LTSC versions when that runs out in late 2027.
The criteria was based on hardware mitigation support for Meltdown and Spectre patches. Because at the time those vulnerabilities could be exploited by executing malicious javascript in a browser to steal passwords
Meanwhile, advertising on the Edge start page and the top of Chrome search is the number one source of practical, working malware attacks. But those things make the browser companies money.
I no longer think big tech security people are serious.
Nobody in tech seems to be serious except for the people driving the adtech and surveillance models. Nothing else makes as much profit, and it financially justifies enshittifying every other aspect of every other piece of hardware or software.
Legislate protections of user data, and start nuking brokers and data collectors from orbit, and everything gets better. Until then, the only space that isn't continually and totally enshittified is open source, and/or markets and products new enough that quality still matters.
Our choices are end adtech, or suffer.
Does the world wide web still work? If so, the change was fine.
See also the removal of the client certificate bit from Let's Encrypt certificates. Let's Encrypt issues certificates for web servers. What are you doing using one on a client? You should either do your own thing, or have an actual contract with Let's Encrypt for them to support whatever you're doing. Otherwise you have no right to complain about that.
"could be" is doing a lot of work here. AFAIK there has never been a PoC or active exploit which actually exfiltrates sensitive data from a browser using these vulnerabilities. Anyways, browsers have long since implemented software mitigations.
IIRC the real criteria for W11 support has to do with TPMs. Microsoft really wants to have secure boot on all Windows systems.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-upda...
And I don't want anything to do with windows 11, even LTSC at the moment.
The author then goes on to describe how he's just purchased 3 new Windows 11 licences... (indirectly via new computers)
reminder that you can get a 10 year old pc with an SSD and any linux disto that will perform as good or even better for most basic office work than modern windows 11 on modern hardware....
These perfectly good machines will likely be sold off eBay or similar, and / or go in bulk to poorer countries somewhere in Asia, where they are going to replace yet more ancient machines.
I don't throw away phones or computers myself either, but a cursory Googling should be informative. From what I understand, it's a lot of "out of sight, out of mind" in wealthy countries.
Is the cutoff for 11 a bit arbitrary? Sure, but it's not unprecedented by any means. The machines that are supposedly turning to ewaste stopped receiving driver updates years ago. Why aren't we calling for the heads of hardware manufacturers?
Also let's ignore the obvious that the TPM check is still easily bypassable. It's not the most user friendly, your grandmother isn't going to be able to do it, but frankly your grandmother isn't going to update to 11 anyway. She's still stuck on 8.1.
The task/start bar is unfortunately not size adjustable anymore and requires third party replacement if you want that back.
It can be molded back into a reasonable Windows experience, but I imagine future updates will break every change I make at least once.
I kept a lot of notes and a lot should still apply to 11, but it's still a chore. I'm actually looking at recreating Tiny11 as a base and figuring out what to manually add back on a case by case basis to have all the functionality I need.
I will need something to run GTA6 when it comes, if nothing else.
The two that piss me off the most are - web results in start menu - and there being no option to always show all icons in the system tray.
There are a few other similar tools to try as well, I'll leave others to talk about them as I never got around to trying more than this one so can't talk with any authority at all.
When the attacker is Microsoft, the situation seems pretty hopeless.
It's like that Auto Shutoff they added to cars. Helps no one, and nobody wanted it. (Thanks Obama https://www.newsweek.com/automatic-start-stop-technology-new...)
I would be on Linux today if Steam OS came out properly for desktop. I'm ready to dip.
Just install Steam on any distribution (I use Fedora) and it all just works like SteamOS - Proton use is transparent.
Absolutely! And if you really feel you need a truly SteamOS-like experience, there's entire distros (like Bazzite for example) devoted to replicating that as closely as possible for desktop PC users.
If you just want Steam on an OS then installing Steam will do fine, but it's no "real" SteamOS experience.
Another part of the appeal is how stable the updates are thanks to update mechanism (and locking users out of the system config by default so they can't break their Linux installs with outdated scripts from askubuntu.com).
I don't get the hatred. It's very useful in countries where keeping the engine running at a red light or at a railway crossing is illegal. It also saves a ton of gas and emissions.
SteamOS will probably work if you're on an all-AMD machine (maybe not the latest GPU revisions because of driver lag), but SteamOS-likes like Bazzite will work fine on a lot of commodity hardware. I'd recommend trying the KDE flavour to get the most SteamOS-like experience, unless you prefer Gnome over KDE (like I do personally but tastes differ).
Also, Win 10 LTSC is still supported until like 2032 or so. I love it because it's more bare, and LTSCs don't get functional updates. Just install, point the thing toward an activation server / massgrave it, and you are good to go for many years.
Anyone selling hardware with Win10 after the EOL date, heck anyone selling hardware with Windows 10 now, is hardly professional, at least if they don't warn their customers of the security implications they may have if they don't pay MS for extended support⁰.
Once past EOL, unless you pay for the extended support¹, a Win10 device is a potential security problem for the user and the wider Internet.
UNprofessional hardware sellers can and will keep selling devices with Windows 10 to unsuspecting end users who do not know what the issue could be with that, of course.
> Because in the "refurb" space, there are a whole lot of computers that cannot run W11 due to graphic card requirements.
The only good-ish option for that is Linux of some variety. I say “good-ish” as an average assessment, for some it'll be great, for others it'll be a learning curve at best or significant incompatibility² at worst.
My laptop came with Win11, the old laptop³ that could upgrade to 11 will get Linux instead. My home desktop will also go the Linux way⁴.
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[0] which someone buying an old refurb PC may not be able/willing to afford, and even if they can it'll only last one year
[1] $30 for one year, per device, after that year you are out of luck as they are currently only planning to offer it for that long
[2] with other devices they own, or because they need specific software that can't be beaten into running on Linux without expertise they don't have, etc.
[3] the one with the slightly dodgy screen that I take for personal travelling as it matters a lot less if it gets lost or further broken
[4] I've just been too busy recently to faf, which is why that hasn't already been done, if it gets too close to Win10 EOL before I've cared enough to bother I'll buy an inexpensive dock and use the laptop connected to the nice big screens instead
we replaced most of the machines in our office. There are 2 our finance person didn't want to replace, so we used the install check bypass for Win11, those employees don't really do much on those computers anyway...
They use legalese now to say you are leasing the software, using with conditions, etc, but they love pulling the rug from under users now, and replacing it with an often-inferior product. This user-hostile mentality has been this way for consumer computers since they were created.
And managing Microsoft's hand of greed at the IT level sucks, too. Don't get me started on how "Microsoft Copilot" magically appeared on every windows machine in the world and starting using CPU cycles.
And the OP is right to install working software on old hardware as a reaction. It's a natural reaction. Ubuntu freed a lot of my old hardware. Gaming still sucks on Linux though.
If we mandated keeping things around a baseline OS a little longer, the need for foreign electronics could reduce in the short-term. Maybe it could offset those dumb tariff we're all paying for a little. Just mandate support for current OSes we have for the next four years at least while we wait for the economic tantrum to leave office.
The only reason most of these computers cannot run W11 is the graphic card, nothing more, they can have 16+ gigs of RAM, can be upgraded with internal 5G wifi cards for cheap, and yes, I still use ExpressCard PCMCIA extensions as well (to add USB ports for instance), or even docking stations!
edit: they are easier to repair as well or find parts for because the design goal wasn't to be ultra-thin or ultra-light.
If anything many of these PCs will enjoy a second life off eBay in someone's home-lab running Linux. One of the most popular "servers" in the home-lab community are those little Lenovo Thinkstations you see in hospitals.
Edit: if you're a sysadmin at a university, aren't you replacing machines every 3-5 years anyway?
It might surprise you to learn that 90% of computers sold are not-Macs: https://canalys.com/newsroom/worldwide-pc-shipments-q1-2025#...
> Note: Win 10 OS can't support beyond 19H2 version
Verdict: It's been actually amazing, and I had forgotten how much I love having a computer that never decides that it's acceptable to interrupt my workspace because it knows better than me. Anyone who wants to tell me to BE AFRAID is welcome to come haxx0r my Gibson and make me believe, otherwise I'll happily keep using this garbage forever ;)
I'm using a Xeon E3-1270 v3 which doesn't have integrated graphics. I'm pretty sure I don't even have the Intel iGPU drivers installed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_processors_...
Maybe just having the physical VGA port is enough to run afoul of it even though it's inoperable? Either way I'm fine with it v(._. )v
“Luckily” I already had a physical Windows 2019 Server on my LAN, had Windows 10 Enterprise on all my clients, and had my own Active Domain set up, because that was the only official way to configure it to spy on me less†, so it was easy enough to create an additional Group Policy pinning `ProductVersion` to `Windows 10` and `TargetReleaseVersion` to `1909`‡ and WMI-filtering it to my Haswell Xeon machine so it would stop nagging me: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/...
† I'm still not optimistic enough to say “configure it to not spy on me” lol
I'm sure an update will break the machines, down the road, but for now it's letting me eek a little more life out of some machines.
Install ChromeOS Flex or NetBSD or whatever on your Turing machine if you're so inclined.
Not to mention, Microsoft is rotten from the very beginning. But to be fair, it's not like the other tech giants are much more philanthropic.
For my hurt feelings, I found refuge in the open source community. Like you, I feel betrayed by technology - computers were really supposed to be different - and these guys are actually doing it. It just has a kind of warmth, and respect, that I don't get from Windows since like.... Win 95.
- Multiple virtual desktops (usably built into the UI)
- Screen recording
- HDR support
- Much better antivirus built in
- Hyper-V support
- Much faster search (faster, not necessarily fast)
- Much better codec/preview support for the built-in media player
- Much better touch screen support
- Real fingerprint support instead of the pluggable API that no vendor actually implemented right
- Windows Hello infrared facial recognition
- DirectX 12
- Docked windows, in multiple arrangements, without janky third party software
- Multitouch gesture support
- Native DNS over HTTPS
- WSL2, especially gWSL, the Wayland compositor used to display Linux GUI applications
- Forcing companies to move their shitty unstable drivers to userland instead of crashing the kernel every time you turn on a printer.
- WPA3, better hotspot support, etc.
- Native phone integration
- A notification system that isn't applications drawing boxes all over your screen
- winget
- Windows Terminal and the various advancements in PowerShell
I don't like the remnants of Windows 8's UI but there were definitely useful features in Windows 10+.
Those abstracted away details matter a lot if you care about user experience. Just watch how painfully a task both Apple and Microsoft are enduring to try to improve their consumer OS.
If you sat down in front of my computer you probably wouldn't even know how to move the windows around.
And that's fine. We don't need to be running the same software as long as everything actually works.
Enjoy your DE however you like it :)
That's just fundamentally incompatible with Linux on desktops. Who's going to take charge and make decisions? And, how will they enforce? Will they make their desktop closed-source and take you to court if you try to fork it? That doesn't sound very pleasant.
People are gonna fork and do their own thing because that's what makes Linux Linux.
Sure, being closed-source prevents fragmentation from the start coz there's nothing to fork from, but it's not a requisite. There are many open source projects with less degree of fragmentation with major marketshare winners that the ecosystem can target for, and you can mostly recommend people to use without too much thinking, e.g. browsers and web servers.
There's dozens of forks of Chromium. They're so prolific that everyone is advocating a different one. Opera is better, no wait brave is better, no actually arc is the best. But no wait, edge is pretty good.
However you like/dislike any of the popular choices, the point is that other players in the ecosystem can mostly target the top choices and be reasonably sure that they cover the vast majority of user bases, so that upper layers could flourish. Except for Edge being the default on Windows, sane companies wouldn't care about minor players like Opera/Brave/Arc.
(You could also argue the degree of open source in these cases but that would be a different issue.)
pretty basic stuff till now:
but hoping it will work out
Or don't if you're okay with taking the risk. It's not like Windows 10 stops working the day free support runs out.
v9v•7mo ago
candiddevmike•7mo ago
immibis•7mo ago
mock-possum•7mo ago
Like come on. Let’s not pretend this is a M$ problem. Apple is just as greedy in terms of what is effectively planned obsolescence.
1231231231e•7mo ago
jeroenhd•7mo ago
Apple does have better speakers, though. So that's a nice plus.
IshKebab•7mo ago
estebank•7mo ago
aflag•7mo ago
smarx007•7mo ago
1. Disconnect that computer from the internet.
2. Are happy to have your computer infected and join a botnet.
1231231231e•7mo ago
frollogaston•7mo ago
Also, Wannacry is a good example of a LAN attack reaching further than you might expect. Or there are various conditional ways to breach the NAT, one of them simply being NATless ipv6 with a misconfigured firewall.
Microsoft might bluff a bit and actually backport fixes for very serious issues, like how Wannacry was patched all the way back to XP. Maybe Win10 is fine for several years, but the real problem is that you don't know how vulnerable you are with each passing year.
1231231231e•7mo ago
frollogaston•7mo ago
One random thing that ticks me off, Google Meet insists on using VP8/VP9 because they invented it, which has way less overall support for hardware transcoding. That's why it uses so much more CPU on many devices than Zoom etc which use the more common H.264.
jeroenhd•7mo ago
Microsoft at some point had a bug where a single packet could take over the entire kernel. I think it was a bug somewhere in the IP stack (something related to fragmentation in IPv6 I think?). Linux had similar issues.
If the built-in JPEG viewer or h.264 decoder or whatever component you use contains a bug, your computer can get infected. That also goes for things like preview generators and file indexers that run even if you don't open the file.
As much as the web seems to have consumed everything, there are still plenty of files people open.
In practice, you'll probably be fine as long as you keep your browser up to date and use up-to-date third-party software to open most files. At some point Chrome and Firefox stop supporting your system, though, and that's when infection suddenly becomes real easy.
vinyl7•7mo ago
indrora•7mo ago
jm4•7mo ago