cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15988326
Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025. The current version, 22H2, will be the final version of Windows 10, and all editions will remain in support with monthly security update releases through that date. Existing LTSC releases will continue to receive updates beyond that date based on their specific lifecycles.
Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-home-and-pro
You can recommend what you like. As soon as Windows 10 can’t play the latest games I’m off to Linux.
Eat my whole ass, Microsoft.
Come on over, the water is fine. I switched to Pop_OS a few months back for the gaming rig and Proton+Steam works almost flawlessly. Older titles sometimes have hiccups, but so far ive only been blocked on one title.
Yep it’s pretty easy and my computer runs so much faster than Windows on the same machine.
Windows running on a VM under linux runs faster than windows on bare metal …
I just switched from W10 to Pop_OS and have had lots of trouble. I’m trying to stick with it but from audio glitches to many games not running unless I find a random CLI arg that someone mentioned on Reddit, to my UI freezing, it’s not been an easy switch.
Any chance you have an nvidia card? Nvidia for a long time has been in a worse spot on Linux than AMD, which interestingly is the inverse of Windows. A lot of AMD users complain of driver issues on Windows and swap to Nvidia as a result, and the exact opposite happens on Linux.
Nvidia is getting much better on Linux though, and Wayland+explicit sync is coming down the pipeline. With NVK in a couple years it’s quite possible that nvidia/amd Linux experience will be very similar.
it’s not a drop in replacement and anyone looking for one will be disappointed by literally anything available.
You’re learning an entirely new operating system, don’t think of it as an upgrade, this is a time sink. You’ll be under the hood more than on the road for the foreseeable future, but what’s the alternative?
I’ve seen a lot of people recommending Pop_OS lately. Out of curiosity, what’s the benefit over something like Mint?
I’ll try to offer an answer to both you and @natedog526.
Pop came heavily recommended for a while because it’s relatively light-weight for a modern desktop, had some fresh UI ideas with its COSMIC plugins for Gnome, and ships with some nice bonuses for gamers like built in Steam and Nvidia setup scripts.
Unfortunately, it’s become pretty stale lately. I still use it daily on my main desktop, but lately it’s becoming harder and harder to keep from hopping to something new. A few pain points include Pop shipping older version of some important software like the Kernel, Wine, and Mesa, persistsant audio bugs like the other user mentioned, and basically no support for Wayland at the moment.
A lot of these are because System76 has been heavily focused working on its COSMIC desktop, which should function a full standalone desktop environment instead of Gnome with duct tape. It’s looking forward to seeing it which has so far kept me from switching, but with no release date and other distros offering what Pop offers, it’s harder and harder to stay put.
If iRacing and my other sim racing gear worked with Linux I’d make the switch asap. I already have popOS on another hard drive and everything other than iRacing has worked well
Yup, similar boat but with planes instead of cars. Most inputs Linux can support on a single usb device is 86 or so, my throttle alone has well over 150 buttons on it. Add in all the stuff for my sim cockpit (probably around 1000 buttons), my haptic feedback chair, and then VR… as much as I’d like to use Linux, I don’t think it’d be possible for the foreseeable future for me to switch.
We need a successful replacement to DirectX for this to happen.
Look how desperate they are now for their web browser, imagine when people start abandoning Windows because there are other options that work just as well. I can’t wait.
Honestly even the as-is directX with Wine is already quite good. With Vulkan, game over :-)
Wine doesn’t do DirectX. A wine environment set up for gaming uses DXVK or VKD3D to translate everything to Vulkan.
We already do?
DXVK and VKD3D have been translating DirectX 9-12 to Vulkan for a while now, allowing DirectX games and applications to run on hardware and/or operating systems that don’t support DirectX.
Intels ARC GPUs don’t even support DirectX on a hardware level, like it’s just straight up not there. Intels drivers instead just translate it to Vulkan, and their at times insane FPS boosts from driver updates was due to them improving that translation and getting closer to 1:1 performance.
At times, yes. But at most times, no. Certain games can capitalize on ARC and I was just as enthusiastic as everyone else when it first started making the rounds. But theres a reason the cards haven’t caught on and most people seem to rely on them more for offloading things like streaming and AV1 encoding/decoding
That was my choice too. I made the jump to Mint earlier this year and couldn’t be happier. It took a little effort to get updated GPU drivers, and my games sometimes need an extra CLI argument added, but those things have been pretty quickly and easily found on the Mint forums, Ubuntu forums, or ProtonDB comments.
Linux can play most games nowadays. You can check if your games are compatible and to what extend they are not here https://www.protondb.com/
Switched to arch linux last november, didn’t had to launch my backup VM Win10 at all. I even managed to play at StarCitizen with better performance than under Win 10…
Just wow the progress of Linux, Wine & co since my last linux try (Ubuntu, around 2010).
I just need now to find a linux way for my music stack and all the VST (my steinberg usb card is recognized and play properly oO) and Windows will be history at home…
Yeah ive also had s Star Citizen running in Arch. My setup didnt support game updates though so every update needed a complete redownload of the entire game which got old real fast.
Also had Microsoft Flight Simulator running very well too which is peak irony. At first there was issues with satellite terrain and imagary as the networking was broken but a Proton update actually fixed that.
Im incredibly impressed on the type of heavy duty window games ive got working in linux, some working very well others with slight occasional issues.
Linux gaming isnt perfect but windows has never been either. Ive had plenty of experience over the years with some games just not running properly or at all in windows even though they should.
Ive found many older games generally run better in Linux now in respect to modern windows, despite the compatibility layers.
It’s funny seeing this every couple of years. People get up in arms about something with Windows, some switch to Linux because they outgrew Windows and the time was right. By now I think you guys could be primary source of Linux users.
Yeah, I’m guilty of this tbh. It’s just the massive unknown of leaving something you’ve been so close to for literally the majority of my life.
It’s scary!
It’s little grievances that eventually pile up and one day you’ll just have had enough and switch.
Uncertainty, really.
What distro works with my setup: 3700x and rtx 4090?
Folks will say arch.
But honestly any modern Linux system with 3rd party drivers will work. Mint pop_os arch Manjaro Debian Ubuntu etc
I’m running a 1660 and an i5 64xx on kubuntu 24.04 Granted that stuff is older but you’ll have the same experience.
Unless you’re running the absolute bleeding edge… You’ll not have a lot of problems.
*Ymmv of course but majority of folks won’t have issues.
If you had any real intention of making the shift, you’d have done so already. Protip: You know I’m right!
The ‘as soon as Windows 10 can’t x I’m off to Linux!’ refrain is so routine in our circles it’s practically a meme. All someone says when they pontificate like this is that their true priority is can kicking rather than action.
This one is particularly harsh since win11 has ridiculous artificial hard stops on installation based on made up hardware requirements. Also it sucks.
This also makes it easy to block Win 10 from upgrading to 11, just disable tpm in BIOS. From where I’m sitting, that’s kinda convenient.
That’s where you grab a W10 Enterprise LTSC iso which has support until 2032.
Already got a surface running it.
I have a PC I built that was absolutely top of the line 9½ years ago, that still plays most games in high to max settings. It’s a little powerhouse for its age, I often use it for rendering video and it still smokes everybody I know 's devices.
Windows 11 is too powerful for my PC according to Microsoft and I’ve been so pleased about that. If it wasn’t for the fact that I have no issues with my current windows 10 setup, I’d put in some time to jump to Linux. I’m just too lazy to give it the weekend it would take to learn, set up and move my content over properly.
Well to my knowledge there are (or at least were) workarounds to get win 11 to install anyway. It of course worked fine, despite saying it needed a TPM and/or specific minimum CPU.
From an eWaste perspective Microsofts decision to force literally millions of PCs into fake obsolescence is obviously horrible. And I honestly have no idea what their motivation even was for this.
As for trying Linux, these days it really isn’t even a weekend. Sure if you want to tinker and learn, you can invest a weekend. But if you want to just use the PC just pick any of the commonly recommended distros and just go. It’s installed in minutes and you can honestly just use the PC for whatever you used to use it before. Just backup/move your data off it and you got nothing to lose but like an hour, if it really doesn’t work as you need it to.
I’ve the newest AMD hardware available and I’m not able to upgrade. No idea what they want.
Hopefully you bought your fully assembled pc with an official Microsoft sticker already on the case right?
Lemmy probably isn’t the target audience for this, here’s the steps to bypass the MS account requirement when setting up W11:
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Configure your keyboard, but before you select your wifi network press Shift+(Fn)+F10 to open Command Prompt.
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Type in the following command and press enter. Your computer will reboot: oobe\bypassnro
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After the reboot, configure your keyboard and location settings, and click the option at the bottom of the page to say that you don’t want to connect to the internet
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Click the link on the next page to “Continue with limited setup”, then follow the prompts to enter a username and password.
If you use rufus to make a windows usb you can select to not require Microsoft account and bypass tpm right in the program, just get a windows 11 iso off the site instead of media creation tool
Also, if you have windows 11 pro, you can do:
Sign in options Domain join instead Make local account
If you have windows 11 home you can:
put no@thankyou.com Use whatever as the password Hit next after the error message Make local account
I do this shit at least three times a week at my job. It’s the fuckin worst.
Great mini guide.
I love the weasel words “continue with limited setup” that Microsoft uses.
I agree, but I find something else even more weasel-y and annoying when I’m adding a second user to an already-configured W11 computer. If I’m adding them as a local account without a Microsoft account, I’ll use Tab to navigate through the process of creating a username, password, and security questions. After the last security question, I’ll hit tab to navigate to the “Okay” button at bottom left of the window, which seems like a reasonable expectation. Instead, Windows will highlight the “Back” button at the bottom right. If you aren’t paying attention and hit enter or space bar, you have to start all the way back at the beginning.
I know that is a small dumb complaint, but when I’m setting 5 computers up in a row and tabbing through everything, my habits get the better of me, and I’ll have to redo it two or three times out of the five.
This sounds like a problem for October 2025 me
Governments, schools, and companies just finished (for the most part) to move to Windows 10. So it really sounds more like a problem for 2030 to me.
I really want to see the EU force Microsoft to release a stripped down version that continues to support older hardware.
Because a bunch of government and business uses 10 and they really don’t want “Recall AI” in there for a plethora of reasons.
A devastating amount of computer hardware is about to be e-wasted because they decided to drop support for anything older than roughly 2017/2018.
It’s an arbitrary limitation as people have succeeded in forcing it to work on much older hardware that still works well enough for your avg person.
Additionally, windows used to be a tool now it’s a platform for them to essentially market any number of things and user privacy appears to be the least important thing on the table.
The only reason we don’t see mass adoption of Linux has been 4 decades of software development and marketing that let’s them continue to wear their crown.
A regulatory party needs to humble them and return windows to being a tool.
Imagine if the gasoline companies one day announced that they will be changing gas so only cars bought in the last 5 years or so could refuel.
Now imagine if to buy a car you had to tolerate cameras and other forms of tracking your telemetry just to get to work and feed yourself.
Lunacy yes? They took the “my” out of my computer.
Imagine if the gasoline companies one day announced that they will be changing gas so only cars bought in the last 5 years or so could refuel.
They’ve already effectively did this, and by they I mean the US government mandated it. 5% ethanol has been mandated since 2006, and 10% since 2012. If your car is too old (lots of 90s cars) you’ll have to find a gas station that has ethanol free fuel.
The real thing stopping mass adoption of Linux is that few people want to fiddle around with their machines to that degree. For the vast majority of users, it just needs to run and be able to run whatever programs are needed, and the easier it is to do so, the better.
Now imagine if to buy a car you had to tolerate cameras and other forms of tracking your telemetry just to get to work and feed yourself.
Sorry to be the bearer of depressing news, but that’s basically already happening in new cars.
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/car-spying-insurance-surveillance-data/
Why should they have to support Windows 10 when Linux would run fine on your ‘old’ machine? That really puts the ‘yours’ back in your computer, no need for a company to do it for you.
It already exists. Most of the requirements that break with current W10 machines are artificial and can be removed at install time with rufus (memory requirement, secure boot, TPM2, microsoft account).
Still not a solution; you should not have to fight against your OS design choices that much.
Shouldn’t they just support Linux more? Maybe fund some driver development but otherwise - win?
I’m not too familiar with that side of things but I do believe they do. My understanding is that some organizations are set up as nonprofits and they contribute to the development of Linux.
Some European governments also use foss software for things like email and office.
But it’s easier to throw darts at a big company than lots of small things that add up to something big.
