Microsoft accidentally turned off hardware requirements for Windows 11 Microsoft has accidentally turned off its controversial hardware compatibility check, thus offering Windows 11 to computers not on the list. Windows 11 does not install on computers that lack a recent TPM-equipped CPU, although there are exceptions (notably for some of Microsoft's own hardware, which failed to make the cut in …
Same here... finally moved to W10 in Jan 2019 when I built a new system... Left my mediaserver on W7 until April 2020, when I also rebuilt that system.
I'm not looking to do a new build on either of my systems until 2024 or 25... I can upgrade my AM4 system from the 3800X to a 5800X or X3D at some point, and of course a new GPU when prices become reasonable again.... if they ever do.
So I'll be staying with W10... whilst ensuring it's kept in line with OOSU10, and putting the start menu back exactly how it should be. All telemetry shut off along with all of the other snooping and attempts to force you onto the MS store... dead and defeated.
with valve releasing the steam deck which runs steam OS which is based on Arch Linux. (not to be confused with the stream deck which is a different product by elgato) more games are being ported to Linux so soon you might only need windows for a handful mainly ones with anti cheat and ones which are no longer updated/abandoned.
Technically speaking, many games run better on Linux than they do on Windows (better Vulkan support etc) even with non-native games. Proton is so f~~king good. Even my VR games work, thanks to Steam's amazing Linux support.
Note that the games don't have to "officially" support proton either - you can turn on "use Proton/SteamPlay for all titles" in Steam, and you will find that almost everything works out of the box. A lot has changed in the last few years in the world of Linux gaming thanks to Valve/Proton.
However, some games try to install windows rootkits under the guise of anti-cheat, and these games do not work well in Proton.
It was true of 7 though. There are still updates to 7 if you use a special script allowing you to receive them, as Microsoft is still patching it until 2023.
10 will still be patched until 2032, if you have a very specific version of it, so that's the next best version of Windows once 7 has finally expired.
Even the XP hold outs had updates until 2019 by using a workaround.
I'm still running Windows 7 on my main PC with the tweak to continue getting updates. I do have Windows 10 on the same PC as a dual-boot OS, but I much prefer Windows 7 and will continue to use it as long as it is patched and the software I use continues to support it. Of course, that will unfortunately change over the next 6 months.
As for Windows 11, I have no interest in it until MS undo some of the stupid decisions they made with it, such as the hobbled task bar and woeful start menu. I imagine in 6 months time I'll have to bite the bullet and start booting into Windows 10. Not ideal from my perspective, but at least Windows 10 is more usable/customisable than Windows 11.
It's anything but shallow IMO. The UI is the very essence of how you, the user, interface with the machine, so being provided with a UI which appeals to your specific preferences damn well ought to be THE most fundamental requirement for any UI design specification...
The way I see it, modern UI design feels like it's been driven by people who look at the UI as being a static graphical element which has been made to look as beautiful as possible in PR screengrabs, but which doesn't actually need to be useable in any way, shape or form. Legacy UI design OTOH was driven primarily by the desire to create something that worked as a dynamic interactive link between meatsack and silicon, and to hell with what it might look like when viewed as a static screengrab in an advert or whatever.
Hence why modern UIs seem to focus so much on trying to make the UI look like something that wouldn't look out of place when printed on high quality paper for a coffee-table book about something stylish. All that whitespace and subtle, simple iconography and typefaces looks drop dead gorgeous when viewed as a design concept - there are times when W10 and 11 genuinely take my breath away at how nice the UI can look when you just sit back and gaze upon it from afar.
As something a human needs to be able to interact with OTOH, it's all a complete pile of shite. Give me skeuomorphic icons, 3D bevelled edges and all the other stuff that modern designers heap scorn on as being oh so out od date and past its best, but which, for those of us who spent several decades using early WIMP UIs, served us just fine across god knows how many different versions of OSs running on different systems, across widely differing screen sizes/resolutions/colour depths...
I'm using 'classic start menu' on W10 to revert it back to how it looks on W7... I've only ever used the actual W10 start menu version upon first install... and one of the first things I do, is install that along with OOSU10 to disable all of the telemetry and other MS shite
A few months ago, we upgraded a CAD/CAM suite to the lastest version that requieres Win10, and I asked "Many computers are still in Win7, will it work?" and they answerd "sure, there is a workaround".
Yeah, except that after installing the programs in those computers, printing would stop working, first in one computer, then another, then another,...
And they didn't support Win7, so the only solution was to upgrade to Win10.
And so it will be with Win11, we may loath it all we want, we may say that not having a local account isn't acceptable, but we will have to bend the knee.
I may use Linux exclusively at home and have Linux servers at work, but that CAD/CAM suite is not going to be available for Linux any time soon, or ever really.
Once enough companies get fed up with Microsofts antics, and the call for Linux support becomes strong enough, those CAD/CAM suites will "suddenly" be ported to Linux. As someone working in engineering, the call is there, and it's strength is growing. Many in the IT department here (and at our clients) detest the latest flavours of Windows as much as we do and the engineers REALLY don't care as long as the CAD/CAM works and they have their 3D mouse working. The rest is all incidental.
Addendum:
It did take a little while to realise that the Cura 5.0.0 Linux downloaded file isn't a package to install. Time-wasting dead-ends trying various package installers.
The unfamiliar downloaded file suffix ".AppImage" actually means you just give it execute permission in Linux Mint. Then it will run like any application program - it is NOT a preparatory install. It is self-contained with all its runtime dependencies. Neat.
Quote
" but that CAD/CAM suite is not going to be available for Linux any time soon, or ever really."
thats our problem, I'd like our CAD/CAM maker to make a linux mint version so that we can dump windows once and for all (it will persist in the office due to the admin 'needing it' to read emails/requests for quotes)
After all theres nothing better than to have to do an emergency re-program of a job because a custom tool has failed and you need to do it the older/slower way with conventional tools, and the win10 laptop decides "I need to update" and locks you out of the thing because it needs to spend 30 minutes 'updating' all the while you have the manglers going "is it done yet?" every 30 seconds....
At least mint pops up an icon saying "I need to update...." and not the 'fuck you and your job " way that windoze does...
If you still drive the same car you drove 10 years ago, you can stay with 10. But you would be surprised at how much technology changes and, just as surprising, how much it stays the same. The truth is I reluctantly went from 7 to 10. But after I did, I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier it was to move around in this new space once I got the hang of the interface. Same will be true for 11, which I just installed on my beautiful Spectre laptop (not quite ready to update my desktop yet). All my apps port nicely, in fact they were already there, and as I hinted at, function very well in this new space. It's like a city that's gotten a facelift. Some of the streets have been rerouted or renamed to help manage the traffic a bit better, but the buildings remain intact. Listen, as a systems engineer I write a lot of code to model and simulate complex systems. I would really hate to have to give up the Adobe suite of programs, and the Microsoft suite of programs that I use constantly for augmenting and developing my code and the presentation of its results. I have been writing code for over 40 years. I have only had to write code in four languages: FORTRAN, C, C++, and now Java.. On the other hand I have had to put up with at least 20 changes in Operating Systems. In reality they are just Windows dressing; it's the Internals that count, and they don't change very much: regardless of the latest programming fad or OS.
Yeah, I am still driving the same car I did ten years ago. I'd been driving it for more than ten years at that point... and it was ten years old when I bought it. When something works, it works.
But I am not touching Windows 10 or 11 with a ten (or eleven) foot pole. Windows 10 was the Windows that was so "good" that it made this guy who dislikes change leave the platform he had been using for 25 years. Linux (with KDE Plasma) is truer to what Windows used to be than Windows itself is anymore.
> You still have to accept the update don't you?
For now, yes. But since MS has a documented history of either upgrading without prompting or totally ignoring the response to the prompt, there is zero trust that this will continue.
In fact, I'd say there is absolute trust that MS will introduce those shenanigans now that the upgrade rate has started to drop. Most of the early adopters or those who need it (e.g. reviewers, people sho's job is to test these new versions) have already upgraded, so the adoption rate has started to decline after that initial hump has been satisfied.
I installed Win 11 on an old Lenovo Thinkcentre, purchased new in 2017 and it runs fine.
The secret is to download an iso and boot from a USB drive.
Any time I try to do anything useful it prompts me to log into my Microsoft account, which I don't want to do, but the actual OS does work.
I thought my sole Win10 device, a piddling little tablet, was safe from this shit, but now it has to fear for its poor little life.
Oh wait - no it doesn't! It up and died on me the other day and just sits there with a blank expression, bereft of life.
Still, better to go that way than to be savagely 'improved' when MS forget that they're supposed to ASK before updating to Win11.
Using anything on Windows appears o be a hassle these days. I mean, really. Nothing works straight out of the box, and if it does, it's classified as a bug. Go figure. True, the main consoles are still running some Windows here, still, but when it comes to testing new things... actually not much does. Will be another few years, and either Windows is a GUI frontend like X Server on Linux or it will be gone. Maybe for good.
I have just purchased/built a NEW desktop computer along with a TPN module.
I see no benifit to use TPM it seems to offer me NO additionl secutity.
As for BitLocker it seems to give more problems if you enable/use it.
My computers are secuted by MS Defender and MS advanced Guard and over the last few years and not be caught out.
I'm careful and always alert for scam e-mails and what I open CHECK First.
MS has sold or tried to sell us a lemon regarding the bennifits of TPM.
Regards Carl
This week, I had it on my year old compatible Acer machine for just over one hour. After enabling virtualization the Amazon app-store would not install, which was the sole reason I wanted to use it at all. I found out that's because I live in the UK, but it did not tell me that it was only available in the USA. Windows security was missing from settings after the update and gave an error when I clicked on the relevant button in the settings app. Then it mentioned something about Intel USB 3 drivers not being compatible. After taking a good look around, 11 offers me NO improvements to Windows 10 whatsoever IMHO. I then rolled right back to 10, which is in a decent state these days.
Microsoft should be ashamed of this pile of junk I think.
Isn't this the same kind of situation as where a Manufacturer makes a blunder? What are its' obligations to its' customers under these circumstances?
Potentially people whose machines have erroneously been upgraded [sic] could have their pc's bricked in an instant. Some of those people could be running software which is Very Important. (Ok, ok, so why run Win in the first place?).
It used to be said that every other Windows release was awful, and the one after would be better.
I don't know at what point you start this, but 98 was good, XP was great. Windows 7 was great. Windows 10 is great.
What was inbetween? Windows ME was shite. Windows Vista was abhorrent shite. Windows 8 wasn't great.
And so fits Windows 11 in to this odd, not at all scientific, model.
XP had issues as released - it was only with a major service pack that it became decent-ish!
Windows 2000 (derived from the NT line) was good, and formed the basis of all subsequent versions. The contemporary consumer version, Windows ME (from the Windows 95 line), was crap and probably as a result the line was discontinued and all future consumer versions were basically the business version, i.e. the NT line, with a few features such as domain join disabled.
There appears to be a registry setting to block W10 feature updates, which seems to block the W11 update too. It might stop working at any time of course.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/this-registry-trick-lets-you-block-major-windows-10-updates/
When will people realize that M$'s goal is to make $$$ and that will be to entice users to to monthly subscription on the 'Cloud' where his/her OS will be the current version of Windows updated (daily?) by M$ and accessed though any browser? The software required by the user will be a optional extra monthly fee. Microsoft will escape supporting hardware which is not profitable. The computer joins the phone as a monthly profit source.
There is a huge difference between "I can install it and it seems to run" versus "all the parts actually work and should continue to do so in future updates".
Microsoft breaking the install time check does not suddenly make all the rest of the OS work on unsupported hardware.
To the extent that Windows 11 has support for older processors, that is probably just because Windows 11 started off by copying the Windows 10 source code. Microsoft won't bother writing such support code when they change things in future. And they are likely to remove existing old processor support code when changing stuff in future - such code just makes programs slightly bigger, slower, and harder to test.
I spent a fair amount of time yesterday learning about the 'Bitmask Manipulation Instructionset 2' (BMI2) and in particular why a library I'm using was causing a #UD fault on a brand-new Windows 11 laptop from Asus. The reason is that it's an 'Intel Inside' (aka 'Celeron') and... despite meeting the weighty requirements for windows 11 lacks some Haswell era instruction sets. (Answer is to recompile the library with some defines that do things the hard way). Mind you, I know this is a cheap laptop, that is why I purchased it since I'm developing software and want to know the worst-case performance scenario. Naively I was hoping that win11 at least meant we could count on some sort of baseline of cpu features from say 2013. Nope.
I have W10 and like all users it took some getting to know the new system. I wouldn't want to go back, but yet again my 7th generation processor is disallowed from joining the W11 club. However, having seen the interface I would need to install a product like Start11 to make it feel friendly again. Why do MS do this with every few issues of Windows and come up with s**t. Will probably wait for W12 to come along to see if they have had a better think about the UI.
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