You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation' Microsoft has explained what it means by "deprecation" – it doesn't mean "the end", it means "save the date." Perhaps with an eye to the impending end of support for most versions of Windows 10, Microsoft this week clarified the difference between deprecation – the end of active development – and the end of support, which is …
This post has been deleted by its author
Have you tried double-clicking on the firmament and selecting "About"?
Windows was a collaboration between Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, otherwise known as The Trinity.
Some OSs are born great, some OSs achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.
But then again, with Windows:
"Out, damned spot! out, I say!"
But, it's Friday night and the weather forecast for the weekend is good so down to the seaside:
"Once more unto the beach, dear friends, once more."
Given the defecatory nature of the product, the literate Tudor might have preferred fenestrae merdarum although unlike my literate forbears, I am buggered what the locative of modern Redmond should be (redmondii?)
As for Unix being handed to Moses alternative popular opinion suggests soprano Unix originated from the palace harem in which tenor Multics had previously been "inducted."
Well, stage 1 is referred to as being deprecated
Stage 2 ( or "Number 2") is being eliminated.
Feature lifecycle:
"Feature Request" > "In Development" > "Preview" > "Fully Supported" > "Discouraged" > "Deprecated" > "Eliminated" > "Feature Request"
Cycle implies cyclic.
"The company is fervently hoping that users are listening."
Are they?
I'm sure somebody there has been working out how much money they can make by selling extended support o an ongoing basis to those who won't buy a "perpetual" licence for W11 as part of a hardware replacement.
I'm also sure that there must be plenty of customers who have been working out how much they can save by subscribing to extended support instead of replacing H/W.
And someone else at Microsoft noting how easy it is to get customers to slip into thinking of the whole of Windows a subscription service rather than a perpetual licence and that by doing so they free themselves of dependence on H/W refresh cycles.
You'd think that but they don't seem to realise that. They seem to think that if it's a paid-for product they'll somehow be able to get actual support rather than a stream of patches.
I remember the times when we (a) bought a licence for server S/W and (b) paid for support, usually at 15% of licence fee. Support not only included updates but also a phone number with someone knowledgeable to answer it (promptly AFAICR) with escalation to even more knowledgeable people.
For commercial use free as in beer isn't necessarily a stumbling block and there are a number of companies who will support free as in speech S/W - and it's the free as in speech that enables that to happen.
I have a perfectly serviceable PC that's a few years old but still plenty fast enough for video editing and gaming (all but the latest games at least) but apparently it's not compatible with Windows 11 as it doesn't have a modern TPM, and so refuses to install on this machine.
In all other respects it's perfectly capable.
I'm not spending hundreds on a new motherboard, so it'll stay as it is, until I rebuild it with linux (Davinci Resolve and OBS Studio work well there, and Steam too iirc).
Grumble grumble etc.
But can it run Crysis…?
I’ve just set up a 2017 NUC with Debian LMDE for a friend - it’s identical to the WFH PC I use, a cheap cast-off that supposedly isn’t supported for Win11 (but mine automagically upgraded itself to Win11). Just for fun I installed Wine and Bottles and tried installing the Crysis demo… much to my amazement it worked, and was playable at 1280x720 at High - which is nearly as good as the first, fairly expensive, gaming rig I built specifically to play Crysis back in 2008!
The CPU is no faster than my 2012 high-end laptops, but the integrated GPU clearly is, as none of them can run Crysis, even natively.
I then tried installing Office 2003: nope, everything I tried resulted in an installer error. I tried a few other Windows apps and they were all fine.
Not exactly a definitive test and I’m sure there are plenty of use cases that would make Linux a no-go for users who are desperate to keep a particular Windows app, but I really want to make the switch so I was basically testing to see whether I could put up with Mint as my personal daily driver (instead of Win7) and whether there was anything that would be a show-stopper.
I found lots to like and actually preferred it in some respects, and it was much faster than Win10/11 at everything (though not noticeably faster than Win7 since that is similarly instant on similar hardware).
I’ll try Excel 2000 next - it’s actually my preferred spreadsheet anyway. If that fails it’s not the end of the world; Calc is no worse than the current Excel, which I’m using all day everyday atm.
When you say just a few years old, is it 2016 or newer? If so you may have a BIOS option to enable TPM 2.0 support. On Intel chips it's called Intel Platform Trust Technology or PTT. On AMD it's called fTPM.
If your PC passed the processor model check you have a TPM built into it.
Of course Steam works because it has a native Linux client and it downloads its own runtime libraries to partially isolate itself and its games from differences in distributions.
I like taking the occasional swipe at Microsoft, but I think this article somewhat misses the mark. My first encounter with “deprecated” in software came via the Bell Labs Unix crew, who would mark something as deprecated to mean that (a) it is going away at some point in the future, and (b) there is another, presumably better, way of doing the same thing. For example, one might mark the description of tmpnam (a C library procedure that computes the name of a temporary file) as deprecated in favor of mkstemp (a C library procedure that avoids a race condition between computing the name and opening the file). Because many programs still use tmpnam, unfortunately, this procedure will go away only far in the future. In fact, if some implementation found a bug in tmpnam, they would produce an update.
So “deprecated” means nothing more than “don't use this, there's a better way of doing it, and this might vanish someday.”
So “deprecated” means nothing more than “don't use this, there's a better way of doing it, and this might vanish someday.”
Bingo. You have just described Windows 11.
Hoping that it vanished entirely at midnight tonight. It really is a POS for an OS and that is thanks to their fiddling with stuff that users were in the main happy with.
This post has been deleted by its author
If Microshaft truly ends Windows 10 - won't that just make people who don't want to play join the Linux revolution? MS's market share is held up by the number of dodgy users who didn't quite find their way to buying a licenced copy. I bought my last copy of Office when it was still better than the free alternatives. My only Windows machine left is for music production – everything else is Linux. I have a server farm of mini PCs, even though they came with Windows pre-installed I blatted them before I even powered them up. That’s right, I’ll no longer use Windows even if it’s free to me and that’s from taking a look at my firewall log for a Windows 11 machine, I’m not using a PC that calls home that often! 10’s telemetry was bad enough – 11 is a joke – and if anyone says “if you’ve got nothing to hide – blah blah blah” - they should be banned from having locks on their front door - no, make that banned from HAVING a front door! ;)
>> won't that just make people who don't want to play join the Linux revolution?"
> Did that happen when XP and Win 7 support ended?
Yes, to some extent it did. But sure, most erstwhile Winserfs simply ponied up or jumped through the hoops to obtain a "free" "upgrade".
That doesn't apply here. Should your hardware fail to pass the entirely arbitrary muster it's game over. Moreover, Windows 11 offers, objectively, a worse experience to its users than its forebear(s). No amount of "free" "upgrade" can overcome that.
-A.
The other difference is that almost everything people do on their PC now works just fine under Linux.
Almost everything 'normal' people do actually runs in a web browser, so works just fine on tablet, Linux, macOS.
Valve have more or less solved gaming under Linux.
It's a pretty small subset of people who actually need Windows now.
The majority of home users are going to stay on Windows 10, unpatched, until their machine actually dies, same as they did with XP and 7.
Then they'll look at the cost of a new PC, and a lot of them will run away to Android tablets.
It's only businesses who will pay that premium.
Then they'll look at the cost of a new PC, and a lot of them will run away to Android tablets.
Very true. Even name brand 300mm/12" tablet comes in a bit cheaper than a lot of AI contaminated Win11 notebooks. Only gets worse for US residents with the new trumped up tariffs.
I notice here a decent ex-Govt refurbished (DELL, Lenovo etc) notebook or desktop with Win10 is easily under AUD400 (USD250) - the Win11 boxes are not any more expensive. The refurbisher just installs the latest version of Windows supported by the hardware.
Of course there will be a lot of very cheap hardware that cannot run Win11 when Win10 is gone - happened when the Win7 OEM licensed could no longer be used to activate Win10. From that I got some rather nice micro PCs which are now happily running Linux and FreeBSD.
They do worse things every release. 24H2 tried to do a Type 1 hypervisor trick for security on unsupported (i5 7th gen) CPU of mine. It took me 15 days to figure it out and it was a fan noise nightmare with lagging system. Their telemetry isn't interested in this of course.
"MS's market share is held up by the number of dodgy users who didn't quite find their way to buying a licenced copy."
The only market share they care about is the number of purchased licences. They're in the marketplace to sell. What wasn't bought wasn't sold.
What they were hoping for was that everyone would run out to buy new H/W to replace the old and with it a new Windows licence. A potential problem was people who'd recently bought W10 and might get rounded up into a class action to fatten lawyers at Microsoft's expense. That was bought off with a free upgrade provided the H/W was "modern enough" ("ooh, look, TPM2's just what we need").
But if somebody isn't buying W11 accompanied by new H/W it's much the same whether they stay on W10 or migrate to Linux, as least in the short to medium term. Unless, of course, they can be sold a subscription extended support. That's an even better wheeze than a perpetual licence and opens the door nicely to W12 being subscription only.
Stop and then Disable "Connected User Experiences and Telemetry" and "Inventory and Compatibility Appraisal service" in Services, eliminating the vast majority of telemetry.
I think all you Linux zealots commenting at every article covering Windows should have their front doorways sealed with rebar enforced concrete. Yeah we get it, you hate Windows 10/11 so stop reading Windows articles and subjecting us to your hate. Stick with Linux related articles and leave Windows users alone!
at least in corporate environment...
We know the company does not, but the company should. (Single MS employees are listening, but the company does not. It is like George Carlin says: A group of people, especially when they start wearing the same buttons, signs, hat, whatever shows they are the same...... Stay away from them.)
It is end of FREE support. Companies can purchase support for a few years beyond that date.
I recall there were some on the internet repackaging Microsoft's patches for Windows 7 and making them available, the same will probably happen with Windows 10. Whether you TRUST whoever is doing that is another matter, but assuming there is one you can trust that kicks the date back another few years for home users who may have a working Windows 10 PC they can't or won't upgrade to Windows 11.
Is another BypassESU script a possibility? The previous script kept me on Win7 for a couple more years until I was finally forced onto Win10.
My main rig has twin graphics cards and six monitors and I just can't get Linux to play ball with it, even when I built a new box with AMD cards instead of Nvidia. That actually worked at first then nuked itself when I inadvisably tried to implement hibernation (inexplicably absent from Mint along with a remotely acceptable media player such as the one that shipped with XP all those years ago). On restart a GRUB menu appeared from nowhere and the desktop was completely broken. Even when I completely wiped the installation partitions and reinstalled from scratch, adding the second graphics card just breaks the system now. Can GRUB screw with your BIOS settings?
Anon 'cos I'm not sure how "naughty" those scripts were.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that’s all.”
--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
I have had a long association with Windows initially with 3.0 and then later as a tester on 2000 learning valuable lessons about not being an early adopter after travials with 95 on floppy. Which leaves me with the current problem I have changed one laptop to Linux now I have just the one program that cannot run natively on Linux, Canon's photo editor Digital Photo Professional . This despite Linux being teased as a listed OS in the download page -so annoying . Months will tick down now as I can possibly learn Gimp or Lightroom or bow down to Redmond or the last option isolate my photo editing machines from the internet like going to build a wall ....
None of my computers meet Microsoft's requirements for Windows 11, so even if I wanted the extra surveillance and intrusion. I couldn't have it.
When Windows 10 is no longer safe enough,they will all switch to Zorin or similar.
Not a single new Windows feature in the last decade has been of any interest or use to me.
Clearly I'm not their target demographic. I wonder who is.
SMB 1.0 (originated for DOS networking 1986) has been depreciated for nearly 12 years (June 2013) yet Microsoft has not declared an End Of Life or remove it from Windows 11.
Microsoft's gibberish about depreciation reminds me of the NSA's definition of collected data when reporting to Congress about their data dragnet, "Data is not collected until it is looked at by an analyst.". So the NSA has petabytes of data that could sit for decades uncollected, because it was never "looked at". Microsoft uses depreciation as an excuse to cling to obsolete protocol and utilities because they are like hoarders, can't part with their junk. Windows 11 still has 'Simple TCPIP services' from UNIX and the early beginnings of the Internet ('60s), rarely needed today. PowerShell 2.0, Internet Information Services (IIS) reached end of life in 2023, Telnet all still linger in Windows 11, abandoned and forgotten.
It is the customers who are too lazy. And Cisco, and Oracle and so on. Both mentioned with surprisingly new product versions (2024). You won't believe what other big names come up when logging "Who The Frig Is Still Doing SMB1 here?". For Scanners and the like: No mercy, we don't care. But for VPN gateways, databases and so on you can't go the "just don't care, turn if of right about now" way. And funk soul brother won't help you here...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
