Windows: “We dropped support for that thing you bought brand new 5 years ago”
Linux: “We are considering dropping support for something that has existed for longer than you had”
Hell, I can get a 30 year old HP LaserJet 4 printer working just fine on almost any version of Linux with the official HPLIP CLI software provided by (shockingly) HP, which was updated 2 months ago with support for over 50 new printers and the following OSes:
- LinuxMint 21.1
- MxLinux 21.3
- Elementary OS 7
- Ubuntu 22.10
- RHEL 8.6
- RHEL 8.7
- RHEL 9.1
- Fedora 37
I HATE HP and their printers (PC LOAD LETTER WTF FOR LIFE) but I will admit that this is impressive support.
It’s not even a matter of when. I was recently given an i7 6700K, and no game, old or new, comes close to fully using it, and it’s not even overclocked. If anyone is in doubt about the requirement being artificial, try this CPU.
The windows 11 cpu requirement isn’t a requirement per se but a “it’s validated to work on this or newer”. 6th gen Intel is no problem. Even 4th gen or older aren’t a problem, performance wise. The problem is the mandatory TPM 2.0 support. Intel CPUs only massively support that from 6th gen on and AMD CPUs even later (I think Zen 2). On some older boards you might have luck, especially if you buy a hardware TPM but my PC for example, running a i7 3770, only has a TPM 1.2 and no way to upgrade to 2.0. Now, there are ways to circumvent the need for a TPM all together on Win 11 but tbh, Win 10 installs perfectly well still on Hardware as old as Athlon 64 and in my experience even better than 11 anyways.
It’s a requirement both on paper and in that, even though Microsoft document an official way to bypass it, they will warn you that they do not even guarantee security updates unless your CPU is supported. Moreover, we know of at least one game, Valorant, that will not work on Windows 11 unless you are meeting its hardware requirements. The bottom line is that installing Windows 11 is a risk.
True, but getting that thing that’s older than you to actually work is going to require recompiling your kernel with some specific options, downloading a driver from an obscure git repo, running a tool to generate a config file, manually editing that config, and then running another tool to install the driver and then troubleshooting what went wrong.
Oh, wait, that was me trying to use my relatively new Sound Blaster sound card when experimenting with Linux 20 years ago. Linux had terrible support for ISA Plug and Play cards for some reason.
By comparison my solution to windows dropping support for a thing was to grab the cheapest PC I could find that might hypothetically work and stick an old version of windows on it that still had support and just not connect it to the Internet.
20 years ago? Try installing Linux on that same hardware now. Now try installing Windows?
Try the same experiment with any hardware 5 years old or older. Linux wins every time.
People will say that on newer hardware, Windows is better. Partially true. New hardware that was designed to ship with Windows will work better. A fair comparison would be hardware that ships with Linux.
Proprietary firmware has always been an issue ( like Broadcom and like NVIDIA ), especially on distros like Debian that could not ship non-free firmware. The situation has improved though. Even NVIDIA will ship out of the box soon. And Debian will shop non-free firmware now so those old Broadcom cards should work.
One of my favourite things about Linux is how much easier it is to get it running on random hardware, especially “out of the box” without having to track down drivers or install stuff after. With older Apple hardware, it is not just easier but it may be the only way to use modern software at all. I confess though that I am mostly speaking about older hardware.
