I hate this article because of the title. I clicked this honestly because I was expecting to learn something outrageous about the pricing, but Microsoft hasn’t even announced it yet, just that it’s not going to be free. The journalist here could have just wrote in the title that it’s going to cost money, and left it at that. If they wanted to do a real good job, within the article they could even share what the Windows 7 version of the program cost people to help give a sense for what we should expect. But they didn’t even do that.
Anyway, here’s the latest information from Microsoft:
“Security as a Service”
At that point, the OS will be 10 years old, and was a free upgrade for anyone running Windows 7 or later. It’s plausible to not have paid a cent for your OS for 15+ years by 2025.
If you’ve bought a new computer with Windows since 2021, you’ll have v11 anyway and won’t be affected.
Frankly I have to hand it to Microsoft - they’ve been generous with OS support. The pessimist/pragmatist part of me puts it down to upgrading old OS’s to combat their reputation as being the cause of worms/viruses going mental on the Internet over the past decade or so. So it isn’t like they haven’t had ulterior motives.
But yeah, I can’t really fault them for this one.
Microsoft outdoes every other (paid) OS including Chrome, Android*, iOS, and Mac in terms of their longterm support, as far as I am concerned.
But Win10 is still the end of the line for me, I suspect. All the MS Account stuff deeply integrated into 11 is a bridge too far.
*(which is free, but also doesn’t get properly supported on older devices)
I’m literally sitting here waiting for the rest of my files to transfer so I can finally update my win7 gaming rig with… Ubuntu.
I swapped to linux this summer from Win10 and have absolutely no regrets.
Actually, that’s not true, I do have one regret: I can no longer take advantage of the PC half of my Gamepass Ultimate subscription. It was nice being able to play games on PC that are just better with KBM (recent example: Steamworld Build would be much better on PC than console).
Beyond that one thing, which I will get over eventually, no regrets. Every game I want to play on my PC works perfectly fine so far. I’m not a linux guy. I don’t tweak things. I just turn on my computer and use it for normal computer things and then turn it off. Surfing the net, gaming, word/excel type things, Discord, Steam, etc. Everything normal works easy peasy on linux now.
Most average home users could get their computer preinstalled with linux and never know the difference after a day of figuring out where the new “shut down” button is and such. Hopefully MS keeps driving people away so we can get more people on linux so even more things work easy peasy.
What distro are you using?
Did you follow any guides for getting all of your games running?
I’m on Pop_OS. I like Nobara better but on my laptop with hybrid graphics, Pop works better for gaming.
I didn’t follow any guides. I looked up individual games that had issues. Mostly I game on my Xbox unless it’s a game that plays better with KBM (think Civ and the like) or indy games that aren’t on console yet. Neither of those tend to have any major issues with Proton.
I honestly don’t know what I’ll end up doing once my Win10 support runs out. I use linux pretty extensively, but there are still a lot of games I play that do not run under Proton/Wine (e.g. Mabinogi).
Worst case, I will probably dual-boot win/lin on my next desktop, but in my experience with dual-booting in the past, I just end up using one or the other.
Just do what I did. Build a server that runs a Windows VM with GPU passthrough with the intention of using it as your own cloud gaming service, realize the performance is shit because you bought old Xeons with horrendous single-core performance, and give up and just accept that some games won’t be playable because of anticheat. Nvidia please make GeForce Now usable at more than 1080p60 on Linux
Unfortunately I am a creature driven by nostalgia, and I cannot give up certain games. :)
If you’re willing to go through some setup you can make a dual booted system, then boot the windows install in a VM inside the Linux one for anything that doesn’t require absolutely all the performance, switch over to booting bare metal only when necessary
You can also run Linux on integrated graphics and pass in the GPU to windows for more performance in a VM
We do this every single windows release, the major downside of faster version cadences is we’re going to get multiple versions as the “best version”.
We do this every single windows release
Nah, I’ve never had an issue upgrading Windows until 11, and that includes going to 98, ME, and 8/8.1. But Windows 11’s UI I just absolutely hate, after trying it on my wife’s laptop.
But hey, maybe I’ll see if BB4Win is still kicking. ;P
