Microsoft will stop selling Windows 10 licenses this month

[brucek]

Microsoft is one of the richest corporations on the planet and has almost as many US members of congress in its pocket as the US healthcare industry. I seriously doubt that anything will be done to them, not because of what they do, but because of who they own.

I agree on the big picture, but that sort of corruption works best when it is hard to see.

Take for example the oil company that can write an obfuscated tax law change deep in a thousand page bill that few Americans will ever see and even fewer will ever understand, and sure enough they can run off with billions with no one the wiser. Even better when you can hand the politicians some complicated economic talking point about how this is really beneficial for everyone along with the bribe, and have some people believe it.

But it works a lot less well when the damage is on the front page of the newspaper. If the result of Microsoft stranding tens of millions of devices that consumers and some businesses feel they have strong economic incentive to keep using anyway, and the result is lots of voters getting their computer ransomwared, and then pipelines and hospitals shutting down, and police stations going offline, and maybe some members of congress getting their files hijacked, and also some of the jury members that hear some of these cases, and all because Microsoft refused to either keep giving out security patches for Win 10 or let these older computers run Win 11 officially (even though they run it just fine when hacked) then that political & legal cover is not going to hold up against that for very long. At least I hope.

 

[ddferrari]

-HDR support is still pretty meh
-LOLno. Windows 11 still has more resource usage then 10 and is still slower unless you go and disable all of MS's garbage
-Currently useless, and lets be frank, much like every version of direct X ever it will take YEARS before it is widespread in game engines, let alone games themselves.
Every single thing you listed as an "ACTUAL REQUIREMENT" is either the result of tweaking windows with various work arounds or disabling certain checks. NONE of this is guaranteed to continue and may/will pose issues with receiving updates in the future.

Much like running 7 on ryzen 3000+, just because you can do it doesnt mean it is supported or will work right. Especially with MS, they've already shown a willingness to cut off PCs that do not meet their random requirements. Guarantee you within a year of 10 going out of support MS will stop updating anything that doesnt meet the official requirements through some sort of hardware check.

Thanks Theinsanegamer very much! I'll stick with 10 for as long as I can until MS stops supporting it. I wish they would have just kept on with Windows 10 and continued updating it - rather than fixing something that (for the most part) wasn't broken.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I agree on the big picture, but that sort of corruption works best when it is hard to see.

Take for example the oil company that can write an obfuscated tax law change deep in a thousand page bill that few Americans will ever see and even fewer will ever understand, and sure enough they can run off with billions with no one the wiser. Even better when you can hand the politicians some complicated economic talking point about how this is really beneficial for everyone along with the bribe, and have some people believe it.

But it works a lot less well when the damage is on the front page of the newspaper. If the result of Microsoft stranding tens of millions of devices that consumers and some businesses feel they have strong economic incentive to keep using anyway, and the result is lots of voters getting their computer ransomwared, and then pipelines and hospitals shutting down, and police stations going offline, and maybe some members of congress getting their files hijacked, and also some of the jury members that hear some of these cases, and all because Microsoft refused to either keep giving out security patches for Win 10 or let these older computers run Win 11 officially (even though they run it just fine when hacked) then that political & legal cover is not going to hold up against that for very long. At least I hope.

Well, they already got away with it when they stopped supporting XP even though it's still used to this day so I'm really skeptical that this will be any different.

 

[brucek]

Well, they already got away with it when they stopped supporting XP even though it's still used to this day so I'm really skeptical that this will be any different.

There's a difference between not respecting the customer's preference for operating system flavor, vs. leaving them no option at all.

I understand that there are users who prefer Win XP over later releases. But at least as far as basic continued functionality of their computer, the vast majority at least had to the option to hold their nose and install Win Vista and beyond, as opposed to having to chuck out their computer entirely. Microsoft may have ended support for XP but they were still supporting (a different flavor of) Windows on those devices. If there was any delta between the minimum required hardware for the two releases, it was stuff that truly felt ancient compared to what was still supported.

This will not be the case when Win 10 support ends. There will be tens of millions of devices still performing productive work that households and businesses would not willingly choose to prioritize budget on replacing early. We are also in a different era as to the frequency and esp. severity of malware attacks, which is why the withholding of security patches can by itself turn a device from useful to useless.

 

[Avro Arrow]

There's a difference between not respecting the customer's preference for operating system flavor, vs. leaving them no option at all.

I understand that there are users who prefer Win XP over later releases. But at least as far as basic continued functionality of their computer, the vast majority at least had to the option to hold their nose and install Win Vista and beyond, as opposed to having to chuck out their computer entirely. Microsoft may have ended support for XP but they were still supporting (a different flavor of) Windows on those devices. If there was any delta between the minimum required hardware for the two releases, it was stuff that truly felt ancient compared to what was still supported.

This will not be the case when Win 10 support ends. There will be tens of millions of devices still performing productive work that households and businesses would not willingly choose to prioritize budget on replacing early. We are also in a different era as to the frequency and esp. severity of malware attacks, which is why the withholding of security patches can by itself turn a device from useful to useless.

Oh ok, I see what you're saying now. Yeah, that is different but I still don't think that MS will have any real negative consequences as a result as long as they make the correct campaign donations.

 

[BadThad]

Have not rebooted by main PC in a few months, Windows 10 is GREAT. Rebooted yesterday and was greeted by Microshaft Windows 11 nag screens BEFORE it OS loaded. It looked like there was no way out without "upgrading". Down in the left corner I finally saw my out "Stay on Windows 10" - hard to see and out of the way. FU MS, you're not cramming 11 down my throat!