People upgrading to Windows 11 with incompatible hardware have had an easy time so far, but Microsoft wants to change that.
    • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      4 months ago

      I just installed Linux Mint on a 15-year-old desktop that has never been upgraded and was middle-of-the-road when I got it. It shipped with Windows 7, and I tried a couple of times to upgrade to 10 (it failed every time, either losing core hardware functionality, running so slowly as to be unusable, or just refusing to boot altogether). But it runs Linux like a dream. Seriously—it’s easily running the latest version of Mint better than it ran an 11-year-old service pack of Windows 7.

      What’s even crazier is that I installed VirtualBox on it, and put Windows 10 on that, to use some work programs. And that runs Windows 10 a bit slowly, but otherwise more or less flawlessly!

      That’s right: I’m having a better Windows experience in Linux than I’ve ever had on baremetal Windows on this box.

      I can’t believe I didn’t do this…well, 15 years ago.

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        4 months ago

        I can’t believe I didn’t do this…well, 15 years ago.

        For what it’s worth, your experience 15 years ago likely would have been very different. It’s only in the past few years that things like drivers for basic hardware have become widely available on Linux without a bunch of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. And even today, there are still certain drivers that often don’t like to play nice.

        Ask anyone who had an nvidia GPU 15 years ago if they’d suggest switching to Linux. The answer would have been a resounding “fuck no, it won’t work with your GPU.”

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          31·
          4 months ago

          Eh, “a few years” here is selling Linux a bit short. I switched about 15 years ago, and while driver issues were a thing, it was still a pretty solid experience. I had to fiddle with my sound card and I replaced my wifi card in my laptop, but other than that, everything else worked perfectly. That still occasionally happens today, but as of about 10 years ago, I honestly haven’t heard of many problems (esp. w/ sound, that seems largely solved, at least within a few months of HW release).

          I don’t know what you’re talking about WRT GPUs. Bumblebee (graphics switch) was absolutely a thing back in the day for Nvidia GPUs on laptops, which kinda sucked but did work, and today there are better options. On desktops, I ran Nvidia because ATI’s drivers were more annoying at the time. Ubuntu would detect your hardware and ask you to install proprietary drivers for whichever card you had. I ended up getting a laptop w/o a dGPU, mostly because I didn’t want to deal with graphics switching, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t work, it was just a pain. For dedicated systems though, it was pretty simple, I was able to play Minecraft on the GPU that came with my motherboard (ATI?), and it ran the beta Minecraft build just fine, along with some other simple games.

          In short, if you were on a desktop, pretty much everything would work just fine. If you were on a laptop, most things would work just fine, and the better your hardware, the fewer problems you’d have (i.e. my ThinkPad worked just fine ~10 years ago).

          Playing games could be a bit more tricky, but for just using the machine, pretty much any hardware would work out of the box, even 15 years ago. It has only gotten better since then.

  • Brownian Motion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    43·
    4 months ago

    If you must use Windows, download it legitimately from MS website. Use RUFUS to burn the ISO image to a USB. Remove the restrictions you hate.

    Dual boot a Linux variant, and move over apps at your leisure, until you are no longer Win OS dependent.

    • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      I just moved to Linux and started fresh.

      The big mental change was instead of searching “sony vegas on linux please” I just started searching for “video editing software Linux”, and take any possible limitations and live with them, as I know it’s only temporary until Linux catches on.

      • Myro@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        What exactly do you mean, Linux had been "catching on’ since decades, you may need to wait for a while…

    • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      I preferred to do Windows as a VM personally. Dual boot cost me a year before my Linux switch BC it was easier to boot Windows when I needed it. With VM I could do mostly Linux with maybe just vm to open a word doc if I needed it.

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    212·
    4 months ago

    I mean, this was 100% predictable.

    And anyone who didnt think it would happen were willfully blind or just plain ignorant.

  • 2pt_perversion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    151·
    4 months ago

    If it’s just an installer check then people could just use the old installer versions and update afterward right? Or are they planning on stopping updates for unsupported hardware that already installed windows 11?

    • toddestan@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      My guess is one of the upcoming major updates will either refuse to install, or will try to install and fail, if you try that route.

      Something like that happened with a 2006-era laptop I have with Windows 10. It ran Windows 10 fine for several years, but finally one of the big updates decided it no longer liked some of the Vista-era drivers I was using. The update would try to install, fail, and roll back. And since Windows doesn’t let you turn off or disable updates, a few days later it would try again only to fail in the exact same way.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
      82·
      4 months ago

      It’s MS. I wouldn’t be surprised if they bricked systems attempting to bypass the requirements.

      • pyre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        4 months ago

        lol sorry, i meant in the war sense… cracking down on “dodging” minimum requirements sounded so self-serious, like the government cracking down on draft dodgers or something.

  • abcdqfr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    4 months ago

    So what was the conspiracy theory around tpm requirements, bitlocker and copilot? Some new privacy nightmare?

  • Evotech@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    4 months ago

    I’ve literally been trying to install windows 11 several times. I’ve made my PC support it, but the update just breaks and rolls back every time

    When googling I see others with the same issue but no solution

      • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        132·
        4 months ago

        Stop. We get it. I got a proxmox server, a truenas server, a half rack in the garage and everything is great. I’ve also got three brand-new in the box laptops for people who wouldnt know what to do with any Linux distro. They wanna use office and QuickBooks and that’s it.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    851·
    4 months ago

    “By god we have got to stop people from using Windows!”

    Uh. Yes. Do that.

      • mrinfinity@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Honestly, I’m so sick of Microsoft’s bullshit, I just want to spread to love of Linux desktop. They’re more than free to downvote me in to oblivion. I’m pro-freedom over the software, open source software, and freedom to use the hardware we want to use. Plus I really love Manjaro and XFCE. KDE’s a good experience, but Windows 11 has advertisements in its start menu, and I’m not entirely sure what that ‘screenshot your desktop to feed an AI’ stuff was about but I’m not really down with that.

        So, don’t thank me, but I would hope more people enjoy the different flavors of Linux desktop or give them a chance. The only way to not have Microsoft jam its software/cloud services/Teams down your throat is to get the HIPAA related Windows 11 OS which they make it a pain in the butt to grab.

  • hydroxycotton@lemmy.worldEnglish
    362·
    4 months ago

    I installed Linux mint on my laptop the other day because of various sustained long term annoyances with Windows. Despite some minor hiccups it only took about 30 minutes. It’s been such a great experience so far.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      I’ve been on EndeavourOS (basically Arch… btw…) for about a year and a half now, and I absolutely love it. I will never use Windows by choice again.

    • Spaniard@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      4 months ago

      Did the same on my desktop computer two weeks ago, everything else is already on Linux (servers and laptops).

      I am fed up on Microsoft shenanigans with windows.

  • superkret@feddit.orgEnglish
    1688·
    4 months ago

    If you’re using Windows 11 and not having a great time with it, there are ways to make the experience more pleasant. We’ve covered 14 tweaks to make Windows 11 better and how to remove Windows 11’s junk, which is a good start toward making an OS you enjoy.

    There’s another way…