Comment by sedatk

And I say it as a Linux user. My story is breathing life into old hardware back in the 2010s without having to spend any money, and just enjoying the No Man's Sky style freedom of exploring a whole new world of how a desktop operating system could look in feel and work, unmoored from the background sickness of thinking everything I do is channeled into Microsoft telemetry.

If you're the type of person who's capable of falling in love with software and software ecosystems, there's nothing like a first jump into Linux and understanding it as a world ready and waiting for you.

FreeBSD user here too <3 Mainly because I think Linux is way too aligned (and developed by) big tech these days.

We have Netflix and Sun influence but the former is not really putting its stamp on it and the latter no longer exists (and evil Oracle has zero interest of course)

I prefer the OS aligned with users like me not the big cloud boys.

Prior to a lot of apps transitioning to be web apps, this would be more important, but there’s less value now that almost everything is non-native. Even MS Office is online now

If you bypass the installer minimum hardware checks then you're making a gamble that the official statement from Microsoft won't affect you:

> If Windows 11 is installed on ineligible hardware, your device won't receive support from Microsoft, and you should be comfortable assuming the risk of running into compatibility issues.

> Devices that don't meet these system requirements might malfunction due to compatibility or other issues. Additionally, these devices aren't guaranteed to receive updates, including but not limited to security updates.

There's a ton of outdated guides out there because Microsoft has been patching out workaround after workaround. It's likely that the simple solution you used doesn't work anymore.

There's a little bit of considering it already yeah. Plus what the sibling comments say of it being clearly against what Microsoft wants, so no guarantee they won't disable it or make it even harder in the future. And also, the factor of, doing any of these check-disabling hacks also seems to require a full OS reinstall instead of an in-place update. If I need to do a full reinstall anyways, why not do it with an OS I don't need to hack up to get it to install on a system the OS maintainer doesn't want it to be installed on.

Apparently, fundamentally, Microsoft does not want me as a user. Hacking around their checks won't change that. I'd rather comply with their wishes and use an OS that actually wants me as a user.

I have two laptops that - even being 8 years and 4 years old fit the specs MS decided to set.

I still kicked itin the can. Am a happy Arch User & Ubuntu (will probably migrate that one to an Arch derivate as well, though) nowadays. I still use WIN11 in my day job. And it is an okay OS. I had worse. I had better.

What I find interesting is, that I gained on average 30 - 50% more battery time from the laptops I switched to Linux. It is quite unexpected and to me quite frankly amazing. I am writing this on my day job quite expensive Surface machine. I pulled it from the power connection to sit on the sofa about 20 minutes ago. My battery? At 73%. And I am running Firefox and PowerPoint at the moment (plus whatever corp crapware is installed underneath).

Except for exactly one set of tools (older Affinity progs) I have no need for WIN anymore. And as my day job provides a WIN machine...

I can confirm this.

Honestly, I am really surprised this is a top comment here. This was an extremely easy work around. We are all mostly curious nerds here.

All this work because one couldn't google a easy work around?

Last time I tried Linux it sucked for gaming and I've spent hours trying to install a printer.

Not to excuse Microsoft in this situation, Linux is obviously more open.

They also provide security updates for those old OSes for quite a while, AFAIK.

That's great, but it's no silver bullet. We have a 4th Gen iPad that was used mostly for consumption. Only one of the streaming apps works with its ios version.

I just installed Opencore and run the newer OSs anyway. It will eventually not be an option when they come up with an ARM-only OS, but at the moment it seems to work ok.

2013 MacBook Air on Linux Mint is fantastic

Software in much more tied to the OS though. For example, Chrome is still compatible with Windows 10 which is more than 10 years old, while on macOS you cannot install it past Monterey (2021). Not to mention that also system applications are updated with the OS, so forget about using Safari

Though it's kinda funny that Wine can run Windows applications that Windows can't.

Windows doesn't support 16bit apps anymore, but Wine (at least Wine <9.0) still does.

> I think Apple gets a pass because they're a luxury product.

No they aren't. They've just convinced everyone that they are.

I've seen people meme about Android being for people who couldn't afford an iPhone when the fact is that a flagship Android costs just as much as an iPhone.

I ran iPhone 6 and 8 well beyond their years. I only replaced because the batteries were already replaced once. But otherwise the phone was fine. I have had same issues with laptops

I used to install linux on older mac hardware and donate it. I don't think that works anymore with with the M chips (at least in the same easy way)

Erm, isn't the last bit a key part of Tim Cooks job (getting people to buy new apple stuff even if they don't really need it)?

If only there was a way to write software that uses the new hardware features if they're available but falls back to a legacy path, if the hardware features were not available.

Someone inside Microsoft probably did see it coming. That comic of their org chart being individual bubbles, all pointing guns at each other really does explain that company's behavior.

Microsoft doesn't seem to be one unified entity, but a bunch of smaller competing companies under the same umbrella, each trying to destroy the other.

Allegedly Sony saw the writing on the wall and secured a good amount of GDDR supply for their consoles. Microsoft did not, and has had to raise the price of the Xbox Series X as a result.

I don't think that Microsoft knows what Microsoft is doing.

I can solve this problem if I have to. Right now, I don't.

But I think you miss my core point. If "Ask an LLM" is the answer to this, Microsoft are doing an unforgivably shit job of maintaining Windows. Why on earth should that be necessary? Surely they can provide the minimum of information about why they think the upgrade isn't possible.

This is exactly my experience - I have a Lenovo W530 from 2013, it has an i7, 32gb RAM and SSDs (RAID0 for performance, backups are off-device) - and it is STILL lightning fast.

However - EVERY single trick I have tried... the above command, LTSC, Enterprise edition, etc, results in a situation where after installation a few days (or hours) and some updates get installed, and... blue-screen-of-death on every boot.

Gave up, installed Linux - still working through some issues (GPU driver compatibility), but overall it is a much better experience...

I think at a certain point you need to just call it quits with that sort of bullshit. I have my dignity. I'm a fucking grown adult. I'm not going to spend my spare time haplessly looking online to unfuck the new current set of fuckery. Just take the fucking bullet. Learn linux. Congrats you're playing whack-a-mole with a trillion dollar corporation and prolonging your misery. This is stupid.

Take backups and disable the updates with group policy. OP just wanted to install Windows 11.

Well that's never happened before (with Windows anyway), so it's not likely to happen now.

The windows assessment and deployment kit is what you need, with the windows pe add-on: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

You should be aware there's a 3 day limit to uptime, then PE reboots. You can work around that: https://lsoft.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011128377-I-n...

The other thing to tell you is that this is not a live version of windows with all the features of the full desktop. It is the windows that runs the windows installer application, so enough windows to do that and no more.

I would personally recommend linux instead.

Who would argue that Windows is open source? That's hilarious.

Whenever I see an unexplained command I don't understand from a random internet forum, I hop onto the production server and run it, just in case it might boost performance. Wouldn't want to miss out on that.

Been doing it since I was 12. It taught me all about the ins and outs of `rm`.

A work-around to install on unsupported hardware which both works, but is unsupported and could break during a feature Windows Update.

A clever way to maximize the chances that your computer gets bricked on a future Patch Tuesday.

One backslash really gets you going huh?

BT can be a shitshow on any OS. Some combinations work flawlessly, some don't. It's not even the OS' fault IMHO, but the device manufacturers'. My Bose headphones have the same problems under both Windows 10 and Linux.

How so? Bluetooth has been working out of the box (no tinkering) for me under Linux for the past ten years now across multiple devices. Including stuff like APT-X and LDAC. All with proper OS integration (I use Gnome). What's the story on Windows?

Well I won't be buying Dell again.

Agreed. Given my expectation of travel, it's probably the sanest choice. Esp with the Stores for service.

I bought it in late 2013, so 12 years from purchase.

Intel lists the launch date of the CPU (Atom D2500) as Q3'11, making it 14 years old when OpenSUSE Leap 16 was released.

It looks like Intel was releasing Atom CPUs without SSE4.1/4.2 up until 2013, e.g. Atom Z2420.

There is no chance they break it. That’s just scaremongering. This also isn’t “constant hacking” it’s bypassing one warning during setup and that’s it.

Yeah I caught a lot of downvotes for coming out early against it.

The scary part of HN these days is that I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic