Windows 11 - and why I don't see a point in upgrading

[Sob__]

Why would they now need to ALSO deprecate hardware than is older than 8th gen intel...

It seemed weird at first, but how much does it really matter? (TL;DR, it doesn't)

Let's assume that you were left behing with 7th gen (as a worst case, since it's newest; that's what I have now). If you're running Windows, you're now on Win10 (if you have some older version, then you're clearly not someone who would care about Win11). Reasons to upgrade from Win10 to Win11 on this hardware are... erm... none. Support for Win10 (updates, mainly security ones) ends three years from now (2025-10-14), so until then you're fine. I wouldn't worry about other software dropping support for Win10 sooner than that, except perhaps some newest games that would be too much for your hardware anyway.

But what about 2026 and beyond? You can keep Win10, but it's not ideal, because even though some do not believe it, security updates are good thing. But don't forget how old will your PC be by then, 7th gen is from 2017, so it will be eight years. As someone who had previous PC for 11,5 years, I don't see eight years as extreme age, but I also have to admit that near the end it wasn't great. Most people upgrade sooner. But if you find yourself in 2026 still with your current 7th gen that would still be performant enough for you, nothing is lost. Even if you wouldn't want to upgrade (by then, you could get second-hand 8th+ gen hardware for next to nothing), Win11 can be convinced to run on older hardware, it's not officially supported, but it works. Yes, it could change, but until it does, don't worry, be happy.

[frostknight]

Hmm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake

2016 August

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen

2017 February


I recall seeing on youtube comments where people basically stated, that devices with these processors were plenty strong enough to run windows 11.

I have even seen many people mention that they plan to go linux after windows 10 support is nonexistent.

Also, there is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Sph ... oft_Pluton

On youtube pages that mention this, some even on mainstream channels like linus tech tips say this has people even who are average users disturbed about the future of hardware.

The windows 11 situation is similar.

Off-topic:
Although, I can't say linux doesn't have its own unneeded security issues of its own.

However, that isn't due to the devs of it as much as, due to other issues:

for those of you who don't know about libreboot & maybe coreboot?

They have had some interesting issues with their newest stable release on most distros lately... due to some annoying bloated crap, likely...

I mention this, because of this:

https://notabug.org/libreboot/lbmk/issues/56

Though off topic somewhat, my point being, linux is getting extremely bloated if you use mainstream distros on one side and on the other, you have windows 11 doing weird expletive stuff like deprecated processors that more than have enough power to run windows 11 without any trouble at all.

Btw, if libreboot has these issues, I cannot imagine the stock bios problems that must exist too.

Long story short, for those of you who need a user friendly graphical interface akin to windows, etc...

this is probably extremely frustrating, I understand your pain, given the problems I had before I ditched windows.

[therube]

hasn't microsoft, done more than enough planned obsolescence on the software and hardware sides

Most people upgrade sooner.

For me, Win10 has stifled hardware updates on my end.

I have an old Win7, i5-3570K, 16 GB RAM, & while certainly not the fastest (CPU...), the system is clean & runs very well.
Runs FAR better then any (relatively) low end Win10/11 system I have had the displeasure to come across.

If 10/11 were not such dogs (IMO), if the UI worked for me (& even without UX improvements), if they did run cleanly, sure, I'd update to newer hardware. As it is, I've had no interest in hardware, in ages now - because of the OS requirements (10/11) for updated hardware to work, & I'm not about to go there if I can help it.

[Night Wing]

I have an old Win7, i5-3570K, 16 GB RAM, & while certainly not the fastest (CPU...), the system is clean & runs very well.
Runs FAR better then any (relatively) low end Win10/11 system I have had the displeasure to come across.

I have an old laptop; an HP dv4-5113cl which has an i5 (Sandy Bridge?) processor with a processor speed of 2.80, 16 GB of DDR3 memory and which came with 64 bit Windows Home Premium.

Like you I hung onto this laptop. But as time wore on, it was easy for me to see that some products were no longer supporting Windows 7. Since I do not need any Windows only software and I'm not a "gamer", I finally got up the nerve to take out the laptop's 750 GB, 7200 rpm platter drive and I put a 500 GB SSD in it's hard drive slot. Since I have many hard drives running 64 bit linux Mint, I decided to install 64 bit MX Linux on the SSD for this laptop.

If you don't need any Windows only software such as Microsoft 365 and you're not a gamer, then you might want to hold on to your old laptop and maybe, just maybe, give a linux distro a try.

I'm not a power user in linux, but I know enough about the linux distros I experiment with on bare metal to never get myself into trouble with the linux distros I play around with.

[mtosev]

I think this wasn't mentioned here. Wiki says why older CPUs aren't officially supported:
Microsoft has not specifically acknowledged this when discussing the cutoff, it was also acknowledged that the sixth and seventh generation of Intel Core processors were prominently afflicted by CPU-level security vulnerabilities such as Meltdown and Spectre, and that newer CPUs manufactured since then had increased mitigations against the flaws.[87][139]

[Sob__]

Requirements for bare system are not too bad and are increasing quite slowly (not counting those few obvious artificial limitations).

One difference is that historically the system requirements were given as absolute minimum to start it (like the near nonsense 386 + 4MB RAM for Win95, that was barely enough for system itself), only later they became more realistic, so that you can actually do something with it. Win11 with official minimum 4GB is not the greatest combination, but you do have 2.5GB free after boot. It's possible to do something with that, if you don't go overboard. Obviously, if you know that you have weak HW, you can't open everything ten times (but some people don't seem to understand that).

Another difference is that yes, there was some bloating. Prime example is Defender that became mandatory. Who would think that resident antivirus constantly interfering with everything would slow things down... and it does, big time. It's especially deadly if you try to run system on HDD (don't do it, get SSD). But kill the damn thing and suddenly everything is much snappier. I had Win7 and Win10 on same HW (i5-750 from 2009) and I didn't see a significant difference, in fact Win10 seemed slightly faster. I did only quick test with Win11 and I didn't see any noticeable difference either.

[jangdonggun1234]

I also don't want to upgrade to Windows 10, but being a Python dev, recently Python 3.9 deprecated Windows 7, so to continue to use Python I have to upgrade to Windows 10, but Windows 10 will soon be deprecated due to Microsoft's new rapid release cycle policy, so kinda pointless to switch to 10, and my computer runs Windows 10 like crap.

[Moonchild]

my computer runs Windows 10 like crap.

Did you use the upgrade path or a new install? Upgrades from Win 7 are notorious for running slow.

[van p]

my computer runs Windows 10 like crap

How so, and why should 7 vs. 10 make a difference? I went from 7 to 10 with no discernible difference in performance. If it matters, and in light of Moonchild's comment/question, I tried twice to upgrade from 7 to 10 and the process failed each time, so I bought the physical package and installed it.

[therube]

why should 7 vs. 10 make a difference?

Because 10/11 are not (& never will be) a "clean" OS.
They are no longer an OS.
Rather they are a data collection (spying) mechanism.

Because there are huge numbers of ancillary things going on (that most will never want or use).
Because all control has been removed from the user.
The user is at the behest of MS.

Now, you get a powerful enough system, one that is powerful enough to (partially) negate all those negatives, well, at that point, you have a "much more powerful" system - but only one that performs on par with what you had before (on your less powerful, but clean running Win7 system).

IMHO.

[therube]

I tried twice to upgrade from 7 to 10 and the process failed each time, so I bought the physical package and installed it.

I would think there are ways to do a clean install, even from "upgrade"?
https://www.google.com/search?q=clean+i ... om+upgrade

[van p]

therube, I was asking the poster what the "crap" performance he got was and never got a response. You badmouth W10/11 for good reason, then go on to say you may still get a usable system out of it. Not sure we moved the needle real far there.

Concerning my upgrade, that was in 2015. I just wanted to get the deal done, so that's what I did. I'm not sure what sense it makes to clean install a product that has already been clean installed (I guess that's what happened when I installed from the retail product media). Most of your references are from years after I installed; at this point the whole issue is moot.

[jez9999]

I'm still using Win7 as my main OS. And I won't be able to for much longer as software is stopping working. I have to use my Win10 work laptop for increasing amounts of things.

I desperately want to switch to Linux as my main OS. I really wish Linux would fix a whole host of things I hate about it, but I'm pretty sure they're considered features and not bugs, and will never be fixed. Things like the dual clipboard buffers (I want one, two is retarded and confusing), having to drop to the commandline every 5 minutes to configure things that are meant to have GUI alternatives, not being able to right-click-drag files to a file browser to choose whether to copy or move a file, the border of windows being literally 1px so it's very hard to resize them, the X button in the corner not actually being in the top-right pixel but just inside so it's much harder to click, the package management system nightmare and the fact that I still don't fully get it, everything seems to be fully intertwined so that if you want a recent version of software, you sometimes have to *upgrade your entire operating system* to get it to the point that some programs like Chrome just ignore the whole thing and install themselves in /opt and update themselves (everything should do that)... I really wish I could find one Linux distro that fixed most or all of these problems. But I haven't.

People were indeed saying the same stuff about Win10 as they're saying about Win11. Almost none switched to Linux, and most are now on Win10. It sucks. You're getting hit with telemetry and constant phoning home, the UI was turned to shit (new 'apps' have small monochrome icons, a massive step backwards from Windows 7 for the sole purposes of following recent UX trends), updating/restarting is so forced and impossible to disable I was forced to write a taskbar program that runs in Admin mode, and checks windows update service every few seconds, kills and disables it. It has to do this at least once a day.

But, it's good to see that Windows 11 icons are getting more colourful again. I guess that's good, yay. I predicted that, upon removing all colour from icons, UX experts would rediscover and 'innovate' colour icons, and they're gradually starting to. Before long, the icons will have a flashy new 1995-style 3d perspective.

[andyprough]

I desperately want to switch to Linux as my main OS. I really wish Linux would fix a whole host of things I hate about it, but I'm pretty sure they're considered features and not bugs, and will never be fixed. Things like the dual clipboard buffers (I want one, two is retarded and confusing), having to drop to the commandline every 5 minutes to configure things that are meant to have GUI alternatives, not being able to right-click-drag files to a file browser to choose whether to copy or move a file, the border of windows being literally 1px so it's very hard to resize them, the X button in the corner not actually being in the top-right pixel but just inside so it's much harder to click, the package management system nightmare and the fact that I still don't fully get it, everything seems to be fully intertwined so that if you want a recent version of software, you sometimes have to *upgrade your entire operating system* to get it to the point that some programs like Chrome just ignore the whole thing and install themselves in /opt and update themselves (everything should do that)... I really wish I could find one Linux distro that fixed most or all of these problems. But I haven't.

You should try MX Linux, it handles pretty much everything you've listed with ease. There's people on the MX forums who haven't used a command line in 5-10 years. Their software center has everything all in one place, including proprietary stuff like Zoom and Teams and so forth. They backport a lot of newer software so that it works on your version without forcing you to upgrade the entire OS. Steve Pusser, who is a member here and makes all the Debian versions of Pale Moon for the whole world, is one of the main developers/packagers for MX.

And clicking on corners of windows to drag and re-size them is very old school. On Linux desktops you just hit the left Alt key and left-click drag to move the window, or right-click drag to resize it. Once you try it, you'll never want to hunt for a corner again.

MX Linux has been the favorite Linux distro of die-hard Windows fanatic Dedoimedo - you can look up his many glowing reviews over the years. Most of your concerns with Linux distros are similar to the ones he brings up in his reviews and bashes most other distros for, but MX routinely wins his Linux distro of the year awards.

[jez9999]

Which of the things that I cited does it fix? The awful Windows 10 icons, that's a given because Linux in general didn't go down that road, but I just read one of his reviews and he doesn't mention anything I said above, and mentions a few flaws of MX Linux.

[Moonchild]

And clicking on corners of windows to drag and re-size them is very old school. On Linux desktops you just hit the left Alt key and left-click drag to move the window, or right-click drag to resize it. Once you try it, you'll never want to hunt for a corner again.

Some concerns with that MO for me...
Ergonomics: just using the mouse > using mouse and keyboard combo
Resizing with Alt+drag would have to always use one corner to move. In Windows you can use any and resize from any side. And edges will restrict to just one direction; how does alt+right drag do that?
Usability: Alt+mouse drag may be handled by the application you're using to do something specific. How would that conflict be handled?

Windows has also understood that the "drag zone" should be more than 1px wide, even if it's not visual in Win 10 like in Win 7. So it really isn't that bad not having a window border once you understand the drag area around windows there.

Not trying to be a stickler here but it really isn't that clear-cut of an "advantage" using Linux WMs of different flavours.

[Falna]

Well I have finally upgraded... from Windows 8.1 (which worked fine with Start8) to Windows 10 (plus Start11, which is compatible). The Pro version for a little more control.

Unfortunately Linux wasn't an option; I use MX Linux (previously Linux Lite and a couple of other distros) on a rarely used backup machine, but I have a couple of vital apps that only run in Windows.

So why not Windows 11? Officially I can't run it due to hardware constraints, so I'd rather wait a couple of years to see if the workarounds continue to be tolerated before jumping in, and I guess there's a chance that W10 support may get extended beyond the planned EOL due to the number of people who will be impacted by those constraints. Plus I can't see anything to attract me to W11.

[andyprough]

Resizing with Alt+drag would have to always use one corner to move. In Windows you can use any and resize from any side. And edges will restrict to just one direction; how does alt+right drag do that?
Usability: Alt+mouse drag may be handled by the application you're using to do something specific. How would that conflict be handled?

Windows has also understood that the "drag zone" should be more than 1px wide, even if it's not visual in Win 10 like in Win 7. So it really isn't that bad not having a window border once you understand the drag area around windows there.

Not trying to be a stickler here but it really isn't that clear-cut of an "advantage" using Linux WMs of different flavours.

You just put the mouse anywhere in any window and ALT+right-click-drag in any direction or angle. That seems to be it. Don't need to be near any corner or in any particular place. Works on every window unless it's a particular dialog box that doesn't resize. At least that's how it's working on the XFCE desktop right at the moment for me. I think the other major desktop environments are the same way.

I personally use a tiling window manager most of the time, so even ALT+clicking+dragging anything is old fashioned for what I'm used to. I do nearly all my window moving and resizing with programmable keyboard shortcuts.

[andyprough]

Which of the things that I cited does it fix? The awful Windows 10 icons, that's a given because Linux in general didn't go down that road, but I just read one of his reviews and he doesn't mention anything I said above, and mentions a few flaws of MX Linux.

As I said, MX has one GUI software center for all software installation, you will hardly ever NEED to use the command line, and your window resizing issue wouldn't really be an issue. Also your clipboard concerns would probably be solved with the options available in the clipboard manager in the systray.

But what you use is your choice - what I personally use is not MX but instead is a command line heavy minimalistic Linux distro, and I gathered that that's not what you are looking for, so I offered MX as a suggestion.

Here's the most recent Dedoimedo review of MX that I read: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/mx-21-kde.html
He's written several reviews over the years where he expressed his love and affection for MX as a demanding Windows user who normally hates Linux distros.

[Mæstro]

I must never use the terminal, even for administrative tasks, in Linux Mint Debian Edition. I am as afraid of it as Jez. Cinnamon, the desktop environment which comes with LMDE, lends itself to window frames that behave as one would expect. One can even style it to look like Aero.