The openSUSE project is encouraging people who currently run Windows 10 and whose computers are not compatible with Windows 11 to consider a migration to Linux instead of throwing out their old hardware. "The openSUSE Project's Upgrade to Freedom campaign urges people to extend the life of their device rather than becoming e-waste. Since millions of Windows 10 users may believe their devices will become useless and contribute to the waste of fully functional devices, installing a Linux operating systems like openSUSE or another Linux distribution is more reasonable.
A new initiative called End of 10 has launched that shares the purposes and origin of openSUSE's Upgrade to Freedom efforts. As the End of 10 initiative also intends to help people extend the life of devices that would otherwise become e-waste, rather than dilute the messaging and narrative, members of openSUSE marketing have decided to transition the Upgrade to Freedom campaign to joining the End of 10 initiative."
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 09, @05:39AM
I've got relatives on Windows 7 that nobody wants to "upgrade". Becoming tech support for 81 year olds is no light undertaking.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Friday May 09, @08:12AM
I have one windows box left at home, gaming PC for the family. Linux compatibility is not so bad now for gaming so I plan to switch.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 09, @09:04AM (1 child)
https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol [massgrave.dev]
YMMV etc
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Friday May 09, @07:57PM
https://gravesoft.dev/ [gravesoft.dev] is surprisingly helpful also, thats their cousin site for issues involving less legal entanglements (like how to use rufus to make actually usable install media, etc)
It seems like there was a general posted on /g/ roughly daily "in the recent past" about these guys.
I suppose, if Microsoft is pretty much conceding the home / non-corporate market as lost to apple and android, it can only do them good to not-stop people encouraging the use of their software in the theory that the might want to use it at work with a paid license.
It's always been kind of funny to me that Ubuntu Pro is only free for five servers at home, but with massgrave you can have an entire data center in your mom's basement for free as long as you're not an auditable small business and just doing personal education stuff.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SDRefugee on Friday May 09, @05:50PM
I'm 100% behind the migration to Linux.. Frankly, being a retired IT pro, I've been doing this exact thing, when XP and Win7 went EOL. I'd NEVER recommend OpenSUSE for a beginning Linux user, rather Mint or one of the Ubuntu spins. These migrations I've done used both the X and L Ubuntu spins, NOT the base Ubuntu, as its user-interface is just too different than the Windows interface for a Linux beginner. I think Microsoft forcing this unneeded garbage on machines that can run Win11 will backfire handsomely on them. Its nice to one large Linux
distro promoting this, now we just need Canonical to join the "End of 10" project.
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 09, @08:44PM (3 children)
One thing that keeps kids on Windows is the games. In particular, Roblox. Roblox used to work under Wine, but Roblox broke that compatibility, claiming that Wine enabled too many ways to cheat. As far as I know, you can't keep using the last version of Roblox that worked. It wants to connect to their servers, and I expect that if you did hack the thing so it won't try to update, or hack the latest version so it won't detect Wine and quit, their servers can test it and reject its attempts to connect.
I have also found that DRMed commercial software often does not work under Wine. I tried to check out a digital book from the public library. The software that implements the DRM, some offering from Adobe, does not work under Wine. I got as far as installing it and getting it to run under Wine, but when it came time to open the book, it failed. So I just downloaded a pirate copy of the book in question, regretting the time I had wasted on a good faith effort to view the digital book I had legitimately checked out.
If you try to get around the DRM problems by using a crack, that too often fails to work in Wine.
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday May 10, @10:22AM (2 children)
The thing that keeps me on Win 11 is my work: mostly Altium. I’ve tried hard running it in a VM but it’s slow. Bhyve is limited for screen resolution (I run FreeBSD on my desktop as well as Linux and Win), while QEMU (Gentoo Linux) seems to lack screen refresh rates (max 30fps). Both of these suck for CAD (which Altium is) so I had to abandon using them. I’ve gone to Plan C, which is running Win 11 natively, but I default block all traffic going outbound on my server gateway from the Windows box. Then I run squid proxy for Firefox and unlock specific domains and IP address ranges for Altium to talk to its workspace and licence servers. It works well. I see the gateway firewall being hammered by Win constantly, and using whois, I determined all the IPs are Microsoft. It doesn’t update but that doesn’t matter, updates are superfluous and overrated.
I also have a MacBook Pro which I use for a lot of browsing and work. It’s great. I use Parallels for Altium on it and it runs really decently considering it’s a VM on arm64 architecture.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday May 10, @02:06PM (1 child)
For many years, one of the biggest lacks in the libre software world was a decent CAD/CAM app. Even among commercial offerings, there was little alternative to AutoCAD. In 1993, I used Manufacturing and Consulting Services (MCS) Anvil-5000. Wrote code in its language, GRAPL, which is based on FORTRAN. GRAPL is to ANVIL-5000 as AutoLISP is to AutoCAD. I also did a little AutoLISP. I have never heard of Altium, but then I haven't kept up with the CAD world, for a variety of reasons, the chief being the expense. Typically, commercial CAD software pricing starts at $1000. Also they were (and maybe still are?) pretty insular.
What I mean by insular is that there's this attitude that CAD is best left to professionals. Amateurs were discouraged. The high prices certainly did that. But there were other things. A symptom of this attitude is that into the 1990s, the AutoCAD user interfaces were stunningly bad. Did they not ever look at user interfaces outside of CAD? Could it be that they purposefully left the interfaces unpolished, to further discourage casual use? The main menu was a numbered list of options, 2 of which were to list the CAD files, and open a CAD file. To select an option, pressing a number was not enough, had to enter the number, that is press the number, then press the enter key. You could not view the list of files while attempting to open one. You had to view the names, commit the name you wanted to memory in your brain, or note it down somewhere, then go to the option to load a file which wiped the screen clear of the names you'd just viewed, and type in the name. Then, in the application, it took very delicate mouse movement to precisely position the mouse cursor where wanted. Yeah, it had a snap grid, but I have never found those all that useful. I often found it easier to create what I wanted programmatically, using AutoLISP.
It was possible to pirate AutoCAD, but in the 1980s there was one additional hitch. AutoCAD required a math coprocessor, and until the 80486 was released, most PCs didn't have that. Fortunately, someone came up with a math coprocessor emulator that could trick AutoCAD's math coprocessor detection code. Yeah, the hardware was 50x the speed of the emulator, but the emulator was good enough to keep AutoCAD happy. "Slow" is better than "no".
Things have finally improved. FreeCAD was launched in the early 2000s, and only just last year the developers decided to number the release the big "1.0". I gave FreeCAD a try when the latest version was 0.18. Not bad. I was able to design a few things and successfully 3D print them on a 3D printer at a public library. There are several other libre CAD programs.
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday May 10, @11:43PM
Yeah true. I used to use AutoCAD ten years ago and loved it. Altium is an electronics schematic capture and PCB design tool. It costs $15k per licence and now moving to purely subscription model, as they all are to milk companies harder. The open source alternative, which is a great piece of software and is getting very popular with Altium’s move to raise profits, is KiCAD.
I use FreeCAD to view STEP files but not much else. It’s UI seems confusing to me. But otherwise good.