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Windows 11 hardware requirements made a mockery of by an Intel Pentium 4 processor
As the screenshots below show, Microsoft considers the Intel Pentium 4 661 a supported processor. Intel released the Pentium 4 661 in early 2006, with a solitary core to its name. Apparently, Microsoft forgot to add any Intel Family 15 (Netburst) SKUs in its unsupported processors list for Windows 11.
Hence, the PC Health Check tool sees that the Pentium 4 661 has a 3.6 GHz boost clock, which satisfies one of Windows 11's requirements. Curiously, the tool states that the Pentium 4 661 has two or more cores, even though it lists it as having one.
@Carlos_SM1995 has even got Windows 11 (Build 22000.258) running on a Pentium 4 661. Supposedly, Windows Update still works too, highlighting the ridiculousness of Microsoft's overtures regarding Windows 11 compatibility.
Windows 11 final (Build 22000.258) running on Intel Pentium 4 (11m4s video)
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 19 2021, @04:04PM (8 children)
There are other things holding me back. Lately, it's PDF forms. None of the free PDF readers, except Google Chrome, can quite swing forms, they all have bugs or missing features. Okular will not show or print the choices made in check boxes and radio buttons. Ditto Evince, and I think it's because they're both based on Poppler. Okular also can't insert an image in a standard way. Even Firefox hasn't quite covered all the pieces. LibreOffice won't put a custom font in a text entry box when exporting to PDF. LibreOffice Draw more often than not butchers a PDF by substituting fonts that aren't quite the same size, so that columns end up crooked, and text ends up being run past the margin, and even lost from being run past the page edge. One of the points of PDF is that the fonts are included, so I don't understand why LibreOffice Draw doesn't use them, instead insisting on getting the matching font through the OS, and, if not present, substituting. And the command line tools? Apt to degrade a PDF form to a plain text PDF. So I must have Adobe Acrobat DC, not just the free reader, and that is available only on, yeah, commercial platforms such as Windows.
I've been running dual boot systems for a quarter century now, and find inconvenient all the rebooting and shuffling about of files. So I am wondering if the latest PC hardware can now support virtualization well enough that i could run a graphics intensive game in Windows 11 installed on a virtual machine, with Linux as the host.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Tuesday October 19 2021, @06:26PM
Install adobe acrobat on linux if that is the problem...
adobe-reader-11
on arch/manjaro
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday October 19 2021, @06:29PM
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-adobe-acrobat-reader-dc-wine-on-ubuntu-20-04-focal-fossa-linux [linuxconfig.org]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday October 19 2021, @06:57PM (4 children)
Google Chrome runs on Linux, so, if you're happy with its form support, I think you should be good there, right?
My personal method of dealing with PDF forms is flpsed. It just takes the PDF as a background image and draws on top of it. It works great whether the PDF is an actual fillable form or is intended to be printed out and filled in with a pen. I highly recommend it.
I wouldn't recommend taking this approach. I do run Heroes 3 in a VM, and it works okay, but that's a pretty old game. I would not expect newer ones to work very well. If you're going to switch, do your best to get the games running in WINE. Performance will be excellent in WINE, and games are usually pretty easy to get working. If Acrobat doesn't run in WINE after you try it, then use virtualization to run your Acrobat. Modern PC virtualization will give you more than enough performance for desktop publishing.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19 2021, @07:00PM (1 child)
Anyone who actually deals with PDFs programmatically, like me, who maintained a PDF editor, hates you deeply, with all the fiery, burning hatred of Mordor.
Please don't draw over form fields. The usual not-to-spec crap is awful. Adobe doesn't even meet their own spec.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19 2021, @10:04PM
How well does SumatraPDF do--relative to your criteria? It seems to do most things I want, but I'm not doing any pdf programming.
Sumatra does one thing that I use--it has a Postscript interpreter in it and I have an old MS-DOS word-processor that runs nicely in DosBox...which spits out clean, tight .ps files. I can open the Postscript (ascii files) directly in Sumatra and then print. Mostly my ancient Xmas card list (print directly on envelopes), but also random old manuals for engineering software we used to sell.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Wednesday October 20 2021, @01:23PM (1 child)
You are probably better off going the other way. Their are Linux distros optimized for VMs that claim bare metal adjacent efficiency.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday October 20 2021, @05:32PM
The technology that allows that for gaming purposes is GPU passthrough. It's awkward and wasteful in that you need at least two GPUs in your machine, and you also need either two monitors or an HDMI switcher box.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20 2021, @12:14PM
Yes, this has been possible for years. It runs every game except for three : Tarkov, Valorant, and Rainbow 6 Siege.
It's not particularly convenient to set up, but don't listen to the FUD about performance. It's within 5% of native. WINE usually matches native performance, sometimes even running faster, but WINE has a lot of bugs and it frequently doesn't work. Proton makes it easier, but lots of games still don't work.
The biggest problem with VM gaming is that you will be better off having two GPUs (one for the host and one for the VM), because while I have done it with a single GPU, it is much more useful with two. But only one of them has to actually be high performance, the other one just has to be able to drive your monitors. If you only have one monitor, an integrated GPU is good enough.
Check out r/VFIO for more information.