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During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.
"We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell's slice of machines. "And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can't run Windows 11." He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year.
↫ Tom Warren at The Verge
The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won't or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it's absolutely bonkers to me that we're mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should've 100% forced Microsoft's hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen.
Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there's also the massive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don't have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering – rightfully so – but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on.
At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gonemissing on Wednesday December 03 2025, @07:37AM (13 children)
I've had several people ask me how to install Linux on their machines because Windows keeps telling them that they're about to be unsupported.
They just want me to confirm that it'll run their (usually very) old Windows applications - which I tell them that we'll just have to try Wine and see what happens...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday December 03 2025, @08:17AM (9 children)
In my experience, wine has better compatibility for (especially old) windows software than windows does.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2025, @08:35AM (8 children)
Wine also has better compatibility for old windows software than Linux has for old Linux software:
https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ [hiler.eu]
🤣
(Score: 3, Informative) by aafcac on Wednesday December 03 2025, @03:15PM
Probably, if you want support for super old software, you mostly stick with the older OSes and run them in a locked down VM. Fortunately, a good chunk of those programs don't require a net connection. That being said, a bunch of them do.
Other than that, often times the *BSD will handle some pretty old software, although I haven't really tried, compatibility libraries are available going back quite a ways. Linux is just at a significant disadvantage in this respect owing to the way distros are cobbled together from a kernel and whatever 3rd party programs that the project is choosing to use. As a result, I don't even know how they'd go about maintaining long term support other than with LTS releases that don't generally get new features.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday December 03 2025, @08:42PM (4 children)
It was a conscious decision with Linux. Being FOSS, you were supposed to be able to recompile your software. The commercial/closed source folks were thus strongly encouraged to keep up with developments.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday December 04 2025, @03:10AM (3 children)
Not really, there are projects that handle it, some like Linux put zero thought into it and you had better hope that an older version that supports the use exists and runs in your environment if it's anything essential.
I like modern Linux a lot, but let's not pretend like this was planned or intentional, it's a broken ass part of the philosophy because nobody could be bothered to properly deal with the problem of having a consistent and defined base system independent of the stuff the users choose to install.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday December 04 2025, @09:59AM (2 children)
I didn't claim it was the right thing to do, only what the idea was. I used to work for Sun (of Solaris fame) at the time, who took APIs and ABIs very seriously (even for device drivers). They used to criticise Linux for its attitude in that regard. However, FOSS eventually ate their lunch because it moved so much faster and had greater development resources behind it.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday December 04 2025, @07:53PM (1 child)
Linux would have taken over even more quickly if not for that arrogant attitude. There were a bunch of times when I tried Linux and basic functionality was just flat out broken in ways that made no sense. OpenSUSE when I tried it could use a bluetooth keyboard just fine, but for some reason you could not use it to actually login. You had to have a regular keyboard for that. The first time I tried Ext4 as my filesystem, I literally could not reboot the computer without the entire thing being corrupted beyond repair, even when using the system options to shutdown or reboot. Or, when Ubuntu decided to put Unity into a release without disclosing that it was barely alpha software and would be completely unusable on some systems.
Presumably, things on the server side were less inconsistent, but Linux developers have an addiction to shooting themselves in the foot over the stupidest things.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by turgid on Thursday December 04 2025, @08:35PM
Linux would have taken over even more quickly if not for that arrogant attitude. There were a bunch of times when I tried Linux and basic functionality was just flat out broken in ways that made no sense.
...and then you list things that were the fault of particular Linux distributions, rather than Linux itself.
That's the thing: when Linux gets the blame for something, is it the kernel (and which version and with whose special patches e.g. Red Hat). the GNU user land, or a particular distribution? It's not "Linux Inc." It's not done in the same way as Microsoft Windows (or erstwhile Sun Solaris for that matter).
I use Slackware on all my own machines. At work I use and have used everything from Debian to RedHat/CentOS/Fedora to Ubuntu to various embedded distros. I've installed Mint for people.
They're all diverging nowadays. Slackware is still very Unix-like and still doesn't even use systemd, for example. RedHat is now completely payware. It used to be notorious for having its own special kernel and gcc patches. Who knows nowadays? I've not seen it in years thanks to it going totally payware and CentOS is dead.
I prefer the choice and diversity that FOSS provides. I could never go back to proprietary software, especially operating systems. I need a unix-like OS with a Bourne-type shell and a free C compiler. And I shall rule the world!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by Bentonite on Thursday December 04 2025, @05:15AM
Linux's SYSCALL ABI hasn't changed - only some rarely used legacy SYSCALLs are disabled by default and you can just set .config to get them back.
Even for running extremely old GNU/Linux binaries, as glibc's ABI was made to be forward-compatible 20+ years ago, it's generally just a matter of locating binaries of the needed .so files that the dynamic linker reports as missing and copying them to the same directory until you've resolved all dependencies and the software runs.
But if it's free software and it was decently programmed, with decent dependencies, you don't need to hunt for library binaries - you just compile the 25 year old source code, maybe fixing a mistake or two that a later version of GCC now detects and it works (the main pain in the neck that you can run into is if there is a configure.in file that was wrong from the start that only works by mistake with a specific autotools version - which needs to be renamed to configure.ac and fixed up for compilation to work).
(Score: 2) by cykros on Thursday December 04 2025, @11:47PM
I definitely have experienced this.
Thankfully, it's quite easy to install a fairly barebones version of Ubuntu or Debian in a chroot to solve most issues there without too much trouble. I most recently went through this for libbitcoin v3 after trying everything else first and it was strikingly simple. Even managed to compile things portably so I could just copy the binary back to my host system.
Pretty sure you're not gonna pull that on Windows though...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ShovelOperator1 on Wednesday December 03 2025, @03:08PM (1 child)
Unfortunately, in recent years Linux got worse in this area.
Yes, Linux will fix this... with GPU drivers which slow the system down tenfold. Had exactly this thing in Debian and nVidia graphics first, and then with ATI, for it I had no way to fix this (had to stay with the older version, only hardened it a bit more). Fortunately for nVidia I had only to patch a few procedures into kernel module's source code and build this into my DKMS. For these "leading edge" distributions - buy a new GPU.
Of course unofficial patches for nVidia are available, but these projects are notoriously understaffed, so nobody maintains them and they get abandoned quickly. The open source driver is I think ready to get almost the same performance for my GPU, but this would require pushing about 700 unsigned chars thru the chip's serial bus (with 90% certainty this is a set of feature-frequency-voltage matrices). The funny thing: this loading has been sent as patch about 8 times and every time it was submitted, it got rejected.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Ingar on Wednesday December 03 2025, @05:29PM
"Fuck you Nvidia" - Linus Torvalds
Love is a three-edged sword: heart, soul, and reality.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday December 03 2025, @10:40PM
Like with A320s, sometimes it's much better to not be running the latest release.