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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: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Wednesday December 03 2025, @01:41PM (3 children)
"Desktop Linux" isn't ready either - it's about as crap as Win 11 just differently crap. The server stuff is fine/great.
Itchy chin.
My retired boomer parents are doing just fine with Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition [linuxmint.com]. It's been two years now and I think I've been asked for help about twice since I installed it for them, and then that was just to tell them to what to put into a search engine to find what they needed.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2025, @03:08PM
The desktop stuff that Windows does better than Linux often doesn't work so well in Windows in a VM (talking to GPUs and other proprietary hardware).
Whereas the stuff that Linux does better than Windows, often works fine in Linux in a VM.
Except perhaps for RAID and SSD caching. I think that one Linux does better than Windows.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Wednesday December 03 2025, @03:19PM (1 child)
I personally believe that thanks to the idiotic way that MS keeps radically changing the way their GUI works that a Linux distro based on roughly the same paradigm that was used from Win XP to Win 7 would be an easier transition for those sorts than going to a more recent release of Windows where a bunch of stuff was changed for no particular reason with no particular consideration paid for migrating users to newer versions. If you choose something sensible like Linux Mint, the amount of learning needed to do just basic stuff is pretty minimal and you're still able to grow into something more flexible if you really want to.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2025, @10:00AM
I put Lubuntu on an old laptop and gave it to my dad about 8 years ago. He fine with it and it's still running. All he needs is a browser, really, and everything has auto-updates turned on and it just keeps working.