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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: 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.