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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 Snospar on Wednesday December 03 2025, @03:08PM (1 child)
I'd argue that Desktop Linux is a huge improvement over any Windows. I started using Linux back in 1998 and things were tough: Lack of hardware support or system constraints often meant compiling a custom kernel; Lack of good package management frequently meant dependency hell; Support for gaming was almost non-existent.
Now in 2025 all those issues have disappeared. Modern hardware comes with Linux support almost out of the factory. PC specs are pushed ever upward by bloated Windows so running Linux on the same hardware is a resource paradise. There are a huge choice of distros and almost all have excellent package management with a vast array of software available (who needs the original Windows software when native tools are available). Gaming has come on leaps and bounds with things like Wine/Proton making it trivial to run most AAA games without any tweaks and they run better on Linux because you're not wasting resources on e.g. telemetry, windows update, anti-malware etc.
I don't see any "crap" there.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2025, @03:33PM
Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc [youtube.com]
Still true many years after the video. That's why you still have so many crappy ways of packaging stuff on Linux Flatpak, Snap, etc. Hurray for bloat and trying to compete with Windows Store for crappiness.
And that's just one aspect.