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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: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 03 2025, @03:43PM (4 children)
My experience with desktop Linux:
- Install is pretty easy, takes maybe 15-20 minutes which is good enough for OS+bunch of useful applications.
- Everything that comes with your distro Just Works. This includes good alternatives to a lot of expensive Windows applications.
- Snaps handle a lot of stuff that doesn't come with your distro well enough.
- More works well under Wine than you might expect.
So why do you describe it as "isn't ready"? What exactly do you need that doesn't work?
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday December 03 2025, @07:13PM
One of the things that doesn't work are screen readers for people with visual impairments. Windows is just so much better than Linux for this particular niche requirement.
Unless you have long expertise in this area, please don't comment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2025, @09:24PM (1 child)
How well does online meeting software work in Linux?
My customers (giant companies) mostly use MS-Teams and I use the browser version in Firefox ESR (on Win 7 Pro). Once I tried using the Teams download and that caused some instability in Win 7, so I don't do that anymore. It's still possible to login to Teams using 2FA, using a Google Voice account for the text message (I don't have a smart phone). However, more and more customers want MS-Authenticator which has been disastrous for one of my associates--not only did it quit working but all attempts to restore the phone and try a fresh version of Authenticator have failed.
I also use Zoom, again the browser version, which has some limitations (only share browser tabs, not windows opened by other programs.)
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday December 04 2025, @12:56PM
Zoom [zoom.us] works pretty well on Linux, in my experience.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by Bentonite on Thursday December 04 2025, @05:29AM
The perceived problems are that;
- GNU/Linux isn't 100% proprietary software (GNU rather exists to grant the user freedom by replacing all proprietary software) - although ironically how Linux is in fact proprietary software and all the proprietary software distro's ship, advertised as a feature, works towards that goal.
- Every last proprietary program doesn't run without fail (even though most problems are caused by proprietary sabotage to prevent execution with WINE and how windows often has issues running proprietary programs is ignored) - arguably it is a feature if proprietary software refuses to run, on what should be a free system.
- There's far more GNU than Linux and there are people who dare to say the f word - freedom (no matter how many times an error is repeated doesn't make it the truth - it's mostly the GNU system and Linux is merely the kernel).