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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 RedGreen on Thursday December 04 2025, @01:46AM (1 child)
"there are still Linux distributions that use alternatives to systemd, e.g. Void Linux suits my purposes. "
Yes I know this, I tried the Void but could not get past the lack of detail shown in it. Everything you install you have to figure out some sane defaults for the configuration. This lead me back to my favourite of all time Linux distros Debian which does do that for you, I use the Devuan flavour of it to get rid of the garbage systemd problem. I also do not like most other of the systemd less distros as they are all rolling release packages upgraded all of the time/compiling every damn thing in sight to get it done. I really have until 2030 I think it is for Trixie support to run out so plenty of time to figure out what I want to do. That is if them people at Devuan keep it going for that long, been ten years or so now so it should be good. You never know how it will go in the open source world so always nice to have backup plan just in case.
"Cervantes definitely was prescient in describing a senile Don fighting against windmills." -- larryjoe on /.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Thursday December 04 2025, @03:57PM
Devuan (and Debian) are solid reliable choices. If what I'm doing were more critically important I'd probably use one of them as a backup.