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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 aafcac on Thursday December 04 2025, @03:10AM (3 children)
Not really, there are projects that handle it, some like Linux put zero thought into it and you had better hope that an older version that supports the use exists and runs in your environment if it's anything essential.
I like modern Linux a lot, but let's not pretend like this was planned or intentional, it's a broken ass part of the philosophy because nobody could be bothered to properly deal with the problem of having a consistent and defined base system independent of the stuff the users choose to install.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday December 04 2025, @09:59AM (2 children)
I didn't claim it was the right thing to do, only what the idea was. I used to work for Sun (of Solaris fame) at the time, who took APIs and ABIs very seriously (even for device drivers). They used to criticise Linux for its attitude in that regard. However, FOSS eventually ate their lunch because it moved so much faster and had greater development resources behind it.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday December 04 2025, @07:53PM (1 child)
Linux would have taken over even more quickly if not for that arrogant attitude. There were a bunch of times when I tried Linux and basic functionality was just flat out broken in ways that made no sense. OpenSUSE when I tried it could use a bluetooth keyboard just fine, but for some reason you could not use it to actually login. You had to have a regular keyboard for that. The first time I tried Ext4 as my filesystem, I literally could not reboot the computer without the entire thing being corrupted beyond repair, even when using the system options to shutdown or reboot. Or, when Ubuntu decided to put Unity into a release without disclosing that it was barely alpha software and would be completely unusable on some systems.
Presumably, things on the server side were less inconsistent, but Linux developers have an addiction to shooting themselves in the foot over the stupidest things.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by turgid on Thursday December 04 2025, @08:35PM
Linux would have taken over even more quickly if not for that arrogant attitude. There were a bunch of times when I tried Linux and basic functionality was just flat out broken in ways that made no sense.
...and then you list things that were the fault of particular Linux distributions, rather than Linux itself.
That's the thing: when Linux gets the blame for something, is it the kernel (and which version and with whose special patches e.g. Red Hat). the GNU user land, or a particular distribution? It's not "Linux Inc." It's not done in the same way as Microsoft Windows (or erstwhile Sun Solaris for that matter).
I use Slackware on all my own machines. At work I use and have used everything from Debian to RedHat/CentOS/Fedora to Ubuntu to various embedded distros. I've installed Mint for people.
They're all diverging nowadays. Slackware is still very Unix-like and still doesn't even use systemd, for example. RedHat is now completely payware. It used to be notorious for having its own special kernel and gcc patches. Who knows nowadays? I've not seen it in years thanks to it going totally payware and CentOS is dead.
I prefer the choice and diversity that FOSS provides. I could never go back to proprietary software, especially operating systems. I need a unix-like OS with a Bourne-type shell and a free C compiler. And I shall rule the world!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].