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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: 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).