Seriously consider moving to Linux

[manly]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I'll answer your last question: MS is offering 3 years of extended support on Win10 at a rate of $60 for the first year, $120 for the second year and $240 for the third year. I doubt that LTSC or any other edition will work around that because MS wants the $$$.

The official workaround for Win11 is really easy: Download a Win11 ISO, use Rufus to burn it to USB and tick the options that you want (including the system requirements workaround). Install Windows with said USB stick. End of story. For the upgrade install 2 years later, rinse and repeat but do an upgrade install with it instead.

Using this technique I even upgrade-installed a Win10 install. The only complication I've encountered is that one should try to consistently use the same language edition of Windows when downloading the ISOs, otherwise the upgrade-install option won't be a straight upgrade install, more of a reset install but keeping personal files (it warns you beforehand).

I thought I'd mention it because while I took the Linux route in 2018, I wouldn't say it was the easy route, and I started migrating when I saw the writing on the wall with Win10 and jumped ship from Win7 with two years' support left so I had plenty of time to even go back to Win7 if I chose. I have a lot more experience with Windows than Linux (though I have played around with test Linux installs several times over the last ~20 years), and if I had to summarise my experience with Linux, I'd word it like this: Stuff I expected to be complicated turned out to be easy, and stuff I expected to be easy turned out to be more complicated.

That's the announced business rate for extended support; perhaps the consumer pricing will be lower. We don't know yet. (IIRC non-profits can pay $1/year.) Based on the pricing model, I actually don't think MS is serious about getting the money. They seem more serious about forcing upgrades to Win11, based on how they've structured the costs to escalate.

I'm not saying MS will be agnostic to consumers getting extended updates for free, but it was trivially easy to get the WinXP POSReady updates. LTSC/IoT editions aren't a workaround if they are already supported "long term." Any workaround would be if you used a regular edition of Win10 to get such LTSC/IoT updates for free until EOL; I guess time will reveal if that's an option.

The Win11 install hacks are not hard, but are too much to expect of a typical consumer. (The installation is easy, but it's the backing up and restoring of the existing environment that isn't.) Consumers will either use Win10 without latest security patches, or buy a new PC. And I wouldn't expect Joe User to switch to Linux either.

 

[mikeymikec]

That's the announced business rate for extended support; perhaps the consumer pricing will be lower. We don't know yet. (IIRC non-profits can pay $1/year.) Based on the pricing model, I actually don't think MS is serious about getting the money. They seem more serious about forcing upgrades to Win11, based on how they've structured the costs to escalate.

I'm not saying MS will be agnostic to consumers getting extended updates for free, but it was trivially easy to get the WinXP POSReady updates. LTSC/IoT editions aren't a workaround if they are already supported "long term." Any workaround would be if you used a regular edition of Win10 to get such LTSC/IoT updates for free until EOL; I guess time will reveal if that's an option.

The Win11 install hacks are not hard, but are too much to expect of a typical consumer. (The installation is easy, but it's the backing up and restoring of the existing environment that isn't.) Consumers will either use Win10 without latest security patches, or buy a new PC. And I wouldn't expect Joe User to switch to Linux either.

I was just making a suggestion to a fellow forum user, not remarking on the morality of Microsoft's strategy. If I were going there, my primary argument would be about the filling of landfills with perfectly good hardware at a time when humanity should be making the most of what we've got.

 

[Triloby]

My difficulty is I love debian based distro's that are stable - Linux Mint.. however games love updates and patches.. so I'm going to have to force myself to either like Fedora once it has a Cinnamon distro or just put SteamOS as an OS.

I think Fedora has an official distro that uses Cinnamon. Even Ubuntu now has an official distro that uses Cinnamon:
https://fedoraproject.org/spins/cinnamon/ - Fedora Cinnamon Spin
https://ubuntucinnamon.org/ - Ubuntu Cinnamon

Whether or not their Cinnamon versions are any good compared to Linux Mint is up for debate.

 

[Indus]

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is out.

Mint should be out in about 2 months or so.

I'm still not on the wayland bandwagon so I'm hoping mint sticks with x11 till they fix wayland's lack of features.