Microsoft is cracking down on people upgrading to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware

most people will not start looking at Linux. They should, but they won't.

Assuming you're correct, the Linux community needs to get their shit together then.

And i can fix that.

All i need is 1 billion dollars in investment. 10 million people giving 100 dollars to a Kickstarter/indie gogo

And ill make it happen in my lifetime.

I'll accept louis rossman as my business partner who handles the money to prevent me from abusing it or staying from the goal

It will take time.

But it will be global.

First year will only cost 150k. My salary until the donors decide to adjust it as source by Louis

Plus travel expenses. I'm willing to have review board and recommended budget changes as long as i can work on 2-3 year spreads with a fixed budget, as approved by Louis and the board.

I will only tell Louis my plan and he can choose where the money goes and who replaced me if he decides to remove me

Also I'm serious and will donate 30,000 dollars to the campaign and 5 thousand to person who can run this campaign and get this started

This is not a joke

Most users won't. Users that are happy to fiddle with registry settings might be a little more likely to though

I work in IT, run Mint on my travel laptop, and yet at home use the desktop I got 10 years ago, still with Win 8.1. And I use my current desktop quite extensively. There's still a lot of perfectly fine hardware with outdated OS floating around, and I'd argue that a significant portion of it is used by people experienced enough that they know what they are doing. Much of that will shift towards Linux. Not most of it, I'll grant you that, but more than people expect.

I'd bet most non-nerdy people would rather not upgrade their PCs at all. Upgrading is financially hard, while using an EOL OS in their eyes, especially if it is better than the new version, isn't bad. Maybe even good, because no sudden, annoying, unskippable updates would come anymore.

Well, I guarantee you that the whole world that don’t have strong currencies (like the dollar or euro) will find workarounds to avoid buying new computers.

Two sides of the same coin though. For every ten people not switching even if there is one, it's good just for the push alone

That is most likely not a linux issue, but a driver issue, if the driver was as bad on windows as it is on Linux, you would need to do the same to achieve that with that hardware. 🤔

Or, if handled by window manager, it may be, that there are different implementations for different managers, and yours happened to not support scroll speed change🤔

To be fair, most common user do not change scroll speed.

But I agree, most will just continue using unsafe windows 10

Had to literally compile C code just to change my touchpad scroll speed.

I can change that by moving a slider in KDE Plasma System Settings

Linux on the desktop has a long way to go

What do you perceive is missing? I've been using Linux exclusively since 2006 (while supporting Windows users at work), there's never been a time when I felt like I was missing a particular Windows feature. Mostly I just find Windows' lack of user-friendliness to be extremely maddening.

Switched my mum to Mint, and encouraged her to attend outreach meets put on by local Linux groups. She's well pleased with it and has been recommending her friends to switch.

Just install them a browser and pin it to task bar on mint. Maybe add all important websites to favourites, and boom 99% of use cases of common people: Check ✅

not sure what they're trying to do here

Maximise profits and minimise losses. My guess is that someone important at Microsoft thinks that this will do just that, and if not that, will make them, personally, a lot of money. That person has no-one who will dare challenge their authority and so we go down this road.

They (that individual or Microsoft as a whole) almost certainly have a stake in the companies that provide newer hardware, and if they didn't before this decision, they will have by now.

It theoretically makes Micosoft's job easier too. A huge chunk of backwards compatibility maintenance goes out of the window, if you'll pardon the pun.

"Oh you have 5 year old hardware? We don't support that."

Sounds fairly similar to Apple's business model if you think about it that way.

Tbh I thought they would have already gone subscription by now. When they announced win11 after saying 10 was the last I was very surprised it wasn't either free or subscription based. Now I wonder if they will at some point release win12 with AI tools behind pro and make that subscription only.

I use Linux so I won't be touching it but will see how it goes. Usually end up having to know at least a little about this as people ask me to fix their windows PCs

Your argument is flawed. The situation is using Windows 11 on unsupported hardware. So the sale you are talking about has already happened which invalidates your point

I'm assuming you simply misread the question

Windows 7/8/10 are irrelevant as that's an entirely different situation

They don't care about home users buying licenses. That's probably less than 1% of license sales. As long as businesses are buying it they're happy. You can activate Windows with a github script. Microsoft would have fixed that vulnerability if they really cared.

I'm installing Mint! I also had an eye on EndeavourOS, but I'm thinking I can first switch to mint and once I have some time in it switch to the more involved EndeavourOS tweaking process.

😂

Personal preference really but Debian is pretty much just Ubuntu without the bloat. You can also try a lot of them on a live disk without installing (Mint is a good option too).