Windows 10 gets a version of the program that extended updates for Windows 7.
Windows 10 gets three more years of security updates, if you can afford them::Windows 10 gets a version of the program that extended updates for Windows 7.
I've been with Windows forever, since version 3. I'm old.
These past few months I've been trying Ubuntu, and it's fine for everyday use, browsing and file management. And, LibreOffice has been my office suite for years, so no problem there--I don't demand much from that.
But, graphics applications are barely there. Blender is fine. Inkscape is so-so, but I just discovered recently that it doesn't keep track of object rotation, so there is no simple way to set the rotation back to zero. Corel Draw gave up Linux support years ago, or that would be my go-to. I haven't tried LibreDraw yet, but I don't have much hope for it. Gimp is, eh.
I haven't tried playing FO4 or Starfield yet, though. I've just been switching back to Windows for that.
I don't mind using Terminal, it reminds me of MS-DOS days, but I don't see myself ever become proficient at it.
I won't be getting Windows 11, I've decided that. But I see that I'll likely need to give up a lot to make that stand.
Why are people making a huge deal out of this? Win10 was released in 2015, and support ends in 2025. That's 10 years of support, I don't think this is unreasonable for a consumer product by any means.
As far as industry goes it's a bit short, but nothing catastrophic. There's plenty of xp machines still running just fine in many places. Lack of security updates is less crucial for most of these applications since they're often not required to be connected to internet.
I can't upgrade to Windows 11 (not that I'd want to considering all their enshittification), so they're leaving me with an unsecured OS. I survive on £160 a month so, no, I won't be paying for fucking security updates, instead I'll be switching to Linux and literally never considering using Windows again.
It's also not reasonable to expect updates forever. No matter what, support for software always stops at some point, and 10 years of support is pretty reasonable for consumer products. Not great, but also not terrible.
It's not like this is something that's right around the corner, it's nearly two years down the road from now. If you already have old hardware that doesn't meet specs, then that will be even more deprecated in two years.
Its the same circus every time a windows OS goes EOL, people loose their shit for no reason and then move on.
🙄 yeah it's like they've gone an written an entirely incompatible desktop with earlier versions with little upgrade path and filled to the brim with incompatibility!
Oh, that's Wayland?
Well it's not like every other commercially supported OS has an eol with posts support!
Oh that's the entire model to support rhel, Debian, etc... I see.
Because it's forced obsolescence by a convicted monopolist. Microsoft is effectively withholding security updates from computers built before 2018 or so with the arbitrary TPM requirement to install Win11. While I don't expect them to support everything forever, this is another step along their journey to make PCs like cellphones. Fixed support periods for no reason other than they want you buying new ones every x years. Next up will be widespread locked down bootloaders so you can't install Linux if you wanted to. Throw away the old and buy new. Mamma needs more quarterly revenue.
Firstly, you can clean install 11 without TPM no problem, and you can upgrade in place with some tweaks. It’s annoying, but in no way “forced.”
Secondly, the EOL has been known since original release. We know the EOL of current versions of Windows 11 as well (they moved to supporting specific versions, for instance 21H2 recently went EOL, in October. 23H2 is slotted for EOL in 2026. https://endoflife.date/windows
Fixed support periods make sense. Otherwise you’re going to have to spring an EOL on people arbitrarily. 10 years of free support on Windows 10, a product most people got for free, seems sane to me. I realize it won’t make sense to everyone.
Next up will be widespread locked down bootloaders so you can't install Linux if you wanted to.
Technologically, Window is great. There is no denying that, and if anything some the dated (+ insecure) things on it is the result of its own success, i.e. the app installation and management process, as it is hard to convince billions of people to do anything different.
On the other hand, the management of the company is the biggest problem with everything in and around Window. First, there is no single business model; MS sells you a 1 time licence for the OS itself, but then constantly try to harvest and sell your data (with ads everywhere in Windows 11), and if you want to do any office work then you have to pay a subscription for MS 365. Last but not least, they keep breaking things every few updates, i.e. I actually failed one of my university course because OneDrive decided that my report don’t need to exist after an update (in 2018).
I’ve been on Linux for 20+ years and have never had to rely on paid for support. The paid for support is really geared towards professional big business work stations and server stacks. If you need support for Linux you can find free support on their forums 99% of the time. It’s the IT departments with lazy techs that rely on Linux paid support.
You are right about the Micro$uck hate though. Why should I pay to use an operating system on a computer I buy and use until it’s reached it’s EOL when I can use Linux to do everything you do on windows and I don’t have to pay for the software? In today’s economy, it makes sense to use Linux.
They just want to shout about them while ignoring paid support for extended life Linux.
Ironically, you're just shouting about linux while ignoring the context behind the paid support for "extended life linux"
The paid support is for enterprise linux distros like Red Hat. This support is aimed at businesses. Not regular end users.
Regular users can get Long Term Support (LTS) versions of regular distros entirely free. Such as Ubuntu's LTS versions. With the cool addition of being able to freely move to the next LTS version whenever that comes out to replace the current LTS version.
As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Windows 10: three additional years of security updates, provided to those who can pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program.
The initial announcement, written by Windows Servicing and Delivery Principal Product Manager Jason Leznek, spends most of its time encouraging users and businesses to upgrade to Windows 11 rather than staying on 10, either by updating their current computers, upgrading to new PCs or transitioning to a Windows 365 cloud-based PC instead.
The company told us that "pricing will be provided at a later date," but for the Windows 7 version of the ESU program, Microsoft upped the cost of the program each year to encourage people to upgrade to a newer Windows version before they absolutely had to; the cost was also per-seat, so what you paid was proportional to the number of PCs you needed updates for.
Windows 10 has mostly been in a security-updates-only maintenance mode since the 22H2 update came out late last year, but Microsoft did "revisit" the operating system last month to add the Copilot generative AI assistant and a handful of other tweaks.
For businesses, educational institutions, or governments, the point of the ESU program has always been to buy slow-moving IT shops extra time to learn about the new features in newer versions of Windows, to educate and inform users about the upgrade, and to test for incompatibilities with other mission-critical hardware and software.
Windows 11's new system requirements add an additional wrinkle, though—not every single Windows 10 PC in every single organization officially supports Windows 11, adding the time and cost of hardware replacement (or migrating to a cloud-based setup) to the time and cost of changing operating system versions.
The original article contains 620 words, the summary contains 306 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I'm not gonna pay for updates, I'm just stick with my old win 7 untill the end. Glad i take the right decision to full backup 8 years ago
Although i never got updates or can run modern apps anymore, at least i got very stable & less annoying windows