Linux is free and less wasteful on resources on the other hand.

This is bad advice that is being repeated over and over by the so called tech influencers. You go to an older version that only got security updates so you will lack optimizations and features already in the current stable windows 10. And for the foreseeable future you gain nothing at all. If one day the normal version acctually stops reviving security updates, it almost certainly will be possible to switch the update channel to LTSC and get the LTSC updates that way but for now this is not needed and the switch is unnecessary Also without some trickery, switching to LTSC requires a complete reinstallation, which for most people likely wasting sever hours.

We had a PC that came properly-licensed with that edition of Windows (with the matching sticker and everything), and it didn't work out as a desktop machine for the intended user. It's been a year or two and some details are lost, but IIRC there were issues with some Intuit program or other.

It was probably something that could have been worked around, but workarounds tend to pile up and become difficult to track. I avoided the problem by putting a more-pedestrian version of Windows 10 on it instead.

You can continue using normal Windows 10 if you have a Microsoft account attached to it. They give you the option to sign up for free extended updates (until 2027).

Well, not just anyone can buy a license for it. You need some sort of enterprise volume license agreement, as far as I can tell.

Current trends indicate that regular Windows 10 may as well.

Does that support modern gaming?

Also MS go to great lengths to make the secret good version of Windows (It honestly is very good, I'd put it up there with Linux Mint) very difficult to buy. So just torrent it. It's bad enough running Windows let alone giving money to MS.

>> Windows 11 requiring TPM, Secure Boot and being all react wasn't great.

For me a bigger concern is that Windows 11 requires MS account, and making harder and harder to bypass it. This is a disrespect for my freedom and privacy. The hardware is not the biggest issue because it might catch up eventually. https://waspdev.com/articles/2026-03-12/i-ll-probably-never-...

>What even is Microsoft's strategy? Windows 11 requiring TPM, Secure Boot

Their goal is to help their OEM buddies sell new computers despite the fact that PCs have been “good enough” for a decade or longer, because those new PCs will come with Windows and the cycle is what keeps each one relevant.

Otherwise they'd risk being usurped, which almost happened circa 2006 with the one-two-three-four punch of GNOME2 (great UI), Compiz (‘wow’ factor that gets people to jump in and try it), OpenOffice-dot-org 2.0 (when OpenDocument Format was getting a ton of press), and Windows Longhorn/Vista being famously late-and-then-hated. Luckily for Microsoft, the Desktop Linux community decided to throw all that out with Wayland (which is Fine but set us back two decades) and GNOME3 which is irredeemable — *James Rolfe voice* what were they thinking??

Old versions of Windows always fell out of support.

Some old versions of windows also had newer hardware requirements (95 dropped support for 16 bit systems, Vista required a DirectX9 GPU).

There's nothing really new here.

Microsoft doesn't care about end users like you or I. We don't impact their bottom line at all. 0%. They care about business customers using other products, and occasionally data collection.

Windows has to be just functional enough to keep businesses that use it from raising a stink about it.

I don't think requiring secure boot is a big deal given every computer since Sandy Bridge iirc ships with it.

Requiring a sodding Copilot advert on the keyboard too, in the case of laptops..

I assume they're secretly trying to get people over to Mageia.

The people I've switched from windows to Mageia since win11 all love it.

(As great as Mageia is, it does have small repos compared to Debian or fedora.)

Have you tried wineHQ? It works very well IMO. But I also understand your point of view here; I have a second computer system on my left running Win10.

It's nothing inherent about Windows (not even one-click .exe files), it's existing programs and drivers that only run on Windows, which of course only run on Windows because it was already popular.

For me it's MS Office. Sorry, but OpenOffice.org and the Google apps still don't come close. (And of course Office file formats are their own lock in, very analogously to the programs that run on Windows.)

Gaming support for Linux still isn’t 100% there like Windows. It’s still about a 50/50 chance a popular AAA or indie pc game supports Linux.

It's much less fiddly for games is the only reason for me.

My last Windows machine is for games. Hopefully I'll be able to get a Steam machine for an easy exit. If a game doesn't run on it, I won't buy or play it.

And then?

And sad for us. We may have to wait for nice cheap used hardware for use with Linux or *BSD.

But I wonder if components would have been stripped out due to AI. I heard even older RAM and SDD/HDD are getting expensive.

You can use https://github.com/abbodi1406/ConsumerESU to bypass the account requirement.

I think you can log in to activate without changing to a microsoft account for desktop login (or at least you can switch back, I have some machines on microsoft account and some not)

You mean do the ads in the Win11 start menu pay for Win10 updates? Or does Win10 have ads in the start menu, too?

"Quietly," like in "has quietly become the biggest/best X" is silly and everywhere, but "quietly" in this sense of "they didn't announce it and people just happened to notice the change" is fine and descriptive I would say.

Biggest LLM giveaway these days

Win11 has come up short,

So 10 needs more support.

How do they offer it, according to AI?

Quietly,

quietly,

quiet... L-Y!

To anyone reading this: please don't use ISOs downloaded from not-official sources.

Use an autounattend.xml, the mass graves, and a WinGet JSON to customise an online image.

[1]: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/package-manager/wi...

NTlite has also been around for more than a decade, although it has a freemium model.

That won't help you get to the minimum of Win10, though

Even cleaner when you don't install Windows at all :P

Why would people put themselves through the painful process of keeping themselves safe from their own computer?

Don't forget the Windows NT configuration consoles like MMC, and other 9x configuration dialogs not accessible from the control panel, like the one to show or hide desktop icons.

The reason for this is that there are still drivers for old hardware that hook into the old control panel elements to actually function.

If you get rid of the control panel applets, you break the drivers.

This is also an old and out-of-date complaint. Almost all of the settings are now inside the Settings application and only inside the Settings application, with the related control panel applets gone.

This rule was always wrong and stupid, people skipped versions and never started at the beginning to fit the narrative.