Microsoft Is Basically Discontinuing Windows. What Will Happen, Then?
20th October 2024
So the end of life for Windows 10 looms ahead of us, which is a problem because Windows 11 has two fundamental problems, as it currently stands:
First, it just won’t run on the majority of hardware that currently runs Windows 10. This isn’t just, like, ancient hardware; I have a desktop gaming PC that is perfectly fine to play current-gen AAA games on; it’s what I played Cyberpunk 2077 on and that was totally okay. But somehow it doesn’t meet Win11 requirements because of the CPU; it has a Ryzen 5 1600X in it, a CPU from 2017 that is apparently still actively being manufactured.
Moore’s law has been dead for a while, so the long plateauing of, particularly, CPU power has meant that some of this hardware has a looong shelf life. I still haven’t run into a game I want to play on PC that is cpu-bound on my machine and which would make me want to upgrade.
Second, win11 is unsecurable, because they implemented a feature (recall) that is just constantly screen recording everything you do on the computer, creating a sort of one-stop-shop for compromising literally anything. It functionally means that you can’t be sure your computer hasn’t, say, saved a password in plaintext (effectively) just because you had the ‘show password’ switch flipped once.
Those two things make win11 untenable for probably the majority of its users. Hardware compatibility will stop a ton of people on older or lower end personal machines. Individuals, small businesses, the public school in your town that hasn’t had money for new computers in five or ten years. Recall being a major security flaw will, I fucking hope, give pause to a ton of institutional users. Is a computer with Win11 even legal to use in some restrictive settings like government offices, militaries, or hospitals?
I see no reason for Windows 11; Windows 10 was perfectly adequate. (I felt the same way about Windows 7.) Of course, unlike Apple, Microsoft needs to sell Windows (and Windows upgrades) in order to make money.