You got downvoted, but that’s literally who’s catch phrase it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’d ultimately be better for everyone if no PCs could boot windows 11.
I have a laptop that runs Win11. I have had no issues with it since I did the upgrade when it first came out and as far a Microsoft products go, it’s OK. But with the addition of the AI, I know at some point it will piss me off and I will wipe it and chose a distro to take it’s place.
I’m retired now, and I no longer really need the Fusion360 install that one customer requested I use for their designs nor do I play games beyond a little mahjongg and solitaire in the evenings if I feel the need.
Windows is merely a tool and a means to an end. It’s NOT the end in itself. Use the tool you want/need to and feel the best with and just get on with the job…
So if you got Win11 to install on an “unsupported” CPU it might not boot now?
Backward compatibility is a big selling point for me. It bugged me for years when Windows got rid of 16-bit compatibility.
Looking forward to Linux instead of Windows 11/12, I know it will be a learning curve but Linux is getting better and easier.
Honestly, it’s easier to keep my Debian machine from killing itself than any Windows install.
It seems like Windows actively sabotages itself for no reason.
OH NO anyway.
Maybe this will convince more people to switch to linux.
That’s not a guarantee on the Linux world either, but at least you do have the option of recompiling your distro to not use those options.
There’s talks from some distros to start dropping support for such old CPUs because it’s holding back newer CPUs that could run even faster by using those instructions.
Is it really that hard to include a fallback though? Obviously there’s a way to collect the information without that flag. I suppose if you didn’t want to take a performance hitting checking the flag all the time it could become a compile option (I would think anyone running that old of hardware would be willing to learn how to compile the kernel anyway), but there should be options available to keep the support available some how?
That’s pretty much exactly how it works already. You compile with
-march=x86-64-v4and it’ll use SSE and AVX all over the place.glibc does the runtime thing, but only once on application startup where the dynamic linker will link the version of the function optimized for your CPU. But it’s a manual process on glibc’s part, the variants are written by hand.
Not every project cares enough to do it dynamically like that and it would be a nightmare that way.
The fallback is, recompile with
-march=x86-64which will only use the base set of instructions. Or-march=i486if you want to run on absolutely ancient hardware.
The actual oh no is the amount of ewaste this will create as people buy completely new systems as they think that’s their only option
One man’s ewaste is another man’s etreasure.
Sure, but only a fraction will be saved. It’s criminal how much ewaste Apple and Microsoft are responsible for. That’s what happens when people are taught that profits can only increase year on year.
when they say “older” PCs they’re talking about machines with CPUs that are over 14 years old now.
You’d need to have replaced that CPU by now anyway.
Hard disagree. If this was the 80s or the 90s, you would have a case. But nowadays? 14 year old PCs are quite capable for many everyday uses.
The only people trying to convince you that you have to upgrade things every other year are the ones who sell them.
IDK, it’s a far cry from “dropping support for stuff 14+ years old” to “we’re going to coerce you into buying new hardware every other year”.
I bought a laptop at the beginning of 2010 and used it until spring of 2021. It was long overdue for replacement by then, so even that wouldn’t have been affected by this.
What made it long overdue for replacement, though?
Because I bet a mom or pops who only browse facebook could (technically) still use it for five more years*.
*Though facebook is not the best example because they are constantly bloating their own product.
For me: I like to play games. It was still fine for games like Dwarf Fortress or Civilization, and it could handle Factorio decently well (enough to launch a rocket, not enough for a megabase, heh).
For my mom? IDK, I was already pushing it with how long I stayed on Windows 7. I’m not sure that this particular laptop would have been a good hand-me-down in 2021.
Finally…I have to repeat: I bought the laptop in 2010. I got eleven years out of it for a type of device that most people replace every 2-3 years. Why isn’t that good enough for you?
You’re right. 11 years is a good run.
Thank you!
I was pretty thrilled at how much use I got out of that laptop. I originally picked it up as a companion machine to a desktop, but about a year later, I switched over to using the laptop almost exclusively. I got a docking station and hooked it up to my desktop monitors, and all was well. It did limit the games I could play, but hey, I guess you could call me a “patient gamer”.
I did have to repair it a couple of times – I replaced both the cooling fan and the hard drive around 2015-2017.
It was funny, what finally spurred me to start looking for a new machine was a free giveaway of Total War: Shogun 2 on Steam back in 2020. Free game? New computer!
You can have it, but expecting modern windows to run seems a bit silly. It’s a for sale product not a community supported hobby project.
If it was worth supporting for old ATMs or POS terminals, Ms probably would. But the people with those systems aren’t paying for windows updates.
I never said 14 year old PCs have to support modern Windows as it stands now.
But anyway. With all the billions Microsoft has as its operating budget, why can’t it launch a Windows tailored to low spec machines? Not profitable enough. That’s why.
My old system was starting to run like shit anyway I had it for over 10 years
Hardware doesn’t last forever and older hardware is vulnerable to more things.
It certainly would be nice if you never needed to upgrade anything and could just run the same hardware forever, but we don’t live in that world.
I get it, there’s that old saying “what Intel giveth Microsoft taketh away” but I’ve said it several times in this thread, you need to periodically upgrade hardware anyway to stay safer from certain kinds of malware
The malware part is the sad truth. You’re right.
Why?
Progress mate. Shit gets old because we came up with better shit (thats gonna get old too) so you toss it and forget about it. Repeat until planet fucked.
harvest all the gold and copper from your old hardware.
Itt: Use Linux Spam. This is not feasible for most users. Not all applicatopns are posted to Linux and some explicitly do not work. In particular for people that play games socially this just does not work. That being said they are unaffected by this change.
At this point the only games that don’t work on Linux are games using kernel level anti-cheats, and these are the largest games out there.
If you don’t play any of those games then your game most likely works just fine on Linux.
This is simply not true. I recently tried Linux for gaming after several years because I read that Valve made some great progress. Installed Crusader Kings III and didn’t get Paradox Launcher to run which is necessary for any DLC.
This was literally the first game I installed from my huge library and it simpl didn’t work so I had to do two hours of research, trial and error and reading error logs to conclude that I wasn’t able to solve this problem.
This is the exact reason why I use Windows for gaming. It simply works 99 % of the time. And I don’t have the time to troubleshoot my games all the time.
By recently you mean this year? The paradox launcher was broken on the steamdeck a year ago, should be working now.
Also iirc that game has a native linux version.
No, not this year but maybe last fall, early winter. The game itself was running fine but without DLC (which neede the launcher to work) was useless to me.
Maybe I have to give it another try but this experience was the worst possible advertisement for “gaming on Linux” 😐
Maybe I have to give it another try but this experience was the worst possible advertisement for “gaming on Linux” 😐
I mean there isn’t much more that can be done, these days that is usually the issue with gaming in linux, either the game has anti cheat which you cannot fix or the launcher of the application changes and you have to wait for it to get fixed.
The good news is that more studios are starting to release native versions of their linux games, so hopefully in the future this isn’t as much of an issue.
Its certainly not as likely to run a game as windows, but I also think you just go INCREDIBLY unlucky with your first attempt at a game. The vast majority of games buyable on Steam can be run at this point out of the box (some might be a bit jank for the Steamdeck though)
I’m finding out that particularly complex modding can be a bit of a pain as well, but thats a more niche category than gaming in general
(I’m having a TERRIBLE time trying to get Bannerlord Script Extender to work on my Steamdeck)
Let me know, or make a big post if you solve it. I haven’t played Bannerlord since switching to Linux and don’t want to dive into a quagmire quite yet.
I’ll tinker with it more over the weekend, but I’m fairly new to linux myself, so we’ll see if I can figure it out!
do hack to make software run on unsupported hardware
software stops working with update
surprised pikachu
“this is why i switched to linux” no shut up lol. this is not an issue for any average user and if you had the ability to hack the TPM requirements you have the ability to fix your borked install. this issue affects no one else. 🙂🙂🙂
No, the issue is that Microsoft officially supports only two versions of Windows. And support of the older one is ending next year. They are forcing users that are using perfectly capable hardware to artificially switch to - for many - needless new hardware.
edit: pls see jj4211s comment for an actual rebuttal. the below is just me being curious and probably ill-informed. i do appreciate your help if you are feeling helpful tho.
please identify the material changes that come with an end of support that force users to artificially switch.
in general i am entirely on the position against ms, but i genuinely do not see any concrete evidence of a “force”; ms’s own lifecycle policy even notes that products will continue to get “security and non-security updates.”
again i am anti-corporate, but i’d very much like to be accurate in my criticism, so any insight into the forces at play are appreciated 🙂
I agree with you, but did you read the article? This is about a specific CPU instruction, not TPMs.
In modern x86 CPUs, POPCNT is implemented as part of the SSE4 instruction set. For Intel’s chips, it was added as part of SSE4.2 in the original first-generation Core architecture, codenamed Nehalem. In AMD’s processors, it’s included in SSE4a, first used in Phenom, Athlon, and Sempron CPUs based on the K10 architecture. These architectures date back to 2008 and 2007, respectively.
yeah i did read the article. to clarify for anyone confused, folks are already bypassing the TPM requirement to get these windows installs working in the first place. the POPCNT instruction issue is only affecting installs that are already using this workaround to force W11 to run on a device it doesn’t want to work on.
