End of 10: Upgrade your old Windows 10 computer to Linux

Idk why we need separate media anyways. Just resize the existing partition and create a new Linux recovery partition in place, reboot from that to install m. Or just run the whole installer in a VM on windows and then reboot to a completely working Linux system.

EDIT: Beyond skill, just getting the external media is a substantial friction. I haven't used a thumb drive besides for Linux install media in 15 years; I'm good at computers but just finding / buying one of those things is its own roadblock.

I never understood why it's so complicated. On Linux, you can make a liveusb as easily as `cat liveusb.iso > /dev/sdX`. I imagine there is a powershell equivalent. There is a risk of writing to the wrong drive, so some kind of utility is needed. But the actual write is trivial. Why not make a win32 executable with the iso embedded so users only need to download one thing and then run it to write the USB media?

It's even more damning when you realize the Windows stage 1 installation process is essentially unchanged since Vista. The Linux people had nearly 20 years to straighten this out.

Installing Ubuntu bricked a Samsung laptop I had some years back. Never again.

I think it could also be worthwhile to figure out ways to:

- Avoid requiring the user to figure out how to get into BIOS/EFI and change boot order. Windows has APIs for manipulating EFI things, may be worth looking into that.

- Replace GRUB with something more modern like rEFInd or Clover with a nice looking theme.

For the latter point, while GRUB is technically functional, it looks scary and arcane to new users and has little resiliency to things like Windows updates mucking with boot entries. It makes for a bad first impression (“why is my computer showing hacker screens suddenly”) and when it breaks your average user doesn’t have a prayer of fixing it. Something that looks more modern and self-heals would be a big improvement.

> One idea to fix this and get more people to switch would be for Ubuntu to offer a Windows app that handles everything. It could download the ISO in the background, format the flash drive, install Ubuntu in dual boot with Windows by default, and clearly explain each step so users know how to start using Ubuntu or go back to Windows.

I am almost certain something like this existed 15-20 years ago from Canonical.

Maybe something like https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wubi again.

> and needing external tools like Rufus

Ubuntu and Linux Mint are now recommending balenaEtcher, which is easier to use than Rufus.

No?

Nobody in their right mind would claim that they are building the official Linux OS without turning the whole community against them.

And it's not as if the average user need to use linux. If developers move from windows 10 to linux, the impact would be huge.

I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu, though.

One of the biggest faults of Linux is we don't have an easy, user friendly, idiot proof distro for normies, but Ubuntu is just broken corporate slop.

When I was wearing the various "save users from themselves" hats in my previous life, Ubuntu users were 100% the bane of my existence... since they were all server customers, the ones that took my advice and let me help them switch over to Debian suddenly stopped being frequent footgun fliers, no matter what their original issue was.

Ubuntu, to me, is simply Debian that has been aggressively turned into enterprise slop.

This isn't an "if". And this shouldn't be shocking to anyone as Microsoft has EOL'ed all of it's previous OSes with a deadline.

You can buy extended support for orgs like yours that require it - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/extended...

> I work in a research lab with 10s of 1000s of dollars worth of Windows 10 workstations that cannot be upgraded.

It's the same situation as last time with Windows 7. You can get three years of extended support for the monthly cumulative update, which I assume is being done given it is fairly inexpensive. The US government gets favorable pricing from Microsoft.

The consumer price for Windows 10 ESU is $30/$60/$90 for the first/second/third year.

In case you are not aware, right now the Windows 11 upgrade can be forced to ignore the hardware requirements. At this time this does allow unsupported machines to receive Windows 11 updates, though this is not really a viable option for commercial users needing long-term official support.

Windows 10 ending in October blows my mind in contrast to the free as in beer near GUI-less Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019 receiving extended support (security updates) until 2029. I'll probably assemble a patched-up/slipstreamed installer for recycling older equipment!

You'd think the sysadmins would think of upgrading the operating systems when setting the system up, no?

You might consider Windows 10 LTSC IoT edition, it's supported until 2031 iirc.

The answer is to simply not upgrade those machines. Computers that are important for work shouldn't be upgraded or experimented on.

It's not terrible these days, especially with the advent of the Steam Deck. If you're not playing flavor-of-the-month live service games, then I've found that I rarely run into games where DRM/anti-cheat is the issue. A quick glance at protondb will let you know if a game runs fine on linux or not.

Kernel-level anti-cheat is quite bad, and I just wish it would be abandoned altogether rather than extended to Linux. This wasn't a problem when we had private servers rather than random matchmaking.

If there’s really a market for linux distros that have been pre-infected by rootkits, it seems one of the major game studios could provide it.

Of course the well known gaming company that releases a distro is Valve. But, rootkits don’t seem like they fit their particular ethos (they are well known for their less annoying DRM scheme, right?). TBH, it seems like a rare opportunity to break the hold they have on the “game store” concept.

Anti-cheat themselves are not the problem, developers who decide not to block Windows even when the anti-cheat would work is.

Fortnite uses EAC which does work on Linux, only they decide to block it.

Some anticheats work on Linux, including Easy Anticheat. Which ones are you still having problems with?

There is no reason Linux could not support sensible userland anti-cheat protections. What Linux wrappers mostly refuse to actually support is rootkits and exploits. Linux should not support rootkits and exploits, and frankly neither should Windows, but I suppose Microsoft doesn't care all that much about security in a games context.

Linux's inability to run specific anti-cheat solutions is a vendor support issue on the anti-cheat maker's part, because they don't care about your security, and they've managed to convince game developers that this practice is acceptable. It's not. Vote with your wallet.

Which in particular? Many online games run fine.

The only way to leave Windows is to not care about video games. Despite Wine etc, this is basically how it goes. But it's a win-win, you get back your time and focus.

It's great in theory.

In practice, it may not work properly even on their "supported" models. For example, sound does not work on my Dell E7270. Secondly, you must be willing use the Chrome browser. I will not because Chrome no longer has the option to always show the scrollbars. I am convinced that modern UX/UI designers hate their users.

Every 4.75 days, by my reckoning.

This is the first post to get substantial conversation, though. The impression I get is that on-topic reposts are fine until such time as they get traction - provided that they a. aren’t self-promotion and b. are made by different users.

everyone has a phone nowadays, I think the expectation that the e-waste cycle would continue was a misjudgement. For most normal people I know, windows 7 was their last "laptop generation"(10 at the latest) before they could have switched entirely to their phones or tablets. They also don't really bother getting rid of this gear by sale, most of the prior generation's machines were priced in the thousands and were towers so it made more sense to resell them, that generation(to my perception) was mostly thin plastic units with almost no durability. Most people I've seen hold onto them "just in case", as they wouldn't sell in their condition.

Perhaps it's getting repurposed?

Think about the demand and supply curves of calculations (or computation). For most of history, they moved in tandem, with supply moving slightly faster, so computers would always do more at slightly lower costs.

Now both curves are speeding up, but demand is moving faster, so the costs of hardware are going up. And when high end servers (with GPUs) are unavailable, people hold onto the older ones longer.

It’s actually really wild that OS vendors apparently sell software that is so defective that it is assumed unsafe without ongoing updates, and then use the threat of not providing updates to spur adoption of their subsequent products.

In a more reasonable world they’d owe their customers a recall.

It only took about 7 years between XP’s EOL and EternalBlue based attacks like Wannacry and NotPetya.

A well configured firewall between your computer and the internet, uBlock Origin in the browser, and not downloading untrusted files off the internet can do a long way to help. Not stopping everything but at least shielding you from the worst.

I think the bigger issue is like on iPhones and Androids. Your software and apps stop supporting your OS long before the hardware or OS fails you.

This is entirely possible in many ways. You could keep the NTFS partition, shrink it, eventually copy data off of it, …

So long as enough contiguous space is available to install the desired Linux distro.

Linux has to install somewhere, and it needs a filesystem that supports POSIX permissions, so you need a partition formatted for it. If NTFS is taking up the entire drive and can't be shrunk, where does Linux install?

You can't do this all on the same drive, because you need a place to copy the documents directory to. You need to delete the NTFS partition to create the place to copy the files to, but by the time you've done that, the Documents are inaccessible. You could do it in memory, feasibly, if you create a RAMdisk and are lucky enough to have enough memory for all your documents, but then you're still gambling on not running out of memory during the install.

So it is possible to copy the documents on the same device, and it's possible to even automate the process, but it's not possible to do it reliably or safely, and the reliability is so low that it's not worth even offering the possibility. If somebody has a handful of gigabytes of documents, it's already a nonstarter. To be safe you'd demand the user make a backup onto another device anyway, in which case they might as well do that and then copy the files into a fresh install themselves

There’s no technical reason it can’t copy all your documents to the new system, or partition your drive to allow dual-booting with your documents accessible from both OSes, and allow you to remove the Windows partition once you’re comfortable doing so. If the installers don’t have this option, they certainly should.