Windows 11 will reportedly display a watermark if your PC does not support AI requirements
Windows 11 will reportedly display a watermark if your PC does not support AI requirements
BRUH
Lol, year of the Linux desktop here we come XD
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 Year of the Linux desktop!
😂
Interestingly, the software giant added this check since the Windows 11 24H2 will not boot without these instruction sets, according to a previous report. Though speculative, one would wonder if the company has this extra step in case someone uses bypasses to force the OS to boot with an unsupported CPU.
Why is the watermark the headline
Why is MS targeting specific hardware when windows has historically been a general purpose OS?
I’m switching my machine to Linux this weekend, even if my chip is supported, who’s to say it will stay supported for the next couple of years.
Only targeting new hardware is just a win-win-win for them.
Hardware partners love it, planned obsolescence is just new sales. Legal departments love it, constantly worse DRM. The development teams like it, less support burden. Marketing loves AI being a core feature.
They have no competition. There is no downside for them.
We're actually shifting our entire workplace. Fuck this shit - both from a hassle viewpoint and content security requirements
Hi, yeah. Uh long time listener, first time caller. Thank you for taking my question. Yes, I was wondering does Linux do this? I'll take my answer off the air. Thanks!
This is the Linux equivalent:
(check-dfsg-status | cowsay -f gnu on Debian)
I have not dared to test my games with proton on Linux, but if they all work, Windows will be nothing but a VM for me that I use for the exceptions when something doesn't run under wine. Sheesh.
Check protondb.com if you want some idea before switching
Honestly the site is kind of useless, every time I look at it games that work perfectly out of the box with no changes will practically say that they don't work at all and vice versa games that don't work at all will say they run without issue.
Not to mention the amount of people putting literally fucking hundreds of completely worthless flags that actually do literally nothing whatsoever in the code swearing left right and Center that it does something. I kind of wish that site would just disappear
Oh, they will likely work. Proton has come quite a long way
I haven't tried linux for like 8 years now and my oly problem was that the games i played back then weren't supported by linux. I kinda want them to force me to dip into linux again. Last week or so i had to solve a fucking riddle to start my computer to not accidentally accept anything. I hate it so much.
I made the switch on my daily driver laptop about 4 months ago. I mainly play games like Factorio, Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld, and they all work fine. Only trouble Ive had is with older games like Red Alert. Check out ProtonDB
I decided to play Commandos (1998) and it worked as perfectly fine as it would on Windows. It required a fan patch to support higher resolution and 16:9, but that patch worked fine too. The only large issues I've experienced so far are with multiplayer. For example, The Finals hadn't updated their version of Easy Anti-cheat to a version that supported Linux so it didn't work for a while, but it does now. That might actually be the only game that was an issue for me, and now it isn't.
IME, there's very little that won't run. I don't have a single game in my Steam library that doesn't run just fine. The most I've had to do to run anything was to try different versions of Proton, and that's as easy as choosing from a dropdown menu.
You can check all your games on ProtonDB. That being said, almost any single player game will work. Same with any multiplayer game that doesn't insist on poorly implemented anti-cheat
I’ll grab the popcorn while I watch the dumpster fire of what Microsoft is doing to Windows, from the comfort of my Linux-running system.
Obligatory BTW I use Arch.
Cries in corporate systems, balls deep in Microsoft ecosystem.
All my personal devices are running Linux however.
Yeah, this is where I'm at. O365, Teams, OneDrive, Azure, evening.
Except that my "personal" device is my work device. (I get a stipend to maintain my own tech.)
My Steam Deck runs Linux, at least?
That's weird, the watermark says, "I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."
God damn. It went down hill fast. I’m actually gonna start looking at distros. Fuck. I just bought a mini pc to install OPNsense on but I think my weekend just drastically shifted.
Who knew they were telling the truth after all. When they said Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows.
Join the dark side 😈🐧
Yay for what I assume is a BSD reference there
Add a 🐡
ai file explorer? I can fi d my own files thanks
Oh no, you misunderstand. It's not help you find stuff on your computer.
ohhhh that makes sense
Can you though? Explorer.exe on windows 11 is already a steaming pile. Why the fuck can't I disable grouping? If I need to find a specific kind of files in my download directory, it's way easier for me to sort by size. What isn't easy is that now it's grouped by fucking date as well. IDK when I grabbed the last windows iso on my.visualstudio.com, I just know that I have <10 files that are >3GB in my download directory. But noooo now after sorting by size I've got to either search though 4 or 5 groups or turn grouping off.
The IT dept at work has decided that we all will run windows 11, and it's locked down tighter than I've experienced in a long time. Guess who has a VM called "Windows 10 Daily driver" running. Fuck windows 11 and the iso it rode in on.
It's probably going to use some stupid-ass system to place them in the next available spot on the HDD and you actually won't be able to find them without the AI.
Too bad I'm on Linux.
I can't wait for it to be added to activate-linux!
My windows 10 already has a watermark to activate it
Given how Linux support for steam has been going I've just started migrating everything and just popping in to windows when I have something that doesn't work.
Don't threaten me with a good user experience.
Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinux
Wasnt going to install it anyway so no loss
I've spent half a day yesterday to set up a VM running Debian on my office's Win PC. Since I'm tied to Windows because of my proprietary CAD, my plan is to limit my interaction to a minimum and instead do everything else in the Linux-VM. With shared drives and drag'n'drop I hope it will work out. It comes in also very handy that I started years ago to strictly choose open source software that's available for both platforms - so no learning curve. Since MS won't listen - we all need to laudly complain about the lack of linux support towards our software providers. And yes, maybe too naïve, it will change something in the long run.
I've gone full linux both at home and at work. Thankfully, most of the tools we use are cross platform / FOSS. But in the odd case, I use KVM (the linux equivalent to Hyper-V) to spin up a windows VM
It has it's issues (like graphics card pass-through), but it works pretty well
i'd rather have web 3.0 and crypto than ai
One has to wonder how many clock cycles are wasted to render the watermark
Enough to make an Arch user have an aneurysm.
Li-nux! Li-nux! Li-nux! Li-nux!
Yet another reason to toss non-DOS based software.
hardware requirements aren't that huge ... a cpu that supports 11 and 16GB RAM minimum. CPU has to support SSE4.2, which every 11 compatible cpu has. Honestly, this should be your minimum requirements nowadays. Anythjng that can't do the job is literally 8+ years old.
every laptop that's on sale right now under $600 has less than 16gb of RAM
it's not compatible with windows 11, but today apple is still selling $1500 laptops with 8gb of RAM
PC vendors are still selling laptops with 4GB RAM. 16GB should absolutely be the minimum (and should have been since 2020), but it's very much not true that anything with less than 16GB is over 8 years old.
Anythjng that can’t do the job is literally 8+ years old.
So what? How about Microsoft lets me define what 'the job' is and I will decide for myself whether my machine is up to it? In my opinion the job of an operating system is to expose computing resources to whatever the user wants to do and then get the fuck out of the way.
The minimum requirements are there for them to set a lower limit on what they're willing to support. You do whatever you want, just don't complain when something doesn't work, or breaks because you're bypassing those limits.
People do this all the time and then complain and blame Microsoft for issues when they are using an configuration they were told was unsupported and might have issues.
My PC has a i7-4790k overclocked to 4.5 GHz. It runs smoothly since I got it when it came out and it is still not a bottleneck in any of the games I play. But if I wanted to upgrade to Windows 11 I would need to buy a new CPU, new main board and new RAM, and it would not improve my gaming experience at all. It was my last machine running windows which I changed to Linux 2 months ago and I haven't looked back.
That CPU would probably meet these requirements abd wouldn't be affected. The normal Windows 11 requirements are a separate thing which are more demanding but can be bypassed. Though Linux is probably better anyway, especially for older machines. Itt's requirements haven't really changed in the last 10 years.
you should be able to 'rufus' an installer for that. the instruction in the 'new' minimum requirement dates back to 1st gen.
I'm only addressing that last line, but really think it through. Should you really expect, or even want, an OS that runs on a 386? It wasn't that long ago that most Linux distros could. But they all moved away from it because that limited performance on anything more modern.
The newer instruction sets are created for a reason, and that reason is typically higher performance. If the OS (or any code, really) can use them, it will work better. But if you can't or don't, the code will be more compatible.
There also isn't "any" computer; it's simply not a thing. The question becomes how old (more technically, what minimum specs) do you want to support, and performance you want to be limited by?
While I agree that Microsoft has leaned too heavily into newer hardware as an expectation, there's definitely a line to be drawn.
I have a computer I use mostly in my office, but sometimes I run games on it, because why not, that has a Xeon x3460. It can run literally every game I’ve thrown at it at 60fps, and it can do literally any workload I need it to do. It’s 15 years old. This isn’t the 80s or 90s where technology is changing so fast that you have to upgrade every year or two to keep up. There’s very little reason to upgrade if you have a working computer.
That CPU came out in 2009. I think things have changed since then. The Intel stagnation issue ended with Ryzen.
Not saying you should throw away your machine, but expecting it to support all features of an OS made 15 years later is unreasonable. They also aren't saying it won't work, just that you don't get all features. It already is way past what Windows 11 was designed to run on (which imo was unreasonable at the time).
If you want to use 15 year old hardware then use Linux. I do anyway for other reasons, and it keeps my FX-6300 server running fine too.
Funny. Linux doesn't care how old your hardware is. It still works fine. Too bad Windows can't be that robust.
I've just moved my work PC from a cast off from a customer - it had a BIOS date stamped 2012, and was a rather shag Lenovo with a ... Intel Core something and four GB RAM. Cheap though, ie free. I did wedge in a SSD to make it usable.
I run KDE which isn't known for being tiny and I have a Postgres DB and a few containers for experiments running. The new box is a i5 Intel G13 thingy - HP mini jobbie. Luxury
To ensure that I am as disadvantaged as everyone else, I run ESET Endpoint AV and full disc encryption on it. It boots EFI and Secure Boot is enabled. I will pass a Cyber Essentials Plus audit (UK standard) without having to employ any misdirection. I've also read up on the US standards. The STIG for Ubuntu 22.04 is doable but my desktop is running 23.04 and 24.04 has just come out.
I run my company and we have some customers who have some rather more stringent requirements than others. We also have our own standards.
Do you need my PayPal or Venmo account so you can send me money to replace perfectly working hardware?
Microsoft itself doesn't even sell their own laptops with 16GB RAM standard, it's always an expensive upgrade.
Guess Microsoft can buy me a new computer if they want me to use Windows 11.
I got a new computer to replace the old windows 10. But the new toy won't see windows.
They're treating it like it's not your computer anyways, might as well get them to foot the bill.
By getting more people to buy computers they get more window licenses to sell and it's always been that way, but they're getting more pushy
But this is making the Windows 11 experience worse, making fewer people upgrade to get Windows 11.