Before installing Linux, I had originally planned to dual-boot on my main PC, but somehow a gaming rig from 5 years ago isn't good enough to run windows 11, which is ridiculous.
Now genuinely curious, as an ex-Windows-refugee, how did the non-Windows-refugees, the "native" GNU/Linux users, find out about it?
Edit: BTW, started a journey with a laptop in a place with no internet. Luckily I had the foresight to install GNU/Linux on it before I started my journey. I was constantly reminded that I were in the same situation with Windows, the computer would stop working because it had no internet. You need internet for Microshit office, Adobe software, etc. That was the time I said: there has to be a better way. That's when I started using free software. I'll take the occasional, inadvertent usability annoyance with free software over the megacorporations trying to constantly gang rape me into submission any day.
A Celeron n4000 with only two cores, 4gb of DDR 3 RAM and 80gb sata I 5400rpm drive, that takes 25 minutes to boot: ✅ supported by Windows 11 because introduced on the market after 2018
A Xeon E7-8894 v4 with 24 cores, 3tb of ECC RAM and petabytes of nvme storage, paid $130k: ❌ unsupported by Windows 11 because introduced on the market before 2018
A totally valid way to define minimum requirements...
It'll run the Windows 11 IoT edition and it'll run it well.
(though it'd run Linux better :) )
Tux: What 4 GB RAM? This is some gourmet shit.
Tell that to the modern web though.
The web is so fat nowadays that it makes Windows look slim.
The modern web so fat that when it sits around the house, it sits around the shockingly robust infrastructure we've collected that provides us great convenience while it slurps up our privacy.
Fuckin' a man. My backup server uses 70mb of ram, My NAS, 250mb. My laptop, about 1GB doing normal usage things. Open up one webpage with a YouTube video embedded and the processor constantly runs all 4 cores at 30%+, fan is on high, 3GB ram getting eaten away at for a paused video and text. It's ridiculous.
I don’t know how youtube does it, but decoding a video, say with libavcodec(ffmpeg) without GPU acceleration is pretty demanding. They could do it on their server and send you the stream, but then again they’d save a lot of money not doing that.
But I agree it shouldn’t take so much when nothing is happening, the web has very much become so bloated.
And electron based apps 🤮 Why did they become the norm, especially ones that don't even have an actual website version.
i think the biggest problem with electron is that it doesn't just use some system-provided browser library, instead every electron app ships its own browser environment, which takes up a lot of space each time and makes the whole system a whole lot less efficient. shared libraries exist for a reason.
and all the oem bundleware. i knocked-down fresh boot idle active ram usage from 5.5gb to 3.5gb on a new dell desktop just by uninstalling anything that had 'dell' in the name.
I am physicist and software engineer. My current Linux desktop PC is now 16 years old, from 2009, and with 8-core CPU and 16 GB RAM is still plain over-powered for running Emacs and rustc under Debian and Arch in VM. It is only the third desktop computer I own. I bought the second one in 1999, and that one had an AMD K6 (Pentium-like) CPU with 300Mhz clock, running S.u.S.E. Linux, and I used it for writing uni stuff and my PhD thesis on digital speech processing. The first PC I owned was a old PC with an Intel 80386 CPU which my uncle gave me in 1995. I could barely run Word 6.0 on Windows 3.11 on it (MS Word became very instable for larger documents), but LaTeX (emTeX) was running totally fine (after installing it from about 30 floppy disks).
So, to sum up: Using Linux you will save a ton of money for hardware.
If they stopped showing so many ads, maybe they’d leave enough memory to run an operating system.
That'd be like asking a a kid to stop selling lemonade so he can focus on making a sign out of something other than cardboard
Nah man, Microsoft doesn’t give their OS away for free. The ads are just greed on top of an already expensive product.
God, I love Linux nerds.
That is a glorious pizza box computer.
Extra fun: My current gaming laptop has a TPM, but it's so new that Windows 10 doesn't recognize it. So when I try to upgrade it says 'lol nope'.
The TPM requirement is artificial and can be bypassed in the installer.
Just save yourself the hassle and ditch the malware.
I did and am much happier. When I went to install Linux, it was a last minute decision to try to dual boot, and that was the day that the Win11 pop-up showed up saying that I couldn't, so I thought "that makes my decision easy" and wiped the whole thing.
Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025.
Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer.
But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again?
I made the switch to Linux about ten years ago ... mainly because I didn't want to upgrade to the latest Windows 7/8 and I just didn't have the need to use any Windows software ... all I do is write documents, store photos, some light video editing and go online - why do I need any other OS? The only problem I had at the start was video editing ... it just meant I didn't do any. Now there are several options to get that done too.
The fun part was that my old hardware suddenly ran twice as fast with the latest Ubuntu at the time ... and I haven't look back since.
Linux gang rise up!!!
I switch to Linux in college (20ish years ago) and have been exclusively using it since. Windows XP was my last windows machine. I've never regretted it.
I recently picked up a couple of e-waste laptops, Thinkpad x130e's with an AMD E-300, 4GB RAM and a 320GB spinner. For the pair I paid $60 shipped. These were low-end semi-ruggedized laptops meant for students released around the time that HBO started showing Game of Thrones.
I've put Debian on one and it runs great. All the hardware just works, everything is pretty quick after boot, and I love how rugged and portable it is. Email, writing, basic productivity, hobby development and 2D gaming all work great. Web browsing takes a hit if I open too many tabs, the video card is too underpowered for most 3D games that came out after 2010, and large compiles are slow. I'm a bit worried about the aging HDD so I'm going to replace it with a cheap SSD which should help with boot and compile times.
The other one I'm not sure about. I've tried HaikuOS and the video and wifi work well and the whole system feels very snappy, but there's no audio or webcam support. Redox seems interesting but needs a whole lot more hardware support. I'll probably just end up cloning the first one unless I can get a better suggestion.
All that is to say, Linux is great on old cheap hardware.
My laptop is also an old e-waste Thinkpad. I run Xubuntu on it and it flies.
that a ryzen 2200g with 16gb ram, nvme, and usb-c is 'unsupported' is total bullshit. i just pulled one from service. meanwhile, i just 'upgraded' a 10th gen celeron desktop, and some even-worse gemini lake laptops, all with hdd (except one with a massive 64gb emmc chip) to 11.
(that ryzen is now rocking silverblue and looking for a new forever home)
That fan in there is probably bloat.
Win11 is 4,5 years old and still feels like 10 builds away from going gold. It feels thrown together.
Someone got the link to the guy's video installing windows 11 on a 2007 Sun Workstation by disabling the arbitrary checks?
Hey, that looks like the same PC I recently got ... I immediately installed Linux on it, though.
You might want to invest in some spacers to prevent your monitor from breaking when you close the box.
Hint: :q!
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