kirk781What I learned from 3 years of running Windows 11 on “unsupported” PCs
KecessaITT: People who talk about Linux (as if that was the subject) because they just can’t accept that some people actually need to use Windows and might find articles like this one useful.
ZachariahIf you need Windows, don’t run it on hardware that doesn’t support Windows 11. If you need it, do it the right way, so you can count on it working.
Now, what do you do with your old hardware? There are plenty of good ideas in the comments here.
Or instead of installing Linux as a workaround and having to learn how to use a new OS and having to troubleshoot a ton of inevitable issues to make it work as well as the setup you’re used to just… Use a workaround to skip the hardware requirement! In the end both are a way to work around Microsoft’s requirements, one is something you need to deal with once just requiring you to follow a guide and you’re done, the other will be an ongoing learning process.
How is having to apply workarounds to keep windows working on old machines any different from troubleshooting the occasional linux issue? It’s a rethorical question, the difference is that the workaround on Windows is mandatory while the Linux troubleshoot is nowadays rare and usually related to edge cases.
Some of the workarounds in this article are far more involved and convoluted than what I’ve ever had to do in 15 years of linux. My very recent install of bazzite in a new laptop has been a perfectly out of the box it just works experience. Not even having to open the terminal. 100% friendly GUI without compromising flexibility, power and customizability. Today, suggesting linux with a solid desktop environment like KDE plasma is just foolproof. The end user will be using exactly the same knowledge and habits of Windows, without the harassment machine that is MS now.
Meanwhile I started on Bazzite, my display signal just stopped whenever there was load on the GPU, two days trying different things to make it work, switched to Mint, GPU works but wifi antenna doesn’t, another couple hours to make it work… Windows? Install it and… Well, that’s it, it just works.
burgersc12Let’s not pretend there isn’t driver hell on Microsoft, sometimes its even worse than Linux.
Yup, on Linux, you have three possible outcomes:
Ideally, you end up with 1 or 2, because 3 gives you hope that you’ll get it working properly eventually. I had this happen on my desktop, when I got a new motherboard, the WiFi chip gave really crappy performance because it was stuck on an old Wi-Fi standard or something. I got it to work at ~20mbit/s, but eventually gave up and bought a new Wi-Fi card for $20 or something and now I’m getting way better speed. And this was despite following my own advice to only buy Intel hardware, this chip is just notorious for having issues and is certainly an outlier (replacement chip is also Intel, but a more capable chip).
I had a lot of frustration on Windows w/ my wife’s computer running AMD’s audio driver and AMD GPUs, whereas both just work on Linux. After a couple hours, it mostly works as expected, but it’s still a bit janky. So it absolutely goes both ways.