Analysts have warned Windows 10 end of life plans could spark a global torrent of e-waste, with millions of devices expected to be scrapped in the coming years.
Research from Canalys shows that up to 240 million PCs globally could be terminated as a result of the shift over to Windows 11, raising critical questions about device refreshes and the responsibility of vendors to extend life cycles.
People are mad at MS for being MS. MS isn’t great, Windows is flawed, and there should be better alternatives. People would be quick to move to Linux if it worked for them. Most desktops now are for gaming. Most gamers have Nvidia. Linux famously has issues with Nvidia because 90% of the distros out there decided to jump on to Wayland before it was even half done. If that’s the state of Linux where my 8-year-old Windows 10 machine still gets updates regularly and runs fine. Windows 10 will actively prevent you from trying to upgrade and bricking your system whereas Linux is absolutely like “Go ahead, hope you read all the patch notes for the 1000s different updates you are about to get!” Most people will go with Windows because Linux doesn’t work for them.
Overall Linux has the power to be good, it just doesn’t have the community will power to do so.
I think you’re massively over-generalizing here to make Linux look like an unstable mess. Rolling release distros are the ones that want you to read the patch notes. Arch is the poster child for those. Stable distros like Mint and Ubuntu and elementaryOS don’t brick your system with every update. They hold back updates and stick with older kernels to ensure stability. Linux is, already, very good. It sounds like you haven’t used it for any length of time. Valve’s work on Proton has made Linux gaming viable for a whole lot of people, but the majority of computer users don’t play intense video games. They want web browsing, email, office software, that kind of thing. Linux does those just great on almost any device all the way down to Raspberry Pi boards.
I used Linux as a daily driver for 5 years and was a FreeBSD porter for 2 years after that. I’ve been using Linux every year to pop in and see the issues and their current state. In this year alone, I’ve seen issues with Fedora, Linux Mint, and Manjaro. Hell, even right now the Fedora Live installer won’t launch on my desktop. It hard freezes before it can even get the installer up.
In seriousness, I have used Mint as a daily driver for probably 7 years now and I have found only the MATE and xfce flavors to be properly reliable and stable. Cinnamon, no matter how many times and on what hardware I’ve tried it, has a lovely habit of crashing and freezing at random times. For normal desktop tasks, Linux Mint xfce has been more reliable than any Windows I’ve ever used.
Have you considered that you might have Bad Vibes? Maybe the installer is afraid.
It is so obivious that you have never used linux… or you have only tried vanilla arch or something
I’ve used it since about 2007. I’ve used Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, Manjaro, and Arch, Was a FreeBSD porter for a few years, and have a lot of experience releasing games for Linux, Mac, and consoles. It’s clear you have no clue about me and are mindlessly defending an OS you are overly obsessed with. Don’t worry, I was there a few years ago. There is help out there.
what ticked me off was "Go ahead, hope you read all the patch notes for the 1000s different updates you are about to get!” since that is relavant for only arch and some of its deriatives. It sounded like someone who has heard/read others talk about linux but never used it themselves hence my assumption. I am sorry that you had such a negative experience beforehand but I swear its much more stable nowadays. My obssession for linux comes from the free software movement and it’s alignment with my personal values, so I tend to take some linux related criticsm personally I guess. 😅 Anyway have a nice day
Sure, it was a bit hyperbole but I’ve certainly seen that exact thing on Arch/Manjaro, one of the more popular distros. I’ve also seen a handful of updates on Fedora and Ubuntu just fully brick the system. My whole point with that was that Windows checks its updates against far more configurations than a single Linux distro ever could. One of the most common things I’ve seen Linux do on multiple distros is update the Linux kernel without waiting for all my installed kernel modules to be updated to work with that version. In a lot of cases, this has left my computer unbootable until I rescued it either changing grub or using another live CD.
Manjaro spesifically is the arch deriative that is bound to break no one reccomends it nowadays. And Ubuntu and fedora aren’t distros that tend to break really, Linux doesn’t auto update either. if you are installing custom kernel modules it is your responsibility to check if they’re updated not before you update your system as long as that stuff doesn’t come with the distro (than it’s the distro maintainers responsibility). You are doing modifications that are meant for experienced users when youbson’t know what you are getting into. User error user error user error. Linux kernel is also far more compatible with any congifuration rrally than windows ever could be, it’s the reason linhx works so well in older machines too. and distro maibtainer don’t have to accojbt for every set up it juat doesn’t work like that windows doean’t do that either. Kindly I propose stopping this stupid discussion because you only half know what you are talking about.
Nvidia GPUs require a custom kernel module. If you expect the average user to care that much about their computer, you are silly.
I know exactly what modification I’ve done and why. In fact, lots of distros ship with these modules then don’t update them properly. Despite that I’ve solved this issue many times. It’s just a time-consuming task that I don’t want to do. I have other hobbies.
You know nothing of what you talk about. You are extremely biased as you’ve pointed out in your other comments and proud of it. No one is saying people shouldn’t use Linux, people here are saying they don’t want a chore for an OS.
Also, your attitude is the biggest reason Linux isn’t a popular desktop OS. The Linux community keeps mass adoption away with this sort of attitude. I recommend stopping this conversation at the risk of truly exposing yourself as the angry troglodyte you are.
Linux is only a problem for folks used to someone else. Also, the article is about ewaste. Meaning, these machines are going to be trashed unless someone puts linux on them. So I’d say your diatribe of misinformation was misplaced.
I assume you mean for folks used to something else and if that’s what you mean, no, it’s not. People want to play minecraft, fortnite, and use office without problems. Hell, right now with how the Nvidia/Wayland situation is, I can’t even launch the fedora 36 live cd to install it without it crashing on my 3080, amd ryzen 9.
No, it doesn’t, It means they’ll be using Windows 10 without patching. At the EoL, Windows 10 doesn’t uninstall itself.
Yes being pedantic is easy. Did you have a point? What does nvidia’s failings have to do with anything? Pull that garbage out, drop in linux mint and donate it to a poor kid that needs it for school.
I have to agree with this. I tried Linux a couple of months ago, and ran into those issues with Nvidia. My computer was reasonably stable in the desktop environment using a particular version of the drivers, so as long as I was happy to never update the drivers and never do anything but email, web browsing, and word processing, Linux would have been fine. If I wanted to play any games or do any digital art or anything else that required my graphics card, it was either unstable or running barely faster than continental drift, depending on which set of drivers I was using.
Like, I do think Linux is pretty cool, but it very much feels like a project for people who have the time and money to continuously tinker with their computer to get it working exactly as they want. It’s not there yet on the “it just works no matter what you do” front, which is what the vast majority of computer users need from their operating system. Windows, for all its many faults, is broadly stable and can largely be ignored once it’s installed - although I do think it benefits from a reformat every 12-18 months.
And if your machine was to be tossed in the trash otherwise, how well do the proprietary drivers operate in the dump?
I might as well have tossed my computer in the trash if I’d kept Linux on it, since I couldn’t actually do anything with it.
It is perfect for a poor person that just needs internet and email. But yup, because it didn’t meet your use case it is trash. That there is some thinkin’.
“most” desktops are used in business and other organizations, not by gamers, and it is these customers and their systems that will be the bulk of the e-waste generated by the forced-obsolescence of their hardware due to 10’s EOL and 11’s ‘new’ requirements.
At least one computer in every US household (these stats show 2 but let’s just keep it one https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107206/average-number-of-connected-devices-us-house/ since it is an average). It’s hard to say that desktops are mostly used in business since there are only 754,633 office workers in the US (https://www.zippia.com/office-worker-jobs/demographics/) and 131.43 million households. ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-households-in-the-us/ )
Also, many people used Windows XP after its EoL, so much so that they increased it. It’s likely going to be the case here. Windows 10 EoL doesn’t mean the end of use. People seriously, care little about security. They don’t care about having the latest updates. They care about using a functioning computer.
Did you actually think about this for a second? Do you really think only 0.2% of the American population or 0.4% of American workers are working in the office? This should be a lesson on not to pick the first Google result.
How the narrative has turned Nvidias active sabotage into Linux maintainers fault is beyond me.
Latest for their reluctance to act on scalpers it should be transparent what you’re getting into with Nvidia.
And then people like you write thing like this… Why?!
Nvidia works fine on X11. You might say it’s Nvidia’s fault for not supporting Wayland more or not having open drivers but the truth is, it doesn’t truly matter. What matters is the end result.
Wanna come configure optimus for me?
On windows it’s trivial.
Same on linux
Both Intel and AMD GPUs work fine on Linux. Both work fine with Wayland.
Wayland has been around for over a decade and has been in a usable state for the last 3 or so years.
Attributing the fact that Nvidia stuff still barely works to the fact that some distros have made Wayland the default is just stupid wrong.
Besides, Nvidia experience isn’t/wasn’t the smoothest even on Xorg. Linux desktop is simply not a priority for Nvidia.
k, so for the least used hardware, linux works fine. Good to know.
Eh, no, KDE last year just barely started working with Wayland.
The popular distros are what counts. Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora. Just because you have some minor 0.00001% usage distro that still defaults to X11 doesn’t really matter.
Worked well enough for me to run into the dozen of other issues that Linux has. While I am sure you will just blow it off as not the true fault of Linux, the result is the same. I like most people want a usable environment. Linux doesn’t provide that out of the box. You can argue excuses for it all day but the end of it is, it’s not going to be a useful OS until it works out of the box with things like wacom tablets (which are broken with nvidia drivers), xbox controllers (which are just broken unless you do research and install the correct driver), and tons of incompatible software (which I am sure you can blame the developers for.) The end result is the same though, you don’t have a working environment.
Yeah, basically. Which raises a question: how companies with much smaller market share can justify providing support, but Nvidia, a company that dominates the GPU market, can’t?
Debian supports several DEs with only Gnome defaulting to Wayland. Everything else uses X11 by default.
Some other popular distros that ship with Gnome or KDE still default to X11 too. Pop!_OS, for example. Zorin. SteamOS too, technically. EndeavorOS and Manjaro are similar to Debian, since they support several DEs.
Either way, none of those are Wayland exclusive and changing to X11 takes exactly 2 clicks on the login screen. Which isn’t necessary for anyone using AMD or Intel, and wouldn’t be necessary for Nvidia users, if Nvidia actually bothered to support their hardware properly. But I digress.
Oh, it’s no way perfect. Never claimed it is.
This both depends on the disto you use and on what you consider a “usable environment”.
If you extensively use Office 365, OneDrive, need ActiveDirectory, have portable storage encrypted with BitLocker, etc. then, sure, you won’t have a good experience with any distro out there. Or even if you don’t, but you grab a geek oriented distro (e.g. Arch or Gentoo) or a barebones one (e.g. Debian) you, again, won’t have the best experience.
A lot of people, however, don’t really do a whole lot on their devices. The most widely used OS in the world, at this point in time, is Android, of all things.
If all you need to do is use the web and, maybe, edit some documents or pictures now and then, Linux is perfectly capable of that.
Real life example: I’ve switched my parents onto Linux. They’re very much not computer savvy and Gnome with it’s minimalistic mobile device-like UI and very visual app-store-like program manager is significantly easier for them to grasp. The number of issues they ask me to deal with has dropped by… A lot. Actually, every single issue this year was the printer failing to connect to the Wifi, so, I don’t suppose that counts as a technical issue with the computer, does it?
I use Gnome (Wayland) with an AMD GPU. My tablet is plug and play… Unlike on Windows. Go figure.
I feel like it’s the opposite as Nvidia provides a lot of Linux support by providing an open source kernel module (https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules) while AMD gets proprietary blobs into the Linux kernel ( https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/configure-2d-and-3d-graphics-acceleration). How come Linux is supporting AMD more than Nvidia currently?
You’re linking a post… From 2010. AMD replaced radeon with their open source drivers (AMDgpu) in 2015. That’s what pretty much any AMD GPU that came out in the last 10 years uses now.
Furthermore, the AMDgpu drivers are in-tree drivers, and AMD actively collaborate with the kernel maintainers and developers of other graphics related projects.
As for Nvidia: their kernel modules are better than nothing, but they don’t contain a whole lot in terms of actual implementation. If before we had a solid black box, now, with those modules, we know that this black box has around 900 holes and what comes in and out of those.
Furthermore, if you look at the page you’ve linked, you’ll see that “the GitHub repository will function mostly as a snapshot of each driver release”. While the possibility of contributing is mentioned… Well, it’s Nvidia. It took them several years to finally give up trying to force EGLStreams and implement GBM, which was already adopted as the de-facto standard by literally everybody else.
The modules are not useless. Nvidia tend to not publish any documentation whatsoever, so it’s probably better than nothing and probably of some use for the nouveau driver developers… But it’s not like Nvidea came out and offered to work on nouveau to make up to par and comparable to their proprietary drivers.