Windows 10 will run out of support in October 2025

Whats to say a current typical W11 PC will not become obselete quiet soon with the introduction of the new AI PCs which do not currently use AMD or Intel processors ?
Dell Laptops with Snapdragon X Series Next-Gen AI PC Technology | Dell USA

If you look at the market share of Windows 10 PCs worldwide its running into many hundreds of millions of users need to buy a new PC ?
Canalys Insights - The end of Windows 10 support could turn 240 million PCs into e-waste

Linux is ideal for anyone who wants to do typical home office apps but there are still quiet a few more specialised apps that can only be realistically run on Windows.

Even so, though we have W11, we also have a working Linux system as backup for when we say we have had enough of Microsoft !

 

My older sister went off to university, and told us that one of the students had his own computer in his room. I imagined a room full of dials and switches and flashing lights! Only on looking back did I realise it was almost certainly a Sinclair ZX80.

 

I started on mainframes that used punched cards or punched tape. We'd draw a flow chart, test it then write the code in COBOL, PLAN, FORTRAN and send it away to be type dup then go thru it to check for errors and correct any typing mistakes on our office punching machine. They'd then go off to be compiled and then we'd test, de-bug and correct.

This all generated a huge amount of paper - cards, computer listings, office paper and our newspapers - and we'd have a monthly collection by a paper merchant and then have a jolly good night out on the proceeds - pub then curry.

I shall need a new PC before Windows 10 goes offlinebut am wary as I remember well the chaos that followed the implementation of Windows 10 and have yet to find a recent PC with a CD/DVD reader. Bit of a dinosaur really.

 

You are right. Gates said that your grandchildren will use Windows 10, but this lasted just until 2020, when Apple sent it grand granny OS10 into pension. Microsoft had hoped that macOSX will end as 10.99.

 

That already happened in November 2020 with the big update. Most people didn't realise that this was the starting point for Windows 11.

There is only 1 reason why Linux never became interesting for professionals and that is it doesn't support colour management. That's why Adobe never developed for Linux. Everything else like video editing is just down to codecs, which they do support since 2020.
The first Windows version that supported colour management was Vista, btw. Thats why Apple and Adobe had this close relationship since the 80’s. What many don’t know is that macOS is just made of what Adobe wants it to do.
Additionally, okay, it’s the missing font support in professional sense. Yes you can install fonts, even Windows fonts as macOS does, but the designers do a bit more with fonts.

 

@simone_in_wiltshire

Though a good few folk will need to stay with Windows for the reasons you say, think a lot users would be quiet happy with a Linux system like Mint which is really quiet good these days.

Though business users can purchase Extended Support Updates for W10 it will be interesting to see if they do offer it to home users, suspect with so many still on W10 the US users may start a class action if they do not ?

14 months is a long time before its due to happen, suspect we will see some interesting changes before then ?

Personally think that many of the casual W10 home pc users will simply continue to migrate to their smart phones / tablets rather than spend several hundreds on a new laptop ?

 

My boss at my first computer job could read paper tape. He was registered blind, with specs like the bottom of milk bottles, but that was some party trick. Great guy.

 

Reminds me on Leo Apotheker, the only German who ever made it to become a CEO of a company that is not in the GAS region. He managed it to halve HP shares just inside 1 month. He was sure that people no longer want desktop PCs after the success of Apple's iPad, and announced that HP no longer will be producing PCs but just printers.
Said in August, he was gone by September, and half the business customers switched from HP to Lenovo.
Meg Whitman personally travelled for the next 2 months to all biggest businesses around the world to ask them not to take seriously what Apotheker had said. It took HP 3 years to recover from that and another 5 years to be back.

Misjudgement is a serious thread for every company.

 

Didn't IBM also have a problem of seriously misjudging the situation? They thought the PC would never take off and that mainframe computers would always be top dog.

 

@JWK Not to mention the compensation that this chap got for being sacked.
That’s what happens if a CEO is just capable to fill out spreadsheets.

 

I work in IT (in fact I run my own computer repair business) and I've started advising customers about Windows 10 EOL.

Aside from the fact you won't received security updates, new devices and software will eventually stop working as manufacturers won't support the older operating systems. I see it a lot where people expect new devices or software to work on old technology.

 

I think 'eventually' is the most important word there. There is certainly no need to panic and dive into either updating the OS or purchasing a new machine if the current one won't run Windows 11. Support end date is still over a year away.