What’s the original link? The archive won’t load for me.

Edit: I got hit with a captcha that wouldn’t load in DDG mobile. I opened it on a desktop and I have it now.

I think they may benefit from relaxing their hardware requirements across the board in a cost of living crisis. The CPU list — no rules to determine if your CPU is valid, there’s just a list of acceptable ones — is particularly hostile imo.

There was an older senior engineer at a company I used to work for who insisted on referring to non-technical staff as “business critters”, and it made everything he said sound sarcastic and condescending.

So I do get where you’re coming from.

While I shorten Microsoft to avoid algorithmic and AI attention, I can see how it may detract from my comment. It isn’t a “20-year-old meme that was only leveraged by teenagers when WinXP was retired” — it may seem that way to you, but everyone I know in tech types it for the aforementioned reasons and because it’s faster.

Microsoft has proven repeatedly that they are a hostile, monopolistic force in the tech sphere, actively and successfully lobbying to retain their stranglehold on desktop and productivity markets. They support genocide and silence internal opposition at all costs. It is not an argument in poor faith to point that out. They are motivated solely by money and always have been. They are not a good entity in the tech space for anyone who prioritizes user experience, privacy, non-violence, security, and accessibility.

While I appreciate your input, and will strongly consider limiting my use of that abbreviation in “mixed” tech spaces, I cannot and will not pretend that Microsoft deserves better.

OP has indicated they’re hostile to advice, which is unfortunate since, assuming a person insists on keeping Windows, they need to switch to Win 11 for best security practice.

Your advice is good. I hope they read it.

I replied in earnest and was thanked with an immediate downvote. Your response is the right one: This is a technology space, let’s support contributions that keep that in mind. This was a dull read expressing nothing but a backwards mentality.

I get the frustration, but at this point, Windows 10 is no longer supported and the push to get people off of it is partially related to the inevitable flood of hacking that follows an OS deprecation. Vulnerabilities are immediately exploitable for any user still on the old OS.

Microsoft is indeed evil, and Windows 11 sucks, but running an unsupported OS carries real risk. I agree that there should be some way to finalize the decision to keep using it and to waive liability for Microsoft, but of course they’re motivated to get you to switch. There are means of bypassing the hardware requirements. There are also some very well-supported and user-friendly Linux options.

Win 10 is ten years old. It’s time to let it go.