I don't think the security requirements are unreasonable, and actually make a lot of sense. The issue is a lot of corporations that store your personal data are just insecure and careless. While they could be spending the money you give them on IT upgrades, a lot of times they are upgrading Yachts and their mistresses.
The thing I don't like is that even with better hardware, Windows will still find ways to enable telemetry and then exploits to that data. So, even once you upgrade your hardware, attackers will still find a way in thanks to Microsoft.
Do we still need to upgrade every x years, in my opinion we've reached quite a plateau. E.g. my 4 year old phone is still fast enough.
Mandating an upgrade by obsoleting the OS is going to add to our environmental disaster, the newest IPCC report says probably +1.5 C more by 2040 at current trajectories. I wish influential environmentalists would start shaming Microsoft.
I'd argue that on the desktop, we reached that plateau years ago. I'm not doing anything on my computer that I couldn't have done on a computer ten years ago.
Which isn't to say that modern apps and websites would run well on ten-year-old hardware—but there are equivalent apps and websites that would have run fine. In other words, the only thing you're getting with new hardware software bloat...
We are talking about workstations, and 4 years ago the best ones were those with ~8cores, maybe more if we consider start of the threadripper era. First gen threadripper had many issues and those were ironed out over the years. Also the performance per core increased a lot so I don't think the progress wasn't as small.
I agree that phones that are 4 years old are fine for most of the daily stuff, and even haswell PCs are still perfectly OK for the office, but this segment is a bit different and depending on the use case even earlier updates might be useful (like switching to pcie4/5 etc).
btw since I meant 4 years from now it also means that those unsupported workstations are not even new today, they could be running 2+years already, and 6 years upgrade cycle is not that bad
It's pretty clear IMHO that they are not talking about "workstations" in the "high-end machines for special use cases" here, but about "enterprise desktop PCs".
I saw "Red Hat" on the login screen of a retail cash register a few years ago. If Ubuntu is ready and able to be installed on old workstations with Win 10 that are otherwise about to lose security updates, that could be millions of dollars cheaper than replacing 10,000+ Dells just to get Win 11. And there are still enterprises around that financially reward bean counters that successfully cut costs to increase profitability. So does this create an opening for enterprise Linux?
At the Windows-centric companies I've worked for it was mostly just running Outlook that was the thing we all absolutely had to do every day, with only occasional use of Word.
So many businesses now have replaced Windows native business apps with either web based ones or (less and less) Java apps. Both work on Linux.
Question: How good is Thunderbird nowadays as an alternative to Outlook, from a business decision maker perspective? (Or is there better than Thunderbird for businesses deeply entrenched in Outlook?)
I think this idea is kind of nuts. Even if there is a Linux distro with 1:1 feature parity with Windows for a particular business application--which I don't think is a given--there are still massive hurdles:
- The cost of retraining users
- The cost of evaluating whether, for each use case, the Linux distro has feature parity
- The cost of transitioning each old PC
- The dissatisfaction among the employee base about having to re-learn a system, even if the necessary features are there
- The fact that most business with 10k+ users are going to have business-specific apps that barely run on Windows 10, with no equivalent on Linux
- The risk to the decision-makers if it doesn't pan out -- it's the opposite of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"
- The fact that all of the back-end infrastructure--active directory domains, security, etc--is going to have to be transitioned too.
- The likely costs to the business itself in terms of lost opportunities, errors, and so on while the transition occurs.
The hardware itself is relatively cheap compared to the cost and logistics of getting that hardware set up and training users. My guess is that basically every business with that quantity of users would choose to just buy new hardware and keep their existing infrastructure and training over the alternative.
One way to look at it though is how easily many consumers are migrating to Chromebooks from Windows PCs (Chromebooks sales have increased over 600% during the pandemic). Since so much can be done in a web browser now, the migration isn't too hard for a considerable number of users. I think the strongest point on your list is the security migration. Hardened Linux has become a preferred OS for militaries and intelligence agencies, but there certainly is a great deal of training and certification involved with setting up SELinux, AppArmor, etc.
What enterprise laptop/desktop (Think* for Lenovo, Dell Precision/XPS/Latitude, HP Pro* and Elite*) hasn’t been sold with a TPM in the last five years? I know Intel has been shipping them standard since Sandy Bridge or so. I’m 90% sure my X220 has one.
I think the bigger problem might be the CPU compatibility list, but that isn’t being enforced to my knowledge.
> Another problem for enterprises, assuming they want to upgrade to Windows 11, is that Microsoft's minimum hardware requirements also apply to virtual machine platforms such as Microsoft HyperV, VMware and Oracle VM Virtual Box.
Are VMs that prevalent? I use them all the time, but I always assumed that was because I'm a weird nerd.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 62.9 ms ] threadThe thing I don't like is that even with better hardware, Windows will still find ways to enable telemetry and then exploits to that data. So, even once you upgrade your hardware, attackers will still find a way in thanks to Microsoft.
Mandating an upgrade by obsoleting the OS is going to add to our environmental disaster, the newest IPCC report says probably +1.5 C more by 2040 at current trajectories. I wish influential environmentalists would start shaming Microsoft.
Which isn't to say that modern apps and websites would run well on ten-year-old hardware—but there are equivalent apps and websites that would have run fine. In other words, the only thing you're getting with new hardware software bloat...
I agree that phones that are 4 years old are fine for most of the daily stuff, and even haswell PCs are still perfectly OK for the office, but this segment is a bit different and depending on the use case even earlier updates might be useful (like switching to pcie4/5 etc).
btw since I meant 4 years from now it also means that those unsupported workstations are not even new today, they could be running 2+years already, and 6 years upgrade cycle is not that bad
a) cheaper to replace
b) see updated answer - if these will be running for 6+ years at that point, it's mostly ok to upgrade them
At the Windows-centric companies I've worked for it was mostly just running Outlook that was the thing we all absolutely had to do every day, with only occasional use of Word.
So many businesses now have replaced Windows native business apps with either web based ones or (less and less) Java apps. Both work on Linux.
Question: How good is Thunderbird nowadays as an alternative to Outlook, from a business decision maker perspective? (Or is there better than Thunderbird for businesses deeply entrenched in Outlook?)
- The cost of retraining users
- The cost of evaluating whether, for each use case, the Linux distro has feature parity
- The cost of transitioning each old PC
- The dissatisfaction among the employee base about having to re-learn a system, even if the necessary features are there
- The fact that most business with 10k+ users are going to have business-specific apps that barely run on Windows 10, with no equivalent on Linux
- The risk to the decision-makers if it doesn't pan out -- it's the opposite of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"
- The fact that all of the back-end infrastructure--active directory domains, security, etc--is going to have to be transitioned too.
- The likely costs to the business itself in terms of lost opportunities, errors, and so on while the transition occurs.
The hardware itself is relatively cheap compared to the cost and logistics of getting that hardware set up and training users. My guess is that basically every business with that quantity of users would choose to just buy new hardware and keep their existing infrastructure and training over the alternative.
I think the bigger problem might be the CPU compatibility list, but that isn’t being enforced to my knowledge.
Are VMs that prevalent? I use them all the time, but I always assumed that was because I'm a weird nerd.