Unofficial Windows 11 Requirements Bypass Tool Allows Disabling All AI Features
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A tool has been released to bypass Windows 11 requirements and disable AI features, sparking discussion about Microsoft's practices and the desire for a more minimal Windows experience, with many users expressing frustration and considering alternatives like Linux.
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None of the 7 computers in our house have processors that are supported. Just the AMD Threadripper 2000 series and earlier that launched in 2018 (just 7 years ago) are not supported. That's a massive amount of CPUs about to hit ebay probably at huge discounts.
I'm hoping the Linux community takes advantage of this moment and focuses heavily on converting Windows users to Linux + Bottles.
The worst death is from fright. So let’s keep calm. Because Win 10 will work after October 2025.
I remember last year when they announced removing a major MS Teams connector around webhook integrations.
In July 2024 they said in August 2024 this feature would be disabled for new apps and then in October 2024 all integrations would stop working. This would effectively break a ton of 3rd party integrations. Think how crazy that is considering their top market is enterprise companies being sold on Teams through O365 licenses.
For context, this would be the equivalent of Slack saying they are going to remove all OAuth / webhook integrations and replace it with something else when "something else" wasn't even properly documented with practically no notice.
A few weeks after that announcement MS decided to extend that deadline to December 2025. I don't know the current state of things since I no longer work at the place using Teams.
My prediction is that instead of extending support forever like XP and 7, Windows 10 will be “unsupported” but it’ll still get security patches for a long time.
The “unsupported” nature of the OS will only matter to corporate auditors. Consumers will be using Windows 10 for years longer.
Linux Mint is said to be good for usage.
But what I will miss is Outlook tuned to perfection. I don’t know how to transform 30+ GB pst file to something different. :)
> I'm honestly still shocked there isn't some kind of lawsuit or federal investigation on how Microsoft is able to get away with dropping support for CPUs that are only a few years old.
There is no law that requires a company to make their new product compatible with a different company’s 7 year old hardware. I don’t know why you’d expect this to become a lawsuit or federal investigation.
This kind of user isn’t exactly jumping on the latest Windows version. They’re going to be using Windows 10 until their hardware dies and they’ll “upgrade” when their next machine comes with the current Microsoft OS.
I personally don’t think the end of “support” for Windows 10 will have any meaning. There are too many users still using it for Microsoft to stop patching it. The “unsupported” status will only matter to companies who want to pass audits.
Isn't it only 2017 CPUs and older? So that's at least ~9 years of free updates (free updates stop at the end of 2026 with the extension), which is frankly better than most other OSs.
If you include paid ESU updates it's at least ~11 years and if you include LTSC it's even way longer than that.
There are many things we can complain about when it comes to Windows, but I wouldn't say long term support is one of them. It's generally better than macOS or Linux distros, not to mention smartphones.
That's the indictment of the industry, not a praise for Microsoft.
MSFT lies to our face about not supporting Kaby Lake, except the one single CPU that was sold in Surfaces when W11 was announced. What an coincidence.
I don't know why you must come conclusion at this point, no one force you to upgrade into next version
as far as I know, when you buy windows 10 license, you tied into certain edition that would work for that edition. nothing mention next OS (in this case windows11) should backward compatible with last edition
if you think 7-8 years is bad, think how much smartphone that not receive update for years, most often that this phone didn't receive update at all
and google and apple literally making new edition of android/ios that break depedency every year
mac os always have been backward compatible with old intel hardware, nothing changes or stopping you to still use your old intel mac either
"Sooner or later that will be gaming on Linux and Windows never get booted again."
that never gonna happen
Security updates are necessary and regular Windows 10 users won't get them anymore.
Run Windows 10 ltsc or move to Unix or Linux if that's an issue
Rufus can create a bootable USB drive with the 11 installer modified* to bypass the other artificial requirements like TPM and bypass the stupid “need internet access to force you to make a Microsoft account” requirement too.
https://rufus.ie/en/
*change some flags in the installer
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
...which you probably didn't need either, so just refuse to upgrade and start pushing back that way.
the way MS gets away with it is by making people think they have no other choice.
I also installed Linux Mint which I am trying to do as much as possible on. Its really fantastic, its crazy how it "just works".. The most intuitive and user friendly OS ive ever used.. I just do a lot of weird game and game-dev stuff that I still need Windows for.. If I didnt do that stuff I would 100% be on Mint.. And that is changing with Steam, Wine, Bottles, Proton, Lutris, the amount of stuff u cant do keeps shrinking and it keeps getting easier and easier. Most people on earth should be using Linux, it would be objectively better and easier to do everything they want to do on their computer compared to all the other popular OSes.
Still, I've been using computers for 30 years and I'm starting to feel the itch to look for Linux alternatives and I'm pretty old. Change does do not comes easily to old people. This is bad for ms.
You keep on testing/experimenting daily, slowly getting the hang of it one software at a time. And once you found how to do everything you have to on linux, you're just ready to switch.
Constantly fighting MS irresponsible decisions makes no sense any more.
I don't think the current state of the Linux desktop is ready for that. Linux desktop still loves to show its sharp edges from time to time. Sure, I do also think most of Windows stuff now "just works" on Linux; Proton & Wine already cover a lot of "Windows-only" app I need and I only boot to Windows when I need to change some proprietary driver config.
However, I think "just works" here is different from the general population definition of "just works". HN folks probably don't even mind writing their own patches or compiling stuff for themself. But for the general population, people don't even change the default settings, let alone follow a tutorial or type in some commands on their terminal. People delegate this stuff to more "techie" people around them or dial customer support.
I don't think there will be a mass adoption of Linux desktop until this part gets ironed out or somehow everyone is forced to install Linux by their employer/school.
In my experience, it's still quite annoying and fragmented in Linux desktop to install stuff here. GUIs like KDE Discover exist, but sometimes it doesn't do the things I expect them to do. For example Wine. Last week I tried to install it from Discover but it doesn't work like expected for apps I need. After figuring things out, it was some kind of regression bug, and I had to open a terminal to install the version I needed.
Games, sure. I think Steam + Proton does a very good job making things seamless; you don't even need to do anything other than press the install button on your library. This is what I expect if you try to sell Linux to the general population.
Drivers, it's kind of a mixed bag. I've had some bad experiences with Nvidia drivers lately, and it just got fixed in the latest patch. Proprietary drivers also rarely support Linux distros. It might be useless, but some people might find their RGB mouse and peripherals not working anymore to be a dealbreaker.
Closed-source doesn't help for a poweruser; I'm fine with fiddling around with the code or config, just give me the code and manpages.
But again, my argument is that all of this is not applicable for the general population. Excluding loud internet forums, people seem fine sacrificing this kind of jank behavior as long as it doesn't interfere with their task that much.
I think Apple's recent Liquid Glass is a kind of stupid attempt to try to copy Win Vista-7 Aero style with terrible execution. But as long as it still allows Apple users do their things, I don't think they're going to switch to Linux just for customization.
* If you use auto-hide, it won't show when some applications are open. Edge in particular is bad.
* Some applications simply don't show on the taskbar at all. Teams is one. It's in the alt-tab list.
* Sometimes it stops working entirely.
The testing and QA of this stuff appears to be largely absent.
Meanwhile whenever I had to deal with Ubuntu or other such distros, I keep getting issues in the most basic functionality even on fresh installs. Can't launch firefox, random non descriptive errors from package updates, poor device support...
The UI and reliability is still generally better than Linux, although KDE is getting pretty close.
There's been many such tools for other anti-features, they eventually stop working.
Then again, this is the company that answered complaints about Windows being bad for development by embedding an OS that is good for development and calling that an innovation rather than an acknowledgement that Windows is bad.
Well, they actually did it twice in recent history: WSL 1 was relatively innovative, integrating Linux application compatibility into the Windows operating system itself. But that turned out to still be bad for development because it meant Linux software was now subjected to the performance problems of the Windows IO stack. So they responded with WSL 2, an ordinary Linux VM. And separately they also introduced the "Dev Drive" feature to let you create a filesystem that bypassed the worst parts of the Windows IO stack.
Both FreeBSD and Illumos were running Linux applications (at various levels of compatibility) many years prior to wsl v1. Joyent even went as far as re-implementing the Docker api to allow running OCI images natively in LX zones. Hence, it wasn't even that novel of an idea.
Admittedly back then I was working for a place that mainly developed in Perl, so I didn’t port a whole lot of ELFs across. So maybe I’m misremembering
Thanks for correction
It was nice because getting anything approved by the windows sysadmin group was like changing the tire on a moving truck.
It was more than a godsend, because when a windows server was plugging into "the wrong vlan" we could just give them the tcpdump command to capture a CDP/LLDP packet and tell us which switch and port the box was physically connected to.
For example with tcpdump:
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Athe-tcpdump-group%2Ftcpdu...
So it’s not quite the same thing as what we were discussing further up the thread. Though it’s still an interesting anecdote in its own right.
But there are plenty of examples of compatibility layers like this throughout computing history. WINE, cygwin, Linux compat, etc.
Microsoft even went down this road already in the 80s with Xenix before abandoning the idea of Unix.
The only novel part of WSL was the marketing folks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
Then with the release of XP it was replaced with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2
https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/6ce3f21
https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/1a68594
He also came to the same conclusion compat layers were a dead end (OpenBSD removed all compat_*(8) support, including Linux).
The interesting thing about WSLv1 is the pico process concept, not the syscall compatibility.
I would say that this vision of Windows would involve Microsoft essentially producing a Linux graphical shell similar to Gnome and KDE with a bunch of convenience tools that are typical to the Windows experience. It would have defaults like the Bing brower and all the typical Windows revenue-generating stuff.
I don’t think the GPL requirement to release code is a problem for the business model. Not all of the tooling has to be released as GPL and even if some of it does, the brand and commercial partnerships of Windows will mean that most people don’t go out and replace Windows with the hypothetical de-commercialized version.
We see this with VSCode where Microsoft is totally fine to release the code with an even more permissive license than the GPL, but they keep the extension marketplace gated. If you want Microsoft’s extensions you have to use VSCode.
One day Microsoft would say, hey, Windows 15 is Linux-based. It'll run most of your Windows stuff either natively with some nice developer tooling to make a transition or using a compatibility layer (which, as we know, Linux already has!)
But you can keep using Windows 14 for a very, very long time.
The moment these 'solutions' would get mainstream traction they will be shut down.
Linux is catching up (mostly in gaming) but nothing comes close to the amount of engineer-hours poured into building Windows desktop apps.
Microsoft has their niche, which is offices. This used to be the main application of computers, but now it is just a very large niche.
The overwhelming majority of computer interactions are Android clients talking to Linux servers.
Just because lots of people use their phones primarily doesn’t mean that desktop computers aren’t responsible for producing literally trillions of dollars of shit every month. All those mobile apps? Developed and built and tested on desktops. The mobile phones themselves? Designed and built and QA’d using desktops. The payroll for the 200,000 people in the supply chain to get them to you? Desktops.
The power grid. Airline reservation systems. CNC mills. MRI machines. Mortgage underwriting. Computer factories. Pick-n-place machines. These aren’t run off phones.
You get the idea. Real business runs on real computers, still, no matter how many billions spend how many hours playing Candy Crush.
It’s bordering on unusable. There is no amount of money you could pay me to daily-drive the current release of consumer windows.
In fact, I was trying to convince developers at work (fortune 500 company) to move from Windows to Linux for a long time, only 1 person moved.
For a bit of cruel fun, have a Finance person use Libreoffice scalc instead of Excel. Doing that is probably the worse thing you can do to a Finance person, I think after a few days of that, they will end up in ICU.
FWIW, we were allowed to use RHEL, Fedora or Ubuntu on our workstations instead of Windows.
you cannot take a compiled gui app for linux from 20 years ago and run it on a modern system and have it work. on windows it will work just fine.
not to bring out that old trope, but windows is an OS (and desktop environment) - linux is a kernel. you know what they meant, and your rebuttal isn’t one.
also, GP clearly said ABI and you jumped to API - one is much harder than the other.
If something is being pushed on me, it's obviously bad for me, and good for the pusher.
That being said, I do agree that windows is user hostile and i won't run it myself.
Maybe if those were only security updates. Windows pushes new features, new crap, and re-enables and re-installs (!) stuff you've removed via this path as well.
ms is def at the point of major enshitification
You're thirsty. Do you want a Coke or an Africola? Coke obviously - what the heck is Africola? Why do you want a Coke? Because you saw the Coke logo everywhere since birth.
For all the other companies its exactly the other way around. I will see products of a company, I know bothers me when I want to do something else, and a bunch of products I have no (negative) opinion yet. Guess which products I will evaluate?
For an ad to leave a good impression it must be actually good, otherwise it achieves exactly the opposite. People used to buy advertisements, the ad industry destroyed this, by forcing people to look at ads. People don't like being forced.
I don't think we will ever see a new version the way you described it, the amount of information Microsoft get from spying and telemetry is so much more profitable they even gave 10/11 for free.
thats what i use it for, comes with no new feature updates (which is sometimes annoying as some software depends on some Windows feature updates) and you have to buy 5x licences- and its more expensive. but it works.
The price varies a lot from suprisingly cheap ($7.7, is buykeysoft.com legit?) to a bit expensive but acceptable (~200 CHF). I'll definitely use these when I'm setting up my new desktop in the future.
What's the difference between outright piracy and buying an invalid (but functioning) CD key? Legally: nothing.
If a key is minted to be used only in certain areas or for certain purposes (healthcare, education) and it's sold to me- I don't have a right to use it.
That's the really annoying thing about these CD key online things, they give the illusion of doing the right thing but ultimately it's the same issue.
Truthfully I don't think any of us will be audited, but it's an annoying situation I continually see. People think just because money changed hands that they're legal.
But in the end I'm fine with that. First, the vendor is no longer selling this product, second, there is only that much one can do.
IoT LTSC.
Works like a charm and no bloat.
windows was feature complete with Windows 2000
There is no universe in which LTSC is slower than the regular release.
I don't game and all my software is cross platform. Windows still has a few things I miss, programs like notepad++ (for which there's no true Linux equivalent), and portable apps (with Linux equivalents not really coming close, but understandably so).
Windows really is a broken OS solely set up for spying on users.
Sublime text
Creating bootable install disc via Rufus gives you an options to set up offline account, skip secure boot requirements, skip privacy options, etc., Installation is then a matter of few clicks.
They are fundamentally incapable of doing this. The senior management are incapable of even imagining in a dream of a windows that didn't spy on its users while also forcing them to use the software managers want in the way managers want.
Even if some dev team managed to make one (it would have to be on the sly), and guerrilla marketed it, and it was a giant hit, the managers would just force all the spyware and bloat and restrictions over time. They can't help but do it.
Or being able to sell it as an aftermarket license upgrade would be a way to get more revenue from people who were otherwise going to ride an OEM Home license for which MS had a negotiated rate of 34 cents per machine.
OTOH, one thing about the ongoing advertising/enshittification bubble is that it seems to distort people's understanding of revenue and NPV. They'd rather have the possibility of infinite future ad/spyware revenue even when people are clamoring to offer up-front real cash instead.
Fedora.
Arch.
Open Suse .
Pick one, stop trying to make Windows look like a decent os. My local Windows install just gave up. I'm very close to trying Windows 11 in a VM on top of Fedora or whatever, can't really do that on my 16gb ram value laptop though.
If Maschine offered official Linux support, that's what I make music with, I'd be 100% Windows free.
The Desktop on Linux has come pretty far already and most of the complaints are from people that made the wrong choice for their UX.
Sometimes setting up a WINE environment is worth it, but I'd argue that as long ss you still need to use the CLI to create environments, it's not there yet. Proton has been amazing for better support.
Also, don't pick Arch when you come from Windows, it's not the right choice for you. Pick a beginner friendly distro, everyone has to start somewhere. Debian, LinuxMint, or Ubuntu are incredibly easy to learn.
KDE is heavy, but that's the magic of Linux. It's to you to figure out your perfect combination.
I'd argue that if you don't care how computers work, buy a Mac. If you actually enjoy the process Linux is great.
They are overpriced for 2025 (especially because the height-adjustable stand costs quite a bit extra). But they wake very fast from sleep and work fantastically with a Mac.
Linux on Desktop is especially great for used Laptops. In that case the Linux community had a bit of time to adjust to the hardware.
Laptop also offer a well defined hardware environment where you know exactly what's inside.
Once you additional devices the range of hardware that needs to be supported is so much wider and so is the risk that something does not work.
However, especially for more casual users to just use your Laptop and not connect anything ever is in my opinion a quite common use case. There you can optimise to support some Laptops really well. And that is where Linux can shine.
In terms of install size, performance is usually higher than on lightweight DEs.
Go grab an installation of Bottles and prepare to be amazed.
And look, I love Ubuntu. I'm sticking with it (although kinda wish I'd been less safe and chosen Fedora or OpenSuse). But, to be honest, I've had, and continue to have, a ton of problems related to hardware. Problems waking from sleep (I gave up trying to fix this and just restart every time now), problems with external monitor not reawakening after screen timeout, problems with the wifi speed suddenly dropping until I restart (apparently Linux doesn't play well with Intel Killer 6e laptop wifi), problems with my Brother printer (won't wake from sleep over wifi, works fine on Android and Windows though).
None of these are quite deal breakers. Sure, I have to open and close my laptop lid three or four times to get the external monitor to switch back on, and and the login prompt will only show on my laptop screen which gets set to 1% brightness every restart, so if it's sunny I have to stick my face right against the screen to see it.
Nevertheless, I persevere. I've fixed 70% of the initial issues. But you know what I will not do? Recommend Linux desktop to a non-technical person. My mother, my sister, my girlfriend, most of my acquaintances. They would hate to deal with this stuff, and simply don't have to on Windows, for all it's faults.
I think that people who recommend Linux desktop nearly all started by buying a laptop that officially supports Linux, or at least is known to not have issues like these. Then they forget how important this step was and go around recommending it to everyone.
Most people shouldn't install a Linux desktop on any normal Windows laptop. Not a decade ago when I last seriously tried it out, and not now either. Although the experience definitely has improved, so maybe in another 5 or 10 years.
My only issue is that this CPU is a bit too slow, I should have bought laptop with a performance line CPU. And of course I have a lot of issues with Linux approach to usability, but that has nothing to do with hardware support, more like opinions.
Non-developer, don’t need Linux but sometimes need a Windows machine and this is it.
Everything worked out of the box with Linux except the fingerprint reader. About a fortnight after I bought it, it received a firmware update and the fingerprint reader just started working and has since.
I know there are tradeoffs everywhere in life but man, these are deal breakers. I'd install windows in my brain before I put up with having to push my boulder uphill just to log in.
Usually I can use muscle memory to bypass the login screen so it's not quite as bad. It's only if I do something wrong that I need to see it.
My personal experience was completely the opposite. I had two ordinary Windows laptops that I decided to install Linux on, all hardware worked perfectly. Even on the most niche distros like Void Linux, the touchscreen, pen pressure sensitivity, everything worked. The beauty of having hardware that is supported in mainline Linux kernel.
So it entirely depends on the hardware you choose to buy. Most people don't think about Linux when purchasing hardware, neither did I, and I only got lucky. But now it's at the front of my mind, and I think other people should also keep it in their minds if they don't want to forever be stuck with whatever Microsoft decides to stick on their computers
Who do you think you are addressing with this? People here are either on Apple, already on some other X or do use Windows because they have to.
Most of the rest of the people on this planet won't use either of your recommendations because they have no idea how to work this, how to fix errors, how to find programs they need, jump over compatibility issues with other Windows users, or don't even have a PC at home and have to work with windows at their workplaces.
So what is the point of your comment?
Plenty of people here on this site are right on the edge of a major change in operating system and benefit from that slight peer pressure to go ahead and make that change.
What is the point of your comment? Just use the downvote button.
Edit: see? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45155975
From my experience, Windows has always been somewhat modular (see 98lite for an early example), so it's not too difficult to pick and choose what pieces you want, but the main worry is that one of these hostile features is a dependency of a core component.
but do keep in mind that there is a risk associated with customizing your Windows installation in unintended ways
Of course there is this obligatory FUD from the Microsoft-fansite. In contrast to the risk associated with letting Microsoft absorb all your data and take control of your computer?
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