Before installing Linux, I had originally planned to dual-boot on my main PC, but somehow a gaming rig from 5 years ago isn’t good enough to run windows 11, which is ridiculous.
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Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025.
Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer.
But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again?
Weird, my gaming rig that I built before COVID runs 11 like a champ. Didn’t buy good parts by the sound of it.
I bought a shitty laptop 3 and 1/2 years ago that came with Windows 11 on it and I’ve never had an issue with it I don’t know how all these people are having problems with these supposedly well-built systems
The problem is that Microsoft set seemingly arbitrary hardware requirenents to install Windows 11, it’s not about performance.
If you have a Kaby Lake or Ryzen 2000 system of any specs, you are already out of luck, no matter if you have 32 cores or 128G RAM.
But somehow, magically, a few Kaby Lake Microsoft Surface laptops are fine to run Windows 11, so those specific CPUs are cool. The rest (mostly desktops) is not.
God, I love Linux nerds.
That is a glorious pizza box computer.
:) I have an old 2010 network drive, running Debian and OpenMediaVault for music and video shares. It has 256MB of memory and doesn’t need it all to act as a folder share and streaming box. Windows 11 needing such a high end chip to run is just really poor optimization
Little PCeaser’s.
Win11 is 4,5 years old and still feels like 10 builds away from going gold. It feels thrown together.
Regularly, file explorer just stops being an explorer for me. Window sizing and buttons work, but I can’t select files or folders. I have to exit file explorer and relaunch it.
Extra fun: My current gaming laptop has a TPM, but it’s so new that Windows 10 doesn’t recognize it. So when I try to upgrade it says ‘lol nope’.
My work laptop had required CPU, but said can’t upgrade due to TPM chip being 1.2 and requirements are TPM 2.0. So I downloaded the firmware updater to get the TPM to 2.0. Then I reran the checker and it said nope CPU not supported. Lol, just arbitrary nonsense.
The TPM requirement is artificial and can be bypassed in the installer.
But I don’t want to install windows
Then why are you using a Windows installer? I’m so confused.
Microsoft are not asking you, they will install it anyway
Tell me more, I thought TPM was hardware checked?
No critical part of Windows actually requires the TPM. The limitation is 99% artificial. Which is why people keep finding workarounds.
Windows security is built upon the a chain of trust from boot. If you do not have a chip then that is not there which I’d say is a critical part of Windows missing. You can argue its not required but its part of what windows wants to ship so id say it is.
Even if it were true. Windows security is probably the worst part about windows, and that’s saying alot. If you can manage to somehow disable it you will probably improve your frame rates 15%, your battery life by 30%, double your hard drives life, and increase the actual security of your system significantly, since most of the malware will just crash as it doesn’t know how to deal with not having Windows security installed, breaking it’s install process. You will also greatly increase your privacy, and extend the life of good software, because without the spyware, Microsoft has a harder time figuring out which software people install that they want to break in a future update to benefit their corporate partners in crime. You will also greatly improve the responsiveness of the system anytime there is disk IO. There is literally not a single reason to use windows security. The only time it will benefit you is if your cat is walking on your keyboard at night and installing random software or something because you don’t have a lock screen. You will also somehow get laid more because you don’t look like a boomer.
You realize the post you’re replying in right? Lol
No I genuinely dont understand why my comment would be considered out of place or strange?
I saw someone complain about TPM requirements and someone else say to ignore them because they arent needed but I think if you want windows 11 they ARE needed.
The amount of misinformation here made me think I’m on the Technology community.
TPM 2.0 is only of the MANY security features that are now hard-required. Among them is DCH driver support, MBEC support, or HVCI.
Tux: What 4 GB RAM? This is some gourmet shit.
Tell that to the modern web though.
Fuckin’ a man. My backup server uses 70mb of ram, My NAS, 250mb. My laptop, about 1GB doing normal usage things. Open up one webpage with a YouTube video embedded and the processor constantly runs all 4 cores at 30%+, fan is on high, 3GB ram getting eaten away at for a paused video and text. It’s ridiculous.
I don’t know how youtube does it, but decoding a video, say with libavcodec(ffmpeg) without GPU acceleration is pretty demanding. They could do it on their server and send you the stream, but then again they’d save a lot of money not doing that.
But I agree it shouldn’t take so much when nothing is happening, the web has very much become so bloated.
The web is so fat nowadays that it makes Windows look slim.
The modern web so fat that when it sits around the house, it sits around the shockingly robust infrastructure we’ve collected that provides us great convenience while it slurps up our privacy.
The modern web so fat that It uses a VCR as a beeper.
Hey you kids, get off my lawn!
And electron based apps 🤮 Why did they become the norm, especially ones that don’t even have an actual website version.
i think the biggest problem with electron is that it doesn’t just use some system-provided browser library, instead every electron app ships its own browser environment, which takes up a lot of space each time and makes the whole system a whole lot less efficient. shared libraries exist for a reason.
I compile links2 from source and use “links2 -g” strictly nowadays. Wikipedia works so it has everything I need. I would contribute if I knew how to program latex rendering.
Installed Fedora on my newish dell with intel integrated graphics. Watching videos in Firefox was nothing but lag, even in 720P.
And also when the lid is closed, it doesn’t go to sleep.
Linux is only good if you have some kind of driver support.
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia?highlight=(\bCategoryHowto\b)
You should install the intel media driver and ffmpeg to have hardware acceleration support on firefox, iirc
I recently picked up a couple of e-waste laptops, Thinkpad x130e’s with an AMD E-300, 4GB RAM and a 320GB spinner. For the pair I paid $60 shipped. These were low-end semi-ruggedized laptops meant for students released around the time that HBO started showing Game of Thrones.
I’ve put Debian on one and it runs great. All the hardware just works, everything is pretty quick after boot, and I love how rugged and portable it is. Email, writing, basic productivity, hobby development and 2D gaming all work great. Web browsing takes a hit if I open too many tabs, the video card is too underpowered for most 3D games that came out after 2010, and large compiles are slow. I’m a bit worried about the aging HDD so I’m going to replace it with a cheap SSD which should help with boot and compile times.
The other one I’m not sure about. I’ve tried HaikuOS and the video and wifi work well and the whole system feels very snappy, but there’s no audio or webcam support. Redox seems interesting but needs a whole lot more hardware support. I’ll probably just end up cloning the first one unless I can get a better suggestion.
All that is to say, Linux is great on old cheap hardware.
Even the cheapest SSD you can find will improve the performance quite significantly.
My laptop is also an old e-waste Thinkpad. I run Xubuntu on it and it flies.
E-waste Thinkpads are quickly becoming my favorite laptops.
… I should really start a business selling nice socks …
If they stopped showing so many ads, maybe they’d leave enough memory to run an operating system.
That’d be like asking a a kid to stop selling lemonade so he can focus on making a sign out of something other than cardboard
Nah man, Microsoft doesn’t give their OS away for free. The ads are just greed on top of an already expensive product.
More like asking a kid to stop selling lemonade so he can focus on making lemonade out of something other than cardboard.
I had the same on my 5 year old gaming rig. Turns out only thing blocking it was TPM being disabled. I reluctantly upgraded, as I have too many files on my PC needed for my wife’s visa process, as well as a 2 year old toddler, so I really don’t currently have the time to sort through, and backup all the files, and then install Linux.
Ok so important advice: regardless of Win/Linux, back up your data! Hard drive failures happen, and it can happen randomly at any time. So if you have important documents or any data you want to keep, back it up onto another drive, and ideally a second back up off site. And then get in the habit of refreshing those backups regularly,
I have had multiple hard drives failures over the years and learnt the hard way that you need multiple backups.
This is also important as a 5 year old gaming PC means 5 year old hard drives, and shit really does happen.
EDIT: And if you really have 0 time, get a second drive the same size as your hard drive and clone it. It’s better than nothing and can be set up in minutes. It’s not efficient as you will clone data you don’t need but at least you’ll be safe as soon as it’s done.
Totally understandable. I took literal years to finally get a backup set up so that I could do this.
Well hey, if you keep your old hardware there’s probably a ton of different ways you can use it for other purposes! :)
I made the switch to Linux about ten years ago … mainly because I didn’t want to upgrade to the latest Windows 7/8 and I just didn’t have the need to use any Windows software … all I do is write documents, store photos, some light video editing and go online - why do I need any other OS? The only problem I had at the start was video editing … it just meant I didn’t do any. Now there are several options to get that done too.
The fun part was that my old hardware suddenly ran twice as fast with the latest Ubuntu at the time … and I haven’t look back since.
Linux gang rise up!!!
I switch to Linux in college (20ish years ago) and have been exclusively using it since. Windows XP was my last windows machine. I’ve never regretted it.
If it wasn’t for work/school and Microsoft fucking around with document standards I’d happily never see a windows machine again. My last true windows machine was 7 for gaming and correcting document formatting in college.
I went 15 years without needing a windows machine and now I’m taking online courses where a full windows install is required for some test taking, so I have tiny10 on a dirty gross separate drive, dual booted, fuck off with windows 11. I have a VM with it as well for fixing formatting in docs and spreadsheets I make in libreoffice, because Microsoft STILL has to just fuck with open standards.
I’ll be damned if I have to use it more than I have to.
My wife is in grad school (again) and has survived on a cheap Chromebook so far, but it entirely depends on the university (and maybe the class/degree).
I’m doing a computer information systems degree, but it’s through the business school. So my first class is “how to use Microsoft Office”. The assignments are basically “do these things to make look exactly like this” so I have to pull out the VM to look to see if the formatting stuck (it usually doesn’t on the little obscure things).
Plus there’s a locked down browser for testing that ONLY works on a full install of windows (not even VM) but I have yet to be required to use that, so Windows is staying off until they time. I’m super tempted to try to put windows on a USB so I can throw it across the room in a biohazard bag when not in use.
Video editing is still a hurdle for me, sometimes I do some shitposts but want to add sparkles and some effects. There’s Davinci and it’s fucking great but I can’t afford the paywalled version (even less if I’m gonna use something once or twice), it doesn’t have things like copilot for quick default effects. Also it doesn’t renderize things that are outside the usual/common video sizes.
Kdenlive works for some basic video editing, but it feels too convoluted just for some basic editing.I end up booting Windows and going to after effects anyway.
I thought that for a while myself … then I started editing things with simple cuts and very few effects. They did build an entire movie industry for most of the 20th century on editing equipment that was no more complex than simple cutting and splicing.
If you want a more simple video editing package you could give OpenShot a try.
My first “true gaming PC” has been turned into a NAS and small docker host. Its about to turn 15, and I have spare hardware to upgrade it, but I like to see how much I can churn out of it.
I did the same for a while using TrueNAS … I cobbled together every single spare HDD I had at the time onto my first true desktop PC (450Mhz CPU with a gig of RAM, in a giant box full of HDD that felt like a small heater in my office)… I think it was six or seven drives that added up to about 2TB and I felt like I had become Hackerman … I even set it up with Transmission to download a bunch of Linux distros I wanted to try as well as a ton on movies and TV shows I couldn’t get at the time. Basically the reason why I got back into watching all the Star Trek series after downloading all of TNG, VOY and DS9
I had one of the Macintosh iBook G4s with the notoriously shitty graphics card soldering. Early days of lead-free soldering. Mine started to fail just outside of warranty. The ‘fix’ was to put a lot of pressure on the chip so that all the connections were held in place, but that was quite difficult to do while it was still a laptop.
Dismantled the damn thing, yeeted the plastic shell, and screwed the remains onto a sheet of plywood. Looked a lot like pizza-box PC in the corner there. Got another couple of years out of it. Made it a lot more convenient for watching videos, since you could just prop the whole thing against a wall or whatever. Couple of USB extension leads meant that you could still use a mouse and keyboard in comfort.
Just save yourself the hassle and ditch the malware.
I did and am much happier. When I went to install Linux, it was a last minute decision to try to dual boot, and that was the day that the Win11 pop-up showed up saying that I couldn’t, so I thought “that makes my decision easy” and wiped the whole thing.
