I will have a look and see if it is within my capabilities, i am useless when it comes to stuff like this.
As per my OP, I downloaded a Win 11 ISO plus Rufus and used the options in the Rufus setup to make a USB install stick that bypasses the MS requirements that usually prevents it installing on older non compatible PCs. Successes so far: 4th Gen i5 4670 ITX 5th gen i3 laptop 6th gen i3 6100 office PC 7th gen i5 7500 office PC Gen 7 Microserver
personally, I just create a autounattend file, add it to a w11 iso and chuck it on ventoy. Bypass everything, create local account, remove all the bloat and basically have a clean w11 install. Not found anything it wont install on yet, its even running on this laptop thats a dinosaur with an AMD A6-3400M APU from 2011! to create the xml file I use https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
As far as I'm aware with Rufus bypasses all you need is a CPU that supports SSE4.2, so you can get away with first gen intel (Nehalem onwards) i-series from 2008.
Windows hasn't been an operating system for a very long time. For the better part of a decade it has been nothing more than a mass data collection endpoint and a vehicle to railroad you into ongoing subscriptions to Microsoft services: OneDrive, the 'Microsoft Store', Office365, Azure services, Copilot... Microsoft doesn't give one wet turd whether you paid £220, £22, £2.20, £0.22, £0.02, or even £0 for your copy of Windows. What matters is that you're using Windows, because that makes it a hell of a lot easier to sell you more Microsoft stuff and harvest that sweet sweet user activity data. Microsoft owes its entire existence to nepotism, and its market-strangling anti-competitive practices have never changed. I realise the irony of me posting this from my desktop PC running Windows 11. As soon as I get a good few hours to myself, where I have no other commitments or obligations to worry about, I will be moving to Linux. Installing Linux isn't the "hard" part - sorting through the years of crufty data to make sure stuff is backed up properly is the hard part. For a long time I held off because of the possibility of having issues with DRM or anti-cheat technology in games, but I do. not. care. If a game stops working then it stops working. To paraphrase Ed Zitron... "**** these people. **** them for making me so angry about this. **** them for destroying something that I am passionate about and care about."
Do any of you know if it's possible to upgrade win10 to 11 on unsupported hardware, say with a rufus iso? Friend has a laptop that can't really be formatted at this point.
You can indeed, Rufus has additional options when you press START to generate a windows 11 flash disk as below. Now you don't have to do a clean install, just open setup on the flash drive and you can upgrade within Windows 10 on anything from 2008ish onwards that supports SSE 4.2 I've recently updated everything I have to Win11 with this method, no reason Microsoft couldn't let you do it yourself with a waiver or summat.
I didn't know either til the other day! Have got a tablet I've been wanting to upgrade since last year that has TPM 2.0 but the processor (8th gen i5) didn't make it onto the guestlist. There's gonna be so much e-waste because of these pointless restrictions.
They design their hardware in such a way that it becomes e-waste the moment it rolls off the production line. It’s entirely in character for them to design their OS to create even more e-waste. Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know, Linux drops support for older hardware, too. Why, it was only this year that the kernel dropped support for the 486 and the first generation Pentium. Totally stands to reason that Microsoft should drop support for CPUs that were released as far back as five years before Win11 launched. (I hope it need not be said that those last two parts were sarcasm! The first bit absolutely was not sarcasm though.)
Whilst there are distros that support allsorts, many commercial Linux distros also drop cpu support in the enterprise world because when something falls out of support it becomes a liability or lacks the features needed going forward, try run that 486 on RHEL10 with official support.
You're right, RHEL10 does not support 32-bit x86 targets (or any 32-bit targets, for that matter.) It does, however, support ppc64le - as in PowerPC Little Endian, as in POWER8, as in you can install it on systems launched in 2014, eleven years ago. It also doesn't discriminate as to what AMD64 chips it runs on, and will happily install on - and be supported on, if you're willing to pony up the cash - an Opteron from 2003 or a Pentium 4 from 2004, with as little as 1.5GB of RAM. That's not the oldest system you can run fully-supported RHEL10 on, though: that'd be IBM Z architecture, introduced on the IBM zSeries 900 in December 2000. 25 years old this year, though I'll admit that's a lot younger than the 486. Source.
Not sure if that is the case as it requires x86-64-v3 at a minimum. but yes I am sure the support for some of the other stuff probably has military/energy reasons for its longevity.
Oh, does it? My mistake. So that's, what... Intel Haswell (June 2013), AMD Excavator (2015). Still older than Microsoft's supporting! That same page suggests the IBM Z support is limited to z14 and newer, too, which launched in 2017 - and the ppc64le version requires POWER9, which was also 2017. So looks like a Haswell system is the oldest you could get RHEL10 on without cheating, 12 years old. Not quite the 25 I thought! Fun fact: 64-bit IBM z/Architecture is implemented as an extension on top of the S/360 architecture, and is still compatible with programs written for S/360 in 31-bit and 24-bit addressing mode - meaning you can take a program written in 1964 and run it on an IBM Z unmodified. Neat, right?!
Edit: tapped the wrong tiny fraction of screen and posted an incomplete train of thought that I hadn’t finished turning into something resembling a coherent post.
So… because I can’t run RHEL10 on a 486 (though I’m not sure why you’d want to even try), that means it’s ok that Win11 has an arbitrary software lockout…? Enterprise kit is irrelevant in this context. Most of the world’s servers already run Linux, and there aren’t going to be many people trying to run Win11 on an enterprise server. The point is that it’s an arbitrary software lockout. If Win11 absolutely could not function without some CPU feature that simply did not exist 5 years ago then it would be understandable. But that isn’t the case. Win11 will happily work with absolutely zero loss of functionality on hardware that Microsoft says isn’t compatible. The Win11 hardware requirements are a blatant lie, and the OS is actively hostile towards users.
