I thought the post might fall flat on its face if people didn't know him or his back story. Sam Tucker is a Australian youtuber that's been poking fun at the big tech companies advertising campaigns, products and prices for years such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. Ever since he started people keep telling him that Linux is free, i think they have finally broken him.
If it was so important, the OS wouldn’t work without it. But you can patch the installer to remove the check… and it works.
In the same boat here - two of our systems run Sandy and are performing absolutely fine (apart from some random blue screens on mine which I'm not sure yet are down to the board or the drive failing. Or the memory. But I've got a lot more on my plate at the moment so have just put that to one side to use the laptop).
I've often wonder the entire point of collecting that user data because they sure as hell aren't using it to improve the Windows experience. If anything they seem to be making things much much worse. Like how many different ways do you need to open task manager? How many different settings menus do you need? and for the love of all things holy can you please fix sleep? Apple needed one generation to get a desktop to work on arm and a translation/emulation layer that was for the most part *chefs kiss*...MS have been attempting it since windows 8 and it still feels like an OS with performance from 10 years prior. Any software engineer who is experience imposter syndrome just remember a company the size of Microsoft hired teams of people to build Windows and this is what they shat out Put Windows 11 on an old Thinkpad edge E320 running Sandybridge i3 (upgraded to an i7 quad for giggles) to see what the process was like in the event I went that route on my main PC. Needless to say it works, slow AF booting but it works. Ended up running Bazzite on my GPD Win 3 and it's been amazing. Still a few things to get sorted (mainly TPD controls) that I'll try and address but I've actually found enjoyment tinkering again I'd lost with Windows. Would Probably run Pop_Os! as Framework have support for it and want to try Endeavour as it supposedly has good support for Nvidia drivers. Since the rise of gaming handhelds and the work Valve has done for SteamOS, there has been a noticeable rise in "one click installers" and plenty of how to guides and videos for any gotchas. Means you don't quite have to learn the inner workings to understand what problem you are looking at (and subsuquent downsides to that) but means installing and setting up is much less of a chore. Just the choice paralysis now setting in......
I can see the board meetings now.... "We have metrics that by implementing these changes, introducing layers of bad design and features no one uses to the point we have frustrating the hell out of all our users that they either refuse to upgrade and are still rocking windows 10 and it was a challenge getting them even to upgrade to that from Windows 7 never mind 8 and are now willing to abandon us for Mac or even Linux please throw money at us" AI model training or torturing the poor thing. I've seen the videos of an AI playing [insert game here] game and I bet that's what the average Window user looks to an AI. Clicking through random menus, spinning in circles and falling down all over the place before breaking down and buying a Mac instead or attempting to complete the task on their phone instead.
I may be getting senile and repeating but; Remember windows troubleshooter? - The one you tried since it was implemented sometime around win 95? Remember how it never fixed anything? That's now the backbone of windows, and possibly will be writing it's code in the future.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/05/set_up_windows11_local_account/ This has turned up on the front page of theregister and mentions Rufus. Windows has become a load of faffing about in comparison to a Linux install.
I’m a bit late to this thread I grant. Not too late that this counts as a necro though. I actually don’t get why Windows 11 specifically is getting all this hate for dropping support for older hardware. Windows XP to Vista also dropped support for a huge pile of older hardware, stuff just didn’t have drivers for it and had to go in the bin. The world mostly just shrugged and bought new stuff then. Then there was stuff that never got 64bit drivers. Stuff that was just updated to Vista but never to 7 for whatever reason. There’s a long history of dropping support, so by all means hate Microsoft’s money-grubbing, ecologically-disastrous policies, but they’re not new Just with a new ribbon tied around it. As soon as I can spare some pennies, which may be a while, I’ve decided to mirror my SSD to a spare and bite the bullet: switching to Linux as a daily driver. Either Kubuntu, the KDE Plasma version of Ubuntu, or I am tempted by CachyOS or Bazzite which is are both Arch Linux distributions. They have a reputation for being simpler to use for Linux gaming since they are closer to SteamOS, coming with bleeding edge releases of the relevant gaming software out of the box. In theory easy enough to put on Kubuntu too, but there’s utility in it being a default package in the distro itself, as it should go through their QA loop.
Secure Boot and TPM2.0 don't preclude you from using various Linux distributions. It's a bit of a faff to set up the keys for Secure Boot, but it's not impossible. But the only anti-cheat system I'm aware of that has this requirement is EA's Javelin, introduced for Battlefield 6. Oh no, I can't play Battlefield 6 if I install Linux. That's just terrible, how on earth will I cope. DRM and anti-cheat systems with 'ring 0' level access are some of the absolute worst developments in modern computing. We only need to look at the CrowdStrike Kerfuffle to see the consequences of such incredibly low-level system access.
Oh I missed that! Okay not Bazzite for me then, I never have liked Fedora for some reason. Might just stick with Kubuntu since I have been running Debian and Ubuntu for decades as servers and have it on WSL right now. From my perspective, not currently an issue, since I don't tend to play those kinds of games anyway. But I don't like kernel-level anticheat as a concept, seems ripe for backdoors and abuse.
Switched from Kubuntu to CachyOS (a fork of Arch) a while back. Seems to fulfill all my gaming needs nicely.
I've just enrolled in the 'Extended Security Updates' (ESU) expecting to pay the £26 for each PC and found that by signing in to the same Microsoft account means all 4 PCs now have extended support. What I can't understand is why I got this extended support for free. It took a little bit of work to get the option for ESU to appear in Windows update but this guide from askwoody forums helped. Just in case the link disappears this is the basics of what you need to do: First of all, ensure the Connected User Experiences and Telemetry (DiagTrack) service is not disabled. For that, in the Windows search, Type cmd, right-click it, and choose Run as Administrator. Enter this command: sc.exe config DiagTrack start= auto sc.exe start DiagTrack Add the following registry key, using the same Command Prompt admin that forces the ESU feature to appear: reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides" /v 4011992206 /t REG_DWORD /d 2 /f Restart the Computer once. Use this command to trigger the ESU Popup in the Windows update area, which would resolve the ESU Program not appearing in Windows update issue. cmd /c ClipESUConsumer.exe -evaluateEligibility Restart again, and you should see the pop-up in Windows Update NOTE from the Elf: you may need to repeat the final command 'cmd /c ClipESUConsumer.exe -evaluateEligibility' more than once
Thanks for that @Big Elf. I was offered the ESU on my PC automatically and just accepted it but, the option was not available on the wife's PC. Your instructions did the job. Found other "help" but, was all just chocolate teapots.
