It isn’t a question of “How long are they supposed to support it for”; it’s a matter of “Don’t artificially break things”.

As to Linux distro EOLs, they’re are bad examples for several reasons:

• 1. Linux distros are being provided to us for free – Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
• 2. Linux distro EOLs are generally a very different beast than a Windows EOL: They change your user experience and may break some beloved software, but they generally don’t make core hardware components unusable, let alone entire computers.
• 3. When the Linux kernel does discontinue support for some very old hardware, we still have the source code of the last version available and are free to build some continuation. When your Windows updates end, you’re left with nothing. And that’s not just a theoretical option (which, however, is important enough in itself!): Only in the case of 35-year old hardware is it unlikely that people would actually do that work (on the kernel and all the relevant higher-level software). If – by contrast – the Linux kernel team would for no good reason stop supporting hardware that’s a mere 10 years old, you betcha there would be people starting work to fill in the void (starting with current kernel devs who don’t agree with that decision). Why? Because that’s what Linux community is doing right now and has been doing for decades – keeping up support for hardware way older than 10 years.
• 4. Linux developers are credible when they say that a decision to drop support for some old thing is because continuation would be to much work. Sure, also for Windows 10, economic unfeasability of further maintenance might have been the reason why they discontinued it. However, over the course of years and decades, Microsoft has given us countless well-documented reasons to suspect that their decision here is not because they have, to their own displeasure, concluded that the burden of continued support has become too heavy, but because they’ve spotted some new way to make money and/or reinforce their market dominance in various segments, to which people’s ability to stick with their current systems is an impediment. Since people not having a TPM2 on their computers is extremely unlikely to require much additional effort on Microsoft’s side to keep them supported, this is all the more likely to be the case, and that’s what the plaintiff’s claim is.

Microsoft does support Windows for a good length of time. The problem is when they don’t provide a migration route for people using and older OS on hardware that is still perfectly powerful enough to remain in use. If they had Windows 11 fail over gracefully when the recommended TPM etc. is not present, then these users could migrate to Windows 11 without issue. The thing blocking these computers from going over to Windows 11 is an entirely artificial set of requirements concocted by a company that makes money from each new machine sold, and which doesn’t care that its customers now have to choose between environmental irresponsibility or running an insecure OS.

That said, Linux is there, it’s free, and it’s so much nicer.

I don’t disagree with this sentiment, but the problem is you can’t upgrade windows if your hardware doesn’t support it. It’s not like we are talking about i386 or anything. This is modern hardware and it’s just wasteful.

Well those are FOSS operating systems and Microsoft is selling Windows for money so I think “Right to repair” or “Don’t kill games” is more related than Linux. They should give people option to repair their OS if there will be security issues.

Fair but w10 was supposed to be the last os that gets continuously updated and all of a sudden they drop 11

Before I switched to Mint, my W10 spat out a full screen ad that was telling me to dump my PC and get a new one because support was ending for W10. I clicked on ‘maybe later’ because there was no other viable option to get it off screen, thinking it was a one off. It was when the ad popped up again 3 days later that I spat the dummy and went into Linux land.

It wasn’t about ongoing support. It was about being left alone with my choice and not having my personal computer nagging me every few days to spend money when I didn’t need to. I believe this is what most people are angry about.

I think it’s fair for an operating system you have to pay for to have a longer lifespan than an operating system you don’t have to pay for.

You can install the current version of Ubuntu on your Windows 10 PC that can’t run Windows 11.