Will the courts intervene to keep Windows 10 alive?

Lawrence Klein, who’s based in Southern California, filed a complaint against Microsoft in the San Diego Superior Court over its plan to discontinue support for Windows 10 by October 14, 2025. According to the Courthouse News Service, Klein owns two Windows 10 laptops, both of which will become obsolete come October. He asserts that Microsoft is making this move “to force its customers to purchase new devices optimized to run Microsoft’s suite of generative artificial intelligence (AI) software such as Copilot, which comes bundled with Windows 11 by default.”

  • loveknight@programming.devEnglish
    22·
    3 days ago

    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.
      1. 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.
      1. 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.
      1. 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.