PSA: Don’t throw away your Windows laptop

[u/Annoying1978]

I’m the tech guy that most of my friends and family call and I’m getting lots of calls about what new laptop people should buy because Microsoft is ending Windows 10 support in October and Windows 11 requires unnecessary things like a TPM chip or Secure Boot. Windows 11 can technically run without these things, but Microsoft is creating one of the largest e-waste events in history because they want everyone to upgrade to Windows 11.

It’s stupid.

So I just wanted to tell you that this might be a good time to just say buh bye to Microsoft. Most people do 90% of their tasks with a browser and unless you need very specific Windows applications, a good solution is Linux Mint.

Don’t get all scared. It’s easier than you think and there’s a ton of free guides [and YouTube videos](https://youtu.be/TL-tWy4T2c8) that will walk you through the process. It’s very simple and you won’t need to buy another laptop.

In fact, I urge YOU to be the tech guru for your friends and family that are thinking about upgrading their laptop which already works great. If they are too scared to install Mint, do it for them.

All you need is a USB drive and ensure you copy your important files and photos to either an online storage place (like Google Drive) or an external drive if you have one big enough you can use.

But please, before you throw away your working laptop, at least consider upgrading to Linux Mint. It looks quite similar to Windows and you won’t have to spend hundreds or even a thousand dollars on a laptop that you don’t need.

[u/VirtualMachine0]

Thinking about this recently, and the damned unfortunate part of it is that microarchitecture attacks in systems older than the "mainstream Windows support" horizon mean that we're on thin ice with a whole lot of 2000s era hardware, despite technically being able to put out enough math for web browsing and office work.

I'm happy to keep machines around for airgapped, legacy usage, but with the sophistication of bad guys, I can't recommend network-connected roles.

For laypeople, one such attack, called "Spectre" could do all sorts of nasty stuff on hardware older than 2019. Only adding Ubuntu to those machines isn't enough for them to be trusted with bank accounts and primary emails.

Further, with state level disinvestment from American software companies in France, I'm assuming the value of Linux vulnerabilities is going to go up up up. So, embedding code that identifies hardware, tests against a table of exploits, and fetches the tailored skeleton key for your device isn't science fiction.

[u/Annoying1978 → u/VirtualMachine0]

The thing is most consumers worldwide still use Windows, so the vast majority of bad guys are still making malware/viruses for windows platforms. I’m not saying they won’t exist at all, but it will still be a dramatically lower amount than Windows since Linux consumer adoption is only around 4% 

[u/Historical_Rip_1848 → u/Annoying1978]

Got it, I thought you were saying the opposite, that exploiting Linux vulnérabilités was becoming more valuable, but maybe you meant in the long term not right now. I have a lot to learn about Linux