I don't understand how can critical buisness machines which work perfectly fine be switched to windows 11?

We have a machine at work which is beefy and works as a server and backups for many many years on windows 10. Why the hell should I upgrade my buisness critical system ?? Why would I take my risk breaking stuff. I am sure there are millions of critical systems running gon windows 10 which should not be distribed at any means, what would Microsoft do about them.

Your business critical system will no longer be supported with security updates which will leave it vulnerable to attack.

I guess, if it's not connected to any sort of outside network, and has no way of accepting data from media like discs or thumb drives then it's perfectly safe, but if that's the case, and it works in isolation, how "business critical" is it?

Why should the financial sector ever switch away from their amazing COBOL code base? Why should anyone switch away from VGA, works just fine? No need for USB, PS2 etc. work just fine.

What Microsoft probably expects you to do is get your management to buy new computers that support Windows 11 and/or whatever the hell their current server OS is, and in the process give them and their hardware vendor partners a lot of money.

What you can do instead is switch to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC which is what I did at my workplace recently. It's supported until 2032 with security updates. Not feature updates, but I suspect that business users probably don't care about those much. In fact, most people would probably treat that as a benefit. It also comes with basically no bloatware (except goddamned Edge), which is surprising. No Copilot, no Cortana, no Recall. None of that shit.

We have a fleet of machines that "can't" be upgraded to Win11 because of hardware shortcomings, at least without overriding the requirements with Rufus or similar. Unfortunately we also rely on a small but important spread of proprietary Windows-only applications which have no open source or Linux replacements, and at least two of them absolutely will not run in Wine. Believe me, I tried.

The only wrinkle with this is that you cannot upgrade or license swap in place. You have to do a full reinstall, which for us is not a problem because we have a modest number of computers and I have physical access to all of them. None are bricked up behind a wall or anything.

You would be amazed in the industrial world. There are tons of large and incredibly expensive special purpose machines that are operated by super antiquated PC architecture computers running geriatric operating systems, sometimes still even DOS or Windows 3.x.

Think industrial CNC mills and lathes, presses, pick-and-place machines, specialty lab testing equipment, electron microscopes, etc.

Process control, i.e. production line automation, is usually driven by dedicated PLCs. But the user interfaces connected to them are almost invariantly some old ruggedized panel mounted PC running Windows. An absurd number of them in my experience are still on 2000 or XP. NT4 is pretty easy to find, too.

Granted often these are not networked, and in cases where they are they're not connected to the internet, or may even talk to other workstations via RS-485 serial (!) or some other gimcrack method that is unlikely to be a vector for modern malware.

Their answer would probably be to run Windows Server 2022, which is supported until 2031.

I always find it odd that posts like this get any downvotes at all. Like, are people really that in love with Windows and or Microsoft?

As long as they aren't networked, there's no problem there!

It's getting downvoted because it's not realistic.

I thought so too, largely on the basis of some very bad experiences with ubuntu-based distributions (they seem to hate my bog-standard RTX3060 GPU for whatever reason), but in frustration I tried one last time to install a linux distro and went with something based on fedora and it has 95% just worked, it's been great. I haven't booted up windows in almost 3 weeks, all my games work (battle.net was a bit of a pain to get working), the proprietary windows software I use for work runs great in wine, etc. I'm at the point now where I'm transferring all my files off of NTFS partitions and reformatting them to btrfs and integrating them into the linux filesystem, cause I'm done with windows forever to the greatest possible extent that I can be.

The problem is that Microsoft is ending Win10 support so you won't be able to get updates and such (especially security updates) for the OS anymore which will ultimately lead to things breaking or being vulnerable anyway, plus if that business-critical software ever gets updated to the point where it also doesn't support win10 anymore (I've run into this in the past with XP/Vista) then you're going to have to change anyway. But you don't have to change to win11. Companies and governments all over Europe are switching their mission-critical systems to linux and FOSS, yeah it's a pain, but it's going to save you pain down the road.

Because either way you’re taking a risk.

Security flaws and aging hardware are two obvious problems.

I’d very much question why you’d use windows 10 over something better supported— maybe not Linux but at least Windows Server OS.

It's because LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX

Linux spam is really annoying. Linux users seem to base their entire personality around a goddamn operating system.

I'd rather suck off Bill Gates than be one of those people.

It's because we've seen this post 1000 times

If you are running business critical applications on Windows 10 that is a problem. Windows 10 is only meant for end user machines. Other services should be running on OS's that are meant for the application such as Windows Server or server versions of Linux distros running LTS kernels.

Not to mention, near every piece of software I've been involved with at work has required specific versions of Windows Server and whatever database it uses, if you want to upgrade the software you use, then upgrading the OS is part of the task.

That's not the flex you think it is.

Your preoccupation with image here hurts you more than it helps you.

Putting Bill Gates’ dick in my mouth is far too high of a licensing fee. I’ll just play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe instead. But no judgment. You live your best life.

I really need to stop putting it off and install Linux on my PC and laptops