As much as Microsoft would love for you to hand over full control of your PCs so they can do with them as they’re doing with Xbox but somehow worse, there are so many reasons to not deal with Windows 11 if you have a choice. And somehow not all of them are just “install Linux” either. Though I recommend trying that at least once.
So of course with installing Linux, there are many distros to check out, and one that works great for someone might not be the best pick for someone else. I’ve been using Linux Mint as my “daily driver” that doesn’t do the high-end and VR gaming. It can play games, but it’s more just for doing a bunch of other things first. Then there’s whatever the Steam Deck has going on in order to run a whole bunch of games. Proton has been a major step in getting gaming away from being a mostly Windows-exclusive thing on PCs.
For PCs that already have Windows 10, there’s a few options to hang onto it while getting security updates. One that’s pretty up front, alongside the whole “please install 11 already” thing in the update screen, is to enroll in extended support, even if what they’re offering for now is only good for a year out. There’s a couple free methods to claim it, including grinding rewards points on Bing or whatever and having had backed up whatever settings to a Microsoft account sometime in the past. For some reason I was eligible for the latter method though I’m not sure when I ever did any of that. It also worked without having to specifically turn my local account into an online one. They apparently also offer paying money for this update if you don’t want to do either of those things but screw that. There’s also certain tools you can find out there to further extend support for security patches years out at no additional cost, if you want to look for avoiding the mass grave of e-waste or something like that, apparently.
Of course, if you’re not the type to just click on random things that really insist that you download and install and run as administrator, it’s possible you can get even further without specific support. Then there’s seeing what happens when (not if) some major exploit that threatens government systems comes through and now Microsoft has to push a bunch of legacy updates outside of their intended paid extension.
Then there’s the big question of how long Steam will stay supporting Windows 10, given that’s a major hub for what a lot of people end up having to do with Windows in the first place. Currently they’ve only announced a cutoff date for the 32-bit version, which I’m not sure which computers are doing that now. Probably some real legacy stuff. However, if it’s similar to what happened when Windows 7 and 8.1 were cut off, it might just be related to the embedded Chromium stuff, so for all I know that’ll just arbitrarily declare a cutoff instead of it being related to SDKs and whatnot. I’d think Windows 11 is close enough to 10 in core architecture to not worry about that right now. I guess what to expect sooner for anyone using it is the Xbox app, linked to playing whatever games are in there, deciding that they no longer want it to run on the older OS. As if there weren’t enough reasons to hurry up and finish whatever games people wanted to wrap up before cutting off Game Pass.
On top of that, some games are now insisting on having certain features active that just happen to align with Windows 11 requirements in order to run them, namely Secure Boot alongside that TPM thing. Of course these are mostly things that require kernel-level anti-cheat for whatever reason, something that I’m already trying to avoid as much as possible.
And my condolences if you already felt pressured to move to Windows 11 already from a previous install. More so if it did it on its own for whatever reason. Here’s hoping you know your way around OS components and admin programs if you’re more than a little nitpicky about having control over an OS rather than the other way around.