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For people who still need Windows:
I have a 10-year-old Surface Pro 4 and I was able to freely upgrade to Windows 11 and it works fine. It wasn't technically supported but I enabled preview builds or something like that (I think I had to enable the Insider program) and it showed up as a Windows Update. I don't know if this is applicable to all PCs that don't support Win 11, but surely it's applicable to some of them that Windows says don't support Win 11.
Yes, it's known that it is possible to do that, but Windows 11 has TPU 2.0 requirements for a reason. As they say, it's for security. In my opinion, if you have to jump through so many hoops and loops to use a damn OS, just to use it as a home desktop or to use old tech, just move to Linux. You have Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora KDE, Steam OS (not yet fully out), and many more. For a beginner who came from Windoes, I recommend Linux Mint. If you already have a Steam deck, for example, I recommend Bazzite (it's non-imutable) or Fedora KDE Plasma.
Edit: Sorry if I came out harsh, I didn't mean to sound like that, I just feel frustrated at how shit Windoes has turned in too
Ah, no worries. I'm just sharing for folks who might need Windows for one reason or another. It's a one time thing to upgrade either way, not a hassle at all. They might own weird niche unrepairable devices like my SP4 which may not handle Linux well or who knows. For clean installs there's that nifty place with serial keys and builds whose name I forget right now.
As for Linux, I'm kinda torn. I had my time tinkering with config files in the early 2000s in the days of Fedora Core 3 and KDE 3.x before all this Plasma stuff. The whole "year of the Linux desktop" that never came left me disillusioned, although I did enjoy the Compiz/Beryl days. It's probably better now but I'm too comfortable nowadays. We'll see if things get dire enough that I need to jump ship again, I hope not.
It's true, I know from experience that running Linux on old SP's is not easy, I also have an SP5 and I installed Linux on it, it took me a long time, time that not many people are willing to give just to experiment with stuff. What I can say about it is that it's working amazingly well, after I installed the Surface kernel... my pen works ok, the touch is weird, you can't press with the tip of the finger, due to how it reads touches, but it's a work in progress. Now, I use an SP8 with Fedora KDE for university, which works great. It took me just a few hours to install, due to me tinkering before with the SP5.
In my opinion, you should give it a try on a virtual machine, just to try it before installing it directly, and just give it another go. KDE came a long, long way now. It's not perfect, but it works very well.
i run nobara (a fedora spinoff) for a few months now, and it's a great experience, i learn a lot about how the os works and it's all visible! i feel like i modded my pc into a transparent machine - i can read up about simply every part of the os. i freakin love it :-D and all this while i can use it as before.
my last experience with linux was debian jessie - i was not so happy with that, and after i landed in dependency hell for the first time, i switched back. nowadays, with flatpaks and appimages, all those issues i was having in normal operation are gone.
I'm happy to hear it. My first experience with Linux was Steam OS on the steam deck for one year. At first, I didn't get technical with it, but some time after I bought it, I started tinkering with the desktop environment and loved it. FF to recently, I had Bazzite. It was amazing, but it was a pain with the non-imutability of the system, then moved to Fedora KDE Plasma, and I love it. A very big plus for me on Linux over Windows is that I can play very, very old games on Linux, thanks to wine.
Zorin os!