You could probably get Linux to run on a decently close friendship and a stack of paper.
Comfortably runs on electronic thermometer or pregnancy test.
Linux 🤝 DOOM
it actually did not run on the pregnancy test, just outputting on it’s display. something else was computing
for now
Only win 11 home needs internet.
be alpine linux
copy bootloader from the installer to ESP usb drive
load entire OS from bootloader to RAM
lbu commit, save changes to bootloader
378mb fully loaded to RAM
Linux. Hard disk optional.
on a VM, I could boot windows from only 256MB RAM
I was just looking at that windows 11 list yesterday. My mother-in-law has a 7th gen i3.
She’s not eligible to get windows 11, but her computer works surprisingly quickly. Well it did after I removed 2 different antivirus programs from it.
But it’s fine for what she uses it for “Netflix”, maybe an occasional dock.
No, Microsoft, I’m not buying her a new computer for that. If ever, she’d just get an iPad.
My wife’s in favor of just letting the computer get infected if it gets infected since it’s just a Netflix machine.
I’m not here to debate whether that’s a good idea or not, but I’m here to say that this is what is going to happen for the majority of people.
I’ll probably end up putting Linux Mint on it if the WiFi card will play nice, but I expect that it will.
Getting infected with a crypto miner is the more likely outcome for such a computer, which can be a bother
It’s crazy that microsoft, a company that once had 90+ market share of the OS market and is now down in the low 70% range and falling, would rather force this shit and potentially lose people to ipads than simply just make an upgrade path for older hardware (that isn’t even that old)
What could possibly motivate this? They have to see the folly in such a decision with all their market research and shit. Do they really have the hubris to think that people will just go out and buy new hardware en masse because they said to so they could check emails, go on social media, and do streaming shit? Tinfoil hat time: were they influenced by a three letter agency or something to include the need for secure boot and tpm? Is there an exploit or backdoor in these?
I have to imagine it’s because most of their money comes from business customers who rely on windows and would have to spend tons of money to switch to something else or OEMs who are making new computers anyways who this won’t affect. There’s a reason windows upgrades have been free for a while, I don’t think they really care about getting money from people anymore, they’re just after money from businesses and OEMs.
Dave Plummer recently put out a video on why he thinks windows upgrades are free now. I found it interesting.
But what’s the net benefit if they overall lose a ton of market share? Sales of, absolute best scenario, 10 million dollars? That’s a lot of money but it’s also really unlikely they’d get that level of sales and is it worth having a shareholders meeting in 1 year where they have to address questions about market share continuing to slide noticeably? Apparently I guess
It seems like it would mainly be a good deal for oem pc manufacturers. If I was lenovo or whoever I’d be jazzed about it, let microsoft take all the negativity and sell more thinkpads
Yeah I agree I don’t think it’s a good long term strategy, losing the dominant position is gonna make it easier for businesses to seriously consider switching to Mac, Chrome OS, or Linux. And when more people start to switch the OEMs will follow. It’s the classic short term profit over long term success approach that companies will always fall into. For now it provides a nice bump in sales through mainly OEMs selling new computers to people and down the line through the businesses who don’t want to make the switch or can’t make the switch so are forced to buy new windows computers. But yeah it’s probably gonna continue to sink their market share if average people can’t use the new OS and are smart enough to switch to something else. Although I’ve seen people still using Windows XP while connected to the internet so who knows if it’ll even be a big impact or not. It will really just depend on if enough people switch that more programs get ported to other OSes and then businesses can actually make the switch more easily. And if that ball gets rolling Microsoft’s market share will keep tumbling down, but again it’s hard to say if that’s gonna start or if Microsoft is gonna have to do a lot more bad things first to get there.
That is a great question. But, I do not think so, the computer without tpm are just not encrypted at all. I think it is about collecting user data and advertising.
This makes sense, the tinfoil hat shit is one thing but it’s much easier to just explain it as tpm and secure boot will enable more data collection, which is probably a stronger revenue stream than keeping windows on 75% of pcs vs 72%
Of course some nerd will probably figure out ways to defeat it all eventually but microsoft is probably (correctly) banking on your grandma not knowing how to install extensions and whatever 3rd party shit that will require
The sad thing is at one point I would have said that’s a foolish way thing to bank on and eventually those computer illiterate folk will die out but it appears that that younger gen z and below have many people that are slightly more advanced than boomers in tech knowledge. They know how to use their phones but have no clue how to do anything interesting with them and have barely any idea how to use a pc.
I worked in a school for a bit a few years ago and the amount of kids that didn’t know about something as basic as Adblock was shocking, let alone how to navigate the file system. Modern phones as a primary computing device really fucked that generation
What’s the long term play? We can teach our parents as best as we can and we can teach our kids the same, but from what i can tell they don’t really even care. What happens in 50 years, will the biggest tech companies just have unprecedented control of what people see and can do because no one who doesn’t get a career in it, just won’t care how things work?
Put my mother on mint. The only issue she encountered was the mouse cursor not appearing sometimes, but that hasn’t happened in a while. Other than that, she can hardly tell the difference from windows 10. You should go through with it.
She might get a video quality downgrade on Netflix because of DRM
Does she have the eyesight to see the quality difference?
Which is such a bullshit. On Linux we can met all requirements yet Netflix and co decides to not give us the best streams because we run Linux…
You can try the android netflix app via Waydroid(with widevine).
Maybe not as resilient/convenient/stable as a browser, but i think you can set up waydroid app as a single icon.
Of course then you’re just swapping MS for gooogle.
sure that, or… just don’t buy into it as streaming is more like Cable/PayTV 2.0 and go to the movies and or buy them in a store, or 🏴☠️
Yeah, I’m thinking it couldn’t be worse than windows is now. It even sometimes will drop wifi connection. So how much worse could Linux be.
My main concern for her is how often she edits documents. Since she gets her pension, she needs to do paperwork for it occasionally, so I don’t want formatting to mess something up for her.
I’ll take the computer on the right to the car wash and pressure wash it, then go find an air compressor to quickly dry it out.
Sure it might need a new fan and perhaps hard drive and other mechanical parts, but that looks almost totally salvageable.
Fun fact: Linux can actually run on faulty RAM, if you configure the kernel to just avoid the bad RAM regions.
Linux doesn’t actually need any functional components to run; if you put on enough pairs of programming socks and take some psychedelics you can simply sit in front of a blank screen and hallucinate a fully functional Linux distro!
How slow would that windows box be with the minimum specs? That seems like it would be a nightmare.
Linux on the other hand will run on anything and it’s glorious!
It’s okay. Not particularly brilliant but it will run. I’m 80% sure that ram is the big thing that makes it feel responsive. My dad’s PC runs windows 11 but is a 2nd gen i5 Sony AIO. 2c4t, an aging 5400 rpm laptop hdd, and 8 gb of ram. It’s usable enough for his usecase.
My friend has a quad core Celeron (n4020) laptop with 64 gb of emmc and 4 gb of ram. It’s usable. She can play the Sims on it.
An SSD will make a huge difference
I agree but idk what the hell Hitachi did with that hdd. It is the most responsive hdd equipped machine I’ve used.
I might also shove 16 gb into it but idk if it will boot with 16 gb. It’s also from Sony so idk if I can find an up to date bios for it.
i have a laptop here with a gemini lake celeron n4000, 4gb ram, and 64gb emmc. it barely meets the requirements imposed by microsoft for win11.
windows 11 on it is as horrible as you might imagine. someone brought me one very similar last week to ‘fix’… basically same model but with upgrade to 16gb ram. was not any better at all. essentially unusable, just like mine. their ‘fix’ was buying a new ryzen 5 laptop 12 hrs later.
If you just let it run idle, it runs great! /s
Fr I had a computer with those specs 15 years ago wtf are they thinking lol
of all that shit microsoft forces upon you…
it’s the msa (online microsoft account) that’s the biggest deal-breaker for me.
absolutely not. never gonna happen.
I got doom eternal a month or so ago and haven’t gotten around to playing it. Now that I’ve tried it I realized that there’s a mandatory Bethesda account creation screen unless you don’t have an Internet connection. I’ve been turning the Wi-Fi off on my Steam Deck or pulling the ethernet on my desktop to get by that.
I have Debian running on an ARM board that has 256MB RAM. Handles Audio and 720/video streaming without having to use swap.
I’m not using swap on my work and gaming PCs > 10 years now. I first started to question I need it, when I got a new PC going from 512MB to 2GB. Now I have 20GB in one of them and I don’t think I will ever be able to fill it all up until I get an upgrade again.
Good for you, I have 32g and if I do too many things at once, the oom killer will stalk my tabs
😯 how many tabs did you open?
That’s amazing. Mind sharing more details?
Its a 2010 IOMega Home media hard drive, with OEM OS wiped off, and Debian imstalled. 32 bit armv6 board. Since it only has 256Mb the 3.12 kernel is the latest that would install, newer give errors about size, so I have it blocked from internet access. But you can see from the screen capture that once running is barely takes up 30% of that 256MB. Music streaming was my last use, previously was movie streaming using twonky until we got a 4k TV. Image is a few months back when it wasrunning openmediavault but I built a new server recently and this might just become a ups monitor or something. PS my date is wrong LOL 01 09 2025 vs 09 01 2025 I assume is what I did.
Windows 11 on 4GB of RAM? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight…
I tried running it in a VM with 8GiB and it was still struggling at times
ok but can you run linux on a toaster
Of course, just make sure you paint a penguin on the side first.
You can run Linux on an esp32 using using a risc-v or pdp 11 emulator.
I’m curious. I just updated to Windows 11 because I got tired of the full-screen EOL IS COIIMING PANNIICC! messages. I also just moved. I will be plugging in my PC tonight and won’t have Internet until the day after tomorrow. I wonder if it’ll let me do anything.
If you upgraded an existing installation of Win 10 you should be fine, AFAIK the internet requirement is only for installing a new copy of Win 11.
Yeee they removed the oobe (or whatever) skip account command which is just a script to create a reg key so you can do it yourself for now
That’s good to know. Thanks!
This is pretty old. I had to use the way back to find it.
500 Error
I must have forgotten to copy the archived link. I updated it.
