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Comment by Worldblender | Hacker News Reader

It's good to see a report like this. I hope that ReactOS can reach production ready status, even if it's just the basics, before the end of support for Windows 10 in October 2025 (or later if this gets postponed). Once Windows 10 goes out of support, I fear that there may be a spike in e-waste due to many older computers not officially supported by Windows 11 primarily due to its CPU requirements, even though the official ISO images don't stop Windows 11 from being installed onto these older systems at all. But then they can miss out on critical stuff like security updates that may or may not be worse than switching to a Linux distro, for example.

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Given their fairly lacklustre progress in the past 20ish years [0], I doubt they’ll manage to make it much better within the next two.

Windows 10 going out of support is not going to cause the computers to stop working and become e-waste. Commonly used software (such as web browsers) will continue to support Windows 10 for a few more years; Windows itself may be less secure, but for basic usage and with a restrictive firewall, it should be fine.

If you’re concerned about lack of support for Windows 10 and want to switch to a supported OS, you’ll be better off using Linux.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Release_history

I should've mentioned it earlier, but I already switched to Linux distros like Ubuntu since about 2011, so I'm personally not affected by these end of support dates as much. My concern is more about other people, the kind of stuff I can't really influence myself.

Of course I know that computers don't stop working after just because Windows 10 went out of support. It's more of, for example, a severe vulnerability is discovered that has been fixed in later Windows versions but not 10 that may cause some people to panic. Maybe I'm being paranoid here, but I did raise some valid points, some of which coincidentally play into profit motives such as by encouraging the purchase of new hardware.

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