The Windows 11 problem

corbin@infosec.pub to Technology@lemmy.world – 242 points –
The Windows 11 problem
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Windows 11 definitely has its issues, but I don’t think the author of this article has sufficient knowledge to be writing articles about it.

There’s not a great solution for switching to UEFI in an existing install

MBR2GPT is baked into Windows and works great as long as you don’t have a jacked up partition layout.

Windows 11 demands a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 security coprocessor, which isn’t in many PCs that meet all the other requirements.

Part of the reason that Intel 8xxx and Ryzen 2xxx processors are the baseline “requirement” is that they have fTPM 2.0 embedded in the silicon. It’s actually in the overwhelming majority of devices that meet the other requirements.

There appears to be no loss in functionality when bypassing the installation requirements… so why do they exist?

Microsoft could provide a more limited Windows 11 experience to PCs that don’t meet the strict requirements

Microsoft doesn’t go out of their way to hide the fact that you can install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.

By providing and sanctioning a “limited” experience, Microsoft would then have to dedicate resources to supporting that experience. I’ve worked with tons of legacy devices that had odd quirks that required workarounds in Windows 10, so I can’t really blame them for wanting to limit how they spend their support resources.

I second MBR2GPT. With a guide it's quite straightforward to migrate from BIOS to EUFI but probably too scary for the average user.

No, you can't blame them. You also can't blame people for not upgradeing. The truth is picking totally arbitrary install requirements, especially ones that favour new hardware to high end ones alienated the early adopter base. Also microsoft killed any goodwill againtst them by bloating windows even more.

It's not arbitrary. Securing an OS today is a huge challenge and Microsoft wants to leverage this tech to facilitate this. New hardware supports it, a lot of older hardware supports it and they strongly encourage this as the new standard.

Yes it means some people won't update without workarounds but they are setting a standard moving forward and for supported hardware, they were quite aggressive with the upgrade (I had to make sure the TPM was disabled in BIOS on a machine I didn't wish to upgrade early on).

What exactly is TPM used for in Windows 11?

It allows Windows to create and store cryptographic keys and validate OS and firmware components haven't been tampered with.

Okay, how is that inherently useful? All any form of trusted boot does is make sure, that the OS is whatever the manufacturer approves. If that is an outdated image full of backdoors and exploits, than that is what the TB enforces. TECHNICALLY a phone on android 2 is secure (by this logic) because the TB enforces that awfully outdated image. All trusted boot is good for is to make sure you can't run acutally secure software on your device