Windows 11 will reportedly display a watermark if your PC does not support AI requirements

dvdnet62@feddit.nl to Technology@lemmy.ml – 332 points –
Windows 11 will reportedly display a watermark if your PC does not support AI requirements
tomshardware.com
126

Guess Microsoft can buy me a new computer if they want me to use Windows 11.

I got a new computer to replace the old windows 10. But the new toy won't see windows.

By getting more people to buy computers they get more window licenses to sell and it's always been that way, but they're getting more pushy

Lol, year of the Linux desktop here we come XD

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 Year of the Linux desktop!

Interestingly, the software giant added this check since the Windows 11 24H2 will not boot without these instruction sets, according to a previous report. Though speculative, one would wonder if the company has this extra step in case someone uses bypasses to force the OS to boot with an unsupported CPU.

Why is the watermark the headline

Why is MS targeting specific hardware when windows has historically been a general purpose OS?

I’m switching my machine to Linux this weekend, even if my chip is supported, who’s to say it will stay supported for the next couple of years.

Only targeting new hardware is just a win-win-win for them.

Hardware partners love it, planned obsolescence is just new sales. Legal departments love it, constantly worse DRM. The development teams like it, less support burden. Marketing loves AI being a core feature.

They have no competition. There is no downside for them.

We're actually shifting our entire workplace. Fuck this shit - both from a hassle viewpoint and content security requirements

Hi, yeah. Uh long time listener, first time caller. Thank you for taking my question. Yes, I was wondering does Linux do this? I'll take my answer off the air. Thanks!

1 more...

I have not dared to test my games with proton on Linux, but if they all work, Windows will be nothing but a VM for me that I use for the exceptions when something doesn't run under wine. Sheesh.

Check protondb.com if you want some idea before switching

Honestly the site is kind of useless, every time I look at it games that work perfectly out of the box with no changes will practically say that they don't work at all and vice versa games that don't work at all will say they run without issue.

Not to mention the amount of people putting literally fucking hundreds of completely worthless flags that actually do literally nothing whatsoever in the code swearing left right and Center that it does something. I kind of wish that site would just disappear

That is....not my experience. I've had a lot of issues that tips/flags helped clear up

Usually it's one flag that actually does something, surrounded by about 8 to 9 flags that do absolutely nothing. "flag soup" as developers like to call it. People add all of them at once and so they assume all of them are doing something when in reality only one of them did anything at all

I definitely believe that. you're using filters to cater to your setup, right? Typically if I set those filters I look for the simplest tips and try those. At least half the time it works first try (these are only cases where the game needed tinkering to get working properly)

Have you tried those flags tho?

No need, you can just look at the source code and see that that flag is not defined anywhere. It's not going to do anything it's not even being parsed it's just getting ignored. The creator of dxvk complains about this all the time. People piling on completely useless or redundant flags and spreading them everywhere.

I dunno man, can't know unless you try the flags. Might work. It worked for that guy.

Would be a nice feature if the UI could surface those useless flags somehow, assuming that's possible

Oh, they will likely work. Proton has come quite a long way

I haven't tried linux for like 8 years now and my oly problem was that the games i played back then weren't supported by linux. I kinda want them to force me to dip into linux again. Last week or so i had to solve a fucking riddle to start my computer to not accidentally accept anything. I hate it so much.

I switched to EndeavourOS (no dual boot to fall back on needed since I received a "work laptop" with Windows 11) about a year ago, first time using Linux period, let alone as a daily driver, and all I can say is that it has been a wonderful experience. I will never use Windows on a personal machine again.

Full disclosure: I have a brother who has been using Linux for a while that helped me through the install process, and basically showed me how to search Google (and the Arch wiki) if I run into any issues, and I have yet to run into anything serious enough to require his attention (which I'm sure he's thankful for). Small things here or there that I've been able to fix myself have gone a long way to helping me grasp (at least a little bit) what's going on under the hood.

Additionally, while I don't have a background in comp sci, I grew up during a time where we needed to know how computers worked beyond "press the button on the screen for the thing to start", so I was already pretty comfortable with the command line and all that.

So I had a little help, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that I haven't needed his direct help since installation.

As far as games are concerned, most of my PC gaming these days is on my Steam Deck, and even on there I've gotten games that Steam labels "unsupported" to work. For example, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition with DSFix works great despite being "unsupported" on Steam.

As others have said, check out protondb.

And that wasn't enough to force you to try Linux again? Does Billy Gates have to sodomize your dog, or where is the line? lol

I made the switch on my daily driver laptop about 4 months ago. I mainly play games like Factorio, Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld, and they all work fine. Only trouble Ive had is with older games like Red Alert. Check out ProtonDB

I decided to play Commandos (1998) and it worked as perfectly fine as it would on Windows. It required a fan patch to support higher resolution and 16:9, but that patch worked fine too. The only large issues I've experienced so far are with multiplayer. For example, The Finals hadn't updated their version of Easy Anti-cheat to a version that supported Linux so it didn't work for a while, but it does now. That might actually be the only game that was an issue for me, and now it isn't.

IME, there's very little that won't run. I don't have a single game in my Steam library that doesn't run just fine. The most I've had to do to run anything was to try different versions of Proton, and that's as easy as choosing from a dropdown menu.

And what if we have a ton of games outside of steam?
My next pc will probably have linux, and my current windows as vm. I will get them to work hehe

Non-steam games can be added to Steam and run from there. There are also other launchers such as Lutris and Heroic that can help you install, manage, and run games from other marketplaces or other non-standard sources.

Figured as much, as proton seems to be focused purely on handheld devices needing launchers etc. But thats ok, means they are (hopefully) upstreaming back to wine

Proton is not specifically focused on handhelds. It's definitely an all-platforms thing.

You'll still be using proton in Lutris or Bottles most likely, at least for games. Proton is just a compatibility layer. Proton is absolutely not focused on handhelds. It's just performance improvements for Wine for Windows games.

You may be thinking of SteamOS.

A combination of Lutris, Bottles, and Proton GE has covered me so far. I find Lutris more gaming focused, and I have used Bottles a lot for little windows programs that aren't really games (as an example, some stuff I have for making TTRPG maps and tokens and stuff that I could probably find alternatives to, but they work fine in Bottles so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

You can check all your games on ProtonDB. That being said, almost any single player game will work. Same with any multiplayer game that doesn't insist on poorly implemented anti-cheat

I’ll grab the popcorn while I watch the dumpster fire of what Microsoft is doing to Windows, from the comfort of my Linux-running system.

Obligatory BTW I use Arch.

Cries in corporate systems, balls deep in Microsoft ecosystem.

All my personal devices are running Linux however.

Yeah, this is where I'm at. O365, Teams, OneDrive, Azure, evening.

Except that my "personal" device is my work device. (I get a stipend to maintain my own tech.)

My Steam Deck runs Linux, at least?

God damn. It went down hill fast. I’m actually gonna start looking at distros. Fuck. I just bought a mini pc to install OPNsense on but I think my weekend just drastically shifted.

Lucky for you, Linux runs on just about anything. Even teeeny tiny computers!

Haha my phrasing was bad. It’ll be a 4090 i9 for Linux 😆 but I’m holding off on destroying my internal network to make this change first.

Just give it the same machine name and network name, and it should be pretty easy to switch.

Yeah. Gonna have to dual boot also unless somehow game pass works on Linux lol

Game pass for Xbox? Yeah, I think that'll be a no, but someone on Reddit said that you can stream it if you have good Internet.

Interesting. I meant game pass for PC 😆 maybe we are talking about the same thing.

Edit:ah yeah it’s Xbox game pass for PC.

Who knew they were telling the truth after all. When they said Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows.

That's weird, the watermark says, "I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."

ai file explorer? I can fi d my own files thanks

Can’t wait for my ai to hallucinate last year’s tax return

I think what's interesting about this take, is when they use AI to generate things like new taxes, tax codes and tax laws. The levels of loopery will be insane.

Can you though? Explorer.exe on windows 11 is already a steaming pile. Why the fuck can't I disable grouping? If I need to find a specific kind of files in my download directory, it's way easier for me to sort by size. What isn't easy is that now it's grouped by fucking date as well. IDK when I grabbed the last windows iso on my.visualstudio.com, I just know that I have <10 files that are >3GB in my download directory. But noooo now after sorting by size I've got to either search though 4 or 5 groups or turn grouping off.

The IT dept at work has decided that we all will run windows 11, and it's locked down tighter than I've experienced in a long time. Guess who has a VM called "Windows 10 Daily driver" running. Fuck windows 11 and the iso it rode in on.

You can sort by size and turn grouping by date off. It is right in the menu.

I'm quite aware it is. I usually use the detailed view, so sorting is easy. But going into the menu to turn off grouping only works once for me. If I go into the settings for explorer and chose the "make the current setup default" button (or whatever it is called, I can't recall right now), then every single other aspect than grouping are preserved. Are you telling me that my issues aren't caused by windows 11 being a needy little b*tch?

It's probably going to use some stupid-ass system to place them in the next available spot on the HDD and you actually won't be able to find them without the AI.

My windows 10 already has a watermark to activate it

Given how Linux support for steam has been going I've just started migrating everything and just popping in to windows when I have something that doesn't work.

Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinux

Screenshot?

Read the article? :D Doesn't look like it's live they just caught it in code

Yeah, so if they have the code, they could run it...

That's not how code of this magnitude works off the cuff GetPhysicallyInstalledSystemMemory() and GetPhysicalDiskSize()) aren't defined and might exist in a file they couldn't access. It's also in C++ so you'd have to compile it first no one's going through all that for a visual screenshot of a watermark at this stage

Wow that's some crappy C/C++ code, there's even a goto 😁

But whats the 0i64?

They kinda don't have the sources there. That's a decompilation by IDA in that image.

But nevertheless they could run it if they set up an arm64 machine, technically.

If you want a serious answer, you could theoretically disable all security checks on Win11 so you could hex-edit patch it to run, but it would be (1) a lot of effort and (2) probably show that it's nowhere near finished, because it still misses UI integration for example

I've spent half a day yesterday to set up a VM running Debian on my office's Win PC. Since I'm tied to Windows because of my proprietary CAD, my plan is to limit my interaction to a minimum and instead do everything else in the Linux-VM. With shared drives and drag'n'drop I hope it will work out. It comes in also very handy that I started years ago to strictly choose open source software that's available for both platforms - so no learning curve. Since MS won't listen - we all need to laudly complain about the lack of linux support towards our software providers. And yes, maybe too naïve, it will change something in the long run.

I've gone full linux both at home and at work. Thankfully, most of the tools we use are cross platform / FOSS. But in the odd case, I use KVM (the linux equivalent to Hyper-V) to spin up a windows VM

It has it's issues (like graphics card pass-through), but it works pretty well

Yet another reason to toss non-DOS based software.

hardware requirements aren't that huge ... a cpu that supports 11 and 16GB RAM minimum. CPU has to support SSE4.2, which every 11 compatible cpu has. Honestly, this should be your minimum requirements nowadays. Anythjng that can't do the job is literally 8+ years old.

every laptop that's on sale right now under $600 has less than 16gb of RAM

it's not compatible with windows 11, but today apple is still selling $1500 laptops with 8gb of RAM

i just directed someone to a 12th gen laptop (i5-1235u) with 16gb ram and 512gb nvme at dell for $430 in a ready-to-ship configuration, search their site for nn3520gsbbs to find it.

Amazing price but I see $699 when browsing from Italy the USA store (and not available at all in Italian store)

If it was available in my country for that price I'd buy it even if my laptop is still newish

PC vendors are still selling laptops with 4GB RAM. 16GB should absolutely be the minimum (and should have been since 2020), but it's very much not true that anything with less than 16GB is over 8 years old.

Anythjng that can’t do the job is literally 8+ years old.

So what? How about Microsoft lets me define what 'the job' is and I will decide for myself whether my machine is up to it? In my opinion the job of an operating system is to expose computing resources to whatever the user wants to do and then get the fuck out of the way.

The minimum requirements are there for them to set a lower limit on what they're willing to support. You do whatever you want, just don't complain when something doesn't work, or breaks because you're bypassing those limits.

People do this all the time and then complain and blame Microsoft for issues when they are using an configuration they were told was unsupported and might have issues.

The minimum requirements are there for them to set a lower limit on what they’re willing to support.

I agree and they're free to do whatever they want. I get to have an opinion on their actions though.

What I take issue with is they are enforcing minimum specs because they're choosing to put a bunch of stuff in the operating system that won't run (well) below those specs. In other words they are choosing the job that the operating system has to do (GenAI in this case) and I think that is up to the user, not the OS vendor.

If the GenAI stuff they want to build in were optional then you could choose to purchase a cheaper computer or upgrade your existing hardware to a current OS. By going this route Microsoft is artificially inflating hardware requirements.

My PC has a i7-4790k overclocked to 4.5 GHz. It runs smoothly since I got it when it came out and it is still not a bottleneck in any of the games I play. But if I wanted to upgrade to Windows 11 I would need to buy a new CPU, new main board and new RAM, and it would not improve my gaming experience at all. It was my last machine running windows which I changed to Linux 2 months ago and I haven't looked back.

That CPU would probably meet these requirements abd wouldn't be affected. The normal Windows 11 requirements are a separate thing which are more demanding but can be bypassed. Though Linux is probably better anyway, especially for older machines. Itt's requirements haven't really changed in the last 10 years.

Idk about you, but I want an OS that is efficient, not one that gobbles every resource I have.

Like Bro I use Linux. I agree it's more efficient, that's why I said it's better for older machines like yours.

What I don't understand is criticising Windows over this specific new issue. It's like hating the Nazis because they had bad interior decor, instead of the fact they committed genocide. Like it's not even an issue, Windows has much bigger real issues.

Not everything is a comparison. It's entirely possible to discuss one new negative thing about Windows without comparing it to the worse things you dislike about Windows. I don't have an old computer, I have a wicked fast i7 12700kf, 32GB of DDR5 4800, 2TB Samsung 970 NVMe drive, Auoris RTX 30170 ti, and a z690 Auoris pro MOBO. That doesn't mean I want my frickin OS gobbling up my resources. I bought powerful components for my uses, not for Microsoft to calculate how to best serve me ads on my computer, using my computing power. Oh, and I do use Linux.

It didn't realize I was replying to someone else. The person I thought I was replying to was on a 4790K.

This change isn't a problem at all, just like the Nazis interior decor wasn't a problem. AI needing certain instructions to run well isn't unreasonable at all. They are using these instructions and resources to provide a service. This isn't them wasting resources unnecessarily, presumably they are only used if you engage those services. Don't get me wrong Microsoft does waste resources but this isn't an example of that afaik.

What you and others are doing is a motte and bailey argument. First you say these AI requirements are unreasonable, then I say actually they aren't unreasonable at all and is well exceeded by the actual Windows 11 requirements or most machines made in the last 10 years, then you counter that the Windows 11 is slow and has unreasonable requirements. Do you see how the first and second points are unrelated? The general Windows 11 requirements are way more strict than requiring SSE 4.2. any PC back to like 1st or 2nd gen will have the needed instructions. Maybe the 16 GB requirement is a bit more than some people have, but it's not a large amount either and you can just keep using it without the AI features.

I think the 16GB requirement is ridiculous, considering Microsoft's own laptops and Surface Pros don't come with 16GB standard. They seem to be trying to drive sales through intentional obsolescence of adequate hardware.

16 GB should be the minimum for a new PC these days. The fact they are selling less takes the piss.

you should be able to 'rufus' an installer for that. the instruction in the 'new' minimum requirement dates back to 1st gen.

Imagine unironically defending Microsoft making their product shittier

Maybe they should just make the OS work on any computer? Kinda seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot, yeah?

I'm only addressing that last line, but really think it through. Should you really expect, or even want, an OS that runs on a 386? It wasn't that long ago that most Linux distros could. But they all moved away from it because that limited performance on anything more modern.

The newer instruction sets are created for a reason, and that reason is typically higher performance. If the OS (or any code, really) can use them, it will work better. But if you can't or don't, the code will be more compatible.

There also isn't "any" computer; it's simply not a thing. The question becomes how old (more technically, what minimum specs) do you want to support, and performance you want to be limited by?

While I agree that Microsoft has leaned too heavily into newer hardware as an expectation, there's definitely a line to be drawn.

I'm not sure if you are overthinking, by trying to equate a 386 with a top of the line only a few years old.

Or if you under-thought, buy not going back to a 286, or an XT, or a mainframe.

Or that you are in lala land by not including Macs on a Power PC chip.

My point was, where do you draw the line? Any answer is equally arbitrary. MS drew it at 8th Gen Intel Core. Would 6th Gen have been the right answer? 3rd? Core 2 Duo? All of them can run Win 10 just fine, and can (at least technically, and for today) run Win11.

I have a computer I use mostly in my office, but sometimes I run games on it, because why not, that has a Xeon x3460. It can run literally every game I’ve thrown at it at 60fps, and it can do literally any workload I need it to do. It’s 15 years old. This isn’t the 80s or 90s where technology is changing so fast that you have to upgrade every year or two to keep up. There’s very little reason to upgrade if you have a working computer.

That CPU came out in 2009. I think things have changed since then. The Intel stagnation issue ended with Ryzen.

Not saying you should throw away your machine, but expecting it to support all features of an OS made 15 years later is unreasonable. They also aren't saying it won't work, just that you don't get all features. It already is way past what Windows 11 was designed to run on (which imo was unreasonable at the time).

If you want to use 15 year old hardware then use Linux. I do anyway for other reasons, and it keeps my FX-6300 server running fine too.

Funny. Linux doesn't care how old your hardware is. It still works fine. Too bad Windows can't be that robust.

I've just moved my work PC from a cast off from a customer - it had a BIOS date stamped 2012, and was a rather shag Lenovo with a ... Intel Core something and four GB RAM. Cheap though, ie free. I did wedge in a SSD to make it usable.

I run KDE which isn't known for being tiny and I have a Postgres DB and a few containers for experiments running. The new box is a i5 Intel G13 thingy - HP mini jobbie. Luxury

To ensure that I am as disadvantaged as everyone else, I run ESET Endpoint AV and full disc encryption on it. It boots EFI and Secure Boot is enabled. I will pass a Cyber Essentials Plus audit (UK standard) without having to employ any misdirection. I've also read up on the US standards. The STIG for Ubuntu 22.04 is doable but my desktop is running 23.04 and 24.04 has just come out.

I run my company and we have some customers who have some rather more stringent requirements than others. We also have our own standards.

Do you need my PayPal or Venmo account so you can send me money to replace perfectly working hardware?

Microsoft itself doesn't even sell their own laptops with 16GB RAM standard, it's always an expensive upgrade.