This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So, could users just ignore that and just buy an anti-virus product or use 0patch? If it's like Widows 8, most apps will still be updated for a few years.
The most important thing to get updates in the browser tbh. That's the source of nearly everything bad these days, and the main reason somebody would bother to update their PC.
I reckon they'll continue providing updates for those for as long as there's enough people using it. It's not like Google are going to willing turn round and go "whelp, no more adverts and spying for these millions of users!"
"Switch to Linux" is always the answer but a Nvidia graphics card, Stream Deck, and GoXLR are all things I use every single day, with no official linux support I'm never going to be able to use it as a daily driver. I have plenty of VMs that I run Linux on, but it's just a non-starter for my day to day gaming rig.
MS should have done what they said and made W10 "the last version of windows" instead of doing the typical corpo bullshit and coming out with an even worse version.
As someone who switched to Linux, and found reasons not to for literal decades, this has helped me:
Have a second ssd in your PC that is untarnished by the windows bootloader.
This way one can easily switch via BIOS / UEFI and no other annoying software.
Dual booting is also less annoying, if you switch via boot menu. It lets you test drive and configure Linux anytime you're in the headspace for it and reduces pressure on yourself.
Install linux on it. My current favorite for your situation would be Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Spin (what a mouthful). Have another exfat partitioned usb disk ready for file exchange with windows. Again, this makes handling windows easier, has nothing to do with linux.
Nvidia on fedora works good enough. third party repos also help a lot.
streamdeck is wonderful hardware, I know a friend who uses it daily with streamdeck_ui
This is to my knowledge as close to "official" as you can get. Good luck on your journey!
I'll switch my windows drive to the LTSC IoT version, when this happens. The only reason I have dual boot is for a fallback, if some games make trouble. For example for whatever reason BG3 multiplayer freezes randomly on linux. Single player is fine though. So until I got that sorted out I can fall back to windows. But when even the LTSC support runs out, then that's it completely for me.
I'll probably put windows enterprise iot lts on a vm in case I ever need to use a windows computer.
With the different distros of Linux, do different things support different distros? Like Zoom is support on Arch but not Mint, and Steam is supported in Mint but not Arch; or if an app supports Linux, it is on all distros? And if there is differences, do you have different partitions for different types of Linux?
All distros are equivalent, as far as software is concerned. They all have access to the same open source software, and Flatpak; AppImage; and Snap can be used for extra portability.
Think of a distro like a pre-configured image of linux. You can always change the configuration later, if you desire. For example, the Desktop Environment. All you have to do is just install a different DE package (usually via command line)
The DE has a major impact on user experience. Use KDE plasma for a more windows-familiar experience, or Gnome for a more Mac-familiar experience. Or experiment with others
The Linux Experiment is a good resource
To be fair, I may have stopped getting updates anyway? I suspect what happened is typical, that some Win10 update bugged the update process and I was supposed to either roll it back or get the next one by hand and just... didn't.
It is my intention to start looking at linux distros and have one installed by Summer 25...assuming I haven't immolated in a wildfire or been sent to a detention center by then.
time to block microsoft in pihole then.
no Microsoft, no updates.
mine hasnt been updated for about 3.5 years now. not having online access has its moments
