Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates
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Should OS makers, like Microsoft, be legally required to provide 15 years of security updates?
If the EU is going to pay for the developers, sure. I’d even go higher and say make it 50 years. Otherwise make your own OS or use Linux.
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Should OS makers, like Microsoft, be legally required to provide 15 years of security updates?
That sounds like an insane duration, even LTS distros are not usually anything like 15 years
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The jank oh my god the jank
Windows is far more jank than a lot of Linux distros/desktop environments.
Like…
- Multiple different right click menus?
- No consistent and cohesive design language even throughout system or first party apps?
- Having to search online for an exe download page, download, open downloads folder, double click, click next through an installer? Then each app having to have its own update process, often that always runs in the background to check (or none at all)?
- Updates that happen when you don’t want them to, take forever, and break things?
- Fucking ads everywhere?
- Web results in your start menu before actual stuff on your system
- Multiple settings apps?
- Sleep that doesn’t work?
- Convoluted process for setting things as the default app?
- Dark mode that’s only functional for some apps?
It’s actually incredible how much money Microsoft has, and how much more they spend than probably all Linux DEs combined, but they’ve still yet to fix so much low hanging fruit.
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That sounds like an insane duration, even LTS distros are not usually anything like 15 years
yeah but you don’t pay 150euros for it + all the ads and stuffs
but yeah, I don’t see the point of this, it’s clearly aimed at Microsoft, and at this point alternative solutions exist
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yeah but you don’t pay 150euros for it + all the ads and stuffs
but yeah, I don’t see the point of this, it’s clearly aimed at Microsoft, and at this point alternative solutions exist
I almost feel like the compromise we will eventually land on is that if an OS maker like Microsoft wants to continue advertising on your OS they have to take some liability for its security.
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I would prefer if they force the companies to unlock root and boot-loader, when they not ship security updates anymore for a device.
I’d add the hardware drivers must be open sourced at the end of support as well, and no drm, patent, reverse engineering legal protections for a out of support Device/chipset
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That sounds like an insane duration, even LTS distros are not usually anything like 15 years
this isn’t about the age of the OS, it’s the age of the device. I can install linux on a device from 20 years ago if not more.
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this isn’t about the age of the OS, it’s the age of the device. I can install linux on a device from 20 years ago if not more.
I don’t know. just the other day somebody on lemmy was asking about installing a 32bit linux distro on an old netbook and the majority of comments were discussing whether there was any practical reason for distros to continue 32-bit support.
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That sounds like an insane duration, even LTS distros are not usually anything like 15 years
They didn’t say you could not do version upgrade…
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This would almost certainly rule out Linux as an option. What Linux vendor feels comfortable committing to something, anything, for 15 years?
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this isn’t about the age of the OS, it’s the age of the device. I can install linux on a device from 20 years ago if not more.
Ahh, so the win11 arbitrary hardware requirements bullshit
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Should OS makers, like Microsoft, be legally required to provide 15 years of security updates?
15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.
If anything this slows down innovation which leads me to suspect the 15 year idea was though of by someone who dislikes any technical changes.
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15 is an arbitrarily long time. I think forcing it to be open sourced upon the companies end of life is the better option
Then you can have a company that acquires the original failed company and provides “support” in the form of one bugfix per year.
All of these solutions are gamable except for requiring that the solution be open source from the get-go.
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Should OS makers, like Microsoft, be legally required to provide 15 years of security updates?
No. Maintain your own OS. Any country or group of countries should be doing so.
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15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.
If anything this slows down innovation which leads me to suspect the 15 year idea was though of by someone who dislikes any technical changes.
Before Microsoft demanded TPM 2.0, you could install the latest version of Windows on extremely old hardware. Easily reaching that 15 years. We had this already. And Windows 11 can easily run without TPM 2.0. Microsoft just has business reasons to demand it. So I don’t see how innovation is slowed down by this.
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15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.
If anything this slows down innovation which leads me to suspect the 15 year idea was though of by someone who dislikes any technical changes.
Fair like imagine if Microsoft was forced to support windows 8 for 15 years, a operating system people barely use, also some OSs arnt ran by huge companys
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Should OS makers, like Microsoft, be legally required to provide 15 years of security updates?
No, OS makers should just not make their OS bloated with useless shit, stealing your data and have arbitrary system requirements. I think 15 years of OS updates is excessive unless we’re talking about servers or very specific workflows. IMO 5-10 years is enough.
That said, for some operating systems it doesn’t even make sense to support for THAT long, because how they are designed (A lot of Linux distros for example). It turns out, if you don’t break users’ workflow, they don’t mind to upgrade.
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Just require any new operating systems to support 15 year old hardware. We should require manufacturers to provide 15 years of UEFI and firmware updates too.
That is way more sensible, than the other way around.
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I don’t know. just the other day somebody on lemmy was asking about installing a 32bit linux distro on an old netbook and the majority of comments were discussing whether there was any practical reason for distros to continue 32-bit support.
That’s unfortunate, but still leaves you 20 years worth of devices if they drop 32-bit.
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15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.
If anything this slows down innovation which leads me to suspect the 15 year idea was though of by someone who dislikes any technical changes.
Or an established player in the market that wants to keep competitors out (but I guess in a way that is someone who dislikes change). While legislation like this can sometimes be great (e.g. the recent changes forcing longer support for mobile phones) there comes a point where it cuts the other way and it becomes an entry barrier.
Imo the better solution would be to legislate what happens after support ends. Like forcing the disclosure of at least some documentation that allows others to continue servicing the product or at least transfer out data and install other software on the device.
