[FirmwareBurner]

>I have a Skylake Dell Inspiron, it has TPM 2.0 but of course the CPU is not supported.

As a Skylake owner too, there's a good and well documented reason for that. Apparently, Skylake is full of so many silicon bugs[1](or just google "Skylake bugs") that Microsoft has had its work cut out patching Windows with workarounds based on Intel's erratas.

Maintaining support and testing for older and buggy silicon moving forward, keeps adding to the development cost of Windows, so it's only natural Microsoft would just say "fuck it" and drop further support for that CPU family at one point to save money and support headaches. Apple was also quick to drop Skylake.

Yeah, it sucks as a Skylake owner, but Intel holds a large part of the blame as well for pushing out junk without QA. Honesty there should be class action lawsuist for this.

FWIW, I have Win11 installed on Skylake and it seems to work just fine, so I assume Microsoft has it blacklisted as unsupported just so that if you ruin your accounting business due to some errors from the silicon bugs showing their heads, you can't hold them accountable as it's on you for working around their restrictions and running Windows 11 on an explicitly unsupported CPU.

> I think I just need to replace this thing finally.

Install Linux you mean.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/ex-intel-engineer-apple-turned...

[ActionHank]

I had a daily driver that ran windows 10.

Once a year I would format and reinstall because it would get sluggish.

I got a steamdeck and was blown away by how well everything ran on it.

The next time I was due to reinstall I switched to linux. It has been snappier than windows ever was and everything works fantastically well.

[refracture]

Thanks for the Skylake information.

> Install Linux you mean.

I'll preface this by saying I should have mentioned it's an Nvidia Optimus equipped laptop, a Dell Inspiron i5 7559 and that I've been running Linux to some capacity or another on a variety of hardware for nearly two decades now and will probably never stop using it, so believe me I'm aware that trying Linux on otherwise landfilled hardware is always worth a consideration.

So no, I don't mean 'Install linux'. Until about 6 months ago I was running Fedora on it (historically Slackware and Kubuntu).

Nvidia Optimus is garbage and I refuse to put up with it any longer. Whether it was an Ubuntu derivative with its own means for handling this or not I've found that Nvidia Optimus under Linux is a recipe for tearing, poor battery life, lots of heat when doing seemingly nothing and frequently fighting Nvidia drivers failing to work when I update the kernel.

This laptop does not give you the ability to disable the Intel GPU and use just the nvidia GPU, so the only option that makes the laptop decently usable is to just not install nvidia drivers at all and use only the Intel GPU, but even then it was never stable enough to live with day to day. It didn't matter what distro I ran, it just randomly would freeze without any useful information in the logs as to why. I realize this is Nvidia's fault more than anyone else's but I just don't have the energy to fight it anymore, particularly because it was 100% trouble free anytime Windows 10 was running.

Once Windows 10 goes fully EOL I am either recycling this laptop or giving it away, it can be somebody else's problem. The replacement laptop will either be straight Intel or AMD, I'm done with Nvidia.

A happier story is the Asus U43F. I believe it was a first gen Core i5; it had a bios bug in it that prevented installing Windows 10, it was stuck on 7, didn't have any EFI support. Asus and Microsoft both refused to do anything about it so it was completely abandoned. I installed a linux distro on it and my niece used it during the pandemic when they were forced to do school from home. It worked out great. I got it back later and sold it to somebody who understood they needed to run Linux on it and as far as I know to this day it still works just fine.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Nvidia Optimus is garbage and I refuse to put up with it any longer.

I heard PopOS works with Optimus out of the box, but I'm still gonna get a laptop with an AMD APU as I don't want the headaches of discrete GPUs and MUXs, plus I don't game too much anyway.

If a lot of games can run on the Steam Deck, then they can definitely run on laptops with similar or better AMD APUs, no need for discrete GPUs anymore unless you're a proper gamer, but for casual and retro gaming it should be good enough.

[my123]

Optimus proper power management for laptops on Linux (including fully turning the GPU down) only works on Coffee Lake (and AMD Renoir) and later with Ampere or later GPUs.

Prior to that generation, standard power management mechanisms don't work, and so the NVIDIA driver doesn't turn off the GPU when idle on those older platforms.

[FirmwareBurner]

Then https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF_5EKNX0Eg

[refracture]

So both the iGPU and Discrete GPUs lacked power management all together, that would explain a lot about how miserable this has been.

[refracture]

It will likely be an AMD APU as well, and I'll probably install Fedora or Kubuntu on it. I have no interest in discrete GPUs on laptops anymore, I do appreciate the gaming options it provides but I don't appreciate the heat and poor battery life. I also play a lot of older games that run great on any recent APU, some of which were just too demanding for the intel GPU on that Dell and really needed the Nvidia GPU to run well.