On Tue, Sep 9, 2025 at 5:19 PM Michael Galea via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:

> Many machines are not eligible for updates to Win 11. In particular,
> AMD machines older than Ryzen and Intel machines older than the Core 8th
> generation.
>
> I don't know about you, but I have a bunch of Windows 10 installations
> that I almost never use. What should we know?
>
> - there are hacks to let some ineligible machines get updated to Win 11.
> Those hacks may well cease to work.

Many of them still do. One place to start is here:
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-requirement

Although... Even these workarounds still require at least TPM 1.2 (Win11 demands 2.0) so if your hardware doesn't have any TPM at all don't waste your time, Linux is really your only option.

My wife has the only Windows 10 box in the house. Its processor fails the Microsoft requirements and also can't be upgraded.

See above. If the system has a TPM module then the CPU requirements can be bypassed.

ALL her apps (Thunderbird, Chromium, LibreOffice, Gimp) are available in Linux, so no problem there.

The problem is games, of which we have copious quantities, most of which have problems running on Wine.

You may be in for a pleasant surprise, emphasis on "may".

Wine long ago stopped being the preeminent way to run Windows games on Linux, being generally superseded by Proton -- a Wine fork created and actively developed by Steam. Since the SteamDeck runs Linux, Proton needs to run as many Steam games as possible, in the process making Linux more suited for gaming in 2025 than it's ever been. Indeed a number of top-tier games are reported to run faster under Linux+Proton than under Windows. Certainly games that were barely playable under Wine should be much better under Proton.

A good place to start to see how well your games run on Linux+Proton can be found at the website ProtonDB. The games that are least likely to work under Proton are multi-player cloud-based games, mainly because the companies that do anti-cheat libraries refuse to support Linux. Work is ongoing (many blogs and videos have been made on the issue, just search "Linux Anti Cheat") but this is not a technical issue.

Steam has even released its own Linux distribution, SteamOS -- based on what it shipped on the SteamDeck using Arch Linux and KDE -- but it's not fully cooked for public use. People who want a Linux system primarily for gaming (never thought you'd hear THAT did you?) are leaning toward Bazzite Linux, though there are instructions on how to install Steam for Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch and others. NOTE: Proton appears to be optimised for AMD graphics cards.

This option gives money to nobody, though I'm sure that Steam would love for you to buy some games from them.

Hope this helps. I have installed Steam and play a few of my PC games on it. Only one of my Steam library of about 10 games doesn't work. Cities Skylines 2 isn't supported (though the original is).

I hope you found this useful.
Good luck!

Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada

@evanleibovitch / @el56