From: Michael Galea via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
I will consider any alternative that costs money, but no alternative that involves paying Microsoft, such as the extended Security Update program.
The first year is free, without commitment to pay after that. But it is only a year. And it requires yielding to Microsoft's cloud. Since computers get obsolescent fairly quickly, that year may be significant. After all, when the EoS announcement was first made, obsoleting Intel 7th gen and older boxes sounded really bad. By now, the current Intel gen is 14 (I think) and lots of ordinary folk think of 7th gen and older as ancient. As a Linux user, I think that Haswell (Intel 4th gen) and newer are pretty functional. Some post-Haswell evolution: - NVMe support came later and would be nice. - Performance has improved linearly but many tasks don't care. - Confusing improvements to USB have been made. - iGPUs finally got better. - most important: AMD's processors are now often better than Intel's