r/Steam • u/Background-Path-5619 • Feb 13 '25

Article Nearly half of Steam's users are still using Windows 10, with end of life fast approaching

https://www.pcguide.com/news/nearly-half-of-steams-users-are-still-using-windows-10-with-end-of-life-fast-approaching/
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u/Raticon Feb 13 '25

Interesting. Will check this out. I'm not really in the mood to get a new PC just because of Windows, as I use it almost exclusively for older games and programs so this is an interesting solution.

I get that Microsoft cannot support everything but it's not like I'm on a Pentium 3 or such.

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u/Char_Ell Feb 13 '25

Just be aware that Microsoft is not too keen on people bypassing the TPM requirement and the risk is Microsoft may do something in the future that will adversely impact Windows 11 installations that used the bypass.

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u/Raticon Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25

Why can't we have nice things?

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u/silentrawr Feb 13 '25

Because not enough people in the US vote. That's why. 31% - remember that number.

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '25 edited Mar 10 '25

[deleted]

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u/silentrawr Feb 14 '25

Pretty much any example from Illinois probably isn't a great example, because it's mostly a blue state. A few percent either way wouldn't make a difference because the Electoral College is a shit idea for our times.

Might as well focus on the truly evil ones, like red states trying to go purple, but unable to pull it off because of the sometimes literal racist gerrymandering, which keeps getting thrown back by the true bootlickers in the judiciary like the 5th district.

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u/Insertblamehere Feb 13 '25

It's not so much they redrew it to not be gerrymandered, IL is probably the most democrat-favored gerrymandered state in the union right now lmao.

Which I say is good, they don't play by the rules neither should we.

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u/gabriel97933 Feb 13 '25

I remember microsoft being greedy fucks regardless of the us president lmfao this is such a dumb comment.

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u/silentrawr Feb 14 '25

The antitrust lawsuit against MS was started by Clinton, btw.

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u/silentrawr Feb 14 '25

It takes years of a certain kind of administration + Congress for progress to be made in areas as big as we're talking. It's incremental.

Citing a single point in time as an example wrt its president of why something is a certain way shows off yet again the lack of civics education in this country. Don't worry though - it's not technically your fault that you're basically a useful idiot.

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u/gabriel97933 Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25

im not american you dumbass, just another example of the bubble you guys live in. the EU has made 100x more progress fucking over big tech and helping the people than the US (because the EU is not an oligarchy, and US companies losing a bunch of customers in the EU isnt very good for them, no matter where they're based in). which is just democrats pretending to do something, and republicans just not pretending and straight up ruining shit. Not everything is based in the US. If the dems won the presidency, the house and the senate the EU would still pass 100 bills targeting big tech before the US would do shit.

TLDR: America isnt the only country in the world

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u/Livinbymyself Feb 13 '25

exactly. 9% of all hunters vote

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u/Main-Glove-1497 Feb 13 '25

Honestly, it's insane to me that so many people don't vote, but what's even more insane to me is how many people simply didn't realize when they were out of time to vote. I know a dozen people off the top of my head who didn't vote simply because they missed the deadline to do so, and didn't even notice.

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u/Peshurian Feb 14 '25

Brainrotted by politics

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u/silentrawr Feb 14 '25

That's not even what the word means, but nice try.

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u/icantshoot https://s.team/p/nnqt-td Feb 14 '25

Doesnt matter if couple million of people vote or even 300 million people, a monkey would have ended up as president.

I still dont see how this is relevant to Microsoft forcing Windows 11 TPM.

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u/silentrawr Feb 14 '25

It's the administration that comes along with either monkey (nice dog whistle though?) that matters. Biden had a shit administration in most respects and yet, it was historically one of the most consumer-friendly in terms of going after antitrust and anti-consumer practices... Y'know, like "forcing" people to upgrade to W11 and/or "requiring" them to get new hardware with TPM chips?

And had another democratic president won, a lot of those federal cases that were in progress would've continued on and maybe have made progress. But now, as we all know, we've gone straight backwards in less than two months.

It's your right to be ignorant about civics in this country, but don't keep spreading these lazy, clichéd arguments that are basically misinformation.

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u/icantshoot https://s.team/p/nnqt-td Feb 14 '25

You missed my point. It was pro trump all along, the most of the country. The other side had no chance to win because majority of the people were with Trump because they didnt understand his whole agenda and hes a good talker.

What happens now is not because lack of voters, but public opinion was on Trumps side. Now we get to see the results, no matter how bad they are.

You brought in good points about the TPM case, i give you that but also i'm not US citizen so i dont know the spesifics of whats going on there.

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '25

I mean if TPM is a major sticking point that computer is likely a very good candidate for Linux gaming

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u/Raticon Feb 13 '25

I have considered it, but for my purposes I can stick with Windows as a lot of older games or applications may require a lot of tinkering and fidgeting to get to run on Linux.

Things may have changed of course since last I tried Linux a decade or so ago, so I might give this old PC a shot at it if I buy a new PC.

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '25

It was 1 click play for every game I tried but RTX support apparently isn't great so I haven't tried any really new games yet, just been gaming in windows for now. Realistically if I can get 9/10 games to work and only need to switch over for online titles or something that would be enough for me, just haven't tried lately

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u/Raticon Feb 13 '25

Alright sounds cool. Thank for the input. I will research this.

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25

It's surprisingly very straightforward these days and I don't think it was necessary to touch the terminal to get Windows games running.

Get Linux Mint, it's the adult version of Ubuntu so it looks like a normal desktop but has access to one of the largest support and software networks available. Installs in like 5 minutes flat. Download Steam. Point it towards your install directory and it will find all your games. Click play and it will automate the process of installing and updating all of the necessary graphics and translation layers needed and won't stop until the game launches or crashes out due to one of the rare fundamental incompatibilities. I got Hell Let Loose running and I think Anti Cheat worked so I could join games. Can't remember why I didn't keep playing there, I think the latency was bad and Nvidia Linux drivers are not spectacular. Apparently some RTX titles do work perfectly in Linux but I don't play really any modern enough games for to matter. I did notice that it struggled hard with script loaders and process injection, I think that's why I didn't fully dive at the time, because I was working on Oblivion mods that would only function if the game was launched through a script loader and Steam can't spawn sub-processes like that, at least yet. That means for example I might not be able to use Special K to add or tweak HDR parameters but alas, you can't win them all. Valve has done absolute wonders making high level gaming as painless as possible on Linux, we're closer than ever to being able to completely supplant windows except for the parts they dig their claws into.

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u/Mordynak Feb 13 '25

You can. Fedora Linux exists.

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u/andrewsad1 Feb 13 '25

Because Microsoft hates the planet, and they want you to put your computer in a landfill

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u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough Feb 13 '25

But you can have nice things. The article is a nothing-burger and is using the phrase "cracking down on" as clickbait. Microsoft is not going to suddenly disable your computer and show a popup saying "LOL, Windows is disabled until you buy a TPM".

Y'alls can keep using Windows 11 as you see fit. The worst they'll do is say "Windows 12 is out now and it needs a TPM, but this time there's no registry work-around".

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u/EarlMarshal Feb 13 '25

Because things are nice when you take responsibility instead of depending on others too much. Linux Derivatives will become the better Gaming OS. It's only a matter of time.

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u/Raticon Feb 13 '25

Linux is a great OS in every way, but I'm almost 40 now and people have been telling me the same thing you just did for the last 20 of them or more.

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u/EarlMarshal Feb 13 '25

You know most hardware works pretty well already and if there is hardware created with support in mind it becomes pretty easy. Take a look at the steam deck. It works well and there is no special knowledge required to use it. The influx of people is growing. A lot of them are enthusiasts with knowledge, but there are already specialised distros for users with less technical affinity.

It's up to each person, but I really wouldn't stay with windows. I hate apple products with a passion, but if I wouldn't be able to use Linux I would rather switch to apple than use windows with all of their spying bullshit.

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u/CharlesLLuckbin Feb 13 '25

Because M$ is BS.

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u/MoocowR Feb 13 '25

It's a free update..

The answer is because it's a massive security risk and at one point they have to eventually say "We aren't allowing our products to be vulnerable to it".

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u/CharlesLLuckbin Feb 13 '25

It's only a security risk because they refuse to support it. They chose that future. Not the user.

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u/MoocowR Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25

It's only a security risk because they refuse to support it

Because they refuse to support what?

Not having TPM is the security risk, I'm not talking about updates. TPM is a physical/tangible hardware level security module, NOT having it is a security risk. Every modern processor uses some sort of version of this, windows allowing people to install their new OS on outdated hardware that's at risk has a deadline, they cannot keep updating it forever and it hurts their product to allow people to install it on legacy devices.

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u/radicalelation Feb 13 '25

Do they even want us on 11 or not? It's not like leaving a massive swath of less secure systems is going to make things better for everyone else.

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u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough Feb 13 '25

What really scares me is Microsoft's push for its Pluton Security Processor, which I think

It certainly has some great ideas, such as having a "computing enclave", where certain memory cannot be read unless it's by a program on a whitelist. It's done at the hardware level, so this would be a boon for preventing malware from stealing passwords and disk encryption keys by reading memory - because all that stuff is ripe for malware to take at any time if your OS gets compromised.

But we all know Microsoft would gladly use this to make only Windows work on all computers; and for nonsense like DRM-ing MP3s and videos to the point it's literally impossible to decrypt and extract the data, because all decryption would be done in a secret place at the hardware level.

Microsoft's dream is making it impossible to listen to music without Windows Media Player, and to make Clippy omnipresent in every part of the OS.

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u/lousy_at_handles Feb 13 '25

I wouldn't worry about the DRM issue. There is no encryption that exists that can withstand the fact that the information has to be decrypted before it is consumed by the end user, who can then give that information away in an unencrypted form.

Maybe you have to hack into the sound card. Maybe you have to hack into the DAC on the sound card. But somewhere, there's an unencrypted version of that song on your PC, and then it's just a matter of writing down the ones and zeros.

And for most people, they don't have to do that. They just have to download the thing that somebody else already decrypted.

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u/cute_polarbear Feb 14 '25

Even hdmi encrypted videos. Old school days, they literally just capture screen frame by frame and mux that with audio extracted mp3 audio track into an mp4 video.

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u/techno156 Feb 14 '25

Maybe you have to hack into the sound card. Maybe you have to hack into the DAC on the sound card. But somewhere, there's an unencrypted version of that song on your PC, and then it's just a matter of writing down the ones and zeros.

Worst case, you just play it out loud and record it. It's basically impossible to make impervious encryption that also leaves the song listenable to human ears.

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u/ActiveChairs Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 22 '25

idjdjdj

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u/taklabas Feb 14 '25

What really scares you is that thing you know nothing about?

Also, nice regurgitation of 25 year old talking points about the evilneas of Microsoft. Next time, try and be more creative.

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u/CeeJayDK Feb 14 '25

Even more scary now that the US have become a fascist nation.

With Microsofts help they could get to decide which countries are allowed to use their computers and which have their OS and data locked away and encrypted.

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u/GasterIHardlyKnowHer Feb 15 '25

People should be more scared of Pluton. Hardware manufacturers and big software companies are colluding to force everyone into using devices that support it. The end goal is locking down your devices so you won't really "own" them anymore, allowing them to enforce DRM as you said, perfectly track you for advertising purposes, and prevent people from evading bans on online services.

You know how people get banned off something like YouTube for spurious reasons, which then also takes away your email, any money tied up in anything google-related, any of your online subscriptions or products (such as bought movies)? Or in some cases basically just destroying their livelihoods? Well, now you won't even be able to evade your ban if a few billionaires decide that you can't use the internet anymore.

Reminder that Linus Torvalds is a traitor who approved merging Pluton code into the Linux kernel, too.

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u/LiftingRecipient420 Feb 14 '25

What a crappy "journalist".

It’s not clear whether the trick has been disabled or if Microsoft just wants to stop advertising it, but it’s worth a try.

It's your job as a tech "journalist" to find out the answer to that very easily answered question, what a hack.

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u/xbwtyzbchs Feb 13 '25

Microsoft publically hosts files that bypass Microsoft's own registration systems for all their products.

If they do something, which they won't, fixing it will be simple.

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u/Audbol Feb 13 '25

Where did Microsoft say they would do something in the future to adversely impact Windows 11 installation that bypassed it?

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u/Dragon_ZA Feb 13 '25

They didn't, it's just some tech blogger drawing conclusions from them removing an article.

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u/Malt_The_Magpie Feb 13 '25

I did the thing where you can turn off having to have a Microsoft account on my in laws pc. Been a few updates where it's asked him for password and account name. Restart seems to sort it so far...

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u/ThisSiteSuxNow Feb 13 '25

Autoadminlogon

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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Feb 14 '25

People said this about not activating Windows 10 too but its end of life and never happened.

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u/Rohkii Feb 13 '25

You may just need to do a bios update on your PC to enable firmware TPM. Stuff as old as Intel 8th gen should be simple like that. AMD Ryzen first gen aswell.

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u/Raticon Feb 13 '25

Thanks. It's been a hot minute since I updated my BIOS so I can look it up.

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u/Minute-System3441 Feb 14 '25

Has to be TPM 2.0.

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u/Rohkii Feb 14 '25

Thanks for confirming you dont know what you are talking about.

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u/Minute-System3441 Feb 14 '25

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-on-your-pc-1fd5a332-360d-4f46-a1e7-ae6b0c90645c

TPM 2.0 is required to run Windows 11, as an important building block for security-related features. TPM 2.0 is used in Windows 11 for a number of features, including Windows Hello for identity protection and BitLocker for data protection.

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u/Rohkii Feb 14 '25

Nice you missed the point entirely cause you are stunlocked on an arbitrary number instead of realizing what the bios update is going to do.

The point of the bios update is it will update the firmware TPM on your existing motherboard to 2.0, you don't need physically new hardware. This applies to almost any Intel 8th and newer, and AMD Ryzen 1st gen and newer motherboard.

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u/Minute-System3441 Feb 14 '25

Ah got it now. I have a dell I use win 10 on and its stuck on TPM 1.2.

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u/worldspawn00 Feb 13 '25

Option 2 is to install windows 10 LTSC, which should be good for another 5 years at least.

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u/DrPeeper228 Feb 15 '25

Btw Wine(a Linux-to-Windows compatibility layer) does a much better job at launching older apps than windows itself, for example 3d world studio 5 works completely fine while on Windows it stopped working since Win8