Providing support for Windows 10 refugees
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In October, consumer versions of Windows 10 will stop receiving security updates. Many users who would ordinarily move to the next version are blocked by Windows 11's hardware requirements unless they are willing to buy a newer PC. The "End of 10" campaign is an effort to convince those users to switch to Linux rather than sticking with an end-of-life operating system or buying a new Windows system. At Akademy 2025, Dr. Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss, Bettina Louis, Carolina Silva Rodé, and Nicole Teale discussed their work on the campaign, its progress so far, and what's next.
End of 10
The End of 10 project was dreamed up at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference
(SFSCON) and launched
on May 28. According to the announcement, the end of Windows 10
security updates will "turn an estimated 200 to 400 million laptops
and computers worldwide into security risks and heavily polluting
e-waste
" simply because those systems don't meet Microsoft's
requirement for a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0. Linux, of course,
will run quite happily on hardware that Microsoft has deemed
obsolete.
I did not have the opportunity to attend Akademy this year, but its talks were live-streamed to YouTube, and the unedited streams for all talks are available now. The End of 10 session begins at 4:13 in the room-one video. Slides are also available.
Teale introduced herself as a member of the KDE Eco team working on its Opt
Green campaign, which seeks to reduce energy demands of software
and extend hardware life. Louis said that she is a retired engineer
and teacher based in Berlin; before joining the End of 10 project in
January 2025, she "hardly knew anything about Linux and had
never heard of KDE before
". Her activities with the campaign are
focused on bringing Linux to "open-minded elderly people in
Berlin
", beginning with her neighbors. Silva Rodé said that she
was also "pretty new at everything
"; she met
De Veaugh-Geiss at a conference last year and talked to him about
the End of 10 campaign, leading to her involvement.
De Veaugh-Geiss is a project and community manager for
KDE e.V., working on KDE Eco. He said that the group wanted
to do the update jointly because the campaign is conceptualized as a
collaborative effort—thus it made sense to have the people on
stage who are doing the work. There are, he noted, many others who
were not on stage, and the group could only provide a general
overview of the campaign. "It's really just the tip of the
iceberg
".
End of 10 was born out of the Opt Green campaign, he said, which is funded by Germany's Federal Environment Agency and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection.
Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, which
coincides with the International E-Waste
Day (there really is a "day" for everything...) and KDE's
29th birthday. "So it seemed things are coming together, and we
should do something with this
". He held a BoF at
SFSCON in November of last year that
brought a handful of people with ideas; that led to another BoF at the
Chaos
Communication Congress (CCC) in December, where people started
volunteering to do work on End of 10.
Silva Rodé said that she was at CCC as part of a school event
and wound up volunteering to help with translating materials into
Spanish, which led to doing outreach in Latin America. "This was
very exciting to me to see Latin America heavily represented
".
What worked
The main goal, De Veaugh-Geiss said, was to connect new users with
in-person support. He addressed the audience, "who here has helped
someone install Linux that has never used it before, and then who has
had to help them again afterward?
" The idea was to
recreate the support network at scale so that people know that they
can go somewhere and get someone to help them out.
The first step was to promote existing local networks, such as
Linux user groups. The second step was to do outreach to FOSS users
and the media to "give the campaign some weight
" so that people
begin to pay attention to it. The third step was to build up new
support networks. All of that, he said, had been a great
success. There are more than 300 places that offer recurring support
for new users, and more than 225 events have been listed on the
End of 10 web site, in 40-plus countries. The web site has a
current map of all of the repair cafes, independent shops, organizations, groups, and collectives that
are providing support, as well as a list of upcoming events.
Some of the areas, he said, have much better representation than others. He invited people in underrepresented areas to consider getting involved to establish support networks in those areas as well.
One of the things that worked well, according to Silva Rodé, was to have concrete tasks for volunteers to take on. There were many people who really wanted to help but did not know where to begin or what to do.
De Veaugh-Geiss said that one of the ideas behind the campaign was
to make it distribution-neutral and to "try to speak as a big FOSS
family
". The project was "at least getting there
", with a
number of different organizations, distributions, and companies
supporting the campaign that are listed on the End of 10 web
site. This includes not just the usual suspects from the free-software
world but also repair collectives that have been focused on more
general hardware repair. He said that the campaign was illustrating
the importance of software for repairing hardware:
This is something that I think is quite abstract for many people. But when you start to realize, oh, my hardware won't work because the software has stopped being supported. I can go to a repair cafe. That becomes not abstract and very concrete.
Louis said that she lives in a "quite big cooperative apartment
complex
" that is home to about 1,000 people. She decided to start
there, and her first presentation drew about 30 people. After that,
interest in installing and using Linux took off; she began having
regular office hours and organized an installation event with
one-to-one support for users. "And we helped with doing backups
first!
"
The effort also included demo computers on hand so that users could
try Linux beforehand. "If they only use the browser, afterward
they say that it looks just like Windows
". Overall, she said it
was successful because people kept coming back for continuous
support. "As we have all heard, the experience is not done just
with going to an install party
", people need assurance there is
someone who can help them afterward too.
Opt Green
Teale said that part of the Opt Green campaign is to make people aware that they have options other than Windows or Apple. Part of that campaign has been to put ads into magazines, such as Öko-Test, a German consumer-protection publication, and Linux Magazine.
The idea was to take a distributed approach so that supporting
organizations would do their own campaigns within the context of
End of 10, De Veaugh-Geiss said. He noted that Zorin OS and KDE were running
their own campaigns, as well as the repair initiative Runder Tisch
Reparatur. "This gave us a much wider reach than we would have
been able to do if we had done it on our own.
"
Normal people, Louis said, don't read Linux Magazine. She
then backtracked a bit about suggesting that Linux users were not
normal people, with a laugh, "you know what I mean
". It is
important, she continued, to reach out to more mainstream publications
like Tom's Hardware, PC World, and non-technical
publications like The Irish
Times. She said that she learned about organic coverage of
the campaign in broadcast media when a friend contacted her to ask if
there would be more installation events. "I changed my mind after
listening to the radio broadcast
", her friend said.
Challenges
There was some skepticism when reaching out to existing repair cafes, De Veaugh-Geiss said. One organization in Germany said it did not see what software had to do with repair cafes and did not think that its communities would be interested in installing Linux. To persuade the organization, he proposed doing a presentation to the community, and about 180 people from different repair cafes showed up. After a presentation about e-waste and the energy consumption involved in producing new devices, many of those who attended were interested in follow-ups.
Louis said that the people she spoke to who run repair cafes had
many reasons not to offer Linux support. "When somebody comes with
a broken toaster to the repair cafe, afterward it's fixed and they
can just use it
". Linux, of course, is a totally different
story. The repair cafes did not want to deal with "all these people
coming to them and having to explain how to use this and how to do
that
". The cafes just want to repair things, and that's quite
understandable.
The FOSS way of doing things is "new and foreign
",
De Veaugh-Geiss said, to many of the people who are excited about
the environmental aspects of installing Linux. There are also
challenges with building new teams and communities. There are many
places that do not have the maker spaces and Linux user groups one
might find in a large city like Berlin; there are a lot of gaps in the
map, he said.
Teale added that keeping people hooked was also a big
challenge. It's a lot of work to keep people updated and interested
after the excitement of a first event. Silva Rodé added that the same
is true for volunteers: "it's not a very instant gratification kind
of thing. Some people join the Matrix channel, and they expect
revolution the next day
". When that doesn't happen, she said, they
are disappointed, and then they leave. Everything is slow, and people's
expectations have to be managed.
De Veaugh-Geiss said that now that the campaign had "hit
the ground running
", the second phase could be to try to take the
enthusiasm and get people involved with the developer community. One
way to do that might be to write up guides to help people learn to
write bug reports. Another idea, he said, would be to do a follow-up
"i-Waste
" campaign for Intel-based Macs that are losing macOS
support but are still good hardware.
Q&A
The first question was about the barriers people faced when moving from Windows to Linux; specifically, what were people complaining about or missing?
Louis said that she had received a lot of positive feedback on how
fast Linux is, and how easy it was to use. De Veaugh-Geiss
answered that there is a real vendor lock-in issue, where people
need—or think they need—specific software on Linux. "If
it doesn't run on Linux, it just creates a barrier that feels
insurmountable
".
Another attendee wanted to know if the group was keeping a database of feedback from repair cafes and others who were getting input from people. De Veaugh-Geiss said that the campaign had done a survey of about 50 repair cafes recently, asking about general obstacles and if they had seen an increase in visitors. But, at the moment, the campaign is not keeping a database of feedback or anything of that sort.
One person said that they were quite amazed by the number of
events and such, but "at the same time, it still seems small
compared to the vast internet
". They wanted to know what the
organizers thought about the scale, or if they were happy with what
they had achieved.
Louis referred back to slide six in the presentation, which showed
an iceberg with several penguins on top: "this is only what we see
and what people have told us
". She suggested that there was much
more activity than what the campaign knew about directly and noted
that there are people using the End of 10 hashtag
("#Endof10") on the Fediverse that are
not involved with the campaign at all. "It is pretty cool to see
that it's becoming its own thing and has legs beyond ours
".
As always, there are some questions during the Q&A that are not
actually questions; one audience member interjected that is it
possible to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, but
"there's no guarantee you'll get updates
".
Someone else wondered if the campaign is reaching highly technical
people or "sort of more normal people
". Louis said that
tech-savvy people tend to just watch some videos and do it by
themselves; they are not the people that the campaign is reaching out
to. Instead, the campaign is trying to reach the people who want
personal support for the installation and afterward as well.
Readers interested in assisting with the campaign can find ways to get involved on the contribution page.