As the sun sets on Windows 10 support, many venues online decry the tsunami of e-waste Windows 11’s nonsensical hardware requirements are expected to create. Still more will offer advice: which Linux distribution is best for your aging PC? [Sean] from Action Retro has an alternate solution: get a 20 year old Sun Workstation, and run Windows 11 on that.
The Workstation in question from 2005 is apparently among the first Sun made using AMD’s shiny new 64-bit Opteron processor. Since Windows has no legacy 32-bit support– something it shares with certain Linux distributions– this is amongst the oldest hardware that could conceivably install and run Redmond’s latest.
And it can! Not in unaltered form, of course– the real hack here is courtesy of [ntdevlabs], whose “Tiny11” project strips all the cruft from Windows 11, including its hardware compatibility checker. [ntdevlabs] has produced a Tiny11Builder script that is available on GitHub, but the specific version [Sean] used is available on Archive.org.
[Sean] needed the archived version of Tiny11 because Windows 11 builds newer than 22H2 use the POPCNT operation, which was not present in AMD’s first revision of the x86_64 instruction set. POPCNT is part of Intel’s SSE4 extension from 2007, a couple years after this workstation shipped.
If you’re sick of being told to switch to Linux, but can’t stomach staying with Windows either, maybe check out Haiku, which we reported as ready for daily driving early last year.
Feels sacrilegious, like pissing in the baptismal font. Let that noble beast rest, why would you resurrect it just to scramble its brains with absolute Windows horrors from the future?
Imagine if you died and somebody brought your body back and installed whatever garbage Microsoft is turning out in 2050 on your corpse via neuralink.
Imagine how much RAM it takes just to boot the OS with no other apps. Imagine the start menu full of ads for 2050s gacha games. Don’t imagine 2050s gacha games, I’m not that cruel. Imagine the constant pop-up nags asking you for direct access permission to your deep amygdala for algo targeting.
imagine 10 years ago I was running as a side project a mainstream (debian) linux laptop with a non MMX 90Mhz CPU and 8MB of ram
dont hate the game, cause a lightweight distro requires more today than windows 10 yesterday
Win10 LTSC. There, fixed.