Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

yeah but you don’t pay 150euros for it + all the ads and stuffs

but yeah, I don’t see the point of this, it’s clearly aimed at Microsoft, and at this point alternative solutions exist

I almost feel like the compromise we will eventually land on is that if an OS maker like Microsoft wants to continue advertising on your OS they have to take some liability for its security.

I’d add the hardware drivers must be open sourced at the end of support as well, and no drm, patent, reverse engineering legal protections for a out of support Device/chipset

this isn’t about the age of the OS, it’s the age of the device. I can install linux on a device from 20 years ago if not more.

I don’t know. just the other day somebody on lemmy was asking about installing a 32bit linux distro on an old netbook and the majority of comments were discussing whether there was any practical reason for distros to continue 32-bit support.

They didn’t say you could not do version upgrade…

This would almost certainly rule out Linux as an option. What Linux vendor feels comfortable committing to something, anything, for 15 years?

Ahh, so the win11 arbitrary hardware requirements bullshit

15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.

If anything this slows down innovation which leads me to suspect the 15 year idea was though of by someone who dislikes any technical changes.

Then you can have a company that acquires the original failed company and provides “support” in the form of one bugfix per year.

All of these solutions are gamable except for requiring that the solution be open source from the get-go.

No. Maintain your own OS. Any country or group of countries should be doing so.

Before Microsoft demanded TPM 2.0, you could install the latest version of Windows on extremely old hardware. Easily reaching that 15 years. We had this already. And Windows 11 can easily run without TPM 2.0. Microsoft just has business reasons to demand it. So I don’t see how innovation is slowed down by this.

Fair like imagine if Microsoft was forced to support windows 8 for 15 years, a operating system people barely use, also some OSs arnt ran by huge companys

No, OS makers should just not make their OS bloated with useless shit, stealing your data and have arbitrary system requirements. I think 15 years of OS updates is excessive unless we’re talking about servers or very specific workflows. IMO 5-10 years is enough.

That said, for some operating systems it doesn’t even make sense to support for THAT long, because how they are designed (A lot of Linux distros for example). It turns out, if you don’t break users’ workflow, they don’t mind to upgrade.

That is way more sensible, than the other way around.

That’s unfortunate, but still leaves you 20 years worth of devices if they drop 32-bit.

Or an established player in the market that wants to keep competitors out (but I guess in a way that is someone who dislikes change). While legislation like this can sometimes be great (e.g. the recent changes forcing longer support for mobile phones) there comes a point where it cuts the other way and it becomes an entry barrier.

Imo the better solution would be to legislate what happens after support ends. Like forcing the disclosure of at least some documentation that allows others to continue servicing the product or at least transfer out data and install other software on the device.

This comes after e-waste watchers revealed that 75 million iPhones could be rendered obsolete – tipping the scales at around 1.2 million kilograms of e-waste – following the release of iOS 26.

Not strictly true because the phones they counted here will still get security updates for 2-3 years AFAIK. 7 year old phones, mind you. But yeah, no more feature updates. Which are so meaningless these days anyway.

Yes exactly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

I think Microsoft should be punished with forcing to release the Windows kernel source code.