For some IT pros, the Windows 11 update isn’t an easy switch

Could this finally be the year of the Linux desktop?!

As Microsoft pushes users to upgrade to Windows 11, IT professionals find themselves in a familiar cycle: swapping out a tested, app-compatible Windows OS for a new and less familiar one.

• Support for Windows XP, which launched in 2001, halted in 2014. XP’s end-of-life led many users to switch to Windows 7, and many IT admins to hang on to their legacy software as long as possible.
• Windows 7, launched in 2009, stopped getting updates in 2020—not that it stopped the OS from maintaining market share.
• Windows 8.1 was released in 2013 and lost support in 2023. This version of the OS was meant to correct many of the complaints about Windows 8, which radically altered some aspects of the traditional Windows UX.
• Windows 10, launched in 2015, was a “back-to-basics” version of the OS after the criticism of Windows 8.
• Windows 11 became available in 2021.

On Oct. 14, Microsoft announced an end to Windows 10 software updates and security fixes. IT pros considering a quick update to Windows 11 need to be aware of the OS’s specific hardware demands—at least 64 GB of available disk space, 4 GB or more of memory, and secure crypto-processor Trusted Platform Module 2.0, for example—which could lead some customers to buy new machines to remain aboard the Windows train.

That’s one reason some IT pros are questioning whether they need to stay on this upgrade at all when it comes to Windows 11.

The last version of Windows...jk. Windows 10 was supposed to be the end of the upgrading cycle. As Microsoft’s then-evangelist Jerry Nixon reportedly said in 2015 at the company’s Ignite conference: “Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10."

But like an aging band announcing a “farewell” tour, there’s almost always another one.

“As technology evolves, updating operating system and hardware requirements is essential to ensure we stay ahead of the rise of increasingly sophisticated security threats,” Mark Linton, vice president for Windows and devices, wrote to IT Brew in an email in which he also noted Windows 10’s decade-long run.

Linton added that Windows 11 is “the most secure version of Windows ever by default” and meets the company’s Secure Future Initiative standards—a commitment made in May 2024 to create secure by default, continuously protected products. The 11’s required Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 chips, for example, store cryptographic keys designed to determine if an operating system or firmware has been tampered with. (The sign-in feature Windows Hello uses the TPM to securely hold fingerprint and facial-recognition data.)

10 to the end. A Q3 2025 study from employee platform ControlUp found 21% of more than 1 million investigated Windows machines had not migrated to Windows 11. September data from web-traffic analysis site StatCounter calculated Windows 10 market share at 41% and Windows 11 market share at 49%, despite the latter being on the market for four years.

Live and let Linux. The push to upgrade to Windows 11 frustrated project manager and indie game developer Rayan Khan. He and his small team had used Windows 10 previously for gaming and development tasks. “We were die-hard Windows people,” he said.

His brand-new laptop, equipped with Windows 11, was running hot, Khan said, impacting performance.

“Do I really want to have all this extra bloatware running on my computer?” he recalls asking himself. “A mark of a good machine is: If I can get you from point A to point B, using the least amount of resources possible, that’s good. We shouldn’t all be running the most energy intensive rigs just to, I don’t know, watch YouTube videos,” he told us.

Microsoft announced feedback features in July 2025 to address system sluggishness. Windows 11, according to Microsoft, arrives with lots of AI features. On Oct. 16, Microsoft published a blog post saying new experiences from AI-powered assistant Copilot “make every Windows 11 PC an AI PC.”

Despite the promise of AI features, though, this Windows 11 upgrade is the latest version of a familiar frustration loop for IT professionals: an IT pro resists upgrading Microsoft yanks security updates or adds flashy features to move the migration along.

Instead of upgrading, Khan decided to switch to Linux Mint, a free, mostly open-source operating system.

“This whole ploy by Microsoft just felt like a way to make us get rid of working computers, just to buy new stuff,” he said.

Thanks for the memories. Those who stick with Windows 10 face the risks of using a system that no longer receives security updates. For student and cybersecurity practitioner Byrch Baker, letting go of Windows 10 had to do with both security and a little nostalgia. Windows 10 has a flat design and user interface (UI) he’s familiar with; he knows the settings and start menu, and he only very recently made the change to Windows 11.

“Windows 11 asks you to embrace all that stuff of the future, like AI, cloud integration, tighter security, but by doing that, you leave behind a decade of finely tuned and stable releases of this system of Windows 10 that just worked,” he told IT Brew.

Baker, too, has built many PowerShell apps in Windows 10, often using Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)—an application “no longer in active feature development,” according to Microsoft.

“I spent all my time developing on Windows 10,” he said. “It’s a new frontier that I don’t know if I want to go to.”