In my case my partner has a Windows 10 surface laptop. It’s perfectly functional and does what she needs it to do, but Windows 10 is dying next year, so I need to find some solution that is user friendly (meaning GUI-based in this case) to maintain her access to her OneDrive, or we throw away a perfectly good laptop to buy a slightly newer one. Besides the e-waste it’s just a waste of money. It makes some business sense, why make it easy to move away from windows? Except it also sucks on anything that isn’t a windows desktop, so they just expect people to put up with a subpar service essentially because their business users don’t have much choice. Dropbox was better 10 years ago than OneDrive is now, in terms of platform availability and usability.
Note: I’m aware we can access OneDrive and office via a browser, however it’s not the same as native and feels clunky. Throwing Linux on it and using a browser is probably going to be our solution if I can’t get rclone to work in a way she’ll be happy with.
I read an article that MS has backed off almost entirely on Win 11’s requirements. Now it’s a checkbox, “Your hardware isn’t supported so you accept responsibility if you have problems.”
As long as it’s newer than Pentium 4, you are probably fine.
Win 11 now only needs popcnt (a newer instruction added 15 years ago) and sse4.2.
You can modify the Windows 11 iso to bypass the requirements. You can tick a checkbox in Rufus when creating the install media to have it do it for you.
Well after looking further it’s actually the processor isn’t supported in general so Linux it is! It’s going to be a hard sell to my partner who doesn’t like using office 365 on the browser because “it screws up templates”. If even Microsoft’s tools screw up I can’t imagine libre office would do any better so that’s an even harder sell… Sigh.
I think both KDE and GNOME desktop environments might have integration with OneDrive as an option in their respective file browsers.
I remember KDE could work with Google Drive in that casual “download when you need it” way, rather than the traditional “sync mirrored copies” way.
Personally I’d say KDE is also a fantastic desktop environment for coming from Windows with little friction. I run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed personally, but Fedora has a KDE “spin” and I think Zorin uses it by default.
In my case my partner has a Windows 10 surface laptop. It’s perfectly functional and does what she needs it to do, but Windows 10 is dying next year, so I need to find some solution that is user friendly (meaning GUI-based in this case) to maintain her access to her OneDrive, or we throw away a perfectly good laptop to buy a slightly newer one. Besides the e-waste it’s just a waste of money. It makes some business sense, why make it easy to move away from windows? Except it also sucks on anything that isn’t a windows desktop, so they just expect people to put up with a subpar service essentially because their business users don’t have much choice. Dropbox was better 10 years ago than OneDrive is now, in terms of platform availability and usability.
Note: I’m aware we can access OneDrive and office via a browser, however it’s not the same as native and feels clunky. Throwing Linux on it and using a browser is probably going to be our solution if I can’t get rclone to work in a way she’ll be happy with.
There was quite a bit of initial config to do, but there is Linux OneDrive Client, and OneDriveGUI
I read an article that MS has backed off almost entirely on Win 11’s requirements. Now it’s a checkbox, “Your hardware isn’t supported so you accept responsibility if you have problems.”
As long as it’s newer than Pentium 4, you are probably fine.
Win 11 now only needs popcnt (a newer instruction added 15 years ago) and sse4.2.
I think my limiting factor is TPM 2.0 which I believe isn’t supported by the device but is required by windows 11
You can modify the Windows 11 iso to bypass the requirements. You can tick a checkbox in Rufus when creating the install media to have it do it for you.
Well after looking further it’s actually the processor isn’t supported in general so Linux it is! It’s going to be a hard sell to my partner who doesn’t like using office 365 on the browser because “it screws up templates”. If even Microsoft’s tools screw up I can’t imagine libre office would do any better so that’s an even harder sell… Sigh.
And popular distros like: Ubuntu,Fedora,etc your Cpu should be Atleast 64Bit and have atleast 3-4gb of ram
When did this happen?
It was in my news feed 2 days ago and as is the nature of the modern Internet, today I cannot find the article using Google.
Is this it?
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-details-how-to-install-windows-11-on-unsupported-pc-not-meeting-requirements/
Yes!
If you’re going to try Linux, there’s obviously a ton of great options but I can definitely recommend ZorinOS for anyone unfamiliar with Linux.
I replaced Windows on my Mom’s computer with Zorin and she absolutely loves it. Its UI is simple and clean and the OS just works.
Might also look into https://github.com/jstaf/onedriver !
I think both KDE and GNOME desktop environments might have integration with OneDrive as an option in their respective file browsers.
I remember KDE could work with Google Drive in that casual “download when you need it” way, rather than the traditional “sync mirrored copies” way.
Personally I’d say KDE is also a fantastic desktop environment for coming from Windows with little friction. I run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed personally, but Fedora has a KDE “spin” and I think Zorin uses it by default.
Hope this is helpful :)