this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates (www.theregister.com)
submitted 11 hours ago by SleafordMod@feddit.uk to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Should OS makers, like Microsoft, be legally required to provide 15 years of security updates?

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[–] Cricket@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 hours ago

Ten years is a very long time for support. If you need support past that length, you need a different OS.

I strongly disagree. Ten years should be the bare minimum required. Windows used to support hardware way longer than 10 years and probably more than 15, until Windows 11 came out.

The older hardware gets the harder it is to keep supporting it. Case in point, there reason you can’t get TLS 1.2 that pretty much every site now requires onto Windows 95 era machine is the underlying hardware cannot keep up with the required computational needs to support that encryption. And if you happened to install Windows 95 onto modern hardware, the number of changes to the OS to get access to the underlying hardware is pretty much an upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows 95 is a bad example since it's a 30 year old OS. It's a completely different era with different OS architecture and different OS environment. Let's instead use an example of an OS from the time frame being discussed: Windows 7, released a little over 15 years ago. There's very little reason why a computer that was made since Windows 7 was released shouldn't be able to run Windows 11. I think that this is a profit maximization decision on Microsoft's part (less hardware support, less development and testing cost). They basically said screw the customers and screw the environment.