news
Providing support for Windows 10 refugees
The End of 10 project was dreamed up at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference (SFSCON) and launched on May 28. According to the announcement, the end of Windows 10 security updates will ""turn an estimated 200 to 400 million laptops and computers worldwide into security risks and heavily polluting e-waste"" simply because those systems don't meet Microsoft's requirement for a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0. Linux, of course, will run quite happily on hardware that Microsoft has deemed obsolete.
I did not have the opportunity to attend Akademy this year, but its talks were live-streamed to YouTube, and the unedited streams for all talks are available now. The End of 10 session begins at 4:13 in the room-one video. Slides are also available.
Teale introduced herself as a member of the KDE Eco team working on its Opt Green campaign, which seeks to reduce energy demands of software and extend hardware life. Louis said that she is a retired engineer and teacher based in Berlin; before joining the End of 10 project in January 2025, she ""hardly knew anything about Linux and had never heard of KDE before"". Her activities with the campaign are focused on bringing Linux to ""open-minded elderly people in Berlin"", beginning with her neighbors. Silva Rodé said that she was also ""pretty new at everything""; she met De Veaugh-Geiss at a conference last year and talked to him about the End of 10 campaign, leading to her involvement.
De Veaugh-Geiss is a project and community manager for KDE e.V., working on KDE Eco. He said that the group wanted to do the update jointly because the campaign is conceptualized as a collaborative effort—thus it made sense to have the people on stage who are doing the work. There are, he noted, many others who were not on stage, and the group could only provide a general overview of the campaign. ""It's really just the tip of the iceberg"".
End of 10 was born out of the Opt Green campaign, he said, which is funded by Germany's Federal Environment Agency and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection.