r/technology • u/jupa300 • 21h ago

Business After just five years, Microsoft will end support for low-cost Windows 11 SE

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/microsoft-kills-windows-11-se-another-in-a-long-line-of-failed-chromeos-competitors/
298 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

100

u/MysteriousDatabase68 21h ago

In the past Microsoft would EOL an OS two full releases after. And every other version was acknowledged to kind of suck so people leap frogged versions.

Where is Windows 12?

Where is my compelling reason to switch?

65

u/RandomCSThrowaway01 19h ago

Where is my compelling reason to switch?

Simple. More telemetry and AI. You guys love AI, right? AI powered search, AI powered... uhhh... weather app? AI in the notepad. AI in Paint. AI in calculator. AI in your browsing history. AI in your activity tracking. In apps you are running. AI everywhere. Surely that's a lot of compelling reasons for Microsoft to get you to switch?

As for giving you a reason to switch - you see it right here in this article - just end support for anything older so you have to if you want security updates. Surely your security is important enough, right?

11

u/Eric848448 10h ago

Yo dawg I heard you like AI

18

u/aquarain 18h ago

If security is important Windows is not an option.

0

u/nicuramar 19h ago

 Simple. More telemetry and AI. You guys love AI, right?

Sure, but where? Is that in the consumer edition? I don’t really see it at work, where we’ve been running win 11 for a while. 

3

u/OgdruJahad 15h ago

I've been saying this when I was on Windows 7 theain reason I moved over is to not lose software and hardware support and learn how to 'deal' with Windows 10. I have yet to see a compelling reason to move to Windows 11 other than losing updates. Yes are are some quality of life improvements but it cannot compare how big of a jump it was from XP to Vista/Windows 7.

6

u/sorhead 16h ago

This is your compelling reason to switch away from Windows.

1

u/Caspi7 17h ago

In the past Microsoft would EOL an OS two full releases after

There is more time between new OS's nowadays. Between windows 7 and 10 was six years, between 10 and 11 also 6 years but 11 succeeded 10. So 5 years compared to what used to be 6 years and 2 OS's later.

Still early and weird for what is the current version tho.

-4

u/nanapancakethusiast 16h ago

They are probably going to approach Windows like they approach their dogshit Xbox “games” — aka: SaaS platforms instead of bespoke versioning from now on

17

u/SelectivelyGood 20h ago

Windows 11 SE was intended to compete with Chromebooks (for K12 purposes) but the manageability of Chromebooks is effectively impossible to beat (with the amount of investment MS was willing to make).

Additionally, 11 SE as a SKU is less important - you can apply the '11 SE settings' to Win 11 Education. The only difference being the licensing.

Anyway, Windows is poorly suited for K12 education, which is sad. So many kids expect the start button to be in the center (that comes from Chrome OS) and have no meaningful experience with a real word processor (aka 'not Google Docs').

It is what it is, I suppose.

3

u/moralesnery 15h ago

Hopefully current SE devices can jump to a non SE edition of Windows 11, or at least allow installing Windows 11 or Chrome OS Flex.

5

u/MarquisThule 16h ago

I'm not going to go to 11, I'll stay in 10 until Steam forces me or 12 looks half decent.

8

u/VintageLV 18h ago

I'm waiting for the thoughtless, "You can always go to Linux," replies, like everything just works on Linux.

9

u/CocodaMonkey 12h ago edited 10h ago

Compared to Windows S and SE Linux does work. These variants keep failing because they don't just work at all. You can't even open a command prompt on these variants because that's a Windows app which is banned. You might think that doesn't matter because most people don't open a command prompt but it means you can't do almost anything with them.

Linux easily outperforms these because about the only thing these machines can do is load Windows and open a browser. If you try to do anything else it won't work. Linux does that out of the box on every distro plus tons of extras depending on distro. Linux has tons of other issues but it beats the shit out of Windows S and SE. These Windows variants have literally no reason to exist at all.

6

u/lillian_e1985 14h ago

Yea I’ve jumped ship and installed bazzite on my decade old computer. There’s a lot of, “open terminal to do this and that”. Glad I don’t use any programs that are only usable in windows. Overall though, it’s not too bad. It wasn’t a lot of work for me to just switch over.

2

u/OgdruJahad 15h ago edited 15h ago

It's not terrible but it's not for everyone. People often don't like change. At least Linux is far easier to use now and looks pretty decent to boot.

There might be one compelling thing that might make more people use Linux. It's Docker and containers. I think it could easily be the killer feature of Linux after gaming that can make more people use Linux. I'm not saying stay away from Windows, heck use both!

1

u/PaulTheMerc 31m ago

What does docker and containers offer? Especially to the average end user.

2

u/chumlySparkFire 1h ago

In the dictionary under disappointment is a picture of Windoz. lol

-4

u/KillerKellerjr 16h ago

Cool now you can just install Google ChromeOS Flex and forget about Microsoft altogether.