Windows 10

» see microsoft.com/windows10 as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i was running windows 10 on the home desktop in ankara from '15 through '18, then again on a work-issued thinkpad through most of the edge-ai job. it was the first windows in a long time where the daily friction dropped near zero. by then i was already spending most of my day in linux vms for the uav computer vision work. windows 10 was the host os and the browser tabs.

the launch on 29 july 2015 came with a free upgrade for genuine windows 7 and 8.1 licenses. microsoft ran that offer for a full year. it also ran a public-relations cycle over the get-windows-10 nag dialog that pre-checked the upgrade button on machines nobody had opted in. the install base moved anyway, because vista was long gone and windows 8 had been a mistake nobody wanted to keep defending. by mid-2018 net applications had it past windows 7 on the worldwide desktop share.

microsoft told the press at build 2015 that this would be the last windows. no more numbered releases. just rolling feature updates twice a year forever. that was a marketing framing that held for about six years. windows 11 arrived in october '21 with a tpm 2.0 chip requirement that cut off a sizable slice of otherwise fine machines. the "last windows" line quietly disappeared from the microsoft site.

mainstream support ended 14 october 2025. on that day the install base was still estimated in the hundreds of millions of machines. microsoft opened the extended security updates program for consumer accounts, free if you sign in and sync your settings to the cloud, paid at thirty dollars a year otherwise. the patch pipeline for regular home users closed on the same day.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what shipped ~

windows 10 was the walk-back from the windows 8 start-screen bet. the start menu came back as a hybrid of the old list and the tile grid, cortana sat in her own search bar next to it. edge shipped as the browser meant to replace internet explorer, then got quietly rewritten on chromium in 2020 because the original edgehtml engine could not keep up with what the modern web had become. by the 22h2 release in late '22 windows 10 was mostly frozen. microsoft was already pushing everyone to 11.

underneath, the ntkernel got the linux subsystem in '16 and windows update went from a thing you scheduled to a thing that would eventually happen whether you wanted it or not. that last part became its own genre of internet complaint. i saw it hit a colleague's demo laptop mid-presentation once.

~ the long tail ~

peak install base was somewhere around 1.6 billion active devices in 2022, which made windows 10 the most-installed windows release at any single point in the operating system's history. that number came out of microsoft's own reporting during the ignite keynotes. the count was already sliding by 2024 as windows 11 caught up on eligible hardware, but the sub-eligible portion of the install base kept holding on.

the tpm 2.0 cutoff for windows 11 stranded a lot of machines that were otherwise still fast enough. it was not just budget hardware either. plenty of 2016-2018 business laptops shipped with tpm 1.2 or a firmware tpm that windows 11 refused to accept. those machines are the ones sitting on esu now, or just quietly staying on windows 10 unpatched.

~ the day it died ~

14 october 2025 was a patch tuesday. the final cumulative update went out that morning. the microsoft support page updated to past tense the same day. the eu press coverage was heavier than the us press coverage because european consumer-rights groups had been arguing for months that stranding otherwise-functional hardware was an environmental problem.

esu will run through october 2028 for enrolled machines. after that the patch pipeline closes for real. by 2026 the desktops i still see running windows 10 in ankara small offices are mostly unaware the cutoff even happened. the machine turns on and the browser opens. the os underneath is the thing nobody was ever really thinking about.

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