I think most users don’t care about support and will happily run an outdated OS.
This is precisely what happened every time a previous edition of Windows met end of support, with most users only moving to the current version by way of buying a new name-brand PC because their old one either finally broke or, more likely, because it became so loaded down with malware that it was subsequently unusable.
The majority of home users are non-nerds who only barely tolerate their computer at the best of times, click off error messages without reading them, and are quite likely to ignore any pleas from Microsoft to upgrade or buy a new computer as long as the prompts are dismissable and don’t go as far as fully locking them out of using their machine.
These users will overwhelmingly have a “go to the store and buy it” mentality; they will not migrate to Linux. Rather, they will march to Best Buy or go to Amazon and buy a new PC with Windows 11 already on it, or maybe a small subset of them will work themselves up to being angry enough to switch to a Mac.
This is precisely what happened every time a previous edition of Windows met end of support, with most users only moving to the current version by way of buying a new name-brand PC because their old one either finally broke or, more likely, because it became so loaded down with malware that it was subsequently unusable.
The majority of home users are non-nerds who only barely tolerate their computer at the best of times, click off error messages without reading them, and are quite likely to ignore any pleas from Microsoft to upgrade or buy a new computer as long as the prompts are dismissable and don’t go as far as fully locking them out of using their machine.
These users will overwhelmingly have a “go to the store and buy it” mentality; they will not migrate to Linux. Rather, they will march to Best Buy or go to Amazon and buy a new PC with Windows 11 already on it, or maybe a small subset of them will work themselves up to being angry enough to switch to a Mac.