Ask Paul: February 23 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Let's kick off the weekend a little earlier with another set of great reader questions, all of them answered AI-free.
Lifecycle
spacecamel asks:

In your story about the expanded availability of 23H2, one thing that struck me was that each "update" had an end-of-life date of only about 18 months.

It's actually 24 months. (See below.) And just to give credit where it's due, Laurent wrote that article.

This made me wonder how much longer Windows 11 was going to be in the market since they could kill it and stop supporting this version of Windows pretty quickly. So my question is, how much longer do you think we will see Windows 11 around? I have a laptop that is seventh-gen, I7, so I have to "help" it get upgraded. It runs well, but I will upgrade when the next version of Windows enters the market. So how much time do you think I have since I think Microsoft will move on/away from Windows 11 pretty quickly?

I find it next to impossible to remember which versions of Windows are supported for whatever length of time. Part of the problem is that Microsoft has been screwing with the Windows version release schedule since Windows 10, when it switched away from the historical 10-year cycle with 5 years of mainstream support (during which new features could be added) and 5 years of extended support (during which we only got bug and security fixes). But the support lifecycle of each version---for consumers, anyway---never changed, for Windows 10. It's always been 18 months. So this isn't new.

And remember that Microsoft used to ship two Windows 10 Feature Updates (major version upgrades) every year. (And it was going to ship three at one point, but stepped back from that cliff.) With Windows 11, that calmed down to just one Feature Update per year, though of course Microsoft also ships new features monthly and bundles of new features quarterly (moments). But it also extended the support lifecycle for each version from 18 to 24 months.

If you look at the Windows 10 Home and Pro lifecycle on Microsoft Learn, you'll see that each version up to 22H2, which is "the last version" and thus different, was supported for 18 months regardless of when it was released. 22H2 is supported until the Windows 10 end of life (EOL) on October 18, 2022, so that works out to about three years, double the normal lifecycle, but it's the exception.

However, each Windows 11 Home and Pro version (21H2, 22H2, 23H2) is/was supported for 24 months. So Microsoft extended the support timeframe for consumers.

Of course, the support lifecycle is technically more complicated than that because businesses of different sizes, and on different volume licensing plans, get different lifecycles than consumers. But just looking at the people who matter here---us---it's all good. You can use any given version of Windows 11 for two years, you will have to stay reasonably up-to-date during that time, and God only knows when support for Windows 11 will end ...