If you need GrapheneOS, that is right.
But if LineageOS or eOS is sufficient for you, Fairphones are a solid option with long term support.

And in the long run, GrapheneOS might also have to look for other options, as the good developer support for new Pixel devices will not be given any more.

I don’t think fairphones are directly available in the US, but in principle they should work in the local 5G networks without problems.

Pixel’s aven’t the first choice for custom ROMs any more anyway, as Google recently has stopped making the device trees public for developers.
So say hello to Fairphone and similar companies, that are still caring about openess!

One thing is certain:
The day the related news story got viral, champagne corks must have been flying in the marketing department at GrapheneOS…

Well, in my region it typically is already sufficient to look Arabic to become the guest of a “random” police control.

Compared to that, having a closer look at people running GrapheneOS on their phones sounds relatively well-grounded and almost reasonable.
At least not totally crypto-racist (although I have the feeling that still comes on top…)

Thanks!
Turns out that OPs heading is a little bit exaggerated, as nobody is confiscating anything.

I do know, but I also refuse to do OPs work for him.

Would be minimal effort to post a link together with a click-baity (and wrong - nobody is confiscating anything) heading.

What? Sauce?

what is needed to run win 11.

And that would be?
x86 processors are fairly standardized, I don’t see anything that could be the reason for such exclusions…?

Well there is a big difference between switching the CPU architecture altogether and just arbitrarily declaring a slightly older CPU with the exact same instruction set to be “outdated”.
Also, the customer profile of Apple users and Windows users is somewhat different. You won’t find a lot of Macs at normal peoples homes in e.g. Indonesia…

Well, we are talking about half the active PCs still running Windows 10 instead of Windows 11.
That’s a lot more than just the few “I don’t care”-people.

Instead it consist mainly of the “I don’t have the means” people, that don’t have the Hardware required to upgrade and also not the money to quickly change that.

Microsoft screwed up here. There simple was no need to demand such harsh hardware requirements and especially no need to enforce them that hard.

I agree that would have been the sensible way to go… Together with an “Install at your own risk” message when trying to upgrade a PC containing an older CPU…
I really don’t know what their reasoning is to enforce the requirements so hard for everyone.

First major requirement is the presence of a recent TPM module, which is absolutely not required performance-wise, but only for DRM-reasons (and read that as “Digital Restriction Management”).
Second even more arbitrary one is that they excluded all CPUs before at least Coffee Lake generation. Perhaps half of the PC stuff people I know to be running at home is still from the mid-2010s, so practically completely pre-Coffee-Lake.
And the IT infrastructure of the e.g. the German executive government branches is on average probably more in the range of 15 years old. A surprising lot of that isn’t even fully switched to Windows 10 yet… (hey, at least we are increasingly migrating away from Telefax…!)

Wait…
Excluding half of the active PCs or so from upgrade due to arbitrary hardware constraints didn’t push upgrading?
How can this be??? 😯🫢

Well, a mindless, repetitive task prone to errors and a task requiring obscure knowledge (“d” as a synonym for dick… one of those self-censoring Gen-Z things?)
Nice to now have tools to solve these tasks and gain some time to do more interesting stuff instead. Lively discussions on Lemmy, e.g. ;-)

I didn’t understand your comment, so I asked the same LLM as before.
It explained it and I think that I get it now. Low-grade middle-school-“Your Mom”-joke, is it? Ha-ha… 🙄

This also means that AI did better than myself at both tasks I’ve given it today (I found only 9 states with “d” when going over the state-list myself…).

Whatever. I’m gonna have second lunch now.

No, this is Google throwing the cheapest possible shit at you that is barely capable of stringing together 5 coherent sentences and has the reasoning capability of a tapeworm.

Here is the output of the minimalist open Chinese model Qwen3, that runs locally on my 6 year old mid-end PC:

The US states that contain the letter "d" (case-insensitive, as state names are typically capitalized) are as follows. I've verified each state name for the presence of the letter "d" in its standard spelling:

    Colorado (contains "d" in "Colorado")  
    Delaware (starts with "D")  
    Florida (contains "d" in "Florida")  
    Idaho (contains "d" in "Idaho")  
    Indiana (contains "d" in "Indiana")  
    Maryland (ends with "d" in "Maryland")  
    Nevada (contains "d" in "Nevada")  
    North Dakota (contains "d" in "Dakota")  
    Rhode Island (contains "d" in "Rhode")  
    South Dakota (contains "d" in "Dakota")  


Total: 10 states.

Thanks, will try that!

And Reddit completely.blocks you from reading when coming from a VPN exit, unless you are logged in (at least with. MullvadVPN).
Brave new world… :-(

I guess this also must be an additional layer of hellfire for dyslexics…