In 2022, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) exploded in popularity, with millions of users taking advantage of the ability to develop, create and administrate inside a native Linux environment deeply integrated with Windows. This is thanks in large part to continued investment from Microsoft, consistently rolling out new features and updates for the platform on both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 21h1 will go in End of Servicing (EOS) on December 13, 2022, and a month later, on January 10, 2023, they will put Windows 8 in End of Life (EOL)—Windows 8.1 End of Life will also occur on the same date. What does this mean for you as an MSP or internal IT team… should you care? The short answer is “probably”.

When I initially wrote my guide to blocking Microsoft’s auto-update to Windows 11—Windows 11: how to configure an auto-patch decline in N-central—I only had N-central partners and our N-central Patch Management in mind. However, after reading various other forums and discussions, I thought I’d take a more regimented approach to stopping or blocking Windows 11 from your machine.

A new era is here, where cloud computing is taking a growing share of the digital workspace market. Microsoft are well placed to capture an increasing part of this market to deliver digital workspaces to end users to run their business applications. Using Azure as the umbrella we see new Microsoft services arise each year. Last year the Windows 365 service was born with a Cloud PC service offering both Business and Enterprise subscriptions.

As we all know, Windows is one of the most popular operating systems in the world. It has a dominant share in the desktop computer market, with more than 70% of the machines running the operating system. It makes sense, then, that the Windows integration is also one of the most used and popular integrations in Grafana Cloud.