Switching from Windows 10 to NovaOS in 30 minutes. Honest about what is, and is not, ready.
Microsoft ended free Windows 10 support, and the question “what now?” is landing in inboxes. This is the calm, private answer: what NovaOS is committed to today, the 30-minute switch you can run when the build ships, and what to actually do in the meantime.
For readers who want the next step
The 30-minute plan lives below. The waitlist brief is what follows it.
The full switching plan is below: the install flow, what leaves the machine at first boot, and the honest gaps. After reading, the next gated step is the waitlist brief — it spells out the launch contract and the dates involved.
Why the Win10 cliff is real
The end-of-support window is not a marketing story.
Millions of machines still run Windows 10. When free support ends, the operating surface stays usable — but unpatched vulnerabilities pile up, and the gap between what an OS is and what it is no longer becomes the machine owner’s problem.
The honest framing is that the Win10 cliff is personal, not abstract. It is the difference between a machine that gets fixes and a machine that is on its own. It does not mean the machine stops working tomorrow — it means the surface underneath the apps is on a slow clock.
That pressure is why this post is here. NovaOS is one answer; it is the answer this team is shipping. But the right answer for your machine depends on what the next two years actually look like, not which screen most resembles what is already on it.
Two decisions matter: which machine you trust with the everyday surface, and which kernel gets to read what your apps send across the wire. Both decisions are made at install time, and both can be reversed.
What NovaOS is honest about today
Real commitments, a public build date, no marketing mirrors.
Two answers. The first is the commitment. The second is what is still genuinely open.
Committed to
An auditable, opt-in, reversible desktop OS.
- Memory-safe kernel, drivers, and core services in one codebase — whole exploit classes disappear with the code, not with patching.
- Gaming as a first-class workload from the first boot — not bolted on, not a stream-only stack.
- Telemetry off by default. Opt-in is a separate, reversible choice. There is no second-tier product without it.
- On-device AI runtime that ships with the OS — no data-center round trip, no prompt-redirected inference.
Honest gap
The public build is later in 2026.
NovaOS is not a daily-driver build today. We will not ship a release-date-shaped promise we cannot keep. The build ships when it ships; you hear from us the same day it does, on one email.
The 30-minute flow
Run it on a free evening. Nothing leaves the machine at first boot.
The flow below is what the experience looks like when the public build ships. A free evening, a single rebooted machine, and a clean side-by-side install.
- 01Download the signed image. The same one everyone else downloads — no registrar, no account, no telemetry opt-in dialog.
- 02Flash it to a USB stick. One partition, one signature, one boot selection prompt.
- 03Boot. Side-by-side install keeps your existing OS as a selectable entry — not deleted, not modified, not contacted.
- 04First-boot setup runs. Set a username, pick a theme, switch on the data program or do not. Reversible from settings at any time.
- 05The desktop is on the screen. The 30 minutes is up. Your old OS is still in the boot menu — nothing on it has been touched.
The default commitment: nothing leaves the machine at first boot. That is not a marketing line; it is the architectural condition. The data program is a separate, opt-in only choice, scoped at the OS-feature level once you flip it on.
What leaves, and what does not
Two-part answer. Same template as the FAQ: committed to, honest gap.
The contract you can hold us to, and the contract we are still working on.
Committed to at first boot
- No screen contents, window titles, file paths, or keystrokes.
- No identifiers that resolve to a single user or device.
- No third-party SDK fingerprints, no analytics piggybacks, no ad-tech.
- No data program participation until you switch it on. Off by default, reversible from settings.
Honest gap · still in progress
- No migration tool for Windows today.
- Game-by-game compatibility coverage is published when the build is ready, not before. The waitlist plus the data program is what produces the coverage map.
- No finalised hardware compat list yet — not enough installs to write a trustworthy one. Verified-good hardware will be listed at launch.
- We will not promise a specific day for the build — you hear from us the day it ships, on one email.
What to do today
Hold position. Join the waitlist. Watch the repo. Decide when the build ships.
The short answer, copy-pasteable into an email reply when someone asks you “what about Win10” tomorrow morning.
The right move today is to do nothing on the install front and three small things instead.
- Join the waitlist — one email when the build is ready, nothing else. The list lives at /waitlist.
- Watch the GitHub repo. The codebase is open. Day-to-day progress is the most honest signal that the build is converging.
- Read the five-question FAQ. It is a calmer version of this post, plus the data program, security model, and hardware questions.
That is the contract: do not switch your primary machine on a promise. Wait for the build to ship, decide on the day it does.
What to do when the build ships
One email. One human reads every reply. That is the entire channel plan.
Readers who joined the waitlist will hear from us before the public build day. Here is what the message looks like and what to do with it.
The contract is short: one confirmation when you sign up, one email when the public build is ready, and that is it. No drip campaign, no weekly note, no funnel. The inbox on that second email is read by a human — every reply, no queue.
When the email lands, the body has the install link, the hash so you can verify the image, and the FAQ entry for the most-asked questions of the week. Read it twice, then decide. If your machine is the one to switch, side-by-side install keeps the old OS around in the boot menu — you can leave it a week and bounce back any time.
If the second email is not for you — reply with “remove me” and the row is gone on our side. The reply is read by a person, not a system. The waitlist table does not get resold, packaged, or enriched; it is a single Postgres row per reader, and the deletion is one column flip away.
Head to the Downloads dashboard →
Signed-in readers have early access to the build images already published for the waitlist cohort.