Separate to the main sessions at .Next 2025 there are breakout sessions held less formally in the Solutions Expo hall where vendors can chat with an audience about their solutions.
Kevin Greenway – CTO at 10ZiG held a session discussing how 10ZiG and Nutanix can help with the challenges associated with Windows 10 EOL and older hardware that may not be able to run Windows 11.
10ZiG are a well known EUC vendor with headquarters in Phoenix, USA and Leicester, UK.
10ZiG offer both hardware+software, and software only solutions allowing customers the freedom to choose what fits best for their needs, supporting multiple operating systems depending upon what the objective is.
NOS – An optimised ‘single’ vendor (i.e. Omnissa, Citrix, Parallels, Dizzion, etc) tiny footprint OS enabling the endpoint to only have the software it ‘needs’ on it rather than everything else. In most cases you don’t need both Omnissa and Citrix together on a client, so you’d pick one or the other NOS build.
PeakOS – Maybe you do need multiple clients together on the same device, PeakOS has a huge list of supported offerings to connect to any backend or Web App.
Windows 11 IOT – Providing a native Windows 11 experience managed by the 10ZiG control plane can provide the trade-off between security/manageability and compatibility with specific endpoint software or hardware requirements.
RepurpOS – Think of this as PeakOS on your own endpoint hardware, this is where 10ZiG believe they can help with the Windows 10 EOL
(much more information available on 10ZiG’s website – https://www.10zig.com/10zig-operating-systems/)
As Windows 11 requires a TPM which is fairly common place is newer hardware but some perfectly good devices that run Windows 10 may not have one and are otherwise useless in the new world as a result. (yes, you can workaround this during installation of Windows 11 but sacrifice some security and supportability)
Along comes RepurpOS as a way to extend the life of the perfectly good endpoint device running Windows 10 by repurposing (see what they did there?) it to run 10ZiG’s optimised Linux OS and connect it to a back end VDI / Web solution running Windows 11 potentially with a vTPM from Nutanix AHV or something entirely different.
RepurpOS comes on a USB stick, can be run ‘live’ from it, or installed onto the local device and turns it effectively into a 10ZiG thin client, removing the security headache of Windows 10 EOL on that device, and opening the possibilities of extending its life, doing something different.
RepurpOSon endpoints, and other 10ZiG hardware+software devices are all managed via the 10ZiG Manager – a Windows app or Linux appliance (AHV support soon) that allows lifecycle operations and ongoing management to be carried out. This is free of charge included with the software solution.
All in all, a really cool ‘art of the possible‘ session discussing how we can try to avoid sending a load of perfectly functioning hardware to the landfill.
You can request a free demo unit to play with here or download RepurpOS hereto play with it yourself.