Virus protection is a lot different than security patches, and there are a lot more exploits than hardware-level exploits. Virus protection can limit the mechanisms that security holes can be exploited, but they aren’t proactive, but reactive, so by the time your antivirus detects a virus, you have already been exploited, and it’s possible you have been exploited for some time. Antivirus checkers don’t catch everything, and they can be delayed in catching issues for quite some time.
On the whole, I think Windows 11 would be safer than Windows 10 because:
almost nobody uses Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, so the attacks in the wild will be much less common
a lot of people will use Windows 10 on supported hardware after SW support ends, so any zero-days will remain unpatched at the OS level, so you’ll be vulnerable to any new viruses using older exploits; the longer you use unsupported SW, the more viruses will be created to exploit it
If I had a friend/family member considering using Windows 11 w/ unsupported hardware, I would give them these options:
upgrade their hardware - I’ll help them pick out something or upgrade what they have
use something other than Windows - some flavor of Linux, most likely
Remaining on Windows 10 is unacceptable because it’ll get more insecure the longer they use it, and using Windows 11 on unsupported hardware is unacceptable because they’re vulnerable to bugs in unsupported hardware. That said, I think Windows 11 on unsupported hardware will be more secure than Windows 10 w/o software updates on supported hardware.
Virus protection is a lot different than security patches, and there are a lot more exploits than hardware-level exploits. Virus protection can limit the mechanisms that security holes can be exploited, but they aren’t proactive, but reactive, so by the time your antivirus detects a virus, you have already been exploited, and it’s possible you have been exploited for some time. Antivirus checkers don’t catch everything, and they can be delayed in catching issues for quite some time.
On the whole, I think Windows 11 would be safer than Windows 10 because:
If I had a friend/family member considering using Windows 11 w/ unsupported hardware, I would give them these options:
Remaining on Windows 10 is unacceptable because it’ll get more insecure the longer they use it, and using Windows 11 on unsupported hardware is unacceptable because they’re vulnerable to bugs in unsupported hardware. That said, I think Windows 11 on unsupported hardware will be more secure than Windows 10 w/o software updates on supported hardware.