Despite Microsoft’s push to get customers onto Windows 11, growth in the market share of the software giant’s latest operating system has stalled, while Windows 10 has made modest gains, according to fresh figures from Statcounter.
This is not the news Microsoft wanted to hear. After half a year of growth, the line for Windows 11 global desktop market share has taken a slight downturn, according to the website usage monitor, going from 35.6 percent in October to 34.9 percent in November. Windows 10, on the other hand, managed to grow its share of that market by just under a percentage point to 61.8 percent.
The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade. The stats also revealed a small drop in the market share of its Edge browser, despite relentlessly plugging the application in the operating system.
im forced to use it at work and holy shit. 11 is so heavy for no reason, 8gb of ram is not remotely enough anymore, even if you yank out some of the garbage. theres no apparent change in functionality to justify it.
the ssd smart says its almost at its end, and i suspect its because its constantly swapping. paging file is always full, unless i set it to something big like 8+ gb
I’m pegged at 95% RAM usage all day at work 16 gigs and I’m not doing anything too heavy. Windows is a bloated gross mess
And I can still run a 2010 MacBook with 4GB to do photo editing and render non HD video
Bloat is too mild a word for Windows
Same but I blame work. My surface tablet at home is vanilla windows professional and memory usage is fine with 16gb.
That said I don’t use Chrome at home and Chrome is absolutely insane with memory consumption
Yeah, as much as Windows feels… subpar for my day to day vanilla, it really turns crappy with my corporate’s mandated load. System is constantly chewing on some bloat from one of the various ‘security’, monitoring, or fix management solutions that they have on this.
Unfortunately, if a company pitches their extra crap as ‘enhancing security’, the execs just have to say yes, because to be an exec who ever said ‘no’ to more security is to put your job at peril. Even if three of that vendor’s competitors already got their equivalent solutions into the load already…
And fucking Teams.
That’s wild… I’m currently running Steam and Firefox and I’m at about 8GB.
Bazzite with KDE Plasma. I loaded up on RAM this time when I got this laptop, and I haven’t even come close to maxing it out lol. It’s nice to not have to worry about though.
Wow, what is running in your background though?
I have Windows 11 and it uses a total of 5.6 GB of RAM (I’m also using a Surface Pro 7 if that matters) at idle. I would bring up task manager and see where all that RAM is going.
5.6 GB RAM usage on idle, I presume on a fresh boot, is just outrageous for an OS, especially relative to 8 o 16 GB total RAM.
Wait until you see what the new OSs will need soon. Windows Copilot+ PC, macOS with Apple Intelligence, and newer versions of Android all have a starting need of 16GB (for background AI processes that are done on device). I doubt they will have a small idle RAM footprint.
(iPhone and iPad OS hasn’t been stated for their RAM requirements, but they never do.)
True, good points!
It’s just a hunch, but my suspicion is it’s already capturing a lot of data for Recall to process later after it’s launched.
I can’t think of any other reasonable explanation for the severe performance decrease on Windows 11.
I think it’s simpler than that.
I think Windows 11 feels unresponsive because of how many features have Internet-enabled features built deep into them. All those little delays opening menus, etc, I think are actually network delay, so the little ads or other stuff have time to fetch and load and show simultaneously with the rest of the UI. Meaning the UI itself has to be delayed slightly to make it less obvious what’s being fed to you from online vs local.
Nothing makes my Windows 11 PC shit the bed harder than an unreliable or interrupted Internet connection. Literally crashing the whole PC sometimes.
Could be they already have their servers processing the data, and Recall is just their effort to offload the processing cost to the end user.
Or it’s just straight up spying.
They 100% are spying and not even hiding it. That isnt what makes a system laggy though as its just a background process snitching on you once and hour or so.
Walk me through that thinking. You believe constantly capturing screen grabs/key presses/file content/etc, processing it, packaging it, and sending to the home servers would have no impact on system resources?
its not grabbing screen grabs and and key presses as you do them, its logging things that you interact with in the background and then packaging that up as a telemetry package to asynchronously send off to a server.
No it doesnt have no impact on resources but it negligable compared to what the previous poster mentioned about making everything dependent on network services and introducing latency that way.
You should read up on Recall. It is openly designed to use screen grabs. And my suspicion is they’re already collecting the data for it.
Yes I am aware of recall, and that it is only available on specific AI focused PCs (copilot+). Dont get me wrong its a been a complete clusterfuck in they way they have done it, but if windows was using regular windows installs to gather screenshots and then phone them home it would be both incredibly stupid on Microsoft’s part (for a huge amount of companies that would be a deal breaker) and be very discoverable.
No, 8 GB is nothing these days. It’s not an enjoyable experience on Win 10, 12, Linux, or MacOS.
The 8 gigs in my Thinkpad seem fine with Mint
The 8 GB in my ThinkPad is pretty annoying. It’s usable but not enjoyable.
what do you use it for to be filling 8gb on linux?
I would guess a heavy UI, and a couple heavy apps that they don’t close.
I admittedly use xfce, which is much lighter than most, I wouldn’t want to run Gnome or KDE on this machine.
Or I suppose I think I wouldn’t; I’ve been using lightweight desktop environments for a decade or so. I just assume the like Ubuntu or whatever default is going to be slower and RAM-heavy.
Opening a few apps fills it up very quickly.
I even run Spotifyd and a cli UI for Spotify because I need to be conservative with my RAM.
curious. im running all regular gui software and i usually only go over 8gb when im pushing it harder. the only time i do consistently is while gaming and even then im always below 16gb.
what distro are you running? do you have KSM enabled?
My 8GB 13-year old Linux laptop and I would like to disagree
its great on linux (regular distro, not particularly lightweight) and reasonable on windows 10 for me.
unless you are pushing too many tabs and/or many heavy programs
8 GB works just fine on my laptop running EndeavourOS. And I know there are much more lightweight distros than that. Not ideal, but fine.
I guess, if you are able to minimize the amount of open programs and browser tabs, it can run fine.
Well yeah, I had been using that laptop for a few years so I knew its limits very well.