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.
Well, Microsoft said way back when that “Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows” so a lot of enterprise went to it. To this day I’m dealing with vendors that have a certified “Windows 10-only” solution. Another funny one is stuff like Ford’s FDRS software still only officially supports Windows 10 Pro.
Platform changes and all that are fine, but when Microsoft says basically “This is gonna be your LTS forever” and then bails on it, shit like this is no surprise at all.
The moment I can verify a solution for my music production workflow on Linux, I know that I’m out as well.
Have you tried something like Wine or even Proton for it? I know that Proton is thought as more for games, but it runs Windows apps in general. Just add the app as a “game” in Steam and tell it to run with a version of Proton.
Im at the same point. I spent quite some Money on Studio one and plugins…i’ll probably try a setup with Wine and/or Yabridge soon. Wouldnt mind that much if i had to switch to Reaper.
What do you do? I have been doing some hobby stuff with generating music once a few months.
Nothing serious, but music seems to actually be the only area on desktop (outside of development) where Linux is fully competitive.
Gaming and Clip Studio Paint for me. (Maybe some other stuff that I just haven’t thought of.)
Needless to say, every day my Windows 11 machine bugs out on me I get closer and closer to just giving Linux a solid try for the first time since college.
Hmmm… Maybe people using windows 10 really do love the full screen ads! Yeah! They missed the ads so they went back to windows 10 until they can get those ads in windows 11! Yup! That must be it!
I would double down on full screen unstoppable ads. Maybe one that looks like a BSOD? That would be lovely!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
I literally left windows because of the incessant ads for 11. The last straw was them forcing copilot on my windows 10 install, but a lot of other things were bugging me way too much before I kicked the bucket. Thankfully I have the help of a friend that uses Linux daily and my boyfriend who just knows a fuckton about computers, but after finishing the initial setup I haven’t really had any issues
well the market share of Windows 11 has risen significantly on my work laptop, and I can wholehearedly say, I understand why its global market share is falling… random freezes, random restarts, battery life sliced, random starting up from suspend. it’s not great.
meanwhile, Manjaro on my personal Lenovo laptop has been cutting edge with consistent updates for years.
The only reason I’m still on windows is I run a weird 3 monitor setup on a Nvidia GPU.
Even then I could probably switch but I’m too lazy
If you feel up for it, boot into the live disk for Mint. Lets you trial the OS without touching your OS install.
But, I hear you on the lazy angle. Momentum is a hell of a thing.
I really don’t want to have to install it for work at all next year.
Windows: you’ll eat this slop even if we have to carve a hole in your throat and force it through.
Windows users will do everything, including using a soon unsupported and insecure, outdated version of this proprietary garbage, instead of just switching to a better OS
Don’t lump us all together. Windows users are just linux users who aren’t there yet.
I moved early this year and haven’t had significiant problems, though I’m IT savvy and can code my way around my issues. Linux is great, and I’d been halfway there for a long time, but Windows had the edge on gaming and simplicity. They fucked up, though when they started pushing for AI and Win11, at least for me. Where the Rubicon lies will be different for everyone, but it does exist for many.
We win by couching linux as the place to go to escape corporate focus and greed, not by being elitist.
You sound like a child. Be OS agnostic and use the correct tool for the job.
because windows 2000 was peak windows
As much as I loved 2000, XP was better and 7 the best ever.
2000 was the pioneer though, it was such a huge step forward in every way
Yes, Win2k, WinXP, and Win7 were all major leaps forward in various areas. Imagine if 8 had been just a major cleanup of Windows 7 and unifying the various settings paradigms, how much better that would have been.
Who thought that puting ridiculous minimum requirements so your spyware can work better would mean that lots of people without newer hardware just won’t upgrade.
Announcing in 2025
Windows Buntu we bring the U in Windows … Actually that would be nice for Ubuntu to slowly suffocate and take over Windows lol
The bunt has been on the path of enshitification itself for many years no thanks.
When games work so well on Linux these days, it seems to me that there is absolutely no reason for Windows to exist anymore. Why does anyone use it?
Adobe Premiere, Vegas, and my Pioneer DDJ equipment.
Main reason would be “why not?” windows is also working great for most common use cases. Actually there is not much difference nowadays between OSes. Another reason would be specific software like Excel. Why would you switch your OS adlnd most of the software you use if you don’t gain much from it.
I’ve a Linux OS for coding, OSX for work and Windows for gaming. There are absolutely no problems with any of them. Windows worked great last 4 years, no virusesor performance issues without anti-virus or tweaking. Linux drivers needed work at the start but now there is no issues, Mac is similar. Only issue is when I try to code with Windows it feels annoying but it is mostly because I’m doing things with CLI where I should have used GUI.
Especially for buisnesses its hard to switch. A lot of specialised software is not supported on Linux and often there isn’t any form of good replacement.
Btw, anyone got Reshade 5+ working in wine/proton?
Never had a problem with Reshade. You could use steamtinkerlaunch to do it more easily or just config Wine to overwrite the .dll needed for Reshade(I think is the dxgi.dll).
If that doesn’t work you can pass a argument on steam/gog/lutris/heroic/whatever to replace the .dll. I’m linking a guide to mod Cyberpunk 2077 on linux but the instructions works for any game and any .dll just change the name.
Still needed for VR games.
Not needed, many VR games work fine under Proton. Unlike desktop though, not “plug and play”. If you’re ready to spend time troubleshooting, give Linux VR a try with SteamVR or Monado through Envision. If you just want to play VR, stick to Windows for now.
Yes, you can technically get some games working. If you use the right VR headset (meaning Valve Index or Vive), use the right distro, with the right compositor and right GPU, spend a lot of time troubleshooting, then you can maybe get a few games to start. Camera passthrough won’t work, power management won’t work (no control for base stations), Bluetooth won’t work, tracking won’t be as good, you will experience weird bugs and crashes of both the games and SteamVR, and you will get less FPS than on Windows. And even with that inferior experience, most games still won’t run.
I spent a lot of time trying despite this being the experience for most people online, and I only confirmed that it’s the case. Windows is absolutely needed if you want a good experience. Hopefully Valve changes that in the future, but that’s the case today.
Not entirely. SteamVR on Linux is almost that bad, yes. With ALVR you can try to use standalones on SteamVR, but it’s not very stable. Most games will “run” under SteamVR and modern proton, I’ve only encountered a few situations where they don’t, once again caused by kernel level anticheat. SteamVR does have major issues with stability and reprojection, which makes the VR experience much worse overall.
However, Monado and WiVRN (+ OpenComposite) are great when using Envision. Not all games run, and some have input issues, but it’s significantly better than SteamVR. With a couple overlays, you can get most functions working as expected, like desktop view, camera passthrough, etc.
As for “power management” and “bluetooth”, the only thing the Valve Index uses bluetooth for is power management. That doesn’t work in the drivers on Linux, but there are scripts you can use if you have a separate bluetooth dongle. It’s not a full fix, but not as painful as using an Android app or unplugging the basestations.
As we both noted, it requires setup and troubleshooting, and as someone who uses Linux for VR gaming too, I can’t recommend it to the average person. That does not make Windows a “requirement”, just much easier and the better plug and play experience.
Sure, as I said “Windows is absolutely needed if you want a good experience”. Yes, it’s not required to get something working if you try hard enough, but it is required if you want everything to work well.
I keep a Windows virtual machine with GPU passthrough for VR and don’t see myself ditching it any time soon. At least I don’t need to boot into Windows.
Aw shit! Thought there was nothing left that would keep me from completely ditching windows (htpc, pihole, homelab … everything but my workstation is Linux already). I recently got a headset tho and quite enjoy it… What a bummer :(
Just switched from win 10 to Linux mint today. Feels good, games running faster than before even. The only thing that doesn’t work is the invasive anti cheat shit for multiplayer games. But I get merked every time in multiplayer so screw it
I am used to it. I don’t like the app store of Ubuntu and manually installing software on Linux is vastly different.
But Win11 is forcing me to Ubuntu. It’s the same but with commercials.
Go to Mint, Ubuntu is owned by Canonical and they’re doing ad shit too
Why do you need an app store?
Ease of installing I would say. Most people do not need nor want to learn how to install stuff using terminal. An app store is necessary for your regular Joe using the Operating system.
Windows is only relevant because of a few key applications, like MS Office (no, libre office doesn’t come close).
office can be used in a browser and mac so why windows?
Because my work enforces a non-english locale and the keyboard shortcuts make no sense 🤷♂️
