Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.
The search function has never been the same since vista. I’m not doing a web search from the search bar. I am specifically searching for files on my computer. F-off. And now I’m constantly asked to save to some cloud I don’t give a shit about.
Just pure greed and giving users less and less control of an OS will push people away. It did for me outside of work. I don’t have any reason to touch Windows that often.
Everyone talking about how it’s because of Windows 11 or their greed driving people away, etc. But they’re ignoring the big one:
People don’t need as many computers these days. You don’t have a lot of households with a laptop for every member of the family because smartphones and tablets have replaced the PC for many people for media consumption and basic tasks.
Forcing people to buy a new computer for nothing more than a security chip on the motherboard will do that
They also had pretty strict CPU requirements. Mostly only 8th gen and newer, or a ryzen, would be required.
I just wish Linux remote desktop support wasn’t absolute dogshit.
Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.
I’ll be joining soon enough, going to dual boot with Linux. Only keeping windows for games that won’t work on Linux.
I haven’t had windows for 5 or 6 years when I switched to Mac. But earlier this year I bought a cheap Windows 11 machine because Windows was required for a contract I thought I was going to get (but didn’t). I was going to return it but thought meh it might be nice to have a personal laptop I can play around with. But I was unimpressed with Windows 11 so much that it mostly gathers dust now.
I’m thinking this is the perfect opportunity to take the plunge into Linux. Has anyone on here used Linux and have any advice?
Yes. Though it depends on what you want. If you are willing to learn some stuff, and don’t mind doing some maintenance, then CachyOS is hard to beat. It’s fast, up to date, has packages for basically everything, and the documentation from both them and from arch linux the parent distribution is great. Otherwise Linux Mint, PopOS, Aurora, and OpenSUSE are all good options. I wouldn’t recommend using Ubuntu directly anymore because of the enshitification canonical have engaged in. Debian is always good, but might not be what you are looking for in terms of ease of use or being up to date.
As everyone here will say. Go with linux mint. Haven’t used windows in months now and when I do need to its generally way more of a pain to do anything. Plus. Ms wants to shove their shitty ai in my face at all times (so they can recoup the billions they’ve most pouring into a buzzword). So I refuse to use it.
You will need to have a learning curve with linux. Is basically a German car:" oh wow, this is so genius I love how this was designed! "And then “why the hell do i need a custom 12 pt socket to get this one bolt and why is it completely inaccessbile just to change a brake rotor”
We all use Linux here brother 😄 but to be fair, it’s not that complicated. Find yourself some simple tutorial on webpage on other device and just follow step by step and everything should be okay :) At least for me was, when I was first moving to Linux 😄 get yourself some good beginner distro like Ubuntu or Fedora and you are good to go :) good luck on your journey brother 🫡
Try a few distros they all pretty much have strengths and weaknesses. Run Linux boxes here for servers and other tasks and a mix of uses
We’re in the process of moving to Linux in our company, entirely because of how aggressively awful Windows 11 is. We’d have been perfectly happy staying on Windows 10 forever, but last week our head of development woke up to discover that Windows 10 had spontaneously chosen to “upgrade” itself during the night without him agreeing to it.
Wish you success in the migration
I must be in the minority but generally I like Win 11. Most of my clients still on Windows as well so I have to keep up to date…
I’m using Windows 11 at work and I don’t feel really a difference. I just had to double check if the start menu is really in the middle.
What do you like? Or asked differently, what do you think is on Windows compared to other OSes?
good. fuck. microsoft.
they had the choice of not being fucking awful and they had no reason to. im glad its crumbling for them even if wayyy too late.
They would have way higher ratio of supporters if they stayed at XP or 7, and just keep security patching it but no, they deliberately sabotaged their star product with Vista, 8, 10, and 11. They deserved it.
Just want to say, Google Docs is NOT free. Just because you don’t send them money doesn’t mean you aren’t paying.
What is free though is LibreOffice, or some Nextcloud document addons (to a degree) if ”cloud” is the thing.
This aligns with statcounter data here: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202505
Windows market share on desktop has been slowly but steadily declining. From 95+% in 2009, to almost 70% today. In the same time period Linux went up from 0.6% to 4%, which is not bad.
Apple Silicon goes absolutely BRRRR
Apparently Linux have 20% market share in Norway. That is… I don’t really believe it, but really cool if true.
So this is just an apple victory or is Android to blame?
Kids mostly use mobile devices and don’t even know what a folder is, so both.
And that’s honestly why this story isn’t the good news it appears to be. An entire generation growing up used to (or rather, used by) locked-down devices designed for consumption is a goddamned disaster!
But if you say something like People should have basic IT knowledge you get called an elitist.
Can’t use a computer when you’re tired and wanna lay in bed, or just browse memes on transit to work, or have a GPS in your pocket, or a camera in your pocket, or a portable communication device… etc
Yea, people don’t even have computers now. Its happy tap the phone and love the Google, return to monke. We are the .00000001 percent.
Three point four percentage points. Not great. Not terrible.
It can also be noted that the trend over time for the “unknown” category (which stands for 8 % today) follows the same trend as Linux. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Linux is over-represented in the “unknown” category, and may actually be closer to 5-7 %.
Hey, I have an idea that will help Microsoft:
why not add even more AI that logs everything and then reports it to the government through additional telemetry?
then they could even require the next edition to include a dedicated advertising GPU to take those logs and create tailored ads on the wallpaper as well as occasionally parse the logs and generate summaries for safety purposes!
that will bring the customers back and boost short-term profits too!
Yeah, that wouldn’t really do anything, google just announced it for gemini and I don’t really see a push back against it, meta wants to compromise the copy right of all creators on its platform and it too was allowed, sadly right now in the name of AI advancement every kind of privacy will be compromised
Sad thing is I guarantee they’d keep a majority market share after doing this. Few people would even be aware, and fewer still actually give a shit about their privacy. As for ads on the desktop, that might push people away… but then again, I had to practically force uBlock Origin down my friends’ throat after finding that they’ve had ads on YouTube for years and didn’t really care.
but then again, I had to practically force uBlock Origin down my friends’ throat after finding that they’ve had ads on YouTube for years and didn’t really care.
This is insane to me. How people can use the internet with ads is just beyond me.
And you wanna know the full hypocrisy? Google Chrome also comes with an Ad blocker, on by default. They block ads they don’t deem good, but allow all ads from AdSense, of course.
This is insane to me. How people can use the internet with ads is just beyond me.
My friend did have an adblock, but it was the one built into Brave (iirc) by default. I noticed they knew it was there and active, but didn’t really think twice about any of the sites it didn’t block ads on. I assume they just didn’t know it was possible to block certain ads, never really crossing their mind that some adblockers are better than others. No, if theirs can’t do it, no adblock can.
I also think years and years of unskippable commercials on cable TV, and now even streaming services, has made people kinda numb to it.
You mother fucker… You’re hired.
My new laptop came with Windows 11, but that’s gone now. Steamdeck must be helping with these figures too. Good work everyone.
M series chips on macbooks are likely helping more.
The article says Mac sales are declining too.
Apparently most of the decline is people that are simply ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore.People ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore doesn’t explain that the relative share of Mac and Linux has increased for the past 15 years though. Unless for some reason Windows users are more likely to ditch their PC because they don’t need it than Mac or Linux users.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202505
Both Linux and MacOS look fairly flat overall, with a few spikes for Mac. What did happen was iOS and especially Android went to the moon.
Most people had a PC for a bit of light office work, emails and storing pictures. All of that can be done on a phone and more besides. It’s not great that a handful of Silicon Valley techbros are holding everyone’s data to ransom, but that’s what the masses are doing.
I think thats exactly it. A lot of the people begrudgingly have a PC. I bet most of those just use whatever the PC came with. Linux and Mac users are more likely to enjoy using a PC.
Linux users NEED their computer. You don’t put up with getting into Linux for fun except of you are a very special breed of geek.
Average people are also more likely to ditch their PCs than Linux users.
See the recent meme:
I could quite literally just get by on my phone these days. I only use the laptop for the larger screen and something to hold an extremely large capacity SD card, as for whatever reason samsung flip phones don’t have that anymore.
MAC sales peaked 10-11 years ago.
I just got a cheap minipc to tinker with and it had windows 11. Not bad and unexpected.
First thing I did was wipe and install Ubuntu of course because that’s what I wanted.
I do like Mini PCs, but I kind of wish there was an easy way to get a solid GPU into it. There’s those weird docks but they’re far from standard, and it would be nice if the GPU had a similar form factor, so you could just stack them up like a MiniPC on top of it like an old hi-fi separates system.
Slap a storage box on it as well for some HDDs, baby you got a server going.
