TechnologyMicrosoft 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.
Windows 11 overheated my CPU so harsh that nearly destroyed my computer. Unneeded features and frustrating updates pushed me over
Win 11 got so bad over the last years that Linux is the better option now.
switched to Linux and don't regret it. fuck copilot, laggy ass UI, terabyte of ram usage, forced updates and any other bullshit they can come up with.
As much as I want to joke that it is the year of the Linux desktop, I think it is mostly because the younger you are the less likely you are to have a pc (so Windows, Mac, Linux and BSD for the dozens of you).
As far as I can see most of the time people use their phone for everything and only touch a pc for work or if they have a hobby that requires the use of a pc (gaming, digital art, music, programming, etc...).
now they try to backtrack by giving another year of w10 updates if the user:
- logs in with the microsoft account
- enables backup to onedrive (presumably filling it so they can nag all the time "hey buy our cloud subscription")
- uses bing as default
Best gif ever. Download!
It is a shame that the article has been updated and Microsoft is denying the drop. I will get excited when the drop is reflected in Steam data.
question: if i'm using steam in linux under wine, it counts as windows or linux?
There’s a native client so I’m not sure why you would do that. I would guess that it would think it is running on Windows but I could be wrong.
Wine is a translation layer, not an emulator so you'll likely appear in the Linux users list.
Will not happen. Privacy conscious people who have evaded Microsoft don't use Steam. Being closed source software, they collect huge amounts of data.
Sure it will, there are a ton of people who want to get away from the trash that is Microsoft and play Steam games, myself included.
In your case Nobara is the perfect distro. It comes with steam preinstalled and has a lot of gaming tweaks. I used it as a daily driver a year ago, but it wasn't something for me.
No worries here. I've been on EndeavourOS for 3+ months now. Im just saying there's enough crossover that I think the steam hardware survey will show the uptick over time.
Tbh, I've wanted to cut over to Linux for years, but I hadn't due to game support. We're at a point now with Proton that there's almost no reason not to, unless you're that beholden to games that install ~~rootkits~~, er, kernel level anticheat, in which case just dual boot.
Bazzite as well, which uses the Atomic backing, so it is more easily recoverable in case of an oops.
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.
Yeah this happened in Japan way earlier. Japan got mobile internet much sooner than the rest of the world it was called i-mode. Which was launched in 1999. The home computer boom never happened there like it did in the West. Since everyone just uses their mobile phone to go in the internet and Japanese PCs were expensive. And doing work after hours at home wasn’t a thing since you do that at the office where your boss can see you putting in the work. The only PCs that sold reasonably well were VAIOs since those were relatively compact.
It’s also why computer literacy is very low in Japan, ask anyone who taught in Japan and they will tell you most Japanese high school students don’t know how to use a computer. Like the problems we are seeing now in the West with computer literacy among students they had for decades already.
Not just casual users, I work in software development and I don't have a personal computer and haven't bought one in over 8 years. Every company I worked for provided me with a laptop whether Windows or Mac. I have my smartphone and video game consoles for personal use.
I think you're right on this. People aren't moving away from MS because of their obnoxious behaviour. They're moving to alternate form factors and dealing with Apple's and Google's obnoxious behaviour instead. People are willing to put up with a metric ton of bullshit so they don't have to actually do anything for themselves.
Not to mention google has fought to replace real PCs in grade school computer courses with chromebooks, which are glorified tablets. Recent gens simply aren't as familiar with proper computers as phones and tablets.
I don't think their obnoxious behavior is completely unrelated. After all, people aren't choosing windows phones or tablets either.
That's just because Microsoft waited until Android and iOS were well-established before trying to make a smartphone OS. It could have been the best OS ever made, and it still would have been a failure because there wasn't a market for a third OS. It was hard enough at the time to get apps developed for both iOS and Android - there wasn't room for a third player.
MS charged for Windows Lite, the others were free. And anyway they were building market share, but not fast enough for management, so they abandoned it mid-cycle.
And this is the absolute truth. I showed my brother today in haveibeenpawned how his main email (you guessed it, Gmail) is out there in over 150 leaks and hacks. Not 2 hours later he was buying 2 new nest thermostats to replace the ones he has at home because Google is phasing them out (yes, they still work, Google just chose to kill them).
I'm done trying to make people see the light. We'll see what happens when it all blows up (see I didn't say "if").
Correct. Whenever you see a large chunk of the population making a change, first assume it is for mundane reasons like finances or convenience.
Exactly. My wife hasn't used an actual computer more than a handful of times in the last several years. She does EVERYTHING on her smartphone.
I have never owned a laptop, because my desktop unit is where I do most of my business stuff, and when I'm away from that, my smartphone is good enough.
Of course, the most important thing isn't that we account for two less computers than a few years ago, but the smartphones that we have replaced laptops with, run Android. So that's actually a net loss of 4 MS products.
And after all these years, Windows products still make me frustrated and infuriated. You'd think they would have honed it to a perfect product by now, but every few years they completely reconfigure the UI, and make us have to navigate a whole new, buggy system.
I keep having to remind people around me that phones are the primary computing device for an ever increasing percentage of the population.
Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.
Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.
At some point, it just becomes exhausting to hear people explain-o-brag about their ability to navigate the command-line, like typing "dir" into a cursor field makes them the hottest thing since Alan Turing.
Millennials will tell you they are tech geniuses, then throw up their hands when their dishwasher breaks or their check-oil light comes on. The need to be cluelessly smug rivals any 90s-era Boomer.
Looks around my living room, 3 laptops, stationary, 1 nas and a server. 2 laptops are still running windows.
You are an outlier.
Same here. I was just thinking that I have way more running computers now than I did in years past. But none of mine are running Windows now.
What a well earned drop. They keep forcing their bullshit on us, of course we're interested in other OS's as a result.
I do use windows for most things, but my servers will never run anything but Linux at this point.
Funny thing. Back in the day, and possibly today, all windows Hotmail/Livemail servers were Linux.
Hotmail ran on FreeBSD when Microsoft acquired the company in 1997. They started the transition a few years later and it was entirely hosted on Windows by 2005.
Requiring 50x the hardware no doubt
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.
It never worked for me, wouldn't find a file on the directory it was searching.
FYI you can disable that, but yes it’s a shitty new default.
After a blissful decade on Arch Linux, stock Windows enrages me, takes hours to make it somewhat bearable.
You sound grumpy. You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems too I bet... ha ha ha l o l
You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems
It's crazy to see how much of our society hinges on having access to the internet.
Paying bills, applying for jobs, registering for any kind of public or private service, long distance travel or communication... A technology that was supposed to make life quicker and easier has become this firehose of annoying digital chores, scams, and red tape.
I feel the same about phone numbers. Almost everything blocks VoIP numbers and only offers SMS MFA
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
What distro is your company going with?
How do you manage a fleet of linux devices and stay up to date with compliance?
Not entirely sure what you mean; Linux’s user management, access control, security etc has always been ahead of Windows’ for its whole existence.
On the server side I can agree, but linux does not get device drivers for majority of hardware let alone regular device driver updates. That fact alone makes the entire company un-compliant in many industries.
You could get an entire fleet of linux supported laptops and get then compliance becomes easier to manage since the software on linux lends well to sys admin fleet control. You would have to push patches weekly to the fleet which would result in a ton of random user bugs.
does not get device drivers for majority of hardware
Literally lying
Please go on any distro fourm to the support section and tell me how many threads have hardware related issues. Majority of these are due to non-existent/unsupported drivers.
One guy hacking together a device driver to upstream is not the same as the manufacturer supporting it with regular updates. Windows gets driver updates seemingly every week and linux is lucky to get a 2nd update or even a first.
support section
If I was reading your fan club forum I would see loads of positive comments about you.
You have no data to support your claim.
This is such a stupid argument I cant believe you're even trying to make the case. I'll pick a common enterprise device the HP zbook firefly. NXP NFC NPC300 Proximity Driver - Its had 5 OEM driver updates in the past 4 years on windows. Meanwhile the NXP linux_libnfc-nci repo which is NXP's OEM repo is wildly out of date and looks borderline dead. I checked the kernel tree and there are "common" patches under drivers/nfc/nxp-nci that include support for the NPC300 but these dont match up with the patches that are released for windows and dont seem to be specific fixes to address CVE issues.
Lets go less specific and take a look at fwupd for the zbook https://fwupd.org/lvfs/hsireports/device?host_vendor=HP&host_family=103C_5336AN+HP+ZBook&host_product=HP+ZBook+Firefly+14+G7+Mobile+Workstation
Here we can see the tests that fwupd has done to verify the device firmware. As you can see its missing a lot of functionality. This is a linux supported device apparently. If its missing this much I can only imagine how bad other devices are. Keep in mind this is only checking the working functionality and is not checking to see if the patches are up to date to protect against the latest CVEs. On windows HP has released 22 patches in the last 5 years with the latest patch containing fixes for 12 CVEs. Meanwhile on linux im not sure if HP has even released a single complete patch for this device let alone constant updates to fix the CVEs.
I'm currently working on getting our device fleet in order for EU Gov contract compliance and a fleet of these devices would instantly disqualify us. I love linux but we have work to do and being ignorant to the issues doesnt help anything.
Do you work for Microsoft or something? This reads exactly like their sales FUD playbook
No, im a linux user and I love linux. But it doesnt help anything to pretend it isnt flawed.
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.
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.
It's because most people use their phones as their main computing device these days. The idea that the average person would give up the convenience, stability, and familiarity of something like windows because of "pure greed" and "loss of OS control" is a fantasy. The average person would buy a screwdriver with banner ads if it saved them $10.
This.
Longtime computer "nerd" here. 8 years ago I would have balked about spending more on a cellphone than my gaming PC, but I end up using my phone more hours per day than my desktop so I bit the bullet and bought a nice phone. Now my PC is basically a dedicated entertainment device, and my phone is my go-to for email, chat, music, videos, reading, documents, and even some work.
If I wasn't an avid gamer, I probably wouldn't have a desktop or laptop at all right now.
And I will be switching to Linux this year, mainly because of Windows 11 and the general direction the Microsoft is going. I've got a laptop to test with and when I have the hang of it, the big battle station is getting switched too.
To me the phone is such a perfect device but it fails to reach its potential. When i think about a computer in my pocket, I want a computer that I can hack around with and use. My two main issues with phones are their software is awful, its locked down and its to simplified and the other issue is input devices for mobile leave a lot to be desired. I dream of AR glasses and a dataglove on each hand.
Yeah. You can unlock the phone, but it takes some work.
I the thing that upset me the most was that my phone was packed with an amazing array of sensors, and most of them are blocked from the user accessing. I got an app that gives me sensor data output. It really turns your phone from a device into a tool.
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.
id appreciate it if they didnt get it chock full of fucking ads. big part of why i left it.
its actually a good system underneath the crud, and microsoft loves to insist on the crud.
Enshittification will do that, yep
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!
You mother fucker... You're hired.
friendship ended with npu chips now ad-processing-unit chips are my best friend.
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.
This is the terrifying part. Ads have become so normal in everyday life that people see nothing wrong with wasting their life away being marketed to by corporations. How much of someone's life is wasted hearing their existence isn't good enough but if they'd only buy some product they could be happy?
The Fifteen Million Merits episode of Black Mirror was supposed to be a warming.
But instead it seems corporations used it as a guide, and people just accepted having ads bombarded into their skulls in exchange for content, instead of getting enraged by it.
Perfect for when malware distributors host on Microsoft domains (Sharepoint?)… built-in ain’t blocking that enormous mess, sigh
windows dying doesn't help. they are on a shopping spree buying every AAA game that tencent haven't already bought.
Yay, monopolies
Let's wait 'til the shopping spree is over and break them the fuck up <3
Prevention is always better than a cure
I don't disagree, but unhappy to report I have the same power over either outcome.
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.
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 %.
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.
And yet people are fine with:
People should have basic cooking knowledge
People should have basic financial knowledge
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
Strap a minisfourm pc and battery pack to your back, run a usb cable up to your AR glasses. Strap a Svalboard to each hand and run the cables up your arms. Easy problem solved.
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.
Android is not on this plot, it's desktop only.
The 2nd place is interestingly not Apple, but Unknown.
Three point four percentage points. Not great. Not terrible.
It sounds much better when you say 1 in 167 people then vs 1 in 25 people today.
It was unthinkable 10 years ago. I call it a win.
Apple Silicon goes absolutely BRRRR
I'll be joining soon enough, going to dual boot with Linux. Only keeping windows for games that won't work on Linux.
If this calculation proves true, one would think losing close to 1/3 of its customers would cause M$ to rethink some of its business policies/plans...
Such as forcing folks to retire perfectly good hardware and buy new if they wish to run Windoze11.
But then again, it's M$... 🤷♂️ 🤦♂️
they already have an their AI division earns way more than the Windows division. Matters little to them about Windows numbers dropping because in reality PCs as we know it are declining far more rapidly that anyone wants to say
1/3 of its Windows customers, not of all of its customers. I bet they still make plenty of money with Azure and Office 365.
they do OK but services side including AI make way more....
They pay for that AI from Open AI though. It's not pure profit for them.
Precisely. Windows is a side project for Microsoft now.
Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft's lunch.
It's too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform -- Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera -- all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.
I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.
It's only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.
Been saying exactly that for years but it hasn't happened yet.... It will when the last people (like my age) want to use Windows at home, but by then Macs will have gone as well because the pc as we know it will be finished. I can see pcs as such being gone in say 10 years and it will all be mobile devices as such, and I include laptops in that. Wifey has just lost the last installed program needed for her work from home. All web/connected apps to work from now, and when they go down the whole company stops work(ing). Lost 3 whole days this year so far as the whole company couldn't function for various reasons
I could imagine a future where Windows is just a proprietary DE over a Linux system. I don’t think it’s coming anytime soon because of the development cost it would impose, but I don’t see why they would go to such efforts maintaining a system they could get for free if the desktop user base keeps shrinking. They’re just too greedy not to do that. Even the backwards compatibility with Windows software is becoming a solved problem.
Aside from my above rant, the PC is definitely fast becoming an enthusiast/business platform. I opened a retirement account the other day through my smart phone!
MS did a shift like that already. The shift from MS-DOS to NT was transparent to the vast majority of people to the point that most people didn't realize they were two different OSes.
I don't see why they couldn't do it again. NTVDM was similar in concept to what wine does. Imagine if MS actively contributed to wine, or a wine like project.
Well a bunch of them are using WSL to do their work, which isn't the same, but shows how many people are just stuck with a Windows box.
In StackOverflow 2024 survey ~17% of both professional and personal use users were using WSL.
Source: StackOverflow 2024 Survey
Edit - A word went missing due to my battle with autocorrect. 😩
Microsoft could become a cloud computing platform, and the machine itself would act as a Terminal.
This often sucks when the server and terminal are onsite. Put the server elsewhere and only those with best connections will like it. Latency is a bitch.
It's only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses
I think at least one M365 plan includes a windows license now.
i was a MS employee once. Windows hasn't been their focus since Windows XP. Once they discovered the profit margins of Office 98... Windows was just a way to keep you using Office
This makes sense. I have a friend from way back in HS who interned there while he was working on his degree who said that cloud services was the priority at the time, and Windows was more just a vehicle that they continued to maintain. That continues to be the approximate temperature of the product and is in line with my expectations.
im glad they are losing users then.
if not being their cash cow gotta mean we get treated like this, then they should not have the market cornered.
For some reason modern business degree holders don't even consider the possibility of increasing head coubts but instead maximising gains from remaining heads.
Same with employees, they see things like dirty stores and long lines and they try to force employees to work as sanitation crews and implement time limits to make lines faster long before they ever hire somebody new.
This will rely on having an executive team that can predict trends beyond the next quarter.
Doubling down on advertising, telemetry, and AI in an overly bloated OS looks really good if you only care about the profits that brings for the next 3 months, rather than how much your userbase resents it. MS is fully capable of turning this around immediately by just making LTSC available to the public without needing to buy a MAK through an enterprise channel, but that means throwing away some recurring revenue in favor of claiming a lost userbase
And adding advertising to various parts of the OS.
Hey, Microsoft: de-shitify your OS if you want it to be more popular.
It’s Microsoft’s current CEO. All he is interested in is subscription revenue. Xbox hardware is next to go.
Breaking up Microsoft would be the best thing they could do right now. But it won’t happen.
And that CEO completely turned the company around. Microsoft was circling the drain before they changed strategies.
You say turned around, I say ruined. He’s just remaking it into another IBM by selling services and killing anything innovative or creative.
You're allowed to be wrong. The fact is if they continued doing what they were doing they would be almost entirely irrelevant today.
You would hope, but this is the same thing we see across almost all industries these days. It's almost like there's a root cause for it, some sort of, Iunno, economic system we could blame ...
But especially cable companies, for example. Has a dwindling customer base caused them to rethink their business strategies? Or has it caused them to try and bleed that dwindling base dryer even faster?
There's no "learning" anymore, there's riding the bus to the absolute pits of hell and just hoping you're not the CEO to be the one that has to go down with it.
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?
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 🫡
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.
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
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.
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 just installed Mint and some games on 5 Thinkpad T420s my boss was going to throw out. Sunday’s LAN party was pretty fun.
Is this my future?
If you're lucky
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 wonder how cloud accessibility plays into this. In the past if I had a dedicated windows app I might typically have maybe a hundred windows desktops accessing onsite servers. Nowadays I can replace that with thin clients and cloud based RDSH servers.
It's Linux for me but I also have to assume tablet culture plays a role too.
I think it's more to do with phones - people are just more likely to do most tasks on a phone rather than a laptop.
Absolutely! I observe this behaviour on myself: I am nowadays even sometimes coding on my phone (though, the experience is still... "suboptimal"), but for everything else? Its mostly fine.
There is no way it's "mostly fine".
Small screen for consumption, large screen for creation, - only way it's fine if you don't create anything and just consume, which is I guess what most people do.
At best I'll use Termux as I am not in the mood to boot my pc and I juat need to edit some config file.
Are people really actively using tablets? I thought that was more of a hype and is now something that lies around and gets occasional use on the couch, but not really productive.
Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It's broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it's familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.
I've been using tablets since the first generation (Galaxy tab), and I must say that it kind of veered to that side after a while, since getting a convertible laptop. A few years back I got a Huawei tablet with a pen and keyboard, that had impressive battery, and it took the place of my convertible. While I'm a Linux-Android-occassional Windows guy, I now use an ipad (As much as I hate to admit, in the tablet space they are vastly superior), with keyboard and pen, for most of my away needs, and for general around the house stuff. I do a lot of graphic design and photo stuff, and thanks to Affinity's suite, I can actually do real work on the thing.
As a student, yeah, I see lots of people using tablets for their work instead of laptops.
please tell me they have those little external keyboards which would make them basically a shitty laptop
Some do, but a lot also use it with a touch pen for notes.
Honestly tablets are perfectly sufficient for most education related things, plus they're thin, light weight, and don't need to be plugged in constantly unlike the goobers who bring gaming laptops.
I would've sprung for an iPad and done the same (though used a BT mechanical keyboard instead a chicklet one) if I wasn't in a CS degree that requires me to have a real OS that can run compilers, interpreters, multiple browsers, and uses a real folder structure.
oh thank goodness. An image of students typing their notes with the on screen keyboard flashed in my mind and i was scared
Your average computer user is mainly using it for interacting with various web based services and playing media. Don't need good input methods for that so tablets are a cheaper and easier to maintain alternative to a laptop.
I bought a tablet and I feel like the money has been wasted. I use it maybe once a month.
I just barely used my first one for the longest time, since I mostly played games or programmed on computers. Then I started to use it to read books and watch Netflix. I am on my 3rd one now and probably spend 60% of my computer time on it.
Me and my Steam Deck
Mostly used it in 2023 or so when I was sick on the couch. And yeah some hours on the trip I'm currently on. But it would just have been fine without.
Sometimes I see people post pictures use it in the most scenic locations, similar to the promotional video. And all I can think of is that if you want to play game so badly, you can just stay home. Much easier and also probably safer for the deck.
To each their own. Just hard to understand for me
According to StatCounter tablets never breached 7% market share, and even that was in 2014. Nowadays they are below 2%. Windows's lost userbase seems to be mostly about people using their phones for everything.
It sounds like a mixture of Chromebooks, and people simply not owning a traditional computer.
Either way, it seems to be mostly Google that's winning here.
These 2023 stats have Chromebook sales at only ~25M units globally, so this is probably the second scenarion, people decommissioning Windows computers and using the phone and/or tablet instead. https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-tablet-market-share-Q2-2023
For most people, a tablet is a direct replacement for a laptop anyway, especially with a wireless keyboard. I run software for work that, as far as I know, is Windows only, but most people will be fine with a tablet, or even just a phone.
A tablet is not a replacement for a laptop, its just a secondary "big phone" for watching videos because its more confortable for the eyes.
And sending emails, social media, video calls, taking notes, pretty sure they can even run things like power point presentations now.
Chromebooks went from "What is that?" To literally everywhere in schools.
Android phones are everywhere.
Google and the Chrome browser really ate into Microsoft's dominance.
And Apple, with people replacing traditional computers with Android and iOS devices.
It's almost like if you piss off your users then they'll ditch you.
Mobile and I imagine Google Docs really did a number on Windows necessity. In my experience, large companies and government rely on Windows and O365, smaller organizations use Google Docs. Even universities I've seen start with classrooms a decade ago using Google Docs and hangouts to eventually using Google Suite or whatever its called these days for student/faculty email
At least word documents saved as PDF and shared is way more common today than a decade ago. A decade ago I mainly remember seeing nothing but Excel and SPSS in classes, now I see professors showing how to do stuff in Google Sheets. For a long time computer science and math professors have been geeky and idealistic so you'd regularly see Libre/OpenOffice used in lectures
Another is Blender. In like 2008 ~2.49 Blender, professionals would scoff. A decade later Blender 2.8 releases and by today I hear way less vitriol and more opensess as another tool in the toolbox or recognition as great for at least learning or professional use for smaller teams. Flow was a successful movie made with it
Davinci Resolve is getting better and a lot more mainstream today than a decade ago. And stuff like Kdenlive is more powerful than the vast majority of people need. People were doing great stuff a decade+ ago with iMovie and basic Windows Movie Maker
Video games are a lot easier now because of Valve with Linux
Mobile, adults used to have laptop that pretty much excited to login to their credit cards and pay them, use TurboxTax, print out MapQuest directions, etc. Phones have made a laptop redundant I think for most people now. Work provides one if needed. TV for movies and phone for everything else
To me there's nothing Microsoft can do to stem the decline of Windows. Mobile first is standard now. Microsoft has no presence in smart TVs because they failed with Windows Mobile and Xbox hardware is on life support and they never made the stripped down Xbox Windows available for TV makers anyways. The loss towards mobile will continue.
Then there's national security concerns for countries around the world to be reliant on American software and hardware. Diversification of operating system has picked up heavily. It started like 20 years ago but it didn't seem to really pick up until the Huawei sanctions and driving Huawei to their own OS and Chinese government to invest even more into domestic Linux distro a. Then the recent American trade wars renewing interest in European countries in Linux and LibreOffice. My understanding has been that Linux had had strong adoption in India for some time now
Desktop Linux in the US, I say just keep focusing on prosumer/professional users. Software developers and other IT professionals are already Linux heavy. Some commercial software is available like Maya and Davinci Resolve. Krita and Blender are great. Kdenlive is good. Seems like GIMP and Inkscape development may be picking up momentum. Darktable is great. Valve keep focusing on SteamOS and community distros keep supporting more handhelds making every year easier and easier for gaming. Steam Deck 2 is hopefully a way more available in retail than the first deck. First product work out the kinks and prove viability. Second product and possibly AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc are way more interested in low power gaming than before as well as first class Linux support
Outside of the US, I feel like Trump both term one and now term two has really given Linux and open source software a global boost in appeal.
I agree with all your points bar one.
5000 employees, 10b valuation. We use Google docs. We're not "China Telecom" big, but I doubt anyone would call us small. I think most young companies are happy on google docs.
5000 employees, 10b valuation. We use Google docs. We’re not “China Telecom” big, but I doubt anyone would call us small. I think most young companies are happy on google docs.
And on the flip-side my dozen-employee workplace runs on Microsoft Outlook/OneDrive/Teams 🙃
If your founder used Microsoft, that might be why they just chose to go with what they knew.
Yea, the organisation was also founded in the 90s, so Microsoft was the default for everything.
Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.
They don’t care they have Azure now.
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 also found it OK-ish, at least after my usual disabling of BITS and SuperFetch (SysMain now, I think), and disabling auto-updates, I think in gpedit.msc, and using the provided BypassNRO.cmd to create local account.
Alright, maybe not that OK, but after the initial setup it ran fine even on officially unsupported computer made in 2007. Just had to modify the installer by merging W11 image into W10 installer.
Anyway, the Windows store or whatever isn't that used, and I got tired of updating every random program coming from .exe files. But similarly I don't like the large hops in versions like Windows 10 -> 11, or similarly with Linux Mint, so I went with Arch.
Anyway, I'll be a smaller minority. I most liked Windows 8.1. It was really well optimized.
What do you like? Or asked differently, what do you think is on Windows compared to other OSes?
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.
I’m thinking they’re doing it on purpose. Think you’re a multibazillion company, want to quit your least profitable line of work (OS business) but it’s also your most famous front. Diluting a business is how you quit without scaring investors.
No source for the blog post. Here it is: windows blog
Note that the number has been updated, and at the bottom they state that that figure has been updated.
The original text said 'over a billion'. 1.4 billion is over a billion.
Yeah, this is just terrible journalism.
I love how they went into so much detail about why the old numbers would be accurate, then proceed to say they can 'safely' say that windows has lost 400 million users over a sentence on a blog stating windows has 'over a billion users'.
Also quite disappointing that no one is questioning, "where did they go". If Chromebooks or Apple picked up a fraction of the "lost" users, they'd be shouting from the rooftops. And a fraction of those users would crush most Linux distros infrastructure, so we'd have heard something.
What Linux infrastructure? The wikis and torrent links?
Fwiw, I've switched 2 computers in my house to Linux. Still researching to find out if I can switch my z13 tablet and keep all the functionality.
What Linux infrastructure? The wikis and torrent links?
Package database mirrors (i.e. the things you're downloading from when you install new software).
Speaking from a university perspective - we've been scaling back our computer labs a fair bit, as there's a lot of people with personal laptops and tablets now. Almost half our former workstations are now eliminated or BYOD.
So a lot of Windows machines are just gone.
I happy to believe that its probably trending down, overall PC shipments have been trending down for a while, but 400m drop over 3 years is a huge amount that just doesnt smell right.
A lab computer is used by up to N students typically, so by removing it, there is potentially N more devices being purchased by the N students. So that could mean more iPads or Chromebooks, or even more PCs overall.
And converting a university device to a byod device doesn't necessarily remove a PC either, given the user may purchase a new device for work.
With any statistics to back it up (which none of us have, especially not the original article) all we have is speculation.
Yeah I don't buy 400m either.
Given there’s 7 billion people on earth, I’m a bit surprised this number is so low at only 1.4 billion. People will usually have a home computer and then use one at work, plus all the devices in data centers and other environments where they are not used as a desktop.
Developing world is more about mobile than PC, so that does explain part of the discrepancy.
They just had to copy the walled garden approach of the competitors, and badly at that. They could have not pursued forcing users to a Microsoft account. They could've avoided the telemetry and ads business(/bloat). Google has them beat there anyway. They had the more open alternative to Google and Apple but they're trying terribly to be second fiddle to them. And now Linux has become a good enough alternative to what Windows should've been. They are still the choice for business machines, but they've been terrible with consumer devices.
Microsoft for the past 17 years: We have a monopoly, so we can just copy people and become more popular than them. Aaaany day now. Anyway day now. Any day nowwwwww...
I'm about to make it one more...
Because they made it shit....
I was one of the 400 million.
I wonder how many millions of computers are going to end up getting thrown away because they don't meet the ridiculous requirements for windows 11.
I just recently built a computer, though truth be told it's basically my wife's old computer stuffed into a new case, we've been holding onto her old components as she's done upgrades. So it's basically a roughly 10 year old computer, it has one of the last AMD processors from before the ryzen era, but it was a beefy computer when she built it and it's still managing to run most of what's out there on acceptable (for me, I'm not exactly a graphics snob) settings.
Of course it's not gonna be compatible with windows 11, so I've been figuring out what my next move is going to be. Most likely I'll bite the bullet and build basically a whole new PC and recycle this one into a home server or something, it's definitely still got a lot of life left in it, but I'd be lying if the idea of just going over to Linux isn't really tempting
if the options are build a new pc or try out linux you've really got nothing to lose giving linux a go.
400 million user loss doesn't sound like "quietly shrinking". Sounds like outright hemorrhaging users because instead of improving, you are consistently making products shittier each year.
I began using Windows in 1992. I switched to MacOS this year and I'm never going back.
As someone who has had to use Windows, OSX and Linux as a daily driver at different points, OSX was by far the most challenging to work with. Every few months something broke. Fully on Linux now.
I’m way past making a living in tech, and so far (5 months) my MacBook is delivering a very satisfactory user experience. I’m not thrilled with the “radical” changes coming to MacOs, but I don’t have that much invested in the current version to fret over it. So far the biggest controversy about the new OS is how the finder icon swapped colours. I can live with that! I considered and tried some Linux distros over the past few years, but there was too much intervention required by me, the user. The “Total Recall” vibe of Windows 11 pushed me over the line.
Finally! Someone said it! My company changed my work laptop to a Mac. It's been a couple of months, and I still haven't got used to the desktop environment. Navigating between open windows with regular mouse/keyboard is a pain.
I find window grouping very annoying (this is also true for Gnome). What makes it even worse, is that the tilde is next to the left shift, instead of being above Tab. I think that's because we have British keyboard.
I never got used to it. Always felt gimped using it. At least with Windows I had shortcuts and virtual desktops.
As someone who has used Windows, OSX, and Linux as a daily driver at different points, Windows was by far the most challenging to work with. Every week there was some problem.
In recent years, my company provided Dell with 32GB of memory running Windows would blue screen practically weekly. Most of the time it struggled to run more than one instance of an IDE. Windows finally crashed to the point that the only option was restore the OS.
I requested a different machine and have been running macOS with less memory. Have actually been able to run more IDE instances than the Windows machine would run. No crashes.
Completely Unix based OSes now. Linux servers. Linux desktops. Mac laptops.
Your windows problems weren't brand new problems and likely from there systems or integrations.
When I say there were issues with OSX, I mean brand new problems stemming from updates breaking compatibility with systems and software. Nothing like getting to work one morning and every single employee lost the ability to screen share, or suddenly the file system for your virtual machines was broken, etc.
I've neutered my win 10 updates so they don't work and I've got Linux on two laptops out of 3 now. Going to move my server over soon, then eventually my desktop and the final laptop. Peacing out of the ms ecosystem
I just wish Linux remote desktop support wasn't absolute dogshit.
RustDesk, it's by far the best remote desktop software I've used on any platform.
Tons of great features, open source, self-hostable, easy to install and configure, works on all major platforms including mobile. Cross platform works like a charm.
Thanks. I’ll give it a try.
It really isn't. You don't even need to port forward, you can use AnyDesk or TeamViewer or any other option entirely for free. There are also open-source options too.
I’ve used them all. They all suck.
How so? They work fine on me between laptop and desktop, phone and desktop, etc.
They work well enough to get by, but definitely lack the responsiveness and modern feel of Windows rdp. Which makes sense, given the Linux solutions are essentially sending screen caps vs rdp's protocols.
It feels like using a raspberry pi as your workstation. Technically it can do it, but it’s not a great experience. It feels like when you’re in a video chat app, and someone using screen share gives you keyboard/mouse control.
I had luck with VNC, although it's still worse than RDP. There's also some RDP implementations on Linux that are apparently better, but VNC works well enough for me.
But there's no sound, I don't know if RDP has that. I've used VLC for sound forwarding. I also tried PulseAudio TCP module, but that didn't quite work. With VLC I can do lossy compression.
What I wish would work better is X11 forwarding. That could be so awesome, just having the remote windows local-like. But from what I can find, in the past, programs used X11's drawing features which would save a lot of bandwidth, while now they just draw pixel by pixel.
To give you some idea, I've tried it on LAN with gigabit ethernet, ping below 1ms. It would saturate the port and still be kinda slow.
There are plenty of options for both software and OS, so not every combination is going to have the same level of support as Windows, where every user gets the same experience.
That said, I've heard lots of good things about NoMachine.
I used NoMachine for the better part of a year, and I’d agree it’s the best of the options. It still sucks.
Most excellent news!
People will keep breaking their arms stroking their own selves, instead of thinkinig rationally.
Sigh...
Outside of the biz world, people aren't buying as many devices that would use the os. Or not replacing the ones they had that can't upgrade?
I wonder if there's any correlation with AI killing the office job market.
Where are they going? There's no way it's Linux, right? So I guess it's Mac?
Phones and tablets. The younger generations are only using those for the most part.
It's kind of linux. Also kind of mac. They're going to android and ios.
I know everybody's here to rag on Microsoft, but I honestly am quite pleased with Windows 11. I comfortably do software development in an Ubuntu shell using the Widows Subsystem for Linux and it honestly works like a charm. Then I can unplug and play video games in Steam and everything works great, there, too.
Of course this is all possible on Linux, but my point here is that Windows really isn't as awful as everybody makes it out to be.
Meanwhile, MacOS enters into a second decade of no innovation. It still relies on Homebrew for developer tools, still lacks any substantial improvements to Xcode and only ever receives iterative cosmetic changes like video lock screens and the new bundle of desktop backgrounds for its latest "update."
You're trying to paint windows in a positive light when Microsoft is desperately trying to spy on us and force more advertising on us even though we really don't want it, and the only reason they can do that is because they have a monopoly. So yeah, it really is that awful.
And if we want to do side by side comparisons of the available software packages, most things that you would need for your average office setup are free and come by default on your major Linux distros. On Windows, you have to install them manually, and the default options are mainly commercial. So you're paying more and possibly getting something worse, depending on your personal preferences about each software package and its alternative. That's pretty bad, my friend. Windows is competing with free and losing, but they have inertia and a monopoly.
My personal experience with Windows has been different. ~~I've not seen advertising in Windows; where have you seen that?~~* I'm a bit shocked about Microsoft spying on me, too. Do you have any sources on that? It feels like that should be illegal in Europe and would make headlines.
I don't use desktop office software and haven't purchased any desktop software in probably a decade. My business makes heavy use of Google Workspace and uses online services that are agnostic to the operating system. The only things I'm really installing on my machine are developer tools through apt-get and games through Steam.
*) Edit: Windows periodically prompts to use Edge or subscribe to Office 365; I had forgotten about that because it's perhaps less frequent here in Europe.
I log into a windows 10 server and see system notifications ads pop up. Here is an example of one i've seen several times across multiple windows 10/11 boxes.
When you install windows from fresh, you have a bunch of "suggested" apps on your task bar which are ads. Spotify for example.
Then you also have Notifications that tell you the news, which are sponsored news. Then you have other notifications telling you to use this or that Microsoft service (eg. oneDrive), another form of ads.
If you have the know-how to install windows 11/without logging into a Microsoft account, the notifications pester you endlessly to log in to a Windows account, which uses an outlook email, of course.
If you use a browser that isn't Edge, you'll be routinely "reminded" how amazing edge is. Also, even if you uninstall Edge, it reinstalls itself after every update. Same happens with Copilot. Even if you don't want to see those programs, because they are ever-present, you're more likely to use them.
All of these are forms of ads and outright user abuse, probably worthy of having Microsoft being fined again. Maybe you don't care, but this is definitely happening.
I'm also in the EU, my laptop was bought in the EU.
You're right that Edge routinely attempts to make its return—that's annoying alright. Microsoft is skirting a fine line here since they were found guilty of antitrust practices for this very thing. (Tangentially, I wonder if iPhone users have the same complaints about Safari.) In Europe, at least, those updates prompt you whether to make the switch, and the user remains in control. It's been many years since Microsoft changed my defaults.
You're also absolutely right about the attempted upsells for Office 365 or OneDrive or whatever. I agree they're ads and that they're annoying, but not more so than how my MacBook constantly nags me about iCloud or how iPhone consumes it with app data, or how Google leverages its surfaces for Photos, Drive, Workspace and Gemini upsells.
In the end all these companies arrive at the same challenge: converting a one-time purchase into regular payments through subscription models. I had honestly forgotten about these prompts until you reminded me of them, and so long as they're irregular and easy to ignore, I feel like Microsoft isn't doing anything outright awful.
I often think communities like Lemmy choose to disproportionately hate on things. In this case it's Windows, which I really don't think is warranted.
I often think communities like Lemmy choose to disproportionately hate on things. In this case it's Windows, which I really don't think is warranted.
But it is, though. You just choose to not see it that way. Laptops aren't cheap and Windows comes priced into the purchase. They already made money from you, that was always their business model.
For me, if I already paid for the product, that's it. The company loses the right to advertise to me and milk me for further revenue, and just because its industry standard it doesn't make it okay: the law should be tighter around this. Full stop.
I wonder if consumers would choose to pay more to opt out of this. Surely corporations have done their research, because none of them have chosen to offer a buy-out option. To be perfectly frank, I wouldn't pay more for a laptop for a guarantee that I'm not prompted for any up-sells, and it'd only make the consumer offerings more confusing if such an option existed.
All these companies are forcing themselves into the corner of offering the one-time fee to be as low as possible, preferably free, and find other revue channels after the purchase. I hold them all equally guilty of this: why pay $100 for Windows when there's no such fee for a Chromebook or MacBook? Microsoft is forced by competition to reduce the fee and recoup it elsewhere, and they're in my opinion not even the worst among those examples.
It's odd that Lemmy directs its anger at an individual company, while they're all guilty of the same practices, instead of towards their government representatives who are actually able to take action against it.
It’s odd that Lemmy directs its anger at an individual company, while they’re all guilty of the same practices, instead of towards their government representatives who are actually able to take action against it.
What? Lemmy fucken hates the government dude. People here absolutely rail against the government to take action against these practices and companies.
Open up your start menu and start typing, what comes up? Is it just apps or in other words program within your local hardware? Are there suggestions from the Internet or in other words an advertisement.
The results are honestly pretty spot on, at least for my use cases, and this isn't different from how Chromebooks or MacOS does it (although for the latter, Spotlight results are hilariously terrible). Even Linux distros often combine on-device and online search results—are those also advertisements? I'm puzzled why Windows is called out in particular on this.
If my Linux distro searched the internet, when I opened my launcher, I'd be finding a new Linux distro.
I distinctly recall a version of Ubuntu that not only showed search results, but Amazon shopping links.
And i no longer use Ubuntu. I remember that too. I also remember such large push back that it was removed
I didn't mean to have upset you as I wasn't aware that European users weren't allowed to comment here. I only ever meant to speak to my own experiences and not on behalf of anybody else.
That guy is a jackass. Probably an American upset that he's a minority on Lemmy. Don't mind him.
I reviewed the community rules and didn't see anything about Europe, so I'm left confused about what I've done wrong.
Check the part about misinformation.
Kindly reference the sections where I've provided misinformation and I will add a correction.
I see my comment about advertising and will clarify it.
I don't think the biggest concerns about Windows are about functionality. It works perfectly well and even has some neat features. I'm using Linux and I miss the sys + v for clipboard history. The biggest gripe themes I see are the loss of privacy coupled with increasing sales pressure for everything Microsoft.
Edit: I looked it up, of course there's a Linux equivalent to clipboard history. Added!
sys + v can be bound to bring up clipboard history if you are using KDE!
Yes, I probably use this hundreds of times a day! This is a perfect example of something missing from Mac that requires an App Store purchase to fix—same for better window management. I suppose Apple prefers this situation because it allows them to both monetize on a lackluster OS and avoid making investments to fix anything.
I think you nailed it. There are definite upsides to macOS, especially for less tech savvy users, but they gouge the hell out of the denizens of their walled garden.
