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.
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
deleted by creator
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.
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 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.
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”).
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.
Correct. Whenever you see a large chunk of the population making a change, first assume it is for mundane reasons like finances or convenience.
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
Do you work for Microsoft or something? This reads exactly like their sales FUD playbook
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.
Enshittification will do that, yep
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.
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.
