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.
windows dying doesn’t help. they are on a shopping spree buying every AAA game that tencent haven’t already bought.
I began using Windows in 1992. I switched to MacOS this year and I’m never going back.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think their obnoxious behavior is completely unrelated. After all, people aren’t choosing windows phones or tablets either.
Correct. Whenever you see a large chunk of the population making a change, first assume it is for mundane reasons like finances or convenience.
Looks around my living room, 3 laptops, stationary, 1 nas and a server. 2 laptops are still running windows.
You are an outlier.
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.
You sound grumpy. You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems too I bet… ha ha ha l o l
Enshittification will do that, yep
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.
I’ll be joining soon enough, going to dual boot with Linux. Only keeping windows for games that won’t work on Linux.
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’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.
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
Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.
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”
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
