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.
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…).
Win 11 got so bad over the last years that Linux is the better option now.
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.
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.
Correct. Whenever you see a large chunk of the population making a change, first assume it is for mundane reasons like finances or convenience.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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
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.
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.
Lots of valid points here, but then I wouldn’t imagine a community like this actually liking Windows and/or Micro$oft. But here in the UK Mac usage is miniscule especially at work where my client base is, and is declining not increasing. I’d say that more than the OS the AI hype train is way worse for dropping numbers than the OS. Businesses here are using AI and just firing employees left right and centre. Every week a client says they have either fired a whole department and replaced them with using AI or outsourced the department to somewhere that uses AI to get the job done. If it continues at this rate the UK will have a massive unemployment issue in a few years where nobody, and I mean nobody works with computers like they used to.
What a well earned drop. They keep forcing their bullshit on us, of course we’re interested in other OS’s as a result.
I do use windows for most things, but my servers will never run anything but Linux at this point.
Funny thing. Back in the day, and possibly today, all windows Hotmail/Livemail servers were Linux.
Hotmail ran on FreeBSD when Microsoft acquired the company in 1997. They started the transition a few years later and it was entirely hosted on Windows by 2005.
Requiring 50x the hardware no doubt
If this calculation proves true, one would think losing close to 1/3 of its customers would cause M$ 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$… 🤷♂️ 🤦♂️
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.
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.
Yes, I don’t like Windows one bit anymore but back then, Windows Mobile was very solid! I loved my Lumia phones.
If Windows becomes a sub service for business only, three things three things can happen:
1 Mac’s become the most sold consumer product
2 Linux takes off like never before
3 Some consumer version where ads accompany every mouse click
I hope it’s gonna be number two
Unless there’s a miracle, it would be:
4 consumer are relegated to DRM’d-to-Hell-and-back smartphones
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.
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.
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
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
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.
And adding advertising to various parts of the OS.
Hey, Microsoft: de-shitify your OS if you want it to be more popular.
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.
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.
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.
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
friendship ended with npu chips now ad-processing-unit chips are my best friend.
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
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.
Best gif ever. Download!
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.
