Despite Microsoft’s push to get customers onto Windows 11, growth in the market share of the software giant’s latest operating system has stalled, while Windows 10 has made modest gains, according to fresh figures from Statcounter.
This is not the news Microsoft wanted to hear. After half a year of growth, the line for Windows 11 global desktop market share has taken a slight downturn, according to the website usage monitor, going from 35.6 percent in October to 34.9 percent in November. Windows 10, on the other hand, managed to grow its share of that market by just under a percentage point to 61.8 percent.
The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade. The stats also revealed a small drop in the market share of its Edge browser, despite relentlessly plugging the application in the operating system.
Our old asses are over here learning mint and Ubuntu on new machines. That wasn’t on our 30s-40s disco card.
It’s fun. Everything looks good, then attach the external monitor to the laptop and it won’t detect. There’s a workaround, there’s almost always a workaround, but these basics of windows are in pieces in Linux.
The basic expectations with windows, like monitor detection, aren’t necessarily there.
Spite is a hell of a fuel though. Oh and I still have my win 10 disc and put a fresh install on another machine.
I plugged in a monitor yesterday on my work laptop 's HDMI port and it did nothing. After some troubleshooting I apparently had to unplug the USB-C dock for it to work. Let’s not pretend Windows is smooth sailing all the time.
At a meeting I was given some kind of remote dongle to duplicate my screen to a monitor and it did nothing. Had to run some exe first. Again, not plug and play.
But there was always a workaround.
Literally on Thanksgiving I pulled my work Mac out to do some stuff. It didn’t know my monitor from home was unplugged. I had to find hotkeys to move windows to the current display because Settings was opening on the non existent display which it also thought was the main one.
That is to say, even macOS gets this shit wrong. There is no perfect OS.
Is it a Dell? I’ve had all kinds of goofy problems like that with Dell hardware. The old ass port replicator my job gave me in 2014 can run 3 screens + laptop flawlessly but every one I’ve received since then can only do 2 screens or 3 screens and no laptop. It’s stupid.
My work dell has that stupid issue too.
Or at least it did, until I booted into Mint for the first time. 4 screens immediately usable. Boot back into Windows and it goes back to not working. You get one monitor mirrored.
Maybe they have some shady limitation in a driver unless you have the highest end models?
that’s why i switched to a mac instead of linux. i love linux on my servers, but for day to day productivity? nothing beats the “turn it on and go” of a mac. of course you pay for it with money (for a mac) or time (for linux)
but at least i don’t get full screen ads for windows 11!
Can I put an Nvidia 4090 in a mac for AI and gaming purposes?
do you really not know the answer to that?
No, I have an IQ below 42, pardon my mental disability sir.
We have a job opening for you in the coming administration, are you going to be available for a job starting in january ?
I tried the apple ecosystem way back when.
Fuck me I hated iTunes!
So glad to be out of that walled garden
I like my work Mac but I’d never buy one myself. They’re extremely overpriced.
I generally like my work mac, but external monitor support (used as an example against Linux here) is awful.
Sure, if you connect one (1) monitor and still use the laptop screen, it’s fine. But try to connect multiple, or disable the laptop screen, or try to lock the dock to your main monitor and you have to jump through all sorts of hoops or it just doesn’t work.
In the end, macos is just another OS, a good one in general, but definitely not without it’s quirks and issues. I run Arch (btw) with KDE/Plasma on my own desktop and am very happy with it
On my work machine, just a Dell laptop with a dock and some monitors, Mint Cinnamon actually gave me a better out-of-box than win10.
I didn’t try Mint until 21 (the version before current) and it’s just so smooth now.
one method that helps is to not think of it as a workaround but as assembling a kit. the base system only comes with what everyone will need, and adding on an extra piece makes it more yours. that also helps with motivation to do a good job of it.
What if I want to pay a little extra to get something ready-to-run? Windows for me then?
macos, probably.
I want to order a taco. Not the ingredients for a taco.
well unfortunately desktop computers are kitchens, not restaurants. if you want a device purely for consumption, a pc is not the right choice.
The Steam Deck and it’s desktop mode are why I decided to try jumping head first into a single boot of Bazzite on my main computer, it’s basically like using a Steam deck, just across four monitors, a year in and I haven’t looked back.
Sunshine worked right out the box too. Very much recommend bazzite. Tried pop os and just could not get sunshine to work with my 3060.
linux desperately needs/needed something like apple for macOS to drive usability. the steam deck is exactly that- one hardware set to really nail the UX and then expand from there.
thanks for the recommendation, I’m going to give that a try myself!
Another recommendation for Bazzite. I’ve been using it on my main laptop for months now and it’s been great. Had to learn a little bit about how to install things on immutable distros (tip, search using “silverblue” instead of “bazzite,” the solution will be the same), but now that I understand it, I really like it as a concept. Incredibly stable.
Oh and gaming just works. Bazzite comes pre-configured for gaming (and that includes monitor switching, etc).
Mint and Ubuntu are Debian based.
Try something Fedora based. I’ve had far less issues with it when it comes to hardware.
I’ve tried quite a few distros on an MSI I got and it wouldn’t recognize dual monitors with Nvidia drivers on any I tried. I went with fedora, Debian based ones, kde, etc. And none worked. Had to go back to Windows on that laptop.
Ah my work laptop had the same issue but as soon as I saw it didn’t work I just switched to windows and it worked.
The only laptop I keep permanently Linuxed I use as a VPS lol. Got Nextcloud on it and a few bots.
that’s switchable graphics for you. nvidia refuse to spill their secret sauce so all the effort in supporting that over the past 10 years have been clean-room reverse engineering. the only way it will ever get any good is if nvidia does it, or if they open it up.
Hmm. Switchable graphics. Do you mean like integrated & GPU? I didn’t think that could affect dual screen setup. Guess maybe it could? Idk.
Each GPU has a limited number of display outputs (also called display pipelines or display controllers). as an example, the macbook air can only support the built-in display and one external display. This is a hardware limitation of its GPU architecture. When using multiple displays on laptops that support it, some systems can utilize both the integrated GPU and discrete GPU simultaneously to drive different displays.
Most laptops with discrete Nvidia and AMD GPUs also have onboard/integrated graphics and only use the Nvidia/AMD GPU when something graphically-intensive is happening (playing a game, video editing or encoding/decoding, etc). They call this “hybrid graphics”.
However, the HDMI port on the laptop (as well as the USB-C graphics) is wired directly to the Nvidia GPU (I’ll call this the “dGPU” from now on). This means that when an external monitor is plugged in but nothing graphically intense is being done, the screen is rendered on the iGPU, then sent to the dGPU to send over the HDMI port.
The hand-off between the dGPU and iGPU (called “reverse PRIME”) is basically voodoo magic. People have tried to get it working in Linux, but there’s a bunch of issues with it.
To get dual monitors working properly on my work laptop (Lenovo X1 Extreme Gen5 with an RTX3050), I have to go into the BIOS and force it to only use the dGPU (disable the hybrid mode). If I don’t do that, the external monitor renders at maybe 5fps? A coworker got it working by instead forcing the Nvidia card to always use a high clock speed for the RAM instead of reducing it to save power, but I haven’t tired that.
This is a laptop-specific problem, only for laptops with hybrid graphics. I have no problems using three monitors on a desktop PC.
The Framework laptops with AMD dGPU has a port on the back of the laptop that comes directly from the dGPU, but you can also have an HDMI module on the side of the laptop, and it outputs to my 4k TV just fine (I guess depending on distro/setup, but Bazzite does it automagically). It uses both cards dynamically, and will engage the dGPU if needed.
But yeah, I mean that’s hardware made specifically for Linux, and the Bazzite image is specifically for FW, so…
Ah, yeah, MSI Nvidia does have issues in general for some reason. At that point basically only Arch or similar that’s more advanced would fix the problem, and at that point it does make sense for most users to stick with Windows.
I’d recommend what others here say and get an iot version or using a Rufus install in those cases of Windows though, to avoid all the telemetry etc.
I would but my cares are pretty much gone rn. I don’t have enough time to do anything nowadays except work, doomscroll and sleep. Much less to start messing with weird stuff and breaking my $2800 laptop for fun hahah. I think I’ll keep it as it came. I hope Bill Gates one day wakes up and looks at a sneak pic of my balls. If I get fired I’ll boot up my work laptop and install Arch on it though. Always wanted to try it!
Should clarify: I meant the IoT LTSC version of Windows. It gets support for much longer too, since it sounded like you reinstalled Windows anyway. Plus games and RAM heavy software work snappier on those cleaner, more minimal versions of Windows. It made a difference even on my 7.5k water cooled desktop. You’d think 128gb of DDR5 RAM, 7900x3D, 3090 computer wouldn’t have any slow down, but base Windows is REALLY bloated - enough that even at those specs you can notice a difference on a gen 5 m.2 ssd. I still use Windows for some modded games and a specific audio program. Oh, and CAD software.
Same with my girlfriend’s 2k gaming laptop. Startup and such is way faster now.
Plus no telemetry or ads as a bonus of course.
Will intensely think about it. Last I heard no bitlocker. Will research this week.
Me: Debian? Fedora? Why are you making up words as if I speak other languages you made up???
#include <iostream>
int main() { std::cout << “no, this is a different language” << std::endl; return 0; }
(All joking aside, the content was made for someone who already knew what a Distro was. If you want to know, feel free to ask for more info)
A lot of the time I’ll “get” jokes. I don’t find most of them funny, but I get the joke. Then someone will accuse me of not being smart enough to get the joke. It’s like “no no, I got the punchline…it’s just not funny.” Then I get insulted that they think I’m dumb.
With your joke…yeah…I actually am too dumb to get it. Part of me thinks Lemmy had some script error, and part of me thinks you’re making some script based joke…in any event, give that joke some wings, because it just flew over my head.
they are both like 20 year-old operating systems (linux distros)
Strange. I have a displaylink box ar home. My Ubuntu machine works first time every time. My wife’s Windows 11 PC takes 10 minutes of stuffing around every time I try to connect it.
Sometimes I wonder what’s going on with other peoples’ setups. Like where do all these issues come from?
I just plug in my external monitors, usually through the usb-c hub at work so both of them at the same time. But sometimes just a single one. Always gets detected. I’ve had Debian and now TumbleWeed on my work computer, neither gave me an issue with this.
There are other issues I’m having - such as I wish I didn’t have to open the lid for a second and then close it back when I’ve just connected the externals and want to use it in clamshell mode (as Apple calls it; idk if there’s a name for it outside of Mac/Apple). But all the expected functionality is there.
Wellp… This morning I was ready to go to work and have a few meetings but thanks to windows 11 inconvenient update service now I can just come here to complain.
How do they judge? How do I look at market?
They link their source in the article, and the source has a FAQ which has their methodology explained in the first question. You are capable of looking at market, you just need to, y’know…look.
In short, they are among the 867 partners on your favorite website who want to install cookies on your browser for analytics. OS info is included in what it reports back home.
well the market share of Windows 11 has risen significantly on my work laptop, and I can wholehearedly say, I understand why its global market share is falling… random freezes, random restarts, battery life sliced, random starting up from suspend. it’s not great.
meanwhile, Manjaro on my personal Lenovo laptop has been cutting edge with consistent updates for years.
Work computer just updated as well. Same dock and monitors but now when the computer wakes from sleep/hibernate the monitors attached to the dock just won’t come on about 80% of the time. So you have to unplug/replug in the dock to get the monitors to kick on. I can’t recall that being the case ever when using 10. Not a single time.
To make matters worse the first time it happened it wasn’t immediately obvious because the laptop monitor was blank. The login screen only shows on the primary monitor which is one of the external monitors. So the computer knows the monitors exist but for whatever reason can’t wake them up. Again never an issue before the update to 11.
I’m sure work loved me spending 3-4 hours mucking with stuff to unclusterfuck windows…our corporate machines still had the Xbox app installed. Thanks IT department! This was a custom image of win11 with all kinds of corporate branding bundled in.
I was wondering about that. I just got forced to run native Windows 11 by work, and one monitor in my multihead setup just never wakes up automatically, but my Linux install on same hardware has no issue.
The moment I can verify a solution for my music production workflow on Linux, I know that I’m out as well.
Announcing in 2025
Windows Buntu we bring the U in Windows … Actually that would be nice for Ubuntu to slowly suffocate and take over Windows lol
The bunt has been on the path of enshitification itself for many years no thanks.
because windows 2000 was peak windows
As much as I loved 2000, XP was better and 7 the best ever.
2000 was the pioneer though, it was such a huge step forward in every way
Long time Linux user here. The smoothest OS I’ve ever used was xp64. That just ran like butter. Unfortunately, it was killed off to push people to Vista.
Yes, Win2k, WinXP, and Win7 were all major leaps forward in various areas. Imagine if 8 had been just a major cleanup of Windows 7 and unifying the various settings paradigms, how much better that would have been.
But alas, Windows 8 was the ‘oh crap, tablets and phones might eat our lunch’ release and the focus was throwing the desktop/laptop experience under the bus to try to cater to sensibilities of markets they were never going to capture. Also, to have their own ‘app store’ to try to wrestle a google/apple like revenue model for applications running on the platform.
If MS had put any focus on allowing skins/themes for Windows, the touch market would have just been an extra feature. There is no technical reason they couldn’t have, as evidenced by the third-party apps that allowed legacy skins on previous versions, such as 8 and 10. But they needed that lock-in and forced experience, rather than giving people the choice.
Windows 8 was actually a big cleanup over 7. We got a much improved task manager, Explorer got a ribbon, copy operations now showed a graph, and performance was very similar to Win7. It was just that Microsoft overshadowed these improvements with the UI disaster and telemetry.
Windows ME was peak.
Let me tel… … … … … … sorry, my ME froze
its funny since windows me was just windows 2000 but worse since they didnt have to worry about business customers
Windows ME was actually some Windows 2000 bits glued onto Windows 98. That’s why it was so terrible, it was kind of an afterthought when initial plans for ‘2k for everyone’ got abandoned as they realized the home app ecosystem needed more compatibility workarounds than they were prepared to offer. So instead of completing the 2k based product line, they just '2k’ed up Win98 to satisfy their then-current release cadence and make sure home market had a ‘current’ OS to go with the 2k professional line.
They’re still too hardheaded to get it
you misspelled greedy
Samediff
If Microsoft really wants people to switch to Windows 11 they need to retain many of the already few remaining customization options from Windows 10. Trackpad gesture support is worse, the only useful button in the new right click menu is the show more one which brings back the old menu but requires an extra click, and the file explore somehow got even more buggy. I hate every time I need to interact with a computer using Windows 11.
Luckily there’s been an initiative within my company recently to support Linux, so I’m hoping that all the network related issues are fully worked out before Windows 11 is forced on us so I can just jump ship to Ubuntu.
When games work so well on Linux these days, it seems to me that there is absolutely no reason for Windows to exist anymore. Why does anyone use it?
Adobe Premiere, Vegas, and my Pioneer DDJ equipment.
Just switched from win 10 to Linux mint today. Feels good, games running faster than before even. The only thing that doesn’t work is the invasive anti cheat shit for multiplayer games. But I get merked every time in multiplayer so screw it
Especially for buisnesses its hard to switch. A lot of specialised software is not supported on Linux and often there isn’t any form of good replacement.
Main reason would be “why not?” windows is also working great for most common use cases. Actually there is not much difference nowadays between OSes. Another reason would be specific software like Excel. Why would you switch your OS adlnd most of the software you use if you don’t gain much from it.
I’ve a Linux OS for coding, OSX for work and Windows for gaming. There are absolutely no problems with any of them. Windows worked great last 4 years, no virusesor performance issues without anti-virus or tweaking. Linux drivers needed work at the start but now there is no issues, Mac is similar. Only issue is when I try to code with Windows it feels annoying but it is mostly because I’m doing things with CLI where I should have used GUI.
Still needed for VR games.
Not needed, many VR games work fine under Proton. Unlike desktop though, not “plug and play”. If you’re ready to spend time troubleshooting, give Linux VR a try with SteamVR or Monado through Envision. If you just want to play VR, stick to Windows for now.
Yes, you can technically get some games working. If you use the right VR headset (meaning Valve Index or Vive), use the right distro, with the right compositor and right GPU, spend a lot of time troubleshooting, then you can maybe get a few games to start. Camera passthrough won’t work, power management won’t work (no control for base stations), Bluetooth won’t work, tracking won’t be as good, you will experience weird bugs and crashes of both the games and SteamVR, and you will get less FPS than on Windows. And even with that inferior experience, most games still won’t run.
I spent a lot of time trying despite this being the experience for most people online, and I only confirmed that it’s the case. Windows is absolutely needed if you want a good experience. Hopefully Valve changes that in the future, but that’s the case today.
Not entirely. SteamVR on Linux is almost that bad, yes. With ALVR you can try to use standalones on SteamVR, but it’s not very stable. Most games will “run” under SteamVR and modern proton, I’ve only encountered a few situations where they don’t, once again caused by kernel level anticheat. SteamVR does have major issues with stability and reprojection, which makes the VR experience much worse overall.
However, Monado and WiVRN (+ OpenComposite) are great when using Envision. Not all games run, and some have input issues, but it’s significantly better than SteamVR. With a couple overlays, you can get most functions working as expected, like desktop view, camera passthrough, etc.
As for “power management” and “bluetooth”, the only thing the Valve Index uses bluetooth for is power management. That doesn’t work in the drivers on Linux, but there are scripts you can use if you have a separate bluetooth dongle. It’s not a full fix, but not as painful as using an Android app or unplugging the basestations.
As we both noted, it requires setup and troubleshooting, and as someone who uses Linux for VR gaming too, I can’t recommend it to the average person. That does not make Windows a “requirement”, just much easier and the better plug and play experience.
Sure, as I said “Windows is absolutely needed if you want a good experience”. Yes, it’s not required to get something working if you try hard enough, but it is required if you want everything to work well.
I keep a Windows virtual machine with GPU passthrough for VR and don’t see myself ditching it any time soon. At least I don’t need to boot into Windows.
Aw shit! Thought there was nothing left that would keep me from completely ditching windows (htpc, pihole, homelab … everything but my workstation is Linux already). I recently got a headset tho and quite enjoy it… What a bummer :(
Btw, anyone got Reshade 5+ working in wine/proton?
Never had a problem with Reshade. You could use steamtinkerlaunch to do it more easily or just config Wine to overwrite the .dll needed for Reshade(I think is the dxgi.dll).
If that doesn’t work you can pass a argument on steam/gog/lutris/heroic/whatever to replace the .dll. I’m linking a guide to mod Cyberpunk 2077 on linux but the instructions works for any game and any .dll just change the name.
I am used to it. I don’t like the app store of Ubuntu and manually installing software on Linux is vastly different.
But Win11 is forcing me to Ubuntu. It’s the same but with commercials.
Go to Mint, Ubuntu is owned by Canonical and they’re doing ad shit too
Why do you need an app store?
I don’t want an app store. But I don’t want to jump through too many hoops when installing Software. I like the “Installer” concept.
Ease of installing I would say. Most people do not need nor want to learn how to install stuff using terminal. An app store is necessary for your regular Joe using the Operating system.
You don’t always need the terminal. If the software is available in a deb package, you just double click it and hit Install. But, you’re right, most people don’t want to learn apt or any other command, and I get that.
Edit: Autocorrect
There are decent GUI installers for most, if not all, major Linux distros. They may not be as full-featured as the CLI versions, but they are sufficient for average users.
Hardware support is still an issue. I recently tried to use Linux on my laptop, it didn’t work out primarily because not all of the hardware was supported. I thought it was when I bought the laptop but the documentation of what actually works and doesn’t work isn’t clear or accurate so I ended up with a laptop that can technically run Linux but has various hardware in it will not function and likely never will.
My PC isn’t compatible, so fuck Windows 11
The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade.
Yeah no shit! When my computer does full-screen, disruptive things that I didn’t tell it to do, I figure out how to remove that malware. I’ve been off Windows at home for about a month now, thanks Linux Mint! Getting some games to work has been challenging, but most things have just worked and quite a few work much better!
Performance is up overall, and my confidence that my computer isn’t running a bunch of secret ad and spy ware is way up. Hardware like my gamepad and microphone would randomly disconnect and have issues on Windows, all working perfectly now.
Unfortunately I’m still deep in MS land for work, but there’s almost a comedic quality to it. Everything’s very slow, everyone has constant issues with Teams, or Office online, or Dynamics, or copilot shoving it’s tendrils into everything. Watching businesses struggle to keep operating in the face of Microsoft’s inadequacy is like being a mechanic watching a motor grind to a halt because the owner/manufacturer replaced all the oil with syrup.
Like yes, it’s my problem to fix, but I’m just glad it’s not my car.
Hmmm… Maybe people using windows 10 really do love the full screen ads! Yeah! They missed the ads so they went back to windows 10 until they can get those ads in windows 11! Yup! That must be it!
I would double down on full screen unstoppable ads. Maybe one that looks like a BSOD? That would be lovely!
Windows users will do everything, including using a soon unsupported and insecure, outdated version of this proprietary garbage, instead of just switching to a better OS
The main problem is that Win11 can only run in special hardware and Microsoft can pry out my potato computer from my cold, dead hands. I won’t change my hardware to update my OS.
