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.
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…).
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.
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
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 do 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Where are they going? There’s no way it’s Linux, right? So I guess it’s Mac?
It’s kind of linux. Also kind of mac. They’re going to android and ios.
Phones and tablets. The younger generations are only using those for the most part.
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.
Enshittification will do that, yep
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 drwaing 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.
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 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.
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.
You are an outlier.
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 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.
