7 ms·
Windows 10 reaches 70% market share as Windows 11 keeps declining
- dcist 2y agoWindows 11 is awful. It ruined the calendar view on the taskbar, which is a huge pet peeve for me.
- noah91734 2y agoThere were a lot of regressions that upset me. The option for seconds in the system time was removed. Right-clicking the WiFi/internet connection in the taskbar no longer has the context menu option for "Troubleshoot connection", forcing me to go to options, search Troubleshooters, click "Other troubleshooters" (Because troubleshooting internet is so uncommon, right?) and THEN troubleshoot the internet connection. From what I read, Microsoft let some designers who only use Mac OS do the design, and they plowed ahead despite hearing extremely reasonable concerns that their OS developers had with some design decisions.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ukuina 2y agoSeconds in the system tray clock is back now.
- mw6621 2y agoThere does seem to be a "Diagnose network problems" in the context menu when right-clicking on the internet connection icon.
- noah91734 2y agoOh wow, and only two and a half years after Windows 11 was released. Better late than never, I guess. I should have heeded the age-old warning of "every other major Windows release is terrible" and not upgraded.
- moffkalast 2y ago> Microsoft let some designers who only use Mac OS do the design I was wondering why Win11 ripped off that central icon taskbar thing from MacOS instead of keeping their iconic and proven layout. That explains everything.
- filchermcurr 2y agoI think the reasoning is that ultrawide / larger monitors are becoming more common and it's easier / faster to access the taskbar from the center than moving the mouse to the far edge. And if it's not easier, they have an option to move it back to the left. This is one of the least egregious changes, really.
- moffkalast 2y agoI'm sure something like that was the rationalization when they pitched it, but we all know it's not why they really did it.
- mw6621 2y agoThe calendar view does exist, but it is collapsed by default. If you expand it, it looks very similar to the Win10 calendar.
- andix 2y agoFor me it was an overall improvement over Windows 10. Every new release of every software has some drawbacks, but I got over getting upset about those little details. I just try to find new solutions, if old ones stop working.
- wing-_-nuts 2y agoI built my first gaming pc in 20 years about a month ago. Before, I had been mainly using linux as my os of choice. Windows is so very. painful. in comparison. Windows apparently replaced CMD with the janky powershell instead of adopting literally any popular unix shell. There's advertising and web results scattered all over the OS. Windows still doesn't have a cohesive apt-get type update functionality even though debian and other distros have had that since the mid 90s (a program such as MSI aferburner could simply register a repo url like how linux distros use PPAs, etc). Window's networking is janky, and it's firewall is pretty bad. Honestly, the only reason I'm using windows is because I want a flawless gaming / vr experience on my $2500 gaming / ai machine. If not for that, or if I was ok with a little jank from proton, I'd go back to linux in a heartbeat. Windows is a penalty box in every other domain except for gaming. WSL only makes it livable.
- TiredOfLife 2y agoMicrosoft broke the calendar view on the taskbar something like a year after release of Windows 10.
- el_don_almighty 2y ago"put down the release and step away"
- solarengineer 2y agoAn important comment. "What's important" depends upon who is asking the question and who they are asking the question to. I am a MacOS user now, but I wonder how Microsoft are faring in the aspects of stability, removal of bloat, fixing tech debt, refactoring of code to improve readability and bloat, addressing security issues, speeding up the builds, ensuring device driver stability on supported hardware, improving support for applications and use cases, improving actual as well as perceived speeds, and so on.
- FredPret 2y agoI paid money Windows 10 when Microsoft said "this is the last version of Windows - only updates from here on". When they announced work on Windows 11, I switched platforms. It didn't help that the Windows 10 updates were incredibly obnoxious, restarting my computer regardless of overnight compute tasks I had running.
- Hock88sdx 2y ago[dead]
- Xeamek 2y agoI mean, you can upgrade from w10 to w11 for free, without reinstalling full system. It's not really much different then 'w10 updates forever', just marketing with new version.
- _aavaa_ 2y agoUnless you happen to have a CPU which isn't supported, like those still being made at the time when w11 was released. High end cpus too.
- Xeamek 2y agoSure, but even we stayed with w10 naming, we would still get an update with stricter requirements eventually
- FredPret 2y agoI'm willing to buy a new computer every couple of years, but not to learn a new operating system.
- _aavaa_ 2y agoEventually is the operative word there. Windows 11 dropped 6 years after windows 10. And at the time it didn't support top of the line CPUs from 2 years ago. Contrast that with Ubuntu which talked about dropping support for x86-v1 only 5 months ago[0]. [0]: https://ubuntu.com/blog/optimising-ubuntu-performance-on-amd64-architecture https://ubuntu.com/blog/optimising-ubuntu-performance-on-amd...
- bruce343434 2y agoI am glad people seem to be aware of the hostilities against them, and are voting with their feet. However, we are talking about a single percent point. Holding my breath. If people seriously put up with win11, I can only see it getting worse.
- FredPret 2y agoThe people here are also the ones who tell grandma which computer to buy. You need mass market adoption, but you really also need the "developers! developers! developers!" (or sub "power users" for "developers") [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
- trog 2y agoYep. And I don't tell my relatives to buy Windows any more. I'm not a Google cheerleader but Chromebook is my number 1 choice if people need a basic machine to do webstuff and I want to have zero to do with its maintenance.
- doctorwho42 2y agoMaybe windows 10 actually is the last windows operating system you will ever need to buy. I remember when that was a big selling point for win10.
- quchen 2y agoI’m wondering, what keeps Windows afloat? I’ve become a Windows person in my childhood, and stayed one because games, Photoshop and 3DS Max ran on it. I’ve long switched to Linux (and dual-boot to a very much unloved Win10 for games that don’t run on Linux these days), and I’m baffled that ads occurring in the start menu are a thing – I was similarly shocked when Ubuntu tried this, and will always be cautious around Canonical. Inertia goes a long way, I guess – and switching OSs is kind of a hobby for a while before being productive again ..? I wonder, had I had a Steam Deck as a child, would I have been an Arch user now? Would be interested in hearing other peoples’ stories.
- perlgeek 2y ago> I’m wondering, what keeps Windows afloat? Businesses with specialized software that doesn't run (or isn't supported) anywhere except on Windows. It's declining, because lots of business applications are moving to the web, but there's still a ton of them around.
- unethical_ban 2y agoGames and media, for me. I'm about to convert my Proxmox file/VM server to Windows, because I want it to double as a media server and Linux GPU support (much less hardware passthrough) is more than I want to deal with. I converted my laptop from Fedora to Windows recently to be able to do some light gaming, and because I want to see if Windows suspend is better on battery than the quick drain I was getting on Fedora.
- tapoxi 2y agoI actually just built a new PC this weekend, my first in a while, with a Radeon GPU. I decided to give Fedora Kinoite a chance on it just because Windows' transition to becoming an ad platform was really pissing me off and it doesn't hurt to see what Linux is like now, especially something weird like an atomic OS. To my surprise, games just work. I haven't really attempted this in over a decade, but I was able to play Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite, Counter-Strike 2, Baldurs Gate 3, and Doom Eternal all without issues or configuration. Kinoite itself is pretty awesome; my system is immutable and treated like a git repo, KDE 6 is extremely polished and visually appealing, and any dev work just runs in their handy "toolbox" utility. The rest of the stuff I use (Signal, Discord, Google Chrome, Blender, Krita, Godot) is all natively supported. I don't see myself touching Windows again, it has nothing I need at this point.
- tifik 2y agoGood. Unless publishing bad products negatively affects sales and profit, there is no reason for MS to change course.
- baal80spam 2y agoGreat news.
- redox99 2y agoAlthough they've improved it a bit since 11's launch, the task bar is still a regression from Windows 10.
- unethical_ban 2y ago23H2 release, which is rolling out slowly, allows the taskbar to at least show titles now. The width of each bar is variable instead of equal across the screen. But it's better than 11 launch.
- nashashmi 2y agoI still love windows 7. I feel like the 10 and 11 go too hard in the Mac direction. So many features of the old task bar are gone
- geodel 2y agoI have a 5-6 year old Lenovo Windows 10 laptop. Wondering when upgrade hackling from MS becomes intolerable should I upgrade 11 or just re-image to ubuntu.
- cjk2 2y agoThat'll be because windows 11 is absolute shit! I know at least 4 people who rolled back to windows 10 in the last 6 months.
- brokencode 2y agoMicrosoft likes to alternate between good and bad releases of Windows. XP was good, Vista was bad. 7 was good, 8 was bad. 10 was good, and 11 is kind of bad. Not as bad as Vista or 8, but still noticeably worse than 10. Here’s hoping that 12 will be an OS with upgrading to.
- grishka 2y agoThey broke that streak at the turn of the century. 95 was bad, 98 was good, 2000 was good, XP was good, and then Vista was bad.
- geraldcombs 2y agoApparently ME was so bad it's been memory-holed.
- steve1977 2y agoWe don’t talk about Window Me
- legitster 2y agoExtremely hot take: Vista was not actually that bad. It was just too many new things at once and required such a massive hardware upgrade. Windows 7 was not that fundamentally different, but by the time it came out the bandaid had been ripped off.
- grishka 2y agoActually, I used Vista myself for around a year, and for me subjectively it was okay. I later upgraded that installation to 7 and used it several more years on the same hardware.
- steve1977 2y agoPretty much what I have been saying. Windows 7 was in many aspects Vista SE, they just had to give it a new name because Vista was so „tainted“. I mean it even reported as Windows NT 6.1 (Vista was 6.0)
- EcommerceFlow 2y agoBoth are complete garbage and hinder the consumer PC market. I've had custom built gaming PCs since 2008, with my current build probably 50x more powerful than the one back then, yet the software has gotten worse.
- fidotron 2y agoValve have done the world a huge favour with their work enabling Steam and PC gaming on linux. Windows 11 is so outright irritating I do not know how anyone could choose to use it. For most purposes KDE is a better Windows facsimile than Windows 11 is. It is a shame the general audio story on Linux remains such a mess and so the non Mac DAW and video crowd remain hostage to the whims of MS.
- wing-_-nuts 2y agoThe wayland transition hasn't done linux any favors, but thankfully most distributions are slow rolling that change.
- gausswho 2y agoa slow roll would be delaying the inevitable and holding back linux as a windows alternative. fortunately no relevant distro is doing what you describe.
- wing-_-nuts 2y agoMost distros have made wayland available but have not forced a change, and will not until wayland's issues get fully sorted. This is a good thing, as wayland doesn't bring the user much from a user perspective, only pain when x, y, or z functionality that has existed for decades breaks.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- loeg 2y agoIs there any way to buy a new legit Windows 10 install today?
- stagger87 2y agoYes, you just use the Win10 media installer (free download from MS) and buy a win10 key off Amazon or wherever.
- lyk2005 2y agoI'm curious why, in 2024, anyone would want to buy a legit copy of Windows 10. Nearly every device comes with 10/11 preinstalled, and if for some reason it doesn't there are ways around that :)
- loeg 2y agoBuilding a desktop for my dad.
- grishka 2y ago> As for Windows 7, despite the no-support state and the continuous developer support exodus, it is still alive and kicking. I know several people who still use Windows 7 as their main OS to this day. I totally understand them, that was the last version before Microsoft started ruining Windows with stupid touch-first UIs and overt contempt for the user. I also heard that Microsoft was telling hardware manufacturers basically "don't you dare release Windows 7 drivers for your new devices or else".
- djaychela 2y agoDoes anyone who works on Windows read HN? I'm just wondering as I nearly only see negative comments about it (particularly about the user-hostile features such as advertising and so on), and I wonder how anyone who works on this thinks that it's a good idea. It would kinda be OK if it was free... but it's not - it's expensive, IMO. I've had to buy Windows 11 for the last two PCs I built for friends, and Pro was £140. Crazy that you have to pay that and then be subjected to abuse. I'd leave and use Linux if I could... but Cubase doesn't run on it and that's my bread and butter, so i'm stuck. And no, Wine or any Open Source DAWs are not the solution, sadly.
- sublinear 2y agoThe people working on Windows are unlikely to be the people making any business decisions. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find out a good chunk of the product negativity is from Windows devs themselves!
- samiru 2y agoTo me this Windows hate feels like a form of a group think. But I find myself on the sidelines on many other issues, too.
- Xeamek 2y ago140$ sounds like price for perpetual license that binds to your Microsoft account and can be transfered from pc to pc. But you can buy legit oem licenses that cost something like 40$. You simply won't be able to move it to new pc, but usually it doesn't matter much. People avoid them cause "surely if they are thus cheap they must be scam", but it's not. They simply have restriction of permanently binding to single hardware. But again, usually it's worth it anyway
- alok-g 2y ago>> Does anyone who works on Windows read HN? I do. However, {#include https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39950708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39950708}
- personalityson 2y ago
- some-guy 2y agoI have W11 due to building a gaming PC with a modern CPU with "efficiency cores", which W10 doesn't support proper task scheduling of. From a stability and performance standpoint the OS has been fine, but every update there's a whole new enshittified UI / UX feature that I have to figure out how to turn off.
- pch00 2y agoImho the TPM 2.0 requirement killed Windows 11. There's still huge fleets of incompatible, yet still perfectly useful, PCs out there - especially in large corp environments.
- grishka 2y agoIt's not a technical requirement but rather a purely marketing one. It's trivially bypassable.
- legitster 2y agoI finally got the upgrade to Windows 11 and it's... fine? I don't get all of the hate. Maybe it's because I'm late and everything has been fixed, but it's actually been my favorite version of Windows so far. It finally axed some of the vestigial UIs from Windows 8. And built-in driver support for things like controllers and bluetooth accessories have been a huge upgrade. I'm ready to be showered in a hail of messages about ads or bloatware or changed layouts, but I found all of the defaults and settings relatively easy to change - if anything easier to find than even Windows 10. This is a relatively tiny blip, and nearly every other hardware survey tool seems to indicate W11 adoption is chugging along briskly.
- albertopv 2y agoIt's not fine. File explorer context menu, taskbar, it was a half baked OS when first released. It improved, but they shouldn't have release it as it was. Taskbar is still a mess, sometimes I have to reboot to get it working again. And still I can't move on the side.
- andix 2y agoThere is a decade old rule: don't upgrade to the next windows version before the first Service Pack is released.
- readthenotes1 2y agoDude, it's not 2014. Decade*s* old rule!
- andix 2y agoTell me I’m getting old without telling me I’m getting old. Thanks! ;)
- legitster 2y agoI haven't had any problem with any of those things - maybe I lucked out with hardware support. However, some longstanding problems I had on Windows with controller and displays and accessories have finally just disappeared. So YMMV.
- sorbusherra 2y agoI have ryzen 2400G. no Windows 11 for that cpu. 2018 is too old I guess. Anyway Linux of course works and steam nowadays works so well with windows games I really have no reason for windows 11 anyway.
- jsnell 2y agoHere's a wild idea: how about we accept that the Statcounter data just isn't any good, should not be used as the basis of any kind of journalism, and definitely shouldn't be amplified by social media? It's incredibly flaky and volatile data gathered by a tracking company with undisclosed methodology. It's rare that a month goes by without clickbait articles about small fluctuations in the data showing up on HN. And that the data is obviously trash. Computers last for years and updates aren't synchronized, so the stats should have a lot of momentum, with changes in sales taking years to materialize as usage share. That's not true of Statcounter's data. Like, just look at the stats for the last year: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-202303-202404 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide... Does anyone honestly believe that OS X market share dropped from 21% to 16% in a month? Even the idea is absurd. The fluctuations in "Unknown" operating systems dwarf literally every change that these articles get written about. Or drilling in deeper, Windows 8.1 was supposedly 6% of US Windows usage in January, but <1% two months before or after. Garbage. Data.
- lyk2005 2y agoGood observation since computers are bought and used for considerable amount of time, it leads to changes with momentum with slowly growing or declining market shares without spikes.
- ryandrake 2y agoWith every release of Windows, I feel like I am in less and less control of my own computer. More and more things run/change/happen because Microsoft wants them to happen, not me. And things I do somehow still have control over, get regularly overridden by Microsoft at their whim. Windows is now even trying to stop me from using the basic Mail application, threatening that "soon" it will just out of the blue replace it with (unwanted) Outlook, without me having any say about it. Apple is getting there too, but it's not as blatant as Microsoft. However, their opinions on how I should be using my computer tend to be even more sweeping and system-wide than Microsoft's. "Like that 32-bit software you've been running forever? Well fuck you, user, you can't anymore!" "You want to modify that file on your filesystem? Nope. Oh you got root? Still nope. Get lost." Computers are supposed to serve the user, and only do things that the user commands them to do. Now, more and more, they are serving their manufacturers and the OS vendors, not the user.
- onewheeltom 2y agoW11 market share “plummeted” from 28.6% to 24% ?
- hasselhoftd 2y ago[dead]
- DoctorMckay101 2y agoWSA was a flop because of the Amazon store exclusivity. Almost nobody implements Direct Storage after years of it being available. The UI worsened overall: new right click context menu is horrible. TPM requirement on install. Microsoft account requirement on install. Only feature that works better on W11 than W10 is autoHDR. You are not getting too many people into W11 for just autoHDR. Let's see what they do with W12 or however they'll call it.
- aileenmarjorie 2y ago[dead]