Windows 11 Poised To Beat 10, Mostly Because It Has To (theregister.com) 91
An anonymous reader shares a report: The gap between Windows 10 and Windows 11 continues to narrow, and Microsoft's flagship operating system is on track to finally surpass its predecessor by summer. The latest figures from Statcounter show the increase in Windows 11's market share accelerating, while Windows 10 declines.
Before Champagne corks start popping in Redmond, it is worth noting that Windows 10 still accounts for over half the market -- 54.2 percent -- and Windows 11 now accounts for 42.69 percent. However, if the current trends continue, Windows 10 should finally drop below the 50 percent mark next month and be surpassed by Windows 11 shortly after.
The cause is likely due to enterprises pushing the upgrade button rather than having to deal with extended support for Windows 10. Support for most Windows 10 versions ends on October 14, 2025, and Microsoft has shown no signs of deviating from its plan to retire the veteran operating system. [...] Whether users actually want the operating system is another matter. Windows 11 offers few compelling features that justify an upgrade and no killer application. The looming October 14 support cut-off date is likely to be the major driving factor behind the move to Windows 11.
Before Champagne corks start popping in Redmond, it is worth noting that Windows 10 still accounts for over half the market -- 54.2 percent -- and Windows 11 now accounts for 42.69 percent. However, if the current trends continue, Windows 10 should finally drop below the 50 percent mark next month and be surpassed by Windows 11 shortly after.
The cause is likely due to enterprises pushing the upgrade button rather than having to deal with extended support for Windows 10. Support for most Windows 10 versions ends on October 14, 2025, and Microsoft has shown no signs of deviating from its plan to retire the veteran operating system. [...] Whether users actually want the operating system is another matter. Windows 11 offers few compelling features that justify an upgrade and no killer application. The looming October 14 support cut-off date is likely to be the major driving factor behind the move to Windows 11.
Hardware upgrade cycle (Score:3)
Planned obsolence as a business strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Planned obsolence as a business strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
How is Microsoft supposed to stay in business if you use an old operating system forever
They can ... wait for it ... *gasp* ... make improvements! But we can't have that, it's not predatory enough. Instead we have copilot keys, ads, bloat, moving everything to services and cloud, etc. I'm going to mourn 33 years of (DOS and ) Windows, it was fun, but enough is enough.
Re: (Score:2)
They can ... wait for it ... *gasp* ... make improvements!
It's not a question on that front - it's the revenue stream question for programming, maintenance, and yes, "improvements."
Windows 10 was released to the public on July 29, 2015. When it's officially marked as EOL, it will be over 10 years old. That's 10 years of (to the end user, setting aside corporate site-licensing/etc contracts) security updates and other patching provided. And many older still-running-Win10 computers shipped originally wit
Re:Planned obsolence as a business strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Doublecheck MacOS for a comparison. Apple cuts off security updates at the 3-year mark for a given MacOS version now and function improvements even sooner than that. iOS similar. The Android version in your cellphone... likely similar.
That's not correct. Apple provides full MacOS updates for 6-7 years - the current release, Sequioa [wikipedia.org] supports a lot of hardware from 2018 and 2019. When they no longer release new OS versions for the hardware, they still supply security updates for a couple of years more. Similar for iOS - it also supports 2018 phones, and if they no longer support that with the next release it'll have security updates until 2027 or so. 9 years is a pretty good lifespan for a phone.
What Apple is pretty bad at is software ba
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
MacOS 12 (Monterey) released in October 2021, and received its last update on July 29, 2024; less than 3 years after release. Maybe you should stop being a crack-smoking dipshitted retard.
That's not how OS releases in the Apple world work. You get a new major OS release for free every year for 5-6 years, and then the final one gets security updates for two more years. Thus, the hardware is supported by Apple for 6-8 years. Which is great for a phone, and a bit behind Windows for PCs and laptops.
Re: (Score:3)
Also perhaps you should be reminded that by your own metric, Apple support is complete shit. They force things into obsolescence at obscene speed.
MacOS 15 only supports [apple.com] the Macbook Air platform from 2020+. The iMac platform from 2019+. Whereas Microsoft will have, again, given OS patching and security updates for free to a computer that ran Windows 7 in 2009, all the way until October 2025. 16 years. So even IF you are counting "from the time of purchase of the computer" rather than examining the fact tha
Re: (Score:2)
Also perhaps you should be reminded that by your own metric, Apple support is complete shit. They force things into obsolescence at obscene speed.
MacOS 15 only supports [apple.com] the Macbook Air platform from 2020+. The iMac platform from 2019+. Whereas Microsoft will have, again, given OS patching and security updates for free to a computer that ran Windows 7 in 2009, all the way until October 2025. 16 years. So even IF you are counting "from the time of purchase of the computer" rather than examining the fact that MacOS 12 got less than 3 years of updates? Fucking hell, you'd have to be the most money-irresponsible dumb fucking retard on the planet to buy Apple knowing their forced-obsolescence crap policies.
This is not how OS support in the Mac world works. Every OS is just supported for 3 years - 1 year of full support including feature upgrades and improvements, and 2 years of security updates. However, Mac gets news major OS versions for free - and a system will get these new major releases for 5-6 years, before they get 2 years of security updates on the final one. So a total of 7-8 years of support. They use the same scheme for both MacOS and iOS. Great for phones, not so great for computers. Microsoft i
Re:Planned obsolence as a business strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't need any of the features of Windows 11 that aren't already in Windows 10. When my games stop working, I'll upgrade, not a second earlier. Security features don't matter much when all it's used for are video games and Chrome, not downloading random b.s. off the internet, and you're sitting behind a firewall/router.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
They can ... wait for it ... *gasp* ... make improvements!
They did precisely that. They released a whole new version with some pretty major changes. The problem is you don't agree the changes they made are improvements, but you can't sit there and claim they did nothing.
Re: (Score:3)
Code doesn't rust or wear out.
It sort of does. Think of attacks against exploitable bugs as a kind of rust. As more are discovered, your OS/apps start to "fall apart" at an increasing rate. You can put your systems behind more and more impenetrable firewalls. Sort of like parking an old pickup truck in the desert. But every once in a while, you've got to drive it into town.
A Windows system isn't of much use if you don't dare answer e-mail. Or turn on JavaScript to visit some ad bloated site.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should they stay in business? If they can no logger provide a useful product that people are willing to pay for. If they continue to make changes nobody wants but can bully people into changing then they should go out of business. That is the way it is supposed to work in a free market.
Re: (Score:2)
Systems needing security will not take well to all the telemetry Win 11 is sending out, nor would they like having everyone to have to have a MS account.
I'm curious how all this will work...these aren't small customer bases either.
Re: (Score:3)
Enterprise edition always has GPOs that give you way more control than home or pro.
Re: (Score:2)
will not take well to all the telemetry Win 11 is sending out, nor would they like having everyone to have to have a MS account.
It's not a problem. Their IT will likely have used the Windows ADK and unattended Windows installation script to customize the deployment per their org's needs. Or AT LEAST Joined the machine to the corporate domain or Hybrid-joined the machine to the company's Azure AD and deployed and endpoint management solution.
The second you do those things; logging into Windows with
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually all of it is technically available to anyone with Windows 11 editions other than Home
(Pro, Education, or Enterprise editions are the only ones that can be deployed). Except the backend pieces. You can create your own customized Windows disk to be imaged from a PE boot disk if you know how to go about it... the Windows deployment toolkit is a free download. There's really no reason you can't really, unless you had the
Re:Planned obsole[sce]nce as a business strategy (Score:2)
The FP wasn't bad, but your comment was pretty tangential while at the same time being a better foundation for an interesting discussion. However it only had a score of two? Almost below my visibility settings... Yet another failure or near failure of the moderation system?
However, I think "Planned obsolescence" [FTFY] is not the correct description. It's more a case of "forced" or "artificial" obsolescence. The Windows OS passed the point of my actual OS-level requirements many years ago. I've been using W
Re: (Score:3)
The Windows OS passed the point of my actual OS-level requirements many years ago. I've been using Windows for a LONG time, way too long, and I am really hard pressed to remember the last new feature that I needed at the OS level. Perhaps TCP/IP support back in Windows 95? Yes, I know that's hard to assess, because I would agree that my computers have gotten more useful and more powerful, and some of that is due to OS-level improvements that are making my application software run faster, but... On balance I strongly believe that a much smaller OS could deliver what I want faster, and with fewer security vulnerabilities.
For all of the MANY, MANY, MANY annoying things that have been added to Windows over the years that make its use a begrudging concession rather than enthusiastic selection, I will see what things I can concede were added to Windows that were genuinely useful since TCP/IP was added in Windows 95...
1. 64-bit support (would you really want to be using 4GB of RAM in 2025?).
2. Desktop compositing (transparency, shadows, variable DPI support, GPU acceleration).
3. Memory management (no more one-app-crashes the OS)
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm... Mostly I think you track Windows much more closely than I do, though I feel many of your examples are less in the category of innovation or improvement and more in the category of fixing bad design decisions or removing bugs that never should have been released into the wild in the first place...
I tend to see things from a different perspective. The OS should be as small as possible and completely secure, though I know perfect security is impossible. Not sure where you got the number of 10,001 for th
Re: (Score:2)
"Code doesn't rust or wear out."
Someone, please, tell Linus about this, so we don't suffer through major updates that just complicate things. It ain't wore, don't replace it for the sake of new.
Ok?.
Re: (Score:2)
Code doesn't rust or wear out. How is Microsoft supposed to stay in business if you use an old operating system forever?
Same as they always have. Continue to sell Windows 10 licenses for new equipment and products on top of Windows 10.
The upgrade is not tied to revenue anyways. The upgrade to Windows 11 is Free, remember? I had a machine where the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was free, and now after upgrading the Motherboard and CPU - the upgrade to Windows 11 is also free. It seems li
Re: (Score:2)
The opposite is also true: I just discovered that Windows 10 doesn't support, and never will, the USB4 and WIFI 7 chips on my new motherboard.
Re: Hardware upgrade cycle (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm quite sure there is, and I haven't had the time to dig into it too much. But let's be honest here: how many users will have the time, skills and willingness to find that out?
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry to be losing half my games (Score:1)
Which Linux has the widest driver support, can handle LM Studio without slowdown, supports the Wine bits and bobs and is easiest to administer as a desktop OS?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not a huge Linux user anymore (I run FreeBSD as my daily driver) though I do have a Linux box running Slackware and another one running Mint. I'd suggest trying Linux Mint, It's easy to install and provides a familiar interface for those coming from Windows.
Re: (Score:2)
I love Mint. If Adobe Creative Cloud ran on Mint, I'd say goodbye to Windows in a heartbeat.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm now on MX Linux.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I pretty much stay in the Debian family, mainly Debian itself. Unfortunately GPUs are still a bit of a pain, and Ubuntu seems to do a better job of matching drivers to kernel versions. I have other issues with Ubuntu, whose attempts to monetize the distro in some ways make it intrusive in its own right.
That being said, for the company I work for, where RDP to Server 2016 TS servers is the primary means of connection, we are at least transitioning most of the desktops and laptops to Debian (with the exceptio
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Zorin (Score:2)
Zorin's focus is that transition from Windows. They have the tightest WINE/Vulkan integration.
I don't know what LM Studio is.
They also ditched Firefox for Brave over privacy concerns.
https://help.zorin.com/docs/ap... [zorin.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Moving from windows to linux is trading a bunch of problems you can't solve and have to live with it by a lot of problems you can solve and eventually reach an OS without annoyances.
Who cares? (Score:2)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, really, it's different shit. Much stinkier shit. The liquid kind, that oozes everywhere and even the best detergent can't get the stains out.
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent funny.
Re: (Score:2)
At the risk of being accused of being gross...
Chocolate pudding shit...
It's a downgrade (Score:5, Insightful)
For as bad as Windows 10 was, it still had items which allowed it to be relatively useful and configurable. With Windows 11 it's now only the Microsoft way. No, you can't move the taskbar to any edge you want. No, you can't have the taskbar expand if to rows if you happen to have an excessive number of software open. No, you can't have Control Panel where all the useful bits and pieces are centrally located and instead have to hunt through something called Settings where you can't really change settings.
Windows 2000 was the last good OS with Windows 7 being a decent replacement. Since then, it's been a downhill ride to crapulence.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
>>I don't know why businesses aren't making the switch this past twenty years.
Because a TON of software was only ever made to run under Windows. In my case, I work for a gov't lab and ALL our software is Windows only, and any attempt to run under a VM or WINE, will shut the software down. Some bespoke lab software is written by a mere handful of devs who have never heard of alternatives to Windows.
I have one software package I have to use that is written in Milan and any attempt to change the date/tim
Re: (Score:2)
Windows 11 offers few compelling features that justify an upgrade and no killer application.
But, but Copilot! What if I want MS to spy on everything I do? Have you thought of the children?
We have AI (Score:2)
Please clap.
Re: (Score:2)
Addressing Microsoft.....
Please GET clap...
Windows 11 is well on to its enshitification.
Re: (Score:2)
I completely agree. My monitors are all wider than tall, so vertical space is at a premium. But there's plenty of horizontal screen real estate. Yet Windows 11 forces the taskbar to be at the bottom of the screen, where it takes up precious vertical screen space.
Re:It's a downgrade (Score:5, Insightful)
The annoying thing with Windows is that Microsoft doesn't improve the OS for the benefit of its users, it "improves" it for the benefit of itself. Users (its "customers" really) are just pawns to be monetized. This is a fundamental cultural thing. I don't forsee them changing it, not unless their self-centered philosophy hits their bottom line too much (as happened with Win8). Even then the course correction was minor - they still managed to push people off Win7 onto the telemetry heavy Win10, while also pushing unrequested BS like Onedrive and Office subscriptions.
With the Win11 push I am exploring a different route. I decided to virtualize my Win10 PC and run it on top of a Linux host (Manjaro). I managed to image the Win10 PC into a qcow2 file, setup a VM, and surprisingly got the Win10 key to accept this as a "hardware change". To keep some performance I installed a 2nd GPU for looking-glass and maxxed the ram (128GB DDR4 - not too expensive - I imagine people will be dumping used DDR4 soon). This virtual setup runs quite well - when the VM is full screen it is indistinguishable from a Win10-only PC.
But the real purpose of this experiment is software - how much Win software do I really run. Interestingly, games are the least trouble to run on Linux (I don't play MMOs, yes I am aware of anti-cheat topics). Literally every single thing I've run off Steam works perfectly fine. Web browser, Youtube, all run fine. At least mostly - I have found Firefox after being up for a few days and having multiple Youtube tabs open will start to lag and act strange - not exactly a memory leak (nothing obvious on btop), and after restarting it runs fine again.
The actual hangups I have found are 1) Fusion360 - I don't think this runs on Wine or has native linux and 2) Portable apps. I make heavy use of USB Portableapps setup - while many Portableapps have native linux versions, they are - not portable. I did try using Wine in combination with the Portableapps exe files, but that was a failure. I don't know if there is a native-linux equivalent of Portableapps, but if so that would reduce my Windows usage to basically only Fusion. And I am OK running Fusion in a Win10 setup indefinitely if needed. Although being tax-season I can forsee other things like tax software being a problem. The experiment remains on-going.
Unfortunately while I can do all these modifications on a desktop PC, I expect the laptops in our house will simply end up on Win11 (or abandoned due to old hardware).
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent up. I would add that the business model targeting hardware vendors rather than the actual end users was one of the key factors in Microsoft's "success". The other key was the EULA elimination of legal liability for every mistake, no matter how egregious. I cannot not think of any third factor of comparable importance.
Re: (Score:2)
Check out Open Shell, https://github.com/Open-Shell/... [github.com]
It makes Windows 10 (and especially 11) tolerable to use.
Also Windows Powertoys - https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com] - the most important bit is that I can assign that stupid Copilot key to whatever.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Speaking of the Win11 taskbar, by default it's also taller than the Win10 taskbar and (shocker!) there's no way to make it smaller like there was in Win10. This is code that the anti-customer fools at MS would've had to manually TAKE OUT so that we get a purposely crappier product.
People keep buying Macs, so MS has to keep producing half-assed copies of the Mac's UI to try and get people to switch. They don't care if it's less functional or makes things harder. That's irrelevant to the UI team working on Windows 11...
Re: (Score:1)
I've had my taskbar on two rows, with text, and no "stacking" ever since the days of Windows 9x. I pushed back against every attempt on Microsoft's behalf to introduce UI defaults that hurt the usability of the operating system. Not looking forward to Windows 11.
Re: (Score:2)
Windows 2000 was the last good OS with Windows 7 being a decent replacement.
I disagree with both aspects of this statement. XP64 was pretty fucking awesome and was better than 2000 by far.
Windows 7 was not able to completely erase the micro-stutters from Vista's excessive DRM. I could always "feel" the latency behind it.
Re: (Score:2)
2K was the best Windows version ever!
they got me this week (Score:2)
the support team i'm on got fucked onto win11 this week, despite the fact that the entire company just got acquired on April 1 and we're all getting new laptops by the end of the month, with current laptops going into the trash. it's so stupid and i am so goddamn mad (you can put that in the paper).
like, i was resigned for the new laptops to be running 11, because ofc they would, but for someone somewhere to decide, hey you know what fuck those guys, let em eat it, and force-upgrade out shit with a month to
Off topic, but, I need to flag this! (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you know Slashdot registrations closed two years ago???? [slashdot.org]
I only found out a couple of days ago on some thread I can't find now
WTF???? We are a dying breed?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Can we, as the remainder of the community, do something about this please?
Re: (Score:2)
yes, and many of us rarely post anymore... sad. I also rarely moderate, so many discussions so shallow with number of posts or depth
Re: (Score:2)
That's a serious drag. I guess we really are dying! /., the old folks home of the internet.
Re: (Score:2)
My guess is it was a hasty response to bots that would create a bajillion new sockpuppet accounts. If there's no technical crew behind the scenes, then there's nobody to replace this band-aid with a real process, and maybe nobody to process applications.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can see from your uid why they had to close registration in the age of AI.
Re: (Score:1)
(although I think they did go away for a while there)
Re: (Score:2)
This is unusual for a site that lives or dies with the amount of users it has contributing, hopefully in an informative or insightful manner.
Wow, thanks for sharing! (Score:2)
News to me. So, /. is a private invite only. Not 100% closed.
Re: (Score:1)
Speaking of such the dying breed just based on discussions there is less discussions on here these days. I would say it sites like this should call anti-trust investigation by not raking good on
New hardware (Score:2)
The biggest issue I see is the requirement for new hardware. As someone else mentioned, companies can coordinate Windows 11 deployment with hardware refresh. But ... we all know that we're SUPPOSED to cycle out hardware every three years or so, but we also know that many companies do not do this. So it'll be interesting to see how that goes.
But consumers... I just don't see Fred and Ethyl Mertz swapping out their laptops in order to run Windows 11. I suspect there will be a lot of Windows 10 machines in
Re: (Score:2)
And with the tariffs and the recession, people (home users) won't be able to afford new computers.
Re: (Score:2)
That may be a factor, but with Windows laptops starting at $120 I don't see it as being a huge impediment. More likely, Fred and Ethyl won't see the need and don't want to bother moving their stuff.
anti-features (Score:3)
Worse than that. Windows 11 offers anti-features that no one wants. These anti-features justify avoiding it entirely.
Re: (Score:3)
How could you possibly not want more ads, AI and hardware restrictions?
I have 3 Pre-Win11 Computer Runing Linux (Score:2)
It’s a winner (Score:2)
You know you’ve got a winning upgrade when people will wait till the very last second to upgrade from what they’ve already got.
MS has done everything they can to get people to switch EXCEPT show us the value. What’s in 11 that I need that couldn’t have just been a 10 SP? And don’t say Copilot because just no.
Upgrade to Linux (Score:2)
Obvious. Sure, you will have a few stragglers that absolutely can't cut the MSFT cord. Remember those old smoking rooms that every company used to have? That's where you put your MSFT stragglers. Firewall it with razor wire. The rest of us can move forward without the MSFT albatross around their necks.
W10 EOL badly timed because W11 24H2 is awful (Score:2)
I was figuring I'd upgrade my W10 box after more W11 bugs were shaken out and MS retreated on some of the user-unfriendly decisions. But from everything I've heard, the 24H2 release was a disaster and is still broken for many users today [zdnet.com]. The number and severity of known issues with 24H2, and how many of them persist half a year later, seems unprecedented for a feature update in the W10-11 era.
On top of that, MS seems to be adding more user-unfriendly decisions (such as going to considerably more lengths to [theverge.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Not touching 24H2 until they fix the scanner bugs. I can't get a straight answer from my scanner vendor (Brother) if they work with 24H2. I contacted Brother support to see if they knew, and they kept asking "What error code are you seeing?".
Until the tariff's hit ... (Score:2, Insightful)
LOL many business may start rethinking buying new hardware when the 25%-50% tariffs get applied to their purchases of new hardware.
So don't count your Windows 11 chickens before they hatch. Windows 10 may be around longer than anticipated now unless something changes.
Re: (Score:2)
They have to pay for support or pay for hardware. Either way it's gonna be a shit sandwich, but still cheaper than an unplanned migration to a less shit OS. They are all addicted to their Microsoft management tools.
Microsoft's continued corruption (Score:2)
No, not financial or political corruption, rather the sort of corruption evidenced by decomposition or decay or rust.
When Microsoft first got going on the PC, people willingly and eagerly bought each new version of DOS. Each version had big improvements, and the price of the upgrade was easy for anybody to justify. When Microsoft rolled out Windows, some people ran to buy it so they could have a computing experience like they saw Mac users having. That initial Windows sucked, so lots of folks did not make t
Our work laptops just got upgraded to win11 (Score:2)