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More Than 30% of Steam Users Now Run Windows 11 (neowin.net) 77

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The latest Steam Hardware and Software Survey results are now available, showing a significant milestone for Microsoft's operating system. From a report: According to Valve, Windows 11 crossed a 30% share on Steam in January 2023. Windows 11's growth on Steam is directly related to Windows 10's decline. The latter remains the most popular OS among the gaming audience, but its market share lost 1.96 points in January 2023.

Windows 10 holds approximately 63.46% of all Steam customers. Windows 11, on the other hand, gained 1.91% points. This allowed the operating system to cross the 30% mark and reach its all-time high of 30.33%. Despite being out of support since 2020 (no paid security updates since January 2023), Windows 7 still has 1.6% of all Steam users. In January 2023, its 64-bit version lost 0.06 points. Overall, 96.02% of all Steam customers use Windows (0.13). macOS is second with 2.61% (+0.13), and Linux is third with 1.38% (no changes last month).
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More Than 30% of Steam Users Now Run Windows 11 More

More Than 30% of Steam Users Now Run Windows 11

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  • I finally installed it in a VM (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @04:25PM (#63273481) Homepage Journal

    With some simple registry tweaking Win 11 will consent to be installed on a potato, and my first impression is, what a sad wannabe OSX. It does actually look pretty nice, but it doesn't look or feel as nice as 7 so fail, fail.

    Why has everyone got to ruin a good thing?

    • Re:I finally installed it in a VM (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @04:29PM (#63273489) Journal

      Because it's Microsoft.

      It's not a new OS unless they've dicked around with the UI to the point of being unrecognizable. And made various control panel applets harder to find, and harder to use, or just removed them altogether without giving any form of replacement for the functionality.

      The whole world shines shit and calls it gold.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Imagine being able to choose...

          To not be forced one way or another.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by batkiwi ( 137781 )

          Were you around when XP launched?

          It was universally HATED, especially for the "fisher price UI". Consumers wanted win98V3, and corporate users still like 2k.

          7 everyone loved, but XP no way. It eventually morphed into something people liked by SP2, but that's some rose coloured glasses.

          I personally loved it.

          • Were you around when XP launched?
            It was universally HATED, especially for the "fisher price UI".

            I remember that. But I also remember it being as solid as win2k (which also needed to be service packed before it was at its best) and also being able to turn that candy coated crap off.

          • We loved 7 except for new EGREGIOUS licensing mechanism. Windows 7 is phoning home! It needs an internet connection to continue working! If only we knew how much worse it was going to get. I still run 7 for gaming and I'm going to build a new computer next month with Linux only :)

    • Re:I finally installed it in a VM (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eneville ( 745111 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @04:33PM (#63273497) Homepage

      The business model is to make something deliberately poor so that fault fixing looks like progression. This was documented in office, MS PowerPoint was consistent under developed so that it deliberate room for improvement.

      The priority was to sell a version next year, not to make good software.

    • because bloat sells faster CPUs and GPUs. And new computers too. And you don't want it to be too good or nobody'll buy next years model. Planned obsolescence is a thing.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm not sure anynoe can complain. Microsoft warned us that Windows 10 would be the final version.

    • Pretty easy to change it to mostly Windows 10 style (more like 7). I think you need 3rd party tools to fix the disaster of a start menu.

    • Why has everyone got to ruin a good thing?

      Extra income from trainings, certificates, etc. - they hold de-facto desktop monopoly and use this position to the maximum.

    • Why has everyone got to ruin a good thing?

      This is a loaded question [wikipedia.org].

    • what a sad wannabe OSX

      It sounds like you judge an OS by the justification of its menu bar. Thank god Windows is nothing even remotely at all like OSX. If you like OSX, fine. I don't. But saying Windows is an OSX wannabe just shows what an incredibly shallow and superficial view you have.

    • It's just Windows 10 once you figure out how to change your start menu back to left alignment and turn off all the extra crap.

      • Well of course it is, just like it's just Windows NT. But I just don't get why the endless need to rearrange shit on the screen in ways which actually compromise UX. The start menu with the button in the lower left (and clickable from the lower left pixel, so you don't have to look) is such a fantastic paradigm that everyone has copied it. Even Apple did in classic Mac OS, with the... wtf was that little dark grey strip thing called in the lower left? I remember it showing up on powerbooks in the later Syst

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      I migt pe stupid, or I might just have misunderstood your bost complitly but "With some simple registry tweaking Win 11 will consent to be installed on a potato", one question: if the instalker refuses to install ( for whatever reason, how are you supposed to tweak the regustry?

      • You are not stupid, you just don't yet know what I didn't know before the other day — if you hit Shift-F10 during the Windows install (at least of 10 and 11, not sure about others) you will get a command prompt and you can run regedit. Adding some DWORDs to HKLM\System\Setup\LabConfig (BypassTPMCheck, BypassSecureBootCheck, BypassRAMCheck, BypassStorageCheck, and BypassCPUCheck) and setting them to 1 will skip the various checks during the install, and you can literally do this at any point.

        If you get

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          right, not that I need it, but thanks for taking the time to write the answer, it might be usefull to someone else. have a nice day

  • linux (Score:2, Insightful)

    by blackomegax ( 807080 )
    Everyone should be switching to linux. With proton, gaming is 99% on par. The last 1% there are hold-out titles with super aggressive DRM or anti-cheat, but they're stupid zoomer games like fortnight so they don't really matter.
    • Sure let me flash a Linux distro to one of my drives and spend hours trying to figure out why a certain driver isn't working. Let's face it, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop. No matter how much you or anyone else shills it. Building on this, the average windows gamer can barely work their windows system. What makes you think they are going to hop on over to Linux land and spend precious time that would rather be spent grooming children on discord when they could just use a system that works?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "What the hell?? That last update broke the old dkms driver and the new one doesn't have the correct xorg config??? I JUST WANT TO PLAY KERBAL."
      • Something does need to be done about this. I'm all in with Linux .. but .. it's a pain in the ASCII to configure when something does not work. I would happily welcome a version of Linux preconfigured with gaming in mind to make it easier for non tech types to at least get it up and running easily. If you can get a majority of gamers to view Linux as an acceptable alternative then M$ just might become an after thought in the future. Wouldn't that be nice.

        • a version of Linux preconfigured with gaming in mind

          You mean like SteamOS? [steampowered.com]

          And if you are thinking that might be TOO task-specific for your tastes, then I would whole-heartedly recommend Ubuntu, which is officially endorsed and supported by Valve to run Steam.

          When I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu, seriously I never looked back. Updating Fedora was always an adventure, and every other major update completely bricked my OS and I had to wipe and re-install (and no, I was not doing any weird tinkering of my own

          • Re:linux (Score:4, Informative)

            by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @07:53PM (#63274051) Homepage Journal

            So, now that I have written the above post about how awesome Ubuntu is....

            I went to launch Battle.Net through Lutris, which worked beautifully yesterday, and today it hangs. I went through an amazing online journey of unhelpful posts and diagnosis efforts to discover that this is because Steam updates sometimes break Lutris. Apparently, waiting around a bit will result in a fix for Lutris which will auto-download when you launch lutris....but not if you have IPV6 enabled! So you have to disable that so the self-update can work but even then you still have to wait for a fix.

            OR you can fix it yourself by editing a python script hidden deep within a folder tree that you can only find by running lutris from terminal to see the python error it gives, and making a specific hack to it.

            THIS is why Linux is not ready for the desktop. THIS is why people are afraid to make the switch. If you don't have the technical chops to make fixes like this, let alone the tenacity to track down helpful posts about it online, you are as helpless as a worm dangling on a hook when something like this happens.

            As great as Linux is, and it IS great, it has a serious fragility problem, and that rightly scares people away from using it.

            • I run Steam on Linux .... never had any issues ....

              Just slowly the number of games I still have to reboot into Windows to play is dwindling it's in single figures out of a large collection

              The thing that breaks games in Lunix is the same thing that breaks them on Windows - badly written launchers and anti-cheat systems ...

            • Linux will never be ready for the desktop if the goal is to make it flawlessly and performantly run software made for other different operating systems.

            • Perhaps your status review is correct, but do you think that gets better or worse if more people use it? To me, the situation you describe is an awful lot like Windows about 20 years ago...
        • Something has been done about this, but you'll have to pay actual money. [system76.com] System76 provides lifetime support for these things if you buy their PCs.
      • The average Windows gamer doesn't install WIndows OS themselves, according to these figures even updating to a "free" major version is a very slow process. The Linux desktop revolution, if it even happens (and that's a big if) is no going to come from end users resizing their NTFS partitions to make room for ext4 but rather systems coming pre-installed with a Linux distribution. Yes the odds are not very good but heck, if you had asked me, pre-release what were the odds the SteamDeck was going to be a comme

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nagora ( 177841 )

        Sure let me flash a Linux distro to one of my drives and spend hours trying to figure out why a certain driver isn't working.

        Thank the gods that never happens on Windows.

        Except when it does.

    • Installing HoloISO v4 was very satisfying.
    • Except that it doesn't work unless you switch to Proton beta buried somewhere in the settings and then when you boot a game there's no audio because it always tries to use your graphics card's HDMI audio output instead of your driverless USB DAC which is already set to default thus necessitating you to turn "off" the HDMI audio output every time you wake your computer from sleep. And luckily I figured that out.

    • Re:linux (Score:4, Insightful)

      by snooo53 ( 663796 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @06:16PM (#63273797) Journal

      I agree that everyone should be on linux! But 20+ years in, the Linux desktop is still a fragmented mess, that even seasoned computer professionals shy away from.

      With windows, 99.9% of problems are a matter of getting the correct drivers, the correct setting in a menu, or in extreme cases, perhaps a registry change. That's it. Download a program and double click. Done and we're up and running.

      With Linux, good luck trying to do the simplest of things without days of research. Want to install a program? OK, Do I go to software manager? Package manager? Use Snap? RPM? Do i download the Deb file? (you can but it's out of date) Do I use apt? apt-get? aptitude? (are they the same? who knows??) yum? pip install? curl? git clone and compile? Good grief. Try to install even simple applications and you're liable to wade through pages of commands and dependencies and config file changes that don't even work half the time, if you can even figure it out.

      Ok so now I've got it installed, where is it? Why doesn't it show up in my menu? Why is the scrollbar all screwed up? Which GTK config file do I edit? 2.0? 3.0? In which directory?? Why doesn't the config file already exist?? Why does it have the wrong permissions?

      And on and on... Why doesn't my usb 3.0 port work? Why doesn't my graphics card work. Why is my standard usb mouse acting funny? Why is bluetooth not working? Why is my sound all screwed up? Why is x.org taking over my CPU? What is Caja and why is it lagging when I open a directory? Why isn't there a simple menu option for this simple config? Which desktop do I pick (cinnamon, mate, kde)? Which distro do I pick ("try them all! see which one you like!!")?

      Uggh. I don't want to spend my life trying to get a basic desktop to work; a computer should be a tool- not a lifestyle. Linux is great. But the desktop and home user solutions are a fragmented mess. Sure, give a choice, have the option to support legacy. But make it the exception! STANDARDIZE ON SOMETHING! Put a GUI on top of the config file. Software and drivers should be a pre-compiled binary I can click on to run! I don't care whether it's Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, MX, Arch, whatever. I think the distro that manages to solve these problems AND get major companies/hardware vendors on board is the one that will ultimately win. But until then, it's going to be the same story of the last 20 years- a fragmented mess!

      • I agree that everyone should be on linux! But 20+ years in, the Linux desktop is still a fragmented mess, that even seasoned computer professionals shy away from.

        Actually, in the last 10 years or so it's felt pretty seamless.

        With windows, 99.9% of problems are a matter of getting the correct drivers, the correct setting in a menu, or in extreme cases, perhaps a registry change. That's it.

        Most complicated thing I've had to do was install an nvidia driver. And that was only tricky because of Tensorflow compatibilities which are a pain whatever OS you're on.

        I can't even remember the last time I needed to edit a file in /etc/.

        Download a program and double click. Done and we're up and running.

        That actually sounds terrifying and complicated. I hate downloading software that I had to find via google (are you even getting the legit site??).

        90% of the stuff I install is "apt/snap/dnf install foo", which

      • You are10 years out of date .. Linux is not anything like this anymore for the regular mainstream distros ...

        I have Steam running on Linux Mint with an NVidia card ... I have never had to edit a config file, never opened a command prompt - everything is graphical - and just works .... to the point where things I have had to find, download a driver for and install manually on Windows ... just worked

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      I DID switch. For about a year or so.

      The experience can be summed up as "compromises".

      There is no good OS out there. They all suck, just in different ways...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        You summed it up perfectly. The adwanradge you get with windows is that it sucks in exactly the same way as most other desktop/laptop users os ( well duh it's the same os ) . And when it comes to games you can be shote they work ( well work jsh) on windows because that is the pkatform they are developed on, if ther is a version for another platform (ecluding consoles here) it's most often a half assed port or it requiers worrharounds that has a tendency to bteak. But maby that's ok, who says Linux needs to

    • My problem is, the games i normally play on steam. If i play them on linux, or through a VM of windows. I will get banned. Bungee bans people for playing Destiny 2 on linux or a vm. Because of their cheat detector software.

      I would be all over gaming on linux if this wasnt a problem.

  • Microsoft dosen't care about old pcs anymore (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @04:42PM (#63273531)
    Backward compatibility thrown out the Window. Their solution to Windows 7 and 8.1 users is to buy a new computer, that will ship with TPM and mandatory MS account (normal users won't know about the BYPASSNRO trick). Google Chrome has just launched their new Windows 7 incompatible version of Chrome too, so websites will be telling you that your computer isn't compatible anymore. Expect Netflix and other drm streamers to drop support first, then along with Banks and E-mail services. Welcome to the upgrade treadmill, which is effectively hardware on subscription. Linux had 30 years to become viable, yet people would rather "be happy". 30% Windows of users have already complied with the Borg, TPM verification will soon be as common as phone number requirements soon.

    • Re:Microsoft dosen't care about old pcs anymore (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @07:17PM (#63273979)

      Backward compatibility thrown out the Window.

      Honestly. Good. A large portion of Windows complaints are the result of systems running the OS which frankly shouldn't run the OS. We need to get past a few ideas.

      Get past the idea that everyone needs the latest shiny OS.
      Get past the idea that every old piece of shit should run the latest OS.
      Get past the idea of supporting legacy (for critical equipment Windows was a poor choice in the first place).
      and Get past the idea that your computer should run forever.

      When Windows 10 goes EOL Windows 11 will be supported by all computers made in the preceding 8 years. Time to move on.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Get past the idea that every old piece of shit should run the latest OS. Get past the idea of supporting legacy (for critical equipment Windows was a poor choice in the first place). and Get past the idea that your computer should run forever.

        I don't know, we're past the days when actual useful, revolutionary new features are added to hardware and the OS, it's really just minor increments in speed and such now; there's increasingly less reason new versions shouldn't run on old hardware. But things like TPM or whatever the hell they're adding these days which really provide no benefit to end users are driving requirements of new versions/hardware. We're at a point where I think we should expect all of those things; they are, of course, highly unp

  • Misleading statistics (Score:2, Insightful)

    by xonen ( 774419 )

    Steam isn't representative. Their audience is way more likely to own a recent gaming rig.

    I'd love to see those stats compared to some others. An appropriate title would be more like 'Gamers more likely to install a new OS on a new PC'

    • Decent point, but gamers tend to be more discerning when it comes to computers than the hoi-polloi. I've been holding off on 11, it has some features I want but early on it caused issues for some games. If 30% of Steam users are OK with it, I might give it a shot.
    • The top games on Steam are CS-GO and Dota2, both decade old games with minimal "rig" requirements.

    • Re:Misleading statistics (Score:5, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @07:24PM (#63274001)

      Steam isn't representative. Their audience is way more likely to own a recent gaming rig.

      You clearly don't know Steam users. The two most prominent GPUs in the hardware survey are the two cheapest and most basic GPUs you can buy followed by a laptop. The most popular CPUs are 6 core followed by 4 core with 8 core machines making up less than 20% of the total. The overwhelming majority of monitors are standard HD resolution.

      No my man. The overwhelming majority of Steam devices are not at all "gaming rigs". The are nothing more than PCs with Steam installed. Including the likes of my underpowered 7 year old thermally throttled cracked screen Surface Pro 3 because let's face it, the vast majority of games on Steam run just fine on a potato.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by vux984 ( 928602 )

        I'd say you are both right.

        Pretty much 100% of people running actual gaming rigs, or even gaming laptops are going to have steam installed.

        But even with pretty much that entire demographic represented on steam, the overall majority of users are still using regular systems and whatever they have in front of them.

        Hell... I have a gaming rig with steam installed. But I also have 2 laptops, both ultraportables (not really gaming capable at all) with it installed too for less demanding stuff when im on the go.

  • PC gamers are the most likely to buy/build a system utilizing the latest hardware and software.

    • Look at the stats ... these people run Steam , but so do everyone else .. with old, cheap and just barely at minimum spec machines ... and they are the majority

  • And probably just young ones. Windows is no longer usable for science or business. I can only conclude they want out of those OS markets. Windows is just for home users now, and not surprisingly, gamers make up a large part of that. The fun part is that emulation is quickly making single platform gaming a thing of the past. So that market will disappear for microsoft too. Not sure what then intend on selling then.
    • Webgl that has already taken over everywhere else and its making large inroads into desktop. Some of these wrapped-in-a-browser games just crush triple A game sales and its not even close. Bejeweled anyone?

      Look carefully and you will see that Steam is full of webgl games in desktop wrappers already. Steam does not skew towards power user. Steam does not skew towards the high end. Steam skews towards desktops and laptops from big box stores. Whatever is selling.

    • Windows is no longer usable for science or business.

      I can't speak to what it means to use a PC for science. But business? Does the Office suite not run on Windows 11? Have they dropped SCCM and Active Directory support? Hell, most business users could probably get by just fine with the versions of Outlook/Word/Excel/Powerpoint at office.com that'll run in your browser.

  • Requirements: you need to acquire brand new hardware, approved and supported by M$slop with spyware features. BZZZT: No way, No how, EVER.
  • Good work MS! Oddly, people don't want spy-bloat, and deleted functionality.
  • Been using it since launch. Never any issues and shit just fucking works.

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