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Windows Operating Systems

Windows 11 Hits 30% Market Share For the First Time (neowin.net) 105

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
With Windows 10's end-of-life update coming next October, it appears that users are finally making the jump to its successor. As spotted by Neowin, Windows 11 crossed the 30% market share mark for the first time since its release. From the report: According to Statcounter's latest findings, last month, Windows 11 reached a new all-time high of 30.83%, gaining 1.08 points in just one month or 7.17 points year-over-year (it was at 23.66% in July 2023). Just as Windows 11 climbs, Windows 10 loses its market share. It is now below 65%, or 64.99%, to be precise, or -1.06 points in one month. Year-over-year change is 11.15 points (it was at 71.14% in July 2023). [...]

Other Windows versions, which are now long unsupported, still have a fair share of customers who refuse to jump-ship. Windows 7, for one, is the third most popular Windows with a 3.04% market share (+0.08 points). Windows 8.1 is fourth with 0.42% (+0.02 points), and Windows XP is fifth with 0.38% (-0.01 points).
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Windows 11 Hits 30% Market Share For the First Time More

Windows 11 Hits 30% Market Share For the First Time

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    • No. Research labs that don't have the dollars to upgrade old equipment that run on software requiring WXP, or even W98! I've worked in a few of them, sadly.

      • or even W98! I've worked in a few of them, sadly.

        Bonus point if that Win8 app uses DOS drivers (i.e. a .sys tsr loaded in confid.sys), that talk to a custom ISA interfac card.

        Which itself is quite picky wrt it requirements and only work with true ISA bus and true DMA, so it's stuck to up to BX 440 chipsets and Pentium III (not the later ISA bridge found on Pentium IV motherboard. As we sadly discovered once when the original computer was fried after a lightnight stroke not far from the institute).

    • There are MANY industries with proprietary electronics that it's cost prohibitive to upgrade the equipment. A couple examples: Optical industry that uses a computer to mark lenses with molten metal to mark the edges to cut the lenses. XP machine: $300 Replacing the controllers: $90k Diamond industry that measures diamonds and gives technical specs of the diamond. XP Machine: $300. Replacing a sarin: $40k - 80k. The need for these machines to surf the Internet or get updates? 0.
    • Naw, we in the Navy (federal civilian scientists) were moved to Win 11 several months ago.

  • Can't Update (Score:4, Informative)

    by SmaryJerry ( 2759091 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @07:47PM (#64683778)
    It's too bad that upgrading requires an actual hardware change in so many cases. Why not at least allow a software update to windows 11 but without that one hardware feature?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'm not defending this decision, but the business reason why they took it is so they can ditch the cost of supporting older hardware. If they make a feature optional then they have to support two configurations.

      There is a good case for keeping Windows 10 alive with security patches while the natural turnover of machines brings Windows 11 up to >90% share. Not a business case, but an environmental and a moral one. Unless someone like the EU steps in they won't do it though.

      2025 is going to be an environme

      • There is a good case for keeping Windows 10 alive with security patches while the natural turnover of machines brings Windows 11 up to >90% share

        Natural turnover of machines has slowed way down.

        I have a few vintage machines now. My main day to day machine, the one I use for trolling^Wposting on slashdor every morning over a cup of coffee is a 14(!) year old Thinkpad W510. It's had a few upgrades, the old spinning disk went away and got replaced by a terabyte of flash, and I upgraded the RAM from the orig

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Funnily enough my main laptop that I still travel with is also 14 years old, being 2012 vintage. Annoyingly the mobile Intel CPUs of that era were limited to 4GB of RAM, but it still copes okay with Windows 10 and the browsing and basic image editing stuff I do with it.

          Might replace it when Windows 10 dies and the market is flooded with non-11 compatible machines. I actually had that one from new, but I don't mind used.

          • with is also 14 years old, being 2012 vintage.

            Shhuurley you mean 12 years old? It's only 2024!

            Annoyingly the mobile Intel CPUs of that era were limited to 4GB of RAM, but it still copes okay with Windows 10 and the browsing and basic image editing stuff I do with it.

            Mine's not ultramobile, it's a Core i7 Q820, from 2010 so one of the high performance mobile processors. It originally came with 16G of RAM, and cost a lot of money. I got it for free at the end of a project because of some hilarious accounting

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              I could switch to Linux, and maybe I will if it ultimately won't run Windows 11.

              I've just grown to hate Linux a lot. Windows may be crap, but it's tolerable. I know how to beat it into submission. I know how to fix all the problems. With Linux I end up googling and wasting time on solutions that don't work with this version of this distro on this hardware. Maybe if I used it more I'd keep up to date with it and get better at problem solving, but as I only use it lightly when travelling that doesn't seem lik

              • I've just grown to hate Linux a lot. Windows may be crap, but it's tolerable. I know how to beat it into submission. I know how to fix all the problems. With Linux I end up googling and wasting time on solutions that don't work with this version of this distro on this hardware. Maybe if I used it more I'd keep up to date with it and get better at problem solving, but as I only use it lightly when travelling that doesn't seem likely.

                I'm genuinely curious here. I mean I know how to beat Linux into submission,

                • I have known some laptops to be highly irritating with Linux even today. The only laptop I actually use has a dual-core Zen+, 8GB RAM, and 512GB nVME SSD. The only things I commonly use it for are Firefox (mostly just playing videos and occasionally looking something up on Wikipedia) and CHIRP. But it has a flaky WLAN NIC and I have been too lazy to replace it because it is kind of a PITA to open. Every so often I have to reboot, I tried a bunch of stuff to reset it and none of it helped. Thankfully suspen

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                  There's always something... Usually sleep/hibernation doesn't work, particularly with SED enabled. For some reason mouse support seems to be quite lacking too, e.g. adjusting the scroll wheel sensitivity, and particularly making the touchpad not hellish to use.

                  High DPI support usually breaks too, but I can probably live without that.

                  I always find the Japanese IME to be horrible too, but maybe it's got better lately. Or maybe I'm just used to the Windows and Google ones.

      • I don't know if Windows 11 ever gets that high. Microsoft seems to fall into a patter of every other release of Windows being crap that no one likes. Windows 12 is expected to be out later this year or early next and (if the pattern holds) become the new version that everyone wants to run and people holdout on when Windows 13 (or whatever they call it) is released.

        Windows 8 never came close to eclipsing the install base of Windows 7, in much the same way that people stuck with XP instead of going to Vist
      • naw, they will be shipped to China for 'recycling', and the Chinese will deal with that pollution. I believe it is illegal, but when has that bothered corporate America?

  • Looks like a total disaster (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @07:54PM (#64683788)

    I do not think these numbers can be interpreted any other way.

    • Indeed, well over a year after its rollout, W11 adoption is where a new MacOS is 12 hours after its release.
      • Don't you mean almost 3 years after?

        October 5, 2021

        • Holy crap, I clearly lost track of time. It was a little over a year ago when they forced everyone at work to upgrade. I clearly confused that with the actual rollout date.

          I find the slow adoption strange, actually. W11 is prettier, more stable and faster than W10. It has a lot of baggage, but that's the deal Microsoft is offering.

    • Re:Looks like a total disaster (Score:5, Insightful)

      by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @10:35PM (#64684038)

      The only way MS can get those numbers is through forced upgrades so yeah, not great.

    • I do not think these numbers can be interpreted any other way.

      Two things are always expected:
      a) corporate users will typically hang on until their existing systems are EOL or an IT refresh is rolled out.
      b) when you release an OS incompatible with most PCs out there since people don't buy a new computer every other year anymore, it won't get market share.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        b) when you release an OS incompatible with most PCs out there since people don't buy a new computer every other year anymore, it won't get market share.

        That one should get you a richly deserved corporate bankruptcy. If customers were rational.

        • That one should get you a richly deserved corporate bankruptcy. If customers were rational.

          Customers are used to buying a new PC when they have a problem with the old one, and don't know enough to know what the cause is so they don't know who to blame. I have bought several such Windows machines, put Linux on them, and used them for some time — sometimes with no other changes.

  • As is tradition, I'll not elaborate on why. Nor will anyone else.

    • Re:11 Bad!! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 05, 2024 @10:56PM (#64684062)

      I'll start. Because of the terrible UI changes, the nonsense AI updates they try to force on everyone, shoving Edge down your throat, the data they're trying to harvest from everyone, the Efficiency Mode crap you can't disable, and so on.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Chaset ( 552418 )

        On the UI changes:
        My work machine got "refreshed" and came with W11. A few things that already annoy me:
        1. Taskbar forced to be on bottom, taking up valuable vertical screen space.
        2. No flexibility in tiling my start menu items, so I can't optimize placement of programs for most efficient access.
        3. Loss of right click recent items shortcut on start menu items.
        4. Need to click the "more>" button on the furthest corner of the menu to show programs not already pinned.
        5. I have to always pass over the "reco

  • Forced Update (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MasterRa ( 655503 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @07:58PM (#64683796) Homepage

    Yeah, because Windows 10 is installing the update without permission!

    • Re:Forced Update (Score:5, Interesting)

      by imustonen ( 177854 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @01:27AM (#64684252)

      I went to my BIOS and disabled whatever crypto chip on my MOBO, that made my PC not support Win11. Nagging stopped. I won!

    • Yeah, because Windows 10 is installing the update without permission!

      People literally don't care about this. Slashdotters care, but users really don't. An update box comes, they mash the next button, and move on with their lives.

      There's no silent majority here that are actively holding on to Windows 10 for dear life. There are corporate IT (who don't experience forced updates), and there's people whose PCs don't meet the requirements (who don't experience forced updates).

      For everyone else, they migrated voluntarily long ago without any fuss.

  • Amazing how well forced updates do on the market (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @07:59PM (#64683798)

    I question whether Windows 11 would have penetrated the market so well on merits alone though.

    • What merits? People don't care, they don't use their OS. An OS runs in the background, and once you point out to people you can left justify the start menu they can barely tell Windows 11 apart from Windows 10.

      Slashdotters: "The technical details of ${Windows_version} are so much worse than ${windows_version-1}, I can't force my OS to X and Y anymore."
      Actual users: "Oh there's a popup saying an update came. *clicks okay - keeps using the software on the computer*"

      In the real world people use software, not O

  • I'm in the 3.04% percentile category looking down on the rest of you.

  • Maybe 2024 will finally be (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @08:11PM (#64683830) Homepage

    the year of the Windows 11 desktop???

    Sorry, couldn't resist. :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      2025 will be, anyway, when they make Windows 10 EOL and they try to force everyone to upgrade.

      I guess that I'll end up putting Ubuntu on the PC's that aren't new enough to be on the supported list. I guess that makes us one step closer to 2025 being the year of the Linux desktop?

  • I just realized that as of this year, I've been using Linux as my daily driver for twenty solid years.

    Got a Win10 vm I fire up once a year to do taxes, but that's it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      The fact that you can't even do your taxes, something that everyone in your nation has to do on your machine natively and that has no particular hardware or software requirements is quite a statement about success of your OS.

      • why can't taxes be su mitted using standardized protocols? maybe like HTML served over HTTPS ?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Lots of things can be done using various standardized protocols. Usually you end up having the kinds of standards that are in large demand.

          It's a question of supply and demand. If there's no demand, there's probably not going to be much supply either.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Funnily, tax software where I live (Europe) has been running on Linux since it got offered officially and fir free about 10 years ago. And today it runs in basically any web-browser and keeps backups of everything you commit on the server.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          In much of European nations, doing your taxes is much easier than in US, because tax code is far less complex.

  • Loving LTSC for gaming. Hopefully proton is awesome after that's EoSL

  • the TPM will remain disabled in BIOS

  • Does this represent Windows 11 adoption - in the sense that people or businesses are making a deliberate choice for this OS (for whatever reasons, good or bad)?

    Or, is this just passive accumulation as people upgrade hardware, i.e. get new computers? With most Windows releases, I have had the impression that it is just an attrition or reverse-attrition, people getting the new OS with new rigs.

    If that is the case, is it individual users buying new PC's or laptops, or is it businesses upgrading by tens or hun

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Older machines can't get stock win11 upgrade at all, because of hardware requirements. So it's mostly just new computers that come with new, even shittier OS.

      Though I'm sure some people downgraded to win 11 because they didn't know any better, they just saw bigger number and made assumptions.

      • What are you going to do, use an alternative? Linux isn't an alternative in the business setting. Everyone uses the latest Windows because they have to, not because they want to. Things don't work if they don't upgrade. They scare customers with warning about being insecure if they don't run the latest. You need the latest because of security, but in that they seem to gloss over that the updates are needed because their programmers made mistakes. Back in the 90s patches used to be released after a long test
        • Soon(er rather than later) all apps will be web, iOS and Android only. Young people spend all their time on phones/tablets. If you want to run those on your laptop/desktop you'll need to have the ability to execute then natively (eg on MacOS) or use something like Phone Link. The thing that killed Windows Mobile (developers) will kill Windows and MacOS too.

  • When people looked forward to new versions of windows. Now all we can look forward to is pointless churn with generous helpings of malware.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      I really only looked forward to new versions of Windows after the prior version was terrible. The Windows 7 update from Windows Vista and the Windows 10 update from Windows 8/8.1 come to mind.

      Windows 11 seems to be one of the "bad" versions, so there is no eagerness to upgrade here. That said, Microsoft backported most of the Onedrive/Edge/Microsoft 365/XBox Game Pass spam to Windows 10 as well... so I'm not exactly eager for Windows 10 patches, either.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Ah yes, Onedrive which is only good disabled and Edge which serves the one purpose of downloading a reasonable browser.

  • At least, that's what the updater tells them.

    (cue the triumphal fanfare) GNU/Linux to the rescue!

  • By far my biggest gripe with Windows 11 has been the "group by" active by default in Explorer, including in all the file dialog boxes.

    If you turn it off, it will find a way to re-enable itself, and that's just horrible design.

    Sure, there's this "WinSetView" utility, but seriously, MS should provide a global off switch by themselves or at least have the "feature" off by default.

    Thankfully, at the office we're still on Win10 without "group by", and my normal home environment is Linux - but I do need to use Wi

  • That site is absolutely useless to draw any accurate conclusion. If their market share numbers were accurate it would mean there is literally variation in the millions back and forth between nonsensical OSes for no good reason.

    Take a look at the graph in TFA, why is no one talking about the literal millions of Windows 8.1 machines that inexplicably were started up in Nov-Jan. That would be news if a previously dead and nonexistent OS suddenly took a market share that dwarfed Linux, only to inexplicably disa

  • I can’t wait to be propagandized By an OS that I paid $ hundreds for! It’s the megastore-enshitification of everything!
  • Great job everyone. Let's try for 29%. Make it count.
    Extra credit: Fire someone for recommending Microsoft. Set a new example.

  • I have a PC I built around 2019 or so... it still does everything I need it to do. After upgrading to an NVIDIA 4070, it runs even the newest games at ultra settings. However, because of a a nuance of hardware requirements, I've never been eligible to upgrade to Windows 11. MS dug their own hole on this one.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jjbenz ( 581536 )
      We have a bunch of Lenovo Ryzen 3 systems at work that are around 5 years old that we can't upgrade to 11. What a waste of money, we could get several more years out of them if they didn't have the stupid TPM 2.0 requirement.
  • Unless we start a hard push forcing game developers to support Linux, this crap will continue. Get some major free level games like Fortnite or Genshen Impact to fully support Linux and the Microshaft tower will fall.

    • Get some major free level games like Fortnite or Genshen Impact to fully support Linux and the Microshaft tower will fall.

      I don't know about Fortnite, Genshin Impact started working a year or so ago, but I don't know if it's still working or what.

      Most games without Kernel DRM will work fine on Linux these days, way more than will work on Windows actually if you count old Windows games, as most of those which won't work on Linux won't work on Windows 10, let alone 11. That does mean no Fortnite. However, I suspect they will revisit that idea once Windows 10 goes out of support. I have never, ever seen so much mainstream interes

      • By "support Linux" I don't mean in the Wine or any other windows emulator. I mean raw, default in Linux supported by the Linux drivers. You open whatever app installer of your choice and you either click install game or type ./setup.sh in the download folder. Windows needs to disappear yesterday from all of the security headaches. Before any of the Mac idiots try to chime in, no, it's no better and the only reason it doesn't get bent over 3 sheets to the wind daily is because of market share. No, no bo

        • By "support Linux" I don't mean in the Wine or any other windows emulator.

          Why?

          You open whatever app installer of your choice and you either click install game or type ./setup.sh in the download folder.

          I open Lutris and I click install game. Supports GOG, EPIC, EA, and Ubisoft (as well as Steam, if you want to launch everything from one place.)

          • 1. It adds a layer of complexity. 2. Some people aren't willing to learn the middle layer between. 3. Google is too hard for the newest generation it seems. 4. Google results have gone to crap with AI generated crap and people trying to get others that don't know better to install malware / viruses. 5. Just gives one more possibility of a piece of software to become unsupported and not working. 6. Compatibility issues... and on and on. So many reasons.
  • Other than security updates, Window 11 brought nothing but usability disimprovements.
  • My expectation would be for the Win 11 share to rise exponentially in the short term. I'm thinking about all the craptops people rushed out to buy in March 2020. They are probably due for another about now.

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