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Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.

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[–] 83 points 1 year ago (13 children)

We're in the process of moving to Linux in our company, entirely because of how aggressively awful Windows 11 is. We'd have been perfectly happy staying on Windows 10 forever, but last week our head of development woke up to discover that Windows 10 had spontaneously chosen to "upgrade" itself during the night without him agreeing to it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (10 children)

    How do you manage a fleet of linux devices and stay up to date with compliance?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Not entirely sure what you mean; Linux’s user management, access control, security etc has always been ahead of Windows’ for its whole existence.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    On the server side I can agree, but linux does not get device drivers for majority of hardware let alone regular device driver updates. That fact alone makes the entire company un-compliant in many industries.

    You could get an entire fleet of linux supported laptops and get then compliance becomes easier to manage since the software on linux lends well to sys admin fleet control. You would have to push patches weekly to the fleet which would result in a ton of random user bugs.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    does not get device drivers for majority of hardware

    Literally lying

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Please go on any distro fourm to the support section and tell me how many threads have hardware related issues. Majority of these are due to non-existent/unsupported drivers.

    One guy hacking together a device driver to upstream is not the same as the manufacturer supporting it with regular updates. Windows gets driver updates seemingly every week and linux is lucky to get a 2nd update or even a first.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (3 children)

    support section

    If I was reading your fan club forum I would see loads of positive comments about you.

    You have no data to support your claim.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    This is such a stupid argument I cant believe you're even trying to make the case. I'll pick a common enterprise device the HP zbook firefly. NXP NFC NPC300 Proximity Driver - Its had 5 OEM driver updates in the past 4 years on windows. Meanwhile the NXP linux_libnfc-nci repo which is NXP's OEM repo is wildly out of date and looks borderline dead. I checked the kernel tree and there are "common" patches under drivers/nfc/nxp-nci that include support for the NPC300 but these dont match up with the patches that are released for windows and dont seem to be specific fixes to address CVE issues.

    Lets go less specific and take a look at fwupd for the zbook https://fwupd.org/lvfs/hsireports/device?host_vendor=HP&host_family=103C_5336AN+HP+ZBook&host_product=HP+ZBook+Firefly+14+G7+Mobile+Workstation

    Here we can see the tests that fwupd has done to verify the device firmware. As you can see its missing a lot of functionality. This is a linux supported device apparently. If its missing this much I can only imagine how bad other devices are. Keep in mind this is only checking the working functionality and is not checking to see if the patches are up to date to protect against the latest CVEs. On windows HP has released 22 patches in the last 5 years with the latest patch containing fixes for 12 CVEs. Meanwhile on linux im not sure if HP has even released a single complete patch for this device let alone constant updates to fix the CVEs.

    I'm currently working on getting our device fleet in order for EU Gov contract compliance and a fleet of these devices would instantly disqualify us. I love linux but we have work to do and being ignorant to the issues doesnt help anything.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    That's an anecdote. The majority of devices have full driver support. Over half of the code in the Linux kernel is just device drivers.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    The linux kernel has good support for server hardware like, drive controllers, network cards, etc but bad support for things like touchpad, bluetooth, fingerprint readers, cameras, nfc readers, wifi cards, power controllers.

    There are a small handful of laptop devices that have "full driver support" and these are still a 3rd party managing the linux drivers framework, system 76, lenovo. This is usually fixing issues as they arise instead of releasing fixes and patches before the disclosed issues go public. That makes them really hard to support in a secure environment.

    If there are majority of devices then give me one machine thats not a framework or system 76 laptop and we can look at the device drivers.

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