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submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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[-] [email protected] 11 points 4 hours ago

Win 11 got so bad over the last years that Linux is the better option now.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 6 hours ago

switched to Linux and don't regret it. fuck copilot, laggy ass UI, terabyte of ram usage, forced updates and any other bullshit they can come up with.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 6 hours ago

As much as I want to joke that it is the year of the Linux desktop, I think it is mostly because the younger you are the less likely you are to have a pc (so Windows, Mac, Linux and BSD for the dozens of you).

As far as I can see most of the time people use their phone for everything and only touch a pc for work or if they have a hobby that requires the use of a pc (gaming, digital art, music, programming, etc...).

[-] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

now they try to backtrack by giving another year of w10 updates if the user:

  1. logs in with the microsoft account
  2. enables backup to onedrive (presumably filling it so they can nag all the time "hey buy our cloud subscription")
  3. uses bing as default
[-] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Best gif ever. Download!

[-] [email protected] 17 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

It is a shame that the article has been updated and Microsoft is denying the drop. I will get excited when the drop is reflected in Steam data.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

question: if i'm using steam in linux under wine, it counts as windows or linux?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

There’s a native client so I’m not sure why you would do that. I would guess that it would think it is running on Windows but I could be wrong.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Wine is a translation layer, not an emulator so you'll likely appear in the Linux users list.

[-] ejizar 1 points 7 hours ago

Will not happen. Privacy conscious people who have evaded Microsoft don't use Steam. Being closed source software, they collect huge amounts of data.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 6 hours ago

Sure it will, there are a ton of people who want to get away from the trash that is Microsoft and play Steam games, myself included.

[-] ejizar 0 points 5 hours ago

In your case Nobara is the perfect distro. It comes with steam preinstalled and has a lot of gaming tweaks. I used it as a daily driver a year ago, but it wasn't something for me.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

No worries here. I've been on EndeavourOS for 3+ months now. Im just saying there's enough crossover that I think the steam hardware survey will show the uptick over time.

Tbh, I've wanted to cut over to Linux for years, but I hadn't due to game support. We're at a point now with Proton that there's almost no reason not to, unless you're that beholden to games that install ~~rootkits~~, er, kernel level anticheat, in which case just dual boot.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 5 hours ago

Bazzite as well, which uses the Atomic backing, so it is more easily recoverable in case of an oops.

[-] [email protected] 124 points 1 day ago

Everyone talking about how it's because of Windows 11 or their greed driving people away, etc. But they're ignoring the big one:

People don't need as many computers these days. You don't have a lot of households with a laptop for every member of the family because smartphones and tablets have replaced the PC for many people for media consumption and basic tasks.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Yeah this happened in Japan way earlier. Japan got mobile internet much sooner than the rest of the world it was called i-mode. Which was launched in 1999. The home computer boom never happened there like it did in the West. Since everyone just uses their mobile phone to go in the internet and Japanese PCs were expensive. And doing work after hours at home wasn’t a thing since you do that at the office where your boss can see you putting in the work. The only PCs that sold reasonably well were VAIOs since those were relatively compact.

It’s also why computer literacy is very low in Japan, ask anyone who taught in Japan and they will tell you most Japanese high school students don’t know how to use a computer. Like the problems we are seeing now in the West with computer literacy among students they had for decades already.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago

Not just casual users, I work in software development and I don't have a personal computer and haven't bought one in over 8 years. Every company I worked for provided me with a laptop whether Windows or Mac. I have my smartphone and video game consoles for personal use.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

Exactly. My wife hasn't used an actual computer more than a handful of times in the last several years. She does EVERYTHING on her smartphone.

I have never owned a laptop, because my desktop unit is where I do most of my business stuff, and when I'm away from that, my smartphone is good enough.

Of course, the most important thing isn't that we account for two less computers than a few years ago, but the smartphones that we have replaced laptops with, run Android. So that's actually a net loss of 4 MS products.

And after all these years, Windows products still make me frustrated and infuriated. You'd think they would have honed it to a perfect product by now, but every few years they completely reconfigure the UI, and make us have to navigate a whole new, buggy system.

[-] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think you're right on this. People aren't moving away from MS because of their obnoxious behaviour. They're moving to alternate form factors and dealing with Apple's and Google's obnoxious behaviour instead. People are willing to put up with a metric ton of bullshit so they don't have to actually do anything for themselves.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

Not to mention google has fought to replace real PCs in grade school computer courses with chromebooks, which are glorified tablets. Recent gens simply aren't as familiar with proper computers as phones and tablets.

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[-] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago

I keep having to remind people around me that phones are the primary computing device for an ever increasing percentage of the population.

Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.

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[-] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago

What a well earned drop. They keep forcing their bullshit on us, of course we're interested in other OS's as a result.

I do use windows for most things, but my servers will never run anything but Linux at this point.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Funny thing. Back in the day, and possibly today, all windows Hotmail/Livemail servers were Linux.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago

Hotmail ran on FreeBSD when Microsoft acquired the company in 1997. They started the transition a few years later and it was entirely hosted on Windows by 2005.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago

Requiring 50x the hardware no doubt

[-] [email protected] 60 points 1 day ago

The search function has never been the same since vista. I'm not doing a web search from the search bar. I am specifically searching for files on my computer. F-off. And now I'm constantly asked to save to some cloud I don't give a shit about.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago

It never worked for me, wouldn't find a file on the directory it was searching.

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[-] [email protected] 81 points 1 day ago

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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[-] [email protected] 44 points 1 day ago

Forcing people to buy a new computer for nothing more than a security chip on the motherboard will do that

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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
998 points (98.0% liked)

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