Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
I switched my four home computers to Linux Mint this week. Windows is just more trouble than it’s worth nowadays.
Just so we’re clear, the data in the headline refers to the share of Windows editions among Windows users. By their count Windows actually went up slightly in the overall Desktop OS share last month, while Linux remains basically flat at 4%.
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I mean, it is higher than a decade ago at least. I think most people are expecting some Linux growth when Microsoft finally axes 10 and millions of machine with no TPM have to move to Linux or face a life of no security updates
Same, its just like everywhere enshitification of companies who try to get more profitable by spying,advertising and many anti consumer practices. Linux just stays good. and / or if you dont like your distribution just swap to another, its easy :D
Hell you can even just change desktop environments to shake things up as well.
When I finally learned how do install a different desktop environment, and still use Debian, I was set. KDE!!! KDE!!! KDE!!!
Windows is just more trouble than it’s worth nowadays.
To be fair that’s exactly how Microsoft management feels. For half a decade now Microsoft is a company that sells Linux and opensource judging by their yearly reports, other departments either don’t grow nearly as fast or are just straight detrimental. So they do want you to dump that shit, preferably gaining some cash before it happens naturally.
Sounds like what happened when Windows 8 came out. Oops I meant Windows Vista. My bad, I’m thinking of Windows Me. Sorry, I might have it confused with NT 3. Everyone loved Windows 2.0 right?
Every other version of Windows. It’s practically a law of nature at this point.
XP was terrible until sp2 and in fact so insecure that people all over the world got infected by all kinds of shit.
People forgot or are too young to remember, but XP needed several “service packs” before it was good.
I’m one of the weirdos that like ME… sure, I reformatted a few times. But i liked it!
Seems like they’re on track to break the streak with Windows 12.
Exception: 95 and 98
98 Second Edition was 'da bomb at the time :) Much more stable than Win95, and not yet phoning home like XP. I get nostalgic seeing the splash screen.
After that, I switched to Win2K, as the last windows that did not phone home - and then straight to Linux, a decision I have never regretted and will never regret.
I agree, but we can’t leave out Windows 7
8/8.1 were better than 7/10
If you had a touchscreen, 8 was great. I ran 8 on my Yoga and enjoyed it. But I must admit 8.1 was significantly better than 8.
And 10 was better than 8.1, so I mostly disagree with you.
But yeah, I really didn’t mind 8/8.1.
10 didn’t have metro so it was a downgrade for kb + mouse
Even used this on browser
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/new-metrotab/oogmkbpkoblajkomflhkkdmbfggdmefd
Far better. Let the crowd shout. Win 8.1 was the last version enjoyable.
They hated him because he spoke the truth
no, it was XP
Candied Windows
I work with Windows as a requirement of my job, I’m in IT and I’m constantly in and out of the bowels of the operating system. I have a lot of thoughts on this stuff.
My first thought is, stop moving everything around. Even in Windows 10, if you’re using an older version, say 1804, and you switch to a newer version, say 22H2, stuff is moved all over the place. It makes it super hard to direct someone blindly to the control they need to click to get something done. You’re making my job much harder than it needs to be. Stop it. There’s no reason to move this crap around.
To bring out my grumpy old man routine: back in my day, if you wanted to do anything, you went to the control panel. Everything you needed was there. Now it’s in settings, no wait, clicking on this settings option for that thing now launches an appx thing that, surprisingly (/s) is broken.
Too many damn times have I tried to open their damned settings app or the new defender security appx dialog simply crashes. The solution is almost always dkim online repair. Well, if it needs repair so damn much, how about you just repair it for me as part of system maintenance? The fuck.
Windows 11 is a special form of suffering. Right clicking on a file and… What the fuck is this? I basically click on “more settings” every time I right click. And the changes to the settings application… Don’t get me started.
Also, why in the fuck do we have copilot installed by default now? You’re an operating system, stay in your goddamned lane.
The only good thing I can say about Windows 11 is that it has really good security. So good that I frequently have trouble doing routine things. Today, I was trying to run a PowerShell script and it told me some bullshit error, which is pretty common for PowerShell. After googling the error, the recommendation was to change the execution policy. I went to do that at an administrative PowerShell prompt and it told me that I didn’t have access to change it. While running as the administrator. Yay. Shit is broken again. Fuck me I guess. I’m off to unfuck my less than five month old new work system because Microsoft can’t get their shit straight.
Customization options do not and cannot help me. 90% of the time I’m working on someone else’s computer, so I have to fucking deal with the default behavior because I’m not going to change it for 500+ users whom I support. I’m pretty sure I’d get more than a few complaints. So I have to fucking deal with whatever hairbrained decision Microsoft made about what should be default.
Windows 10 had its own share of bullshit. One of my most common annoyances was the way the OS decided to install fucking candy crush, every fucking time a new user logged into the goddamned computer. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, but not fun and filled with uninstalls. I hope Microsoft made some good money on that brand deal, because I sure paid for it with my frustration.
After all of this, I keep finding myself in the fucking registry, and thank God that’s one thing that hasn’t been fucked over by their new UI team. I keep having to fix dumb issues by injecting registry keys so I can not deal with the stupid UI all the goddamned time. It’s hacky, and I’m happier for it.
I could keep going. Pretty much every decision they’ve made in the past 5 years has been some measure of bad. The only thing I’ve agreed with them doing is finally ending internet explorer. Begrudgingly, edge is better, but not by a lot, IMO.
The last thing I’ll say is that the tpm bullshit is going to give me an aneurysm. Having a TPM at Windows install usually prompts the system to activate bitlocker. Bitlocker itself isn’t bad, but it’s fucking terrible when windows does this shit and doesn’t really inform the user about it. Nobody knows that they need to back up their goddamned bitlocker recovery keys, so inevitably, when something goes wrong (we’re talking about Windows here, something will go wrong) and the system stops booting, you need the fucking bitlocker recovery key to do anything. Your option, if you can call it that, if you can’t get the recovery key, is to format all of your shit, and reinstall from scratch. I know several people who have lost a lot of work and irreplaceable files, like pictures, because bitlocker fucked them over and they had no idea it was even running.
Sorry about your loss, but all those family photos you saved that don’t exist anywhere else are locked behind basically uncrackable encryption, get fucked, I guess.
I’m going to cut this rant off. Needless to say I’m pretty tired of Microsoft’s bullshit. Make an operating system. That’s what people want. That’s it. We shouldn’t need “debloat” scripts to fix your nonsense. Gah.
That’s it, they need to roll out ads in BIOS
Want to change your boot order?
You’ll need to watch a 30 second ad, or subscribe for ad free BIOS for just 1.99/month
Sponsored product recommendations cannot be loaded without an internet connection. Please configure a wireless/ethernet adapter and connect to the internet to continue.
Nah you’ll have to download a half-english app, sign up on a website you haven’t heard before, request BIOS access code, wait up to a month and then you can do that
If they are gonna put advertisements in the bios then ill flash my pc with libreboot
BaaS??! Oh FFS. It’s too real.
Thankfully no results from any actual BaaS companies yet
Key word: yet 😅
Don’t give them any ideas. They are watching the forums 😂
The funny part is that windows will change your boot order back without your consent.
Creating an image of this and posting it on Lemmy = guaranteed XYZ upvotes.
Who wants to do it?q
Just comment or comment with post?
Would technically be doable in UEFI… But I’m not mad enough to bring this shit to the world
Anyone who does should be trialed for crimes against humanity.
Considering they allow to install application on the bios command (Armory Crate, that kind of shit), consider it already done.
don’t give them ideas, lol
Aren’t there already? With vendor splash screens and all the graphics in the BIOS settings menus? Why don’t I get paid every time Asrock gets to display their logo on my monitor at boot?
Call down Satan.
*edit: Calm. but you know what? Call the man in red. He prolly should be taking notes.
Execs: what can we do?!
Jim from marketing: We could throw ads into windows 11… That’ll get em flocking! People love ads!
More AI in the start menu!
Execs: Holy shit. Give him a raise.
Lay off everyone else while you’re at it.
Hang on a sec, this isn’t Google!
Speaking of, let’s see if we can get that Prabhakar Raghavan guy, he seems to know what he’s doing.
With that attitude, you’ll never work in marketing…
REPLACING the start menu with AI is the way to go!!!111
Ads will continue till the users fall in love with ads
In my company they legitimately try to convince us that our users love ads.
I conducted user research on one of our websites, which showed complaints about the amount of ad placements we have been throwing at them. The execs responded by telling me “but we are actually HELPING them, we’re showing them products that will improve their productivity and processes”. Then, they came up with ideas for new ways we can place MORE ads on top of the ones already there. I’m sure our users are loving it!
You should tell them that if users love ads so much, you should add a slider to let people control how many ads they get. Surely they’ll only increase the ad count, right?
Where is the research part of “marketing research”? lol
Good god that’s actually insane. Corpos have completely lost it.
It’s more like the execs know that ad revenue is a significant chunk of the revenue stream and cost very little to implement so they’ll keep growing that until it starts measurably impacting other revenue centers in the org
On a related note, YouTube just gave me a pop-up advertising premium again, only this time the cancel button was “No, I like ads.”
I was gonna sit back and watch an hour of YT (with ads) but that pop-up rubbed me the wrong way and I didn’t watch anything so that I might skew the A/B test in favor of no dark patterns.
I recently moved my media PC to Linux Mint. I had Bluetooth issues with windows despite my hardware not that old and ‘Windows 11 ready’. Zero problems on Linux. I play the same games thanks to Steam Proton library. I use Mac for work. So I finally did it. No more Windows. I tried to switch 5 years ago. But today Linux is polished. And mostly works as expected. You still need to open terminal a few times to change some settings. I’m happy. Highly recommended.
I switched from Win10 to Arch and now I do have problems with bluetooth, because my mouse officially only supports Windows. Think I will just force my mouse to support Arch (or the other way around). Still way better and faster than Windows.
Now I’m a bit curious how a mouse could theoretically be windows only?
IIRC bluetooth mice use basically the USB protocol but through bluetooth instead of a cable.
It says officially so and I couldn’t connect so far, I’ll let you know if I manage to connect it.
What mouse is it?
https://www.rapoo-eu.com/product/mt350/ Ok, Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, iOS and Android, I will probably get to fix it if I have some time.
This one should work via bluetooth, some pages online indicate so, and it would be very rare that a bluetooth mouse does not work on linux.
And it should absolutely work via the little usb dongle that came with the mouse, as for example my logitech wireless mouse even works in my uefi/bios with the usb receiver.
I sadly don’t have the right USB-port for it, but I’ll try fixing it without the dongle. Which pages?
I may yet try it in the next few years. I think one large frustration I anticipate (among others) is keyboard shortcuts. I’ve become very experienced with those on Windows, and my brief efforts at Linux (eg, on my Steam Deck’s monitor hookup) have not come across enough matches for them.
I can absolutely see value in enduring the pain of a large switch though.
Linux mint keyboard shortcuts mimic those of windows tho, Linux mint is the best choice for windows refugees, this is one of the things majority of Linux community is agree about. Edit: in Linux mint you also can change keyboard shortcuts with gui tools already pre installed
Funny, one of my longstanding frustrations with windows was that I didn’t get a say in my keyboard shortcuts. Namely the fact that the shortcut to swap keyboard layouts has historically been very easy to accidentally hit.
If you ever do switch I suggest something with KDE, I love keyboard shortcuts and I find anything other(Windows the most) extremely lacking in that field.
As someone who uses all 3 (work-issue MBP, personal dev laptop on fedora 40, overbuilt gaming-oriented desktop on w10 with a dual boot Ubuntu partition I haven’t used in ages because WSL lets me do what I need to most of the time), it’s really not that bad. Then again, I’ve had a trifecta like that for well over a decade at this point, so maybe I’ve just fully acclimatized to switching machines and OSes for different primary activities all the time.
Yeah, on Windows Heroes of the Storm was using 10gb on my gpu and stuttering massively
On Linux (Lutris) it just works
Hey fellow HoTS Linuxer!
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Yeah in college I tried to switch for nerd cred and it sucked, but over the past year I switched and while I’ve had some hiccups, I honestly think it’s more a result of me going with an arch based distro than a Debian one. I’m thinking I may hop soon, but I assume it’ll be a massive pain
I thought Arch was more tricky, than Debian
It is, it’s trickier and less supported
My friend, have you checked out the arch user repository? What do you mean with less supported btw?
Less officially supported. Say what you will about the chaotic aur it is chaotic. I think I bit off a bit more than I can chew
Whenever I try switching to Linux, there is always something that doesn’t work right and takes forever to finagle with to fix if it’s even possible. I’m primarily a Linux Mint fan (daily drove it on my aging desktop until it died of old age a few years back), but I’ve also dabbled in a few other noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu (was really into it when everything was still orange and brown lol) and Pop OS.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love using Linux to breathe new life into older systems, but it just isn’t a good option for me personally if my device hasn’t gotten sluggish yet.
As an example, I have an aging laptop that started blue screening a bunch. It doesn’t support the Win 11 upgrade due to it’s processor not meeting minimum specs. So I thought it was finally time to see if Linux would improve it.
First of all, I had a hell of a time installing various distros without having them boot to a black screen after installation completes. Took absolutely forever to finally sus this out on the various distros I tried. Then I find that the couple extra buttons on my basic Logitech mouse don’t work. These are essential buttons for me that I use constantly. I go through a million troubleshooting steps before finding out that it’s a Wayland issue, so I switch back to Xorg and everything is cool. But then I start running into lag issues which never occurred on my Windows install. I also tried playing some games I had in my Epic Games library. I could not for the life of me get it to work, no matter which platform I tried. I get that Steam has better Linux compatibility, but not all of us have all of our games on Steam.
Finally got tired of the whole ordeal and switched back to Windows. Did a bit more troubleshooting and seemed to have resolved the blue screen issues and now it seems to work perfectly and much better out of the box than Linux. It’s not an old enough device a Linux refresh to be worth it yet.
I get that Lemmings are die hard Linux fans, and I think Linux has some fantastic use cases…but for many users it actually isn’t a good alternative. I find it works best when you want to breathe new life into older hardware or if you have every component specifically built to work for a particular Linux distro. But when basic features don’t work properly without hours of troubleshooting (if you can ever get them to work at all), it’s a little hard to just recommend it to your average Joe whose Windows/Mac computer works just fine.
This “everything just works” Linux experience a lot of people talk about on Lemmy/Reddit has absolutely never been my experience, even though I’ve been a casual Linux fan for over a decade now. Meanwhile, I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows (unless you’re talking really old Windows versions like Win XP and older).
I don’t think Linux is for aging hardware. It just depends of your needs. Linux support all mainstream hardware, I guess. Never had any problems with something not working on Linux. I remember many years ago I had a scanner, which used to work only with Win XP or Vista because of outdated drivers. Windows 7 was too modern for it. I tried it with Linux and it worked. Now I have some random-hardware PC, everything works. It’s Intel Core 11400 hardware, AMD RX-GPU, quite modern. I think problems could be on laptops with display backlight, sleep mode or something else. Desktop PC’s should be good. Even if you have last-gen hardware, just use the latest kernel. I haven’t heard about Linux build hardware. It used to be a thing for Hackintosh builds.
My previous company HP laptop worked better on Linux, it wasn’t that hot all the time. Because Linux was consuming less system resources. My work: Browser + IDE. I had dual-boot Win10 and Ubuntu. Ended up with Windows because of Pulse Secure crap and some specific network restrictions. It was years back.
I remember I gave up with Ubuntu 5 years ago at home because after system update It just failed to boot. I didn’t touch anything. I don’t know if it’s possible today. And Proton wasn’t here and I wanted to play games. I remember I was using Lightroom, but for my very basic photographer needs Darktable works perfectly. And it’s free!
All you need is basic troubleshooting skills. You need to google sometimes. I know that it could be an issue. Linux not for everyone. And it’s fine. It’s good to have a chose. Linux gives that choice.
This. I have dabbled with various Linux distros over the past 15+ years out of curiosity. I have, without fail, had to spend days troubleshooting and fixing various problems of all kinds. Sometimes it was WiFi drivers, sometimes it was GPU drivers, sometimes it was power management issues, and most recently it’s soundcard drivers and poor audio control/quality issues. I always installed Linux as dual-boot so I had my normal Windows install to fall back on but I just couldn’t see myself able to fully switch primary OS over.
Nowadays I couldn’t switch over even if I wanted to because numerous programs I use for my work are not supported properly or at all. Linux has indeed come a long way over the years in terms of UX and software compatibility, but not everyone uses their computer just for games. There is a lot of creative and productivity software (and devices!) that have limited or zero Linux support and many FOSS alternatives are not sufficient. I hate Adobe as much as the next person and Photoshop is a bloated pile of trash, but part of my soul dies whenever a Linux fan tells me I can just replace Photoshop with GIMP. GIMP is clownware.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I’ve had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I “should have known better” or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that “maybe Linux isn’t for you”.
You know what? Maybe it isn’t. It sure isn’t for most people and I can’t see that changing soon.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I’ve had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I “should have known better” or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that “maybe Linux isn’t for you”.
I had almost exactly this same issue years ago when I tried Mint. I was trying to get something to work (I think install games on Steam? Something like that) and it would just do nothing, no message, etc. When I asked for help, I was told “This is super obvious” and after trying their suggestions and having them all fail, was told “just go back to windows.”
Ok, done?
(It also doesn’t help that there is a huge difference between ‘you can use the terminal’ and ‘you have to use the terminal.’ I’m an 80’s kid, I grew up with DOS, so I understand how to navigate terminals, I just don’t want to constantly.)
I’ve had similar experiences. Never posted questions myself, but I’ll be Googling for help and find forum posts that are as toxic as you describe.
It’s been bad enough that the Linux elitism on Lemmy leaves a bad taste, even if I haven’t seen as much of the toxic parts here. I know I’m not the only person of my friends group that feels this way about Lemmy’s Linux crowd.
I’ve been exclusively Linux for years, and all the crap now going on with AI and ads being shoved into literally everything makes me happier than ever with that decision.
But you’re absolutely right. Linux is “it just works” in a relatively narrow use-case.
Just going on the internet to browse and play some Facebook games (my parents). It’ll absolutely work out of the box.
Doing some light creative work (design, writing, etc…) No tinkering needed.
But from there it becomes a scale from “probably work fine” to “hours of work and extra repositories needed”.
Video editing or 3D modelling with an NVIDIA card because CUDA, it SHOULD be easy to install, but there’s a chance it won’t be. You take your chances.
Gaming through proton? Single player games, yeah. I’ve literally had 95% work out of the box because Valve is awesome. But I don’t play online multiplayer. If you need to play nice with anticheat software, good luck.
I too get frustrated with the fundamentalist Linux base who think its the right fit for everyone. Because it absolutely is not, and its okay to admit that because admitting that drives the motivation to improve it.
To comment on the first paragraph, that is just a skill issue. Before I switched to Linux I was pretty adept at Windows, but some things are hard to figure out because it’s hidden behind layers of bullshit. Running commands that obscure what exactly they’re doing, just because some guy on some forum said it worked for him, is how you get around on Windows and that knowledge is something you build over many years. Knowing where specific settings are or what values to use takes time. The same counts for Linux. If you stick to it, that knowledge will come with experience.
Just remember the dism and sfc scannows, registry hacks etc the average Joe doesn’t know about. Your learnt it, you didn’t start using Windows with that knowledge. The same will happen with Linux.
I switched recently to Nobara after having a great experience with my steam deck. However, I’ll probably add windows as a dual boot option since CS2 doesn’t run properly (like 16fps…).
CS2 linux version has some issues. Sometimes forcing steam to install the windows version and to run it via proton makes things better.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll definitely try that.
I dont have CS2 because, well, the obvious reasons. But I do have the original Skylines, and its linux version is also a festering pile of rancid dogshit.
Running the windows version via proton made it run smooth, stable (well, as stable as can be expected with a few hundred mods…lol), and without headache.
so yeah, install windows version and use proton. Overall better experience probably.
Honestly, i think thats my advice about gaming on linux in general, to generally avoid the native version. Personally, I’ve only run into two games that the native version wasnt shit, and that was Stardew Valley and Rimworld.
CS2 is Counter Strike 2. Cities: Skylines 2 is C:S2
I tried to get nobara to run a few times but sth was always broken. I’m now on Bazzite after testing Linux Mint a few months. Bazzite seems to be the more polished fedora based gaming distro.
Using Bazzite, myself. I have a weird issue with rebooting, though. Tends to freeze at the boot screen (grub doesn’t show up at all) then the whole boot/login process becomes a slideshow. This doesn’t happen if I manually turn my PC off and turn it on, though. Really odd problem that I haven’t had on other distros.
I like Bazzite as a whole, though.
That sounds awful. Have you tried disabling energy saving options (like automatic screenlock/sleep)?
Automatic screen lock and auto-sleep get disabled everytime I install a KDE DE. I could take a closer look at energy savings, but I don’t think there’s much else I can do there. I know it’s not hardware-related, as this doesn’t happen with any other distro. May be an issue with KDE 6, for all I know. Gonna have to look into it more when I get home from work.
How was it broken?
I had a lot of crashes as soon as I installed it. Must have been some driver/hardware issues probably. I’m not knowledgeable enough (and frankly had no energy to troubleshoot) I just installed mint which ran without (much) trouble. I was interested in a more up to date system and KDE plasma as well as pipewire already integrated and looked at bazzite (after another unsuccessful try at nobara) - have been t running it for a few weeks now and I’m perfectly happy with it. CS 2 also runs without problems - but I mainly cast matches instead of playing myself.
I’ll have a look into that. For work I use Mint and really like it, however wanted to have a gaming distro that already delivers everything that I need and since I already used ProtonGE it was a natural choice for me. But i already had some issues with it probably due to NVidia drivers. Seems to be better now with the latest kernel
I think I get slightly better performance on Bazzite than on mint. Mint e.g. still has the 535 Nvidia drivers as recommended (we’re at 550 now). On Bazzite you’ll probably have to enable x11 until the new update with explicit sync drops mid May. (At least I had a ton of flickering on Wayland with my rtx 3060)
I just got a steam deck, and needed to install FF14 (non steam) so I was mucking around in desktop mode… yeah. I’ll prob be getting a spare drive for my tower now to try out Linux. I’d love nothing more then to cut ties to windows.
Windows just sucks at handling Bluetooth. It’s ridiculous that you can’t change audio codecs, or choose between handsfree and high quality audio. You have to let windows guess at both
The only reason I still even use Windows is because of destiny 2. That’s pretty much the only game I play. If there was a good stable way of doing this on Linux I wouldn’t even use Windows at all.
In fact the only computer in my house that even has windows on it is my gaming rig.
How many % of these 70% can’t upgrade to windows 11 due to hardware limitation?
I’d be happy to upgrade my laptop to Win11 but Win11 doesn’t like it. I’m not buying a new laptop just because of Win11’s dick moves. Win10 works perfectly well on it.
You mean consumers DON’T want ads in every aspect of their OS?
Okay, this seemed wrong. As the article said, even Win8 didn’t go down in usage over time. So I went and checked the methodology for the source data.
Turns out, this number is based on social media and search engine referral data. Also turns out, they warn that while they do track Bing chat referrals when you follow through a link, they don’t see chat responses where you only read the AI response but don’t click through:
We have no way of measuring the number of queries performed in bing chat. However, we also don’t measure the number of queries to regular search engines like bing or google either. Instead we track search engine referrals.
i.e. If you go to a search engine and do a search for anything and you click on a website result, we’ll record that click as a search engine referral if that website had the statcounter code installed. It’s the click to a website that we measure, not the actual search queries that were performed.
When you do a search using bing chat, and you click on one of the “learn more” websites we can track that as a search referral. So we are monitoring bing chat in the same way we measure the regular bing search engine.
From this data we can see from the statcounter network of webites, that the amount of traffic being sent to websites from bing chat is very, very small. Less than 1/100 of 1 percent.
So from our data we can say that bing chat is not currently translating into enough clicks to our network of websites to change the search share.
Of course you are less likely to click on a source website from bing chat than a regular search, as it is intended to give you the answer rather than have you go visiting websites to find the answer. So that needs to be factored in when using our stats for your analysis.
That is very interesting. That’s a likely culprit for Win11 specifically to have gone down a couple of percentage points in the US and EU (the other territories seem to remain flat), but it’s hard to prove.
It’s also a bit concerning in terms of measuring the effects of AI search in both network traffic and in how search results are consumed. If that’s the cause it does suggest that AI chat users are less likely to follow through to the source info, which seems risky, although it’s also hard to prove what that does to receiving truthful info.
Lots of counterintutitive, hard to parse implications from this one data point, but I’d be surprised if it was as simple as “people have randomly decided to roll back to Win10 (and Win8, which also grows) for no reason”.
Steam hardware survey is another data point.
Looks like in March Win10 usage increases a little. Overall it’s on a downward trend though.
I think we just need to move on from this methodology of data collection. Firefox is often cited as very unpopular because it blocks statcounter tracking by default, social networks have absorbed some search volume too. I do think it makes logical sense that people are dropping 11; I did so myself last year. But this data is likely bad, so it’s pointless to try and extract a reason based on it.
Well, a data point is a data point is a data point. You just can’t make all your decisions based on a single one, at least without understanding what’s behind it.
FWIW, the Steam survey has Win 11 growing by 3.5% last month, with Win10 going down by about the same amount (Linux stays at 1.9% there). Neither data source is wrong or bad, necessarily, but you do want to be aware that one is an opt-in survey of gamers and the other is a tracker of search engine referrals.
So the takeaway is that people are probably not deserting Win 11 in droves, but maaaybe their use of online search is being impacted by MS’s integration of AI search or something else changing Win11 users’ behavior around social media or search engines. Or mostly that it may be too early to tell and we may need more sources of info. For all the glee and schadenfreude in this thread, the big teachable moment is that data and stats are nuanced and hard to read and that confirmation bias is a bitch.
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I would much rather pay for windows than become the product with ads, AI, and analytics.
Luckily this is coming at a time where I can run nearly everything on Linux that I previously needed Windows for (with the exception of a handful of games in my steam library)
Whatever happened to windows 10 being the last windows? Like windows was moving to the os as a service model.
My office is currently forcing us on to Win 11.
Feels bad man.
