7d ago

Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base

www.tomshardware.com Microsoft says it still has 1.4 billion monthly active users (Updated)

Our mobile-first world is slowly killing the ubiquitous operating system.

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.

263 comments

Would say that the businesses are still propping up Windows hard whilst the personal space is pretty much dying. I mean, most of the younger generation are using tablets or phones more than a PC these days. I would argue that unless you're in need of that power, those tablets or phones could do everything they need like drawing, gaming or streaming.
If businesses gave Microsoft the flick, it would devastate their bottom line a lot.

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.
- 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.
  
  I don't think their obnoxious behavior is completely unrelated. After all, people aren't choosing windows phones or tablets either.
  
  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.
  
  Correct. Whenever you see a large chunk of the population making a change, first assume it is for mundane reasons like finances or convenience.
  
  And this is the absolute truth. I showed my brother today in haveibeenpawned how his main email (you guessed it, Gmail) is out there in over 150 leaks and hacks. Not 2 hours later he was buying 2 new nest thermostats to replace the ones he has at home because Google is phasing them out (yes, they still work, Google just chose to kill them).
  I'm done trying to make people see the light. We'll see what happens when it all blows up (see I didn't say "if").
- 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.
- 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.
  
  Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.
  At some point, it just becomes exhausting to hear people explain-o-brag about their ability to navigate the command-line, like typing "dir" into a cursor field makes them the hottest thing since Alan Turing.
  Millennials will tell you they are tech geniuses, then throw up their hands when their dishwasher breaks or their check-oil light comes on. The need to be cluelessly smug rivals any 90s-era Boomer.
- 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.
- Looks around my living room, 3 laptops, stationary, 1 nas and a server. 2 laptops are still running windows.
  
  You are an outlier.
  
  Same here. I was just thinking that I have way more running computers now than I did in years past. But none of mine are running Windows now.

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.

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...).

If this calculation proves true, one would think losing close to 1/3 of its customers would cause M$ to rethink some of its business policies/plans...
Such as forcing folks to retire perfectly good hardware and buy new if they wish to run Windoze11.
But then again, it's M$... 🤷‍♂️ 🤦‍♂️
- 1/3 of its Windows customers, not of all of its customers. I bet they still make plenty of money with Azure and Office 365.
  
  Precisely. Windows is a side project for Microsoft now.
  
  they do OK but services side including AI make way more....
- This will rely on having an executive team that can predict trends beyond the next quarter.
  Doubling down on advertising, telemetry, and AI in an overly bloated OS looks really good if you only care about the profits that brings for the next 3 months, rather than how much your userbase resents it. MS is fully capable of turning this around immediately by just making LTSC available to the public without needing to buy a MAK through an enterprise channel, but that means throwing away some recurring revenue in favor of claiming a lost userbase
- It’s Microsoft’s current CEO. All he is interested in is subscription revenue. Xbox hardware is next to go.
  Breaking up Microsoft would be the best thing they could do right now. But it won’t happen.
  
  And that CEO completely turned the company around. Microsoft was circling the drain before they changed strategies.
- And adding advertising to various parts of the OS.
  Hey, Microsoft: de-shitify your OS if you want it to be more popular.
- they already have an their AI division earns way more than the Windows division. Matters little to them about Windows numbers dropping because in reality PCs as we know it are declining far more rapidly that anyone wants to say
- You would hope, but this is the same thing we see across almost all industries these days. It's almost like there's a root cause for it, some sort of, Iunno, economic system we could blame ...
  But especially cable companies, for example. Has a dwindling customer base caused them to rethink their business strategies? Or has it caused them to try and bleed that dwindling base dryer even faster?
  There's no "learning" anymore, there's riding the bus to the absolute pits of hell and just hoping you're not the CEO to be the one that has to go down with it.
- For some reason modern business degree holders don't even consider the possibility of increasing head coubts but instead maximising gains from remaining heads.
  Same with employees, they see things like dirty stores and long lines and they try to force employees to work as sanitation crews and implement time limits to make lines faster long before they ever hire somebody new.

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.
- Wish you success in the migration
- What distro is your company going with?
- How do you manage a fleet of linux devices and stay up to date with compliance?
  
  Not entirely sure what you mean; Linux’s user management, access control, security etc has always been ahead of Windows’ for its whole existence.

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.
- You sound grumpy. You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems too I bet... ha ha ha l o l
  
  You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems
  It's crazy to see how much of our society hinges on having access to the internet.
  Paying bills, applying for jobs, registering for any kind of public or private service, long distance travel or communication... A technology that was supposed to make life quicker and easier has become this firehose of annoying digital chores, scams, and red tape.
- It never worked for me, wouldn't find a file on the directory it was searching.
- FYI you can disable that, but yes it’s a shitty new default.
  After a blissful decade on Arch Linux, stock Windows enrages me, takes hours to make it somewhat bearable.

Hey, I have an idea that will help Microsoft:
why not add even more AI that logs everything and then reports it to the government through additional telemetry?
then they could even require the next edition to include a dedicated advertising GPU to take those logs and create tailored ads on the wallpaper as well as occasionally parse the logs and generate summaries for safety purposes!
that will bring the customers back and boost short-term profits too!
- You mother fucker... You're hired.
- Yeah, that wouldn't really do anything, google just announced it for gemini and I don't really see a push back against it, meta wants to compromise the copy right of all creators on its platform and it too was allowed, sadly right now in the name of AI advancement every kind of privacy will be compromised
- Sad thing is I guarantee they'd keep a majority market share after doing this. Few people would even be aware, and fewer still actually give a shit about their privacy. As for ads on the desktop, that might push people away... but then again, I had to practically force uBlock Origin down my friends' throat after finding that they've had ads on YouTube for years and didn't really care.
  
  but then again, I had to practically force uBlock Origin down my friends' throat after finding that they've had ads on YouTube for years and didn't really care.
  This is insane to me. How people can use the internet with ads is just beyond me.
  And you wanna know the full hypocrisy? Google Chrome also comes with an Ad blocker, on by default. They block ads they don't deem good, but allow all ads from AdSense, of course.
- friendship ended with npu chips now ad-processing-unit chips are my best friend.

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

Forcing people to buy a new computer for nothing more than a security chip on the motherboard will do that
- They also had pretty strict CPU requirements. Mostly only 8th gen and newer, or a ryzen, would be required.

good. fuck. microsoft.
they had the choice of not being fucking awful and they had no reason to. im glad its crumbling for them even if wayyy too late.
- They would have way higher ratio of supporters if they stayed at XP or 7, and just keep security patching it but no, they deliberately sabotaged their star product with Vista, 8, 10, and 11. They deserved it.
  
  id appreciate it if they didnt get it chock full of fucking ads. big part of why i left it.
  its actually a good system underneath the crud, and microsoft loves to insist on the crud.

This aligns with statcounter data here: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202505
Windows market share on desktop has been slowly but steadily declining. From 95+% in 2009, to almost 70% today. In the same time period Linux went up from 0.6% to 4%, which is not bad.
- It can also be noted that the trend over time for the "unknown" category (which stands for 8 % today) follows the same trend as Linux. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that Linux is over-represented in the "unknown" category, and may actually be closer to 5-7 %.
- Apparently Linux have 20% market share in Norway. That is... I don't really believe it, but really cool if true.
- So this is just an apple victory or is Android to blame?
  
  Kids mostly use mobile devices and don't even know what a folder is, so both.
  
  Android is not on this plot, it's desktop only.
  The 2nd place is interestingly not Apple, but Unknown.
- Three point four percentage points. Not great. Not terrible.
  
  It sounds much better when you say 1 in 167 people then vs 1 in 25 people today.
  
  It was unthinkable 10 years ago. I call it a win.
- Apple Silicon goes absolutely BRRRR

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

It sounds like a mixture of Chromebooks, and people simply not owning a traditional computer.
Either way, it seems to be mostly Google that's winning here.
- These 2023 stats have Chromebook sales at only ~25M units globally, so this is probably the second scenarion, people decommissioning Windows computers and using the phone and/or tablet instead. https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-tablet-market-share-Q2-2023
  
  For most people, a tablet is a direct replacement for a laptop anyway, especially with a wireless keyboard. I run software for work that, as far as I know, is Windows only, but most people will be fine with a tablet, or even just a phone.
- Chromebooks went from "What is that?" To literally everywhere in schools.
  Android phones are everywhere.
  Google and the Chrome browser really ate into Microsoft's dominance.
- And Apple, with people replacing traditional computers with Android and iOS devices.

Just want to say, Google Docs is NOT free. Just because you don't send them money doesn't mean you aren't paying.
- What is free though is LibreOffice, or some Nextcloud document addons (to a degree) if ”cloud” is the thing.

Just pure greed and giving users less and less control of an OS will push people away. It did for me outside of work. I don't have any reason to touch Windows that often.
- It's because most people use their phones as their main computing device these days. The idea that the average person would give up the convenience, stability, and familiarity of something like windows because of "pure greed" and "loss of OS control" is a fantasy. The average person would buy a screwdriver with banner ads if it saved them $10.
  
  This.
  Longtime computer "nerd" here. 8 years ago I would have balked about spending more on a cellphone than my gaming PC, but I end up using my phone more hours per day than my desktop so I bit the bullet and bought a nice phone. Now my PC is basically a dedicated entertainment device, and my phone is my go-to for email, chat, music, videos, reading, documents, and even some work.
  If I wasn't an avid gamer, I probably wouldn't have a desktop or laptop at all right now.
  And I will be switching to Linux this year, mainly because of Windows 11 and the general direction the Microsoft is going. I've got a laptop to test with and when I have the hang of it, the big battle station is getting switched too.

My new laptop came with Windows 11, but that’s gone now. Steamdeck must be helping with these figures too. Good work everyone.
- M series chips on macbooks are likely helping more.
  
  The article says Mac sales are declining too.
  Apparently most of the decline is people that are simply ditching their PC because they don't need it anymore.
- I just got a cheap minipc to tinker with and it had windows 11. Not bad and unexpected.
  First thing I did was wipe and install Ubuntu of course because that's what I wanted.
  
  I do like Mini PCs, but I kind of wish there was an easy way to get a solid GPU into it. There's those weird docks but they're far from standard, and it would be nice if the GPU had a similar form factor, so you could just stack them up like a MiniPC on top of it like an old hi-fi separates system.
  Slap a storage box on it as well for some HDDs, baby you got a server going.

It's Linux for me but I also have to assume tablet culture plays a role too.
- I think it's more to do with phones - people are just more likely to do most tasks on a phone rather than a laptop.
  
  Absolutely! I observe this behaviour on myself: I am nowadays even sometimes coding on my phone (though, the experience is still... "suboptimal"), but for everything else? Its mostly fine.
- Are people really actively using tablets? I thought that was more of a hype and is now something that lies around and gets occasional use on the couch, but not really productive.
  
  I've been using tablets since the first generation (Galaxy tab), and I must say that it kind of veered to that side after a while, since getting a convertible laptop. A few years back I got a Huawei tablet with a pen and keyboard, that had impressive battery, and it took the place of my convertible. While I'm a Linux-Android-occassional Windows guy, I now use an ipad (As much as I hate to admit, in the tablet space they are vastly superior), with keyboard and pen, for most of my away needs, and for general around the house stuff. I do a lot of graphic design and photo stuff, and thanks to Affinity's suite, I can actually do real work on the thing.
  
  As a student, yeah, I see lots of people using tablets for their work instead of laptops.
  
  Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It's broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it's familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.
  
  Your average computer user is mainly using it for interacting with various web based services and playing media. Don't need good input methods for that so tablets are a cheaper and easier to maintain alternative to a laptop.
- I bought a tablet and I feel like the money has been wasted. I use it maybe once a month.
  
  Tablets are kind of in the middle of nowhere in terms of functionality at the moment, bigger and less practical than a phone, while being less capable than laptops. Its a shame, because on paper they look pretty great and they are insanely powerful nowadays
  
  I just barely used my first one for the longest time, since I mostly played games or programmed on computers. Then I started to use it to read books and watch Netflix. I am on my 3rd one now and probably spend 60% of my computer time on it.
  
  Me and my Steam Deck
  Mostly used it in 2023 or so when I was sick on the couch. And yeah some hours on the trip I'm currently on. But it would just have been fine without.
  Sometimes I see people post pictures use it in the most scenic locations, similar to the promotional video. And all I can think of is that if you want to play game so badly, you can just stay home. Much easier and also probably safer for the deck.
  To each their own. Just hard to understand for me
- According to StatCounter tablets never breached 7% market share, and even that was in 2014. Nowadays they are below 2%. Windows's lost userbase seems to be mostly about people using their phones for everything.

They don’t care they have Azure now.

now they try to backtrack by giving another year of w10 updates if the user:
logs in with the microsoft account
enables backup to onedrive (presumably filling it so they can nag all the time "hey buy our cloud subscription")
uses bing as default

Enshittification will do that, yep

It's almost like if you piss off your users then they'll ditch you.

Mobile and I imagine Google Docs really did a number on Windows necessity. In my experience, large companies and government rely on Windows and O365, smaller organizations use Google Docs. Even universities I've seen start with classrooms a decade ago using Google Docs and hangouts to eventually using Google Suite or whatever its called these days for student/faculty email
At least word documents saved as PDF and shared is way more common today than a decade ago. A decade ago I mainly remember seeing nothing but Excel and SPSS in classes, now I see professors showing how to do stuff in Google Sheets. For a long time computer science and math professors have been geeky and idealistic so you'd regularly see Libre/OpenOffice used in lectures
Another is Blender. In like 2008 ~2.49 Blender, professionals would scoff. A decade later Blender 2.8 releases and by today I hear way less vitriol and more opensess as another tool in the toolbox or recognition as great for at least learning or professional use for smaller teams. Flow was a successful movie made with it
Davinci Resolve is getting better and a lot more mainstream today than a decade ago. And stuff like Kdenlive is more powerful than the vast majority of people need. People were doing great stuff a decade+ ago with iMovie and basic Windows Movie Maker
Video games are a lot easier now because of Valve with Linux
Mobile, adults used to have laptop that pretty much excited to login to their credit cards and pay them, use TurboxTax, print out MapQuest directions, etc. Phones have made a laptop redundant I think for most people now. Work provides one if needed. TV for movies and phone for everything else
To me there's nothing Microsoft can do to stem the decline of Windows. Mobile first is standard now. Microsoft has no presence in smart TVs because they failed with Windows Mobile and Xbox hardware is on life support and they never made the stripped down Xbox Windows available for TV makers anyways. The loss towards mobile will continue.
Then there's national security concerns for countries around the world to be reliant on American software and hardware. Diversification of operating system has picked up heavily. It started like 20 years ago but it didn't seem to really pick up until the Huawei sanctions and driving Huawei to their own OS and Chinese government to invest even more into domestic Linux distro a. Then the recent American trade wars renewing interest in European countries in Linux and LibreOffice. My understanding has been that Linux had had strong adoption in India for some time now
Desktop Linux in the US, I say just keep focusing on prosumer/professional users. Software developers and other IT professionals are already Linux heavy. Some commercial software is available like Maya and Davinci Resolve. Krita and Blender are great. Kdenlive is good. Seems like GIMP and Inkscape development may be picking up momentum. Darktable is great. Valve keep focusing on SteamOS and community distros keep supporting more handhelds making every year easier and easier for gaming. Steam Deck 2 is hopefully a way more available in retail than the first deck. First product work out the kinks and prove viability. Second product and possibly AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc are way more interested in low power gaming than before as well as first class Linux support
Outside of the US, I feel like Trump both term one and now term two has really given Linux and open source software a global boost in appeal.
- Technically, MSFT can create Windows versions for TVs, smartphones, and smartwatches. Because they've made Windows development more modular, they're not developing it because it won't generate significant profits or revenue.
  That's until OpenAI announces an AI-powered device, and if it ends up being a mainstream consumer success, we'll see many companies creating something similar, adding to the integration of it into their ecosystems.
- I agree with all your points bar one.
  5000 employees, 10b valuation. We use Google docs. We're not "China Telecom" big, but I doubt anyone would call us small. I think most young companies are happy on google docs.
  
  5000 employees, 10b valuation. We use Google docs. We’re not “China Telecom” big, but I doubt anyone would call us small. I think most young companies are happy on google docs.
  And on the flip-side my dozen-employee workplace runs on Microsoft Outlook/OneDrive/Teams 🙃

No source for the blog post. Here it is: windows blog
Note that the number has been updated, and at the bottom they state that that figure has been updated.
The original text said 'over a billion'. 1.4 billion is over a billion.
- Yeah, this is just terrible journalism.
  
  I love how they went into so much detail about why the old numbers would be accurate, then proceed to say they can 'safely' say that windows has lost 400 million users over a sentence on a blog stating windows has 'over a billion users'.

I haven’t had windows for 5 or 6 years when I switched to Mac. But earlier this year I bought a cheap Windows 11 machine because Windows was required for a contract I thought I was going to get (but didn’t). I was going to return it but thought meh it might be nice to have a personal laptop I can play around with. But I was unimpressed with Windows 11 so much that it mostly gathers dust now.
I’m thinking this is the perfect opportunity to take the plunge into Linux. Has anyone on here used Linux and have any advice?
- As everyone here will say. Go with linux mint. Haven't used windows in months now and when I do need to its generally way more of a pain to do anything. Plus. Ms wants to shove their shitty ai in my face at all times (so they can recoup the billions they've most pouring into a buzzword). So I refuse to use it.
  You will need to have a learning curve with linux. Is basically a German car:" oh wow, this is so genius I love how this was designed! "And then "why the hell do i need a custom 12 pt socket to get this one bolt and why is it completely inaccessbile just to change a brake rotor"
- We all use Linux here brother 😄 but to be fair, it's not that complicated. Find yourself some simple tutorial on webpage on other device and just follow step by step and everything should be okay :) At least for me was, when I was first moving to Linux 😄 get yourself some good beginner distro like Ubuntu or Fedora and you are good to go :) good luck on your journey brother 🫡
- Yes. Though it depends on what you want. If you are willing to learn some stuff, and don't mind doing some maintenance, then CachyOS is hard to beat. It's fast, up to date, has packages for basically everything, and the documentation from both them and from arch linux the parent distribution is great. Otherwise Linux Mint, PopOS, Aurora, and OpenSUSE are all good options. I wouldn't recommend using Ubuntu directly anymore because of the enshitification canonical have engaged in. Debian is always good, but might not be what you are looking for in terms of ease of use or being up to date.
- Try a few distros they all pretty much have strengths and weaknesses. Run Linux boxes here for servers and other tasks and a mix of uses

I'll be joining soon enough, going to dual boot with Linux. Only keeping windows for games that won't work on Linux.

windows dying doesn't help. they are on a shopping spree buying every AAA game that tencent haven't already bought.
- Yay, monopolies
  
  Let's wait 'til the shopping spree is over and break them the fuck up <3

- Best gif ever. Download!

They just had to copy the walled garden approach of the competitors, and badly at that. They could have not pursued forcing users to a Microsoft account. They could've avoided the telemetry and ads business(/bloat). Google has them beat there anyway. They had the more open alternative to Google and Apple but they're trying terribly to be second fiddle to them. And now Linux has become a good enough alternative to what Windows should've been. They are still the choice for business machines, but they've been terrible with consumer devices.
- Microsoft for the past 17 years: We have a monopoly, so we can just copy people and become more popular than them. Aaaany day now. Anyway day now. Any day nowwwwww...

I'm about to make it one more...

Given there’s 7 billion people on earth, I’m a bit surprised this number is so low at only 1.4 billion. People will usually have a home computer and then use one at work, plus all the devices in data centers and other environments where they are not used as a desktop.
- Developing world is more about mobile than PC, so that does explain part of the discrepancy.

I was one of the 400 million.

Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.

I must be in the minority but generally I like Win 11. Most of my clients still on Windows as well so I have to keep up to date...
- I also found it OK-ish, at least after my usual disabling of BITS and SuperFetch (SysMain now, I think), and disabling auto-updates, I think in gpedit.msc, and using the provided BypassNRO.cmd to create local account.
  Alright, maybe not that OK, but after the initial setup it ran fine even on officially unsupported computer made in 2007. Just had to modify the installer by merging W11 image into W10 installer.
  Anyway, the Windows store or whatever isn't that used, and I got tired of updating every random program coming from .exe files. But similarly I don't like the large hops in versions like Windows 10 -> 11, or similarly with Linux Mint, so I went with Arch.
  Anyway, I'll be a smaller minority. I most liked Windows 8.1. It was really well optimized.
- What do you like? Or asked differently, what do you think is on Windows compared to other OSes?
- I'm using Windows 11 at work and I don't feel really a difference. I just had to double check if the start menu is really in the middle.

I wonder how many millions of computers are going to end up getting thrown away because they don't meet the ridiculous requirements for windows 11.
- I just recently built a computer, though truth be told it's basically my wife's old computer stuffed into a new case, we've been holding onto her old components as she's done upgrades. So it's basically a roughly 10 year old computer, it has one of the last AMD processors from before the ryzen era, but it was a beefy computer when she built it and it's still managing to run most of what's out there on acceptable (for me, I'm not exactly a graphics snob) settings.
  Of course it's not gonna be compatible with windows 11, so I've been figuring out what my next move is going to be. Most likely I'll bite the bullet and build basically a whole new PC and recycle this one into a home server or something, it's definitely still got a lot of life left in it, but I'd be lying if the idea of just going over to Linux isn't really tempting
  
  if the options are build a new pc or try out linux you've really got nothing to lose giving linux a go.

400 million user loss doesn't sound like "quietly shrinking". Sounds like outright hemorrhaging users because instead of improving, you are consistently making products shittier each year.
- It's from people ditching home PCs for phones and tablets. That's it. End of story. There are no significant numbers of people switching to Linux. They simply went to no PC.
  10-15 years ago I could have made an OK living fixing home computers. That time is long past.

Lots of valid points here, but then I wouldn't imagine a community like this actually liking Windows and/or Micro$oft. But here in the UK Mac usage is miniscule especially at work where my client base is, and is declining not increasing. I'd say that more than the OS the AI hype train is way worse for dropping numbers than the OS. Businesses here are using AI and just firing employees left right and centre. Every week a client says they have either fired a whole department and replaced them with using AI or outsourced the department to somewhere that uses AI to get the job done. If it continues at this rate the UK will have a massive unemployment issue in a few years where nobody, and I mean nobody works with computers like they used to.

I wonder how cloud accessibility plays into this. In the past if I had a dedicated windows app I might typically have maybe a hundred windows desktops accessing onsite servers. Nowadays I can replace that with thin clients and cloud based RDSH servers.

Because they made it shit....

I’m thinking they’re doing it on purpose. Think you’re a multibazillion company, want to quit your least profitable line of work (OS business) but it’s also your most famous front. Diluting a business is how you quit without scaring investors.

Windows 11 overheated my CPU so harsh that nearly destroyed my computer. Unneeded features and frustrating updates pushed me over

I've neutered my win 10 updates so they don't work and I've got Linux on two laptops out of 3 now. Going to move my server over soon, then eventually my desktop and the final laptop. Peacing out of the ms ecosystem

Most excellent news!

Outside of the biz world, people aren't buying as many devices that would use the os. Or not replacing the ones they had that can't upgrade?

People will keep breaking their arms stroking their own selves, instead of thinkinig rationally.
Sigh...

I began using Windows in 1992. I switched to MacOS this year and I'm never going back.
- As someone who has had to use Windows, OSX and Linux as a daily driver at different points, OSX was by far the most challenging to work with. Every few months something broke. Fully on Linux now.
  
  I’m way past making a living in tech, and so far (5 months) my MacBook is delivering a very satisfactory user experience. I’m not thrilled with the “radical” changes coming to MacOs, but I don’t have that much invested in the current version to fret over it. So far the biggest controversy about the new OS is how the finder icon swapped colours. I can live with that! I considered and tried some Linux distros over the past few years, but there was too much intervention required by me, the user. The “Total Recall” vibe of Windows 11 pushed me over the line.
  
  Finally! Someone said it! My company changed my work laptop to a Mac. It's been a couple of months, and I still haven't got used to the desktop environment. Navigating between open windows with regular mouse/keyboard is a pain.
  I find window grouping very annoying (this is also true for Gnome). What makes it even worse, is that the tilde is next to the left shift, instead of being above Tab. I think that's because we have British keyboard.
  
  As someone who has used Windows, OSX, and Linux as a daily driver at different points, Windows was by far the most challenging to work with. Every week there was some problem.
  In recent years, my company provided Dell with 32GB of memory running Windows would blue screen practically weekly. Most of the time it struggled to run more than one instance of an IDE. Windows finally crashed to the point that the only option was restore the OS.
  I requested a different machine and have been running macOS with less memory. Have actually been able to run more IDE instances than the Windows machine would run. No crashes.
  Completely Unix based OSes now. Linux servers. Linux desktops. Mac laptops.

I wonder if there's any correlation with AI killing the office job market.

I just wish Linux remote desktop support wasn't absolute dogshit.
- RustDesk, it's by far the best remote desktop software I've used on any platform.
  Tons of great features, open source, self-hostable, easy to install and configure, works on all major platforms including mobile. Cross platform works like a charm.
  
  Thanks. I’ll give it a try.
- It really isn't. You don't even need to port forward, you can use AnyDesk or TeamViewer or any other option entirely for free. There are also open-source options too.
  
  I’ve used them all. They all suck.
- There are plenty of options for both software and OS, so not every combination is going to have the same level of support as Windows, where every user gets the same experience.
  That said, I've heard lots of good things about NoMachine.
  
  I used NoMachine for the better part of a year, and I’d agree it’s the best of the options. It still sucks.

Where are they going? There's no way it's Linux, right? So I guess it's Mac?
- Phones and tablets. The younger generations are only using those for the most part.
- It's kind of linux. Also kind of mac. They're going to android and ios.

I know everybody's here to rag on Microsoft, but I honestly am quite pleased with Windows 11. I comfortably do software development in an Ubuntu shell using the Widows Subsystem for Linux and it honestly works like a charm. Then I can unplug and play video games in Steam and everything works great, there, too.
Of course this is all possible on Linux, but my point here is that Windows really isn't as awful as everybody makes it out to be.
Meanwhile, MacOS enters into a second decade of no innovation. It still relies on Homebrew for developer tools, still lacks any substantial improvements to Xcode and only ever receives iterative cosmetic changes like video lock screens and the new bundle of desktop backgrounds for its latest "update."
- You're trying to paint windows in a positive light when Microsoft is desperately trying to spy on us and force more advertising on us even though we really don't want it, and the only reason they can do that is because they have a monopoly. So yeah, it really is that awful.
  And if we want to do side by side comparisons of the available software packages, most things that you would need for your average office setup are free and come by default on your major Linux distros. On Windows, you have to install them manually, and the default options are mainly commercial. So you're paying more and possibly getting something worse, depending on your personal preferences about each software package and its alternative. That's pretty bad, my friend. Windows is competing with free and losing, but they have inertia and a monopoly.
  
  My personal experience with Windows has been different. ~~I've not seen advertising in Windows; where have you seen that?~~* I'm a bit shocked about Microsoft spying on me, too. Do you have any sources on that? It feels like that should be illegal in Europe and would make headlines.
  I don't use desktop office software and haven't purchased any desktop software in probably a decade. My business makes heavy use of Google Workspace and uses online services that are agnostic to the operating system. The only things I'm really installing on my machine are developer tools through apt-get and games through Steam.
  *) Edit: Windows periodically prompts to use Edge or subscribe to Office 365; I had forgotten about that because it's perhaps less frequent here in Europe.
- I don't think the biggest concerns about Windows are about functionality. It works perfectly well and even has some neat features. I'm using Linux and I miss the sys + v for clipboard history. The biggest gripe themes I see are the loss of privacy coupled with increasing sales pressure for everything Microsoft.
  Edit: I looked it up, of course there's a Linux equivalent to clipboard history. Added!
  
  sys + v can be bound to bring up clipboard history if you are using KDE!
  
  Yes, I probably use this hundreds of times a day! This is a perfect example of something missing from Mac that requires an App Store purchase to fix—same for better window management. I suppose Apple prefers this situation because it allows them to both monetize on a lackluster OS and avoid making investments to fix anything.

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