With 10 months of support remaining, Windows 10 still dominates Microsoft's 2025 is off to a bad start amid statistics that show users are still giving Windows 11 a wide berth as Windows 10 continues to dominate the desktop operating system market. Figures for December 2024 from Statcounter – used because Microsoft rarely shares usage data unless it has something to boast about – confirm …
Windows 11 is change for the sake of it - and no shite developers spending hours on crap features nobody wants is no justification, apart from to keep their own jobs.
Then an excuse for hardware vendors to try and flog new hardware to users who neither need nor want it.
That's before we even get on to the AI and "Microsoft account" bull....
It is nothing but an utter shit storm.
But, but, don't you want "this horrible" deflation (if you fire them)? Isn't it just wonderful keeping bad businesses on artificial life support, preventing restructuring to actual needs and innovating? While gov jobs are forever whatever the "service" and the fiat currency devaluing instead.
What?
Microsoft is a private company - what has government got to do with it?
Besides, if you don't want to make the bodies working on useless shit unemployed, transfer them to testing. An area Microsoft are utter shite at and getting worse. Customers/users are NOT your effing test department
> Sorry, I need a computer to do actual work, not be a game of Whack-A-Mole with MS.
That's the reason I moved to Linux a dog's age ago.
It might take 3 months to fix something on Linux (e.g. finally discovering it was qpdfview turning /dev/null into a regular file) but IT'S FIXED.
In Windows, you fix something, and 4 weeks later it's broken again.
lol no. Windows 11 was fine when it was introduced. Nice even. Since then, MS has been aggressively enshittifying it. And I know some of you hate that word but there is nothing that better describes what they've done to it, turning it from Windows 10 (which was great) with a few UI tweaks into a rabid 'AI' monster with copilot popping up constantly offering to 'help' and which will screencap everything you do, send it to MS (eventually), and expose every single thing you've ever done to any malware that manages to get admin on your PC. Oh, and major stuff constantly breaking because the only thing they actually care about is their shitty 'AI'.
Of course savvy people can strip all this shit out, but the list of things I have to do to deshittify a Win11 PC is up to half a page (in notepad++!), and it keeps growing, and then of course every time there's a major upgrade like 24H2 MS puts it all back again, being HELPFUL as always. Of course a lot of it can be automated and group policied as well, but why would you spend all your time constantly adding to the list of bullshit you have to strip out of Win11 (and knowing MS will sneakily do end-runs around it to bump their numbers) and dealing with all the major things they break for it when you could just use Win10?
'the fact the new OS is still nowhere near to overtaking Windows 10 may alarm some Microsoft executives' - Only because then they'd have to take the blame for their own catastrophically shitty decisions to go all-in on 'AI' then have to try to make up revenue and 'features' nobody wants (actively hates, even) to justify dumping tens of billions of dollars down the skibidi.
I actually love the term. It accurately and succinctly encapsulates everything that is wrong with U.S. Biznizz (and probably Biznizz in many other countries,as well) in the 21st century, chasing what Greta Thunberg accurately described as, "fairy tales of eternal economic growth".
> I actually love the term.
The people who hate the term seem to be either
1) People who sneer at anything they think is too trendy, to be cool, and the term 'enshittification' is admittedly extremely trendy because actual enshittification is just the business playbook at this point. We are being drowned in enshittification, so yes the term gets used a lot.
2) HOW DAR U use this term about MY favorite giant amoral corporation that I have tied my entire sense of well-being to since I have nothing of my own to be proud of? YES [microsoft/apple/google/peletron/whoever] all suck, but I bought a Tesla and your use of that word about my Wankpanzer threatens my manhood and is clearly abuse of it.
I don't hate the term, nor have I expressed criticism of it before. However, I do find that it is being used more generally than it was originally defined. It is intended to refer to specific, long-lasting policy decisions, so when people use it for "I think it got worse", it tends to lose some meaning.
If it got worse because it is a way to extract more money from you or someone else (advertisers, mostly) because that is the way the people running the business have decided to change the business model, that is what "enshittification" was supposed to mean. If it got worse because they have a new UI designer who is not good at their job, that is something else. Even if that UI designer hired more of them and they're all messing up what once made total sense, and they had some programmer friends who don't understand why you don't catch and ignore exceptions unless you have a specific reason, that's not what the term referred to.
But when the entire QA team gets replaced by an "Insider Channel" of kool-aid glugging MVPs who pay for the "privelege" (not to mention paying customers beta-testers with forced updates in the "release" channel), and the entire Dev team seems to have been replaced by a demented chatbot, yes that is Enshittification
Except, username pun aside, most of the common complaints are not about extracting money. The taskbar isn't as configurable now? We could speculate why they did that, but it's pretty clear that it wasn't about money. It would only qualify if they later charged you to let you have the previous behavior back. Either they somehow thought that the 11 behavior is better or they thought it would take more work to maintain it and they could get away with not doing that work. The same goes for any of the AI features that nobody wants minus those few where you have a finite amount of credits. Those that are merely included are there because someone at Microsoft has convinced themselves that people want that. In my case, and likely everyone else who has posted so far, they are wrong, but they aren't extracting money for those features.
I think the hardware requirements are a much more convincing one. I make this distinction, not to defend Microsoft, but to keep around a useful term. We don't need a special word for things getting worse. People have complained about that forever and people have complained about Windows getting worse with subsequent releases at least from the switch from 3.11 to 95, probably from version 1 to 2 but I haven't seen it. A special term makes more sense when referring to the process that Cory Doctorow described when he made up the term, for example as described here. If the term is used for any change we don't like, then we'll have to use long phrases to get this more specific meaning in there, and that weakens the entire point the term exists for. You can't call attention to something well if it constantly has to be explained every time it's relevant to a discussion.
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The growth is possible with innovative new products actually wanted. Like iPhone. The cornucopia of possible services is unlimited. Example: China/Amazon.
The problem is central banks printing money to keep bad businesses afloat. While governments support irrelevant employment by making firing and workforce redeployment difficult. Deflation is actually good, because it reshapes the economy. (Not to mix with deflation caused by huge debt or the majority of population suddenly dead).
The largest bad "business" is real estate. Someone joked that the whole UK's economy is selling properties to each other. Which is probably so when bubble is growing: a giant pyramid scheme. Then it pops and governments devalue currencies to save debtors and creditors. Rinse and repeat. Worse yet, during the growth stage cost of construction materials and workforce shoot through the roof to meet the demand. The whole economy becomes hugely distorted. It is pity the Land Value Tax is not seriously considered as nobody saw a rich person without land. But it is not about rich/poor, but efficient usage of resources and sustainable economy.
Two more negative side effects of bubbly real estate are reduced workforce mobility and catastrophic unemployment among related jobs, especially engineering and construction, when the bubble bursts. Such high skilled workers are not easy to prepare or redeploy - creating another long term distortion of the economy and education system.
Yes, and don't forget the additional problem of fewer and fewer people being able to afford to buy or even rent houses due to the balooning costs, meaning that the government is doling out large amounts in housing benefit, which basically goes straight into the pockets of landlords where private renting is concerned (and a lot of it is private renting, due an increasing demand for a decreasing number of council / housing association houses).
> someone joked that the whole UK's economy is selling properties to each other. Which is probably so when bubble is growing: a giant pyramid scheme
Having lived through and was trying to buy a house in the UK during 1988/89 I can well an truly relate to that although the pain of negative equity during the following recession when the booming housing prices caused the government to crank up interests rates was real.
Thankfully I took the decision to pull out around the peak** and wait until the early 90's when prices had corrected a bit, however the UK does still seem to be obsessed with property and its price rather than it being a place to live in. Double the pain if renting from a private landlord who probably has dozens of properties that they gobbled up and you are paying their mortgage for.
So it is not really a joke
** had a house lined up for £24.5k , chain got gazumped (I blame the Estate agents for driving that) and a few months later got offered "first option" on it for £47k. Crazy..
It may be fine, but it wasn't needed. Windows 10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows, Microsoft said so. They could keep delivering two big updates a year, and unless they wanted to rearchitect it from the ground up there was no need to make a new version. It was a money grab, and consumers aren't going to update their PCs.
My mom has a Windows 10 PC, she'll have it for the rest of her life. I'm not updating it, because she doesn't keep anything on it that could be lost if she was hacked. Maybe I'll find one of the places that offers quasi-legit copies of the Windows patches Microsoft sells, maybe I won't bother. I suspect most consumers will keep using it without any patches, and they'll only get upgraded when the PC dies and they buy a new one.
My main machine has 16 cores (Ryzen 5950x), 64 GB ECC RAM and a Titan RTX, SATA SSD/HDDs (not even NVME, you read right). 24H2, besides from crashing and having to restart the explorer, works fast enough there. 23h2 was more stable.
Anything below, like my work laptop, i5-11320H, 16 GB RAM, NVME is crawling like hell of molasses with 24H2. Was much better with Windows 10. (Never had 23h2 on that one)
It is not the requirements, nobody cares about that much any more. It is slow and unstable.
My nameless former employer skipped version 13. They went from 12.1 to 14.0, and that should be a big clue.
I got called out for it once. I told them we absolutely had a version 13, and it was only compatible with Windows 9. The customer laughed and conceded the point.
Win 7, no forced updates of new features. No random reboots overnight. No more patch Tuesday.
Agreed, be smart about what you click on. But, it just works.
Where it is starting to bite my butt... Browsers are nagging about it. When they cut off support, and web pages stop working, that will force the change.
"Many editions of Windows 10 are due to drop out of free support on October 14, 2025. Affected users will then have the option to purchase Extended Security Updates (ESU) to keep the lights on a little longer or keep using the operating system and risk falling foul of unpatched vulnerabilities."
By then Microsoft will have been issuing regular patches for it for over ten years. Surely it must be fixed by then?
-A.
There is absolutely nothing in Win11 which I want,
What I do not want is to have to spend an age getting used to win 11, particularly as my Win 10 system is heavily customised so that it works the way I want it to and not the way M$ says I should use it. It might be possible with a lot of work to restore Win11 to something like my current Win10 setup but at the end of that process I would have gained nothing.
"The Register asked Microsoft ... whether it would consider changing the hardware requirements of Windows 11"
Why would they? There's nothing in it for them. The free upgrade is likely to stave off class actions from people who'd just bought W10 boxes. All the rest are expected to buy new kit and with it new licences or, failing that, extended support. Those are revenue streams. Free upgrades for those who they don't have to upgrade aren't. About the only possibility - if it happens you read it here first - would be a paid-for "special" W11 version with the H/W requirements removed.
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I tried win11 and it offered nothing over win7. Before the redmondites start crying about speed and security, I NEVER had any security problems with 7, probably because I didn't click on every URL or open every email that popped up and always ran Norton or similar products. The only reason I upped to 10 was because mictosoft's sycophants crippled their hardware and firmware to not run on 7. Now that 11 has umpteen dozen security and operations patches every week, trying it again is a non-starter. One would hope that a company that's been building something for over 40 years would be able to get it right and not be fatter than the Hindenburg. And comparing 11 to the Hindenburg is quite appropriate.
From the article:
Even though Windows 11's percentage of the pie is still bigger than it was this time last year (when Statcounter pegged it at 26.54 percent), the fact the new OS is still nowhere near to overtaking Windows 10 may alarm some Microsoft executives.
Dear Micros~1 executives,
It is clear that "the Public" is not interested in buying what you're selling. Ain't Cap'talism grand? Now trundle off to your workstations and provide a product that "the Public" wants. Oh, and while you're there, maybe cut back a bit on your Millennial Marketdroid's influence; succumbing to their endemic ADHD-fueled whimsies just isn't working for you, now is it?
Sincerely,
"the Public"
Quote from OA
"Statcounter's figures are calculated based on more than five billion page views per month by users worldwide on its 1.5 million member sites."
Presumably Statscounter can fingerprint specific *machines* between those page views and sites?
I don't suppose there is the slightest chance of an error bar or statement of margin of error on these percentages.
If Statcounter are claiming MoE less than the second decimal point of a percentage then it would be nice to have that stated explicitly.
(Good reporting on the effect of aggregation by country on the final figures though).
On a similar topic, I wonder whether it might be premature to start analyzing exactly how Windows 11 lost in market share when it was one month and a 0.82% difference. I have a theory: business machines stopped being used as much in December because some people were away, but personal machines didn't have as big a drop. If business machines are slightly more likely to be running Windows 11, and I think that is likely*, that could easily give you that result. If it falls consistently for the next three months, then we can consider it more reliable.
* Businesses replace their computers more regularly, meaning that some of them are likely to have gotten ones with Windows 11 preinstalled. Some of them may have a Windows 10 image they apply to every machine, but those are also the types of companies that would have eventually built a Windows 11 image they could use. Home users tend to have longer and more erratic replacement cycles and often users more willing to refuse updates over and over. I know several people who consistently refuse to install updates, even small security-only ones, and some of them are willing to press the "remind me later" button every day even if there is a "don't remind me" button they could have pressed if they looked for twenty more seconds. Therefore, I think it is very likely that a higher proportion of home Windows machines are Windows 10 ones than business machines.
"Many editions of Windows 10 are due to drop out of free support on October 14, 2025. Affected users will then have the option to purchase Extended Security Updates (ESU) to keep the lights on a little longer or keep using the operating system and risk falling foul of unpatched vulnerabilities."
This is so that they can make money of any vulnerabilities that they created. Instead of $0.00(and some respect) that they were getting to fix them.
It's more that it offers bugger all to the users.
This is not like Win 98 that users really wanted. Or 7 that arguably offered real useful improvements. Or even 10 which replaced the excrement of 8.n
10 pretty much lets users do what ordinary users want it to do. Win 11 mostly seems to be trying to stop them doing it.
Though this does fit in with the Microsoft script. Which is; Find the features that users want ( even if it could do with some improvement), then undermine and remove these, leaving and pushing all the stuff they don't want.
Writing with fond memories of my Windows Phone
11 stopped "getting out of my way" and inserted itself into my way.
Everything from the dumb fixed taskbar to the moving of "shutdown" and "logout" behind yet-another-hidden-menu, etc. shoving more things into "apps" (the other day, interestingly, all Windows Store apps went haywire and wouldn't let me open them... there was no way to fix it but every "normal" app just worked. A few reboots and Windows Update runs and it fixed itself (fortunately, because I had NO way to fix anything otherwise)). It's a mess. It's a mess of GETTING IN MY WAY and stopping me and ordinary users from just using the OS to run applications (which is all it needs to do).
7 was great because it got out of your way. 10 was great because it got out of your way but let's be honest - we were forced to move to it and a lot of junk was shoved in that nobody wanted.
Windows 11 has just bogged everything down into "apps" and removed all user customisation in the name of "UI/UX" that nobody wants. Enterprises are forced to deploy it, everyone says "Why?" and ignores it.
I want my OS to load and get out of my way. If I don't want to be badgered by notifications, I want to be able to turn them off. If I want my taskbar to be left-aligned, what business is it of Microsoft? And if I prefer the old start menu, why can't I just use it (no, instead, I have to "search" for every program at ENORMOUS computational expense).
11 forgets that it's an OS. It thinks it's a baby-sitter. The vast majority of users in the modern age are not babies and don't need sitting on the computer. We've been using them all our lives. Remember when Windows 3.0 first introduce a mass-market point-and-click GUI and we included solitaire to subtly train users on drag-and-drop? That was clever and useful.
Remember when Windows 11 said "feck you" and moved all the useful networking options behind a horrible search GUI, made them 5-6 clicks away if you KNOW where to click, and ultimately ends up just running the old control panel dialog anyway? Or when it slapped Copilot into your taskbar without ever asking and starting taking screenshots for AI training without your consent? Yes, it's a bit different.
It's like Microsoft have completely lost sight of what they're selling customers - a modern operating system with GUI. What we have is a marketing tool for their latest fad slapped over old Windows 10 which then does its best to try to hide all the useful features without ever replicating their functionality.
In work, I may have no choice. But personally, I can't see me going to 11. Next time I need a laptop, I'm back to Linux I think, which is ironic because I think desktop Linux is clunkier than ever with systemd and modern DE's. But I ran Slackware as a primary desktop for 10 years so it's nothing I can't battle through.
But Windows, and Office too, are no longer an OS, a GUI and an office suite. They're just marketing tools to get you to upload everything to the cloud and push their latest fad in your face against your will. It may take an actual digital apocalypse (e.g. a long-term collapse of a major cloud) to notice it, but that's all they are.
"I want my OS to load and get out of my way."
Amen to this, have an upvote!
The OS should be a secure platform that allows me to run my required applications. I don't want ads for Edge, Office, OneDrive etc, I don't want stupid restrictions or UI failings to make it harder to do my work, I don't want pointless notifications popping up all the time.
Win 7 was perfect for this. Nice looking, flexible, did what I needed.
Win 10 was ugly as sin and very messy, but was capable and flexible enough that it worked.
Win 11 is restricted, limited and enshittified. The Start Menu is appalling, the taskbar is lacking basic functionality, the UI looks nice, but is messy and badly designed. Despite the drawbacks, it offers no practical benefits over Win 7/10. No thank you!
I have to "search" for every program at ENORMOUS computational expense).
Worse, far worse. Cognitive and time expense. Having to stop, think about what software I have in a given category and what its actual name is. In effect, If you have more than one programme to do a certain tasks,or maybe a programme that you don't use often or which has an unhelpful name ( or a combination of these more often than not e.g. Balbolka or whatever it's called, or Greenfish, or freac to give just a few examples form my collection)) you need to be able to organise then into useful groups ( video editing /Office software/sound players and so on)..
Quote "I want my OS to load and get out of my way. If I don't want to be badgered by notifications, I want to be able to turn them off. If I want my taskbar to be left-aligned, what business is it of Microsoft? And if I prefer the old start menu, why can't I just use it (no, instead, I have to "search" for every program at ENORMOUS computational expense)."
Sorry I can only upvote you once!
All I want the OS to do is operate the machine and allow me to use my Wordprocessor / Spreadsheet / Presentation software / photo editor / CAD package / Web browser (of my choice) without endless nags, adverts and updates that take 15 - 20 minutes on a 16GB Core i7.
I'm on a Win10 machine at the moment, only because I need to do some CAD drawings on AutoCAD. The machine is customised to the way I want it and most (if not all) of the crapware has been removed (Cortana, Copilot, one drive etc). My default photo viewer is the good old Win7 viewer app not "photos"
BTW: My taskbar has been left aligned since 1998, even my Linux Mint taskbar is left aligned.
I have tried Win 11 on SWMBO's Dell Laptop and e.g. I can't put the taskbar on the left, it does counter intuitive things with the desktop and the endless nags and adverts...
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My last laptop was upgraded from Windows 11 to Windows 10. There is no way I would put the current Win 11 on a machine I own. For starters I have a 32:9 monitor and have the start bar on the left side of the screen; you cannot do this with Win 11. I will just hope Micro$oft do the same as they have with Win 2012 and offer a 3 year extended support for users. I can then stick with Win 10 until they fix Win 11 or release Win 12 with the ability to turn or all the help functions and unnecessary noise on the display that just annoy you.
I use Windows 11 for work and I quite like it. With the Enterprise edition, our admins have put in (probably lots of) work to strip out the cruft, ads, AI, shovelware etc and the result is a good experience. It loads quickly, is very responsive and the window management works great for multitasking. If home users could (easily) get the same experience it would be great. However, on my home PC I have to deal with:
- Apps being installed without my consent
- AI garbage that I don't use
- Every time there is a major update I have to go through an annoying wizard trying to get me to buy microsoft services I don't want or need
- The time Edge harvested all my saved passwords and history from Chrome and switched itself to my default browser without asking.
It seems mad that Microsoft have built a pretty good product and seem to be purposefully making it annoying as possible for home users to live with. I really want to cut my losses and go full Linux, but there is still just a bit too much faff to get some games running even with Proton so I'm stuck with them for now.
Many editions of Windows 10 are due to drop out of free support on October 14, 2025. Affected users will then have the option to purchase Extended Security Updates (ESU) to keep the lights on a little longer or keep using the operating system and risk falling foul of unpatched vulnerabilities.
Hardly worse than falling foul of the unpatched vulnerability that is Windows 11.
Swapped for 4 years to Mint daily driving when win 8 came out. But moved back to 10 when it arrived.
Will be doing the same again maybe for good this time..
Is it, can we say it?..
I dunno but as an msp owner I have written to a number of clients to discuss a migration to Linux..
After all, what do half your servers run on.. yeah the one we never have to touch, not the windows ones..
I think as corporate capture continues to take over The World And Their Governments, the capitalist model which Microshaft and others use (i.e. Send Us Your Money) is only likely to get worse, so hoping W12 will be a 98 or 7 or 10 is probably futile. Which js why open source Linux has to be the way of the future for all discerning peeps. Even Apple is screwing up royally with its AI that tells you the BBC have said people have died who haven't.
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