I paid money Windows 10 when Microsoft said "this is the last version of Windows - only updates from here on".
When they announced work on Windows 11, I switched platforms. It didn't help that the Windows 10 updates were incredibly obnoxious, restarting my computer regardless of overnight compute tasks I had running.
I feel Microsoft's main value add is (was?) their business focus. The system is meant for getting things done, and has backward compatibility both for files and for ways of working.
But then with Windows 8, things changed. Suddenly there's two control panels, the interface is totally different, and many more things. They shifted the paradigm on me.
But I have the same Turing machine as before. I'm doing the same types of tasks as before. Why do I have to do it differently? Now my work comes with the additional mental overhead of dealing with the Win 7 to Win 8 shift.
But I was willing to go along, thinking they'd eventually iron out the kinks and then things would work better than before. Win 10 seemed to be a step in the right direction.
So when they changed everything around again, I was done.
Windows 10 EOL is coming in October '25. So either it's replacing the hardware or running Windows 11 on unsupported CPUs. Or not running Windows at all.
> I mean, you can upgrade from w10 to w11 for free, without reinstalling full system.
Depends on how you have formatted your harddrive. If you used MBR instead of GPT Windows will shamelessly claim that 11 isn't compatible with your hardware. Which is a whole lot of bullshit and will probably lead to a whole lot of waste.
It has the advantage that Windows 10 completely stops bugging you about upgrading though.
I finally got the upgrade to Windows 11 and it's... fine?
I don't get all of the hate. Maybe it's because I'm late and everything has been fixed, but it's actually been my favorite version of Windows so far. It finally axed some of the vestigial UIs from Windows 8. And built-in driver support for things like controllers and bluetooth accessories have been a huge upgrade.
I'm ready to be showered in a hail of messages about ads or bloatware or changed layouts, but I found all of the defaults and settings relatively easy to change - if anything easier to find than even Windows 10.
This is a relatively tiny blip, and nearly every other hardware survey tool seems to indicate W11 adoption is chugging along briskly.
One of the biggest improvement for me was improved multi monitor and multi-DPI/PPI support. Being able to just put two different monitors next to each other and moving windows between them works. They just adopt their rendering on the fly to the screens DPI setting and it works with most current software.
One of the biggest issues that block me from moving to Linux, I run my displays with 125% and 150% fractional scaling. That just doesn't work like that on Linux, fractional scaling comes with many drawbacks.
> One of the biggest improvement for me was improved multi monitor and multi-DPI/PPI support. Being able to just put two different monitors next to each other and moving windows between them works. They just adopt their rendering on the fly to the screens DPI setting and it works with most current software.
This was a significant fix from W10 to W11 as it was truly awful with W10.
It already works quite well with current Windows 10, the true nightmare was before Windows 10, or maybe with one of the earlier versions. But there was another big improvement with Windows 11.
It's not fine. File explorer context menu, taskbar, it was a half baked OS when first released. It improved, but they shouldn't have release it as it was. Taskbar is still a mess, sometimes I have to reboot to get it working again. And still I can't move on the side.
> I'm ready to be showered in a hail of messages about ads or bloatware or changed layouts, but I found all of the defaults and settings relatively easy to change - if anything easier to find than even Windows 10.
The answer is very simple - you're just not a power user. You probably use email and a bunch of other specific apps and don't spend a significant amount of time in the OS (and configuring it).
That's not a bad thing. It's just how you use it for your workflow.
But please understand that power users work with the OS differently.
> I get your point, but it's going to be impossible to change anything and maintain every single person's workflow:
A configurable OS is harder and more expensive to maintain for MS and developers, so the trend is to reduce it in order to fit the 90% of the use cases and throw the 10% (arbitrary numbers) of workflows out.
Can't really blame them, but just so people understand the frustrations of others.
My Win11 upgrade broke the partition on one of my drives that was formatted as ReFS. I was able to fix it with a one liner that read the metadata and updated the ReFS version. But until it was fixed it was thrashing my HDD and explorer would crash because it was trying to read the disk.
Other than that, not terrible. But then again, I just use my windows install for gaming and dual boot into Ubuntu for anything research related.
It has annoying defaults with AI and Spyware stuff. The default UI also is too much like MacOS/ChromeOS. However, after 10-15 minutes of tuning, it becomes a better version of Windows 10, at least for my scenarios. I would NOT go back to Windows 10 right now.
Windows 11 was a medium update (XP SP3 like) package to Windows 10, which mostly includes quality of life improvements without breaking everything else. There was no "complete overhaul" jump as it was with 7->8 or 8->10.
I would not expect a user to run a pretty lengthy powershell command or edit registry to get the old right-click context menu though. The "More options" option is quite annoying.
Does anyone who works on Windows read HN? I'm just wondering as I nearly only see negative comments about it (particularly about the user-hostile features such as advertising and so on), and I wonder how anyone who works on this thinks that it's a good idea.
It would kinda be OK if it was free... but it's not - it's expensive, IMO. I've had to buy Windows 11 for the last two PCs I built for friends, and Pro was £140. Crazy that you have to pay that and then be subjected to abuse.
I'd leave and use Linux if I could... but Cubase doesn't run on it and that's my bread and butter, so i'm stuck. And no, Wine or any Open Source DAWs are not the solution, sadly.
2 years ago I refused to upgrade to Windows 11 solely because they removed the "Never combine" taskbar feature. Parts of GUI got slower for some reason, like an extra delay in opening the right click menu.
They've added "Never combine" back in because the users protested, but I'm still punishing Microsoft by not upgrading.
It was of course possible to fix with 3rd party software, but I absolutely can't wrap my head around why they were so stubborn about it.
140$ sounds like price for perpetual license that binds to your Microsoft account and can be transfered from pc to pc.
But you can buy legit oem licenses that cost something like 40$.
You simply won't be able to move it to new pc, but usually it doesn't matter much.
People avoid them cause "surely if they are thus cheap they must be scam", but it's not. They simply have restriction of permanently binding to single hardware. But again, usually it's worth it anyway
Here's a wild idea: how about we accept that the Statcounter data just isn't any good, should not be used as the basis of any kind of journalism, and definitely shouldn't be amplified by social media? It's incredibly flaky and volatile data gathered by a tracking company with undisclosed methodology.
It's rare that a month goes by without clickbait articles about small fluctuations in the data showing up on HN. And that the data is obviously trash.
Computers last for years and updates aren't synchronized, so the stats should have a lot of momentum, with changes in sales taking years to materialize as usage share. That's not true of Statcounter's data. Like, just look at the stats for the last year: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
Does anyone honestly believe that OS X market share dropped from 21% to 16% in a month? Even the idea is absurd. The fluctuations in "Unknown" operating systems dwarf literally every change that these articles get written about.
Or drilling in deeper, Windows 8.1 was supposedly 6% of US Windows usage in January, but <1% two months before or after. Garbage. Data.
Good observation since computers are bought and used for considerable amount of time, it leads to changes with momentum with slowly growing or declining market shares without spikes.
I’m wondering, what keeps Windows afloat? I’ve become a Windows person in my childhood, and stayed one because games, Photoshop and 3DS Max ran on it. I’ve long switched to Linux (and dual-boot to a very much unloved Win10 for games that don’t run on Linux these days), and I’m baffled that ads occurring in the start menu are a thing – I was similarly shocked when Ubuntu tried this, and will always be cautious around Canonical.
Inertia goes a long way, I guess – and switching OSs is kind of a hobby for a while before being productive again ..? I wonder, had I had a Steam Deck as a child, would I have been an Arch user now?
Would be interested in hearing other peoples’ stories.
The fact that it's the only OS you can get preinstalled on an inexpensive computer from a reputable brand is why 90% of its users use it. People willing to spend $1k+ for a laptop mostly buy Apple.
(ChromeOS is a minor exception to this, but its usage is negligible [1], probably because it's so limited by design.)
Gaming mostly, and inertia. But I feel like the choice of OS is a much smaller factor than it used to be. I have a Windows desktop and a MacOS laptop now, but I've used a Linux (Debian Gnome) laptop for many years and I used to have dual boot on my desktop.
Everything runs on everything now mostly, and the rest are web apps.
Chrome, VSCode, Obsidian, Spotify, Steam, Slack, Discord, Docker, Python, Rust, JavaScript (Node), decent terminal (Bash, Fish, Powershell)... That's pretty much all I need, there's almost no difference between OSs on all these nowadays, most data is synced, and I can switch between them seamlessly throughout the day.
The UX is also very similar between all modern OSs, actually Windows 10 is now quite clean and snappy, I might slightly prefer it to MacOS and Gnome.
Same as how they gained the market share in the first place - deals with sellers, businesses, governments. In some places, it was more expensive to not bundle Windows with a new laptop than to bundle it. Governments were given deals, support and bribes to build their infra on Microsoft products, including teaching Windows, Office in schools. And in the meantime, competition was stifled by any means necessary.
At work we write a CRUD-ish B2B application, and it started its life on Windows so is a Win32 application.
We're working on transitioning to the web so perhaps in a decade we'll be entirely off Windows, but for now we and our users run Windows. Directly, or indirectly via published applications.
At home it's primarily RDP. Haven't found any viable alternative for Linux, so my main desktop stays Windows for now.
X2go, and all the similar ones, work and is certainly better than nothing. But they're not in the same ballpark as RDP and as such not a viable alternative for me.
It's not a dig as such, RDP is integrated at a lower level so can do things X2go and similar just can't, at least yet.
Compatibility. I am sorry but Linux and compatibility is like oil and water. I can create a Windows binary and it works on Windows 7, 10, 11 no problem. On Linux I need to pack it in different formats for different distros - AppImage, Snap, Deb, Rpm, ... and then solve compatibility issues between different versions of glibc in different versions of Linux. So much work for so little gain.
I'm about to convert my Proxmox file/VM server to Windows, because I want it to double as a media server and Linux GPU support (much less hardware passthrough) is more than I want to deal with.
I converted my laptop from Fedora to Windows recently to be able to do some light gaming, and because I want to see if Windows suspend is better on battery than the quick drain I was getting on Fedora.
I actually just built a new PC this weekend, my first in a while, with a Radeon GPU. I decided to give Fedora Kinoite a chance on it just because Windows' transition to becoming an ad platform was really pissing me off and it doesn't hurt to see what Linux is like now, especially something weird like an atomic OS.
To my surprise, games just work. I haven't really attempted this in over a decade, but I was able to play Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite, Counter-Strike 2, Baldurs Gate 3, and Doom Eternal all without issues or configuration. Kinoite itself is pretty awesome; my system is immutable and treated like a git repo, KDE 6 is extremely polished and visually appealing, and any dev work just runs in their handy "toolbox" utility.
The rest of the stuff I use (Signal, Discord, Google Chrome, Blender, Krita, Godot) is all natively supported.
I don't see myself touching Windows again, it has nothing I need at this point.
Windows is good enough for the vast majority of people. Businesses simply care about achieving their broader goals (i.e., selling their own products or services) and want to minimize effort on tools required to do that. The vast majority of people know how to use Windows and Office, and although they both suck in various aspects, they're familiar and good enough.
It's not a bad OS, I'm thinking more and more about moving to Linux, but Windows 11 is fine for me and has the broadest compatibility. There is nothing that doesn't work with Windows, since WSL2 it runs nearly all Linux software, and there is nothing that bothers me too much.
And since most people are used to windowsUI, going out of their way to switch to Linux while still keeping windows installed just doesn't make much sense.
Also, with wsl I can switch back and forth seamlessly, while dual boot is inherently clumsy when trying to cross the barrier.
To be fair the first thing I do is disable all ads. Most don't dig that deep. And due to Europe all their "oh are you sure you don't wanna sign up for all these" now has consistent no button positions.
I think w11 is fantastic if only they stopped all ad nonsense.
On devices that have people working to support the hardware, like Steam Deck, linux works fine. On my laptop Windows gives me working sound, video without tearing, scrolling websites without tearing, not crashing during install.
It's cheap, runs on everything, has a decent user experience, has a large network effect, and has wide software and peripheral support. I don't see why it wouldn't stay afloat.
I don't personally like or enjoy using Windows but one good thing I have to say for it is that it has great backward compatibility: you can get old exe program from 20 years ago without too much of a hassle. It's less of an issue with VMs today but sometimes that's not an option for whatever reason.
But otherwise, yeah it's inertia, people will stick with what they know. Until it completely breaks and annoys them enough and then they'll go looking for something else.
Valve have done the world a huge favour with their work enabling Steam and PC gaming on linux. Windows 11 is so outright irritating I do not know how anyone could choose to use it. For most purposes KDE is a better Windows facsimile than Windows 11 is.
It is a shame the general audio story on Linux remains such a mess and so the non Mac DAW and video crowd remain hostage to the whims of MS.
a slow roll would be delaying the inevitable and holding back linux as a windows alternative. fortunately no relevant distro is doing what you describe.
Most distros have made wayland available but have not forced a change, and will not until wayland's issues get fully sorted. This is a good thing, as wayland doesn't bring the user much from a user perspective, only pain when x, y, or z functionality that has existed for decades breaks.
There were a lot of regressions that upset me. The option for seconds in the system time was removed. Right-clicking the WiFi/internet connection in the taskbar no longer has the context menu option for "Troubleshoot connection", forcing me to go to options, search Troubleshooters, click "Other troubleshooters" (Because troubleshooting internet is so uncommon, right?) and THEN troubleshoot the internet connection.
From what I read, Microsoft let some designers who only use Mac OS do the design, and they plowed ahead despite hearing extremely reasonable concerns that their OS developers had with some design decisions.
Oh wow, and only two and a half years after Windows 11 was released. Better late than never, I guess. I should have heeded the age-old warning of "every other major Windows release is terrible" and not upgraded.
> Microsoft let some designers who only use Mac OS do the design
I was wondering why Win11 ripped off that central icon taskbar thing from MacOS instead of keeping their iconic and proven layout. That explains everything.
I think the reasoning is that ultrawide / larger monitors are becoming more common and it's easier / faster to access the taskbar from the center than moving the mouse to the far edge. And if it's not easier, they have an option to move it back to the left. This is one of the least egregious changes, really.
I built my first gaming pc in 20 years about a month ago. Before, I had been mainly using linux as my os of choice. Windows is so very. painful. in comparison. Windows apparently replaced CMD with the janky powershell instead of adopting literally any popular unix shell. There's advertising and web results scattered all over the OS. Windows still doesn't have a cohesive apt-get type update functionality even though debian and other distros have had that since the mid 90s (a program such as MSI aferburner could simply register a repo url like how linux distros use PPAs, etc). Window's networking is janky, and it's firewall is pretty bad.
Honestly, the only reason I'm using windows is because I want a flawless gaming / vr experience on my $2500 gaming / ai machine. If not for that, or if I was ok with a little jank from proton, I'd go back to linux in a heartbeat. Windows is a penalty box in every other domain except for gaming. WSL only makes it livable.
For me it was an overall improvement over Windows 10. Every new release of every software has some drawbacks, but I got over getting upset about those little details. I just try to find new solutions, if old ones stop working.
I am glad people seem to be aware of the hostilities against them, and are voting with their feet. However, we are talking about a single percent point. Holding my breath. If people seriously put up with win11, I can only see it getting worse.
The people here are also the ones who tell grandma which computer to buy. You need mass market adoption, but you really also need the "developers! developers! developers!" (or sub "power users" for "developers") [0]
Yep. And I don't tell my relatives to buy Windows any more. I'm not a Google cheerleader but Chromebook is my number 1 choice if people need a basic machine to do webstuff and I want to have zero to do with its maintenance.
Vista had two major problems: Microsoft understated its minimum requirements and allowed it to be shipped preinstalled on machines that were far short of what it actually required, and UAC was specifically designed to make poorly behaved software unpleasant to use, which was a major problem when every Windows program was poorly behaved.
The first could have been easily avoided, but I genuinely don't know how MS could have avoided burning a version on UAC. Maybe if they had shipped it in a service pack first so that XP SP4 was the thing that got a miserable reputation? That clearly wasn't a reasonable option after the Longhorn disaster, though.
There were also a lot of small problems that got fixed on the way to Windows 7. 7 did feel a lot like Vista SP2 with some visual tweaks, but it would have been a really impressive SP.
Actually, I used Vista myself for around a year, and for me subjectively it was okay. I later upgraded that installation to 7 and used it several more years on the same hardware.
No, it’s just a general theme of Windows releases for the past 20 years. They make big, sweeping changes in one release that people don’t like, then spend multiple years addressing criticism until they come up with something that people like again.
Quibble as you may about exact version numbers, but the pattern is not really deniable.
23H2 release, which is rolling out slowly, allows the taskbar to at least show titles now. The width of each bar is variable instead of equal across the screen. But it's better than 11 launch.
> As for Windows 7, despite the no-support state and the continuous developer support exodus, it is still alive and kicking.
I know several people who still use Windows 7 as their main OS to this day. I totally understand them, that was the last version before Microsoft started ruining Windows with stupid touch-first UIs and overt contempt for the user. I also heard that Microsoft was telling hardware manufacturers basically "don't you dare release Windows 7 drivers for your new devices or else".
WSA was a flop because of the Amazon store exclusivity.
Almost nobody implements Direct Storage after years of it being available.
The UI worsened overall: new right click context menu is horrible.
TPM requirement on install.
Microsoft account requirement on install.
Only feature that works better on W11 than W10 is autoHDR. You are not getting too many people into W11 for just autoHDR.
Let's see what they do with W12 or however they'll call it.
Both are complete garbage and hinder the consumer PC market. I've had custom built gaming PCs since 2008, with my current build probably 50x more powerful than the one back then, yet the software has gotten worse.
I have ryzen 2400G. no Windows 11 for that cpu. 2018 is too old I guess. Anyway Linux of course works and steam nowadays works so well with windows games I really have no reason for windows 11 anyway.
Imho the TPM 2.0 requirement killed Windows 11. There's still huge fleets of incompatible, yet still perfectly useful, PCs out there - especially in large corp environments.
I have a 5-6 year old Lenovo Windows 10 laptop. Wondering when upgrade hackling from MS becomes intolerable should I upgrade 11 or just re-image to ubuntu.
With every release of Windows, I feel like I am in less and less control of my own computer. More and more things run/change/happen because Microsoft wants them to happen, not me. And things I do somehow still have control over, get regularly overridden by Microsoft at their whim. Windows is now even trying to stop me from using the basic Mail application, threatening that "soon" it will just out of the blue replace it with (unwanted) Outlook, without me having any say about it.
Apple is getting there too, but it's not as blatant as Microsoft. However, their opinions on how I should be using my computer tend to be even more sweeping and system-wide than Microsoft's. "Like that 32-bit software you've been running forever? Well fuck you, user, you can't anymore!" "You want to modify that file on your filesystem? Nope. Oh you got root? Still nope. Get lost."
Computers are supposed to serve the user, and only do things that the user commands them to do. Now, more and more, they are serving their manufacturers and the OS vendors, not the user.
I'm curious why, in 2024, anyone would want to buy a legit copy of Windows 10. Nearly every device comes with 10/11 preinstalled, and if for some reason it doesn't there are ways around that :)
"What's important" depends upon who is asking the question and who they are asking the question to.
I am a MacOS user now, but I wonder how Microsoft are faring in the aspects of stability, removal of bloat, fixing tech debt, refactoring of code to improve readability and bloat, addressing security issues, speeding up the builds, ensuring device driver stability on supported hardware, improving support for applications and use cases, improving actual as well as perceived speeds, and so on.
I have W11 due to building a gaming PC with a modern CPU with "efficiency cores", which W10 doesn't support proper task scheduling of. From a stability and performance standpoint the OS has been fine, but every update there's a whole new enshittified UI / UX feature that I have to figure out how to turn off.
When they announced work on Windows 11, I switched platforms. It didn't help that the Windows 10 updates were incredibly obnoxious, restarting my computer regardless of overnight compute tasks I had running.