Windows 10 holds 70.03% market share, while Windows 11 continues to decline

[Redaktion]

Statcounter has published its latest report on Windows version market share. While it may sound surprising, even after around nine years of release, Windows 10 currently holds 70.03% of the market share. Windows 11, on the other hand, has seen another drop, from 26.68% in March to 25.65% in April.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-10-holds-70-03-market-share-while-Windows-11-continues-to-decline.833344.0.html

[George]

IMHO: Not at all surprising.

Until MS allows the users of their OS's the ability to lock down the 'feature set' and actually select (and customize) the UI WIN11 will continue to be rejected.

I currently have 3 WIN11 devices that I have to 'blockade' from getting constant and unwanted changes. One device has not been used for almost YEARS since I allowed it to be upgraded to WIN11.

[NikoB]

Everything will change at the end of 2025, when first M$ will stop supporting W10, and then browser manufacturers will stop supporting it, as they did in 2023 for W7-W8.1. If there was support for at least Firefox, many would continue to sit on W7 until the old hardware fails, when it is quite enough for surfing the Internet.

As soon as support for W10 in Chrome and FF ends, the W10 song will be finished. Formally, M$ has committed to support LTSC 1809 until 2029, and LTSB 1609/LTSC 2021 until 2026, but I highly doubt that browser manufacturers will continue to support only LTSB/LTSC versions when the mainstream W10 Home/Pro/Edu/Ent is no longer supported. And as I already wrote, Google has already quietly removed support for old APIs for hardware decoding of H264/265/VP9/AV1 in Chrome starting from about version 100 in LTSC 1809, because that users are already being forced to switch to LTSC 2021, and its support period is 2-3 years shorter...

Most likely, browser support will be completely closed not in 2029, but in 2026. After that, everyone will either switch to W11 (and W11 will suffer a fate similar to W8-8.1, although much more people switched to it than W8 previously) or to W12 with more large spy probes. At best, 1-2% will switch to Linux.

Where should people actually go? The x86 codebase is huge and almost all of it is designed for Windows. The population will not go anywhere, they will go again with a bow to M$.

[Bizarro_NikoB]

I'll continue to use Windows 10 IoT LTSC Enterprise and skip Win 11.

I have extended support till 2032 so hopefully MSFT releases a worthy successor before then or Linux DEs catches up enough for my use cases that I can finally make the jump.

[kek]

Everything will change at the end of 2025, when first M$ will stop supporting W10, and then browser manufacturers will stop supporting it, as they did in 2023 for W7-W8.1. If there was support for at least Firefox, many would continue to sit on W7 until the old hardware fails, when it is quite enough for surfing the Internet.

As soon as support for W10 in Chrome and FF ends, the W10 song will be finished. Formally, M$ has committed to support LTSC 1809 until 2029, and LTSB 1609/LTSC 2021 until 2026, but I highly doubt that browser manufacturers will continue to support only LTSB/LTSC versions when the mainstream W10 Home/Pro/Edu/Ent is no longer supported. And as I already wrote, Google has already quietly removed support for old APIs for hardware decoding of H264/265/VP9/AV1 in Chrome starting from about version 100 in LTSC 1809, because that users are already being forced to switch to LTSC 2021, and its support period is 2-3 years shorter...

Most likely, browser support will be completely closed not in 2029, but in 2026. After that, everyone will either switch to W11 (and W11 will suffer a fate similar to W8-8.1, although much more people switched to it than W8 previously) or to W12 with more large spy probes. At best, 1-2% will switch to Linux.

Where should people actually go? The x86 codebase is huge and almost all of it is designed for Windows. The population will not go anywhere, they will go again with a bow to M$.

They wont. Compared to previous Windows versions (and the old Windows Server), there's now the LTSC IoT version which goes up to 2032 in support if I remember correctly.

Windows 11 is Windows 8 all over, except now the dreaded changes comes in an AI package. If Microsoft thinks people will go back just to use some gimmicky AI features, they better think twice.

And code-wise, W11 is not that different than 10. 11 was even rumored to be another feature update called Sun Valley early on when it was first leaked.

[vertigo]

My work computer was switched over to 11 a week or two ago and within about 5 minutes I found 3-4 fairly major things about it that were annoying and impossible to change to how they were before. Since then, I've found at least a few other things and I've also found the taskbar to be either glitchy or just downright broken and it seems slightly slower overall, especially File Explorer. So despite reading here and there over the past couple years that it's matured and has been perfectly usable for at least that long, my experience strongly suggests otherwise. Based on my time with it so far, there is absolutely no way I will switch to 11. I'll keep using 10 and just reinforce it myself or get my hands on the corporate security updates, or I'll finally make the move to Linux. Because if I have to deal with all these ridiculous design decisions that MS is forcing on us with 11, I may as well just deal with the issues on the Linux side and at least be done with MS and their complete disregard for users.

[Hunter2021]

Just do what I do, permanently disable WiFi connection on your Win11 PC and install Linux as a dual boot.  Never use Windows for online activities, do it on Linux instead!  Eternal peace and bliss of the mind!

[RobertJasiek]

W11 has a few bugs that W10 does not have. For example, when switching users, W11 sometimes does not log out the first user so I have to toggle WLAN manually. W11 wastes even more storage. The W11 GUI is blown up unnecessarily: my empty start menu is ridiculously huge. W11 needs yet a few more tweaks against telemetry. Nothing serious but all annoying enough to keep W10 on my other computer as long as possible. W7 was the best by far but the code has not kept up with current hardware. Microsoft has been too stupid to keep the W7 GUI and just change the code.

[Plants]

Windows 11 is Windows 8 all over, except now the dreaded changes comes in an AI package. If Microsoft thinks people will go back just to use some gimmicky AI features, they better think twice.

What are you talking about? Windows 8 was really nice and literally the leanest Windows since 2K. Wish I could still run it.

Are you one of the boomers who were complaining about the useless Start button being replaced with a hot corner freeing up taskbar space?

[Jerry]

Windows 11 is Windows 8 all over, except now the dreaded changes comes in an AI package. If Microsoft thinks people will go back just to use some gimmicky AI features, they better think twice.

What are you talking about? Windows 8 was really nice and literally the leanest Windows since 2K. Wish I could still run it.

Are you one of the boomers who were complaining about the useless Start button being replaced with a hot corner freeing up taskbar space?

Is this sarcasm?  Windows 8 was garbage worse than vista.  I'm no boomer.

[NikoB]

Is this sarcasm?  Windows 8 was garbage worse than vista.  I'm no boomer.

W8.1 is really much better than W7 and faster than W10 and even more so W11. But it was less popular.

[Pollotarian]

Windows 8 was garbage worse than vista. 

Please do not mention ignorant statements if you've no idea what you're on about.

Windows 8 was really nice and literally the leanest Windows since 2K. Wish I could still run it.

+10,000% agreed, couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you. Can't believe people keep going on about win 7 / xp being the "golden era" of windows.

They weren't. Real (power) users know win 8 (along with 2k) were peak / pinnacle windows experience. Never forget.

[Pollotarian]

Edit:

Err,  win 10 / 7 / xp **

[NikoB]

XP really was the last "golden OS" with a real "user experience". This is the last OS in which you could completely disable the page file and work only from RAM with excellent response. This is the last OS where the system latency was an order of magnitude lower than that of subsequent versions. That is why the sound engineers loved it so much and sat on it until the very end.

W8.1 was simply a polished W7, but it had one extremely negative drawback, which, to the sadness of all professionals, migrated to W10-11 - the lack of a classic theme with compact window control buttons. In W7 this topic was still there, but the vile M$ deliberately disabled V-Sync in this topic, which supposedly worked in browsers in the Aero theme (I personally checked this statement and V-Sync does not work in W7 there either). I didn't care much about the tiles - all this can be easily removed, but there is no way to return the classic theme without a patch of system DLLs in W8-11 for the most compact (packed) interface on the same screen resolution in comparison with W7 and older ones.

Another interesting point about W10 vs W11 - without any patch of system DLLs in W11 you can return the beautiful analog clock of W7, but this is not possible in W10. Apparently M$ deliberately returned this as a setting in order to somehow lure users away from W10.

This fall, W11 LTSC is finally being released, which means that M$ is finally confident that it has at least some kind of stable kernel for the enterprise version with a long-term (5+ years) service channel. Let me remind you that the W10 LTSB came out a year later in 2016.
The funny thing is that W11 is essentially destined for the same fate as W8.1 - it is a pass-through OS in front of W12 (in which obviously user spying tools from M$ will reach new heights).

I would love to use LTSB, but the new drivers do not support it and there is no support for VP9/AV1 hardware decoders, or rather wrappers with VLD video driver decoders for browsers.

In addition, as I already wrote in LTSC 1809, Google deliberately disabled support for the old VP9/AV1 hardware decoding method, which worked until about version 100 of Chrome, as I discovered. I was never able to return VP9 hardware acceleration under LTSC 1809, although I installed the latest versions of the VP9 wrapper from the M$ store. In LTSC 2021, everything already works as before, even with the same old video drivers from 2020. But LTSC 2021 is even worse than 1809 and it only has 5 years of support, in contrast to 10 years of 1809. So, LTSC 1809 lovers are already being slowly smoked out by such vile methods to LTSC 2021 or W11 LTSC 2024.

You can recall other disadvantages and advantages of each version, but it will take a long time to write. And no one knows 100% of all the problems.

In any case, the new hardware will force everyone to switch first to W11 and then to W12, even if the idiotic neural networks didn't give in to you in vain. Or go to Linux and constantly wait for years for support for current hardware and constantly struggle with a hellish mess and a complete lack of responsibility in a team consisting of "a swan, a crayfish and a pike."

[vertigo]

Didn't spent much time on 8/8.1 and only on my SP3. It didn't seem *bad*, but it didn't seem as good as 7 or 10. But that could just be because the Surface itself was garbage. The common opinion at the time, though was that 8 wasn't very good and 8.1 was a big improvement over it, making it much better. After all, it's the only version since 3/3.11 that actually had such a major update they incremented it that way (unless you could XP SP1/SP2, but IIRC those were really just collections of all the minor updates to that point). So that should say something about the quality of 8. So I'm not sure if those praising 8 actually mean 8.1, or if they genuinely though 8 was that good. Maybe it was, I don't know, as I said, I didn't use it much. But then, there's lots of people saying 11 is great, as good as or better than 10, and I definitely don't agree with that, so clearly there's varied opinion on what's good and what's not.

I'm just curious to see where these numbers go over the next year as 10's EOL approaches and passes. The fact 10 is gaining ground and 11 is losing it despite new computers being sold with 11 really says a lot to me. I foresee 10 being the new XP with people clinging on well past its EOL, and it will be interesting to see if MS extends it like they've done before or if we end up in a situation where a LOT of people are on an increasingly unsecure OS with a decent percentage finally jumping ship over to Linux, which continues to improve as Windows continues to decline.