Nearly half of Steam's users are still using Windows 10
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I have a number of laptops and desktops around home, and I mostly cannot distinguish between the Win 10 vs Win 11 ones - except, Win 11 is more annoying. The inability to move taskbar is one, but they've also removed a lot of keyboard shortcuts for common desktop and file explorer activities for no reason I can discern. So I'll type up a shortcut, nothing or bad things will happen, and that's my clue "oh yeah, this one is on $#&@ Windows 11" :-/.
Also when I need to configure something, like sound or network or power options, it seems like the number of separate windows in different styles to hunt through keeps proliferating.
The control centre generally feels better than Windows 10, except for switching sound outputs or getting to the volume mixer, which require too many clicks.
The settings app is a little more cohesive and has had some more control panel functionality transitioned into it.
Nothing they couldn’t have fixed in Windows 10, but it is overall better for me due to the above.
My new-ish work laptop runs Windows 11, but my personal desktop for gaming on a 6th gen Intel doesn’t meet official requirements. It has TPM 2 though, so once October arrives I reckon it’s better to run Windows 11 in a “technically” unsupported manner rather than stick with an OS which is no longer getting updates (and no, I will not switch to Linux as I’m not looking for another hobby).
Respectable. The state of desktop Linux is pretty good but it's very much a 'your-mileage-may-vary' situation. Every 'exotic' thing you introduce into your setup (having a variable-refresh-rate monitor, having an HDR monitor, two monitors of different refresh rates, running Wayland over X11, having a brand new GPU, having an NVIDIA GPU) is another possible, sometimes likely, source of pain.
Some of the multiplayer games I play with my friends can be played on Linux, but I make a point of using my Windows partition for those because I don't want to waste their time on my troubleshooting.
Win11 gave me tons of sound and Bluetooth issues to the point it felt like Linux alsa issues from 2010 or something.
I still have my win11 install on another partition but I rarely use it now. Just for niche stuff.
Sometimes. Sometimes it does. It's all very random. My work laptop drives me nuts, when plugging back into the dock my windows return to where they were about 3/4 of the times. A quarter of the times they just all bunch up on the main monitor.
Windows only “forget” their old place if you move them or with applications like Slack they are “minimized” to the system tray.
Then windows decided it was my turn to be nagged and OH MAN I understood ...
I have no good answer for exactly how that situation plays out. I swear it's not a local device setting.
At least I hope non-admins can't upgrade, but knowing MS, maybe they can.
I hate all the advertising and spyware, so I'll never run Windows 11 at home, but we have a whole team dedicated to disabling that sort of stuff at work, so I don't have to think about it.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...
When I had the choice I still went back to Windows 10.
My Windows machine has seen an uptick in use over the last months for development purposes, but it's still stuck on Windows 10. I don't think I need or want to upgrade it.
Two questions:
- Do I need to upgrade it?
- How do I get comfortable with Windows shell? PowerShell doesn't do Unixisms. There are too many shells. Command Prompt / CMD, PowerShell, there's some utility that installed mingw64 terminal, and WSL is also a thing. Which one(s) should I use?
I'll expand on my shell question: The thing I'm struggling with now is that when I install utilities like git, cargo, etc., they seem to work for some shells but not others. They seem disconnected and not have the same access, visibility, and privileges. What can I read or do to get me over this hill? Which one(s) should I use? (I assume "CMD" is dead?)
I'm doing mostly Rust / TypeScript development on Windows, FWIW.
The first rule of PowerShell is to install the "real" PowerShell [1] instead of using the one bundled with Windows (which is out of date and importantly doesn't interoperate as well with non-PowerShell commands). I still don't like it, it's way too different from UNIX shells, but at least it's usable.
CMD hasn't gotten any improvements since like 1995 but it isn't going anywhere either. If you need something vaguely like a UNIX shell and that's always available, it's not a bad choice.
WSL2 is fine if you work mostly within its environment, which is made easier by things like VSCode's Remote extension. However, accessing Windows files from within WSL2 is surprisingly slow, so you really want to commit to it if you start using it.
I'm doing Rust on Windows too and apart from installing the MSVC tools and a compatible version of libclang, and occasionally figuring out how to write PowerShell, it's not been too much trouble. WinGet is pretty good and the library has quite a large selection of development tools.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/insta...
That's the current plan but it wouldn't surprise me if they change their mind given the large Windows 10 install base still out there. They've done that before with Windows XP and 7.
-The absolute crap of a start menu now being all but useless -Advertisements -Increasingly forced to online accounts rather than local
Also the UI changes didn't improve anything, and the changes make upgrading more painful and frustrating than needed. One thing OSX has got right it doesn't keep making major surface change every upgrade.
I could strip it down and it performed and stayed out of my way. It wasn't ever pretty, I didn't like a lot of it, but I could just get what I needed out of it.
Then it started to change, UI / UX had about 20 different flavors. I couldn't find settings anymore. Updates would change settings / undo my explicit settings. Eventually it felt like I was using an ADWARE OS.
I fled to macOS and haven't looked back. I'm even ok with less local gaming to avoid the windows hassle.
It's a bit of a sad thing for me. I do think fondly of my "old days windows" experiences in the sense that I was excited about updates and "Start Me Up" always reminds me of a special time in computing that I loved:
I do agree the "there's an app for that" is heavily ingrained in the online user suggestions. The mac power users giving suggestions are often VERY much not knowledgeable. Oddly I do find there often is a command line solution that is better than an app ... but it's NEVER the first suggestion and a pain to find out sometimes. That is a pain, I need to turn a thing off, not an app with 20 features surrounding it ;)
For Linux, it either works (some things), works with effort and time (many things) or wont work (some things) weighted heavily towards the middle in varying degrees.
For windows, it either works (many things), or works in a weird not fully functional way that you can't fix or change and ends up being as frustrating as not having it at all, or as having to fix it in linux (seemingly more and more things), or doesn't work at all (a few things).
I can't stand using Windows anymore. Yes when it works its OK, except the UI gets worse every update, it gets more bloated with ad-ware, keeps trying to force you to online accounts and subscription models, and when it doesn't work the way you want, its a nightmare that typically can't be fixed (more so than any windows OS before)
I'll be shopping for linux pre-installed and natively supported laptops, or Apple/OSX going forward (and I hate apple and refuse to use most of their services, but their hardware is solid and OS is now far better than windows)
For me, they've been way more nefarious than the all too frequent annoyance of the Windows update into the Edge upsell screen.
New boss, same as the old boss, I suppose.
I looked up a Windows "Server with Desktop Experience" license the other day and we're talking $1k+ here....I can't help but hover over the buy button.
I've been so entrenched in the Unixey space for like 13 years that going back to Windows would be a pretty substantial productivity drain in the short term, but I'm not sure I'd want to anyway, simply because gaming on Linux has gotten so good, largely thanks to Valve.
Like, it cannot be overstated how utterly good Proton is now. It's to a point where I almost never check compatibility, because it's more than likely going to work just fine. GameScope in particular is such wonderful thing in its own right, and it has genuinely made Linux the "Gaming OS" of choice for me.
I know it's not perfect, my understanding is that there are some games that break with online play with Proton, but for the games I play I have been very happy with Linux.
Granted, I don't really play new AAA games. Most of the stuff I play is either 10+ years old, or an indie game. Proton seems to be able to rock those just fine.
Edge came out in 2015 and they kept supporting IE11 until June 15, 2022.
Given that the major Windows 11 features were things like introducing a screen grabber to make your passwords and private data vulnerable to theft, it's no wonder people have resisted adopting it.
Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1, Windows 10 - all of these had a published 10 year support lifecycle when they came out.
Windows 10's end of support is completely expected and as planned.
With Windows 11, they've moved it to a new lifecycle model, so it's less clear how long it will be supported for.
Windows 10 at one point advertised that it was the last "new" release of Windows ever.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/938964/microsoft-clarif...
I guess it was one exec at a conference, but they didn't really explicitly disclaim the statement either.
- Windows 7 was supported for 7 years after Windows 8 came out.
- Same for Vista after 7 and Windows XP after Vista.
- Windows ME had 5 years of support after the release of Windows XP
- Windows 98 had 6 years after ME.
- Windows 1, 2, 3.0 and 3.1 all had 6 years of support after Windows 95 came out.
Only 4 years of support after the release of the next version of the operating system is highly unusual for Microsoft. They have always supported previous versions long enough that you could skip one version without running out of support, usually even two entire releases.
Instead they follow the schedule introduced in the "Windows 10 is the last Windows" era where two new versions are released each year and each version has three years of support. But this only makes sense if you treat Windows 11 as a rebranded Windows 10 that got a new name for legal reasons. Which Microsoft pretends it isn't, so I don't feel compelled to follow that reasoning when it benefits them. They can't have it both ways
And the x years of support after the next Windows release is irrelevant. Their product support is more or less 10 years and that didn't change. People were skipping versions because they want to use their license as long as possible and they still do that with win 10.
Among all internet users, 60% are still on Windows 10. Both worldwide [1] and in NA [2]. And that figure includes all the corporate machines that get replaced on deprecation schedules. Among private computers the share of Windows 10 might be even higher
1: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/d...
2: https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
Then I read the stories saying 11 has even more telemetry that you can't disable, ads on the start menu, Edge that you can't get rid of... and when I got around to setting up Windows on it I ordered a Win 10 license. They're still available even now, I think.
Win 10 does try to trick me into upgrading to 11 randomly on boot (full screen ad with a very hidden "fuck off and skip this" button) but so far I've managed to avoid it.
No ads on the start menu. No bs notifications. OneDrive disabled and set to not auto-start.
I did have to disable all of the "interests" on the whatever-widget in the lower left corner, only leaving on the weather, so now it shows the current temperature, but doesn't feel the need to pester me about "breaking news". And I'm really irritable about that shit. Even text or an exclamation point grinds my gears; I feel that same way on mobile phones. No Best Buy, you don't need an indicator on your icon because I've dismissed your 3-times-weekly sale announcements.
Not sure about telemetry, need to look into that. I'm not really against telemetry, per se, provided it has a valid use case. If they're taking pictures of my screen while I'm working to train AI or do god knows what with it, I will deal with that (including moving full time to a distro, which I have done in the past).
Otherwise, my only real complaint is they manage to eff up the mouse in some way every every 4th update or so. Latest one is special pointers failing to return to normal after mousing away from whatever caused the special pointer (i.e. the pointer switches to indicate resizing a window and then doesn't switch back).
Beyond that, mostly smooth sailing. Wish WSL2 would finally officially support 6.x kernels, but they've been blocked on some random issues for 8+ months now.
I'm running Pro btw.
The licenses are the same -- you can install Win10 media using a Win11 license key.
Too great a risk if you ask me.
When you custom build and you're in the EU where reselling unused keys from volume licenses for cheap is legal, at least...
I mean I find it pretty hard to understand what are the actual requirements besides TPM 2.0 but all >= 8th gen Intel CPUs should support that?
Besides I bought AMD. Needed the thing for parallel builds and I was getting more cores for my money. Plus actually usable integrated graphics. Plus less power consumption.
AFAIK most CPUs with > 4 cores are 8th gen or newer and should be supported (besides old Xeons, Skylake-X and such but I doubt there are that many of those ). Also not sure about AMD but their market share was quite low pre 2020.
Such a machine will probably not be able to run the latest AAA titles at a decent framerate, it may run smaller games, but so will a recent "web browser machine". The iGPUs in these machines are starting to get pretty good, probably as good as good as a 10 year old gaming rig but with much better energy efficiency.
I think overall it means that "people", even if they have a more positive view of Linux than they did 10 years ago are still lacking the confidence and know-how to be able to make an actual switch.
There are reasons, sure, but there's absolutely a pool of people right now who would be suitable for Linux and appreciate the switch but there just isn't enough activation energy there to get them over the line.
Anyway, Valve is probably the most likely party to pull that off.
Even Microsoft learnt that with WSL, hence why WSL 2.0 is a plain VM, hardly any different from Virtual Box or VMware Workstation, other than is already on the box and doesn't cost extra.
I have installed Pop!OS on it and the combo Steam+Proton is great. I've kept my Windows 10 partition to run Skyrim with mods (last time I checked, it didn't run on Linux) and maybe the occasional Proton-incompatible game.
I tried once to upgrade the W10 partition to W11, and got an error saying that my CPU was not supported.
The day W10 reaches EOL is the day I finally delete that Windows partition. I could just keep it offline, but I don't really play Skyrim anymore (and worst case, I'll wait for Skyrim to run on Proton). As for the occasional game I can't run on Linux, I'll just pass my way. There's way too many games I still want to play, if editors filter themselves out from my reach, it's not my loss.
Combine that with some of the smartest people I know at microsoft telling me that their current task is to add one iframe to the UI to inject more advertising (and that it had taken six months) and I am an active advocate on not upgrading. I have a test gaming system I'm going to install Arch on to prepare for the win10pocalypse.
This is so sad. A good senior dev can accomplish a lot of good for the customer in 6 months, but instead they're adding ads to an operating system so some Principal Program Manager can get another promo for making his VP's ad revenue go slightly up.
Maybe the number of Steam Decks sold is too small to show up in the statistics? Or maybe it reports as Arch, which is the top category of Linux here.
In any case, I'd like to express my gratitude for Steam's excellent Linux support. If anyone is going to usher in the year of the Linux Desktop, it's Steam.
A couple open replacement options are in the works but nothing is 100% compatible yet
Every time a new Windows version comes out, since Windows XP, that there are forums filled with now the max exodus to Linux Desktop promised land is finally going to happen.
Meanwhile not even Valve was able to convince game studios to port their Android NDK games to SteamDeck, they have to translate Windows/DirectX, and lets see for how long Microsoft will keep tolerating that.
I have the Linux kernel all over the place at home, yet not one of them is a GNU/Linux distribution.
That coupled with the usual non-technical resistance to anything that is unfamiliar, meant that in about two years time, all those custom distros for netbooks were for all practical purposes gone from the market.
All netbooks on shopping malls were using Windows XP, netbook edition.
Nowadays it hardly matters, because the netboook market audience nowadays rather use Android and iPadOS.
How did Microsoft deal with that?
Is that something we actually have to worry about? Wine has been around for more than 30 years in one form or another, and AFAIK Microsoft hasn't really taken any legal action against them.
Are you saying that that has been the case because Wine has historically not been great, so Microsoft didn't perceive it as a threat?
Think of how Microsoft quickly killed the Linux based netbooks, when they really started paying attention, then the new tablets market did the rest.
It's tough to say. Annoying Linux people like me tend to have horse-blinders on towards the rest of the world (hence the constant meme of the "Year of the Linux Desktop"), so it's tough for me to speculate with any kind of objectivity.
That said, Steam Decks seem to be selling pretty well, and people don't seem to mind the SteamOS part of it. I think that there's a chance that Linux will be a permanent fixture for Valve now. I don't think they're going to overtake Microsoft, but I think that "Steam Deck" is a viable enough of a target platform for game studios to develop against that it's here to stay.
I think part of that is because of its form factor already limiting the device. Like how Android and iOS are fine on a phone or tablet, but I doubt most people would want it on a desktop computer.
Not talking about the Linux part, but the real test with the Deck is whether or not it'll stay a target platform with its low performance and Valve not releasing a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve's Steam Deck verified program already checks performance on games and newer games like Horizon Forbidden West and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are failing.
I think especially for indie games, which are typically less demanding than the big new AAA shoot-at-stuff games, the Steam Deck might be an "unofficial standard" for quite awhile.
Though I don't work in the games industry, so I'm talking out of my ass. Again, I'm an annoying Linux person so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Like you say, indie games are less demanding, so even the Deck can be overkill. I remember the Vita being the indie target before the Switch. So many good indie games got ports to the Vita.
Since the Steam Deck is still fundamentally “just a PC” [1], it has the advantage not really requiring specific “ports” of the games? At least that’s how I think of it, again I don’t work in the games industry.
Of course making stuff “Deck Compatible” might require some specific work to make sure stuff can run on it at a playable framerate, so it’s not completely free, but it does get the advantage of inheriting pretty much every last-gen PC game automatically.
[1] in the sense that it’s running a fairly standard Linux kernel on x64 hardware, with typical desktop Linux features available.
Also note that PlayStation makes use of FreeBSD, yet another UNIX based system, even though they use their own proprietary 3D API.
What Microsoft might do, there are legal and technical options they can take, remains to be seen what.
Sure, but I also think it was a matter of getting a huge library of games available on the Steam Deck immediately. Instead of waiting for every GameCo to port their game over to SteamOS, which may or may not happen no matter what (the console world is full of entropy from what I can tell), they can get like 90% of every single game on Steam available on the Steam Deck right away. I don't know exact numbers, but the Steam Deck might have the largest technically-compatible library of games out of any portable console at this point, although a lot probably aren't well optimized for it.
But of course, this leads to Proton also being a crutch; if you know that Proton is going to do a decent enough job running your game on Linux, there becomes little incentive to spend extra time and money getting a native Linux port on there.
It's tough to say. IANAL, but I feel like if Microsoft were going to do anything about the API emulation scene, they probably would have done something about Wine in the last thirty years. I think they're way more likely to do something funky with DirectX that is difficult or impossible to properly translate into a Vulkan shader, thus breaking compatibility with newer games.
Maybe from Windows 3 to 95/98, but I remember (perhaps incorrectly) that moving to 95/98 and/or 7 was pretty stock experience.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/ms-dos-and-win...
Although for me personally I would add Windows 2000.
Nobody wanted to upgrade to XP. It was called the Fisher-Price OS because of the way they made the GUI colorful with oversized icons/shapes and rounded corners everywhere.
The old rule of thumb was that every other version was the good one, so people were naturally skeptical of XP (and after having seen ME, who could blame them). Not sure if that holds anymore, or if there is a good one.
But I agree, I like to see both source and destination if I'm GUIing it.
53.6% Windows 11
43.8% Windows 10
1.59% WINE
0.79% Steamdeck
0.13% Windows 7
0.03% Windows 8Instead of upgrading to windows 11, I’m switching to x plane, which has a native Linux build.
My game machine on W10 runs the games I want it to run well enough as well, which is nice.
I doubt those are regularly updated.
As for everyone else, it's almost identical to 10 aside from one minor graphical change. Personally I don't get why so many are opposed to it.