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Comment by sour-taste | Hacker News Reader

Steam users are more likely to be on win 10 than others because they often spend more money on gaming rigs than people buying web browser machine. With the hardware requirements of win 11 (tpm, others) many gamers will not want to throw out their working machines to satisfy Microsoft's hardware demand.

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It's the other way around: PC gamers have more computer knowledge than the average user and actually upgrade their hardware. Windows 11 has been out for 3.5 years now.

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...

I'm curious what Microsoft will do in 8 months when over half of PC users will be running a Windows version that doesn't get security patches. As a comparison to your 60% figure for Windows 10, Windows 7 had around 30% market share and Windows XP had around 25% market share 8 months before their respective EOL dates. The only options I can think of are loosening the Windows 11 system requirements (dropping the TPM requirement for example) and doing something similar to the GWX program that forced Windows 7/8 users onto Windows 10, or extending the Windows 10 EOL date.

They could just disable Windows 10 through their updates or put it into some kind of read only mode. Basically a more extreme version of what they did with Windows 7 when it went EoL where they disabled wallpapers and showed a bunch of popups.

Well 2 years ago when I built a new desktop i took great care to order hardware that works on windows 11.

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.

I'm running Win11 but I had to check, because I forgot. I remember having to turn off a bunch of bullshit when I first installed Win on this machine but there aren't ads or anything. The most annoying thing it does is power cycle when I'm not expecting it, in order to update. Pretty sure there's a setting for that I haven't touched.

The power cycling is especially annoying for me since I dual boot and I (intentionally) have grub boot into Linux by default. The bright side is it encourages me to spend time in Linux by default!

> when I got around to setting up Windows on it I ordered a Win 10 license. They're still available even now, I think.

The licenses are the same -- you can install Win10 media using a Win11 license key.

> The licenses are the same -- you can install Win10 media using a Win11 license key.

Too great a risk if you ask me.

Risk of what?

Getting some "special" license key that doesn't work like that.

When you custom build and you're in the EU where reselling unused keys from volume licenses for cheap is legal, at least...

I'm talking about mainstream MS keys you buy at reputable vendors, not sketchy eastern European keys. If you're going to pirate it, just pirate it.

Was it possible to build a PC with new components that wouldn't be compatible with Windows 11?

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?

Many custom build PCs had the fTPM disabled by default in the bios. It was buggy and caused performance issues on AMD systems at the time and since few people buying their own motherboards were using it, it was a pretty obvious fix for the motherboard makers.

The TPM is on the motherboard as far as i know? I remember the mobos were specifying if they run windows 11 in descriptions when I ordered.

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.

Been running Win11 for a long time; used to be on the Insider track, so the upgrade came early and automatically.

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.

It's hard to tell but it seems that no more than 20% of Steam users have pre 8th gen Intel CPU. I'm looking at CPUs with 4 or less cores and Intel was shipping them as late as 10th gen so it's probably considerably more so it's probably considerably less than that.

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.

If you are a "serious" gamer and have a machine that doesn't support Windows 11, you are probably considering an upgrade anyways.

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.

Steam users are more likely to be on win 11 than others because they often spend more money on gaming rigs than people buying web browser machine. Many of them will want to throw out their working machines to satisfy Microsoft's demand and upgrade to latest hardware to get 300fps

I doubt I'll be able to use windows 11, even just for gaming. I think when I won't be able to game on 10 I'll just install Linux, or steamos?, and I'll just play whatever I can. And I just won't play any games that require windows for their DRM reasons.

I did that, I'm gaming on linux mint with steam and don't miss anything. Mostly everything works, only a playstation-dedicated wheel doesn't work reliably. PS4 pad works fine in most games. The rest that are native windows games work without hitch. I even tried running some demoscene entries through steam to test my gf card, works too.

That doesn't make sense, Windows 11 was released in 2021. People who spend more money on their hardware are probably not using a 4+ year old machine at this point.

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