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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft's efforts do seem to be paying off (or, at least, some combination of Microsoft's efforts and Windows 10 PCs naturally aging out of the install base). While Windows 10 is still running on the majority of Windows PCs worldwide (about 53 percent, according to Statcounter's May 2025 data)

53% is huge mere months away from the end, and actually means that the efforts have resoundingly failed.

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anecdotal evidence, but even my non-IT friends prefer to try out Linux than upgrade to w11. Meanwhile most corporate already swapped to w11.

53% is a huge failure on MS part, but that's what happens when you design OS to be a bad copy of your competition.

Interesting, how many of your friends stuck with Linux after trying out?

Just one data point, but I have gone full Linux Mint on almost all my computers. Being a MS guy since 1991 at 7 years old. Remember being in aw at windows 95 at 11-12. Avoided apples my whole life.

Seeing how much better my friends apple computers ran than my modern windows computers, I just went full Linux. Loving it. Telling my parents and friends to consider it instead of buying a new computer to replace the 'slow one'.

I have one laptop I got used to be able to daily drive Linux and for now am on Zorin Pro. A lot of people don't like paying for support, or Linux, and v17 definitely has some problems but so far I'm impressed how well it runs win32 stuff out of the box and looks great. Support is pretty awesome so far too.

Also yeah, I could do without paying just fine and work as basically a Windows engineer so I can Google stuff but I'm just over trying to deal with getting Linux working.

I do also have a steam deck and gaming is stellar on Proton but you still need Windows for DRM triple a games.

If you put your Linux questions into any decent AI it basically always solves your problems. Or atleast it did for my beginner tier issues I guess.

Adding another datapoint:

We're down to just three Windows boxes (four if you count the Xbox Series X) in our household, and are likely to winnow that down further following the resounding success of a Linux gaming box on old Sandy Bridge CPU + GTX 970 GPU + HDD. The eldest gamer in the household is so sick of Microsoft's nonsense that the only reason they're not fully on Linux already is because their production box is reliant upon Intel RST, which makes dual-booting a dangerous game.

Including the rest of my family, we have but one other Windows box amongst an extended family of ~dozen folks. Everyone else has moved to macOS or Linux.

Speaking from an IT perspective, I've also seen more organizations court macOS as a standard machine in lieu of Win11, especially with Microsoft's shift to InTune and away from Group Policy. Microsoft thought inertia would carry their customers into the cloud, but the costs involved posed enough of a speed bump that customers are reconsidering their Microsoft estate, provided they weren't already in Azure and/or didn't have M365 E5.

It's a bloodbath. Microsoft extending free support is tacit acknowledgement they s*t the bed and have no other gameplan ready to go right now.

The desktop computer is dying. The only reason why I still have one is because I play videogames. Serious stuff is done on my phone.

If we want to talk about disaster it's that Microsoft lost the smartphone battle. The real future of computing.

The phone/tablet as most common 'personal computer' is what I see that will be a constant bleed on the audience for the desktop PC. At least for the home audience the price trends over the past decade seems like a big deterrence, and the old model of having a desktop for home use and an enthusiast upgrading/modernizing it involves more. I do a fair amount of gaming on my 8-9 year old PC, and it's hard to justify an upgrade (which at this point is a whole new build) for more recent games versus getting a PS5 for 400 bucks or so (or a used one for 200-300) which is less than a reasonably capable/modern GPU by itself.

I guess my concern is where are the gradual on-ramps for getting people into that desktop PC (windows or otherwise) environment so they can explore and discover what it enables for them? There's no trouble if you already know you're an enthusiast, you can make an informed decision if the bill of parts is worth it, and I don't see professional-workstations going away as a tool.

If we want to revive interest in the desktop or laptop computer, and cost is a concern, then we should be steering more folks towards pre-built NUCs and SBCs with an efficient OS on top (like a friendlier Linux Desktop). The problem is that so much of the internet is so bloated and heavy that, with the way the average person uses a computer, the specs quickly become anemic.

So I guess I’m banging my efficiency and optimization drum again, is what I’m saying.

Spent about 12mo on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint) and there were just too many issues.

Ubuntu had weird quirks that almost always turned out to be related to my using a snap package. Of course I wasted countless hours getting to the point where I realised that was the issue.

Mint stopped booting once for unknown reasons on modern hardware and I had to reinstall. Another time I wasted half my day trying to get my whatever-the-distro-calls-taskbar to reappear when it decided to disappear. Debian was stable but every time I had an issue I had to battle through advice that was too new to apply.

Linux is great at making me feel like I’m crazy - I must have wasted 2 hours trying to figure out how to get an app image to run nicely from the whatever-the-distro-calls-a-start-button. Everything seemed so complex and backwards compared to Windows. I have to configure the icon myself?! This was automatic in Windows 3.1. I wasted so much time thinking I was missing a better way only to realise, nope, this is the way. It was bizarre that everybody was happy to run a random 3rd party GitHub app to solve this. Unbelievable that in 2025 downloading an app and getting an icon to start it involved so much complexity (appimage vs flatpak vs snap vs gz vs sh… who the hell has time to figure this out?!).

Eventually I decided I’d had enough and don’t want to spend the rest of my life messing around like I’m a teenager with all the time in the world, and switched everything over to Apple, which is working out great.

And yet, the "Year of the Linux Desktop" is perpetually coming/here.

The impression I have is that YotLD windows migration evangelism is honest so long as you don't go off the beaten track, but as soon as you do it gets hairy quick and that's where I find some of the evangelists dishonest by omission. It's fine if you just use a browser, or software as provided by a repository, or your steam games work and you don't need/want to mod/tinker with them. Otherwise you might be dropping someone recently transplanted into unfamiliar territory and they haven't build up a new knowledge base yet.

OTOH I recently started a new position and was given both a win11 laptop and a win11 cloud desktop and the experience after having used Fedora at pro level for the last 10 years is frustrating.

Virtual Desktop is broken. You can't quickly move a window both on a different screen and virtual desktop at the same time. You need to do it in 2 steps. There are some type of windows (like auth ones) that will appear on all virtual desktop regardless of your wishes.

Windows updates that don't go through with obscure, non informative, codes. When you use a search engine for it, you are led to Microsoft Community with absolutely zero solutions. Sometimes after a random amount of days failing and random reboots, they end up going through.

Hitting win key and trying to search for an app or document randomly freeze. The popup menu appears but you can't type anything. Badically if you don't put apps icons in your taskbar you are never sure you will be able to start it without opening a terminal and starting it from powershell.

There are various stupid stuff, like why can't I create a symlink in my own user directory without being an administrator?

I can't put the taskbar wherever I want. I am fairly sure that last time I used a windows 10 years or so ago I could have the taskbar at the top or on the side. In win2000 and XP too.

UI is super slow all the time.

Peoole complain about appimage/flatpal/snap, this is worse on windows where you have random exe installer, winget, chocolatey, scoop and the windows store. Worse even when winget you seem to still have to go through the interactive installer. If I am using the command line, that's because I want a modern package installation and the app ready, not having to click next n times.

It also took my IT 2 weeks to solve an issue where whatever security tool they are using was complaining that my brand new computer was infringing a number of security policies and my access to some resources online would be limited.

And I am forgetting a lot of other frustrations but basically it feels like you are fighting the OS all the time and an insane amount of time is lost doing so. It doesn't help that I am not allowed to install WSL.

Don't forget Windows 10 was marketed by Microsoft as the final version of Windows. Plenty of people are probably fed up with Microsoft's games.

They did give everybody on Windows 10 the Windows 11 upgrade.

Is that similar? That would make it the last version you'll have to pay for. At least for most people.

Some conditions may apply:

* hardware compatibility permitting

* until we decide otherwise

* unless “the numbers” stop climbing

* until AI suggests so

Machines were still being sold without TPM modules when Windows 10 was 'last Windows', so no.

Some conditions may apply:

* hardware compatibility permitting

It was never marketed as such; it was a single dev evangelist running their mouth.

> When I reached out to Microsoft about Nixon’s comments, the company didn’t dismiss them at all. “Recent comments at Ignite about Windows 10 are reflective of the way Windows will be delivered as a service bringing new innovations and updates in an ongoing manner, with continuous value for our consumer and business customers,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “We aren’t speaking to future branding at this time, but customers can be confident Windows 10 will remain up-to-date and power a variety of devices from PCs to phones to Surface Hub to HoloLens and Xbox. We look forward to a long future of Windows innovations.”

https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-ve...

You missed the weasel words.

> We aren’t speaking to future branding at this time

The purpose of weasel words is to sell falsehoods as pre-meditated gaslighting. The deception was intentional and the press and public believed the deception as intended. I wasn't suggesting that Microsoft is legally liable about anything, only that many people believed their lie as they intended.

Many people believe the earth is flat but we don't put any credence into their beliefs.

If Microsoft encourages people to believe "the world is flat" and deploys deceptions and weasel words when directly questioned for confirmation there are two conclusions: (1) Microsoft knows the world is in fact not flat and (2) Microsoft wants everyone to believe the world is flat. And ultimately when people do believe the world is flat it is in fact a belief Microsoft has encouraged.

Dev evangelists are marketing staff.

It might not have come in a press release, but it came from marketing and wasn't taken back for quite some time.

IMHO, everybody was happy with version 10 forever, but then Apple decided 10 wasn't good enough, so Microsoft had to copy them.

How is it working for your non IT friends? I made the switch when Windows 8.1 went out of support, rather than switch to 10. And while proton worked much better for gaming than expected, there were enough complications to make the switch difficult for a non technical person.

after short help with bumping kernel version for one friend(newest AMD cards weren't supported in default kernel included with mint at that point).. it just works - they are gaming without issues.

The "bad copy of your competition" is probably in relation to the Windows 11 program launcher that resembles the centered design of the MacOS launcher.

But that can be easily removed using tools like Explorer Patcher and Open Shell.

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

The thing that made me switch to Linux is Microsoft's pushing AI into everything. I do not want their AI constantly looking over my shoulder.

windows 11 looks like a KDE rice

When I made a complaint about their UI changes being unintuitive the response was that the intent was to make Windows more familiar to people un-familiar to Windows, as in make it more familiar to those who use Macs.

They assume existing windows users are a captured audience and are trying to capture the Mac market without realizing that they're instead making everything much worse.

Though now ironically with Apple going the whole 'glass' detour people using Macs may be more familiar with Windows. Could be a win for the Microsoft fast follower strategy - so what do I know. I wouldn't have bet on Apple fumbling but here we are. I still prefer Linux to both Apple and Windows.

There's literally options in taskbar settings to change that. You don't need another program.

You might be seeing it in the same lens as macos for instance, but windows' model is fundamentaly different and that deadline is only for specific cases (that's why they can play the "sign up for backup and we'll expand your time" game)

For instance Enterprise LTSC version of Windows 10 is officially supported until 2031.

A ton of the devices inside these 53% have no need to move away from win 10 in any urgent way.

I'm seeing it in the lens of the stated goal mentioned in the article "Microsoft is still sticking to its guns in promoting Windows 11 upgrades"

Thanks. To that point, they still have years to reach that goal, we'll see in a decade if they utterly failed.

I am running Enterprise LTSC version of Windows 10 in a VM for .NET development and it started to show full-screen popups saying that “it’s time to upgrade” to win11 with some text suggesting that it is urgent and time is running out.

That's such a Microsoft move. Corporate users under managed machines will never see that popup so it won't be an issue, so it's mainly heckling the users that probably installed Windows themselves or have a direct access to the someone who can perform the update.

On OS updates I'm willing to give them a pass, but that kind of split and "foot in the door" pushiness is so typical.

If your org has a fiscal year that begins in the middle of the calendar year (July 1), there might not have been the budget to do the upgrade until months away.

Compounded with general upgrade procrastination...

In order to make that claim you'd need to compare it with rates in past upgrade cycles to see if it's worse or better.

I am not sure. The world is different. Perhaps Windows 11 is doing better than Windows Vista or Windows Me, but does it matter?

I'm still on a i7 4770k, waiting for non-bugged intel CPU's to launch, and upgrading to Win11 always fails

Intel cpu manufacturing issues were solved like a year ago.

>waiting for non-bugged intel CPU's to launch

What?!

I'm assuming they're talking about spectre/meltdown which have mitigations slowing down performance, but the hardware is vulnerable without those mitigations

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