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Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz | Windows 10, on the other hand, managed to grow its share of that market

Despite Microsoft's push to get customers onto Windows 11, growth in the market share of the software giant's latest operating system has stalled, while Windows 10 has made modest gains, according to fresh figures from Statcounter.

This is not the news Microsoft wanted to hear. After half a year of growth, the line for Windows 11 global desktop market share has taken a slight downturn, according to the website usage monitor, going from 35.6 percent in October to 34.9 percent in November. Windows 10, on the other hand, managed to grow its share of that market by just under a percentage point to 61.8 percent.

The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade. The stats also revealed a small drop in the market share of its Edge browser, despite relentlessly plugging the application in the operating system.

471 comments

  • "But people love getting spammed with advertisements..." -Shareholders

  • The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade.

    Yeah no shit! When my computer does full-screen, disruptive things that I didn't tell it to do, I figure out how to remove that malware. I've been off Windows at home for about a month now, thanks Linux Mint! Getting some games to work has been challenging, but most things have just worked and quite a few work much better!

    Performance is up overall, and my confidence that my computer isn't running a bunch of secret ad and spy ware is way up. Hardware like my gamepad and microphone would randomly disconnect and have issues on Windows, all working perfectly now.

    Unfortunately I'm still deep in MS land for work, but there's almost a comedic quality to it. Everything's very slow, everyone has constant issues with Teams, or Office online, or Dynamics, or copilot shoving it's tendrils into everything. Watching businesses struggle to keep operating in the face of Microsoft's inadequacy is like being a mechanic watching a motor grind to a halt because the owner/manufacturer replaced all the oil with syrup.

    Like yes, it's my problem to fix, but I'm just glad it's not my car.

  • Look, I don't trust Statista numbers at all.

    People are free to disagree on that one, Statista most of all. But what I think is undeniable is that these sub-percentage point changes are entirely within their margin of error (same goes for Steam, incidentally). You can look at trends over time, -and I think it's pretty undeniable Win11 has struggled to onboard the Win10 userbase-, but I wouldn't overreact to these short term updates.

    • I don't know much about statista, but yeah the steam numbers linux users love to cite regularly fluctuate by like 25% and windows usage has been shown to basically depend on how active the chinese market is.

  • The fact that any company is able to show you ads after you PAID for their shit is bonkers to me. Don't get me started on repair and being able to unlock the bootloader on your device. No wonder education is very expensive and extremely hard to attain. They love the uneducated, so they can fuck them hard like that. Fuck all of them.

  • I think many people in here need to realise that most people don’t care about their OS, or Copilot or Recall or anything like that. I don’t know what the reason is for this but most people don’t change their OS.

    • Most people care about knowing how to use their OS, with as few changes as possible. If they use Windows at work, they will most likely get Windows if they have a computer at home.

      If you have ever taught someone how to print and it took 5 minutes. You should know why they want it to be as close to the same at every computer they step up too.

      Some people hate search functions but at the end of the day I use the keyboard for most things. So if I'm on a Windows machine, I want to be able to hit the windows key and start typing cmd, outlook, whatever. On a Mac cmd space, and start typing disk utility, or whatever it is. If I walk up to any Windows or Mac in the last 10 years and approach it that way it will work. If I walk up to a new Linux distro, I can only remember terminal, and then I have to glance around to figure out what browsers might be on it, what software names exist to figure out what I actually need for file formats etc.

      If it is my home computer, that's fine. I will know what flavor of each application I have installed and have it set up in a way that is quick usage.

      If I walk into a library and it had that, it likely would double the time needed to get done whatever it was I needed to do. People want uniform working devices across all work machines and public settings. It sucks that it is owned by the rich, but I don't see that changing overnight.

      • KDE offers a better user experience than MacOS or Windows (haven't used 11 though). It really took off in the last years.

        By default it's similar to Windows but you can completely customize the look and feel without touching a terminal/console. It has inbuilt stores with user contributed themes, icons, backgrounds, widgets and extensions. Some of those can make KDE really shiny.

        Then you can completley change the layout of the Desktop. Add panels (alias taskbars), add different buttons and functions to the panels change their positions. The widgets KDE comes with are very nice too. Especially the hardware monitor ones. I use HW-mon widgets for temperatures, diskspace, ram, network-activity e.g.

        You can add as much virtual desktops as you want. You can activate desktop animations for things like switching between virtual desktops or window overviews. With an extension like Krohnkite you can automatically arrange your windows. You can change most keyboard combos for the various functions of the desktop.

        KDE is based on the superior Qt programming framework and is therefore pretty optimized and most of the apps are pretty consistent in their design language unless they're written for the concurrent desktop environment Gnome whose apps can also be run under KDE.

        Alt+F2 opens a KRunner overlay which is KDEs universal search for applications documents, web, even open tabs in browsers. You could also open the Kickstarter (Startmenu) via the Windows-key and enter the application name right away.

        Browsernames are the same. Just search them via KRunner. The best way to install software for newbies is a package manager which is included on user-friendly distros like Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE, Kububtu. You open the package-manager/appstore search for the application you want to install and click install. Huge Advantage: With every OS-Update all the software you installed via a package manager gets automatically updated along with the OS packages.

        Generally if you come from Windows use KDE. There other desktop environments like Cinnamon or Mate similar to Windows but none come close to KDE. If you feel adventureous and want to learn a completely new desktop workflow use Gnome.

        The first and most important choice is to choose a good Distribution. I'm using EndeavourOS and Arch. They are extremely good distros but maybe not the best for beginners (although Endeavour is not too bad with onboarding).

        Fedora or OpenSUSE could ease the learning curve.

  • I’m definitely not going to be forced to Windows 11. I’ll probably install Linux on my now three year old PC until it falls apart and I need a new one. Or I might just go back to Mac, which I used exclusively for 7 years in the 2010’s.

    If Microsoft thinks they can intimidate or push me to 11, they’re sorely mistaken.

  • Seriously, stop using Windows. If you set up a new computer, use Linux. Compared to everything we had in the 1990's when we all decided to buy a computer and connect to the internet, modern Linux is fucking awesome, so think of it like prestiging in Call of Duty. You go back to the 90's and start over, but it's not nearly as bad, and it's for a good cause.

    Family need a new computer? Linux, Mac OS. Work need services deployed? Linux, FreeBSD.

    Stop using Windows. Please. I stopped in 2013 and I've never been happier, it's not been easy but I'm better now because of it and when I have to see Windows I fucking cringe and wonder how people can do it.

    Break your addiction to the GUI, it's not better than CLI, it augments it. Break your addiction to download and double click .exe to install applications. Break your addition video games that require Windows, you can run anything in Steam now (sans VR 😿). Break your addiction to your OS stopping you to apply "updates" and breaking your shit and blue screen frown face and moving your start windows logo button from the far left where it's been for decades to the middle and showing you ads and introducing spy features and forcing their browser on you and their search engine and promising you good changes and good software just to deploy a half-baked product and begging you to "just wait it'll get better", to have it die in your arms and have ms just walk up rip it out of your arms and replace it with more half-baked software and promises, over and over. Break your addiction to MS telling you this is the last OS that you will ever buy every fucking release, having features taken from you and placed behind a pay wall, having simple applications like notepad which might have been fine in 1993 but then just remain the same for literally 20 fucking years, just to be overhauled to have tabs, something that notepad++ (which is free) has had since the beginning. Break your addiction to the abuse, this company is buying nuclear power plants to run datacenters to process data about you, that they basically are forcing you to be okay with, so that they can further increase their profit margins, and or enable governments to survey the public for whatever reason they deem necessary.

471 comments