Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz 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 …
Make an OS which has a simple, usable front-end, with a working search which doesn't default to the Internet, like Win7, then offer two versions: A free version which is full of adverts and telemetry, and a paid for version for a nominal fee, say $30, which has no telemetry or adverts, no requirement for an MS account, and you choose which browser(s) you want to have installed. The free version also has the option to upgrade to the paid version, which then removes all the crapware you don't need.
> and a paid for version for a nominal fee, say $30, which has no telemetry or adverts, no requirement for an MS account, and you choose which browser(s) you want to have installed
They already do that, except the nominal fee is USD1500 per seat with a minimum of five seats. It's called Windows 11 Enterprise.
Penguin because that is still the smarter choice.
Interesting. [thinks about the office] Hmm. I suspect you don't work in education, publishing, or manufacturing. At the Fine Institution of Higher Education I do adjunct instruction for in the evenings there are several _thousand_ desktops deployed for students, and hundreds more for staff and faculty. At the office, there are over a thousand more, ranging from ancient XP-vintage systems (Win and Mac) driving Very Expensive hardware without which no work gets done to nice, shiny new (but with Win 10, Mac, and Ubuntu as their OSes, never Win 11) machines in various departments. Portable machines are usually iPads and, in some cases, Surfaces; laptops are quite rare. At home, I have a plentitude of desktop systems, running Unbuntu and macOS and Win 10 and WinServer 2019, and three, count them, three laptops. Plus, multiple iPads, including the very first one I bought, a now ancient iPad 2nd gen that still works and is on its second battery, and a brand new iPad Pro M4. I had a Surface at home, a company machine deployed to do work remotely; I hated it and replaced it with a company iPad Pro. (No, no Android tablets; they're inferior to Surfaces and vastly inferior to iPads. The office used to have some Android tablets; the last were scrapped earlier this year.) Students at the Fine Institution of Higher Education have laptops, mostly MacBooks and Lenovo systems, available from the school bookstore; Chromebooks are strongly discouraged. iPads and Surfaces are allowed. Certain classes use the school desktops, student laptops/tablets are discouraged. (For one thing, mobile devices use a network that cannot talk directly to the main servers or printers; security. If you need to print something, you need to be connected by Ethernet, and the IT department locks down the network ports so that unauthorized devices can't connect. Security.) At the office, the wireless net is quite carefully configured to limit access. Security.
I further suspect that you haven't been in, oh, a Best Buy or similar or even a Costco or similar recently—lots of desktop systems for sale in those places.
Where are you, and. What kind of work do you do?
Sounds like a decent setup and pretty much exercising that magic word I had to learn how to pronounce when I started with the Net (that's pre Tim Berners-Lee's URL idea): interoperability.
The idea of Open Standards: use whatever fits your needs (technical, budgetary, UX) and have it work because it speaks Open Standards.
It's the key reason I rather dislike Microsoft products and the island they always try to build.
Better cooling, less likely to slow down because cpu got hot. Don't run at slower speeds because running on battery only. don't usually suddenly split along the seam between the bottom and top because the battery is swollen. Not hard to get 2nd hand relatively inexpensive desktops with ecc memory. have heard there are laptops with ecc but never seen one. Less likely to suddenly become useless because you need more memory or need more disk space. Lot of reasons to stick with a desktop computer in my opinion. in some cases you may even be able to upgrade the cpu for better performance. Far less likely to become useless because someone didn't see the laptop and sat on it possibly breaking the screen and you find it's not covered under the warranty.
All incredibly true. But with [young] professionals having to live in less and less personal space, because of ever-increasing rents and including shared spaces, laptops will be the growth tech industry for the foreseeable future. Desktops require just that, a desk, and a fair-sized one at that, plus they can't go down to the local Starbucks to slurp off the free Wi-fi that you didn't subscribe to at home in order to save costs.
>> Desktops require just that, a desk
The two pcs sitting on filing cabinets would disagree with you. One of them was on the floor under the work desk before then. Nobody at work actually had a desktop on their desk - those of us with 2 or 3 desktops HAD to stack them on the floor one on top of the other.
Seems the only people who want a desktop "sitting on the desk taking up useful soace" are people who want to show off all their LED ARGB case lighting, can lighting, ram lighting, gpu lighting, headset lighting,keyboard lighting, etc. None of which actually makes their computer run better - it's useless bling.
Almost certainly true, for those youngsters. My daughters, and their friends, certainly seem to fit that pattern. They have personal laptops or tablets, and also work (WFH) laptops. OTOH there are still plenty of companies selling full sized machines (desktop is more a label than a description; even 20 years ago most of our work PCs sat on the floor unless, ironically, there was no available floor space.). We have a nice Chillblast PC at home, which came with 2 SSDs ( a smaller, faster one for the C: drive) and a spinning rust 2Tb HDD. With plenty of space and connectors for my 4 additional salvaged drives used for backups and stuff (including copying over all the data that had been on my previous PC- so much easier if you can just bung the old drive into the new PC and just copy the stuff over as required). But we have space for a desk with a monitor, a decent chair and so on- the actual PC being in a little cubbyhole sort of space under the desk top.
I have an improvised "desk" which consists of a tabletop supported by four desktop "tower" computers! There's also a 4-drawer cupboard under there, full of consumables. The Filing Cabinet behind me has a Brother Laser printer sitting on top. I have plenty of computing power, taking up very little space.
The rest of my little office is taken up by a drawing board (remember those?) and an ancient bureau that provides the housing for a comprehensive radio studio - CD players, MP3 players, MP3 recorders, a couple of Dell USFF Optiplexes, a mixer, audio processing rack and a couple of microphones. The record / CD library is next door!
It's not only that most people prefer W10 to W11, they're tired of the forever changing, "improving" of the OS by otherwise redundant MS developers, marketers, etc.
Let's never forget that MS also loudly declared that W10 will be the "last ever" version of the OS. Let's not only hold them to that assurance, let's encourage some smart lawyers to sue MS for breaking their assurances and wasting our time, resources, forced upgrades to 11, etc...
I bought a new laptop last week with Windows 11 Pro on it. I tried to create a local admin account on it, but it looks as though you have to create an MS account to access the laptop. I could be wrong there, but honestly didn't feel like doing the research so I flattened the drive and install openSUSE on it. I guess I'm one of the reasons there's been a drop in their numbers.
With the Pro version you can do it easily, although they don't make it obvious - click the domain join option, which actually goes through the local account creation process and doesn't join it to the domain!
Home version is a bit more complicated, but still doable - don't connect it to the internet, then on the region selection screen, Shift-F10 to get a command prompt and type oobe\bypassnro - the computer will reboot itself. Make sure it still doesn't get connected to the internet, and tell it you don't have internet when it asks. It will then prompt to create a local account. Tried it with 24H2 and it still works.
I appear to have a downvote stalker - everything I post gets one, no matter how non-controversial. I assume it's someone I disagreed with in a thread on here at some point. It's really quite sad that some people have nothing better to do than engage in this sort of infantile behaviour.
I gave you an upvote, if only to neutralise the downvote already sitting there.
There are some people on here that think up and down votes have more significance than they actually do. i.e. no matter how much someone might feel the emotional need to get at a fellow commentard down voting just for the sake of it is sadly pathetic and ineffectual.
So I guess in 10 months time I will be switching to Linux.
What's the El Reg recommendation for a gaming PC, mainly using Steam? Which Distro has the best game support, needless fap, and is the easiest to get used to after Windows...?
Suggestions on a Postcard? (Or in the comments below, whatever takes your fancy...)
I think ExampleOne means well but plain vanilla SteamOS is not packaged for broad hardware support, easy installation or sustained desktop usage.
If you use the machine only or mostly for gaming, Bazzite should do it. It's a preconfigured SteamOS that installs anywhere except if you have an Nvidia GPU. You could also try ChimeraOS but I feel at the moment Bazzite is more polished. If you're stuck with Nvidia, waiting for PlaytronOS might be the only way forward.
If you also want to use it for desktop work and are a beginner on Linux, try any of the Ubuntus or Fedora, they're pretty much equally easy these days. On Ubuntu you'll have to contend with Snap packages for many basic components like web browsers, though, which are nasty, sad, stupid and evil (in some users' opinion) or the next messiah (in Canonical's opinion only). If that leaves a bad aftertaste for you, Fedora it is.
You'll find a lot of opinions in every direction so maybe head to gamingonlinux.com and join the forum, IRC channel or Discord.
Others have already mentioned some Steam OS's but you don't need to limit yourself to just one OS. It is easy to make your machine multi-boot and more than one OS. You could pick one that works best for games and another such as Mint for browsing the web, writing documents, Zoom, email etc. Mint is quite like Windows 7 and gives you a clean uncluttered desktop without bloat.
Not an imaginative or original option, but one that works just fine for me: Mint.
Especially given that my new rig has an AMD video card - it worked, literally, out of the box. Install Mint, install Steam, install my games, done. *
* Unless you love online games with anti-cheat bullshit built in, which tend to only work on Windows. But you can always check what works on protondb.
Not so much a distro recommendation as a trial recommendation. Try out some distros on VMWare Workstation Pro, it's free now (get it from techspot though, the Broadcom website is impossible) and lets you install as many VMs as you like.
People can recommend distros all day long but we don't know how you like to use your computer. Do you want to be always, or mostly on the bleeding edge (with the potential instabilities that might cause) or are you OK with scheduled releases that might not have the absolute latest hardware supported on day-1 but will in a few months? Then there's desktop environments. If you've only used Windows then some of the options on Linux might be completely alien to you, like Hyperland and Sway. You have 10 months, so it's worth trying them out to see if you like them.
+1 for Mint.
I'm by no means a Linux power user - I still get confused when people get angry about snap or systemd .. etc.
I went with Mint because Liam recommended it a couple of years back as a good option to make the hop across from Windows.
I really like it, and it stays out of my way so I can just get on with things.
I game on it a lot as well, all through Steam, and don't have any issues, but like others have said check protondb for your games of choice.
Another Mint user here, and I'm a gamer, mostly via Steam. Almost 2 years now, no regrets.
A few tips for anyone new to gaming on Linux...
Steam is Linux native and can be installed from the distro software manager.
Steam uses Proton (Valves tweaked version of Wine), to run non native games.
Once up and running, go into Settings > Compatibility and turn on 'Enable Steam Play for all other titles'.
This will enable the Install and Play button for everything. (Otherwise it only enables for games certified to run).
If you have specific issues with a game, you can check Proton DB, although I've not needed to do this for many months now. ( https://www.protondb.com )
Proton GE is a forked version of regular Proton, and is more cutting edge, so can be useful for new released games. It's use is completely optional.
Personally I just use GE all the time, set under the same Settings > Compatibility menu as above, so Steam just uses it all the time. GE download: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases
To install, grab the tar file (e.g. GE-Proton9-20.tar.gz) then extract to ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/ including the directory (e.g. so you end up with ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/GE-Proton9-20)
Restart Steam and GE is now available to select.
You can also set individual games to a specific Proton if needed, just open the games settings/properties from inside the Steam library, go to Compatibility, and you can select a specific Proton version and force the game to use that. You can also use this option to force a native Linux game, to run the Windows version via Proton instead, if needed.
Check if your distro has 'gamemoderun' installed. If it does, add 'gamemoderun %command%' without the quotes to the games launch option within Steam. This sets some temporary (while the game is running) optimisations, which can (although not always) improve the performance of games.
Lutris can be used to run other game stores, like Epic etc.
I've had good results on standard Linux Mint. Install Steam, launch a Windows game - Steam installs everything it needs to make it run, such as its Proton support layer.
Admittedly, my tests have been limited - my Linux machine isn't built on gaming-grade hardware. But it's encouraging that gaming does work to some degree on even a non-optimized system. My son has a Steam Deck, and seems to do much of his gaming there these days.
There’s no need to switch in 10 months. I’ll be running win 10 for a bit longer.
My gaming machine is basically Win 10 to run the various store launchers, mostly steam, with the occasional Gog game and no other purpose.
Mine is TV connected and when I switch away from windows my preferred Linux will be Bazzite so I can make it more console like, booting into game mode, depending on whether the current niggles get sorted by then. If I want more of a tv connected desktop that can play games, then I’d probably use Tumbleweed or Fedora.
There are a couple of only reasons I’ve not switched yet which are distro independent
Hdmi org preventing AMD merging their HDMI 2.1 support code in the open source driver, so no VRR and no 4K > 60Hz, until I replace my video card.
The games I play most have audio issues/glitches/static running in multichannel surround. It’s distro independent and only an issue if I select 7.1 audio output. Not an issue with stereo output, only multichannel.
There are also a couple of Bazzite specific issues, no support for the xpad-noone module and gamemode always defaults back to stereo audio on boot, which may get fixed.
An external nvme usb-c drive makes it very easy to test the state of Linux and gaming as you can just do the install and boot from the usbc drive.
How well Linux will work for gaming depends very much on what you are wanting to build imo. If I was building a gaming pc with stereo audio, display-port connected to a small screen then the issues I have wouldn’t exist. Unfortunately my gaming PC has been a living room PC for years, so I want large screen (75”+) with vrr and 7.1 or Atmos multichannel surround audio, which means HDMI only video connections and no currently owned/available AMD video card.
You've pointed out the real problem with Linux.
There are so many different distros, some very different than others, they very often run very differently and will support different things.
So if one wants to make the switch there is no easy choice to make, unlike switching from Mac to Windows or vice versa.
In a previous life I worked in a plat that refurbished computers. Our big blue customer wanted us to come up with a way to package some of these machines with Linux so they wouldn't have to buy Windows licenses for them.
The customer gave no other guidance, so I got to work. I picked Red Hat because it was popular, was (relatively) easy to use, and the price was right, free. Our software boffins created an image we could load on the machines that had the OS, plus Open Office and a few games. I also wrote a booklet titled "What is this Linux thing anyway", that would give the user what they needed to get started.
We presented it as a nice, neat package, ready for the go ahead and we could start shipping.
The big blue sales guy liked what we did, but then said we really needed to use a distro made by a company the big blue company owned, that wasn't compatible with much of anything AND there was a charge for it.
And... that was the end of that project.
To keep it up much longer (if you even want to) just rip OneDrive, Copilot, and Windows Search service out using reedit/gpedit. All much worse than useless. As another benefit it will burn about 90% as much energy and burn your SSD 90% less because it's not constantly wanking while idle.
The OneDrive and Search wear and tear apply to Win10 as well.
...until I replace my PC with a new one and if that means no updates then so be it. I have looked at all the Linux flavours I can be bothered to check and there is still very little gaming support unless you are willing to fiddle and tweak and sacrifice your firstborn to the Great God Linus. Yes, despite YEARS of faffing about and hundreds of variants Linux is still a PITA to setup if you want to play games and I just can't be arsed. Maybe I'll take another look in a few years when they have sorted out the mess and have a straight forward install that just works, or maybe the games companies will release Linux variants of the games I want to play.
> very little gaming support unless you are willing to fiddle and tweak and sacrifice your firstborn to the Great God Linus. Yes, despite YEARS of faffing about and hundreds of variants Linux is still a PITA to setup if you want to play games and I just can't be arsed
Er, what?
apt install steam (*)
steam -> Settings -> "Enable SteamPlay for all titles"
...
That's it.
* obviously ensure that non-free sources are enabled, and you also may need to enable i386 packages, turning them on is simple: dpkg --add-architecture i386; apt update
Even VR works out of the box. Yes, even with Windows VR games
The Microsoft recent history of turning all its users into beta testers to avoid paying for real testing comes back to bite it. Hardware requirements & loss of compatibility doesn't help.
The worst are the updates that brick computers, delete user documents, games stop working, peripherals stop working (or looses features)...
or similar fatal errors.
More advertising isn't needed to polish the thurds. They should instead spend that on tech/devs that can improve the products more than they break them.
Just in case it's helpful to anyone, I recently installed Ubuntu 24.10 on my Surface Pro 3, which Microsoft have deemed unworthy of Win 11. Everything awkward (touch screen, low power standby, etc.) works out of the box. Didn't even need that custom Surface Kernel that can be found on Github. Admittedly, I don't have any AAAA batteries so cannot check the pen.
I don't think device has felt so responsive since its original Win 8.
If MS want to provide me, at their expense, with new PCs that meet their hardware requirements then I might consider swapping out the W10 machines here. Most of what I have runs Linux, some of it is 10 years old (I finally replaced a Core 2 Duo machine last month, ironically with someone else's cast-off as they upgraded to W11 hardware) and runs the latest distros just fine. So no, not going to switch to W11 any time soon.
It's fashionable to disparage RMS, but he did kickstart the whole concept of an open-source OS way back when most people thought the idea was ridiculous. 'Linux' is great as a short form, but I'm happy to see the full, proper name occasionally. Linus Torvalds is a brilliant software developer - RMS is a visionary. We need both.
hardware requirements and watch win 11 take off
My old dual boot box can run win 10 and the latest Linux mint (it runs the mint way better) but it cant run win 11 due to hardware requirements.... mint does complain about not having a UEFI boot thing... then just gets on with it and runs quite happily, its currently used for steam game servers of various flavours, and showing utube vids.
This box can run win 11 , but its a lot of faffing about to bring it back to the 'standard'* of win 10.
So I'm not bothering.
* bring back the win 7 interface... if linux can have multiple desktop themes, why cant windows?
"hardware requirements and watch win 11 take off"
That wouldn't achieve Microsoft's aims. What you're supposed to do is replace it with a shiny, new PC which comes with a shiny new W11 licence for which you'll have given them money. The only reason for the free upgrades on newer stuff would have been to avoid any class actions along the lies of "I just bought a new machine and Microsoft have made it obsolete" and maybe to get a few examples in front of the public.
I finally got a second SSD for my laptop that came with Windows 11, and put Linux Mint Debian Edition on it.
Wake from sleep is more reliable now - Windows would frequently switch off the backlight right at the point it wanted my password, and I'd have to type Ctrl-Shift-Win-B several times to get it to come back.
All my games work fine with either Lutris or Steam.
1.Go to `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WaaSMedicSvc` 3. In right pane, double click on Start registry DWORD to modify its Value data. 4. Set the Value data to 4 to disable Windows Update Medic Service.
2. Disable windows update.
3. Install Edgeblock
"This is not the news Microsoft wanted to hear."
Microsoft DOES NOT CARE. You will be forced into WIndows 11, or perish. Resistance in futile, you will be assimilated. Your computer is not your own. Your data must be shared with us and our AI. You will own nothing of your individuality, and we will own you.
This same article comes around every time a version of Windows approaches end-of-supported-life.
The commentors here all say "NEVER! I'm sticking with N-1, it's the last version of Windows I'll ever install". Because change is really hard for some people.
Of course, next cycle, they'll all be telling us how Windows 11 'got it right', and they absolutely hate the newest version with a passion.
And the Linux advocates, bless them, will still be following every Windows article closely, waiting to tell the world how they think that Linux is *now* good enough. But not that version that the other commentor suggested. Oh no, because that's crap. Try this other version instead.
Well, if Microsoft would stop being so whiny about people upgrading on supposedly "unsupported" hardware they would see more users adopting. There's no reason they can't support things below 8th generation Intel, I've done the registry hacks and installed it on multiple systems with zero issues, they just don't want to.
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