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.
That’s fair. I maintain a Fedora installation for my elderly mother, whose Windows laptop is on its last legs. I revitalized a 15 year old desktop with Fedora for her, installed everything she needed (browser, file manager, libreoffice, iscan, brother printer drivers, password manager, zoom meetings, etc.). But yeah, every month I hop on, open up a terminal and run
sudo dnf upgrade, and every 6 months run the Fedora major version update.Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed my Mom has been able to get all her business done using Fedora, but I definitely am acting sysadmin should anything in the slightest go wrong or confuse her. That said, I think she could run the upgrades if I left her with extensive notes (but if anything went wrong, she’d lose her shit, ngl).
I don’t know, I think a Linux distribution with automatic updates would be a good thing if you could ensure every user would be guaranteed to not be greeted with any issues upon reboot from said update.
But yeah, sadly, even on the most user friendly of distros, you still have to have a decent familiarity with the command line , and have the patience and knowledge of where to look for, and then read and comprehend, the documentation. And I doubt there will ever be a time in the future where 100% of users are comfortable with all that, though imho if you use any computer at all, you should at least try.
I think this is, for most people I’ve spoken with (including coders in games, my kids, etc) the major issue – they don’t want to have to use the command line for things. It’s fine if you can, but that alone is a massive wall for some people. People are exhausted right now, and having to learn a variety of command line prompts instead of just clicking on icons is too much for some people. That can be argued till you’re red in the face, but I think a major reason so many people bounce off linux, myself included, is that it’s not ‘as easy as windows.’ We need to stop telling people it is, because that means they won’t try again later.
You don’t have to use the command line at all.
Here’s step four of Mint’s installation guide:
Then we get this:
I definitely hear you on that, and in some ways, it’s a shame more people don’t have the option to learn more about how their computer works.
The Linux OS is, in my experience, one of the most amazing things I’ve ever taken the time to learn. In my pursuit of not only learning programming and computer science fundamentals, but also the internals of the Linux operating system, I’ve gained a granular control over my computing devices that has allowed me to be spared the onslaught of forced “AI in everything” that has recently been pushed down people’s throats. I also have minimal exposure to invasive advertisements, and other unwanted features.
But the cost for access to said knowledge was an immense amount of time studying, an equivalent amount of patience, and a strong desire to learn difficult subjects. That’s a cost the majority of users are unable or unwilling to pay. They simply dont have the time and/or desire, and that’s just reality.
Ultimately, I don’t think it’s acknowledged enough that it requires a vast amount of privilege to have the time and energy to devote to such endeavors such as learning how Linux, the command line, and Computer Systems more broadly, work. I think this is because to acknowledge such would open the discussion up to the more broader topics of the qualities of our education systems and our cultivation of more positively reinforced learning models, which is a much more difficult topic to navigate and argue about when contrasted with the “It’s easy to install Linux. Windows bad, so just do it.” argument that pervades the discussion space.
This is an incredibly thoughtful and well said point, thank you for making it. It’s important to remember to empathize with users because we didn’t all start in the same place, or have the same time or money, and so on. The comments about the privilege to have time and energy to learn it are spot on.
So again, thank you :)
Honestly this sounds like it’d be so far in the future that it’s not even realistic to contemplate right now. We’re clearly not even close to this being the reality.
Sadly, I’m in very much agreement with you on this. I love the Linux OS to death, but I’m very very much into learning as much as I can about computers right now, and I am not representative of the majority of computer users.
I understand now why updates are required, why they sometimes break things, and ultimately what has to be done either by myself or, usually, others, to fix them.
But most people seem to go absolute ape shit when things don’t work as expected, and I think that has to do more with human societies not cultivating enough patient, non-stressed, curious, people. And that’s what bums me out more than this whole Windows vs Linux thing…