Windows 11 Growth Slows As Millions Stick With Windows 10 (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0180275573
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/03/174257/windows-11-growth-slows-as-millions-stick-with-windows-10
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/windows_11_statcounter/
> The Register spoke to Lansweeper principal technical evangelist Esben Dochy, who noted that consumers were more likely to have devices that couldn't be upgraded or follow the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule when it comes to change. He also pointed out consumers in the EU get Microsoft Extended Security Updates (ESU) for free.
>
> For businesses, though, it's different. Dochy told us: "The primary blocker is slow change management processes. These can be slow due to bad planning, lack of resources, difficulty in execution (in highly distributed organizations) etc. "The ESU are used to be secure while those change management processes take place, but organizations will have to pay to get those ESU making it more expensive for unprepared or inefficient organizations." [...]
>
> The challenge facing Windows 11 is that, other than the end of free support for many versions, there is no must-have feature to make enterprises break a hardware refresh cycle, particularly in a difficult economic environment. Microsoft has not released official statistics on Windows 11 adoption. However, hardware vendors have noted the sluggish pace of transition. Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke commented during an analyst call: "If you were to look at it relative to the previous OS end of support, we are 10-12 points behind at that point with Windows 11 than we were with the previous generation."
[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/10/14/2043238/windows-10-support-ends-today
[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-202412-202512
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/windows_11_statcounter/
Well yeah.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Repeating somewhat a recent post. I bought a pretty powerful gaming desktop 8 or 10 years ago. Now it still runs all of the games I play (short of like Starfield but it will run Cyberpunk 2077 fairly well). Until the computer is not fast enough I don't need a new one and if someone hacks my machine, a bunch of computer games is not a great loss. What value is Win 11? Not the price of replacing the hardware in this desktop to me.
Re: Well yeah.... (Score:4, Funny)
Surely the value is that with Windows 11 it's much easier for Microsoft to push ads and gather information on how you use your computer. Why wouldn't you want that? I don't understand
Re: (Score:3)
Why should anyone have to go and create a security policy, especially on a "professional" OS to prevent ads? Especially when a future update will almost certainly re-enable them.
Users shouldn't have to baby sit their OS like this. And if you tell the OS not to do something, you shouldn't have to worry about future updates overriding what you've already told it.
MS treats their power users like idiots, and is driving them away with it.
Re: Well yeah.... (Score:2)
I'd really rather opt-in to any ad experiences I just can't live without.
Re: (Score:2)
> I bought a pretty powerful gaming desktop 8 or 10 years ago. Now it still runs all of the games I play ...
I have a Dell XPS 420, that a friend gave me years ago, that is currently running Windows 10 just fine. Don't know when he got it, but the system came out in 2007. I'm sure it would run Linux (Mint) very well too, though I'll be switching to a system I built already running Mint 22.2 (ASRock Z77 Extreme3, Intel i7-3770, 32GB RAM). Neither system meets the (arbitrary) HW requirements for Windows 11, if I even wanted to use it. I also have several other very old Intel-based systems that run Linux fine as
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When my 5 year old system I built specifically to play Cyberpunk 2077 could no longer be updated to Win11, I switched it over to Linux.
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Yeah, with my old gaming PC I stuck to Windows 7 for years since it was pretty much only used for gaming and not browsing pron sites. But then Steam decided they wouldn't run on Windows 7 any more so I had to buy a new one.
Which wasn't such a bad deal as it would probably cost 50% more to build today. But with the downside that it has Windows 11.
Microsoft is on the decline (Score:1)
Sure, their income statements might show something that looks like growth, but that's mostly just a temporary illusion created by subscription shenanigans. Their true pinnacle of achievement was just before the development cycle of Windows 8 started. That's when they stopped caring about the tech the users use, and started focusing on the tech they can use to monetize things that shouldn't be monetized.
Big Tech today forgets that the PC revolution happened because everyone got tired of paying a monthly bill
Re: (Score:2)
I've always liked the Windows 10 interface. I use the "full screen" start menu and it's served me well. I use it to the extent that I use a replacement main screen on Android that clones the Windows Phone interface. IMO, the icon idea from the 1980s needs to be retired.
Re: (Score:1)
Indeed. And it is not only Windows. Office is slowly getting worse and wastes more and more user time. Azure got hacked several times and has crass vulnerabilities only explainable by extreme incompetence.
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And then we have victims with Stockholm-Syndrome that are deep in denial and mod everybody down that states the truth...
windows 11 (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing i see it is an advertising platform and a data/content source to train their AI on. They already stole everything in the azure and git hub now they want the rest.
It's crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
how an American company charges Americans a fee for extended updates, while giving Europe the extended updates for free
Re: It's crazy (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't pay, you just don't get the updates.
[1]https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/extended-security-updates
Re: (Score:2)
New hardware. You don't think Microsofthas financial ties to system manufacturers?
Re:It's crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the difference between a government that cares about consumer rights, and a government who gleefully applies the lube for corporations to fuck youn with.
Re: (Score:2)
> This is the difference between a government that cares about consumer rights, and a government who gleefully applies the lube for corporations to fuck you with.
You get lube? [1]Luxury! [youtube.com] :-)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k
Sharecrop culture (Score:3)
A vocal minority in the US has pretensions of aristocracy, and a lot of awfulness flows from that.
Most of the south actively suppresses labor and wages with the direct goal of being "good for business" - e.g., cheap labor with no recourse or way out.
Now we also have people like Musk and Theil all but openly demanding an end to any political power for anyone but them.
There's a reason guillotine T-shirts are selling well, and there is a certain segment of society that should take it a lot more seriously t
Microsoft's has a Windows 11 problem! (Score:3)
Why update? Unless forced to! There isn't anything meaningful in it for the customers.
Re:Microsoft's has a Windows 11 problem! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd imagine that Microsoft will "fix" this issue soon enough, by insuring that all future versions of Office and probably every new game or application gets published on the Microsoft Store requires Windows 11 as a minimum requirement.
Then they'll just EOL the older versions of Office and wait for their customers to be forced into upgrading. Probably add some new AI bloatware features into the Office document formats as well, just to insure that the older versions can't open them properly.
Re: (Score:3)
Dunno man, I run a low resource Debian on my personal devices.
No problems ever upgrading to the newer stable.
Eventually XFCE will get a Wayland backend and firefox-esr may take advantage of newer Vulkan accelerations but I don't need the bling flavour of the month from an AI chatbot enhanced desktop.
Old man yells at cloud, I know right...
Re: (Score:3)
> I'd imagine that Microsoft will "fix" this issue soon enough, by insuring that all future versions of Office and probably every new game or application gets published on the Microsoft Store requires Windows 11 as a minimum requirement.
That's what LibreOffice is for.
Re: (Score:2)
I could let it go once assuming a typo, but since you wrote it twice: it's *ensure*.
No surprise, Win11 is a regression (Score:5, Insightful)
Same hardware, same software on three systems that ran win10 before. No problems with Win10. Now I observe system, driver, gui and application crashes that never happened before. I get notification tones that I cannot identify or turn off. Things are harder to find. Log-in screen pictures vanish. Some things got slower. And other crap.
Win11 is a pretty seriously worse product than Win10. Fortunately, all my critical systems are Linux, but Microsoft is obviously going downhill.
Re:No surprise, Win11 is a regression (Score:5, Informative)
It's funny on my old laptop..
Windows 10: Boots, fan stays quiet, battery lasts 10 hours idle/document work/browsing.
Windows 11: Boots, fan never shuts up, battery lasts 4 hours idle (even going full e-reader mode idle, nothing loaded but the desktop), fan screams the whole time.
Linux: Fan almost never even starts up, battery lasts 15 hours browsing/doing stuff, 20 hours e-reader mode.
Windows has too much overhead, background junk, and spyware.
Re: (Score:3)
I second that. My corporate laptop's fan started screaming ever since it moved from windows 10 to windows 11. Don't know about battery usage, since I always keep it hooked to the power outlet.
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yup, we're getting reports of this at work. fuck windows 11 with a rusty fucking spatula
Re: (Score:2)
If you open up resource monitor you'll see that various processes are always reading and writing to the disk. It's never idle.
Re: (Score:2)
Please tell me which brand and model you have. I have limited success running Linux with as long battery life as Windows (for the systems that I have that run or ran Windows), I assume that others are below what the hardware supposedly manages with Windows due to Linux.... Perhaps the Windows numbers are just inflated?
Re: (Score:1)
What is E-Reader mode?
Re: Woke Microsoft Games - A BAD sign of DEI quali (Score:2)
Is this some sort of a weird satire...?
Upgrading to Linux (Score:5, Informative)
When I bought a Windows license years ago, it was to setup a Steam machine. After the Win 10 EOL, I tried installing Linux to see how it does with Steam nowadays. My thinking is I would play what I could on Linux, and swap to Win 10 as necessary to play other games, even if I don't have all the security updates.
So far, I haven't found a game that doesn't work on Linux.
Good luck with this strategy of security bricking old devices.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't have the same luck. I have a RTX 3060 (NVidia) video card, it doesn't play well with Proton and Bazzite (AFAIK). Also, the games I play the most have anti-cheat software, which again doesn't run on Linux.
I had to accept privacy invasion and log on Windows 10 with a MS account and setup backup, which game me one more year of security updates. Let's see what happens until then, maybe these problems would be solved (go go Wine/Proton devs!) or maybe I dual-boot Win 10 just for gaming these Windows-only
Re: Upgrading to Linux (Score:2)
Anti-cheat definitely seems to be where most users have issue. Fortunately I don't play multiplayer games, so that doesn't really come up for me.
I'm lucky enough that a GTX 1080 still runs everything I throw at it. My TV is 1080p and I have yet to find a game that card can't handle. I've heard lots of people with higher resolutions or frame rates have issues, but exceedingly few games have any issue on a GTX1080 unless you go past 1080p. I haven't even had to go below max settings for anything yet.
Ent IoT LTSC OMG LTD RGB G2G (Score:5, Informative)
i converted my remaining win 10 box to Enterprise IoT LTSC a couple weeks ago and so far it's been indistinguishable from the Win 10 Pro it was before. EoL is Jan 13, 2032 . it was surprisingly easy to do. search your web, you know it to be true
Re:Ent IoT LTSC OMG LTD RGB G2G (Score:4, Informative)
You're leaving out the best parts. No Edge, no Cortana, and no app store.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, 2030 was going to be the Year of Desktop Linux, but thanks to you, that's now ruined...
Re: (Score:1)
I moved the four Windows 10 machines on my LAN to IoT LTSC in February, anticipating this period, and it wasn't without incident. For instance, the need to install the Microsoft Store from a GitHub repo (the store has some driver-related items that I can't get any other way).
Risk reward? (Score:3)
I have an old desktop in the basement on Windows 10 because it can't be upgraded (I guess I could try the Rufus thing?), and it is only used by the kids using tinkercad or slicing print jobs for the 3d printer. I should probably switch it to Linux but it isn't really used for anything else so not really worth the effort. They're not using it on the open web downloading programs or ads with exploits, and it spends most of its time turned off. Certainly it isn't going to get replaced with a new Windows 11 machine.
As I understand it, I will be gang raped by AI... (Score:3)
... agents if I install windows 11, and windows 10 does everything I need it to. If I get forced off 10, its back to Ubuntu..
Re: (Score:2)
Out of curiosity, what made you leave Ubuntu for Win10?
Not quite accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that Windows 11 doesn't have and "must have" features, it's that Windows 11 has too many "must not have" features. I would have upgraded if I could actually turn the ads, telemetry, and forced updates* off permanently. I'm sure there's other non-optional features that I wouldn't want either.
* - Absent a zero-click exploit in the wild, I do not want to update anything until other suckers have tested it for at least a week or two. Most security updates are for people who click links in spam emails anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
> It's not that Windows 11 doesn't have and "must have" features
Name one.
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Apparently, you missed the point of the sentence. I was refuting the claim that the reason people weren't upgrading was because of a lack of new, good features, but that they weren't upgrading because of all the features it has that they do not want. I would have tolerated all the "meh" features if it didn't have the bad ones.
But, since you asked, there is one "must have" feature Windows 11 has - continued free security updates.
Re: (Score:2)
> Name one.
Copilot in notepad.
Lots of people are switching (Score:2)
I know quite a few people that have ditched M$ Windows entirely and have switched to Linux. I helped only one person switch, but everyone else did it on their own. The more I talk around I find people that have switched to Linux. These are all personal, not corporate machines.
Windows 11 is a huge mess (Score:1)
Right off the bat updates are constantly crashing it because Microsoft is using shitty vibe coding to do critical updates and then acting like they can have people just check the code. Any idiot can realize quickly that's not going to work because there's going to be enormous pressure to check the code quickly in order to realize the cost savings from the AI bullshit.
Meanwhile Windows 11 is slower and more crash prone because it's filled with AI spyware designed to let Microsoft train their chatbots an
Windows 11 Added Nothing for the User (Score:3)
People were excited to use Windows 95 and XP. I think that Windows 2000 was the best, most coherent version of Windows. Windows 8, ME, and 11 put Windows into a dive, and Windows 7 and 10 pulled it out, a bit. The problems remain: Windows is still too bloated, slow, and invasive of privacy. Windows went from your machine and data--to not your machine, and now: not your documents.
Real reason (Score:1)
There's no directx 12 this time, and there are no new complex APIs.
So where microsoft easily forced a lot of people off 7 to 10 by breaking games and applications, no such thing is really possible with forcing people off 10 to 11.
Windows 10 Windows 8 (Score:3)
One thing in favour of Windows 10 adoption was how badly Windows 8 sucked. I mean, people were buying PC's with a license to downgrade to Windows 7. Windows 10 doesn't suck as badly as Windows 8, and arguably doesn't suck as badly as Windows 11 either.
Re: (Score:2)
> Windows 10/WS2019 can't communicate using TLS 1.3
That's false. I'm currently on Windows 10, using Chrome to browse slashdot.org, which is using TLS 1.3.
How much of that "growth" ... (Score:2)
How much of that growth was organic to begin with? How much of it was from being forced to upgrade (in some cases over a month ahead of the EoL date like in my case)?
Wrong Defense. (Score:2)
> or follow the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule when it comes to change..
Uh, other than those who have actually gotten ESU support, what exactly do they mean by if it ain't broke?
Windows 10 support ended. From a security standpoint, it is broke.
Just gonna sit around and wait for the zero-day on Christmas morning to be reminded of the rule of Reality?
Missed one crucial point/reason (Score:5, Insightful)
> Analysts say the slow transition reflects both hardware limitations and a lack of must-have Windows 11 features compelling organizations to refresh their fleets.
Also users (both regular and corporate) are quite literally exhausted of getting fucked in the ass by Micro$haft repeatedly with buggy updates and forced unwanted features (not to mention the slew of privacy raping "telemetry" and other "features"), so there's that.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. I would rephrase the phrase FTA:
> a lack of must-have Windows 11 features
to instead say:
> a lack of want-to-have Windows 11 features.
The Windows 10 start menu was controversial when it was first presented, but became for many a great feature.
Re: (Score:2)
And plenty of oh-hell-naw features.
Re: (Score:2)
> to instead say:
> a lack of want-to-have Windows 11 features.
Or, perhaps more accurately:
> a total lack of Windows 11 useful features.
Re: (Score:2)
Working hardware is working.
Although I am expecting a phone call from my octogenarian mother in the next few months saying Microsoft expect her to upgrade to a new laptop.
Re: (Score:2)
> The Windows 10 start menu was controversial when it was first presented, but became for many a great feature.
I stopped using the start menu entirely.
Re: (Score:2)
> Also users (both regular and corporate) are quite literally exhausted of getting fucked in the ass by Micro$haft repeatedly ...
Still better that what you'd get from MacroSoft ... :-)
Re: (Score:2)
[Big Hero 6 enters the conversation]
Re: (Score:1)
Windows 10 has all of that as well.
Re: (Score:1)
The Windows Start Menu has been broken unusable shit since Windows 8. You have to use a third-party program if you want an actual functional Start Menu.
Windows 11 contains dozens of pointless changes. Changing things just for the sake of making them different, with no regard for the fact that 99% of the changes make things worse.
You can fix a lot of Windows 11's problems with registry changes and third party programs, but you shouldn't have to. This is what happens when a company has too much money
Re: (Score:3)
Having set up two Windows 11 PCs in the last couple of months it's amazing how much work it takes to get a usable OS after installing it.
And who decided that moving the start menu to the middle by default was a good idea?
Re: (Score:2)
Centre-menu? Constantly tweaking with the UI is part of the enshi^H^H en-tablet-ification.
A follower of trends, the design team at Microsoft will follow - paranoid that people really liked the BYOD vibe they were getting from COVID lockdown and that an iPad or a Chromebook (boosted by Aluminium Android hybrid) can replace a traditional PC.
Re: (Score:2)
> Having set up two Windows 11 PCs in the last couple of months it's amazing how much work it takes to get a usable OS after installing it.
The [1]Windows 10 Decrapifier Script [spiceworks.com], combined with most of the tweaks available in [2]WinUtil [github.com] should reduce your workload pretty effectively.
Sad it needs to happen...but I hope it helps streamline things for you.
[1] https://community.spiceworks.com/t/windows-10-11-decrapifier/975250
[2] https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Re: Missed one crucial point/reason (Score:1)
to fix the article: windows 11 growth slows as everyone who could afford a new computer that just came with it pre installed dont need more of them. if normies could just throw money on tech right now microsoft would be having a crazy public jerkoff over the w11 adoption rate, pretending its not just because most are not savvy enough to install an os (or think) for themselves.