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.
Linux is mostly pretty easy to install/use at this point as long as you stick with a main distro like Mint
Even Mint you have to jump through hoops to not have to put in your password every time there’s updates. Hoops that are too complex for a newbie on their own.
Most Linux users don’t want to admit that a huge thing that makes people hate Linux is having to type in their password every time there’s updates (and there’s always updates.)
It’s seemingly such a small thing, and as Linux users, we know the why behind it so we don’t question it, but the average user doesn’t and they hate typing their password over and over to get into the computer, let alone to update it.
To them, Windows is easier since the updates happen silently in the background, and aren’t in the forefront because Linux expects you to know what the fuck you’re doing.
Every Linux box that I didn’t fuck with to make sure updates happened silently in the background that I gave to anyone else would always be wildly out of date the next time I touched it because they just… don’t install updates instead of typing in their password.
Often, they’ve forgotten the fucking password, if you’ve made it so they don’t have to put a password in when they log in (my mother has done this one countless times).
Until we figure out a way to make Linux secure and straightforward for end-users, people will stick with Windows.
I’ve heard people claim Mint is easy enough for non technical users (grandma, etc.), but I think that’s with the caveat that they will have someone to support the machine.
That’s my beef. Most of the time I don’t have the time to reverse engineer my volume knob drivers via the command line, let alone figure out which obscurly-named (but generally under 8 characters) random function or shell script or what have you is the fix, but oh you gotta install the repository, but first you gotta find out which one is compatible with your kernel, and then do it all again cause you forgot to type sudo and your password at every goddamn step
Yeah, nobody’s paying me so I don’t have the time or effort to be everyone’s tech support for Linux. If they can’t figure out how to type in their password to install updates, it means most people are way too fuck stupid to handle Linux. No offense, but I mean really. If Linux still needs me to manage their system for them, it’s by definition NOT friendly to the non-computer-savvy.
I’ve gotta be like one of the few Linux users who still sees it as too much for the average user, mostly because average users are fucking whiny crybabies who hate learning anything new ever. See also Bluesky vs. Mastodon.
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:
You know Windows is exactly the same right?
Nice try, though. I’ll let you have one more go.
Windows is just too difficult for normies to use. All that command line stuff, PowerShell, registry stuff.
Hell, people get mad about having to hit a ‘Cool, do that button’, let alone something like a password. It’s how we ended up with UAC v2, because people were steaming pissed about having to accept when a badly written app was doing something stupid that they just changed the scope of ‘stupid’ to be much less restrictive.
In fact it’s even bled over to OS X, as people are SO mad about entering passwords they’re angry at Apple over it, too.
Basically, any time a UI hops in front of you and goes ‘Wait! This is important!’ people get annoyed, and well, all OSes are moving towards more of that shit rather than less, as if they didn’t know that was annoying or something. Glad I don’t work in UX or I’d probably lose my mind at how much stupid hostile shit is being added constantly.
It honestly baffles me how this keeps being a thing. Not just for OSs but for a lot of websites too. And the wild thing is that most of the time, it’s not even that important and the user does not and should not care about it.
on top of which it creates a security issue too:
by teaching users to always instantly click on “OK”, “Accept”, etc, they stop reading the actually important messages, because they’re being bombarded by so, so many useless pop-ups everywhere…
What people have to watch out for now is unlocking their bootloader if they want to test Linux on a USB drive or dual boot, for example, it will trip Bitlocker (conveniently installed on every Windows computer via update without notification or consent), and that will irreversibly encrypt their Windows hard drive without warning.
Ask me how I know.
Also the fact that linux installers seem to fuck up dualbooting like 60% of the time, effectively locking you out of your windows partition… Make backups you guys!