Windows 11 is dying....

[BrianHG]

Is this for real?  Will windows will be a minority operating system in a few years? 



(I don't know as I still use Windows 7)

[Cyclotron]

Is this for real?  Will windows will be a minority operating system in a few years? 

(I don't know as I still use Windows 7)

I loved Windows 7.  Loved XP, liked 10.

Windows, in some very important ways, is already a minority OS. By the numbers, Linux is king!
No if you narrow that to Desktop OSs, Windows is king but has been losing for years. Mostly to macOS.  Any particular version of Windows loses more share to its siblings than other OSs, I believe.

[Zucca]

I hope so, that will teach a lesson to others.
You can't ignore reality and just be money driven in your choices.

[coromonadalix]

Winux  Zorin  all other flavours  .........  win 11 and up  are dead
 

[ejeffrey]

Dying is strong but increasingly inrellevant.

Android already outnumbers windows worldwide and iOS does in the US.  Linux is the overwhelmingly dominant server OS.  Mac OS and ChromeOS are very strong in the laptop segment.  Windows is still the leader in laptops and the king of desktop operating systems but those are an ever diminishing share of the market.

Plus windows "sales" are basically new device sales.   Replacement cycles especially for desktop computers have increased dramatically.  Even big companies aren't replacing computers every 3 years.

That's why MS is adding mandatory MS account sign-in, user tracking, and ads to windows. That's also why they are tricking people into using cloud storage.   They can't count on selling someone a new computer with a new version of windows any more so they want ongoing revenue.

[jonovid]

the business cycle repeats - Gates should know this.

[CatalinaWOW]

It's happening, but I can't celebrate.  There were real benefits to an almost universal and open operating system.  I know there will be pushback on open, but Windows allowed others to operate in their ecosystem, unlike Apple.   Linux lets anyone play, but because of the fragmentation of Linux the true cross device compatibility is even lower than indicated by the market share.  Same things apply to iOS and Android.   

And the reason it is happening is that Windows is avidly adopting all of the problems I complain about in the other OS.

[iMo]

I think the today's AI, datacenter and network tycoons dream about a "thin minimalist terminals" completely wired to their clouds/accounts. So the "heavy" PCs as we know it today should become the history (OSes regardless). No need for powerful CPUs, GPUs, beefy fast memories/SSDs and heavy thick OSes at home or in any offices then..
 

[special_K]

Probably the biggest force against windows is that nobody (except enthusiasts) actually wants to own a computer of any description. They want the internet so they can buy crap off amazon and make their brains dumber with political propaganda on facebook, and that's already something their phones can do.

For enthusiasts I see no reason why you would want to use Microsoft's tailored-advertising-with-vestigial-operating-system-functions product. You can just install linux mint or something, install steam, your games work. In the rare instance they don't immediately, then it's 99% faster to fix the problem than it would be to decrapify a windows 10 or 11 install.

The remaining market for windows is just office computers and the terminally apathetic.

[Karel]

I'm wondering, how much of that video is fakenews?
If so many desktops have been migrated to Linux, why don't we see that on statcounter?

[mendip_discovery]

I think the today's AI, datacenter and network tycoons dream about a "thin minimalist terminals" completely wired to their clouds/accounts. So the "heavy" PCs as we know it today should become the history (OSes regardless). No need for powerful CPUs, GPUs, beefy fast memories/SSDs and heavy thick OSes at home or in any offices then..
 

Its funny how the circle of computing goes around. You had computers and terminals, then we had physical computers, now we have the 'cloud' and back to computers being terminals. I wonder if we are going to return to PCs at home.

I see more and more often people dont have a PC or even a laptop at home. The phone does most of what they want to do.

People who work in an office I guess are a big part of the PC users and other than being secure the OS makes little difference for those that are cloud users. Its only the ones that need specific apps that still use them.

I have not watched the video, then to avoid click bait vids if I can. Can somone who has watched it give some context to what its rambling on about.

[djsb]

i've watched a few and as usual they repeat the same thing ad nauseum. I'm going to visit "the register" to see if they are any better.

[nctnico]

I have not watched the video, then to avoid click bait vids if I can. Can somone who has watched it give some context to what its rambling on about.

I think it is an AI generated video. Spelling errors and usage of random video fragments based on context. And it seems it is just a rant against Windows 11. Some Googling tells me South Korea decided to ditch Windows in 2020 and finalise the migration to Linux in 2026.

[gamalot]

The color in these videos makes me really uncomfortable, it feels just like a Netflix show. Maybe I'm just getting old and out of touch, maybe it's because I'm Chinese, or maybe I'm just weird. Either way, I'm really not used to this kind of look ...

[mendip_discovery]

The color in these videos makes me really uncomfortable, it feels just like a Netflix show. Maybe I'm just getting old and out of touch, maybe it's because I'm Chinese, or maybe I'm just weird. Either way, I'm really not used to this kind of look ...

Ah looks like a clickbait video collection. I know if I clicked on one I would be shown videos like it for a the next few months. The algorithm is an arse and cant cope with a person who is interested in lots of random things.

Thanks @nctnico that sounds like the standard jump on a partial truth and expand on it crap. I find it interesting that we have statistics and data but it still doesn't stop people using them to spread misinformation.

[DimitriP]

The color in these videos makes me really uncomfortable, it feels just like a Netflix show. Maybe I'm just getting old and out of touch, maybe it's because I'm Chinese, or maybe I'm just weird. Either way, I'm really not used to this kind of look ...

You are allergic to click-bait . And that's a good thing! 

[coppercone2]

are you sure the thin client thing is just not the school of MBA that only knows how to outsource stuff telling you that things need to be outsourced and that is that? They usually push propaganda pretty hard with a strait face

the only thing I see is that its the least work and least responsibility and basically the whole concept is shift risk elsewhere make my position safe and easy, I noticed it has little to do with business continuity or efficiency... its kind of self serving to tell people to rely on services

if you shift all the risk and work it becomes closer to the ideal money making machine (but only for the person in charge of that thing within a organization, not for the organization, i.e. self serving). At some point its like watching your significant other get wow'ed by a infomercial advertisement, because that is the only info they basically have about whats going on, advertisements..


So when there is someone managing an outsourced service that is kind of amusing because what are you paying them for, the possibility of releasing their primal frustration on a telephone to protect your business with a mean and loud conversation when the outsourced risk fucks up? It's not like trump is gonna send delta force for them. Oh or maybe they will get to cut ties and go on a big expensive shopping trip, or get you tied up with lawyers with a company that is bigger then yours because it does generic shit, possibly in another country. bring in that bread hero

[m k]

Back in the day, that's '80s when computer hardware was different, the repair operation was on-site.
That included the user end, that was a terminal.
That was also expensive.

Next step was when user end repair changed to off-site, then a PC was broken.

Earlier a repairman had a hardware kit, a single trip approach.
Next the broken machine was moved and repair facility was stationary, a bit cheaper system.
And now a system where the whole machine is sort of disposable, cheapest for the machine support.

Next rational step is that software support follows, back to its beginning.
First software was centered, obviously when hardware was the same.
Then its bug style period started, actual harmful part started also quite early.
Spreading things around is not cheap, especially when quality and harmony is low.

I've seen a retail chain grow, now it's cashed out at least once and grown more.
When the chain was growing first it bought other sort of small ones, so many kind of retailer electronics and their systems were also collecting.
Obviously combining that collection wasn't very smooth, so outsourcing all hardware stuff became eminent, and no sense to do any different with the software.

[CatalinaWOW]

Probably the biggest force against windows is that nobody (except enthusiasts) actually wants to own a computer of any description. They want the internet so they can buy crap off amazon and make their brains dumber with political propaganda on facebook, and that's already something their phones can do.

For enthusiasts I see no reason why you would want to use Microsoft's tailored-advertising-with-vestigial-operating-system-functions product. You can just install linux mint or something, install steam, your games work. In the rare instance they don't immediately, then it's 99% faster to fix the problem than it would be to decrapify a windows 10 or 11 install.

The remaining market for windows is just office computers and the terminally apathetic.

There are many comments along these lines, and I think they slightly miss the boat on my attitude and situation, and I would guess a significant majority of those on this forum.

I would say it this way. 

In the beginning there were computers.  Served by punch cards and bunches of attendants.  And the purpose of those computers was to do science, and military things and big finance things.   Most people didn't care much about it.  But there was a small percentage of the population, the geeks and scientists and engineers who lusted after access to these new toys.

Then the big users of those computers saw a way to fill their needs with timesharing and smaller machines (called mini-computers at the time and called things like PDP).  And that small group still didn't have their lusts fulfilled because both time share time and mini-computers still were way out of almost everyone's financial reach.  Only the relatively few who could access after hours access on one of the big machines or sweet talk a couple hours of time share from somewhere got to explore this new universe.  Any even smaller subset could actually do hardware interfaces to such machines.

And then came the altairs and the apples and the ohio scientifics and many more.  Finally the geeks had their toys.  And they did things that interested the big boys.  Spreadsheets.  Low cost control of ATE.  And particularly, word processing and graphic presentation tools.   Which talked to the money people.  They could fire secretaries and do local analysis.  So desktop computing became a thing both in big business and small business.  These mass produced things drove costs down even more, and because of their geek roots they still had the features that let those of us in that crowd do our thing. 

Now the business needs of small  and big business have been largely satisfied, and the public has lost their fascination with printing fancy placemats and whatever so the market is moving back to thin clients which do fine for social media and light word processing.  And the geek crowd has lost the big market driving hardware and software suitable for our needs.  Linux is the best available solution for geeks from my point of view, but I doubt it will ever have big money driving it as Microsoft once did.  So we won't have the benefit of what was a relatively brief overlap of our interests with the mainstream market.  Maybe the gamers will be fine, but that isn't what I consider a peer group.

[coppercone2]

I think thats a very bold statement about what the public lost interest in or how much satisfaction there is with thin clients. I worked managing thin clients before and everyone hated them pretty much universally. The only people that liked it were the bosses because they said it saved money (but there was serious friction because of constant complaints)

Worst job I ever had because I had zero power to help people because of how locked down the systems were. If it was a for-profit business, they would have gotten axed, but it was taxpayer dollars at work so complaints fall on deaf ears, mostly. The only thing I kept thinking is that someone must have really thought they can make one of my skill sets useless, and that they have failed.

That is what I think, there is adoption by organizations that basically have no performance metrics (horrible accountability) and change incredibly slowly, that makes it seem like they are popular. I also saw a med doctor go haywire when his thin client bullshit system was acting up. Of course its a 'jump' type organization, where everyone wants to GTFO, there are zero 'lifers' and its only tolerated because the attrition is so damn high for multiple reasons. By jump I mean like a resume filler/looking for another job thing, where its just like a crappy springboard. Those places are like 'damned'. They also like to have zero-tolerance rules, it just seems to go with the territory, so they can prevent experience based pay increase from occurring.

Oh yeah its also not doing its job of being secure (main selling point, that it was supposed to be so secure that there would never be a problem), given how I get regular mail about 'data-break-ins' that invite me for class action fun.  It has the obvious marketing of being a 'golden bullet' solution that will eliminate computer problems, get rid of IT and allow you to be 'cutting edge' with no work. Yeah, golden bullets don't work. I suggest keeping "too go to be true" in mind when you listen to the spiel, your skepticism will save your butt. Does the rhetoric advocating for these changes not sound exactly like "there has been a paradigm shift in the computing industry"? (wow, no one has been making fun of paradigm shift related corpospeak marketing recently... maybe that is why so many companies are getting owned after blindly rushing into a AI focus, what is it, too 2000's to ever happen again, they can't bear to miss out on the profitable paradigm shift?)


If I had to make a list of how to scuttle an organization while making your own career, I would say adopting thin clients is a real good bullet point.

[MrMobodies]

Good.

Bloated, horrible, uncustomizable task bar where I can't even add quick launch folders, cpu slowing animated skeleton placeholder.
 
No OS should require an online account just to use it, forced app store that does things in the background and install things behind the users back and pesters them

[nctnico]

Good.

Bloated, horrible, uncustomizable task bar where I can't even add quick launch folders, cpu slowing animated skeleton placeholder.
 
No OS should require an online account just to use it, forced app store that does things in the background and install things behind the users back and pesters them

As a long time Linux user I have no idea about modern day Windows at all. But from what I remember from the distant past, Microsoft seems to have Windows editions or at least offers way of tailoring Windows to suit business users. AFAIK what drives updates is to add security for the home users. What drives needing an account is to milk extra money from home users. As larger business users typically have IT departments and service contracts, there should be less need for pestering Windows users and milking more money.

[Zero999]

Plus windows "sales" are basically new device sales.

That's a slight over-representation because a good number of people buy a PC or laptop with Windows and immediately wipe it and install Linux. That's what I did with my current machine. I also bought my nephews a Mac Air, to both avoid Windows and because I'm generally happy with Apple's build quality, even though it has downsides of poor upgradability and it being a closed system.

[SteveThackery]

People have been banging on about thin clients for years, probably a couple of decades, maybe three.

Do you remember Web 2.0 back in 2002? As soon as we had interactive Web pages people were predicting that the Web browser would become the universal client to server-side processing. Do you remember ChromeOS and the appearance of Chromebooks back in 2010? Again, we were told that soon all we will need is a Web browser running on a minimalist hardware (and software) platform, and it would be the end of the traditional PC. Chromebooks would supplant most traditional consumer computers.

Honestly, I don't see very much progress towards the widespread use of thin clients, despite the technology being largely in place for a good quarter century. I don't actually know why. Google Docs and the online versions of the MS Office suite have been around for several years now, and are mature technologies, and yet there is still an enormous market for client-side versions of MS Office, et al.

For reasons I don't fully understand, the online versions of MS Office (for example) have slightly different - and lesser - features from the client-side applications.

I suspect - but don't know - that it's all about the UI and the available bandwidth. Take a 3D CAD program, for instance, running on the user's own PC. The bandwidth between the modelling engine and the screen - via a sophisticated and powerful graphics card - must be orders of magnitude faster than even a fast Internet link.

Perhaps the cost of providing all that server-side processing power, and the bandwidth necessary to serve tens or hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users, is just too high for the service providers, and it makes more financial sense to run the software on the end users' own hardware.

And I'm sorry to repeat myself, but I don't think there will be a significant move to Linux on the desktop until the big commercial players port their applications to Linux. The existing Linux desktop applications are just not good enough.

[shapirus]

Honestly, I don't see very much progress towards the widespread use of thin clients

Are you serious? I would bet that vast majority of end users' computers (smartphones included) are actually used as thin clients that do nothing else than access online content. People rarely use anything but the web browser and maybe a couple messenger apps, which are essentially thin clients too. Yes there are cases when people need to run specialized software that don't exist in "the cloud" or can't operate like that because of bandwidth or other limitations, but I'm sure these are comparatively rare.