Windows 11 is dying....

[John Coloccia]

Linux desktops are still just in the noise, but it's interesting that it's pretty much doubled in the last year.

I realized, and have even told customers, that Windows is starting to become my malware, and it's getting harder and harder to lock it down and stay in any sort of compliance. We're actively looking for ways to ditch it entirely, not because we hate it, but because we can't control it.

The killer apps for systems have ALWAYS been games. Yes, there are a couple of niche apps. Altium...Solidworks. But these are really niche. When Linux gaming becomes for real world class, and it's close, Windows will be irrelevant to home systems. And will thus become irrelevant to business systems. Everything is in the web anyway, just like you wanted.

Won't be the next 5 years, probably, but the desktop is effectively dead as a concept at the moment. When the tide shifts again to a local desktop being a thing, I don't think Windows will have any relevance. These things take many years to sort out. We went from remote computing, to local computing, and back to remote over 60 or so years. These are big, long cycles.

[ejeffrey]

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.

What?  Are you serious?  Google docs and MS office 365 are incredibly popular.  If client side office isn't the minority yet it will be soon.  Of course there are still tons of users of the client side office either because they need them for something or just that's what they have always done, but the online versions are hugely popular.

 

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.

Onshape is an online only 3D cad tool founded by former solidworks executives and it works well enough for a large number of use cases.  There are still performance advantages to local tools but it's not orders of magnitude.

[ejeffrey]

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.

Linux desktop users are still a basically irrelevent fraction.

My point was that if new computer sales are down 40% because people are keeping computers for 5 years instead of 3, that's 40% fewer windows sales even if the number of users remains the same.

[MrMobodies]

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.

After what happened in 2019:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/windows-10-update-aggro/
If someone gave me a free Windows 10 (standard branch)/11 license key I'd bin it.

I discovered Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019 in early 2020 which doesn't have a stupid app store and I read security updates only but Flash Player which I used for something was stilled uninstalled under the guise of security so not pleased about that at first.

It took me 2 years from early 2020 to make alterations get it the way I want before I started using it. One thing it won't do anymore is shut down all of a sudden which is a big nono. A notification would be nice but none as above. I have removed services; Rempl, waasmedic and set permissions to stop 'update orchestrator' from rewriting the keys in it's task scheduler folder (system) and registry bit (trustedinstaller) that shuts it down where it'd recreate the keys and deny users write permissions to alter the tasks. Disabled and removed quite a few telemetry things to discover over time there are others and even with Office Click to run service which I now set to manual.

I think this might be my last version of Windows I'd use.

I gave up on LTSC 2021 in 2022 (see screenshot) as soon as I saw it plastered with stupid animated skeleton placeholders that slow everything down for a few seconds by hogging a cpu core, flash and annoy me that they copied of webpages, the built in appstore and bloating of the window appearance where I find I could no longer set the size in the registry like i could before. It just looked bloated and horrible to me. I have seen Windows 11 since when given things to look at or buying newer laptops. It looks to me like they copied what was called Chrome driver, called it Webview and are now trying to use it to mimic explorer. In regedit, deleting keys and it dims the screen or the area? like on a web page which I find a very STUPID idea and that hurts my eyes, especially if I am searching, altering and deleting stuff where it dims and undims excessively goes to show they have absolutely no consideration for the eyes of their users.

I wonder how they'd like it if I turned up and down their contrast and brightness control excessively to the extremes depending on what they're doing.

[nctnico]

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.

What?  Are you serious?  Google docs and MS office 365 are incredibly popular.  If client side office isn't the minority yet it will be soon.  Of course there are still tons of users of the client side office either because they need them for something or just that's what they have always done, but the online versions are hugely popular.

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.

Onshape is an online only 3D cad tool founded by former solidworks executives and it works well enough for a large number of use cases.  There are still performance advantages to local tools but it's not orders of magnitude.

Actually, when visiting various companies, I see a lot of thin clients being used. So to me is seems the thin client is back. And indeed a lot of office tasks can be done online. The last 5 years I have gravitated to using web based office alternatives (like Google docs). These work surprisingly well and get rid of the complexity which comes with MS-Office. I basically stopped using MS-Office.

[jonovid]

when market saturation occurs sometimes a business will try to extract more from what they have.
killing off more demand for the product. greed gets in the way of good judgment. as in trying to please everyone.
maybe by 2027 see Windows phone 2.0  on a wearable device with a hand crank to save energy.
one size fits all Windows is not the answer? in 2026 Windows OS has become obese & too smart for its own good.
but then what would I know.

[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)

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.

Don't know why, but, WinNT4 sp4 with a 2 cpu motherboard was the fastest most efficient OS I ever used.
Win2000pro SP3 was small and a little slower than NT4 with dual cpus.  I think is was something to do with the scheduling as NT4 had a few multi-threading related bugs solved in 2000pro at the expense of speed.  I rarely rebooted 2000pro if ever.

I got 2000pro to work really good on a P-Pro with I believe 512mb of ram.  Boy, have times changed...
I ran a Quake 3 arena server from that system.  It was up for a year without a hiccup.

[BrianHG]

maybe by 2027 see Windows phone 2.0  on a wearable device with a hand crank to save energy.

We already had those for over a century.  They are called watches.
They are so efficient, they only need a windup one a day.
There even exist watches which gather surplus energy from the motion of you arm as you do things throughout the day such as walking.  Never need winding, they just appear to operate perpetually.

[coppercone2]

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.

have you ever tried using that shit? I had a co-worker that wanted to make this the project norm, the google or maybe microsoft virtual office system. Thank god I fucking don't trust it and saved the documents copy paste locally, because I don't trust it with my career. IIRC it even locked access during a important review meeting with people who are hard to get a hold of

[Karel]

Linux desktops are still just in the noise, but it's interesting that it's pretty much doubled in the last year.

5% marketshare in the US is not noise.

[Simon]

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..
 

Have you ever tried controlling 3D CAD on a PC over an internet link from another PC? in 4k ? The average but well setup PC can do 3D CAD so no need for a remote machine. Really the daily use of the vast majority of people is already met by what would be used as a terminal anyway. Where I work the general office PC's are not that powerful compact PC's. I even used one for a bit and with it's integrated graphics and DDR4 RAM it ran 2 4k monitors with no problem and may have managed 3D CAD on a 2k monitor.

My rapsery pi 5+ with an SSD is frankly fast and good enough to run a 4k monitor and do general office work. The new terminal idea won't be to save hardware but to control users and lock them in.

[ebastler]

Linux desktops are still just in the noise, but it's interesting that it's pretty much doubled in the last year.

5% marketshare in the US is not noise.

Funny how different readers get triggered by different things. For me it was the second part of the sentence -- where the heck does the "pretty much doubled last year" claim come from?

[Simon]

People are not switching to Linux in their droves. The open source world has a problem: no standardization. You can't run 3D CAD on linux, the vendors just won't risk such a fractured and fractious bunch of people to provide the thing that if it goes slightly wrong screws them and all of their customers.

Open source is great but not great for business. The big problem Linux has is that the mantra is: It's not perfect but the good news is that you can fix it yourself because you are a programmer yourself and you can do as you please. This is the definition of a business nightmare for anyone wanting to provide software to users on any distribution.

Until there is a big wide ranging reason for people and more importantly businesses adopt one distribution of linux that is seriously supported it won't become mainstream on desktops. If UNIX is still around that would be a better place to start from a business point of view.

this is what the man himself has to say and he is right:

[Analog Kid]

^^^ This, among other things, is why I will never switch to *nix.

And the average person won't either. So enough with the fond fantasies of Linux taking over the world.

[mendip_discovery]

^^^ This, among other things, is why I will never switch to *nix.

And the average person won't either. So enough with the fond fantasies of Linux taking over the world.

This an age old argument. These days we are in echo chambers than we like to admit.

At work we use(d) Google workspace and I dislike it hence we are heading towards MS Office as I do like editing spreadsheets in a grown up program. At home I have 5 MS machines, 1 Chromebook, and 5 Pi with Linux on them but all are headless. Depending on your job and industry things maybe different. I will say again more and more of the general population dont have a computer, just a phone or a tablet.

[paulca]

The other thing that has changed in "computers" is the number of women amongst our ranks.

I thought about this for a while, trying to track where and why they left. 

Consider in the 30/40s it was 99% women as the men where fighting in WWII.  In the 50/60s The "computer room" was often fronted and operated by women.

There is a very human aspect here, which starts to depart the industry.  In those early days "people" brought "people" decks of paper work.  Women who once where in the computing departments, typing pools became "Data entry cleks" through to "system adminstrators".  The point is....  real people met real people face to face to hand over input, action the machines, hand over outputs.  There was a people->people social mechanism.

We progressively "optimized" all that person->person contact out the system with automation.  Eventually even the data entry, typist role disappeared.  Typing became less critical a skill once you could edit before print.

Now "Hardcopy" is hardly ever seen.  We try and encourage women back with incentives and "We'll change the workplace to suit you".  However, women still seem to flock towards "Health Care", "Retail", "Hospitality" and the sciences of the same.   They "enjoy" working with people directly.

Human types something up....  machines move it... another human reads it.  This is 1% the bandwidth of "Human goes to other human and has a conversation"... even if they hand them the document and it's just "small talk", it's still dozens of times more "human bandwidth" that sending an email.

I think this bores women.  I think they prefer a far more human rich environment with "social" turned up to 11.  The IT world has been going the other way in the past 60 years.

For me it's the same as saying, "Women like people.  Men like things"..  that old trope.  I am aware it's a "bell curve thing" though I think it has merit to ask?

Or am I being a sexist pig?

[SteveThackery]

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.

Yes, I'm serious, but I admit that I was thinking mostly about desktop computing rather than mobile computing. What you are describing (Web browsing, messaging) are content consumption activities and mostly take place on Android and iOS devices.

As for desktops, I think I am a fairly typical user, and I don't think I have a single app that - overtly or covertly - runs "in the cloud". Let's see:

MS Visual Studio and Delphi for Windows software development
Arduino and VisualMicro for microcontroller programming
MS Office 2019 for word processing, spreadsheets, etc
Affinity and Corel Paint Shop Pro for graphics creation and editing
Soundforge Audio Studio, Audacity and Pocket MIDI for audio creation and editing
Cyberlink Power Director for video creation and editing
Siemens Solid Edge and KICAD for CAD work

All of those run on my PC, not in the cloud.

So yes, I'm serious. Are you seriously telling me that most desktop users do all that "in the cloud"?

EDIT: I've just remembered: my email software - em Client - also runs locally.  I've also just remembered that I have Messenger and WhatsApp clients on my desktop, and those will definitely be "thin", so that's two cloud apps I run.

[SteveThackery]

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.

What?  Are you serious?  Google docs and MS office 365 are incredibly popular.  If client side office isn't the minority yet it will be soon.  Of course there are still tons of users of the client side office either because they need them for something or just that's what they have always done, but the online versions are hugely popular.

Yep, serious. See the list of non-server-side software I use in my post just above this one.

[SteveThackery]

Onshape is an online only 3D cad tool founded by former solidworks executives and it works well enough for a large number of use cases.  There are still performance advantages to local tools but it's not orders of magnitude.

Yes, I'm aware. I didn’t say that cloud apps don't exist, I said that the local versions are much more popular.

I totally admit that I didn't research the statistics, although I don't believe those of you who disagreed with me did either. All I'm saying is that I'm a pretty boring, conventional Windows desktop PC user, and none of my main applications (listed above) run in the cloud. As far as I know, only MS Office out of my list gives me a choice. That's why I think local applications are more popular than cloud apps.

[shapirus]

Yes, I'm serious, but I admit that I was thinking mostly about desktop computing rather than mobile computing. What you are describing (Web browsing, messaging) are content consumption activities and mostly take place on Android and iOS devices.

As for desktops, I think I am a fairly typical user, and I don't think I have a single app that - overtly or covertly - runs "in the cloud". Let's see:

MS Visual Studio and Delphi for Windows software development
Arduino and VisualMicro for microcontroller programming
MS Office 2019 for word processing, spreadsheets, etc
Affinity and Corel Paint Shop Pro for graphics creation and editing
Soundforge Audio Studio, Audacity and Pocket MIDI for audio creation and editing
Cyberlink Power Director for video creation and editing
Siemens Solid Edge and KICAD for CAD work

All of those run on my PC, not in the cloud.

So yes, I'm serious. Are you seriously telling me that most desktop users do all that "in the cloud"?

I'm telling that most desktop users don't do all that at all, except maybe the office suite, which they don't need either, because it's available in the cloud.

You (and me, and many other folks here) are in the minority, that's what I'm pretty sure about.

[Zero999]

People are not switching to Linux in their droves. The open source world has a problem: no standardization.

It depends. Some things are very well standardised: file formats, much more so than proprietary platforms, others not so much.

The two things I hate most about Windows are the desktop and they way updates are handled. It would be good if someone were to develop their own desktop environment for Windows, which is fully customisable and doesn't change random things when updated.

[nctnico]

People are not switching to Linux in their droves. The open source world has a problem: no standardization. You can't run 3D CAD on linux, the vendors just won't risk such a fractured and fractious bunch of people to provide the thing that if it goes slightly wrong screws them and all of their customers.

Utter nonsense. Lots of software companies prove it is perfectly possible to distribute software to run on Linux. Every FPGA vendor has their tools working on Linux. And take browsers like Firefox and Chrome. That is just the tip of the iceberg. No need to compile anything. Don't confuse not knowing how to use Linux with Linux being useless in general.

[paulca]

Someone asked why the increase in linux desktops does not appear on statcounter.

Look at where they get the data.

About Statcounter GlobalStats
Statcounter Global Stats are brought to you by Statcounter - the free, online visitor stats tool.

It appears to primarily work off of "X-UserAgent" headers from browsers.

You realise that most large company InfoSec teams will have those obfuscated within the proxy right?

Additionally and far more damning.  Virtually no servers have internet access or EVER use a browser.

[SteveThackery]

Yes, I'm serious, but I admit that I was thinking mostly about desktop computing rather than mobile computing. What you are describing (Web browsing, messaging) are content consumption activities and mostly take place on Android and iOS devices.

As for desktops, I think I am a fairly typical user, and I don't think I have a single app that - overtly or covertly - runs "in the cloud". Let's see:

MS Visual Studio and Delphi for Windows software development
Arduino and VisualMicro for microcontroller programming
MS Office 2019 for word processing, spreadsheets, etc
Affinity and Corel Paint Shop Pro for graphics creation and editing
Soundforge Audio Studio, Audacity and Pocket MIDI for audio creation and editing
Cyberlink Power Director for video creation and editing
Siemens Solid Edge and KICAD for CAD work

All of those run on my PC, not in the cloud.

So yes, I'm serious. Are you seriously telling me that most desktop users do all that "in the cloud"?

I'm telling that most desktop users don't do all that at all, except maybe the office suite, which they don't need either, because it's available in the cloud.

You (and me, and many other folks here) are in the minority, that's what I'm pretty sure about.

OK, I think that's a fair point.

As I mentioned above, I think that most content consumption is done with iOS or Android, and I think that is where the thin client is king. I doubt that's true for most machines running Windows. I suspect that - in general - most Windows machines exist because the user needs to do more than just consume content. Trouble is, I don't have the stats to support my suspicion.

[Simon]

People are not switching to Linux in their droves. The open source world has a problem: no standardization. You can't run 3D CAD on linux, the vendors just won't risk such a fractured and fractious bunch of people to provide the thing that if it goes slightly wrong screws them and all of their customers.

Utter nonsense. Lots of software companies prove it is perfectly possible to distribute software to run on Linux. Every FPGA vendor has their tools working on Linux. And take browsers like Firefox and Chrome. That is just the tip of the iceberg. No need to compile anything. Don't confuse not knowing how to use Linux with Linux being useless in general.

OK, find me a professional 3D CAD program that runs on linux. Right so that is my employer out. How many electronics CAD packages are there for linux? Apart from KiCad I don't know of any and KiCad is not a professional package or at least it is not a package that a business is likely to use unless as in my case the electronics engineer (me) gets to choose. Right so that is engineering out.

Programming, of course as the software user is a programmer, yes sure Linux is a doddle.

The general public? People like to all use the same system so that they can compare notes and tell each other about how to do things and how great it is. If everyone is on a different desktop then they won't have access to the same programs.

If you just want to browse the internet and do emails then sure, by definition every phone is linux and a basic desktop machine is fine.

I don't I know anyone that uses Linux for any reason other than they actively don't like windows or are anti capitalism bla bla bla and hate microsoft. None of the general public looks at their options and goes "I think I like the Linux option better", they just want to use whatever is the easiest and supported. For Linux to take over you need a huge commercial drive, some new product that makes you use it and that is nice to use.