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.
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fuck with to make sure updates happened silently in the background that I gave to anyone else would always be wildly out of date the next time I touched it because they just… don’t install updates instead of typing in their password.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.
Linux expects you to know what the fuck you’re doing.
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.
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.
You’re not alone, I’ve been screaming into the void about this for a long time too. People keep saying “Linux is user friendly enough these days for even non techy people” and I’m sorry but it’s totally not.
I think most Linux users just don’t realize how technologically illiterate most people are. Most people can barely use a browser and send emails. They absolutely don’t want to mess with anything related to “updates” that they have no idea wtf is doing to their system anyway.
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
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
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.
Basically, any time a UI hops in front of you and goes ‘Wait! This is important!’ people get annoyed
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.
Indeed.
It’s to the point that even legitimate sites look like those dark-pattern fake scam ecommerce sites with all the popups, fake “deals”, and timers and shit.
Windows of course feels much the same way - recently replaced a failed mac with a new Mini and holy crap is MacOS so fucking zen.
I logged into my apple account and then was assaulted by… fucking nothing. No ads, no popups, no upsells, no candy crush, no enabling AI shit. I just landed on the desktop to do whatever the hell it was I was going to be doing.
Even Mint you have to jump through hoops to not have to put in your password every time there’s updates.
That’s… by design. Nothing can change your computer until you decide to approve it. As you said, you can change that setting but it’s not an oversight. Many of Windows’ historic security vulnerabilities were because they gave every user admin rights and didn’t prompt for changes. It’s also how many users were unknowingly upgraded to Windows 11 without wanting it…
