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Things that fit:
Things that don't fit
I strongly suspect most of them are people who had a PC, but now just use a tablet and phone for everything.
All those family photos at risk of being lost to a dodgy HDD that makes weird clicking noises when you accessed certain folders, now "safely" "stored" in Facebook's AI data training centres.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. As much as I want to imagine 400 million people switched from windows, to Linux or mac, I suspect it's more likely that a lot of people just don't need any other computer besides their phone these days.
Who is storing photos with meta? I get they ae accessing them but they are likely stored on icloud of gdrive. Both of which I would prefer over microsoft. Tbh I would prefer stone tablet carvings to microsoft.
Yeah, definitely iCloud most likely
I bet many of these "lost" users were windows installed on signage displays, and other similar stuff
You've not lived until you've seen a bunch of self-serve petrol pumps out of order, with a quarter of a BSOD on each.
I need to figure out what it takes to move my Minecraft save files from Windows to Linux. Should have started it long ago but never got around to it. It's quite literally the only thing I've used Windows for in a decade. Everything else I've always used Linux compatible stuff if not Linux itself for the last 26 years.
Are these modded worlds? If not, it should be plug in and play. I didn't have any problems when I moved my worlds.
I'd recommend Prism for your Linux minecraft launcher.
i installed prism on a whim a while back when i felt like Minecraft for a day.
it just seems to work out of the box with all mods I've tried
I've had one or two issues with using mods on Prism, but for the most part it's been working out of the box for mods too.
Completely vanilla.
Probably quite easy if you use the Java edition.
You member when they said windows 10 would be the last version of windows? Cause I member.
it was one of devs, not from company itself
I bet a good chunk of this is just flawed reporting. "People aren't buying as many replacement computers" that's because the old ones still work dummy
I think it's mainly because the entire PC market is shrinking. Most people use phones and tablets these days and those don't come with Windows.
and people love to work on Macs because its more convenient than windows when they are programming too.
Good. Stop treating your users like shit.
lol, the MBAs will go "we have less users now, that means we need to shit on the remaining ones even harder so we can still meet our growth targets".
I don't think they going to stop now. They even forced users to create Windows accounts in order to use Windows 11. They will also force Copilot to be installed on Windows 11.
Did we ever ask M$ for this AI spy tool? No.
Hehe, I don't think they will. Looks to me they must be aware of this. Likely they weighed their options and they do this on purpose.
They know. Microsoft is now a service company. Windows upgrades are free. Do you remember when Microsoft said that windows 10 is the last windows?
Now the upgrade to 11 is free, Microsoft is a service company... Windows is only a platform to sell you an office 365 subscription, copilot bullshit and grabbing your information.
They know the Windows days are numbered, and they are going to extract the most juice out of it until it dies.
In their head, the only OS you'll need in the future is a browser, until then, tough luck peasants.
Correct answer. And I think we've been there. We had serial terminals and thin clients before. Just that they were operated by your university or employer and not a for profit megacorp. We even had projects like FirefoxOS, interestingly enough not by Microsoft back then. But the idea was to move everything into the browser.
It's certainly going to help any of the service providers. Any data and control moves away from the user, onto their computers and into their control.
I for one have been a WIndows user (developing apps) since 3.0. And now I'm ditching it for Linux because of clusterfuck Windows 11 is (also to some extent Windows 10). WIll have to run a Windows virtual machine but only for developing long term legacy WIndows .NET Framework apps. For other development (Android, .NET with Avalonia, Blazor, some Rust etc) I'll use Linux natively.
This is alot like me. Two years ago I ditched windows and there have been some bumps but I'm happy to have done it. It took me about a month to find Linux equivalents for everything. I still have a VM with windows so I can run a legacy dev tool but that's the last thing.
I'm also the IT guy for a small (20 person) company. Now I have to get all of them to adopt Linux. I'm for sure not supporting the heap of junk that is Win 11.
How do you connect to Windows VM? RDP clients struggle with multimonitor support AFAIK. Also what virtualization you use?
Oracle VirtualBox
Assuming a single monitor?
For the VM? Yes just one for that, but I have 3 monitors for the Linux box that hosts it.
Right with you. I’ve been using Macintoshes for work, Windows for gaming/personal, and Linux for servers for several decades now and I’m finally done with Windows altogether. I’ve needed a good excuse to ditch Windows and 11 has been an excellent one. The Steam Deck has proven to me I have little need for Windows anymore. I can survive without the one or two games that don’t run on it.
If only my work supported Linux for desktops/laptops…
I also grew up on Windows and spent my whole career with it, personal machines too. Decades of use. Made the switch over the holidays, only one Windows box left in the house and its days are numbered. I'm even replacing Chromebooks with old business class Dell laptops running Linux.
Totally done with these companies, but Windows in particular is just an abomination these days.
Steam has especially made ditching Windows for gaming s lot easier.
And that is a true game changer. 🍿
no surprise. people are using phones more, and tablets/chromebooks, too, to a lesser extent. there's a lot of folks here that only use their phones now.
all sorts of reasons why people are dumping their windows pc.. but microsoft has yet to come up with a good reason why they should keep them or upgrade. none. not a single one.
Even old windows games does no longer work on windows BTW.
That's one of the reasons I use Linux as my daily driver. I'm not playing high end games, I only play old windows games from my childhood.
That's really a pretty staggering fact when you think about it. Windows has jumped the shark so completely that you prefer Linux for running old Windows games. I feel like even just 5 years ago, most folks would find a statement like that completely bizarre, and now it's taken as entirely sensible.
It has been so entertaining to watch these idiots trash one of the most dominant market positions in the history of markets. Just amazing stuff. And I really think we're gonna see that get even worse! I should be buying stock in popcorn lol
Those popcorn stocks went through the roof when Donald Duck got elected president of the United states though
High end games work just fine as well.
If someone can get Ground Control 2 working again, I'll name my first born after you.
This page seems to suggest that it works fine in Linux (otherwise, why would it have notes for Linux users that don't include anything about it not working?)
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Ground_Control_II:_Operation_Exodus
That took me three seconds to google lol
Hm, whenever I've tried to get it running on both windows and Linux there just a black screen. But thinking about it, there was seething about some USB devices causing that. Maybe I'll have a second go at it
Not playable in a VM?
Lots of current reviews on Steam say it still works. Unless you mean multiplayer, could always use a tunnel for "lan" gaming.
In my experience, this is usually the result of DRM. Most of my physical library of PC games doen't work because they use some kind of variation of StarForce. If you go back far enough, yes the old 16-bit titles don't work, and DOS hasn't been properly supported since pre-XP. Things like games not supporting widescreen resolutions or running some kind of bizarre deprecated library is often quite fixable. For all the criticisms I have of Windows, getting old games to work hasn't really been one of them.
Games for Windows Live can go to hell though.
When it comes to 16-bit games dosbox(-x) and other derivatives are your friends. Works on both windows and Linux
Ooh yeah that might work, thank you!
Microsoft's terrible OS and even worse sentiment for the user is killing the PC hardware business. Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc need to turn to Linux.