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PC Gamers Abandoning Windows 11 for Linux with Higher FPS & Fewer Interruptions
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this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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I saw in a recent Youtube video that between web services and AI, Windows licencing is only about 10% of Microslop's business.
IDK if that number is true, but it sure would explain how much they've put into user experience. Does anyone use Windows because they like it?
That's correct. Here's some data on Microsoft's revenue:
It does but it's really short-sighted from MS's part. Sure, Windows might be only 10% of its business, but the other 90% heavily rely on it. Or rather on Windows being a monopoly on desktop OSes; without that people Windows servers, Office and MS "cloud services" (basically: we shit on your computer so much you need to use ours) wouldn't see the light of the day.
Also: even if they are not directly connected, the fact that one monopoly crumbles might result in the next one falling apart too. Someone who successfully got out of Windows might try to ditch their MS365 subscription too.
I don’t think companies are going to ditch their MS365 subscriptions. That would mean getting rid of Outlook and Teams, and that ain’t happening anytime soon.
Can someone more technical than me tell me why Outlook is so awesome for work? I use Outlook 365 for work, and the search function is ass. G-suite worked better on the front end, so I'm wondering about the back end.
Brand recognition. Offices and businesses have been using a version of Outlook for decades.
Just that calendar and email are all in one. I know Thunderbird and Evolution mail have the same features too, its just MS office often came with the systems. And yeah outlook search is the absolute worst. I have literally has the email visible in the mail history and search for it won't find it, not by title or content.
It's just a recognizable brand, and it's often bundled with the other things businesses are already buying in the Office suite. (think: Teams, Word/PowerPoint/Excel/etc)
The interesting bit is that these businesses are almost always using their custom domain for emails... which means if they wanted to switch from Outlook to another provider, and they linked their domain to that new provider, there is then zero switching cost outside the time to sign everyone up for accounts on the new provider and transfer old emails over, since all the emails directed at their domain would just go to the new provider.
Emails also come in standardized formats that can be downloaded and transferred to a new provider, too.
I genuinely have faith that businesses will begin switching away as the cost becomes harder and harder to justify.
Tell me again how you've never supported an email service migration. I'm delighted that you haven't, but it's obvious.
Also, I love when people pull a "draw the rest of the owl" with tech they've never been up in the guts of.
Oh, you sweet sweet thing. I remember when I believed that technical specs were reliable and things were interoperable because documentation said they were.
I can still see their tears.
Maybe it truly is that easy with other providers to switch from one to another, but Outlook, and especially the Exchange backend underneath (both the effectively discontinued self-hosted server version and the Azure-managed Exchange Online) are a special kind of jank.
There isn't a special layer or kind of hell for whoever designed it. There isn't even a specific hell in and of itself.
Whatever exists after death for the designers of Outlook and Exchange is something so much worse than hell that it's categorically different from anything able to be conceptualized by humans. We don't have words to even begin to describe the gulf between comprehendable human thought and what awaits for them.
In the hypothetical situation Windows desktop monopoly is over, there'll be at least some internal pressure to do so. Cost of switch (in money = work hours) might be a pain, but if they believe they'll profit more by using some competitor that is not Windows exclusive, they'll eventually do it.
There are a lot of companies that have migrated to Google and only kept a few Office licenses for cases that MSWord is imperative in order to do properly their job (eg. exchange documents with third parties that only accept docx and the compatibility with GDocs is not perfect).
It depends on the cost and other factors used to sweeten the deal.
And w.r.t. Teams, I never had a good experience with it (regarding virtual meetings), meanwhile I never had an issue with Google Meet.
Unfortunately Google is also slop
Imagine having to babysit Windows servers
Azure has support for Linux servers. They’ve even made an effort to port Dotnet to Linux. A majority of their cloud infrastructure is Linux it seems.
That 40% isn't for Windows Server, is it?
I had to dig through their annual report to find it:
So it includes Windows Server, but it's way more than just that.
I did back in the XP days. Long, loooong ago...
XP was alright, but I'm mostly just nostalgic for the aesthetic of 95/98/2000
Vista was the reason I switched to Linux
Boy, have I got some KDE themes for you!
https://store.kde.org/c/2331481
The worse part of vista wasn't even that it looked awful or ran awful. Personal perfence not with standing.
It was just 3 years too early and hardware fucking sucked. Drivers went standardized and everything was too weak.
Going back to vista years after the fact show it was actually really solid.
Probably the last time Microsoft was ever ahead of the curve in terms of design. Vista then 7 were great design wise, then it was only down hill since.
Hardware was definitely the issue. What got me to first install Linux was my wireless card just randomly stopped working. People were recommending that I do a full reinstall of Vista to get internet working again. I installed Ubuntu instead and never looked back.
Changing the graphics driver model at the same time as making the desktop graphically demanding was probably a bad idea
This was the same era when I tried to switch, due to the shittiness of Vista. I wanna say it was Mandrake Linux was what I was trying to use, but I couldn't get it running correctly on my hardware.
Came back some time later and discovered Mepis Linux. After that, I never went back.
I started with Ubuntu, switched to Mint and finally settled on Arch.
I wouldn't be surprised. Desktop revenue has been a pretty small slice for their revenue long before AI was a thing. Their main drivers were server products and O365, and now AI and Azure are also pushing a lot of revenue.
Direct revenue through Windows sales might be low, but I suspect Windows is still important to drive people to buy One Cloud, office 365 etc subscriptions. So when people move away to Linux, the other services should become less profitable with some time delay
Most likely. The majority of MS products and services are interconnected in some way.
i like windows 7
I don't think the number is indicative of quality. The office suite is their bread and butter (alongside Azure) and Teams is a steaming pile of shit.
none of the other popular desktop operating systems cost money at all. I don't know why Microsoft is doing half of the things that it does