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Windows 11 just lost 5% market share in two months despite Windows 10 losing support.
(www.windowscentral.com)
According to Statcounter, Windows 11 held a 55.18% market share in October 2025. That share dropped to 53.7% in November and dropped again in December. Now, Windows 11 holds a 50.73% market share.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide
Many are rollback to Windows 10, but Linux is increasing as well.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
I been switching everyone to Linux, specifically Mint. It's good enough now for whatever.
I switched my parents to Linux more than 10 years ago. They are very happy with it.
What generation are they?
Mint? Based on Ubuntu 22.04? Seems a hint dated.
No offense, I swear. But I have a buddy who has to support Mint installs for work and it honestly sounds horrible.
Then again, the ease of use is probably worth the time saved setting up Arch.
Edit: It is Pop!_OS that is based on Ubuntu 22.04 not Mint. Ubuntu spinoffs spun me through a loop.
And this is the reason Linux will never go mainstream.
Even the Linux community can't agree which distro is good enough for the general public.
I simply didn't see it that way. Sure, the Linux community doesn't necessarily agree on which version is the best for new users. But we tend to agree on reliable distros which are good to get started on.
Brand New user? Unless they have a specific task that the PC needs to do, then first priority is reliability. Off the top of my head, Debian is reliable as hell, Ubuntu is about the same and fine but not my preference (very dislike snap proprietary bs that almost no one uses anyways), Fedora is a common use case and while I haven't used their desktop in a while, I rather like the rhel based distros they are reliable but keep things a little newer than say Debian.
The point is that I disagree with you entirely. You see the choice of distributions as daunting and a scary thing. I don't. I see the choice as freeing.
It has never mattered to me personally what version of Linux someone is using, or what path they think I should go down, I do my own research for my own purposes and come back with my own options(maybe my 90s rebel inner child still exists). Admittedly, perhaps someone needs more guidance when running away from Microslop and I could help as long as I know what package manager the distro is using.
Now, you also say that Linux isn't mainstream already? There are entire career fields built on it, why the hell is it not considered mainstream. DevOps typically uses Linux heavily, might be as simple as an install script, or a full k8s deployment. And shoot running docker servers for backing up your files via VPN? What about 25 TB of jellyfin movies/shows. Sorry, but even if not used as a desktop, a Linux server can go a long way and do a ton of good.
Even if it wasn't an LTS thing, 'dated' means nothing to Linux. Stability but with security fixes is the real win. There's a hell of a lot of room in the Windows install-base for "needs an os that's not spying on them, but realistically just uses a web browser."
Dated means a fuckton in the Desktop world. Browsers get updates regularly, so do games and graphics drivers. There's nothing "stable" about a website not working correctly just because my browser version is ancient and coming from the official repo.
Thank god flatpak has made people see the light, at least a little bit.
When a distro is 'dated' and get's 'stale' updates, it's not like the browsers don't get regular updates. They're just dragging their feet on kernel revisions and DMs, testing more and moving more slowly, gaining stability. Latest Firefox is still on Debian.
It depends on what you're doing. I've got Mint on my laptop and main PC, and the experience is different on both. On the laptop I tend to play Minecraft and do some basic tasks like taking notes and browsing the web. There's nothing in Mint that really affects that, so it doesn't hold me back at all.
On the PC though, I've got all of my important software, and some of it has had to be installed manually because the Mint repos are outdated. It's nothing that's particularly difficult to fix, but I know my way around computers. For your average user, it would be too much.
Mint is based on 24.04, and will rebase on the next LTS when it's released.
Alternatively, Linux Mint Debian Edition is based on Debian 13, which is currently newer than 24.04. Good option for non-nvidia users.
Straight up, I got it confused with Pop!_OS. Although I'm too lazy to look it up, my buddy who has been using it for years mentioned looking at other options because of that reason.
There are many stops between mint and arch. I'd personally point a new user towards fedora or maybe another Debian distro
Honestly, I'm with you on that one. Debian is reliable, so it send like the safest option. Personally, I use it for my seed box, and I've helped others set their own up to. Fedora, on the other hand, introduces package updates a little more frequently and in the long run, I think it's more enjoyable to work on in a desktop environment.
The "work" part is probably why you have such a bad view of Mint. It could be any OS, but at work there would be a horror story every day (because theres a lot of people, most cant use computers, etc).
The ease of use and not having it break randomly is why you don't use Arch for normal people who just need to get stuff done.
Actually I want to delete my comment... 22.04 is actually Pop!_OS not Mint. So I'm really dumb there, admittedly, Ubuntu spinoffs get me a little mixed up.
And the work bit, in truth, I think he could fix it by using a btrfs partition, snapper, and grub-btrfs. Build the machine to automatically take snapshots so if someone breaks it, you can fix it faster.
And yeah, ease of use is important, that was not meant as a criticism instead I pointed out a logical reason why Mint made sense.
Long story short, comment stupid, my bad.
Mint has snapshots available out of the box even with ext4, the welcome screen prompts you to create a snapshot to fallback to if anything goes wrong.
Interesting, I would love to understand the tooling behind that.