lol no. As much as I would love for Microsoft to go die in a hole, nobody is moving away from Windows. Sensationalist headlines heralding the downfall of Microsoft due to Windows $CURRENT being the worst ever version of Windows have been around since the epoch of Windows itself. People are always moving in droves to Linux. People are always refusing to update to Windows $CURRENT. I've heard it. You've heard it. We've all heard it. And we'll all keep hearing it until the end of times. In the meantime, corporations still depend on that one piece of software they paid for 10 years ago that only runs on Windows, and people are still buying new machines that an OEM already put the latest version of Windows on.
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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Showerthoughts
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Yes and no
Windows market share is falling to other platforms. It won't go away overnight but the current trajectory of Microsoft isn't good.
Honesty a large portion of the market share is now days is Android. People are choosing mobile devices over desktops.
Sure, Windows has been steadily losing marketshare to mobile for years now but that has nothing to do with Windows 11 being so bad that it will destroy Microsoft. I'm not saying Windows isn't gonna die eventually, I'm saying there's no sudden "statistically significant" shift away from it that will impact Microsoft the wat the PS3 impacted Sony. Things are as they've always been and, by the look of things, they'll continue to be that way until desktops are mostly phased out by phones.
Microsoft just has so many users unwilling to change, that I do not foresee that happening. Just 10% of people switching to Linux would be absolute win for me.
In some places like higher ed the market share is much bigger
Windows 11 itself isn't an issue
The problem is all the junk and AI crap they shovel into it. It also doesn't help that they keep trying to sell you things.
Microsoft is bleeding power users and PC enthusiasts at an unprecedented rate. This is a great thing for Linux, but they are still absolutely locked into the corporate world and that's where the money is.
The reality is that Microsoft solved management of corporate policy and identity like 25 years ago and nothing else has come close. It has its problems, but Active Directory is an incredible piece of software. The combination of LDAP, with obfuscation of Kerberos to the point where you don't even need to know it exists, combined with policy deployment to endpoints is nothing short of a miracle.
Linux has tools for all those things, but none are easy to deploy or configure. If you have to manage thousands of desktops, Windows is still the clear choice
If you are a large corporation or government, you'd have the resources to do exactly that. I keep hearing about European governments moving to Linux. And why wouldn't you? Screw perpetual licensing.
What those EU governments are doing is out of interest for national security rather than hate for licensing. The US has changed drastically in the last decade and getting your sensitive data out of their infrastructure is a top priority.
The cost of change from Windows to Linux is pretty small for an individual. Most people have one or two machines and a handful of programs, none of which are critical to your continued existence.
In the corporate world, you need to be absolutely sure that everything will work flawlessly, which often means weeks or months of testing on top of all your regular IT duties, constant support tickets to obscure software vendors who may not have ever worked with Linux, and if some mission-critical piece of software breaks, then the company cannot operate until it is fixed...or you can continue to use Windows, even though it sucks more now.
I want Linux to have wider adoption in the desktop space, but it's a catch 22. People aren't going to move unless the software is guaranteed to work, and Linux-based software isn't going to be made unless people are using it. This is why Proton was such a big deal. It offered a real option for gaming to move to the platform and now it's viable and devs are starting to take linux into account.
Its not a guarantee of flawless operation thats required, its a source of liability if something goes wrong. Someone has to be responsible if the latest update blows everything up.
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Novell solved directory services 25 years ago. It took MS 10 to catch up.
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I present to you a wild notion:
Adobe OS.
They have the market value and revenue to do what steam is doing.
They could make switching a cost save if the OS integrates vertically with the creative cloud.
To be clear, I don't want this and would t use it. But any business with licenses would say "wait... Ditch Microsoft ios, and... Poof? Everything works and we pay way less money?"
All that Microsoft provides any business at this point is AD/Azure.
I feel like Microsoft is taking massive Ls between now and 2030. I don't think Adobe is gonna do this, I'm just saying if they did, it could work. Microsoft is a weak giant right now.
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When recently onboarding for a new job I heard something I never thought I would hear in my life.
Everyone was given a Mac. Eng, design, finance, HR. Everyone. In my onboarding cohort, someone in finance asked if they could have a Windows PC, which has been the backbone of finance orgs for decades. IT said no. They just didn’t want to deal with Microsoft’s enterprise ecosystem.
That's nice to see actually. Regular consumers like us don't have any pull, but businesses do. So I hope more start seeing Microsoft problematic enough to start shifting away to MacOS to get Microsoft to reassess their decisions.
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I got the same treatment recently. All tech departments were issued M4 Mac Book Pros because that was more cost effective than than dealing with the non-compliant fuckery of W11. Unfortunately non-tech departments got the old inventory and are suffering the abhorrent instability of W11. It somehow refuses to play nice with just about everything in our corporate ecosystem.
But macOS is even more locked down than windows?
They specifically mentioned the enterprise ecosystem.
I would not be surprised at all if Apple's MDM system is less painful to use for smaller businesses than Microsoft's AD and everything attached to it. Hell it might even be nicer for big orgs, but I've never heard of one (apart from the likes of Google) not using AD
Also if you're already dealing with one of those systems, an IT department is probably motivated to not run both and set up interop if they can avoid it
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Lets not forget too that Sony ever only started making video games at all because Nintendo thought they had such strong market share that they could bully Phillips AND Sony. Phillips ended up being a little bitch, and didn't do anything noteworthy. But Sony? Sony bent Nintendo over a barrel, and took their lunch money.
And then waited 10 years to make the same exact mistake.
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Every once in a while, Microsoft makes fundamental mistakes which they only survive because of their size. Think Microsoft Bob or Windows 8. Looks like Windows 11 is heading in the same direction.
Nobody sees it that way, nobody notices what we notice. They don't know any alternatives, it has new features so it's innovating, it does what they want/need. I hear no complaints, only from tech people who are invested in privacy and digital sovereignty. That's the reality.
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I don't think Sony intentionally screwed up PS2s to sell more PS3s though so it's not an equal comparison.
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they did manage to win the Blu-ray vs hd-dvd format wars
They didn't win them: they bought them. Blu-ray won via payola more than popularity or technical superiority. HDDVD has way better error correction and thus longevity, but you can see why corpos wouldn't want that at the peak of the planned obsolescence / e-waste years.
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It wouldn’t be the first time a Microsoft OS was a total disaster.
Usually Microsoft releases new versions quickly enough to leap-frog each other, though. Windows 98 was still supported when Windows XP was released, so nobody really needed to use WinME. The same thing happened with Windows Vista and 8. People could always just skip over the especially-shitty versions and wait for the next, not-quite-as-shitty version to come out before upgrading. They can't do that with Windows 11, though.
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Switched my home PC to Linux (Manjaro) over a year ago and had little issue getting it to run what I want. Steam works great these days. Wine has come a long way but I don’t end up using it.. though might try to run Foobar now that I think of it.
I hear the fleet management argument though. I got a MacBook at work because I couldn’t stand windows 11 and it’s claim on all virtualization (have to disable security features to get VMs access to hardware virtualization), and I don’t envy our IT department having to deal with Jamf.
- Sony won that generation.
- The games are still being made for Windows. The time it takes to lose that whole platform would allow them plenty of time to correct their path.
- Microsoft are crooked AF.... They've been keeping their monopoly status for over 30 years. They won't let that change.
Sony objectively did not win that generation. The Nintendo wii did— some gamers don’t want to include the Wii in the running at all, but it was there and it won approximately 101 million to maybe 88 million.
Now, the ps3 made a remarkable comeback and eventually caught back up with the Xbox 360, tying or slightly exceeding it in sales in the very end, but that’s not winning. That’s especially not winning compared to the PS2 generation, where there was absolutely no contest that it won— there wasn’t even a serious rival to the ps2 at the time. It dominated. The ps3 barely squeaking out a second place trophy against a CLOSE third place, when it trailed far behind at first, is not winning the generation. It’s just not.
Sony lost the absolute monolithic dominance they had in the ps2 era. That’s the situation I’m comparing now. Maybe this windows 11 situation won’t echo the past, but it’s a question I’m musing on in the shower.
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No way, unlike Windows 11, the PS3 was actually quite a good product.
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Every other version of windows flops or sucks. 98 SE, good. 2k/ME, No. XP, great. Vista,no. 7, great. 8, No.
10…probably the last good Windows unless M$oft unfucks itself and makes 12 good. But I doubt it.
10…probably the last good Windows
Everybody and their mother complained about how bad and privacy invasive Windows 10 was. Hell, the most famous software to fix the privacy issues of Windows 11 is still called Shut Up 10. This backlash is nothing more than people resisting change.
I think the biggest complaint was trying to shove cortana and the 11 upgrade in everyone’s faces constantly. Once you use whatever fix you choose to remove or silence them, Win10 is fine - as long as you avoid installing other M$ services, but those aren’t 10’s fault. And disabling the few annoyances 10 has are paltry compared to what M$ is trying to force users into accepting in 11.
I think the biggest complaint was trying to shove cortana and the 11 upgrade in everyone’s faces constantly
Cortana was definitely one of the complaints but 11 didn't even exist at the time and Microsoft insisted it never would. Funnily enough, people were pissed about Microsoft shoving the upgrade to 10 in their faces. Other things people complained about were the privacy-invading "quality of life" features, forced updates, the new start menu and metro apps. They also swore on their mothers' graves to never update to 10. It was literally the same thing that's happening with 11. You can look up "Windows spyware" with a pre-2021 filter for a blast from the past.
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While I run Linux on a desktop, I've always owned a Windows laptop. I decided last week that instead of ever running Windows 11, I'm going to buy a Macbook and dual boot it with Linux. Yes I know I can run Linux on any number of PC hardware laptops, there are occasionally windows only utilities needed to run firmware or some other proprieatry application. If I can know I can always fall back to OSX for system updates and running proprietary commercial software, I'll know I never need to touch Windows 11.
May when Microsoft realizes Windows 11 is Vista 2.0, Windows 12 may be great. With Linux and OSX, I don't see myself coming back to Windows even then though.
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one can hope, but I think it's a long shot. Most of my normie friends aren't going to switch even if microsoft assigned a live person to sit next to them and monitor their usage. "it needs to just work, and i know how to use it" they say (or something along those lines).
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I think it's more comparable to say the same kind of mistake that Microsoft made with the Xbox One. Sold at a $100 premium over the playstation 4 because Microsoft assumed that everyone would love to get a bundled Kinect when actually nobody did.
Also when they announced the stupid DRM that they wanted to use on the Xbox One (console must be always online to work, games on disk to become single use gift cards that get redeemed to a Microsoft account and can't be used on a different console) Probably Sony won the console war with this single 20 second video even if Microsoft backtracked immediately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
With windows 11 Microsoft is doing similar mistakes:
- With x86 processors, assuming that everyone has the money to buy a new computer even if their old one could work perfectly for what they need. Last week I went to visit an elementary school in my country and at the wall in the computer room they still had a poster comparing Netscape and Internet Explorer. They definitely don't have the funds to throw and buy again 30 computers. Time for Linux to shine?
- With arm processors, making it an exclusive for the expensive snapdragon x. Result: those laptops cost even more than comparable x86 ones, while could be cheaper. Look at the recently launched Minisforum R1. A full desktop computer with 32gb RAM and an ARM CPU that is comparable to a core i5-10400F while costing only $500. But because Microsoft chose to support only the most expensive snapdragon processors, this brand new computers can exclusively run Linux. Time for Linux to shine?
Maybe for home computing which isn't their priority. They've always had their bread buttered by corporate business
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