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.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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I think it's both. People who've never before really considered using Linux have started migrating off of Windows ever since the end of service announcement for Win10.
Sure. But I think the total number of desktop Linux users is a two digit millions number. So those few millions we've attracted lately are more a decimal point when talking about 400 million. They're there and part of the picture, though.
I'm seeing that a lot with traffic. It's been a steady tick up on mobile and a steady downward for PCs in general. People just use their phones for more things now. And I don't see that trend changing. Including this comment.
Source: web dev with a site that helps maintain a pretty big corporate site.
and people love to work on Macs because its more convenient than windows when they are programming too.
That sounds horrible
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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.
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Good. Stop treating your users like shit.
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.
Yes, we are going back to the mainframe era. It started gradually with "the cloud".
I remember the first days of "the cloud", when people were not keen to give their data to other companies: "we aren't going to put all our data on the internet!". Yet, here we are.
Today, when I bring slightly the idea we could host our operations, I am seen like the crazy one.
Slowly but surely, everything is being locked down in the hands of a few.
The costs are raising, our freedom is diminished, and our privacy is gone.
Linux is like the only bastion remaining. I hope we all take care of this one!
when I bring slightly the idea we could host our operations, I am seen like the crazy one
Interestingly enough, it's the opposite at my company. Mostly due to how damn fucking expensive things like AWS are.
We priced out a VM host, and we determined that if we strongly policed turning off the VMs when we weren't using them, using AWS would cost as much as a completely new local VM host every 6 months. And again, that is IF we police the fuck out of turning off the VMs, which we all knew wouldn't happen.
We have local VM hosts now.
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Linux is like the only bastion remaining. I hope we all take care of this one!
I certainly hope so. And at this point Linux is too big to fail. And some clever people are shaping it and keeping corporate interests in check.
It's an interesting situation. Linux is on my computer and helps me emancipate myself and stay in control. At the same time it's also Linux powering the cloud and the big services.
Plus I even have Linux on my phone. But it's usually a really weird one, full of Google stuff and spyware. (Well... mine isn't.)
But I feel how things change. It's getting harder each day to live without smartphones, proprietary apps and cloud services. And since everyone else is doing it, the alternatives might just vanish. I still don't understand why companies forfeit control, even if they have a appropriate size and business type where it makes sense to have own people and hardware, but hey...
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".
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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.
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.
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…
Steam has especially made ditching Windows for gaming s lot easier.
And that is a true game changer. 🍿
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.
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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!
You member when they said windows 10 would be the last version of windows? Cause I member.
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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.
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.
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
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Probably quite easy if you use the Java edition.
The author is reading WAAAY too much into a blog post statement. "More then a billion" could also mean 1.4 billion just like in 2022 but it just sounds better. Plus, you can't just compare a number from a blog post with an annual report. It's like comparing apples and oranges. I think this article is just wishful thinking.
The Year of Linux.... maybe? LOL
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