Statcounter, a company that tracks website traffic and operating system use, shows a clear picture. In April 2024, Linux had a small 2.84% slice of the desktop market in Europe. Fast forward to July 2025, and that share has jumped to an impressive 5.21%. That’s a massive 83.45% increase in just over a year.
that’s actually a huge increase!
Still in disbelief how they wreck it even in the simplest things.
Remember how clicking the audio system tray icon would open… The common audio settings and nothing else, idem dito for the network icon. For some incomprehensible reason they jammed those system tray icons menus all together a few years ago, you need more clicks, it’s less intuitive and less efficient. For what reason? No one knows.
Remember how right clicking an icon would open a quite extensive context menu? Gone. Now it’s a few BS options I never need. For example “open with…”: gone. Now in the freaking context menu you have to click “more options” for another, full context menu to appear.
Incredible BS tiny changes with a big negative user experience impact I truly cannot grasp why they’d do it. Only reason everyone sticks around is (bad) habits, vendor lockin and obligations for certain software by school or work who insist on keeping Microsoft because they themselves are also vendor locked in or just very very scared of change.
Not to mention the other great features of the shiny new context menu: Annoying little lag when opening, and changing of the content about 1.5 secs after it has opened — right when you have started to click some item so you end up doing some random unintended thing. Chef’s kiss
Exactly!
I think this is the smartphonification of the desktop. Android and iOS hide most settings, it works out of the box, while the user has no idea what’s happening in the background. To be honest: at least the reliability of the software has drastically improved. Nowadays the network just works, so no need to know the details. I remember the days of Win95 and BNC network, where it always took an hour and several tries until the network was up.
Try managing your printers in the modern interface.
THIS IS THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP! LETS GO!
but here’s a fresh twist in the tech world: Linux
Fresh twist?
Like a multi decade old and proven system is the new kid in the block?multi decade old and proven
My 2010 audio drivers would like to have a word with you
I am not surprised. Windows 11 is an utter shit. It is much worse than 10.
The start menu is a Web app as I understand.
What the actual fuck? How the fuck does that even work? So if you don’t have any Internet connection you can’t use the goddamn start button what the
No, I think it works without a network connection. But it’s
an Electrona React Native app now, which means it’s a glorified webview displaying an HTML document pretending to be an app because apparently even Microsoft don’t give a shit about MAUI.Electron apps (and similar shit like React Native) are notorious for being slow and extremely resource-hungry. You know, exactly what you don’t want a care part of your OS to be.
It’s worse that that. Only parts of the start menu are in react native (but it still needs to initialized every time you open it)
I don’t know that I would say “much worse.” But it’s more than incrementally worse, which is what most of the updates to Win10 have been over its lifetime. So straw, meet camel’s back.
Obligatory mention of the Windows 10 Enterprise Edition that goes through 2032 of support.
Eh, no. LTSC has an extra 13 months and you can get extended support for W10 enterprise, but MS made the pricing very unattractive (support cost basically doubles each year).
But W10 enterprise is going eol for mainstream support in October just like the home, pro and education editions.
I’ve been preparing our migration to W11 for 18 months now (we combined that with some other changes, otherwise a simple feature update would have sufficed). And no, linux is not an option.
Would you mind sharing why Linux is not an option? I’m planning to switch a fintech team of 20 to Ubuntu and wondering if I missed anything when doing the PoC
I think you should be good. If I only had some office people, it would make it a lot easier. But we have a lot of engineers who require specific CAD products (Catia, autoCAD) which would make it difficult, as well as we are completely locked into the Microsoft eco system (M365, MSSQL, Azure). Not even saying it wouldn’t be possible for most users, but it would be a massive undertaking (we have around 2000 users in 20 different locations) and I just don’t see us getting any type of support for this kind of project. Not in the least because we only jist migrated from on-prem to M365 cloud which was a multi-year project.
We are starting to use Linux more in the server space (Ubuntu and for some applications like Abaqus we will use RHEL) and I’m drafting a proposal to start switching certain databases to Postgresql to save on license costs, but that’s about it.
Is there lightroom on Linux? That’s basically how I earn my bread
It might work in Proton or WINE, or in a VM with a GPU passthrough. But that’s not something I’d bet my workflow on. Maybe try Darktable on Windows as an intermediate step, or have a separate work machine.
They’re referring to the Enterprise LTSC IoT version: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-iot-enterprise-ltsc-2021
