Wednesday, August 7th 2024
Steam Survey July 2024 Update: Windows 10 Usage Records Uptick, Windows 11 Drops
Interesting things are happening in the gaming community, as Windows 10 operating system has seen an increase in its user base on the Steam platform, while Windows 11 has dipped below the 46% mark for the first time since its launch. According to the latest July data from Steam's hardware and software survey, Windows 10's share rose to 47.69%, marking a significant uptick that contrasts with Windows 11's decline to 45.73%. This trend highlights a growing preference among gamers for the older operating system, which is often praised for its stability and compatibility with a wide range of games and hardware. Many users have expressed concerns over Windows 11's performance and its stringent hardware requirements, which have made it less accessible for some gamers, especially those without the TPM 2.0-enhanced system.
The shift in user demographics is particularly interesting given that Windows 11 was designed with gaming enhancements in mind, including features like DirectStorage and Auto HDR. However, the adoption rate appears to be hampered by issues related to compatibility and performance, leading many gamers to stick with the more familiar and reliable Windows 10. This trend could prompt Microsoft to reevaluate its approach to Windows 11, particularly in terms of addressing user concerns and enhancing compatibility with existing hardware. Other OSes are seeing stagnation, especially with Linux-based distributions recording zero change. Apple's OSX stands at 1.37%, a +0.06% increase from last month.
Sources:
Steam Survey, via NotebookCheck
The shift in user demographics is particularly interesting given that Windows 11 was designed with gaming enhancements in mind, including features like DirectStorage and Auto HDR. However, the adoption rate appears to be hampered by issues related to compatibility and performance, leading many gamers to stick with the more familiar and reliable Windows 10. This trend could prompt Microsoft to reevaluate its approach to Windows 11, particularly in terms of addressing user concerns and enhancing compatibility with existing hardware. Other OSes are seeing stagnation, especially with Linux-based distributions recording zero change. Apple's OSX stands at 1.37%, a +0.06% increase from last month.
115 Comments on Steam Survey July 2024 Update: Windows 10 Usage Records Uptick, Windows 11 Drops
Windows is a GUI. A GRAPHICAL User Interface. We moved beyond text entry in the early '90s but for whatever dumb reason Microsoft wants us to type the name of the program which may or may not give you a shortcut that can launch the program.
One of them is keep it off line. Hehehe.
Another is using Linux/Gnomebox and go virtual. I just might do this when I build my next rig and have this one as my Linux Box.
But I do understand where you are coming from and when have the time I'll work on which way to do this.
BUT W11 Sucks... I tried it... hated it and wiped it off my testing SSD.
Windows 11's start may be broken (I'll talk y'all word for it), but hitting super followed by first two or three letters of your application then enter was an effective and efficient method since at least Vista/7.
I'm all for keeping established interfaces as an option, but let's not be ridiculous here; my queries trump your icons any day (and this last part is [partially] sarcastic)! :nutkick:
Windows 12 or whatever it will be called must be right around the corner.
I think the worst major release was probably Vista. It and Win7 were so slow until SSDs became popular. Vista was especially terrible though because of how unstable drivers for it were and the hardware just not being fast enough to brute force it to be speedy.
I recommend Manjaro for your trial run. Being based on Arch, it’s what SteamOS is based on so the support is best. There are games I’ve tried on Ubuntu that won’t work right with Proton, but work just fine in Manjaro. It’s been good enough that I wiped my W11 drive, which I hadn’t even booted to in a few months.
Then came Win 11 and MS decided to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and now they just copy Apple's UI design. I'd love it if they also copied Apple's software policy and stopped bundling garbage in the base OS.
I have a hardware TPM module installed also :rolleyes:
It works fine. Over the last few years I already found myself just not adding shortcuts to its start menu anymore. The shortcuts themselves would deprecate more often than not (you play a game, you finish it, you leave shortcuts on the menu, but game was already deleted, that kind of stuff) and then you'd have a menu full of random junk you don't use in front of you. Today? Even prior to moving to 11, I already had genuinely just 'started typing' after hitting start, often not even clicking the start menu button but rather hitting the WIN key. Its a complete keyboard workflow, and it works genuinely great.
Things like the snipping tool. hit WIN, type 'snip', hit ENTER, click whatever kind of screenshot option you want, Ctrl+C it and Ctrl+V it on TPU. Its fantastic. Even at work, if I have to make a 'how to' document, its a super basic and simple way to get screenshots in there, that works seamlessly with other applications, whatever they are.
Start a recording session on my DJ gear... hit WIN, type 'rek', hit ENTER. (Rekordbox starts up). Hit WIN again, type 'aud', hit enter again (Audacity starts up). All that's left to do is select track and hit record in audacity.
For games it is no different. Three to four letters and enter. You're in. Even just looking for the right icon in the menu feels like busywork compared to that, honestly.
Yesterday I needed to disable core isolation. You could start clicking past several menus and find it yourself in config menu. But I just typed 'core iso' and hit enter. Never went there before in my life. Took all of two seconds. It even found that same menu with the same prompt despite the OS being in Dutch (and the words nothing alike).Yeah I don't see how Start is broken... and I really, really was fond of my self managed icons in there. You can still get them in there, there's just some additional layers as well.
The longer I read this topic the more I'm convinced people are really just trying to whine about every Windows regardless. I mean... how is 10 worse than 7. Seriously. Everything's still in there, the OS is far more stable than 7 and mitigates issues better too, of all kinds I might add (external influences, but also simple things like borderless windowed applications and smooth alt tabbing... 7 was archaic in that sense, and SLOW AF in multitasking). The scheduler is vastly improved. Etc. And what about boot times ;)
I think there's alot of things people take for granted over the years, but I really can't look back at 7 and say it was the most fantastic OS ever. 10 is much, much better. Now, is 11 better than 10? I don't think it is, just yet. But worse? Yes, if you don't force delete all the newspeak nonsense out of it, its worse. But without that? I'm just looking at a very lean, responsive OS that has all the functionality I've needed out of it so far. In that sense, 11 seems no different than 10.
I just live with its quirks but don't have a valid or useful explanation of why its misbehaving when users ask me what's going on. I just give them workarounds or tell them to reboot, which likely solves the issue by restarting services and resetting sessions.I'm glad I no longer have to deal with any Server 2012. Windows 8's interface on a server was pretty horrible on a physical machine with real screen edges, but when you had to piss about with the silly edge-swipe stuff in an RDP or VNC window and get the dumbass touchscreen gestures to be literally pixel-perfect to even register the action, I just used S2012 as a cli-only OS until S2016 came along.
Any major software has teething problems, especially one as huge as Windows, but 10 had them far longer than 7 thanks to MS outsourcing QA to the end users. It did become stable enough towards the end, at which point, amusingly, it began turning into another 7 (approaching eol after people have finally started getting used to it with everyone hating the next version).
Boot times gains are exaggerated, imo. Sure, an extra 15 seconds may look bigger when shown side by side on some graph, but in real life when you're starting up your machine for a 1~2hr gaming session or an 8 hour shift, does it matter?
And I personally hated the default multi-tasking config of 10. The "snap assist" crap is one of the first things I had to disable when working with Win10 machine. The only real progress 10 made in this department was the ability to resize both windows at the same time.
Each successive Windows version is definitely superior to the precursor under the hood, no argument there. But an OS, especially one so far from being modular as Windows, is not just a kernel. And Microsoft keeps making it difficult to defend them.
People's problem(s) with Windows is that for the bits of it they want and actually use, they have to suck up all the other shit that is either irrelevant, broken, or annoying as well. It doesn't matter what specific parts of the OS those are, almost everyone hates some aspects of Windows no matter the version and each version just takes some steps forwards and some steps backwards without giving the users any actual choice - you have to accept the OS as a whole, with limited customisation or modularity unless you want to disable automatic updates and start hacking out various features and integrations manually (all of which will reinstall themselves if you let Microsoft update the OS automatically).
The modularity of most Linux distros would be very welcome on Windows. Perhaps then Microsoft would see just how unpopular all their bundled crapware really is as billions of customers choose to disable or remove those modules. It's never going to happen though because all that bundled crapware is how they monetise it.
I'm not sure if 11 will ever get to this point.
Here's another oddity that I experienced on my work machine with W11 just this week. I opened calculator. The window popped up, but it was empty, and it took at least 5 seconds for the window to fill in with the actual calculator bits so I could use it. Like really, not kidding. There's just this feeling that the UI is on a delay sometimes. It's really like nothing I've experienced in Windows before. Calculator should be an instant open, and it usually is, but then I had this. It's not like the system was maxed at 100% doing some task either. I don't know if it's just W11, or if it's the Adler Lake i7 with it's P+E causing issues, or if it's the HP Z-book that pretty much always runs hot. It is such an inconsistent experience.
Your guess is as good as mine, but I can only assume it's telemetry-related and waiting for an ack/packet from a Microsoft before continuing. Notepad isn't supposed to backup history to the cloud, I'm not using a Microsoft account with consent to store my %appdata% folders on Onedrive, and I've disabled telemetry (specifically, the domain-wide group policy override to send required diagnostic data only).
Clearly, a local app doesn't need to transmit or receive data from the web, but that's what it's doing. If you really cared to find the exact reason you could run a packet capture - but does it matter? You are probably just going to get confirmation of my cynical suspicions.
Even though the app and others like it literally haven't been updated in several dozen update cycles.
Microsoft Store eviscerated those apps and itself from my system so I can't even get them back without a full reinstall.
Stay off the main update ring.
There are a million blog posts and Youtube videos that will teach someone how to use Windows more effectively, but they have to go and search for them and that is too much work for most users. It's not that they lack curiosity but their curiosity is forcibly directed towards the last trendy thing or celebrity scandal or something like that followed by an ad about some product or other. Plus MS is not interested in people knowing because when you know you don't search and therefore don't contribute to AI training or ad profiling.
Personally, I'd smack myself hard in the head if I hadn't learned at least some ways to take advantage of an OS I've been using almost every single day for the better part of 3 decades.