Steam Survey July 2024 Update: Windows 10 Usage Records Uptick, Windows 11 Drops

[DaemonForce]

I am still workin on getting Windows Server 2022 to be a gaming box. Because I love that server 2022 you can uninstall completely Windows Defender it saves over 1 GB of ram

I wouldn't bother. It's wasn't ready for prime time back in 2022 and I'll bet it's the same today.
Stuck to Server 2012 for as long as possible before adopting Win10 because I needed similar levels of control.
That's what it took to extend the life of my Phenom II X4 system.
The way the OS treated memory was different enough that I preferred the old way.
Also that was part of the 2009-2017 time period when I was still maxed at 4GB.
Things sure went 0-200 in a hurry. 2017: 8GB. 2019: 16GB DDR3/32GB DDR4. 2020: 64GB.
What did we learn? The size and speed matters. My next system will probably use 128GB UDIMMs.

Screw this Steam survey. It's not accurate at all.

Lol the same survey that says everyone is on the 3060 while you have to SCROLL just to find a crumb of RX 580 appear. That's hilarious.

The Steam hardware survey is completed nerfed by Chinese data.

The net cafes all throughout Asia are most likely driving up the figures on this and that appearing out of left field.

What's Edge used for then if I don't use it?

WEBM/WEBP previews in Explorer and other oddities seem tied to it somehow. I still haven't fully looked into it but it's another Internet Explorer situation. There's kind of a lot to cover. Take a look at program defaults.

I haven't been able to adopt Win11 for personal or professional use. Everything about it is either such a massive resource hog or the design so insufferable that I'd rather just stay out of it. I jumped back and forth between Server 2016/2019/2022 all throughout the Win10 timeline while trying to commit to some adoption of Win10. Only 2016 stood out as ready for prime time but the design is so old now that in a creator situations it fights some apps, can't integrate containers or psuedo-VMs of any kind and the service gotchas are annoying. I fully trust it for production though. Runs great on the 1c/1t eMachines in Core and Nanoserver versions. If I went back to cloud development I would be remastering a copy of Nanoserver for my FX rack to be full power 24/7 duty. 2022 has way too many teething issues to be fully adopted and not suitable for creation. I'll stick to Win10 for general purpose stuff until something serious pushes it out. With any luck that won't be until 2030 at the earliest. Some newer hardware driver models appear to be supporting Win11 only so that might be the first thing to break rank. I'm expecting it.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

It would be nice if Valve would finally fix the Steam survey. Make it poll every user every month, so we can get clear true data. It's not like it will cost them any more money, considering they have the system details of every user logged into Steam. Then make it opt in, with a percentage at the top to show how many users opted into the poll.

Spyware or not, what about your government & ISPs?

end to end encryption is a thing. Doesnt help you when the OS is the one doing the spying.

You use ISP email?

Hell naw. Who on earth still uses an ISP email address? I'm guessing the same people who still use AOL.

 

[Chrispy_]

I know for a fact the Win 11 start menu works better for some people, but unfortunately the "search for what you want" paradigm feels slow, inefficient and stupid to me.

That's because it is slow, inefficient, and stupid.

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.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Caught me lol, that's an ancient hotmail account, which I still exclusively access through a browser.


What's Edge used for then if I don't use it?

I suspect New Oulook needs it, Teams, as well as the Store. Anything that uses WebView2 is using Edge. You can see them when you expand out processes in task manager.

That's because it is slow, inefficient, and stupid.

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.

On my work machine, I’ll search for an excel document, and when the hit is right, I’ll hit enter, only to sometimes be greeted with “This action couldn’t be performed because Office doesn’t recognize the command it was given.” W11 is just a buggy mess, IMO. The most inconsistent OS experience to date.

 

[R-T-B]

Personally, I'm not on Windows 11 because it's a massive spyware. The things mentioned in the article have nothing to do with it.

It's as bad as Windows 10 in that department.

Hell naw. Who on earth still uses an ISP email address?

I do. Mine has free IMAP. That's honestly all I need. Keeps ads away.

 

[Icon Charlie]

If windows 7 wasn't a security concern, I'd agree with you.

For the basic tasks of adjusting your hardware settings, launching software, and finding/browsing drives - Windows 7 was a superior solution to 10 and 11. The improvements to Explorer's functionality in particular have come poisoned by the unwanted injection of web-searching, data-harvesting, AI suggestions, and advertising - which will cause poor explorer performance and even timeouts if those unnecessary web-requests and respective web-served bloat aren't working or their servers are overloaded.

I've been daily-driving W11 since it released and it's still inferior to W7 in so many ways despite me neutering as much of the BS as possible. Since I build and deploy machines I'm frequently exposed to Microsoft's idea of what W11 should be - ie, the out-of-the-box experience and it's terrifying in so many ways.

There are several work around's Win 7 security issues.

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.

 

[Shihab]

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.

Windows is an operating system. And searching for an application through a GUI is hardly a CLI.
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)!

 

[swaaye]

I remember when people wanted to stay on DOS. And when people didn't want to move from Windows 98 to XP.

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.

 

[Ripcord]

Possibly because most of the cheats don't work on windows 11 or are detectable on it.

 

[AusWolf]

It's as bad as Windows 10 in that department.

To be fair, I've got an external SSD formatted and ready for Linux to be installed for some experimenting with Proton and Steam. Who knows, if it ends up working well, I might be ditching Windows for good.

I remember when people wanted to stay on DOS. And when people didn't want to move from Windows 98 to XP.

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.

Nah. Windows 8 was far, far worse than Vista. Vista was slow because of its ridiculous hardware requirement, but 8 was completely unusable because of its horrible UI.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

To be fair, I've got an external SSD formatted and ready for Linux to be installed for some experimenting with Proton and Steam. Who knows, if it ends up working well, I might be ditching Windows for good.


Nah. Windows 8 was far, far worse than Vista. Vista was slow because of its ridiculous hardware requirement, but 8 was completely unusable because of its horrible UI.

8 got better with the 8.1 update, but simply using Start8 brought the best of both worlds.

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.

 

[AusWolf]

8 got better with the 8.1 update, but simply using Start8 brought the best of both worlds.

If I need a third-party tool to use an OS properly, then it's not a good OS. Simple.

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.

Thanks. What about Mint? That's the one I've got on a USB stick right now as I've used it in the past, albeit not for gaming.

 

[AGlezB]

Nah. Windows 8 was far, far worse than Vista. Vista was slow because of its ridiculous hardware requirement, but 8 was completely unusable because of its horrible UI.

Microsoft Design Language. I know at least two people who used Windows Phones and my eyes bled every time I saw them.
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.

 

[wolf]

Let's be honest, if I didn't have to upgrade for modern CPU and DirectX support, I'd probably still use Windows 98 or XP.

I remember having to go to Vista for DX10, ergh.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

If I need a third-party tool to use an OS properly, then it's not a good OS. Simple.


Thanks. What about Mint? That's the one I've got on a USB stick right now as I've used it in the past, albeit not for gaming.

Mint is Ubuntu-based, so it might have some of the same struggles I ran into. I had more than one game not want to run in Ubuntu 24.04. Arch-based required nothing but enabling Compatibility in Steam, which is just a toggle.

 

[Makaveli]

Still on Win 10 not surprised!

I have a hardware TPM module installed also

 

[AusWolf]

I remember having to go to Vista for DX10, ergh.

My memories of it aren't that bad. I had a fairly decent PC at that time, maybe that's why.

Mint is Ubuntu-based, so it might have some of the same struggles I ran into. I had more than one game not want to run in Ubuntu 24.04. Arch-based required nothing but enabling Compatibility in Steam, which is just a toggle.

Ah I see. I think I'll have a go with Mint, then. If it doesn't work, I'll swap to Manjaro.

 

[Vayra86]

View attachment 357843

That is my start menu (with a heavy blur applied for privacy) and the main reason I will not leave Win 10 until I absolutely have to. Right now it takes me two clicks or one keypress and one click to launch any one of my most used applications and I already know where they are so I don't even have to think about it. Total time from "I want to launch X application" to that application running is under a second.

I know for a fact the Win 11 start menu works better for some people, but unfortunately the "search for what you want" paradigm feels slow, inefficient and stupid to me. I don't expect any changes in Win 12 either so I'll use Win 10 until I no longer can and then I'll find some paid Win10-style star menu to install on whatever version of Windows I'm forced to use afterwards.

Windows 10 already had search by starting to type anything you want.

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).

Windows is an operating system. And searching for an application through a GUI is hardly a CLI.
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)!

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.

 

[Chrispy_]

On my work machine, I’ll search for an excel document, and when the hit is right, I’ll hit enter, only to sometimes be greeted with “This action couldn’t be performed because Office doesn’t recognize the command it was given.” W11 is just a buggy mess, IMO. The most inconsistent OS experience to date.

Yeah, I feel like the start menu only really works flawlessly if you're using a Microsoft account and Edge is your default browser. On-prem domain accounts, or local accounts, and you start to get inconsistent BS exactly like you and I have described.

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.

Vista was slow because of its ridiculous hardware requirement, but 8 was completely unusable because of its horrible UI.

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.

 

[Shihab]

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

This I have to disagree with.
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.

 

[Chrispy_]

especially one so far from being modular as Windows

This really nails it.

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.

 

[AusWolf]

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.

Windows 10 became better than 7, but it wasn't always the case. I remember Windows Update restarting your PC whether you wanted it or not, apps installing automatically (Candy Crush Saga), etc. It was a deal breaker for many people, including organisations that needed their systems running 24/7. The Settings menu is still inferior to the original Control Panel, we just learned to cope with it, albeit, it has been improved a lot. The file manager and Start menu have been improved a lot as well (although tiles are still an unnecessary misery). Things have changed for the better, but when it released, 10 was considerably worse than 7.
I'm not sure if 11 will ever get to this point.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

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.

That's the thing, MS probably does see how unpopular some things are if they harvest telemetry. I think we see it when certain apps/products get canned. They like to counter this with something new, but people don't trust it.

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.

 

[Chrispy_]

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 what the cause was for you in that instance, but when windows starts running slowly for simple stuff, I always open task manager and check processes. Usually when something's being crap, it's 0% CPU, 0% disk activity, and 0% network. Often, but not always, the frozen/slow app springs to life immediately after a little blip of network activity. I've had this with notepad before and I've had this with frozen settings pages - both of which should be 100% offline, unchanging things that run locally and don't need to do web lookups, updates, or other web-based nonsense.

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.

 

[DaemonForce]

Often, but not always, the frozen/slow app springs to life immediately after a little blip of network activity.

Microsoft Store updates be like...."You cannot open CALCULATOR without getting this super important network update"
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.