Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.
This is probably why Microsoft has been aggressively pushing users to upgrade to Windows 11 after the previous version of the OS loses support — so that its users would install the latest version of Windows on their current system (or get a new PC if their system is incapable of running the latest version). Although macOS is a threat to Windows, especially with the launch of Apple Silicon, we cannot say that those 400 million users all went and bought a MacBook. That’s because, as far back as 2023, Mac sales have also been dropping, with Statista reporting the computer line, once holding more than 85% of the company revenue, now making up just 7.7%.
This is alot like me. Two years ago I ditched windows and there have been some bumps but I’m happy to have done it. It took me about a month to find Linux equivalents for everything. I still have a VM with windows so I can run a legacy dev tool but that’s the last thing.
I’m also the IT guy for a small (20 person) company. Now I have to get all of them to adopt Linux. I’m for sure not supporting the heap of junk that is Win 11.
How do you connect to Windows VM? RDP clients struggle with multimonitor support AFAIK. Also what virtualization you use?
Oracle VirtualBox
Assuming a single monitor?
For the VM? Yes just one for that, but I have 3 monitors for the Linux box that hosts it.