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Windows 8 and 8.1 Pass 15% Market Share, Windows XP Drops Below 20% Mark
An anonymous reader writes Everyone is well-aware by now that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have not seen the impressive adoption rate of their predecessor. Yet the duo had a particularly good run last month, finally passing 15 percent market share together. Together, they owned 16.80 percent of the market at the end of October, up from 12.26 percent at the end of September. Windows XP meanwhile dropped a whopping 6.69 points to 17.18 percent. The biggest catalyst for these changes was most likely back to school sales in September, which are better reflected in the data after students use their new machines for a full month.
Instead of focusing on the problems in Windows (inherently insecure, a spaghetti mess of trying to make things compatible all the way back to single-user Windows3.1, supporting obsolete drivers that don't respect sandboxing, etc.) and therefore being a magnet to malware of all kinds, people are EXCITED by the "new versions" of window dressing (no pun intended) Microsoft keeps bringing to market.
It's like buying new deck chairs for the Titanic. The color is right. The pillows are fluffy. Who cares if the end result is you drown in a cold dark sea.
While Windows 8's UI is broken, I don't think it's true that the open source environments are any better, like they once were.
Look at GNOME 3. It's as broken as Windows 8 was, if not more so. Try the latest version of gedit, if you don't believe me. Yeah, that's right, that's supposed to be a text editor! It's fucking atrocious.
Unity isn't really any better than GNOME 3. They all exhibit the same kind of hipster-driven tablet-lust idiocy that ruined Windows 8. They shit all over the users just to stroke the egos of some dumbass Millenials.
Firefox is absolutely fucked up now. Now it has a UI that's as bad as Chrome's (which is pretty damn bad!), but Firefox's performance and memory usage still suck, whereas Chrome's aren't as bad. I got to use IE 11 recently, and I can say with certainty that it was a better user experience than what Firefox offers today.
There was a time during the mid-2000s where GNOME provided a great desktop environment, where Firefox provided a great web browser, and where combined with Linux they provided an operating system better than Windows XP. But then mobile happened, then the hipsters got drawn in, and we ended up with the GNOME 3 and Firefox 4+ disasters. Now I'd actually rather use Windows 8, as ashamed as I am to say it, than a modern Linux distro.