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Windows Desktop Market Share Drops Below 90% (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat's new article about desktop operating systems: Windows 7 is still the king, but it no longer holds the majority. Nine months after Windows 10's release, Windows 7 has finally fallen below 50 percent market share and Windows XP has dropped into single digits. While this is good news for Microsoft, April was actually a poor month for Windows overall, which for the first time owned less than 90 percent of the market, according to the latest figures from Net Applications.
And why is Windows 3.11 seeing such an uptick in use?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
The flat-out refusal to have kernel level generic usb3 driver means that all hypervisors running on Win7 must either have their own full USB3 implementation or be limited to USB2. This is just an attempt to get people to upgrade from Win7
The number of people looking at Windows 7 USB3 support as a hypervisor host is only slightly more people than "just you".
Ok, I gave a Fedora CD to the windows guy at work that manages the desktops. He is always saying how easy it is to install Windows. He grabbed an engineering workstations with a 6 core processor, 128g of ram, and high end graphics card. Put the CD in, it asked him 4 or 5 questions and installed. The whole process took less than 20 min and everything worked including the 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse Pro.
He was in shock and said "That would have taken me 4 or 5 hours with windows!"
He then grabbed one of the older Dell laptops they give out to the office staff and put it in there. It installed in 20 min and recognized everything including the WiFi card. He admitted that he grabbed that laptop because it is a pain to get windows to work on it and was amazed that linux just installed, came up and worked as expected.
So, He was not a Linux Zealot, he was the windows desktop guy. I did nothing but watch, and he did everything.
Linux has come a ling ways in the last 10 years, I have been surprised as just how easy it is to install. You no longer have to be a computer wiz to install it.
Yeah, I did that. In fact, I kept Linux installed on a second partition for a dozen+ years. When asked (and you did not) I recommend against that dual boot thing. I dare say that, with more than a dozen years and as prolific as I write, I've examined this a lot. It is my experience that most people who do the dual booting thing do not actually convert and remain with Linux for any significant length of time. Which is okay, I'm not one to tell someone what OS to use. On the other hand, if you're interested in converting to the dark side, I've noticed most people do better at it when they go all gung-ho.
To give a bit of history... I came from Unix (more or less). Linux came out and I dicked around with it but I didn't really play with Linux until 1998 or so? It was about the time where I was comfortable with Windows at home and on some of the machines at the office. Everything else was usually from Sun. :) SunOS and Solaris were good to me and the hardware was fantastic but I'm trying to not digress too much.
Still, I liked the idea of Linux. I kept it installed on nearly every computer that I owned that had space. I preferred to put it on a second drive so often would buy (and still do) larger laptops for the express purpose of having a second drive bay. Yet, I didn't boot into it except to update it and try new things in it. Once in a while, I'd use if exclusively for a few months. Sometimes? I'd only use it for a day. Maybe even less - just long enough to break something and not feel like fixing it. Stuff like that.
During this time, with Linux installed on a 2nd drive or partition, I actually was awarded the MS MVP for more than a half-dozen years and in a variety of categories. I still had, even then, every intention to move to Linux. No... I didn't... I'd find something that looked interesting and I'd boot up a second machine or reboot the one I was on and boot to Linux. I'd get frustrated or bored and I'd just go back to Windows on the next boot. More often than not, I'd have broken something (which is actually how I learn) and then I'd just do a re-install or try a new distro and repeat the process - over a period of months, then years, then over a decade.
Then, in a fit of frustration, I realized what I had to do. How many files do you have stored that are cryptically named "setup.exe" or "install.zip?" How many copies of CCleaner.exe do you have? Do you even know what they are any more?
I was frustrated because I'm aging and, I swear, I can feel my brain plasticize. I wasn't learning anything new with Windows. Yes, it feels nice to have been recognized as an MVP and all that but that's not nearly as rewarding as it is to actually figure out something new and to learn something different. It's not as rewarding to know a bunch about the registry. What is rewarding is to figure out learning the ins-and-outs of something new. What is rewarding is finding new ways to approach problems and new ways to solve them. I was not learning anything new about Windows.
So, I guess you can say that I've used Linux for years but I've been a Linux user for only... Hmm... Just a couple or years now. I use Linux exclusively and I've gotta be going on a couple of years at it now. I do have a Windows phone, I guess that's not Linux but Android's not very much like a desktop Linux either. (I'm eagerly awaiting some reports on the new Ubuntu phone. I did pre-order a tablet. I should check on that.) I have pretty much used Linux exclusively on my home servers for much longer than that - but not on the desktop. It's not like I was a n00b coming into it or anything - but, still, there is much to learn even now.
Just delete everything. Save any personal documents. Wipe your drives. Burn all your Windows installs to the ground. Delete all those installers that you'll never need again. Then, no matter what, don't look back. Don't even install Windows in a VM. Screw it... Unless you have a compelling need, don't do it. That is, if you want to actually switch and stay switched. I h
"So long and thanks for all the fish."