The OS itself is free to download and install, the activation key is what costs money. So technically, installing Windows isn’t a “pirated product” unless you dupe the activation, at which point it is activated and doesn’t run into this issue.
Second, there are plenty of situations where a legitimate user of Windows may find themselves no longer activated. Switching motherboards due to hardware failure or upgrading their system comes to mind as a big one. Imagine having paid for Windows, your motherboard fails, you replace the motherboard, and it turns out you had an OEM version of Windows and can no longer use that key to activate Windows on the new motherboard even when the rest of the system is the same hardware!
So yeah, sure, surprised Pikachu face if you pirate something and it doesn’t have the full functionality. Whatever. But more than just that demographic would be negatively affected by this.
Everyone here will probably say people are moving to Linux, but I imagine the biggest beneficiaries of Windows’ long-term decline in market share are ChromeOS and MacOS. I would probably recommend a MacBook to my mother if she asked for my opinion on a new laptop.
There is also the argument that Windows’ market dominance was an aberration and unsustainable, and now we are seeing a reversion to the mean. While Windows is in an enshittification phase right now I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft eases off in a few years if their market share continues to decline.
This is good news, hopefully more competition in the OS space.
While Windows is in an enshittification phase right now
Right now? It’s been there for a decade at least. We all made due with Windows 10 because we learned to clean it up and make it our own, but let’s not pretend it didn’t have a foot in the enshitification direction already. The forced updates alone were more than enough evidence of that. Ads in the start menu started there. Forced “assistants”, telemetry, junk getting reinstalled automatically, etc. They have been spitting on us for a long time.
Windows 11 is just a breaking point for many. At least Windows 10 was easy to clean out and I didn’t absolutely hate the design.
I think there’s an argument to be made for a decrease in computer ownership. In my line of work, over the past ~10 years, there has been an increasing number of people who only interact with our services through just their smartphone and just don’t own a laptop or PC.
I know my folks have switched to Chromebooks primarily. Both my older brother and younger brother in law do not own laptops or PCs. One of my younger sisters has a laptop, and the other a gaming PC. I personally own a pc and laptop. Computers are in a weird place right now.
Honestly? Good. Maybe that’ll stop them trying to chase that mythical “average user” who doesn’t know how to uninstall Candy Crush, and instead have their come to Jesus moment with the audience of professionals and enthusiasts they have been spitting on.
Last month, Statcounter reported a notable decrease in Windows 11’s market share, and the trend continued in April 2024. After reaching its all-time high of 28.16% in February 2024, Windows 11 plummeted below the 26% mark.
According to Statcounter, in April 2024, Windows 11 lost 0.97 points, going down from 26.68% to 25.65%. All those users seemingly went for Windows 10 since the OS, which will soon turn nine, crossed the 70% mark for the first time since September 2023, gaining 0.96 points.
It’s not just that Windows 11 is shrinking, Windows 10 actually increased. The implication being that users have the choice between the two, and they picked 10.
That being said, when we’re talking about percentages this low, I’m not sure there’s anything of statistical relevance here.
Don’t worry my dear widows over lords, I’ll do as you say and ditch my local widows account. Instead I have now chosen a local Debian account instead… That’s what you ment right?
People downvoting you but Linux seriously lacks contenders to those apps (especially if you’re a power user). I’ve used Gimp alongside Photoshop for the past decade and while Gimp excels in a few areas (color to alpha is crazy useful) it’s so poorly designed, it blows my mind. Alpha channel still disabled by default on a layer!?
I use a KVM to switch between Linux, macOS, and Windows every day and it pains me I still can’t switch to Linux full time unless I give up on a tools like Photoshop (Excel however is fast being replaced by Pandas / Polars).
I’m holding out hope that a byproduct of Valve and Codeweaver’s efforts with Proton might mean Photoshop will one day run perfectly on Linux. I hate Adobe but Photoshop doesn’t have a serious contender (and given how asinine the .psd format is, we’ll never see a decent tool support its file format fully either).
I feel like there’s just some techies who consider these applications essential to their whole life and being, while most others have not much use for them.
In this case, I agree that the downvotes are undeserved, because they only talked about their own needs.
But yeah, my gut reaction was to get angry, too, due to association with some jackasses who will vehemently argue that Linux as a whole is not useful (not even for decidedly non-power-users), because clearly everyone unquestionably needs Photoshop and Excel.
Yeah I was a bit surprised by the downvotes considering this is the windows community, but then again the Linux fanboys on Lemmy are a resilient bunch.
Funny thing is that I’m using Linux (Xubuntu) as my daily driver, but switch to Windows for those two applications pretty much exclusively.
I’ve yet to use Pandas / Polars, are they working well with macros/vbs and pivot tables, especially importing existing ones from excel? That was by biggest pain point with Calc.
Pandas and Polars are libraries for the Python and Rust programming languages (respectively).
The way I moved on from Excel was to write code instead since my end goal was always data visualization and there are so many good visualization libraries that offer far more than Excel could out of the box.
It’s not for the faint of heart and you’ll have to reimplement the logic of all your macros but once you’re liberated, it’s exceptionally freeing - especially being able to handle vastly bigger datasets than Excel could handle.
Ah ok, understood. Unfortunately I’m not much of a programmer, I understand just enough of the syntax from macros to use them and make slight adjustments, not to rebuild them from scratch. So I somewhat rely on the tools that some with excel or have been developed in my company.
Have you tried Photopea? I’ve never used it myself, but I hear a lot of good from people who’re looking for a photoshop alternative who don’t find Gimp suitable. It’s web based so it works on everything.
Yes. This literally what everyone said was going to happen. It’s bad enough they continue to enshitify Windows, it’s even worse that they are so damn predictable about it.
This is really irresponsible. Upgrading your OS comes with inherent risks, and I would never recommend this to someone who has a working system unless they have the requisite technical skills to handle it breaking.
It’s not like a smartphone where the hardware is controlled and the upgrade path can be properly tested. Windows runs on all kinds of hardware. Unforeseen issues will occur.
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