this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Yeah, this is just terrible journalism.
I love how they went into so much detail about why the old numbers would be accurate, then proceed to say they can 'safely' say that windows has lost 400 million users over a sentence on a blog stating windows has 'over a billion users'.
Also quite disappointing that no one is questioning, "where did they go". If Chromebooks or Apple picked up a fraction of the "lost" users, they'd be shouting from the rooftops. And a fraction of those users would crush most Linux distros infrastructure, so we'd have heard something.
Speaking from a university perspective - we've been scaling back our computer labs a fair bit, as there's a lot of people with personal laptops and tablets now. Almost half our former workstations are now eliminated or BYOD.
So a lot of Windows machines are just gone.
I happy to believe that its probably trending down, overall PC shipments have been trending down for a while, but 400m drop over 3 years is a huge amount that just doesnt smell right.
A lab computer is used by up to N students typically, so by removing it, there is potentially N more devices being purchased by the N students. So that could mean more iPads or Chromebooks, or even more PCs overall.
And converting a university device to a byod device doesn't necessarily remove a PC either, given the user may purchase a new device for work.
With any statistics to back it up (which none of us have, especially not the original article) all we have is speculation.
Yeah I don't buy 400m either.
What Linux infrastructure? The wikis and torrent links?
Fwiw, I've switched 2 computers in my house to Linux. Still researching to find out if I can switch my z13 tablet and keep all the functionality.
Package database mirrors (i.e. the things you're downloading from when you install new software).