Unprecedented Linux Growth in Europe Amid Windows 10 End-of-Life

THIS IS THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP! LETS GO!

but here’s a fresh twist in the tech world: Linux

Fresh twist?
Like a multi decade old and proven system is the new kid in the block?

proven? how is a system proven for usage by common people that can't even do automatic updates safely? It's just recently getting to that point, with offline updates!
yeah you and me can use it fine. we can run apt upgrade, dist-upgrade, and fix when it does not boot anymore, but most of us are aware that our parents but also non-tech friends can't.
multi decade old and proven
My 2010 audio drivers would like to have a word with you

I am not surprised. Windows 11 is an utter shit. It is much worse than 10.

The start menu is a Web app as I understand.
- What the actual fuck? How the fuck does that even work? So if you don't have any Internet connection you can't use the goddamn start button what the
I don't know that I would say "much worse." But it's more than incrementally worse, which is what most of the updates to Win10 have been over its lifetime. So straw, meet camel's back.

Statcounter, a company that tracks website traffic and operating system use, shows a clear picture. In April 2024, Linux had a small 2.84% slice of the desktop market in Europe. Fast forward to July 2025, and that share has jumped to an impressive 5.21%. That’s a massive 83.45% increase in just over a year.

that's actually a huge increase!

Still in disbelief how they wreck it even in the simplest things.

Remember how clicking the audio system tray icon would open... The common audio settings and nothing else, idem dito for the network icon. For some incomprehensible reason they jammed those system tray icons menus all together a few years ago, you need more clicks, it's less intuitive and less efficient. For what reason? No one knows.

Remember how right clicking an icon would open a quite extensive context menu? Gone. Now it's a few BS options I never need. For example "open with...": gone. Now in the freaking context menu you have to click "more options" for another, full context menu to appear.

Incredible BS tiny changes with a big negative user experience impact I truly cannot grasp why they'd do it. Only reason everyone sticks around is (bad) habits, vendor lockin and obligations for certain software by school or work who insist on keeping Microsoft because they themselves are also vendor locked in or just very very scared of change.

Not to mention the other great features of the shiny new context menu: Annoying little lag when opening, and changing of the content about 1.5 secs after it has opened — right when you have started to click some item so you end up doing some random unintended thing. Chef’s kiss
- Exactly!
I think this is the smartphonification of the desktop. Android and iOS hide most settings, it works out of the box, while the user has no idea what's happening in the background. To be honest: at least the reliability of the software has drastically improved. Nowadays the network just works, so no need to know the details. I remember the days of Win95 and BNC network, where it always took an hour and several tries until the network was up.
Try managing your printers in the modern interface.

Obligatory mention of the Windows 10 Enterprise Edition that goes through 2032 of support.

Eh, no. LTSC has an extra 13 months and you can get extended support for W10 enterprise, but MS made the pricing very unattractive (support cost basically doubles each year).
But W10 enterprise is going eol for mainstream support in October just like the home, pro and education editions.
I've been preparing our migration to W11 for 18 months now (we combined that with some other changes, otherwise a simple feature update would have sufficed). And no, linux is not an option.
- Would you mind sharing why Linux is not an option? I'm planning to switch a fintech team of 20 to Ubuntu and wondering if I missed anything when doing the PoC
- They're referring to the Enterprise LTSC IoT version: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-iot-enterprise-ltsc-2021