Windows 11 is about to see wider adoption by companies

midian182

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In context: Global adoption of Windows 11 hasn't set any speed records, especially in the enterprise segment, which has historically been the slowest area to embrace Redmond's latest operating systems. According to a new report, however, that's set to change going forward, with many corporations now making the slow switch to Windows 11.

As reported by The Register, web analytics service Statcounter, which has tracking code installed on 1.5 million websites, said Windows 11 was running on 16.93 percent of global PCs in December. That figure stood at 16.12% in November and 15.44% in October, so it is rising, albeit slowly. Windows 10, meanwhile, was installed on 68.01% of machines in December.

 

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Windows Version Market Share

Steve Kleynhans, research vice president of Digital Workplace Infrastructure and Operations at Gartner, the market research firm whose reports appear regularly on this site, told The Reg that Windows 11's numbers are pretty much what he would expect at this point.

Kleynhans adds that many businesses have been waiting until Windows 11's first major update before upgrading their systems. That landed with the 22H2 roll out in September, bringing new features and, as usual, a few problems.

"A lot of organizations are in or starting pilots [for Windows 11] this month, and planning to move new purchases over to Win 11 in the next few months once they are comfortable. Upgrades of existing systems are likely to take longer as there isn't really a huge need until later in 2024 when the end of life for Win 10 starts looming," Kleynhans added.

Microsoft previously said it would support at least one Windows 10 Semi-Annual Channel until October 14, 2025, the same date that Windows 10 Home and Pro will be retired. But, as is the case with Windows 7, expect some enterprises to pay for extended support—in the case of Windows 7 Pro, this eventually reached $200 per machine per year.

Windows 11 had a rocky launch, mostly over the hardware requirements that ask for the presence of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0. There are workarounds, but the CPU restrictions are an issue for many businesses using older PCs.

Despite the initial pushback, it appears that more gamers are embracing Windows 11, too; the latest OS continues to erode Windows 10's share in the Steam survey, where Win 11 now holds a 28.42% user share. And back in October, Microsoft boss Satya Nadella claimed the OS was seeing wider adoption by organizations.

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If you are using Windows 11 to play games and you are concerned about a getting performance hit just make sure you go to Windows Security (on the System Tray) -> Device Security -> Core Isolation Details and make sure Memory Integrity is turned off. Then dismiss the warning so windows doesn't keep nagging you.

Note - this does make your machine a little less secure as you no longer get a layer of protection on the memory used by core windows services but those checks do come at a cost to performance. I think its off by default if you upgrade (might be off by default on Win 11 home too???) otherwise it is on.
 
If you are using Windows 11 to play games and you are concerned about a getting performance hit just make sure you go to Windows Security (on the System Tray) -> Device Security -> Core Isolation Details and make sure Memory Integrity is turned off. Then dismiss the warning so windows doesn't keep nagging you.

Note - this does make your machine a little less secure as you no longer get a layer of protection on the memory used by core windows services but those checks do come at a cost to performance. I think its off by default if you upgrade (might be off by default on Win 11 home too???) otherwise it is on.
Good shout, worth mentioning I recently installed Windows 11 22H2 completely fresh on a HP Laptop with a 10th gen Core i5 and a custom built desktop with an 8th Gen Core i7. In both cases this didn't automatically enable itself however, if I go to that menu, it is available for me to enable and indeed both of them let me enable it.

It's interesting because both machines were fully up-to-date (BIOS, drivers, Windows Updates etc...) and both allowed me to enable it without issue. I wonder if Microsoft has a list of hardware this significantly affects performance and therefore, it doesn't auto-enable by default?
 
'Embracing'.

I think for many it just isn't a choice and switching to Windows 10 is more hassle than it's worth.

Honestly, it's no excuse for the poor show that Windows 11 is and how condescending Microsoft have been about it.
 
I'm using w11 from the beginning and it is fine. But I had too many issues with bloatware and lack of control on what's going on, and I found Linux is actually better for me and games, I play actually have better performance there. So until MS wont allow me to get rid off Edge, xbox app and so on I have little reason to come back. Still have a dual boot for Destiny 2 (and maybe other which can't properly use cheat control on Linux) but I'm barely use it recently.
 
Good shout, worth mentioning I recently installed Windows 11 22H2 completely fresh on a HP Laptop with a 10th gen Core i5 and a custom built desktop with an 8th Gen Core i7. In both cases this didn't automatically enable itself however, if I go to that menu, it is available for me to enable and indeed both of them let me enable it.

It's interesting because both machines were fully up-to-date (BIOS, drivers, Windows Updates etc...) and both allowed me to enable it without issue. I wonder if Microsoft has a list of hardware this significantly affects performance and therefore, it doesn't auto-enable by default?
Was that a pro or home version? It was on by default on my fresh install of Win11 Pro - this made me wonder if pro enables it by default and home disables? Who knows!
 
As someone who has their pc hooked up in the living room and uses it as game console/htpc windows11 has enough perks to make it worth the jump.
 
Was that a pro or home version? It was on by default on my fresh install of Win11 Pro - this made me wonder if pro enables it by default and home disables? Who knows!
The custom desktop was Pro, the laptop was Enterprise. Just so it makes even less sense! I reckon Microsoft has a list of hardware with known performance degradation with the feature on and Windows 11 silently doesn't enable it based on said list. I know someone who recently built a new PC based on the AM5 platform and 7600X. I should check to see if that's been turned on automatically.
 
Corporate hasn't approved it yet. We're waiting to see if 12 comes out in 2024.
 
Windows 10 was the final version of Windows for me. I finally dumped it entirely after my install killed itself due to an unstable memory overclock. I'm currently running Fedora Kinoite. It took a solid day to get all my hardware working right and to find a few alternative softwares, but I have everything running smoothly now. And Valve has done great work with Proton (essentially Wine integrated into Steam); all the games I play minus one are running great (and some native games run even better than on Windows).
 
Was that a pro or home version? It was on by default on my fresh install of Win11 Pro - this made me wonder if pro enables it by default and home disables? Who knows!
I purchased a laptop with Windows 11 Home a couple of months ago and Memory Integrity was Enabled.
I learned that fact because I went back to BlueStacks for my Android apps (Windows still has a ways to go). BlueStacks has a .exe file to 'fix' Windows 11 Hypervisor and other stuff so their program works properly and turning off Memory Integrity is part of their solution.
 
Yeah, my new laptop came with Windows 11 and I don't really care. It's for work and for gaming/browsing when I'm out at a cafe anyways.

It has most of the niceties I've expected and used from when using Linux. I can and has made it work well enough for me with StartAllBack top taskbar, WinXCorner + Task View to have Virtual Desktop/Workspace similar enough to KDE and Gnome, and auto-updating apps works well enough with chocolatey + winget. Plus, I could always just use WSL to get access to the Linux apps I liked. A lot of stuff, but I have to do the same on KDE or Gnome for my preferred experience anyways.

Everything else was fine enough, the UX/UI looks and feels much better, we finally have a tabbed file explorer (though still no tree-view or dual-pane view), the terminal works well enough for what I need it to do. And so far, I haven't encountered any update issues -- which was what got me off of Windows 10 into Linux in the first place.

I'm legitimately thinking if it might be worth it to move to Windows 11 on my main PC, but I don't really care, I can do most of the things I want on my Linux PC and Win11 laptop so the OS really doesn't matter as much as "which one can get out of my way and I can spend less attention on so that I can get on with what I want to do." Until my Manjaro really messes up and end of this year where we'll see a lot of interesting development on both Win11, PopOS, and KDE, I'll wait and see before committing to anything for my main PC.

But Windows 11 is fine. It works, it gets out of my way most of the time, so I really don't feel the need to care about replacing it.
 
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