As the article notes, the increase seems to be driven mainly by users in Asia, where recycling and reusing older hardware is quite common. I wonder if third-party companies are offering extended security patches there, which could make affordable second-hand Windows 7 machines more appealing for people who just need them for browsing or light tasks. It would certainly make sense given recent fiascos and Microsoft’s current stance on AI, especially with generative AI being used to develop system-level code.
- Windows 7 was used to browse more web pages on a subset of sites that use the Statcounter plugin, and mostly in one area of the world.
But that doesn’t make a good headline.
I think that it’s a possibility for the rest of the world.
Could it be that something is spoofing a Win7 signature?
I personally just edited the registry to stop my Win10 upgrading to 11. If it fails, it’s Manjaro time.
Manjaro might not be the best starting point tbh. So many better choices.
It’s not that I’m disagreeing with you. I’m just not agreeing with you.
I personally think that (as unpopular an opinion as it may be) Flatpak’s largely make the choice of first distro irrelevant. The weakness in Manjaro is that you either risk using the AUR or stay on old versions of the software. Or with Mint/Ubuntu/etc… you either risk adding random repos to your sources list or you use older versions of the software.
Either way, you run the risk of a new person mucking up their system with a bad repo or a bad aur package.
The alternative, using flatpaks, largely solves both issues for when you need newer versions of a certain software, and are dead simple to install/remove/update, etc…
And I say this as someone who was super skeptical of flatpak’s for a very very long time.
The weakness in Manjaro is that you either risk using the AUR or stay on old versions of the software.
That is part of it yes. But Manjaro has so many other things specially new users will not expect and know how to fix, It is not a great starting point as they claim it is. From DDOS’ing the AUR to forcing users to rollback time because they let ssl certificates expire. their are many things they dont do right and for new users this can be a major turn of when they are hit with these issues. for a distro aiming to be arch but user friendly. And the user doesn’t have to do anything weird for these things to happen just use your system as you would no AUR and update and break the system. this has happened so often with Manjaro that i would steer away from it unless you know how to manually fix those breakages. but at that point just use arch.
If you disable TPM in your bios, W11 won’t install, nor update if it is already installed.
Still, it’s unusual for that to happen.
Thanks Microsoft spokesman.
Why is it that these scores are taken at face value until a corporation doesn’t like them? What you think 4% of a random set of servers suddenly started using Windows 7 to bot pages to drum up Windows 7 support?
Look at the data: https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/asia/#monthly-202408-202509
Or more specifically https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/singapore/#monthly-202408-202509
All the data is nice and smooth, slow rises or declines, as usual.
And then all of a sudden in July and only ins Singapore, Windows 7 goes from <2% to 92%. All other asian countries stay about the same.
Does this sound likely to you that 90% of users uninstall Win10 and Win11 in Singapore to install Win7 and all that in a span of just two months?
Or is it more likely that there’s some bug (or some botnet) causing false stats?
This guy analyzes!
Possibly from people booting up 15 year old laptops to see if they‘re still running so they can install linux on them before trying it on the big machine. Yes, this is my made up narrative but I believe that more than in a Win7 comeback.
Don’t have a link to the thread on Mastodon, but it was only in Singapore. So it is likely a troll or some glitch.
Not from Mastodon, but from looking at the map for September:
Here’s a link to the rest of the map You’ll have to mouse over the different countries here, but regardless of whatever the heck is happening in Singapore, windows 7 is still sitting between 15-5% in other countries across Asia. and 10 is still nowhere near the “safe” levels for EoL coming up.
This is almost certainly a sampling error.
https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/singapore/#monthly-202408-202509
Win7 grows in Singapore from <2% to 92% within two months. All other asian countries stay the same. Yeah, that’s a sampling error.
It makes me a bit sad that there is a whole article on a (very likely) mirage
within the past month? what all these people in Asia suddenly found a stockpile of machines with Win7 on them and all, collectively, decided “yeah lets just use these”?
I don’t buy it.
It is spoofed someone wants people to thinks it it Windows 7.
A friend of mine was still on win7 and just recently made the switch to linux. In the end the issue was that most of the software stopped working.
One caveat here: Statcounter provides no explanation for this unusual surge, so these figures should be treated with a certain amount of skepticism. Could there be a measurement error involved?*
Tbf proton evolving fast as he doing, soon i won’t even will need windows beside my workplace notebook
Switched to Linux a couple years ago and at this point it is rare that a game doesn’t “just work” and even rarer when it still won’t work after trying other versions of proton in the Steam compatibility settings for the game.
Depending on if there is a specific game you know doesn’t work that is a deal breaker for you, it might be fine at this point to switch. Just throwing that out there. You may not need more compatibility than what is available.
Yeah I think a lot of people don’t understand how far it’s come. Often even games that Steam lists as “unsupported” will work with some very light tinkering.
Using wine and Proton, I’ve been able to play old windows games that haven’t worked on real windows for over two decades.
How moddings tool like MO2 and the mods from nexus are behaving on Linux ?
Also, PCVR, playing HALF LIFE ALYX, Arizona Sunshine, OpenMW VR are huge deal breakers for me
I don’t think I’ve actually played any of those so I can’t speak to them but hopefully someone else can. There is a website you can check compatibility on although I don’t know if it includes non-games and/or tools. Arizona Sunshine looks like it’s fine: https://www.protondb.com/search?q=arizona+sunshine
If it’s gold or higher it’ll almost certainly play without issue. Silver will very likely play if you tweak the compatibility settings to change proton versions (go to game options in steam > compatibility > change the version. Bronze is hit or miss, you’ll likely be able to get it to work but it might require more work. Borked is of course…borked.
Anyways, someone else can probably answer those games specifically but if not you can use the website to check.
It’s almost as if there’s a demand for meat and potatoes OS.
they’re using AI to generate system level code?
holy shit this is the dumbest way to destroy civilizationIts so dumb. Linux is the only way to actually get out from under the thumb of Microsoft and its so easy these days to switch.
JFC I wish I could go back to win 7, I had to get win 11 and I’ve never hated an os like this in my life. My favorite part is how I have no control over it changing the things I actually use. No sorry, my favorite part is how right around the time an update is about to come out my windows starts crashing and locking up. It’s amazing.
I still have my old Win7 pro disk with unlimited installs :p
I didn’t think i would ever use it, but I’m also not ever gonna use win11, so maybe upgrading from 10 to 7 will be my plan for my windows needs if they are both gonna be insecure anyway.
7 is just the best OS Microsoft has made, it’s been downhill since.
win7, my beloved. that uxtheme.dll got patched so many times…
