Despite Microsoft’s push to get customers onto Windows 11, growth in the market share of the software giant’s latest operating system has stalled, while Windows 10 has made modest gains, according to fresh figures from Statcounter.
This is not the news Microsoft wanted to hear. After half a year of growth, the line for Windows 11 global desktop market share has taken a slight downturn, according to the website usage monitor, going from 35.6 percent in October to 34.9 percent in November. Windows 10, on the other hand, managed to grow its share of that market by just under a percentage point to 61.8 percent.
The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade. The stats also revealed a small drop in the market share of its Edge browser, despite relentlessly plugging the application in the operating system.
The moment I can verify a solution for my music production workflow on Linux, I know that I’m out as well.
I don’t know what you’re currently accustomed to or what the feature/workflow differences would be, but I’ve had some music folks I know be successful with Ardour and Reaper. Have you checked to see if those would let you do your thing? The other problem I’ve had is audio interface support in Linux, but that seems to have improved a lot. I’ve got an old Axe I/O Solo that didn’t work at all a few years ago but now seems to have full support.
I use FL, but yes, it’s less the DAW that is the issue and more so my VST libraries and audio interface.
Yeah I bought a MacBook Air to replace my old beatmaking Windows computer. I’m loving it!
I have no idea how well it works re: audio software, but have you tried anything like Bottles or Lutris? Or even Proton through Steam?
Gaming and Clip Studio Paint for me. (Maybe some other stuff that I just haven’t thought of.)
Needless to say, every day my Windows 11 machine bugs out on me I get closer and closer to just giving Linux a solid try for the first time since college.
Do it… I switched about a year and a half ago, and I can’t ever imagine going back. And gaming is amazing on it. I’ve been using Bazzite for several months now and it has been awesome.
Aw. Bazzite can’t do Nvidia GPUs. I’m still rocking an RTX 2070 and likely will be for a good while.
Bummer… Aren’t the open source Nvidia drivers half-decent these days? I purposely went with AMD knowing I would be doing Linux gaming on it.
No idea, I was just looking into Bazzite specifically.
Bazzite has a standard build specifically for Nvidia GPUs. It supports back to GTX cards so your RTX 2070 will work. Source: I’m typing to you from my PC running Bazzite with a 3060 TI. The only thing this version doesn’t support is the Steam gaming mode desktop environment. Steam the application still runs fine and all the games I play work. You can run KDE or Gnome desktop environments. It’s time!
Yeah I just learned that this morning. The Bazzite website still has a piece of text on the site that explicitly says it doesn’t support Nvidia stuff, but it looks like that’s an artifact that just needs to be removed.
Perhaps I shall look into it.
Do it! Do it! Easy to dual boot and test it out. They have a great discord for any questions that come up.
Gaming was one of my reasons as well initially, but it has gotten a LOT better on Linux in recent times by the look of it so I just have music remaining on my list. I also don’t use CSP but I have many friends who do art and can understand not wanting to move away from it.
Yeah I used Krita (which works on Linux just fine) for about a year and a half. But once I went back to CSP, I immediately felt that “oh this just works and doesn’t require a million workarounds for stuff” sigh of relief.
I’ve also seen some folks have gotten CSP working on Linux, but it looked like a pretty hairy process. And with CSP having no official Linux support, they might break that process at any point.
It’s tough. Might be worth it anyway, depending on how much Microsoft continues screwing the pooch here.
Have you tried something like Wine or even Proton for it? I know that Proton is thought as more for games, but it runs Windows apps in general. Just add the app as a “game” in Steam and tell it to run with a version of Proton.
This, video gaming has blazed a path forward for music production workflows to fully embrace linux.
It isn’t just a single application is the problem, it’s the VST plugins and their respective management softwares, drivers for audio interfaces, and some other such things. I use FL studio and I have seen people get it mostly working in wine, but its all the other stuff that creates an issue.
You could probably use a Windows VM
Yes I had this thought, however if possible I would like to be fully Linux. The other issue I would expect while this solves the VST problems would be latency with the audio interface.
Where are you on that process? I do 2D visuals and i’m at the point where all software that i use is available on Linux, but i have yet to actually try it in practice
I haven’t had a lot of time recently to look, but I know FL studio can mostly be set up to work through wine. The problems exist in the plugins/VST’s/ the VST management softwares/ the Audio interface drivers and latency.
Yeah, i ruled out Wine as an option pretty early on and i don’t remember why. May have been compatibility issues?
I have cheap audio interfaces (C600, Alesis IO2, M-Audio FastTrack Pro and such), and apparently they’re supposed to be natively compatible with Linux. Huge if true, on Windows i had to install drivers for each of them, including a community-built one. I don’t know what this means for pro interfaces but it’s encouraging
What do you do? I have been doing some hobby stuff with generating music once a few months.
Nothing serious, but music seems to actually be the only area on desktop (outside of development) where Linux is fully competitive.
My workflow is in FL studio, however the bigger problem is my VST libraries. I have the entire Arturia V collection as well as many, many more plugins and I am unsure if they would run on Linux, or if they do, how well. This is unfortunately a big problem as my collection of VST’s total into the thousands of dollars. I suppose I could run a windows VM to make everything function, but then I would probably have problems with latency/connectivity on my audio interface when I want to patch any of my hardware in, if drivers are even available for the interface in on Linux (It’s just a scarlett 2i2 I believe).
Im at the same point. I spent quite some Money on Studio one and plugins…i’ll probably try a setup with Wine and/or Yabridge soon. Wouldnt mind that much if i had to switch to Reaper.
If you do so, I would be interested in hearing about the experience and any troubleshooting you had to perform to fix problems.