Windows 11 Made Modest Usage Share Gains in October
- Paul Thurrott
- Nov 01, 2023
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The market researchers at StatCounter claim that Windows 11 usage jumped to 26.14 percent among all Windows versions last month, a gain of 2.5 percentage points month over month.
But here’s the good news for Windows 11: Compared to the same month one year ago, Windows 11 usage is up 59 percent. It’s been a good year for Windows 11.
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Windows 11’s small gains last month match Windows 10’s small decline. Windows 10 had been maintaining roughly the same usage share for the previous several months. (Indeed, Windows 10 gained share in early 2023 somehow.) But in October, Windows 10 held 69.35 percent usage share, down 2.27 percentage points. One year ago, Windows 10 had 71.26 percent usage share.
If you accept that there are 1.4 billion Windows users overall (the most recent Microsoft number and without knowing whether that figure takes into account unsupported versions), then you might calculate that there are about 970 million of them on Windows 10 and 366 million on Windows 11. Which is, of course, fewer than suggested by a recent report, but in the ballpark.
The other Windows versions that place in StatCounter’s standings are all out of support, but one of them, Windows 7, has seen an appreciable usage decline over the past 12 months, dropping from 10.63 percent a year ago to just 3.33 percent today. Windows 8.1 has 0.61 percent usage share and Windows XP brings up the rear with 0.34 percent usage share, StatCounter says.
Compared to other desktop operating systems, Windows has 68.41 percent usage share overall (down from 75 percent one year ago), with macOS landing at 20.15 percent (up from 14.86 percent). ChromeOS landed at 3.89 percent (up from 2.41 percent) and Linux fell behind to 3.02 percent (up from 2.8 percent).
And compared to all operating systems—mobile and desktop—the picture is, of course, quite different. Here, Android is in first place with 37.66 percent usage, followed by Windows (30.7 percent), iOS (16.63 percent), macOS (9 percent), and ChromeOS (1.         75 percent).