Throughout 2023, Microsoft regularly issued monthly Windows 11 updates, fixing security issues, adding new features, and fixing a few glitches in the process. However, as the latest figures from Statcounter show, Windows 10 users have shown no interest in the new OS, with two-thirds of all Windows PCs choosing Windows 10.

As reported by The Register, Microsoft struggled to significantly increase Windows 11's penetration last year: its global market share in early 2023 was only 17%, rising to 26% in the last quarter, but Windows 10's dominance (67%) is still not far behind.

With Windows 7 officially retired in 2023, its share has gone from 11% to 3.4% in the past 12 months, as organizations switching from the 14-year-old OS can only purchase enterprise licenses for the latest OS.

The stringent hardware requirements of Windows 11 did not work in their favor at all, especially given that those requirements can be easily circumvented. Sales of new PCs have not been particularly strong in recent years, and that has not helped Windows 11's market share.

It will therefore be interesting to see how well the next version of Windows, scheduled for release in summer 2024, will be accepted. As one might imagine, it will require the same hardware aspects as Windows 11, and since this has been a major bottleneck for countless PC owners, Microsoft may be in for another disappointment.

Windows 10 will not disappear overnight, as Microsoft only stopped selling licenses last January; there will be no major updates to the old OS until official support ends in October 2025, and only important security patches will be provided. Still, if you really want to stick with that OS, you can probably pay for a few more years of patches.

In the PC gaming world, major revisions of DirectX (the API of choice for most games) have been tied to newer versions of Windows, but with no indication that Microsoft is planning DirectX 13, there is no there is no significant gravitational pull to switch.

It will only come when all the big new games use all the features of DirectX 12 Ultimate as a minimum hardware requirement. That's not likely to happen for years, and by then Windows 10 will be long retired.

As unpopular as Windows 11 is, there will eventually come a time when you will have to change to the latest version of Microsoft's OS, but by then you will need a major hardware upgrade anyway, and Win 11 will probably be gone by then! Win 11 will probably be gone by then!