Shortly after the release of Windows 10, there was a time when Microsoft would often release specific adoption figures, trumpeting how quickly the new free update was adopted by Windows 7 and Windows 8 users. The company did not repeat this strategy for Windows 11, allowing us to rely on third-party data to see how fast people are adopting a new OS.
We collected several months of Steam Hardware & Software Survey data and compared it to the months immediately following the release of Windows 10. This data is imperfect and inevitably a little noisy – Steam users must voluntarily submit data – but the disparity in acceptance is large enough that we can at least at least some conclusions.
Windows 11 was released to the public in October 2021 and Windows 10 in July 2015. In both cases, we used the Internet Wayback Machine to extract seven months of data, including the month immediately preceding the release of each operating system. We compiled a table of 64-bit operating system usage metrics (32-bit versions are categorized as “other”along with versions like Vista and XP) by combining the data for Windows 8.1 and 8.0.
As a result, Steam users are moving to Windows 11 about twice as fast as they are to Windows 10. Six months after its release, Windows 10 was running on 31% of all Steam PCs—nearly one in three. As of March 2022, just under 17% of Steam PCs are running Windows 11 – about one in six. Three-quarters of all Steam PCs in 2022 are still running Windows 10.
It’s easy to interpret these results as an indictment of Windows 11, which has caused some controversy with its relatively strict (and often poorly explained) security-focused system requirements. At least part of this slow adoption is due to these system requirements – many PCs surveyed by Steam are likely unable to install Windows 11. This may be because users have an older, unsupported processor or have one or more required features disabled. security. ; Secure Boot and the built-in TPM were often disabled by default on newer motherboards for many years.
But there are other compelling explanations as well. Windows 11 adoption looks slow compared to Windows 10, but Windows 10 adoption has also been exceptionally good.
To put it mildly, Windows 8 and 8.1 were not very popular, and Windows 10 was created as the answer (and fix) to most of the changes in the user interface of Windows 8. And people who were still using Windows 7 were missing out on some nice quality-of-life improvements and internal improvements that were added to Windows 8.
You can see this pent up demand in the spike between July 2015 and September 2015. In the first two months of Windows 10 availability, Windows 8 lost users, falling from 35% to 19%. Virtually all of these users — and a smaller but still notable proportion of Windows 7 users — were moving to Windows 10. Windows 11 also saw decent first-time user growth in November 2021, but its growth a month later was much smaller.
In contrast, Windows 11 was announced with little preparation and replaced what users were told as “the latest version of Windows.”Where Windows 10 replaced one new, unloved OS and one beloved, but outdated OS, Windows 11 replaced a modern OS that no one really complained about (in September 2021, Windows 10 was running on more than 90 percent of all Steam computers – even Windows 7 at the time). heyday could not boast of such acceptance).
It’s also worth noting that Microsoft didn’t try to recreate that initial surge in Windows 11 adoption. After some turbulence after the first Windows 10 service updates, Microsoft began rolling out updates more methodically, starting with a small number of PCs and then expanding them. availability gradually as problems are discovered and fixed. Windows 11 only entered its “final availability phase”in February, ensuring that anyone with a compatible PC can get Windows 11 through Windows Update if they want to.