Credit: Microsoft

Complaining about Windows 11 is a popular sport among tech enthusiasts on the Internet, whether you’re publicly switching to Linux, publishing guides about the dozens of things you need to do to make the OS less annoying, or getting upset because you were asked to sign in to an app after clicking a sign-in button.

Despite the negativity surrounding the current version of Windows, it remains the most widely used operating system on the world’s desktop and laptop computers, and people usually prefer to stick to what they’re used to. As a result, Windows 11 has just cleared a big milestone—Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company’s most recent earnings call (via The Verge) that Windows 11 now has over 1 billion users worldwide.

Windows 11 also reached that milestone just a few months quicker than Windows 10 did—1,576 days after its initial public launch on October 5, 2021. Windows 10 took 1,692 days to reach the same milestone, based on its July 29, 2015, general availability date and Microsoft’s announcement on March 16, 2020.

That’s especially notable because Windows 10 was initially offered as a free upgrade to all users of Windows 7 and Windows 8, with no change in system requirements relative to those older versions. Windows 11 was (and still is) a free upgrade to Windows 10, but its relatively high system requirements mean there are plenty of Windows 10 PCs that aren’t eligible to run Windows 11.

Windows 10’s long goodbye

It’s hard to gauge how many PCs are still running Windows 10 because public data on the matter is unreliable. But we can still make educated guesses—and it’s clear that the software is still running on hundreds of millions of PCs, despite hitting its official end-of-support date last October.

Statcounter, one popularly referenced source that collects OS and browser usage stats from web analytics data, reports that between 50 and 55 percent of Windows PCs worldwide are running Windows 11, and between 40 and 45 percent of them run Windows 10. Statcounter also reports that Windows 10 and Windows 7 usage have risen slightly over the last few months, which highlights the noisiness of the data. But as of late 2025, Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke said that there were still roughly 1 billion active Windows 10 PCs in use, around 500 million of which weren’t eligible for an upgrade because of hardware requirements. If Windows 11 just cleared the 1 billion user mark, that suggests Statcounter’s reporting of a nearly evenly split user base isn’t too far from the truth.

Although Windows 11’s reputation could be part of the reason for Windows 10’s tenacity, it’s easy to explain away the older OS’s continuing popularity in other ways. Just a few years ago, Windows 10 was the most ubiquitous version of Windows since XP, and when Windows 11 launched, its requirements mostly excluded PCs older than three or four years.

Because it would be catastrophic if all of those Windows 10 PCs completely stopped getting security patches or anti-malware protection, Microsoft has built a three-year off-ramp for the operating system—one year of free (but opt-in) security updates for consumer PCs, up to three years of paid security updates for businesses and other large institutions, and updates to and basic support for core apps like Windows Defender, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Edge through at least 2028.

Microsoft executives are at least paying lip service to Windows 11’s real and perceived reputational issues. Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s president of Windows and devices, said in a statement to The Verge that the company would be “swarming” engineers over the next few months to “urgently fix Windows 11’s performance and reliability issues” and to modernize more of the barely buried parts of the operating system that still look a lot like they did in Windows 7, or XP, or NT.

Assuming those issues are addressed—and that Microsoft can fix them without adding fun new bugs along the way—it would fix some of what ails Windows 11. But Davuluri didn’t acknowledge the aspects of Windows 11 that make it annoying even when it’s working as designed: the mandatory Microsoft account sign-in prompts, the continual reminders and upsell notifications about OneDrive, Game Pass, and other Microsoft services, and the periodic reminders to use Edge and Bing that come back no matter how many times they’re dismissed.

People are definitely switching to and using Windows 11. For people already used to Windows 10, it’s still the software update of least resistance. What Microsoft needs to do now is ensure that Windows 11 doesn’t frustrate people so much that it’s the last version of Windows they use.