Complaining about Windows 11 is a popular game 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 irritated because you were asked to sign in to an app after clicking the sign-in button.
Despite the negativity surrounding the current version of Windows, it remains the most widely used operating system on desktop and laptop computers in the world, and people generally prefer to stick with the one they are accustomed to. As a result, Windows 11 has passed a major milestone — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company’s most recent earnings call (via The Verge ) that Windows 11 now has more than 1 billion users worldwide.
Windows 11 also reached that milestone just a few months earlier than Windows 10 – 1,576 days after its initial public launch on October 5, 2021. Based on the July 29, 2015, general availability date, and Microsoft’s announcement on March 16, 2020, Windows 10 took 1,692 days to reach the same milestone.
This is especially notable because Windows 10 was initially introduced as a free upgrade to all users of Windows 7 and Windows 8 with no changes in system requirements relative to those earlier versions. Windows 11 was (and still is) a free upgrade to Windows 10, but its relatively high system requirements mean that there are a lot of Windows 10 PCs that are not eligible to run Windows 11.
Goodbye to Windows 10 for a long time
It’s hard to estimate 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 millions of PCs, despite reaching its official support end date last October.
StatCounter, a popularly referenced source that collects OS and browser usage statistics from web analytics data, reports that 50 to 55 percent of Windows PCs worldwide are running Windows 11, and 40 to 45 percent of them are running Windows 10. StatCounter also reports that Windows 10 And use windows 7 Risen A little bit over the last few months, which highlights the silliness of the data. But by the end of 2025, Dell COO Jeffrey Clark said there were still about 1 billion active Windows 10 PCs in use, of which about 500 million were not eligible for the upgrade due to hardware requirements. If Windows 11 just crossed the 1 billion user mark, that suggests StatCounter’s reporting of an almost evenly divided user base isn’t too far from the truth.
<a href