[Grombobulous]

Very untrue for gaming in particular.

For example, if you have an OLED or mini-LED monitor, you really don’t want to be on Windows 10 and miss out on HDR.

And sure, you can say “well nobody has an OLED monitor,” but I’d remind everyone that OLED displays have been pretty much standard on every gaming laptop mid-range and higher for a decent amount of time now.

A lot of the focus for Windows 11 development has been gaming performance and feature improvements. Game developers are also less and less likely over time to bother testing with Windows 10.

[hypfer]

Most people are in fact not gamers. Like.. at all. And even those that are probably don't own an OLED or mini-LED monitor.

Most people just want a computer that does the word, the chrome and that's about it.

[Grombobulous]

There are over 900 million PC gamers in the world.

PCs have 43% marketshare in the total game console market. Yes, that includes marketshare against the Nintendo Switch.

There’s a bit of a bubble of non-gaming in this forum, but gaming is definitely a top use case for PCs.

Just walk into your local Best Buy in the laptop section and count up how many of the laptops are marketed as gaming systems. That should give you a rough idea of how many systems are purchased with gaming as the primary intent.

Sure, HDR is a niche at this point in time, but technologies like OLED and mini LED are increasingly common. If you buy a gaming laptop in 2026 at most reasonable price points it’s very likely to have an OLED monitor.

Example: Legion 5a Gen 11 AMD, price on Lenovo’s site is $1500, has an OLED monitor. You can buy OLED gaming monitors below $500 nowadays, so a lot of people upgrading have that as their next upgrade path…if not today, then tomorrow.

On that subject, most people just use the copy of Windows that comes with the computer, so the whole debate about Windows 10 is perhaps not worth having in the first place. Microsoft most likely just misjudged the pace of hardware replacement especially in the AI era where computer sales have slowed.

[hypfer]

Yes and how many of those people have the cash for cutting edge tech?

And how much does that cutting edge tech truly matter for the core game experience. I think the steam hardware survey might have some answers there and can tell us for which level of hardware currently developed games are being optimized for.

And that's just the currently developed ones. Not the massive backlog that existed before OLED or microLED HDR screens.

Tiny group. Tiny.

___

Btw, super lame to try to improve your argument after the fact with edits, but, well. Anyway.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

[Grombobulous]

Certainly, I agree that most gamers do not have cutting edge tech.

The cutting edge tech does improve the core experience. Quite a lot. You do have to have the money for it, though, and like anything else, diminishing returns on investment.

Steam hardware survey shows Windows 11 gained 2% this month over Windows 10. That’s a significant rate of change.

I recognize that you don’t like my use of edits, however, they are part of this platform and I’m not using them to diss anyone or engage in any kind of negative conversation. Just trying to make my point and support it.

[throwawaytea]

Calling 1 in 7 people on Earth a gamer is a stretch, unless we're calling preloaded trivial game players, gamers.. and even then I'm not sure.

[Grombobulous]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/420621/number-of-pc-game...

https://www.demandsage.com/most-played-games-right-now/

Some of it is unclear about multi-platform splits and mobile gaming but I don’t think I’m incredibly far off.

Gamers across all platform estimated at over 3 billion: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/number-of-gamers

[throwawaytea]

Half the world's population is easily too young or too old or too poor or too rich to be gamers. So that 3 billion stat alone shows me people love just counting any moments spent in a video game at all for who knows what reason on any super bad quality 'game' as gamers.

[Grombobulous]

Anyone with a smartphone can be a gamer.

I think my mom playing Wordle on her smartphone does indeed make her a gamer.

[Ferret7446]

Non gamers who need a PC (most people are mobile only now) can probably use Linux at this point.

[Grombobulous]

I am a gamer who uses Linux! Gaming on Linux is lovely.

I actually left Windows to fix driver stability, which worked and did the trick. I couldn’t play Indiana Jones without crashing.

I should have maybe been more clear (grandparent to your comment) that I didn’t mean to be out defending Windows or anything like that. I migrated away from Windows this year.

I just find that the arguments for sticking to Windows 10 are super weak and overstated. Windows 11 is a decent OS and a clear improvement over 10, in my opinion. It’s just that for me, Linux is now better.

[hypfer]

So you're saying the cutting edge HDR features(?) in windows 11 are not all that important to you personally and thus do not warrant windows 11 usage?

Makes sense, yeah. Nice talking to you.

[Grombobulous]

Not sure why you’re being so bitter toward me in particular.

I don’t personally own a monitor capable of HDR but if I had one I would prioritize it a little more, and in my case, I migrated to Linux to resolve specific graphics driver problems. Getting my games to work at all was more important than HDR.

I also recognize that laptops are generally more popular than desktops and OLED is far more common in that form factor. So when I talked about what gamers in general should prioritize regarding running windows 10 versus 11, I figure that many of them have laptops that therefore have OLED monitors capable of HDR.

Also, I was only using HDR as a single example of the gaming enhancements that Windows 11 has, we don’t have to dwell on that one in particular. We could talk about support for enhanced polling rate mice, or better windowed fullscreen, or better VRR.

[hypfer]

I'm just greatly annoyed that a conversation that could've been about understanding and learning was (at least attempted to be) hijacked/derailed by some ego/identity stuff.

Letting people get away with that has led to the unpleasant state of the internet we have now and mild correction simply doesn't work.

Hence I've pointed at the exact holes/fault lines. Nothing personal. I wish you a lot of fun gaming on linux.

[mrguyorama]

>you really don’t want to be on Windows 10 and miss out on HDR

My HDR monitor is connected to my Windows 10 machine and the HDR switch in settings is on and my monitor reports it is getting HDR

What am I supposedly missing?

[Grombobulous]

It has per-app HDR profiles, auto-HDR, content-only HDR (e.g. you want to watch an HDR video but don’t want your desktop to be HDR), and, on a related topic, better handling of VRR and windowed full screen.

Not that Windows 10 is wildly deficient in these areas, but it has a lot of improvements with display settings and capabilities in general. In my experience with the Windows 11 display settings, it’s an overall big improvement, and I do kind of miss it now that I’m on Linux (e.g., setting up virtual displays with Apollo streaming so that client game stream devices have their own separate display settings per-device was a breeze thanks to the excellent way Windows handles and configures unique sets of attached displays.)

[mrguyorama]

Interesting.

Unlike high refresh rates, 1440p resolution, and variable refresh rates that all were so clearly steps above my previous, 60hz basic HD display that I regretted not being an early adopter, HDR has been an immense letdown.

I can't even tell if it's on or not, even while my monitor and GPU assure me it is. As far as I can tell, the most obvious feature was shabbier looking colors, because they are de-saturated for some reason.

I played with the settings tab shared here[0], but the stupid "Brightness" slider is not obvious at all. Is bright good? Is bright bad? WTF?

That post has some other things to look into though, maybe I need a calibrated color profile? Will that get me colors that actually look better than an SDR display? Who knows.... It doesn't make any sense to me that improved brightness space should somehow result in less saturated colors...

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OLED_Gaming/comments/1h30brf/finall...

[Grombobulous]

I honest don’t even have HDR myself, I was really just picking out an example I know of for “why windows 11 better.”

I’d have upgraded to it just for the screenshot tool to be honest.

[tosti]

Lemme guess...

A shinier notepad with builtin AI.

Ads, more ads.

A BSOD that's got 99% more black.

The "recall" spyware.

Mandatory Microslop account.

I could go on, but I use Linux