Businesses upgrading to Windows 10 forced global PC sales into the black for the first time in seven years in 2019, but it could have been so much better if Intel's chip drought had eased.
Preliminary findings from Gartner pegged shipments at 261.23 million, up 0.6 per cent year-on-year, and rival analyst IDC reckons 266.69 million found their way on the shelves of distributors and resellers, itself up 2.7 per cent.
Forced upgrades from Microsoft still seem to outweigh jumps to Linux. Will that ever change?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Wednesday January 15 2020, @05:20PM
Unless you tried Linux but found it incompatible. In the Bay Trail era, there were a lot of compact laptops whose basic features were difficult to impossible to get working under anything but Windows 8 or later. Even a decade after the release of the ASUS Transformer Book T100TA [debian.org], for example, CPU power management causes frequent freezes, suspend is still broken, the camera and light sensor are not supported at all, backlight control is buggy, and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and sound all require nonfree firmware. Wi-Fi in particular is a Catch-22: you need some sort of network access with which to download the nonfree firmware from elsewhere.