If you’ve been following our coverage for the last few years, you’ll already know that 2025 is the year that Windows 10 died. Technically.
“Died,” because Microsoft’s formal end-of-support date came and went on October 14, as the company had been saying for years. “Technically,” because it’s trivial for home users to get another free year of security updates with a few minutes of effort, and schools and businesses can get an additional two years of updates on top of that, and because load-bearing system apps like Edge and Windows Defender will keep getting updates through at least 2028 regardless.
But 2025 was undoubtedly a tipping point for the so-called “last version of Windows.” StatCounter data says Windows 11 has overtaken Windows 10 as the most-used version of Windows both in the US (February 2025) and worldwide (July 2025). Its market share slid from just over 44 percent to just under 31 percent in the Steam Hardware Survey. And now that Microsoft’s support for the OS has formally ended, games, apps, and drivers are already beginning the gradual process of ending or scaling back official Windows 10 support.
Windows 10 is generally thought of as one of the “good” versions of Windows, and it was extremely popular in its heyday: the most widely used version of Windows since XP. That’s true even though many of the annoying things that people complain about in Windows 11 started during the Windows 10 era. Now that it’s time to write Windows 10’s epitaph, it’s worth examining what Microsoft got right with Windows 10, how it laid the groundwork for many of the things people dislike about Windows 11, and how Microsoft has made all of those problems worse in the years since Windows 11 first launched.