Windows 11 is finally poised to become the most popular desktop operating system

Windows 11 is about to overtake Windows 10 - at long last - according to one set of stats that has just been published.

2

These are the figures for Windows desktop operating systems from StatCounter, and they show a big uptick in favor of Windows 11, at the expense of Windows 10 as you'd doubtless guess.

StatCounter's report for June 2025 shows that Windows 11 has accelerated from 43.22% (in May) to end up on 47.66%, a gain of 4.44%. Windows 10, on the other hand, dropped from 53.19% to 49.03%, a loss of 4.16%.

This means it is very likely that next month, Windows 11 will finally move into pole position - although it should be noted that this is just going by this one set of statistics. Also, we can't take that for granted, either - just last month, Windows 11 somehow lost market share (alarmingly, given how close we are to Windows 10's End of Life).

Still, Microsoft will doubtless take the win for now, although it can't really be described in those terms seeing how long it has taken Windows 11 to achieve this. (Away from gaming, anyway - on Steam, Windows 11 actually took the lead some time ago).

If you're curious as to where Windows 7 stands now, it's on 2.21%, and in fact it has remained on just over 2% for the first half of 2025. There's still a hardcore group of users sticking with that ancient OS, never mind Windows 10.

All of which might make you wonder: how long will it take for Windows 10 to fall to under 10% in terms of user numbers? Quite probably a long, long time, and in this case, Windows 10 is likely to be even more stubbornly hanging around, as consumers can pay for an extra year of updates (for the first time ever).