Microsoft officially pulled the plug on Windows 10 in 2025. Technically.
Support ended on October 14, 2025, just as Microsoft had warned for years. But home users can still snag another free year of security updates with a bit of effort, schools and businesses can pay for up to two more years on top of that, and core apps like Edge and Windows Defender are getting fixes until at least 2028.
So Windows 10 isn’t really dead. But 2025 was the tipping point.
StatCounter says Windows 11 overtook Windows 10 in the US in February 2025 and worldwide in July 2025. On Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey, Windows 10’s share slid from just over 44 percent to just under 31 percent. New games, apps, and drivers are already starting to drop or reduce official support for it.
That makes this a good moment to ask two questions:
- What did Windows 10 actually get right?
- Why does the OS that replaced it feel so much more hostile to use?
What Windows 10 nailed
Windows 10’s main job was simple: don’t be Windows 8.
Windows 8 had real technical improvements over Windows 7, but the full‑screen, touch‑first Start screen was a disaster for people on normal laptops and desktops. Windows 10’s smartest move was to retreat. It brought back a more traditional Start menu—visually updated, but familiar enough that people stopped panicking.
Microsoft also copied some of the things people liked about phones, without breaking everything else:
- Free upgrade: Anyone on Windows 7 or 8 could jump to Windows 10 at no cost.
- Same hardware: If your PC ran 7 or 8, odds were high it ran 10 just fine.
- Regular feature updates: A predictable, ongoing update cycle let Microsoft ship features faster instead of waiting years for the next big release.
- Bigger beta program: The expanded public Insider program let enthusiasts and developers test early builds, file bugs, and influence features.
Windows 10 also landed during a broader cultural reset at Microsoft. Satya Nadella had just taken over from Steve Ballmer. Instead of insisting you live entirely in Microsoft’s ecosystem, the company started meeting users where they already were.
You saw that in moves like:
- Office on iOS and Android rather than only on Windows Phone.
- Edge switching to Chromium, abandoning a weak in‑house engine for something more compatible with the modern web and its extension ecosystem.
- Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which let developers run Linux tools directly on Windows instead of dual‑booting or spinning up VMs.
Taken together, these made Windows 10 feel like an OS trying to win people back after the Windows 8 experiment—more open, more compatible, and more driven by real user complaints.
It wasn’t perfect. But it earned its reputation as one of the “good” Windows releases and ended up the most widely used version since XP.
How Windows 10 set up Windows 11’s worst habits
Here’s the twist: a lot of what people hate about Windows 11 actually started under Windows 10.
From day one, Windows 10 wanted more data. Microsoft framed it as telemetry to improve the OS and “personalize” ads and recommendations. For users, it often just felt like more tracking.
The shift to Windows as a constantly updated service helped Microsoft move faster—but it also broke things, repeatedly. Feature updates arrived on a tight schedule, and major bugs shipped anyway, despite broad public testing.
Then there was the product pushiness:
- New technologies like the original Edge and Cortana were pushed hard, then quietly sidelined when they failed to catch on.
- A news-and-weather widget showed up on the taskbar late in Windows 10’s life, another noisy surface for headlines and promos.
- Lock screens started to look more like billboards.
- The Start menu filled up with icons for low‑effort, ad‑supported Microsoft Store games you never asked for.
Even the controversial Microsoft Account requirement didn’t start with Windows 11. Windows 10 Home was already nudging people toward signing in with an online account—easier to bypass at the time, but very much laying the groundwork for what came next.
And if you remember the Windows 7/8 era, you remember the upgrade nagging: Windows 10 install files downloading in the background, upgrade prompts that were hard to permanently silence. The pattern—"we know what’s best, just click yes"—was already there.
Windows 11 piles on more friction
Windows 11 takes those foundations and stacks new annoyances on top.
The Microsoft Account requirement is now the centerpiece. Connecting to the Internet and signing in with an account became mandatory for both Home and Pro editions starting with Windows 11 version 22H2. Workarounds exist, but only if you already know where to look. The setup screens don’t offer a clean, offline path.
Once you’re in, the upsell machine lights up. Signing in unlocks a stream of prompts for Microsoft 365, Game Pass, and other subscriptions. Even systems that are fully configured get hit with the so‑called “Second Chance Out‑Of‑Box Experience” (SCOOBE), a persistent “finish setting up your PC” flow that mostly exists to push services you’ve already declined.
You can disable SCOOBE—but only via a buried checkbox in the Notifications settings. That’s not an accident. Microsoft already has regular system notifications to promote its services; this is an extra layer of pressure.
Then comes the AI wave.
Copilot doesn’t just live in a single sidebar app with its own taskbar button. Microsoft literally changed the default Windows keyboard layout for the first time in around 30 years to make room for a dedicated Copilot key. Copilot‑branded features now show up in Word, Paint, Edge, Notepad, and more. Some can be removed or switched off; others can’t.
What really rattled people was how far Microsoft was willing to go. The Recall feature for newer PCs, which takes rolling screenshots of your activity so you can search your past usage, was so insecure in its initial form that backlash from users, media, and security researchers forced a redesign. It still shipped.
Microsoft is also testing “agentic” AI features that can act on your behalf inside Windows. Even early documentation acknowledges security and privacy risks, but the company’s executives keep talking about building an “agentic OS” as if its arrival is inevitable.
The line between “new feature” and “you must live with this whether you want it or not” keeps getting blurrier.
The hardware squeeze and the feeling of planned obsolescence
On top of all this, Windows 11 simply doesn’t run—officially—on a lot of perfectly functional PCs.
Microsoft now demands newer CPUs, Trusted Platform Module (TPM) support, and features like Secure Boot. Technically, you can install Windows 11 on older, unsupported hardware if you’re willing to bypass the checks and accept the risk. But the message to normal users is clear: buy something new.
The irony is that the security case isn’t totally flimsy. TPM helps with things like seamless disk encryption. Secure Boot makes some low‑level malware attacks harder. And chip vendors only promise firmware‑level security patches for so many years, which matters in a world of hardware‑level exploits.
But what users see are full‑screen ads on Windows 10 machines pushing shiny new Copilot+ PCs—even when their system is capable of a straight Windows 11 upgrade. For people already convinced everything is designed for “planned obsolescence,” that’s gasoline on the fire.
The hopeful part: Windows 11 is fixable
The frustrating thing is that Windows 11 isn’t rotten at its core.
Run the Enterprise edition and you get a calmer, less junk‑laden OS—the kind Microsoft knows it can’t foist too many experiments on, because big customers pay serious money to deploy it at scale.
Underneath the clutter, there’s real progress:
- Windows on Arm has made major strides in performance and compatibility.
- WSL is better than it has ever been for developers.
- Microsoft is finally taking portable gaming PCs seriously, adding features that acknowledge the Steam Deck era instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.
But for a lot of long‑time Windows users, the “Copilot era” feels like a breaking point. The ritual of taming a new install—stripping out cruft, killing nags, turning off dark‑pattern reminders—has gone from a nerdy preference to a survival skill.
Windows 10 wasn’t some golden age. It shipped bugs, collected data, and nudged people toward Microsoft services, too. Yet it launched as a response to user backlash and was offered broadly, cheaply, and on existing hardware. That goodwill mattered.
If Microsoft wants to bring Windows 10 holdouts into the Windows 11 world, the path is clear enough: fewer dark patterns, fewer mandatory experiments, more respect for the idea that an OS should mostly get out of your way.
Nadella’s Microsoft has already shown it can pivot on strategy when something isn’t working. Doing that for Windows itself—prioritizing a quieter, cleaner default experience—would go further than any AI keynote toward rebuilding trust.
