Last month, for the first time, Windows 11 was a more popular OS than Windows 10 in the Steam Hardware Survey. Of course, this is an imprecise science as people have to opt in to having their machines measured but it's a sign of wider adoption. Windows 8, on the other hand, never made it big enough to do the same in its lifespan. Windows 7 was a very popular OS and adoption even to Windows 10 was fairly slow initially, partially down to that skepticism.

You can't cite the jump from 7 to 8 or 7 to 10 without also remarking on the fact users had far more.control over updates back then.

Yeah, Windows 11 adoption is up, because most people don't have a choice, or they didn't care enough to stop it happening automatically, and don't know how to roll it back. That doesn't translate to approval.

At a certain point, adoption rates just don't matter anymore because increasingly the user doesn't have a choice anymore.