>As soon as one open source player steps up that's 60% as good, it's over.
Does this imply that Linux is <60% as good as Windows because it's not over?
Does this imply that Linux is <60% as good as Windows because it's not over?
Yes, absolutely, in the case of desktops, it is <60% as good as Windows or macOS. I say this as a nearly lifelong desktop Linux user. The userspace desktop software gets almost no attention compared to the kernel/systemd which actually matters for business. The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks. The alternative to using a DE is to use a tiling window manager and spend hours a day re-implementing what would have been one-click operations on Windows/macOS. This is not to mention the lack of non-development-related software targeting desktop Linux.
Will this change in the future? I think it is very likely, but the time horizon is key. There are thousands of possible realities where Microsoft or Apple fails--political problems, economic events, bad management, some black swan startup out of nowhere. All it takes is for one of these to trigger for mindshare to shift to Linux (or BSD or Fuchsia--any free one for that matter) and bring it over the threshold.
(But this is kind of irrelevant to the point about data hoarding business models, since Windows/macOS is pure software.)
These days, everything on linux is either random potentially insecure PPA repos, shell scripts loaded from a server via curl and piped to sh with sudo access, or "snaps" (whatever the fuck they are). That all ontop of wildly outdated packages in the supported repos. No wonder everyone rants and raves about "docker", now we know why things moved into that space.
I know, this is my opinion and it's biased. Yes I may not have done things properly, or there are other ways of doing things, etc etc.
Snaps are actually a great security and packaging advance that decouples package dependencies from a common library set, while maintaining a mechanism to patch and upgrade otherwise dangling library deps. It also starts down the long road to confining software, because what you run shouldn't automatically assume all your privs. Basically iOS style apps for Linux.
People who pipe web content to a privileged shell are on their own at present. Arguably they should be warned, but that assumes taint tracking at every level of the operating system, and no production OS has that. If the software is a dependency shit show then putting it in docker (and then into a VM) is a better compromise.
Windows is already deprecating the installer model for the app store and cloud concept, they just didn't make it stick the first time round.
Snaps are a good idea in theory but do not work in practice.
No more graphical stack.
This happened to me with not only X. It seems to me that installing is tested. Removing is not. It was also badly documented last time i checked.
Happened with discord last time.
Ubuntu needs to more clearly explain whether the app is confined, and force apps to use an API to change the system environment to allow rollback, multiple packages of the same function etc.
Can you give any supporting evidence for this?
Sry, but that is just not true.
The margins are a bit different here.
1. Tries to capture all profit from the edges.
2. Extracts value "unreasonably" both to grab what they still can and to create an explanation for the death. This could be high fees, ads, or extraction of market intelligence.
3. Begins embracing the new platform with compatibility layers.
4. Starts making 2 offers on everything. One with their legacy and one with the rising platforms.
5. Treats their nonfounding CEO as significant and someone to listen to.
Plenty of companies make this transition successfully (I chose IBM as the example) and make huge profits from not having to charge uniform prices across the entire market. But the discussion was the windows platform being replaced by Linux, not Microsoft profits.
That is the future of Microsoft and the non-future of Windows.