Microsoft to Block Windows 11 Browser Workarounds

To MSFT staff who I know hang around on here: prove me wrong by getting this turned around.

What about the rest of the owl?

Many people/businesses can't just swap over to Linux on a whim. I can go through the rest of your examples one by one, and explain why many people/businesses don't have those as realistic options, if you'd like. But it seems excessive.

This is why the more appropriate term is anti trust. Businesses don't need to be monopolies what matters is whether their position is dominant.

The typical individual outside of our profession is not choosing a browser because of a feeling of entitlement. They have maybe 5 hours of free time in their day outside of work / commuting / kids / etc. I doubt they have any idea beyond "this browser works, is fast" or heck "it's installed" as a reason to choose their browser, especially if it's a mobile browser.

Free markets do not solve the issues of monopolies. You don't even have to look to history or the current market to understand that. Monopolies are an unfortunate natural tendency that the market heads towards when uninhibited, because they afford the maximum amount of profit. It also, at least until the monopoly hits a certain point, affords the max amount of efficiency and quality to the consumer.

Unfortunately, by the time the monopoly takes over, there remains no real "choice" left for the consumer to run to. At that point, the profit maximization takes over completely and quality begins to drop. After all, the incentive is just to be better than the "others" who remain, who likely have almost no resources (and moreover the monopoly probably introduces proprietary standards to make remaining alternatives worse).

At that point, we get stagnation, which I would argue the world has seen a good chunk of in recent years. Price fixing, collusion, all too common among the top (see the recent controversy with Google and Facebook working together). Why fight for the "free market" as you call it, when we can work together to rest comfortably?

This is the essence of anti-trust law (commonly refered to as anti-monopoly law), if a company is dominant in a market (or niche), they must refrain from certain anti-competitive practices which would help them to gain dominance in another market.

The law does not prohibit dominance in a market, nor does it prohibit gaining dominance in another market, and while some anti-competitive practices are generally prohibited, others are only prohibited in the context of a market dominant company gaining dominance in another market.

In general, pricing well below costs is prohibited as dumping, but these cases are tricky. When pricing well below cost is in a new market for the company and the old dominant market is subsidizing the costs, there's more room for scrutiny. Enforcement on dumping is light though, because of perceived customer gains when a subsidized product has no direct cost.

Ordinarily, bundling products is acceptable, but forcing a new market product to be purchased with a market dominant product is scrutinized.

Mergers and acquisitions are generally ok, but market dominant companies may need to show that competition remains after the merger.

I think the onboarding is still very difficult for new users (installing, getting packages installed, etc.). The GUI ways of doing package installation aren't as reliable as they could be. As soon as you run into trouble and look for help online you're advised to open a terminal emulator.

I think the ecosystem has come a long way certainly. Technical expertise is a spectrum, and we've certainly lowered the barrier, but you still need to be well above the bar to get up and running, and then operating productively every day.

Back at home they wonder why it doesn't work at all.

After 30 years, unless one is deep into Linux technical knowledge and "search before buy", that impulsive buy is going to end in tears.

Even with "search before buy" the adventure can turn out bad, because the device that apparently has Linux support, actually only works in specific serial numbers with the right firmware in place.

I've had blocking problems with these 3: ElementaryOS, Ubuntu, OpenSuse. The problems include:

- Crash reports every 10 minutes - Segmentation fault error or something when opening the notifications section - Bricking my USB stick - Poor rendering in remote desktop - OS crashing unexpectedly and not starting at all afterwards - Noticeably poor performance for all apps (going full-screen for browser videos happens in 1 second and you see it freeze, in windows it's instant) - Desktop freezing if I press keys too fast (opening and closing the Ubuntu Dash menu quickly). Forced to restart the machine - Visual glitches during every boot - I don't remember now, but the list goes on

Linus Tech Tips wanted to try Linux and see how user friendly it was. Somehow the PopOS steam package decided to uninstall the whole DE. Say what you want about the warnings he ignored,why is this even possible on a PopOS type system? Linus has pointed out that without understanding the terminology and packages, you would have no idea what the error message means. I think user friendly distros are much better but have quite a ways to go.

Also as Linus points out, even picking the right distro is tough if you don't already know a lot of the Linux terminology.

* It freezes hard when it runs out of RAM, while Windows stays somewhat usable in that situation. The OOM killer takes 10 mins to kick in, if it does so at all. The situation is probably made worse by the default 1GB swap partition size (why so small? I would have expected at 16 GB to match the RAM size).

* hibernate doesn't work out of the box. `pm-hibernate` exits printing no error message (code 128). After installing `uswsusp` it'll call `s2disk`, which works. I still need to figure out which config files to add so hibernate shows up in the power manager and shutdown menu.

* When using the graphical updater, the boot partition will fill up, preventing further kernel updates. `apt-get autoremove` fixes that.

I suppose that is what I get for using Fedora, which was supposedly Red Hat's "desktop strategy" but was never even remotely ready for a typical desktop user...

For the average consumer, Linux can be a very, very bad time, in a way Windows doesn’t seem to be.

It can be very hard to imagine what kind of difficulties an average user has; but their videos give a small window into “no, it really isn’t ‘just that easy’ for everybody”.

Commandline is hard.

But the UI might be similarly as open as Windows - I don't have sufficient experience to know.

MacOS (still, and has always) allowed moving the task bar to a different side of the monitor. Windows 10 allowed any of the four sides, MacOS allows all except top. Windows 11 is bottom-only. Earlier in the beta they also forced the application icons into the center of the taskbar (Mac-like), but they've since moved back on that and allow left-aligning them (Win10-like).

They're both pretty light on global, out-of-box customization. If we're counting pennies here, I'd say Windows is still slightly more customizable, and if they re-added moving the taskbar to other sides of the screen, it'd definitely be more customizable.