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Comment by alanwreath | Hacker News Reader

Wishes: Microsoft just buy a linux distro. Bless it, so MS Apps only run on Windows. Make it free for home installs and remove these cloud login shenanigans. Friggin' keep charging Amazon and GCP for running it virtually (unless you actually want mindshare). I'd totally flock to Windows (and its paid services). I guess I just don't see why an operating system is still their cash cow. Feels like the stupid that is: buying your ticket and then paying for placement in an aircraft. Anyone remember when you could buy an airplane ticket and choose your seats because you're booking now vs later? 2020 on has been nothing but nickel and dime-ing.

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The consumer licensing of the OS isn't their cash cow, the subscription revenue from tied services is, so changing the OS base doesn't change the subscription push.

A very small portion of the market is even aware a Windows license costs money. If they've bought a Windows PC since 7 it's pushed them for free all the way to 11 and the vast majority don't build their own to find out they need a license (and heck it really doesn't do much against you if you don't buy the license these days anyways).

The real money in the consumer side is in the services and data, O365/teams/onedrive/bing/edge(browsing), which is why they push these so hard on default installs. It wouldn't matter if they used Linux as a base, their push would still be to push users towards these services.

That a few people who even know what Linux is would be more likely to use thire services if they stopped pushing them to the average user isn't going to sound enticing to Microsoft as they'd be losing a lot more than gaining.

This is how they move away from the OS being their cash cow: using the OS as a gateway for all their cloud services. For that they want everyone to have and use a Microsoft account.

It's just like how airlines used to make money with plane tickets, but now they mostly lose money with the tickets and make it back with everything else (both nickel-and-diming you and frequent flier miles). Flying is cheaper now, but incentives were better aligned when tickets were the cash-cow.

Microsoft has a(t least one) Linux Distro: CBL-Mariner [1]. Not a desktop offering, obviously, but I felt like it was worth pointing out.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner

They do have a Linux distro.

https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner/

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