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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

Can't microsoft work on this instead?

I don't get it.

Because this is hackernews and this guy seems to find it interesting to work on.

Surprised I had to scroll this far to see this. It's an objectively cool project, even if it doesn't make the most financial/business sense. Doesn't seem like that's the point.

I agree. I understand volunteering to make Linux work, since Linux is an open-source project. But why do all this work for Microsoft for free?

I am with you but would guess it's for the same reason one climbs Mount Everest.

(To leave a bunch of trash around for the next set of people who attempt it?)

I refuse to believe that there isn't at least one person or team at Microsoft looking at this already, so it's not only free work but may also be redundant.

Microsoft and Apple are traditional enemies. Microsoft has no reason to make Apple's hardware more attractive to customers.

The thing I don't get is why a consumer would want this. You want an _extremely expensive_ windows laptop. I guess the hope would be that the battery life is worlds better than anything you'd get in standard windows-land. But in reality battery life optimization requires paying careful to the devices and their drivers -- e.g. when parts of the system shut down because they're not in use. Not easy for a project like this.

So I'd sadly guess you end up with an expensive windows laptop with battery life comparable to a standard windows laptop. But you get that nice minimal Apple industrial design. :shrug:

You can't imagine why a Windows user would want to run it on better hardware?

Or that there are Windows workflows that just don't work on OSX?

Or want a fanless laptop with good performance?

TBH I have a hard time understanding why people choose to run windows at all, except for playing games. If you're stuck using windows because the corporate overlords insist, then yeah that sucks.

Also you can always run windows in a VM. Even on an M1.

Windows has fantastic accessibility properties/support. They even have a blind dev working on Visual Studio (or did)[0] for awhile. Apple's accessibility options are not anywhere near on-par with Windows. Linux ... I honestly haven't ever tried a screen reader in Linux and I have a feeling it is 100% up to whichever dev implemented something with no centralized style of doing things.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc

I’m with you. Many people constantly complain about windows but most of them still using it. They say it’s going to get better, but it won’t. You could spend five years trying to make windows run ob an M1 und MS would break it within an hour. I’m done with microsoft, they disappointed me to many times, never again. It’s necessary for some games but it’s getting better with linux (thanks to valve).

> TBH I have a hard time understanding why people choose to run windows at all

I use Windows and Linux equally as often, and I don't see this changing. There are some areas in which Windows itself is far superior, e.g:

- HiDPI and font rendering (ClearType is the best font AA solution I've ever seen);

- gaming and 3D graphics (Direct3D is a straightforward API to program with; OpenGL is 'deprecated', and Vulkan is a mess);

- multi-GPU support with Optimus and related switching technologies;

- a catch-all OS API to program with (WinAPI goes as far as handling user folders, libraries, application configuration and data[0], whereas on Linux land it's just a mess of hopefully-defined environment variables and if not, everything is dumped into a dotfile/dotdir);

- a nice shell[1] (IMO, superior to bash and friends) that is bundled with the OS to manage said OS, with object-oriented data throughput, strong(er) typing, and access to the .NET library;

- as of Windows 11, increasingly unifying UI/UX experience with WinUI 3 (yes, it was a mess with Windows 8 and 10; Vista and 7 were the most recent OSes to drastically change the 'desktop environment', and Windows 8 was a very mild reskin of Windows 7, all things considered);

- powerful ACL-based permissions model and 'hidden file' metadata bit, instead of expecting a dot prefix to mean 'hidden';

- a kernel structure that makes writing third-party device drivers straightforward, because there is no need to compile out-of-kernel drivers with headers;

- vastly improved touchpad handling compared to Linux (yes, OS X is better still, but given that it will be increasingly difficult to 'hackintosh' after Apple's move to ARM, this is a moot point);

Furthermore:

- there are some software that are either industry-standard, or superior to the competition that only run on Windows/OS X, or even only on Windows (e.g. MS Office, Adobe suite, Visual Studio, Autodesk Maya/CAD; Active Directory);

- there is less incentive to run Linux bare-metal when WSL2 exists;

- Windows still holds a supermajority of desktop users, and it would do well for developers to use the OS that their users use, aka dog-fooding.

I have never understood this hardcore anti-Windows dogma that so many hackers seem to have.

[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/knownfo...

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/

Well said.

On top of that, you can run majority of mainstream Linux tools on Windows, natively, without WSL. Contrary is usually not the case, you need Wine or VM.

There is context for everything - Linux is great for servers and particularly IoT since you need lots of them, it doesn't make sense to pay for Windows Server in that case. Since Desktop can be used mostly free of charge nowdays, I don't really see a problem.

And ofc. PowerShell is light years better then anything on Linux, not that it is much important now since pwsh is cross-platform.

> Microsoft has no reason to make Apple's hardware more attractive to customers.

Microsoft released a touch version of Office for iOS before they had a touch version of Office for their own Surface hardware.

This isn't the Ballmer/Gates era anymore.

Fair counter-point, but that's a pretty different situation. I should have said "MS has no reason to make Apple's laptop hardware more attractive." In 2014 when Office was released for iPad, the Surface had negligible market share. Microsoft was losing badly in the tablet space, so they were trying to catch up any way they could. At the time it would have been reasonable to plan for a future where Microsoft completely lost to Apple in the tablet hardware space, so they needed to protect Office (critical line of business) from becoming irrelevant in what was clearly emerging as an important hardware category. Yes even then they weren't so arrogant as to try to protect the fledgling Surface business by withholding Office from iPad - a move they certainly had used in the past.

But today's laptop market is very different. Apple and Microsoft are still very much competing for dominance in laptops, which is an important source of revenue for both companies. It's a familiar pattern where Apple sells fewer units than many others, but at much higher profit margins. MS gets their tax from all these PC sales at high margin, but it's a small amount compared to Apple's huge hardware margins - and that's the key point why it's a bad idea. A consumer who buys a mac to run windows gives WAY more money to Apple than Microsoft.

The secondary point is that every Mac sold erodes the waning dominance of Windows, bleeding out Microsoft's cash cow. Nadella wants (NEEDS!) you to believe Microsoft is kinder & gentler because he knows the days of Windows' hegemony are behind us and there's no stopping its slow fade to irrelevance. That doesn't mean they want to it to happen. Directing consumer's money into Apple's coffers unquestionably accelerates Microsoft's problems.

Why would Microsoft not want this? They make money off of selling Windows licenses, not selling hardware (Yes, I'm aware the Surface exists). The more available hardware to install Windows etc on, the more $ Microsoft makes.

Balmer or not, Microsoft is still in direct competition with Apple for much of its core business. So encouraging customers to buy a laptop where they get $50 for the windows license and if they're lucky another $100 in software sales, but their key competitor gets >=$1000 of profit -- yeah, it's pretty clearly a bad business choice.

Not really. OEMs pay significantly less for Windows licenses than they are retailed for.

And Windows sales to consumers haven't been a core part of their business for a while now. It's all about cloud and enterprise.

Just looked at the earnings report and I have to agree with you. Windows + Office was 25% of MS's revenue in 2021, but I suspect you're right that the big majority of that is not consumer-driven. FWIW just 2 years back, Windows + Office was 40% of revenue, so this segment is very rapidly becoming less important.

Making sure that windows works properly and keeping it working for however long they want to support it has got to cost a bunch of money. The question is, will they ever sell enough Windows licenses for M1(/2/3/etc.) Macs to make up for that investment, let alone profit?

I kind of doubt it.

I don't think Microsoft sees a future in Windows. Their current strategy seems to be one of extracting as much value from it as possible until it dies.

Really? I think Windows is in the best state it's ever been... WSL is incredibly nice to use as a development platform, and many well-designed apps have a Windows version ever since Electron started becoming the de facto standard.

So Linux/GNU is a great dev environment and Electron is the standard for building apps.

Tell me how exactly you think this means Windows is a healthy platform?

Hmm, I guess you must mean that the native Windows development environment (i.e. .NET/Windows App SDK) isn't very developer friendly; I'm afraid I don't have any idea or how to compare it to Swift or Cocoa. As a user, though, I have better access to software and tools than ever before!

I'd argue that the quality of software on Windows specifically has decreased significantly since the rise of Electron.

Electron is a steaming pile of garbage and I wish it a swift and sudden death.

Electron "apps" aren't apps. They are glorified webpages.

I'm not sure why you would want to run Windows at all honestly. It seems like the OS you use when there's literally no other option.

I can get Windows hardware for dirt cheap. Much cheaper than any Mac hardware. So if I am using the computer as essentially a dumb terminal to connect to a service over a network, there’s no reason to buy Mac hardware. Yes the hardware is janky and the OS is bad. But I’m getting what I pay for, and here my needs are modest, so why pay more?

Besides that, some people actually like Windows, or dislike Macs, though I’m not one of those people. I prefer the Mac. I just see when the Mac is a poor buy compared to Windows.

Those aren't the only two options. There's not really any such thing as "windows hardware" - and if you really want maximize performance of low-end hardware, Linux is really the king for that use-case.

A lot of low-end hardware will not even run Windows 11, which is probably going to be more and more of a pain to deal with as time goes on.

I have to run proprietary software on it. Installing it on Linux is a pain. It’s doable in Linux, but the hassle of Linux gets me absolutely nothing in return here. I’ve used Linux extensively so I know.

I don’t need to maximize the performance of the hardware. I don’t need Windows 11.

Sometimes Windows really is the best solution.

Microsoft aren't going to write drivers for the M1 - it's not their job , even if Apple provided sufficient documentation.

> Microsoft aren't going to write drivers for the M1 - it's not their job

It's absolutely their job to make Excel less of a P.O.S. on Mac.

Excel on Mac is a P.O.S. because Microsoft wants it to be one, they don't want users switching to Macs.

Microsoft’s MacBU has always been a separate team who I don’t think have ever held back on trying to make good products and have put surprising amounts of effort into it. Even the PC Office team doesn’t care if the Windows team does well, after all.

They do however have nightmarish build processes and technical debt that when I mention here get replies from people claiming I must have made it up.

Use the web-based version in Edge. It’s not quite the desktop version, but it has improved a lot. At this point I’d rather use the web-versions of all office tools on a Mac rather than deal with installing them.

They can. For whatever reason, they're not.

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