You are right about one thing: I refuse to purchase a Windows computer, and have been refusing for a decade.
I think we should start a revolt in the IT sector against this shit really. I’d start one but I don’t know where to begin.
> because I need to do things I can’t do on macOS.
IT departments in huge corporations have purchasing requirements specs. Require any software that you pay money for to run on at least one non-Microsoft operating system. As a second source requirement.
If more than a trivial number of large corporations do this, developers make sure their software runs on other systems, which is what allows users to switch. Large IT departments are in a position to actually move the needle here.
This also has the side benefit of being a heuristic that excludes primarily low-quality software, because most higher-quality software is already portable.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
As for market share in the US, I very much doubt it's that high really. There are huge unimaginable swathes of windows boxes which won't show up in GlobalStats at all. I know a company with 50,000 desktops that can only visit a web site on an internal network for example. Those sorts of installations are everywhere.
I already see this situation with Google, where non-technical folks will push back on choosing Google products even if they are the only credible player because of the perception that Google cancels everything and they don't want to be caught out.
Microsoft is playing with fire if they think that screwing with their customers computers will have no repercussions with other products.
Also another company we are related to tried a roll out and found they couldn't get Apple to deliver anything other than crap off the shelf configs in any quantity. Dell could. So the trial was ended.
I wouldn't draw any assumption that higher quality software is portable. I've seen monocultural genius (Keysight Genesys) and cross platform garbage (libreoffice) for example.
Or maybe use VirtualBox or VMware?
As for VirtualBox and VMware, that means I have two operating systems instead of one :(
Smart move. Truly sucks that we have to do this nowadays, but this is what Microsoft has become. Back in the day I would format a machine I purchased from a vendor due to all the added garbage; Microsoft is becoming just as bad.
Personally, or at work? Personally, the first steps are actually pretty easy: install an operating system that doesn't do this stuff. And then deal with the fallout as best you can without going back — e.g. finding replacements for software that only ran on $OTHER_OS. Source: did it decades ago. No regrets.
At work? Good luck. We have no credible professional bodies that enough workers are involved in for them to have much relevance, and employers that actually have any kind of values relevant to this discussion are vanishingly rare.
I think the most productive thing would be to start conversations about ethical choices in the computing professions. Start local (friends, colleagues, local meet-ups). Find existing groups with similar values, and share experiences. Then _federate_. Set up regular inter-group meet-ups. Over time, formalise a union out of the federation.
Edit: oh, and don't be an extremist. Keep your policies lean and well within the Overton window. Pick your battles carefully. Compromise isn't weakness — it's just realistic. As long as you're moving things in the right direction, it's still good.
To Microsoft, that isn't considered to be a revolt or an intervention. When receiving consumer input of such a nature, the preferred terminology is "Positive user experience report."
I still use Windows on my personal machine due to gaming still not being comparably good on Linux across all of the titles I want to play - sometimes native releases aren't available, other times even Proton has issues running stuff on Steam. Apart from that, there is actually very little holding me back, since a lot of things on Linux are just better (mostly development related) and in general most of the popular distros feel good enough as a daily driver.
I wrote about my experiences before: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-... but I don't think that in regards to gaming (or other software) all of the titles will ever be supported, so a Windows VM with GPU passthrough might be an okay choice in the future for entertainment and running some specific software packages, with some Linux distro on the host for the rest of my computing needs.
Which is a shame, because on a technical level Windows is okay and has lots of good software built for it in the past. Even the Edge browser is an improvement upon what they did previously (IE and the old Edge, though I'd say the old Edge was reasonably okay too). It's just the project management aspect of it that's annoying - the OS being taken in a direction with mainstream appeal (which is debatably not an issue to many), but without ways to always turn those customizations off and do it easily.
The game output is pushed out of the GPU exactly as if you were playing on bare metal. Streaming assumes some form of processing and pushing bits down a pipe.
I wiped the disk and installed Ubuntu.