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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> but after a few hours you can get Windows to more or less work how it's always worked.

until the next update rolls out

There's a nag screen every 4? 6 months? It takes me about 5 minutes to take care of it. Oh, I'm fairly sure I have the Pro edition.

Hardly anything life changing or that would require a ton more work to set up a new workstation, instead.

"Just ignore the cloud features, it's fine."

"Just ignore the ads, it's fine."

"Just unplug ethernet during setup to get the option to ignore the cloud features, it's fine."

"Just edit the registry to ignore the cloud features, it's fine."

(sound of boiling water increases)

> (sound of boiling water increases)

There's a chance I die before the water boils over.

Famous last words

The joke from Windows users used to be "Linux is only free if your time has no value." The irony there is that I've spent more time in the past 12 months fighting to get software working on Windows than on Linux (and it was Xbox Game Pass, which is from Microsoft themselves!).

Yep. Microsoft has forgotten what their value proposition for Windows is. Once they started to see it as a tool that extracts value and not a product that provides value, everything started to go downhill. I think there is a real opening for a startup company that can create a Linux Distro that is Wine centric, letting users migrate over and still use all their current Windows software.

There's no way for a startup to actually compete vs Windows. The valuable market for that are corporations running Windows, those are extremely risk-averse, and even if the OS was almost a drop-in replacement to their Windows machines these corporations would expect a level of customer service that no startup could provide.

Microsoft has this huge moat with PC gaming + corporations which are really hard markets to crack into as a startup.

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