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Comment by AJ007 | Hacker News Reader

Windows is dead.

Most games can run on Linux fine ( https://www.protondb.com/ ), some even run better.

After some problems with pop-ups I nuked my parent's Windows install and put Linux on the machine. They had no problems using it.

Between those two use cases, why use Windows at all?

A strong warning, the direction Microsoft is going with Windows, Apple is heading in now. I'll put down money that by 2026 iOS and MacOS will no longer be usable. It's good that desktop Linux is now ready for prime time. We can win on mobile too.

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> why use Windows at all?

I wish I had the same optimism. I have a Fedora partition that gets wiped and reinstalled every release and there's always some showstopper or things are slightly worse that make me unable to commit. I'm not settling for 'slightly worse'. The display server situation on Linux is depressing.

I don't like were Microsoft is heading, but it's way too early to claim Windows is dead.

Why do you keep reinstalling Fedora? It might be worth trying a different distribution, although whatever it is thats forcing you to reinstall every release might affect all distributions. Its not something I've experienced with Mandrake, Suse, Mint or Endeavour.

I agree with your point though - Windows is not dead; for me its a lot of the photo editing applications that I want to use don't run well on Linux.

Mandrake - my third or fourth distro. Rather old school these days 8)

> Windows is not dead

I think that's exactly the problem. It's too alive, so they can bastardize the experience in any way.

> Why do you keep reinstalling Fedora

Because it's a partition I use to test Linux and rather than upgrade I'd rather start over from scratch.

As for the distro choice, Fedora is ahead of Ubuntu but not as bleeding edge as Arch.

I'm sure there's plenty arguments for using x distro over y. Fedora is just what I landed on.

> Windows is dead.

Yes, with WSL to keep it afloat just long enough to steal your private data before it sinks.

It use to be the case that your private data would be sold to advertisers but that model is changing with the privacy laws, user starting to not tolerate it (e.g. see poor Google search results), and moats that are starting to fall apart (e.g. Apples app store).

Just in time for the next frontier. This time, the goal is to to feed GPT models with your private data. Windows and Outlook seem like excellent funnels to do just that. The best GPT model will require the most intimate data and at the lowest price possible. MSFT is positioned to do just that.

OMG I switched to Qubes OS and haven't looked back! I value privacy and operational security over gaming and smooth 4K playback. Snowden showed that, yes, we do live in that kind of world today...

What device are you running Qubes on? Its unfortunately a little hard to find a powerful laptop that can run qubes due to Xen.

Lenovo 20tk- Thinkpad line. It is an i7 6 core with 64GB RAM 2TB SSD RAID1 Intel primary gpu + nVidia GTX 1650 Ti secondary (which I have passed to Windows Server 2022 for Siemens NX 10 when I fancy playing with a toy which costs as much as my house to fully all-the-things license).

Why do feel Apple is going in the same direction as Microsoft? Do you think in 2026 Apple will be selling users data to advertisers and have spam search results show up in the Finder?

Emphatically yes.

Ironically the longer and more trusted a company becomes, the more data it gathers, the more potential money it can make by going to the dark side. It only takes one bad CEO thinking of short term profit to see the $$$ and cash in that data and goodwill. Similar to MS it will take 5-10 years for people to realise what's happening and spread the word. By then that person may have cashed out. Is every CEO of Apple or any company for 100 years going to have a long term privacy mindset. I think the only viable way is for the company not to have the data or for them to only service highly knowledgeable users that would move quick if things went to change. But that means the majority must always lose their privacy. It feels similar to the trade off for adblocking.

Sure, I think most people would agree with you but why the strong warning about macos being unusable by 2026? They're making plenty of cash and seem pretty privacy focused under Tim Cook.

Multiplayer and games requiring anticheat are still troublesome, some don't work at all.

When the games run however, I agree they typically run better.

VR is still very very difficult on Linux though. I still run Windows on my gaming pc for that reason.

previous $JOB needed to support Autodesk products. Said products only run in MS windows. Sad pikachu face ensues.

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