Microsoft is driving users away
christitus.com
christitus.com
It is. At Windows 7, they pretty much had desktops right. Everything mostly worked. They'd finally fixed the crashing problems. (How? The Static Driver Verifier validated that third-party kernel drivers would not crash the rest of the system, and a classifier applied to crash dumps routed similar crash dumps to the same maintainer.) The UI was reasonable for a desktop, and wasn't a clone of the mobile UI. No ads. Didn't phone home too much, and you could turn off auto-update. No issues with installing your own software.
Then Microsoft tried to make desktop look like mobile and tablet. Desktop began to look like a big phone, optimized for content consumption and fat finger selection. The result was something that was neither a good desktop nor a good content consumption device.
While I wouldn't want to go back to 8 due to subsequent quality of life improvements for developers like WSL and winget, I still miss the UI every day. It looked clean and simple and worked great with a touchscreen and keyboard alike. Trying to navigate a Surface on Windows 11 with the utterly useless widgets hijacking the left swipe, the microscopic start menu, the on screen keyboard which can no longer be undocked and resized and the now-missing notification toggles is an exercise in frustration.
The backlash against Windows 8 from purists who hated anything mobile is exactly what led to the current enshittified version of the Windows user interface imo. Microsoft overcorrected and have now ended up in a worse place than they were when they started.
We get these slivers of full-integration from time to time. We see it today with the Vision Pro. It's not hard to imagine what could be! But I'm not counting on it anytime soon.
I think that you're being a bit uncharitable here. The issue wasn't "purists who hate mobile". The issue is that what makes a good mobile UI is worlds apart from what makes a good desktop UI. You can't combine the two without making one or both use cases worse.
The pushback was due to Windows 8 being terrible on the desktop.
Microsoft's mistake was in trying to make One UI To Rule Them All rather than having different UIs for different form factors.
I would not mess with that bit these days
1. Updates have been applied (in the middle of your crucial thing). Reboot in 60 seconds. Fuck you if you think you can cancel haha.
2. Updates for the following packages are available. Apply: Now or later.
Windows is #1. Linux is #2.
Linux does it right. Sometimes, you're in the middle of something, and delaying makes sense. But shutting down on a 3d print job, or in the middle of a game session fucking sucks. And, I absolutely despise software with "Mothership knows best" crap. (It's also why I despise Ubuntu's SNAP. Same shit.)
There’s a nice UI under all of the offensive promos and news they force onto you.
My kid just got a new school laptop, preloaded by the school.
He opens up Edge and Boom! It’s spamming him with fake Ads and horror news stories about war.
Thanks for that MS. It’s like they really do not understand what made Google Search so popular back in the say.
FWIW, I do think macOS is a lot better :-)
Also, the world of Linux GUIs really needs to pick up its game. They just never seem very good; accomplished, reliable, feature competitive.
Today’s Ubuntu UI/UX isn’t even competitive with macOS from a decade ago IMHO and for my use cases :-)
I can't even believe I'm saying this: but all joking aside, I MIGHT be inclined to buy a cosmetic skin for smiley if they offered it.
It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux. At least, I am happy with the current state of Linux usability, and no longer care to evangelize the benefits of being free of a walled garden and adware platform.
NVIDIA drivers and game support on Linux is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone without experience. On laptop it's awesome, unless you have both an iGPU and dedicated GPU, then switching properly is a pain. WiFi drivers are a hit or miss: some cards are great, some others are not well supported. Knowing which is which before buying requires reading extensive documentation. Even Dell on their XPS 9310 fucked up Linux support so bad they dediced to quietly remove the option to buy Ubuntu laptop and communication about supporting Linux.
My personal laptop recovers all screen when waking up from sleep, my work laptop doesn't and I need to unplug and plug them again.
One thing that works awesomely well for me is Printer supports (scanners are another pair of hands though). Anywhere I tried, discovery works great out of the box, even for USB printers it works without having to download a driver from a strange website.
When using snap (default on Ubuntu) Firefox crashes often if it updates in background. Libre office is far from the Office experience, which I tend to forget as I use Google Workspace apps instead.
Having tried working on Windows, Linux and MacOS, I wouldn't move to another environment. The pros greatly outweigh the cons for my own use-case. But I will still keep a Windows for gaming and cannot recommend it to relatives.
However, recently Windows started to take more than 15 minutes for booting (except for sometimes, when it takes only 3 seconds as if to mock me), and none of the 30 suggestions or so I've tried could fix this big. Since the advice in such cases is always to re-install everything (nevermind 100+ audio plugins with proprietary DRM I'd need to re-install), I'm thinking more than twice before booting into Windows these days. I don't have much time for gaming anyway, and will probably just give up my audio plugins at some point.
Can't comment on the problems you have had. My own experience has been almost without issue for many years now, using Fedora. YMMV.
I lack the patience to try and troubleshoot it most of the time and primarily use another machine. Usefulness is limited when I can't count on "simple" things like waking from sleep in working state, IME.
Replying with an example of a Nvidia card and Ubuntu Snaps doesn't really address them because they're in all likelihood running compatible hardware with a distro that works for them.
Please continue to use other OSes with the blessing of the rest of us Linux users. No one is forcing you or trying to convince you otherwise.
gaming on it is fine, and the nvidia binary blog was never a problem, even with the basically-alpha-test software that is Fedora.
currently very stable with AMD hardware. playing CP2077 at ultra high with no issues.
the only real challenge I've had is a grad school course or two that have niche software that required Windows, and that was solvable via a Windows VM.
The out of the box experience on Ubuntu doesn’t even come close to modern macOS or Windows 11.
Sure, if all you need to do is use a web browser then you’d be fine with a Linux GUI most of the time.
But then a Chrome Book is better at that point.
P.S. Chromebook is Linux under the hood.
There are tradeoffs. Linux's advantage is that it's not an adware platform, or a walled garden. For my money, I don't care about extra performance or stability, it all works well enough for me.
Of course, that doesn't help if your particular application doesn't work on Linux, you're out of luck. I just don't think it's a worthwhile goal, to try to attract those people to Linux. If they want to fight for it themselves, great! But there's not much benefit for those of us who are already happy on Linux, to work to attract anyone else.
/me shakes head in disbelief. How can one persons experience be so different to mine? Everything is faster / small under Linux - the file system, the graphics, the size of a base OS install with GUI and brower is literally 1/10th of Windows. Windows taking seconds to respond to a click on the start button (I presume so it can fetch the ads) was the final straw for me.
As for stability, I watched co-workers come in in the morning and find their dev environment was broken due an overnight Microsoft update, and just accept the 30 delay while they fixed it as routine, unavoidable, "it's just how things are". But for one, an update that broke things so badly he needed an OS reinstall to drive him to having a "fuck it, I'm going to Debian" moment. That is rare though.
Meanwhile, I've never experienced unwanted downtime from any Debian security patch. OS upgrades are a different matter, but they only happen once in two years, and you have at least another 2 years to get around to it. Or you can do it once every 4 years. Which isn't surprising. Debian is used by a lot of servers around the globe. Stable is the name of the game, uptimes in years aren't uncommon.
The classic desktop open source/free software ecosystem that people are thinking of when they say “Linux” is driven by a technical community, so the types of problems that will be solved are the ones that bother technical people, not non-technical ones. There’s some overlap of course, (everyone wants the fonts and colors in their terminals to look nice, right?) but it is just a side effect of the fact that technical people are also people.
Linux (and BSDs) are important to people who want to do things that are hard to do in a tightly integrated office suite.
Much to technologists dismay, people's technology choices doesn't really involve the technology itself. The thought process is more similar to choosing a car for its color. This is what large enterprises realize, and which is why they shift focus away from the product or service itself, to how the product or service gets into the users hands. Apple is chosen by the people, so they focus on UX, image, status, on being an aspirational product. Microsoft has a different focus, it's businesses, government, education. They aim to be infrastructure, a public service that's proprietary.
What is common is that all of them is that they all build a moat. Consciously making it hard for people to switch. Microsoft does this by making its services and formats into standards, but not opening up the standard itself, and also making it hellishly complex. So now, if you want to interface with your government, you can send your document in docx. And what views and edits docx is MS Office. And what platform that runs on is Windows. That's it, and that's why the OP article is sensationalist. Microsoft is not driving away people by making their lives more complex, the people have nowhere to go, and they are often not the ones choosing Microsoft in the first place.
I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 2019 and I can tell you that the moments I got pissed off where due to companies being extremely hostile towards Linux (ahem, Microsoft) and making their shit with proprietary Windows libraries.
Linux is not difficult, it's much easier to learn than to spend 5 hours on Windows trying to find out which UUID refers to the now-hidden old printer configuration dialog.
Really, even setting up a firewall or hardening your Linux PC is much simpler than Windows.
Don’t ask my mom to open the terminal in 2024, she would rather pay the bills with cash in person.
It's 2024. WiFi even works out of the box on Debian now.
> Or Bluetooth?
Getting some random device to connect to Bluetooth is a lottery - on both Windows and Linux. It's a horrible standard. That said, it usually works on both.
> In Linux… ???? Where do you even go?
If we are talking about printers and one of bigger Linux desktop environments, a little red triangle in the notification area usually.
Yes, it will be different to where a Windows user will expect to find it. But given the dance you have to perform between the old control panel, the new settings app, and having to google to find devmgmt.msc I would hope it is different. Windows is no longer has the nice consistent management UI of the XP days. Modern windows is the mess you get after decades of organic growth with very little cleanup. I can just imagine the public derision an open source developer would receive if they delivered something as bad as that.
CUPS has come a long way over the years.
But have they lost by doing that? They have not lost desktop users to any great extent, especially in the business market Windows is still dominant. They have lost some home desktop share to MacOS and ChomeOS, but they have gained a lot more access to user data.
Managers have to justify their role... so they add stuff and come up with new money-making schemes...
[citation needed]
I'd argue they should have changed things more.
With all the built in advertising Windows reminds me of Frito's TV in Idiocracy. What an augural movie, btw.
> Linux is still crap software
Ubuntu is rock solid and easier to use than Windows. Linux Mint, Fedora and Pop!_OS too.
Any examples to why macOS isn't much better?
IMO Microsoft can gain users back by:
* Not requiring a Microsoft Account * Ending all data/telemetry collection * Not forcing Edge on its users * Stop releasing improved UI updates every week * Make bash, zsh, ... native for Windows * Taking the AI out and making it an optional extension * Making the Microsoft Store optional
A *plus* would be to open source Windows.
I would be interested in hearing your pet peeves.
TBH, I'm on board with some of the negatives you listed, but I feel like the entire enthusiast community has been screaming about edge, telemetry, and start menu search for years. Microsoft seems determined not to listen, it's astonishing.
New users can be steered through every dark-pattern install process, and upsold into every service since they don't have existing preferences.
They can't directly revert power users to that state, but by keeping the UI in a state of constant flux, they might get some accidental traction from them.
Why? There is PowerShell, able to run on Linux and MacOS. And compared to Bash it is actually readable language.
You can keep it. I'll stick with zsh or bash.
My issue with powershell is that it isn't really a shell language, or rather, not a tty language. I do think it's way better than bash, but I do not want to use it like bash, I want to use it like AWK, but for my system. I want it to use it only in scripts, or with an exec in a command line at worst. I think bash have better built-in for ttys, and is faster/more reactive (that might be my windows config but I don't think so).
I want to navigate with bash, and script with powershell (which I do to be completely honest, but I'd like to do that in a windows terminal and not wsl).
As much as I loathe my days being siphoned from me all day long while being forced to use Office, I'd at least forgive them if my daily driver OS wasn't a giant ad-infested spyware app.
However...
It's my operating system. Can they not understand why people would be sensitive about this? It blows my mind that, at least, there isn't an on/off toggle in the Pro version. It's really disrespectful to those of us who care.
I think part of the problem is that it seems like an internal (corporate) push (shift?) to view it as only a "licensed" product that you're using, rather than as something you "own" on your machine.
We saw a bit of this with licensing and product validation. Now, we're seeing it with changes driven by internal (e.g.: corporate command chain) drives. They "need" this data but there's no open transparency about why they need it, where it's housed, who has access, what positive changes this data has driven (if at all), etc.
Back during the Watson or WER (Windows Error Reporting) days, that was the only "telemetry" that the company needed and they got by on quite a few versions of the OS without needing more.
I don't have an answer - but I do know that if my work didn't require Windows, I'd be happy to never see another Windows desktop again.
How about making the installation about 90% less and dropping DCOM support. That is a dinosaur that has long out lived its usefulness. It is a constant source of security problems. DirectX needs a massive overhaul.
I paid damnit, I'm not paying twice.
I still give it, like, less than 50% chance of occurring, but it wouldn’t be totally mind blowing to see MS selling a Linux distro, IMO. Why not, right?
In theory. In practice, this doesn't happen.
Overall, I'd say desktop UIs are actually Linux's greatest failing. It's dominated by two different groups (Gnome vs. KDE) with extremely different design philosophies, and both having major (but different) problems. The whole Wayland vs X thing is also part of the problem. Everything else in Linux generally works really well, which is part of why it's so successful on servers and embedded systems.
Chromebooks sell OK, right?
I am ok with Windows as thin terminal with great graphics and audio support.
Apple now owns the majority of the mobile+tablet+developer laptop market. Getting rid of Windows Phone was a VERY bad decision made by Nadella. A short-term gain in profitability for a long-term loss in marketshare. He completely ceded the OS/device competition and effectively made Apple the dominant cross-form-factor OS company.
Give me the same base setup as Windows 7 but with the Windows 11 security bells and whistles.
* Edge is advertised when you first install Windows, but nothing forces you to use it. I use Firefox with Windows 11 and no mention of Edge appears anywhere now.
* Updates aren't weekly, except maybe security updates. And most updates these days happen unobtrusively in the background.
* They've made great progress with the new Terminal and Powershell apps. They're very good and have more-or-less all the functionality you'd be used to. If you really want more, WSL exists.
* You can turn off anything AI-related. Again, I don't see anything like that on mine.
* You never need to interact with the store, and you can remove it via command if you're really insistent on it.
Why must you use command lines to disable features which should have been opt-in, in the first place?
Why must one use a 3rd party device (e.g. PiHoles, which ARE awesome) to disable stuff — particularly when you can't even turn all telemetry off in the first place?
shell:::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}"
And people complain about Linux.
https://www.howtogeek.com/402458/enable-god-mode-in-windows-...
All sorts of ridiculous stuff like Microsoft realizing people won't be able to find the options to turn system icons on and off on the Desktop anymore, so they add a tiny clickable link to a Bing search for how to find it
If you go back to Windows 95 right now and use the interface it feels amazing in comparison. It feels like everything is designed to be both easy and productive. There's even a little Task Scheduler icon in the taskbar just in case maybe you want to set up something to run sometime. Because why not let normal users discover power user features? The Task Scheduler interface is much clearer and less intimidating than the current one.
Can you imagine getting your first ever PC now and trying to learn Windows 11? Especially without using the Internet to find where everything is?
That's not even mentioning the other issues (advertising/privacy/bloat/Microsoft account to log in...).
-
A while ago I decided to see if there's still local help in Windows and wrote down my experience.
I typed 'help' into the start menu search in Windows 11. An app came up called Get Help.
It opened with an ad banner at the top: "Increase productivity and collaboration all while staying organized, using a new meeting solution designed for small businesses. Learn More". Out of morbid curiosity I chose to Learn More but "We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found."
There were several features in Get Help beyond the primary feature of linking to a broken URL. You can sign in, you can rate your experience out of five, or you can send feedback. There is no Contents or Index, but there is a search box with a few suggested searches like 'How to install Office'. I tried searching 'how to copy paste' (without quotes) but "Your search did not match any solutions." It suggested I sign in to contact support. Closing the app was a little tricky because the minimise/maximise/close buttons are the wrong colour - white on pale grey. I rated my experience a 1/5, although it's 5/5 as a satire.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/aToMCtE
I have mentioned it a few times on HN in the past few weeks, but I already hated the telemetry spying, heck, it was creepy that me looking up files on my one computer was on their servers somewhere, so I wiped all that many years ago. Then I realized, their Antivirus tech will send files to "analyze" with zero audit trail as to which files, or anything of the sort. I immediately pulled down POP OS and wiped my drive. You shouldn't be sending my data around willy nilly without an audit trail. What if I'm working on something classified? What if its highly proprietary? This is so unethical on many levels.
The article also mentions some issues I've run into, where their UI is just not working correctly, which led to me uninstalling Windows one time prior as well, I had Windows Home Edition after spending thousands of dollars on a prebuilt machine, I tried to add a new user, it told me to use a different program, so I went to the different program, which then told me to go back to the program that told me to use that specific program. Why not just let me add users instead of horsing me around? I uninstalled Windows on that box, until I wanted to play Starfield, I got enough hours in until I saw that their AV software violates any sense of privacy on a whim with zero audit trail.
Microsoft. You had a really good OS, and you keep making it worse. Please stop making it worse. I'll gladly take on the task at half of whatever you pay the person currently ruining the OS, which is clearly way too much. You peaked at Windows 7 and its been downhill since. I am someone who weirdly enough did not mind Vista or 8, but I will admit that 7 was the peak best version.
Previous comments I've made on the subject:
Though the article kind of piqued my interest by claiming that Microsoft "is in panic" -- any proof that they are indeed bleeding users more than what is deemed normal?
I have noticed people around me get recommended Linux Mint and being happy with it but I'd think that's a minority; many offices rely on bespoke local network setups with printers and scanners and people putting files in shared directories and what-not... modernizing that and making it better is no easy feat.
EDIT: Oh, and as other users are saying, Linux desktop is absolutely not going to eat Windows' lunch. There are still too many confusing things there, and "you can hack it and make it your own" appeal to an infinitesimally small audience.
They are, but not to other OSes. More and more people associate computers with something you use for work (and work provides) or for school (and school provides). All personal computing happens on a phone.
My partner, for example, uses her personal laptop about once a year to do taxes. Otherwise it sits in the closet.
Even I use an iPad for most personal work these days. Laptop is mostly for personal coding projects for which I have less and less time as life adultifies.
I know a lot of people who don’t even have a personal computer anymore and just use the work laptop the few times their phone isn’t good enough.
This makes me sad, and is scary, etc. However, putting emotions aside, can we extrapolate from this? Could the next "killer app" actually be an even tinier device? A smartwatch? Or have we reached a local extremum (phones)? And what does that say about attempts to regress towards larger screens (AR/VR headsets)?
That's a rare opportunity. I hope someone gets a chance to do it for professional workstation computing one day. The Windows codebase has IMHO reached end-of-life. The Linux community isn't going to stray far outside the bounds of the 1970s era UNIX design. Apple does OK but they can't/won't change the macOS UI in any meaningful way and not enough people write native Mac apps to justify trying to do anything interesting there. ChromeOS is basically just a large screen smartphone OS experience with some Linux virtualization on the side. We're caught in a local minima.
The fact that there can exist sizable population of software engineers that are not into video game is disturbing in itself.
Never looked back. I only boot up windows for occasional games now, and even then, old games started to stop working. Linux at this point has better backwards compatibility using Proton/Wine/etc.
searching for apps in the Windows menu used to take less than a second. Now it takes 5-10 seconds to fetch crap from the internet (ads and bing results), and mix it with local results.
It's also terrible. "Fr" will find FreeCAD, the program I want. "Fre" pulls up "advanced system settings" because there's some subsection about free disk space. "Free" brings back FreeCAD.
Every single thing I do that involves any level of interaction with Windows has found some way of pissing me off.
The good thing is that powertoys and WSL2 at the end of the day compensate for me enough.
But get into setting up some bluetooth device and you want to cry if it doesn't work at first shot. You want to find help online? Pretty much all guides speak about the same OS like Windows 10, and yet they are already outdated with everything having been moved away.
Boy are you going to be disappointed when you discover that settings reset quite aggressively, especially in cases where Apple really thinks it knows better.
Want to keep bluetooth off? Both iPhone and macs will not abide.
Want to keep your passwords in local keychain? Nah, they will be automatically migrated to cloud keychain on next upgrade.
If you're using a Mac with a T1 or T2 security coprocessor or Apple Silicon, your local keychain can only be decrypted with a key stored in those chips. Your backups are useless. I figured this out the hard way when an Apple depot repair for a failed display flex somehow ended up with my logic board getting replaced as well. After reimaging from backup (SSD was integrated on the logic board), the keychain was unreadable and I lost several accounts without recovery options. AppleCare's response was, well, you should have backed up your files, even though I had...
I was able to restore it through external means, but this reinforced “have a non-proprietary backups” for me.
The iOS Bluetooth/wifi never bothered me personally because I use those all the time anyway. Of course everyone’s use case is gonna differ, but for me macOS is far from doing things like pushing huge full page “finish setting up edge” or “buy office” when I log in so, I’m happy.
I’ve been using macs since 2012 and never had any setting change on me.
Are they just not testing what some options do? If so, we might be better off just not giving those options.
> Want to keep bluetooth off? Both iPhone and macs will not abide.
To turn off Bluetooth, go to settings, select Bluetooth, and turn the toggle off. It will abide.
> Nah, they will be automatically migrated to cloud keychain on next upgrade.
I never even heard of this happening despite having used Macs for over a decade.
I will give you benefit of the doubt that you personally never had them, but both are factual based on my experience.
If you are interested you should be able find previous HN threads with same exact symptoms from other people.
It will abide for a while, but the next software update will turn it back on. This happens every single update.
At least the move to using web browsers for everything really eases migration to easier platforms.
From 2 years ago, I think you're still somewhat in the honeymoon period.
The real fun begins when they rewrite system apps in a new framework, and kill the mechanism your favorite system extension was using.
I've maintained an in-house distro for a couple years so I know the ins and outs of systemd, dbus, polkit, xorg and whatever crap is needed to run a desktop session, and how to track down what's broken if the system misbehaves in some way. So switching every machine I use to Linux wasn't really an extra burden. Ironically it made me switch to i3 as my WM and ditching a file manager, gvfs and other moving parts. I'm doing a lot of things in the terminal. I loathe complicated setups - less moving parts, less things that can break. But I'm fully aware that I'm a complete oddball here, and I don't think nor care whether the day of the Linux desktop will ever come. Unless maybe we're at a point where really absolutely everything runs in the cloud and people only need a browser. But at that point just get a Chromebook?
I think an easily discoverable UI for non-technical people is not a problem that many technical communities have. Anyone who does try to start that project is signing themselves up for a lot of complaints from outside the project, almost by definition. I don’t really see why anyone would do it.
The Chromebook is probably the right way to go. I’d recommend them to my non-technical friends if they weren’t designed by an ad company. As it is, I have no idea, there legitimately doesn’t seem to be a good desktop OS for non-technical users anymore.
The final few nails of Microsoft's coffin are being nailed as we speak. Not only because they are just fundamentally bad at innovation, but because they also sold out the United States to China. Billy boy is scared, and he should be.
I think the big middle of the population that's the problem, people who are tech literate enough to do some things, but not willing to relearn the wheel. They can use microsoft office, but don't want to have to relearn a new file structure. Those are the people who probably will have the biggest issue, and there's a lot of them. That's office workers, computer gamers, all those people. Even the pretty tech literate people who know how to do things in Windows but don't care to relearn it all in Linux.
I think I fall in the case of tech literate people who know how to do things in Linux but don't care to relearn it all in Windows.
So I guess it's true for the opposite too ahah
But it seems that convincing the network guys at work is harder than convincing a retiree. Apparently it's easier to administer a Windows network than a Linux one.
Not really. I suspect that there's a fallacy similar to the one in <https://thedailywtf.com/articles/an-obvious-requirement> going on. (The most relevant comment: 'Ah, so the user is using "obvious" to mean "familiar."').
I find Windows to be an unholy confusing mess these days. Want to set the microphone sound level; go to sound settings - nope, not there. Probably in some other legacy control panel I guess.
By contrast, most things I need to configure in Linux are in a single place. File copying is much faster than Windows. Updates don't prevent me from working and require multiple reboots. It crashes less often.
Anyway, a lot is probably just what you're used to. I'm sure I excuse many Linux failings because it doesn't bother me and I know how to work around it.
I really don’t get this. All modern desktop environment (OSX, Windows, KDE, Gnome) looks like very similar in terms of user experience quality to me. All are different, true, which is why I can understand will exists. But I will very hard pressed to justify "actually, x is better than y" (yet alone "light years away"), for any pair (x, y).
Can you name just three deal-breakers, things so huge that they deserve that "light years away" judgement ?
Also managed to get hold of one of the last Asus netbooks (1215 B), that after all these years has finally given the ghost.
Netbooks are now replaced by Chromebooks/Android systems that care about a full stack developer experience where the underlying Linux is a kind of implementation detail, Windows ships WSL (no need for VMWare/Virtual Box), and those that want UNIX proper have macOS.
If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness... Too bad Google's product managers are just busy trying to advance their own careers, plus it's not like they respect users...
Legit question: do you think there will ever be a new commercial desktop operating system (not one that's given away for free) that isn't Windows or MacOS again in the next 30 years?
Because Linux is free, and Windows is ubiquitous, and because you need a lot of hardware support and support for existing applications to be see usage, it seems hard for any new company to break into the market with something genuinely new.
It seems like the way things are now are how they'll be for a long time. We'll just always use Linux, MacOS, or Windows, with superficial changes, I suppose. Or a BSD.
And don't get me started on the ribbon UI which was inflicted upon the world in Office 2007 onwards and then shoved upon everyone's throats in subsequent editions of Windows.
Why did they have to change such things? It worked as it was. There's no improvement and, on the contrary, a quite noticeable involution.
I got a DELL laptop from a client to be able to access their windows applications. I used it for coding for a bit, it was so painfully slow, so I switched back to my macbook air m2.
I thought the Dell was just a cheap laptop, found out the retail price was a few 100 euros higher then my m2. I was dumbfounded a shitty laptop would go for those prices. (granted I have a 13 inch, 15 inch are around the same price)
The new macbook air's are really fairly priced and are sufficient for most professionals.
If you're price shopping Lenovo or Asus would probably be better choices with better designs (but TBH if you're in love with macs you're probably in the right spot for them, I don't see why you'd go choose different tradeoffs)
The closest to that would have been the Surface line, but with Panos out I wouldn't bet on it.
OK, that's one user. But clearly he is still using Windows. Microsoft has not "lost" him. He is just complaining. He even provides a solution re: printing for other Windows users that implies his readers are still using it, too.
"Microsoft is in a panic from the continued loss of it's user base."
Is there no need to present any evidence of this statement's veracity.
Perhaps some evidence has been published of which I am unaware.
Where can we view the data.
The closest thing to info on this I've seen is statcounter's Desktop OS share. According to that Windows has actually lost 15-20% marketshare in the last 10 years. It doesn't look like linux is stealing it though, OSX and "unknown" seem to be the biggest hitters. For all I know unknown is still Windows!
Not sure who "you" refers to, but NB. I do not use Windows. And I rarely use a graphical interface.
I suspect this is on purpose.
We did not manually muck with control panels per station. I could not care less what the settings UIs for home installs of Windows are.
And that's the real truth, power users and these small fry IT install bases are not major markets. The most prominent markets are OEM installs for non-technical home users (who hate complex panels and love the push-button UIs), and large 3/4/5 digit enterprise installs that do not give a damn about this stuff because they're using MDT (or whatever) to deploy images to all their stations and not playing with this per-station configuration stuff.
Apart from the issue of needing control panels mostly to solve problems, they're just not great.
Windows legendarily keeps multiple versions of them, while for ios/macos it's a game of finding which image is actually a clickable button or understanding that wi-fi hotspot is under sharing and not networks. The FA was about command line incantation to fix printers and of course at every new macos version there will be a set of new defaults to get back behaviors. I think that's just the way of life at this point.
Will the 10 person SME run such an setup? Unlikely. Can a 100 person SME that employs four MSCE run such a setup? Yes, but you only need two RHCE or LPIC-2 admins now (for vacation and somesuch). Those are rare, I know, but they will scale to 1000 persons, no problem.
Android Linux and iOS are what killed MS's stranglehold on consumer electronics. GNU is a footnote in the history of MS's rise and fall in the space.
Using old Control Panel (Start->Run->control)
Clicking on this will redirect you to the new settings printer that gives NO options to do any advanced troubleshooting and removes the ability to FIX the issue!
These days, I print so little I either stop at my local library, where printing is free, or I pay a pittance to print at a shop. It would take me a decade or more to pay off a printer when pages cost $.10.
- 1995. wah, wah! Windows 95 sucks, it's so bloated, MS-DOS was so much lighter, this will be the end of Microsoft.
- 2001. wah, wah! Windows XP sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 2000 with Fisher Price coloring, this will be the end of Microsoft.
....
- 2021. wah, wah! Windows 11 sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 10 with a different UX and TPM requirement, this will be the end of Microsoft.
Maybe in 30 more years, when PCs will be in museums as we'll all have AR glasses or neural implants for personal computing, they'll finally be right with their prediction.
(Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... )
- There's so much existing software for Windows on x86 computers that it may not be feasible to migrate to MacOS or Linux.
- Windows does improve sometimes, and security updates are important. There's nothing forcing anyone to stop using Windows, like if it were abandoned.
But just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it won't. MacOS market share has risen. Windows used to have 85% market share, but now it's 53%, and MacOS accounts for 31% of US desktop systems.[0] Perhaps that's just because the desktop market shrank, though.
Maybe in the future, 64-bit ARM Macs will be the standard workstation like Windows PCs, with a minority running Linux on their Macs instead. I don't like that future, though; as much as Windows sucks, at least they don't try to limit user freedom to the extent Apple does. If Windows stopped being profitable to continue for Microsoft, I'd hope another company would rise up and sell their own operating system.
[0]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3695172/statcounter-da...
edit: It was 53% when the article was written. The statistics they link say it's now 64%.
Sure, you can still do things like I can write to a socket using python over using rfcomm, but isn't it the same as this article? It's gets in the way of gnome and friends wanting to "cater the experience" plus it's legacy now (meaning "I don't want to read someone else's code, blegh!") So out it goes! Developers in foss seem to love label things "legacy" to remove, not just in windows and mac land.
I don't even think this is wholly true. The new / old context menu that for some reason now exists in parallel so you have to do two clicks on every right-click actions still mixes legacy and modern UI, and there's so many redundant mouse control and audio control settings also with entirely different look and feel. It's like you're on three Windows operating systems at the same time.
Baffling to me how a company the size of Microsoft cannot streamline their user interfaces.
Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it won't, but like 25 / 0 of the last "Linux is taking over the desktop" moments have been predicted.
Users want to run Adobe's creative suite or Affinity software (because they have to, even tough there are some decent alternatives) or run some very specific Scientific/CAD/whatever software that has no parallel in the Linux world. Worse, sometimes its hard to get Linux native software to run on your choice of distro due to it not being available in your distro repositories yet (flatpaks are changing that but still not a perfect solution) or it being some proprietary software that was really only tested on some old version of Readhat meant for high end workstations which requires you to run some arcane scripts on the command line to install and therefore tainting your whole installation, kinda defeating the purpose of running away from messy Windows installations.
For people above 60 who've spent two decades using windows, Linux Mint has even shown to be more manageable than jumping to a newer version of Windows.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ASUS_ROG_Zephyrus_G14_(2022...
Also NixOS has a nixos-hardware repository with configurations for some laptops:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/tree/master/asus/zep...
Reasonably legible if you ever programmed anything
Fedora has also worked OK for me in the past.
Most companies I've worked with are full of similar projects, rebrandings, major rewrites in micro services, everywhere I look at from UI to tech to product there's always a huge bunch of people needing to show they are actually delivering and working.
The best economical path forward is to redefine intellectual property and reinstate the fact that math cannot be IP. Repeal DRM clause in the DMCS. This forces big entities to compete by having quality products. Large market power is not supposed to have all the advantages. Innovation is meant to disrupt them when they are not operating in the consumers interest. But corps have been allowed to write their own laws to keep themselves ahead artificially. Change the rules of the game.
* Intel Arc drivers
* eGPU drivers
* Razer Blade 18 drivers
* native ssh
* windows containers
* WSL
(and likely many more that i haven’t found yet)
But agree it’s not ideal.
This is the finest advertisement for every OS not named Windows that I have ever seen.
Spoiler alert, your Linux systems probably use them too:
[lammy@emi] blkid
/dev/mapper/nvme0n1p5_crypt: UUID="RjKq3i-w2ov-ZXcp-Uc60-Ylzp-Gc56-xtjpkg" TYPE="LVM2_member"
/dev/mapper/mint--vg-root: UUID="4d5373f4-d9e2-4787-98d8-24c33a1574b7" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/nvme0n1p1: UUID="d6b28757-9cd9-44a5-b68a-25515537e540" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="bc0382eb-01"
/dev/nvme0n1p5: UUID="19104716-2c1f-4e92-8c75-35b113d9ecae" TYPE="crypto_LUKS" PARTUUID="bc0382eb-05"
/dev/mapper/mint--vg-swap_1: UUID="dbfcbc11-37c2-4752-9f8f-6288aa7e8b43" TYPE="swap"
[lammy@popola] gpart list|grep uuid
rawuuid: c345aeb1-1dde-11e9-a10e-0cc42afa3cea
rawuuid: c350c1ee-1dde-11e9-a10e-0cc42afa3cea
rawuuid: c359c46d-1dde-11e9-a10e-0cc42afa3cea
rawuuid: c3601e82-1dde-11e9-a10e-0cc42afa3cea
Also UUIDs in the classic sense do suck in my opinion and Linux and FreeBDS use them, because they have to, to support standards that were made with Windows in mind. UUIDs are strange - i.e. their mixed endianess or how version bits are placed in them. All for a 128 bit random identifier as it is mostly used nowadays. I like the below to get a random identifier:
__uint128_t random;
char id[17] = {0};
getentropy(&random, sizeof(random));
for(int i = 0; i < 16; i++) {
id[i] = 'a' + ((random >> i) & 0xf);
}
Chrome Web Store uses something similar.
Yes, your devices and various other underpinnings have GUIDs, but very few of them _only_ surface the GUID as a referent to the thing in a place a user would have to access it.
Similar to how, if you could only get at this by doing "rundll32 shellex.dll LoadOldPrinterSettings", the issue wouldn't be a function named LoadOldPrinterSettings, the issue would be that it's making you reach into a DLL to invoke a function by hand to get at it at all.
Anyway, I use Linux and to me Windows is so far behind, for example only in recent years they introduced features such as virtual desktops that in Linux DE are present till the 90s... the user experience of windows is kind of bad, and still misses some (to me) basic features, such as the possibility to keep a window always on top, not to mention the mess that is installing and updating software (you still have to download programs from the internet because not even all Microsoft software is distributed trough the Microsoft store, or use third-party package managers), or the Windows updates themself (possible that in 2024 Microsoft or Apple still haven't found out a way to update the system without rebooting it and wasting a ton of time? I mean, come on...).
There's also one for Always on top, or the freeware Turbotop.
Before that (and being young and not exposed to anything else) viewed Microsoft's OS as the best thing since slice bread. I was able to code and do things with Visual Studio 5.0/6.0. In my eyes nothing could compare.
One day, my mouse pointer would slowly move down the screen without touching it. Thinking it was a virus or something, did a reinstall of XP. A few months later, the pointer was playing up, again.
There were other things but it was the start to my journey to GNU/Linux. I was barely exposed to GNU/Linux a year or two before but due to lack of internet at that time, could not grasp the change being a Windows user.
This time I purchased a book on Ubuntu and realised how cool this really is. It also made me appreciate programming. I no longer was 'clicking the play button' on Visual Studio. Now I was understanding how to compile with gcc.
Since then I would choose GNU/Linux over Windows most days of the week. The only exception is my job.
For example, I have one job that still uses legacy software. We are talking programs originally written in the late 90s in Visual Basic 6. I have to use Windows. Some program before I joined moved over to .NET and SQL Server. My goal is to move away from Microsofts tools. No more Windows Servers. Using (perhaps) Go, Postgres, etc. The Company would save a lot more money as well. Baby Steps.
I don't hate Windows, but I still have to install it on one laptop and the amount of stuff I don't want gets annoying!
Most of the time I am using Debian, both on my (other) laptop and as a Server machine.
I could say more but that will do.
And don't get me started on that malware Onedrive or the constantly shitified Teams.
You can't suddenly change things and expect app developers to accept it like they do in OSX. This means they can't change Windows too much.
Any new change creates lots of compromises and just slapping a new UI doesn't fix the underlying issue.
This has been the case since forever, that's why Apple could survive and that's why we have Linux.
It isn't worth for Microsoft for example, to change how program becomes initialized at system startup. What happens is that every program then will want to be initialized at Startup.
The average windows user is used to have to close lots of garbage at system startup. Also dealing with pseudo-ads all around the OS and also edge. Changing this would probably mean less revenue and no corporation would prefer to delay revenue in a bad product that will likely never die.
Mac likely wouldn't be vibrant and with so much attention to details if Windows didn't exist. There wouldn't be a market for it.
Ads in the taskbar indicates that Microsoft has no problem pushing some choices.
Reading all the comments in these discussions I consider myself lucky to never have made the switch 'to' Windows. After triple booting DOS/W98, OS/2 and Linux for a while in the nineties, it was just Linux after 2003 because it is easy and it just works.
Also used Macbooks several years at work and the OS never got in the way of productivity. To me at least MacOS appears to work fine.
Every time I do, I'm blown away with the constant garbage like ads and "news" in the search bar, the bizarre mash-up of UI elements from various generations of WIndows in various menus and the like.
The strongest point for Windows for me is that things like displays and GPU drivers "just work"
Every Mac I've had has had issues with displays/compatibility in some fashion, yet old hardware running windows typically functions fine without any fighting.
Outside of the very minimal gaming I do, there's little value for any of my use cases with Windows.
Unfortunately, we still be using windows.
Curiously the game were working quite fine as long as I was using x11.
(being flippant but also.. Yeah why?)
Not because it's relationship with users, but because of its relationships with the avenues leading to users.
I use linux and, reluctantly, macos (and will switch as soon as feasible). But my kids still use windows sometimes though, to play Roblox and Minecraft redstone edition, etc.
I dread any time I'm asked to help with microsoft accounts, or OS re-installations because windows update borked the system (happens at least every 6 months or so), etc. Microsoft's user experience seems to suck in absolutely everything they do.
Linux is good for gaming. macOS is not and will never be with Apple's attitude.
Paraphrased, but this actually happened on my work machine a few months ago. This kind of bullshit and bald faced disrespect is why I haven't used windows at home in years.
People in poorer countries use pirated software. No, the don't need to be tech-savvy enough to know torrents to use pirated Windows. They don't need to know how to install an OS themselves.
20 years ago when I got my first PC, pirated windows was the norm here. You needed to be tech-savvy to know how to get a legal version. That is how developing countries work.
So the windows activation thing is simply disabled at the computer store or something? Security updates still function alright despite this?
Yes they should keep all the old stuff for us that know how to use it.
But one thing, it IS stable. My Windows 10 install is 4 years old, and Windows updates never broke it. I am not sure what you are doing to your systems.
For me vista was the day I switched completely and haven't looked back.
All I use it for is to launch 8 programs that is pinned to my taskbar that is opened as soon as my PC boots.
It sounds like a hell freezing over situation but maybe they'd even release their own Linux distro with compatibility tools only they'd ever be able to make with access to source code and engineer experience, and just push their web based versions of apps as much as possible.
Either way it seems like Linux will be profiting from the situation at the moment as a huge number of devices out there won't support Windows 11 but will perform perfectly fine with Linux. If Ubuntu / Redhat are smart they'll put the effort in to make transitioning as easy as possible and scoop up all the people who don't want to pay for a new device, and given the financial issues more and more people are having I don't think that's a small group.
And jesus, stop breaking the taskbar. Every major windows version they just make it worse. Now you can't even dock it to different parts of the screen. Why?!? The Windows 2000 taskbar was infinitely superior to this macOS dock wannabe pile of trash. Also, why do "widgets" always come back. It's never been a good idea in any OS, but it feels like we're constantly being sold on it. If I want the weather I'll just do a quick internet search. I mean, they've been trying to make this a thing since Active Desktop in Windows 98 and most users have never ever cared or wanted these things. Maybe 26 years later it's time to say that it's not a good idea?
The problem becomes that A) people really want different presentations of information, B) something tiny and satisfying in the corner isn't as easy to justify as a big improvement, even if it is, as a big flashy thing, and C) some people get very upset at anything doing this at all.
Look at how people got super excited about active desktop backgrounds, or how people used media players which turn into tiny widgets displaying pretty visualizations and a little bit of information.
People want widgets, but getting a consistent design that many people will use without introducing so much complexity that most people will never bother is hard.
Unless that was the irony you were pointing out. Good show.
I have the feeling Windows users are a self-selecting bunch.
The interface changes relatively slowly, all things considered. (When it does change suddenly, some of the same pundits throw a fit.) But the internals are always changing, virtually always for the better; things like the `discoveryd` situation are outliers, not the rule.
So, the question is, is this creative destruction or just destruction. Not every change is an innovation even in IT and large vendors have a long history of failing in computing usually because they either got sclerotic or too focused on the organization and promoting the organization and too little focused on the customer.
In general, MS is pissing a lot away. Office, both the desktop apps and Office 365, are absolutely atrocious (just started using it due to a new job, I previous thought Google Docs was the worst). VSCode has become slow and frustrating to use. I stopped developing on their platform products long ago because most are a terrible value proposition and frustrating developer experience.
I have been a dedicated DOS and Windows user since the 80s, and a Microsoft developer since late 90s and 2000s, but between Vista and Windows 8 it was clear they were circling the drain and I have been distancing myself from their products as much as I can.
Sign me up. If only...
I ALWAYS have to boot up the BIOS and re-disable Fn keys as media keys (personal preference), secure boot and change the SATA mode to AHCI instead of RST + optane, otherwise I can't dual boot Linux.
Literally. every. time. I update Windows and I have to go back to the BIOS.
Peak Windows : Windows 7
Second Best Windows : Windows XP
It's been all downhill since Win 7.
I had spent a pretty penny building a beefy gaming PC and the Windows XP installer would have this selective amnesia about device drivers that weren't signed. A very important driver provided by the motherboard OEM (nVidia) would be cheerfully accepted by the Windows XP installer at the beginning but then after the initial reboot during installation, the driver wouldn't work and would not be considered acceptable by the installer anymore. I was left with a ≈$3,000 (in early 2000s money) PC that could not complete the Windows XP installation. After a few days of hitting my head on this I drove to the nearest Apple Store and bought a MacBook and never looked back.
To this day I am still somewhat livid / grossed out with the entire PC ecosystem and it's lack of any kind of standards, platform conventions, and the general flea market / down market vibe of the available hardware (new motherboards in 2024 STILL have an ocean of USB-A ports instead of USB-C or Thunderbolt!).
There is a lot that Apple could improve on, particularly it would be nice if they loosened up a bit when it comes to what kinds of apps they permit on the App Store. But I immensely enjoy that I haven't had to give a flying dripping shit about device drivers for almost 20 years now. I don't have wonder if something will work when I plug it in. It just does. I sort of get why it's popular in enterprise settings, I don't understand why people put themselves through the misery that Windows seems to insist upon for its end users.
this is ridiculous. just rambling for the sake of rambling, having an out for windows lol. and seemingly (looking at post text alone) not even trying to actually find it, but in the video he even clicks that button and opens it, and yet makes up a more complicated "solution" for it, saying they "hide that button sometimes" which just does not make sense. it's just there. literally not hidden. so that's just a made up problem.
(OK he hates Apple so is pushing an alternative but a good POV)
Seem like an odd take. In the article he does say that he still uses it as a daily driver. He can't hate it that much.
It doesn't matter if I press the spacebar, click my mouse, etc. No matter how the PC awakes, Edge launches itself in full view on top of the other apps.
It's blatantly aggravating stuff like this that pisses me off even more than spying telemetry.