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Comment by quchen | Hacker News Reader

I’m wondering, what keeps Windows afloat? I’ve become a Windows person in my childhood, and stayed one because games, Photoshop and 3DS Max ran on it. I’ve long switched to Linux (and dual-boot to a very much unloved Win10 for games that don’t run on Linux these days), and I’m baffled that ads occurring in the start menu are a thing – I was similarly shocked when Ubuntu tried this, and will always be cautious around Canonical.

Inertia goes a long way, I guess – and switching OSs is kind of a hobby for a while before being productive again ..? I wonder, had I had a Steam Deck as a child, would I have been an Arch user now?

Would be interested in hearing other peoples’ stories.

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> I’m wondering, what keeps Windows afloat?

Businesses with specialized software that doesn't run (or isn't supported) anywhere except on Windows.

It's declining, because lots of business applications are moving to the web, but there's still a ton of them around.

> what keeps Windows afloat?

The fact that it's the only OS you can get preinstalled on an inexpensive computer from a reputable brand is why 90% of its users use it. People willing to spend $1k+ for a laptop mostly buy Apple.

(ChromeOS is a minor exception to this, but its usage is negligible [1], probably because it's so limited by design.)

[1] https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...

> What keeps Windows afloat?

Gaming, enterprise, education, healthcare, manufacturing, etc etc. PCs are everywhere. You can run 40 year old software and they’re upgradable.

Gaming mostly, and inertia. But I feel like the choice of OS is a much smaller factor than it used to be. I have a Windows desktop and a MacOS laptop now, but I've used a Linux (Debian Gnome) laptop for many years and I used to have dual boot on my desktop.

Everything runs on everything now mostly, and the rest are web apps.

Chrome, VSCode, Obsidian, Spotify, Steam, Slack, Discord, Docker, Python, Rust, JavaScript (Node), decent terminal (Bash, Fish, Powershell)... That's pretty much all I need, there's almost no difference between OSs on all these nowadays, most data is synced, and I can switch between them seamlessly throughout the day.

The UX is also very similar between all modern OSs, actually Windows 10 is now quite clean and snappy, I might slightly prefer it to MacOS and Gnome.

Same as how they gained the market share in the first place - deals with sellers, businesses, governments. In some places, it was more expensive to not bundle Windows with a new laptop than to bundle it. Governments were given deals, support and bribes to build their infra on Microsoft products, including teaching Windows, Office in schools. And in the meantime, competition was stifled by any means necessary.

At work we write a CRUD-ish B2B application, and it started its life on Windows so is a Win32 application.

We're working on transitioning to the web so perhaps in a decade we'll be entirely off Windows, but for now we and our users run Windows. Directly, or indirectly via published applications.

At home it's primarily RDP. Haven't found any viable alternative for Linux, so my main desktop stays Windows for now.

X2go is alright

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X2Go

X2go, and all the similar ones, work and is certainly better than nothing. But they're not in the same ballpark as RDP and as such not a viable alternative for me.

It's not a dig as such, RDP is integrated at a lower level so can do things X2go and similar just can't, at least yet.

Compatibility. I am sorry but Linux and compatibility is like oil and water. I can create a Windows binary and it works on Windows 7, 10, 11 no problem. On Linux I need to pack it in different formats for different distros - AppImage, Snap, Deb, Rpm, ... and then solve compatibility issues between different versions of glibc in different versions of Linux. So much work for so little gain.

I have a Windows binary I compiled I think in 1997 or 1998 and the same binary still works fine on my PC today.

Games and media, for me.

I'm about to convert my Proxmox file/VM server to Windows, because I want it to double as a media server and Linux GPU support (much less hardware passthrough) is more than I want to deal with.

I converted my laptop from Fedora to Windows recently to be able to do some light gaming, and because I want to see if Windows suspend is better on battery than the quick drain I was getting on Fedora.

I actually just built a new PC this weekend, my first in a while, with a Radeon GPU. I decided to give Fedora Kinoite a chance on it just because Windows' transition to becoming an ad platform was really pissing me off and it doesn't hurt to see what Linux is like now, especially something weird like an atomic OS.

To my surprise, games just work. I haven't really attempted this in over a decade, but I was able to play Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite, Counter-Strike 2, Baldurs Gate 3, and Doom Eternal all without issues or configuration. Kinoite itself is pretty awesome; my system is immutable and treated like a git repo, KDE 6 is extremely polished and visually appealing, and any dev work just runs in their handy "toolbox" utility.

The rest of the stuff I use (Signal, Discord, Google Chrome, Blender, Krita, Godot) is all natively supported.

I don't see myself touching Windows again, it has nothing I need at this point.

Windows is good enough for the vast majority of people. Businesses simply care about achieving their broader goals (i.e., selling their own products or services) and want to minimize effort on tools required to do that. The vast majority of people know how to use Windows and Office, and although they both suck in various aspects, they're familiar and good enough.

Companies, free OEM licenses, and habit.

It's not a bad OS, I'm thinking more and more about moving to Linux, but Windows 11 is fine for me and has the broadest compatibility. There is nothing that doesn't work with Windows, since WSL2 it runs nearly all Linux software, and there is nothing that bothers me too much.

Wsl is imo more convenient then dual boot.

And since most people are used to windowsUI, going out of their way to switch to Linux while still keeping windows installed just doesn't make much sense. Also, with wsl I can switch back and forth seamlessly, while dual boot is inherently clumsy when trying to cross the barrier.

> I’m wondering, what keeps Windows afloat?

MS Excel

To be fair the first thing I do is disable all ads. Most don't dig that deep. And due to Europe all their "oh are you sure you don't wanna sign up for all these" now has consistent no button positions.

I think w11 is fantastic if only they stopped all ad nonsense.

Microsoft heavily divested from their OS business a while ago. Only the tiniest fraction of their income comes from selling end-user license keys.

Even if you don't use their OS, you probably give them money in gaming or indirectly through their enterprise clients.

On devices that have people working to support the hardware, like Steam Deck, linux works fine. On my laptop Windows gives me working sound, video without tearing, scrolling websites without tearing, not crashing during install.

It's cheap, runs on everything, has a decent user experience, has a large network effect, and has wide software and peripheral support. I don't see why it wouldn't stay afloat.

I don't personally like or enjoy using Windows but one good thing I have to say for it is that it has great backward compatibility: you can get old exe program from 20 years ago without too much of a hassle. It's less of an issue with VMs today but sometimes that's not an option for whatever reason.

But otherwise, yeah it's inertia, people will stick with what they know. Until it completely breaks and annoys them enough and then they'll go looking for something else.

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