Windows Is Free for Business (2008)
davegutteridge.com
davegutteridge.com
Webapps, and the generation of people who built them (who very likely grew up in the era of desktop apps with activation keys), killed the conversation off. You share your identity with the webapp provider to get access to all but the simplest apps, and there's a tiered access model going from freemium to premium. In particular, freemium attempts to remove that "I just need it for one quick thing" friction.
That said, the reasons for piracy remain the same: friction and price. It goes both ways really. People pay for 365 because free Office suites dont quite do what they want and that introduces friction. People pirate Photoshop because its outrageously expensive relative to the value that it provides to the pirating user.
Movies are a great example. If I can stream a given movie on any of the services I already purchase, obviously that's great and I'll do that. Failing that, I'd like to buy it on iTunes as I trust Apple a little more than most others in the space (YMMV). Failing that, if I can buy temporary access on Amazon Prime/YouTube/Whatever, sure. If however I'm essentially expected to fork out yet another $10-$20 on yet another subscription with yet another mediocre app that will slow my Apple TVs to a crawl, or worse, demand the right to shove ads in my face... no. Pass.
I also ditched Photoshop's $10/mo subscription after years because the quality of it just kept going down. I remember being so excited when the first update for the M1 Macs dropped, and Photoshop suddenly felt to use like it did in the 2010's; snappy, performant, efficient. And it took barely 3 years for Adobe to manage to bloat it up so it ran like shit again. So I dropped that and spent $50 on Affinity Photo and I couldn't be happier. Granted some things take a few more steps to do in Affinity, but those steps are all quick, snappy and responsive unlike seemingly every action in Photoshop.
It blows my mind how the software and larger entertainment industries refuse to learn the lessons of Steam. Steam isn't perfect, of course, it has it's issues here and there but it made great strides to reduce piracy not by locking the products down so hard and with such onerous software/rootkits/DRM but instead by just making the idea of buying and getting the game so obtusely convenient that pirating it is more work and why spend hours downloading questionable software and carefully going through an installation procedure when you could just wishlist it there, wait for it to go on sale, grab it for $10 and have it in the time it takes you to make a coffee?
IMO it’s because so many people in large companies want to avoid ownership and responsibility.
It’s like that old saying “nobody got fired for contracting IBM.”
Nobody gets fired for going with intrusive DRM. It’s good for the company!
My understanding of Valve is that it’s a small-ish high-ownership company.
So if you just need one or two features of a program, then you still need to purchase...err, rent...the entire thing. Sometimes you even need to rent it for a full year.
Thankfully it seems LLM's are on track to solve this problem at least partially by being able to effectively code very narrow scope solutions. You can't prompt Claude to write Photoshop, but you can prompt it to write a program that scales images and applies a basic filter. (Yes, I know there are a gazillion free photo tools, this is just an accessible example).
Apple includes a lot of free software with their paid devices, such as iWork, Mail, Garageband, etc.
Why would this be the case? Surely it's because pirating it is cheaper and there aren't any enforced consequences.
The jokes on me. I pirated photoshop way back in the day. Now I have no choice but to shell out a subscription.
My use case is: do some photos once every two months and make them better using lightroom. Paying monthly for it makes really no sense for me.
Eventually there was some crackdown from SPA in cooperation with the police forces, and most businesses nowadays run legit, however I will gladly bet than there are still plenty of business that do not, especially in small towns.
Also that we aren't the only country where it goes like that.
I don't think it was that extreme here in Germany, but I do recall my father coming home various times throughout the years with cases containing ~20-50 3.5" floppy disks for our Atari STs that were either completely unlabeled or with hand-written or home-printed labels. Always interesting finding out how to start each game and looking at the colourful intros.
By the way there is a movie that touches this, but from movie industry side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_by_Erry
Back in the 8 bit days, the dream of each teenager was to get a double deck tape recorder, at least for those on Speccy side.
Years later on the Amiga, X-Copy was a must have.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-sup...
Back in the late aughts, there was an article from someone at Microsoft talking about how they weren't that interested in going after people pirating Windows in the developing world, because they saw it as an opportunity for turning them into paying customers. Really - that piracy is expanding the Microsoft ecosystem, which back then was important because they viewed Linux on the desktop as a huge threat. (Is it the year of Desktop Linux yet?)
The ease with which Windows is cracked still is probably no accident, but nobody's talking about it. If you're running a business at some point your security folks are going to point out that using cracked software is how you invite attackers inside your security perimeter. (Seriously, down that path lies losing all of your bank accounts)
I know this is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment but I would argue that the year of the Linux desktop was in 2022 when the Steam deck, albeit a non-desktop machine, was released. It's a pretty popular console and really forwarded the idea of playing video games on Linux being seamless. The state of gaming on Linux is/was one of the main reason why so many people are/were holding out on Windows, and with a few exceptions of massive games like Fortnite, it's basically here. Adoption, however, is a different story.
Additionally, there are still many types of software that either don't run on Linux or don't perform as well. I primarily use my PC for music production, and that pretty much rules out using Linux unless I'm willing to spend more time configuring things or risk potential compatibility issues.
I do wish I could switch to a Linux desktop without feeling like a second-class citizen in certain areas. I prefer writing web applications on Linux, but with WSL working well enough, I’m too lazy to dual boot just for that.
That said, I'm looking forward to installing Arch on my old laptop. I may be an adult with a full-time job, kids, and little free time, but I'm still a nerd at heart.
Judging by the direction Microsoft is going with Windows 11, I don’t think that will be too long :^)
For music production it’s more tricky. Personally, I’ve had some success with Bitwig (which just worked and picked up my old Novation Launchpad out of the box; I also think it works with Windows VSTs through Wine), but I admit that I’m not a pro by any means, and a more complicated setup might require some fiddling around. Hopefully this gets better with more adoption!
There's never going to be a YoLoD
Desktops/notebooks are second class now
Only Canonical had a good focus on usability for the average Joe, and even then there were a lot of loose ends, especially due to the way Linux works
(see how things like udev work, or wpa_supplicant, or D-Bus work. There's loose coupling, frail interfaces, version mismatches galore and then if you get out of step stuff breaks)
Fedora KDE spin has been a less painful experience than Windows 11 in every way, for me.
They both shipped with Windows 10, which I didn't use for any length of time, since I daily drive Linux. I updated them both to the latest Windows 11 available at the time, with a fresh install, and installed all the drivers from HP.
With the AMD, fresh out of the box, there was some issue with the backlight. The screen would be very dim, even while set all the way up. I initially thought there was some hardware issue, but booting into the BIOS burned my eyes, so the hardware was fine. I didn't really use it for any length, so don't know how that install fared otherwise. After the reinstall, the backlight worked as expected. But, for around half a year, the webcam wouldn't be detected. It suddenly started working after some update or other. This machine can also not sleep for any length of time under Windows. It will usually reboot by itself after a while, and Windows has no idea why (event log says "unexpected shutdown"). Less often, though, it will just get stuck when attempting to wake up (fans full tilt, screen off). The hardware was otherwise in good working condition, since everything worked under Linux since day 1. Yes, including sleep and audio.
With the Intel, the backlight seemed fine initially. I also didn't spend much time with it as delivered and reinstalled it. First off, Windows didn't detect the touchpad, nor the trackpoint, nor the Wifi. I did have a mouse lying around which worked (fortunately I don't care for BT peripherals), but then would have had to jump through some hoops to convince it to not insist on connecting to some server. Fortunately, it was going to be domain-joined so it left me be. Then the fun started. With the HP usb-c dock, the external screen would usually not be recognized at 4k@60 unless I did a plug-unplug-replug at the right time. Sleep would also be unreliable, sometimes waking up to a blank screen and fans going full tilt, sometimes to a garbled image. The output thing has been fixed after a while by using the drivers from Intel's website, but Windows would helpfully update them every other day to the borked ones. In the end, the drivers supplied by Windows have caught up, but my other random Chinese dock still won't output 4k@60. Sleep also mostly works fine now. Never had any issue on Linux. The Chinese dock works fine on Linux, and also on Windows with the AMD laptop.
Audio driver issues.
Graphics driver issues.
WiFi driver issues.
but I still like Linux more than windows.
By my measure, Linux has saved $1000s of dollars of my time just in waiting for updates alone. (Not to mention the employment and community opportunities it made possible.)
I’ve spent days fixing issues after updating my system.
Linux is great, but it has many pain points, as does windows.
I don’t really think either is strictly less finicky or painful than another as long as you’re willing to learn a bit.
If you’re not willing to learn a bit, windows is definitely was.
Linux will always be cooler though.
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski>.
That said, well played.
Linux, on the other hand, has been the least productive. Part of the problem is that it encourages users to tinker, but it also tends to break more easily—whether from tinkering itself or updates that mess with settings or drivers.
I’m not sure about the current state of support for multi-monitor setups with different pixel densities, but I remember struggling a lot with that in various desktop environments in the past.
I seem to recall the network activation server for Windows let you activate unlimited clients on a key, although maybe I'm misremembering, or the person who configured it did something funny.
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[1]: Does Microsoft even do first party license audits anymore? I'd imagine with so much of the licensing being a part of cloud spend that they don't care since you're already paying $20+ per month per head anyway for windows and office.
I was boggled that anyone would be happy about any part of that.
I had successfully avoided letting us ever rely on any MS services other than most people's desktops were Windows.
I can't even imagine so much as letting MS or anyone else even in the building to go through our shit to satisfy their desire to know if any of our machines were running any of their software. I'm sure it's part of some license agreement that you agree to be subject to audits or else you don't get to buy the stuff at all but still.
I can't imagine being pleased that some douchebags have audited me and said I was a good boy this year.
As a linux user it boggles me what people are willing to put up with and consider it not only normal but even valid.
I'm not full Stallman and I will use proprietary stuff when I have to, and deal with it's terms, but I never even slightly actually internalize the vendors ideas about what I should do.
You can install Ubuntu on 100 Thinkpads and have that be the official OS of your company.
The tech folks will love it, but Mr Smith in accounting will be angry and confused. QuickBooks doesn't work, how will he get anything done ? He doesn't want an open source alternative. He wants QuickBooks.
I definitely think Linux is better for personal usage, but I don't expect most companies to ever realistically roll it out to every desktop.
Are you really in a situation where you need to read emails offline ?
It makes no sense to be happy about audits, even successfully passing them, regardless how much value you get out of whatever product they are attached to. The two things have no bearing on each other. By all means, value the product greatly.
This excusing is exactly what I was talking about. It's kind of disturbing and sick even to be so cooperative with a bully.
It's one thing to do what you gotta do and put up with what you gotta put up with, but to actually not see a problem and derive personal sense of worth from some shop owner going through your pockets to satisfy themselves that you didn't steal anything is just bizarre. You should not be happy that the shop owner said "looks like you didn't steal from me today".
Would you be relieved to have passed an IRS tax audit? I know I would.
Yes, it is part of the license agreement to be audited, but there are two kinds of audits -- the one you can tell them to go pound sand, these are usually the ones from 3rd parties, and the ones that have the license agreement enforcement behind them.
> As a linux user it boggles me what people are willing to put up with and consider it not only normal but even valid.
Corporations are because of the the MS stack that still has no equal in AD DS, client management, etc. It has gotten easier with cloud licensing since you can't usually go above the license count you ordered.
If only I had explicitly articulated a distinction vs "relieved to survive a trial imposed on them".
28 U.S. Code § 1498 [1] holds the federal government liable for copyright infringement (section b), but only in the US (c).
I don't know how much copyright enforcement Iraqi courts were doing during the occupation, and the US Military was operating with broad immunity from Iraqi law as well. There's no reason for Microsoft to make a fuss over this infringement, because they're not going to get compensated and the PR will be negative.