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Comment by Night_Thastus | Hacker News Reader

Given Microsoft's recent 'This is an Xbox' and 'Windows 11 will be the platform for gaming' messaging, and the demolishing of the Xbox division, this may be good timing.

Results like this may light a fire under MS to finally fix some deep problems in Windows' performance. At least, one can hope.

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I hope Microsoft stays complacent and ultimately loses the gamer market. With gamers out and most other casual consumers going mobile, Microsoft will be ever more relegated to office environments, making them even less cool and hopefully starting a snowball effect that really hurts them.

Gonna be tough when they own literally all the gaming studios now

They own a bunch of AAA gaming studios, which have been producing flop after multimillion-dollar flop. All that while random indie darlings produce high quality cross-platform hits for a fraction of the budget.

True, and while quite sad for everyone involved, they had one of the best years in gaming, with all their gaming divisions combined.

They just fired a lot of the gaming studios they used to own. (Tango, Arkane), and cancelled most of their major upcoming projects (Everwild, Perfect Dark, the new MMO, etc)

And - while there are rare examples otherwise (like iD software), many of their studios haven't made a well received game in over a decade.

It's not necessarily a great thing for the industry, but Microsoft leaving gaming entirely would not be that terribly tough. If anything, it would probably have the least amount of impact now, then it would have at any other time since 2001.

Microsoft bought the Call of Duty studios for a lot of money and likes to say they are succeeding at video games by pointing to Call of Duty revenue in a vacuum without counting the cost to aquire Activision.

They certainly aren't going to stop releasing Call of Duty games.

Not any of the good ones though. The long-tail of game developers are where most PC gamers are at these days, the AAA slop have large numbers on a per-game basis, but aren't very large compared to the whole gaming market.

Not even close? Tencent and Sony likely have (indirectly) more game developers on their payroll, and even the top 3 (MS, Sony, Tencent) combined aren't that much of the market. Nobody seems to control even 10% of the 500 billion dollar video game market.[1] Also note that for MS and Sony this revenue may also contain sales of third-party games through their stores.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_game_com...

Most office environments seem to be using OSX for their client OS these days. It's just much more behaved OOTB. The only thing people really need Windows for now is the domain controllers and goofy legacy embedded stuff.

That is definitely a silicon valley thing.

I'm definitely seeing it consistently on the East Coast.

Consistently for management or the unwashed masses?

I work at a large F500 company and I would be shocked if Macs were more than 5% of the total computer inventory. Excel alone is very sticky. Excel excerpts will tell you that Mac Excel is weird and does not work correctly.

Said as someone stuck on a windows machine with all of the corporate monitoring spyware which makes performance crawl.

It's expanding beyond the valley, at least I can only speak for the PNW which is admittedly still a minor tech hub but not the level of the Bay Area. My own company I work for included (a change driven by myself) has switched almost everyone to macOS, as have many of our peers and competitors (non tech companies).

I'm also starting to see a lot of Macs pop up in smaller private practices - most dentist offices around here are on Macs, a few dealerships have moved over, etc.

Windows is still the majority by far, but its marketshare is slowly being eroded away. It'll be a while before F500 enterprises move over, if at all, but small-medium businesses are definitely growing their macOS usage.

depends if you look at advertising as a sector it's almost 90% mac.

I wish this was true.

But, there's a lot of business software that's locked into the MS ecosystem with Active Directory.

Office365 is de rigeur.

Then there's everything built on SQL Server.

Excel is the "bicycle for the mind" for many types of professional.

Heaven forbid you ever have to work with an IE-only app from 2003, but those still exist in the wild.

I dream of a glorious shining day when all computing will be 100% POSIX-compliant.

They need to actually hire good devs again but then again they are a major part of why software as a career is dying in America.

This might not be an engineering problem. It just doesn’t feel like anyone at MS actually cares what their users care for. Doesn’t seem like they use the OS themselves.

> Doesn’t seem like they use the OS themselves.

Watch any of the MS BUILD or Ignite conference sessions, and take note of how many MS employees are using MacBooks - there's still Windows & Surface there, but I swear it's becoming less and less every year as Microsoft keeps acquihiring, and moved all in on the MS <3 Open Source campaign.

There used to be a huge culture of dogfooding in MS and I don't see it anymore (granted, I'm not an insider - just speaking from public perception). Also see any new open source stuff they put out - very little of it is using their own stack. Good for the community at large, but it speaks volumes to Microsoft's priorities.

Even on the business side - InTune (their MDM) will happily manage macOS, Ubuntu, Android, iOS almost as well as Windows (there' still deficiencies compared to competitors like JamF). Office is on Mac, EntraID doesn't care what OS you use, Defender EDR doesn't care what OS you use, etc.

It's clear that Windows is no longer a priority. Microsoft doesn't care what OS you use as long as you are using Azure, Office, and M365's suite of services. Definitely a better strategy for them to reach more customers, but it does spell the death of Windows long term.

Actually renting office suites is kind of stupid and I don't think it's going to work out for them. If they don't revert to something that isn't abusive to their customers. There's plenty of old businesses that are still running windows 95.

Initially when Satya took over many were oblieged to use Macs and Linux, exactly because they had to ensure their services also worked great on them, and that there as a culture shift beyond Windows one and only.

The problem is that this kind of backfired, and nowadays they also seem unable to hire new devs, outside game developers, that actually know what developing native Windows applications, and OS services actually means in practice.

Even though Microsoft nowadays is more open, I miss the "Developers, Developers, Developers" mindset on the Windows development team.

At this point, I've given up having hope for Windows to be actually a good experience for anything at all.

Development has been a pain over the last decade. MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on.

Normal everyday experience is just a pain with unintuitive settings pages, slow Files Explorer, and a horrendous start panel experience.

Gaming seems to be the last thread my Windows machine is around for anymore. Although I have not tried moving to Linux for this, the gaming community seems to be happy enough for more and more games every week.

> MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on

Except when Apple deprecates APIs but the replacement doesn't have close to the same functionality (looking at you screen capture kit).

Or when the documentation just doesn't explain anything and you have to reverse engineer the API to figure out what it does.

or how there's a bunch of hidden APIs only certain vendors are told about so you can't even compete on an even playing field.

And don't get me started on the C, C++, ObjectiveC and now Swift monstrosities. Having fun with your legacy project when the new APIs require swift, so you have to use the objectiveC bridge and the weird bugs that comes with it.

Also Apple undercutting your business by turning your app in an OS feature.

Or Apple deleting your app and account because of politics but they claim it's a policy violation. They just selectively enforce it.

Or apple allowing foreign governments back doors.

Because Microsoft never did any of those things...

Certainly not in the way Apple does. Archive/zip integration into the file explorer is a great example. As apposed to F.lux, where Apple completely removed the API and app and made their own version of it.

macOS is great to code on, not to code for

GP said that macOS is a pleasure to code on, you’re arguing that it is not a pleasure to code for. Both can be true at the same time!

> MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on.

I don’t know what kind of projects are you working on, but it couldn’t be further from truth for me. WSL2 is so much better than docker on macOS it isn’t even funny. (Haven’t tried orbstack, heard good things; though fundamentally the problem of developing for linux on not-Linux can only be solved by actually running Linux.)

> (Haven’t tried orbstack, heard good things; though fundamentally the problem of developing for linux on not-Linux can only be solved by actually running Linux.)

I really wish we could get back to true platform-agnostic development and away from shipping whole Linux-jungles containing the banana you actually want to ship. Effective hard-coupling isn’t a good thing isn’t my opinion, even when the platform being coupled to is FOSS.

Agreed. Instead of solving "It runs on my machine" we just decided to ship the machine as part of the app and call it a day.

Docker on macOS also runs a Linux VM under the hood, just like WSL2 does, they're no different in that respect. WSL1 used the more exotic approach of translating Linux system calls to and from NT kernel system calls, but for various reasons (compatibility, performance, complexity) Microsoft abandoned that technique and adopted a Linux VM running under the Hyper-V hypervisor for WSL2.

There is a difference in Hyper-V itself. The Windows hypervisor is underappreciated as one of the better VM hypervisors in some scenarios, and WSL2 uses a few Hyper-V tricks [0] to really shine if your machine's Hyper-V isn't interfered with by other hypervisors. (Sadly not uncommon given how many us have things like old VirtualBox VMs that still need Hyper-V to run in a compatibility mode with Oracle-maintained hypervisors of the past.)

(Also, WSL1 isn't as actively maintained as it was when WSA [Windows Subsystem for Android] was an active Windows 11 feature driving it, but it hasn't been entirely abandoned either and there is some community support ongoing [open source PRs].)

[0] Among other things, Windows likes to run itself at all times as a guest in Hyper-V when Hyper-V is active (and other ancient hypervisors aren't interfering), making Hyper-V VMs like WSL2 "peers" with Windows itself for Hyper-V resources/attention. (It's one of the funnier things about Hyper-V being a "Pro" feature still today because even consumer-focused Windows Home is often still running in Hyper-V [because it's also sometimes a defense-in-depth security/sandboxing in some consumer use cases], it just won't let you configure other VMs in it than your main Windows OS.)

I agree, Hyper-V is a pretty cool technology! I wasn't aware WSL1 was still supported at all, let alone receiving pull requests. Windows Subsystem for Android was a neat feature, but not something I used regularly, especially since it lacked Google Play Services which made many popular apps fail to function on it.

Yeah, it is often mentioned that WSL1/WSL2 are bad names when 2 isn't a direct successor as much as a peer that works well side-by-side. Something like WSLA and WSLB might been useful to help it feel less abandoned. The number of scenarios where WSL1 is better than WSL2 are fewer and weirder, so it will always feel "second ran", but Microsoft still seems to want to support it for the few weird use cases that are left (just not huge new ones that would need massive rewrites or compatibility lab teams to run more massive suites of Linux applications).

Also, yeah the lack of Google Play Services sure was a big issue with WSA, no matter how much Amazon want people to believe their replacements for Google Play Services are fine enough for most users/apps. Google Play Services is quite a moat today.

My experience w/ WSL2 and Docker Desktop has been roughly equivalent: both a little fussy, but work just fine. What was it about either one that led you to such a strong preference?

Orbstack on MacOS

Had to onboard a Windows user the other day and the Docker performance seems to be even worse than I remember the last time I built on Windows.

Orbstack really makes working with Containers a almost-native experience.

Even without WSL, PowerShell is perfectly capable. I find that lots of people just rag about windows because it’s not unix and they’re trying to force it to be.

I genuinely enjoy programming on windows. Perhaps because I don’t try to force windows to be linux, but PowerShell is genuinely good.

The only issues I face are when other developers do non-cross platform things. Like use bash for build scripts.

Anything touching disk, such as reading a bunch of source files is just so much slower on windows right now. From what I hear it improves a little if you actually go through the Linux subsystem, but it just can’t touch native Linux performance.

Just switching OS will seriously improve your DX because of the faster compiles.

Use a ReFS partition.

The problem is the bullet point features that Microsoft is adding to Windows (AI, ads, Xbox bar, etc.). The fastest line of code possible is the line of code that doesn't exist (look, this technically isn't true when considering data structures, but it's a good baseline).

Microsoft would have to exercise discipline with Windows features, which is never going to happen: the very people pushing the garbage are using Macs and don't have to suffer it.

I'm not convinced those new features are adding any substantial overhead. From my understanding, most of the problems are at the low level - things like threading, kernel space operations, file writing, etc.

Very stripped-down versions of Windows perform pretty much identically from what I last saw.

I believe (speculating) that a big reason Windows underperforms in battery life is because of the "death by a thousand cuts" approach to network-connect background services.

Linux desktops have very little background services that make constant network calls. But on Windows, there's hundreds. Every team thinks they need a little bit of telemetry or they need to grab an icon or something stupid, so nobody thinks twice. Same thing goes for logging.

But when you add it all up, it ends up being expensive.

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