A few months ago, I switched my aunt (70+ as well) to Linux Mint after repeated issues with Windows 10 and now 11. The last straw was the printer stopped working one day out of the blue. Tired to re-install it for over an hour, impossible! When I installed Mint and looked to add the printer, it was already there and ready to work. And for the user experience, I just sat her in front of the computer and asker her to do various tasks that she would normally do on Windows without any explanation, and she just did them intuitively. She even sent me a message a few days ago to thank me for installing Linux on her machine!
Microsoft keep shooting themselves in the foot with Windows, it's like they don't even care about consumer operating systems anymore. Most popular Linux distros are stable and easy to use, for an average computer user it's perfect. I also daily drive Linux (Bazzite, based on Fedora Silverblue) and it does everything I need - coding, browsing, games, it's all there. I'm never going back to Windows.
Just works.
Embedded into the operating system? Will they be helpful there?
IMO there are better ways
Integrated AI solves so many real problems, not the least of which is that it’s sanctioned by IT.
This is the big thing that Microsoft understands. For a non-tech company, it's going to be pretty hard to get buy in to pay for ChatGPT enterprise, and then pay for/spend dev or IT resources to integrate it (and develop those integrations) with their already existing Microsoft/SharePoint/Teams stack to make it useful. And then you still don't get the convenient Office app add-ins.
Microsoft bundles this all, integrates it for you, and provides a GUI for governance controls. It's very click-ops focused, which enterprise IT likes, and the bundling means you don't have to sell those with the wallets on buying extra third party tools. Nobody every got fired for buying s/IBM/Microsoft
We do have all the News and Weather and other "Suggestions" turned off.
Adding features isn't inherently a bad thing, but we don't believe Microsoft can do it without making the existing features worse.
alas my new work laptop is still on win 10.
For the normie/general office worker, even Copilot (the Microsoft 365 for Business version) has been wildly popular where I work. "Copilot, help me prepare for this meeting coming up" and the worker gets a nice little package of all the emails, word docs, spreadsheets, teams/sharepoint convos, etc. related to the meeting.
Imagine: User accidentally deletes file. Instead of opening a help desk ticket, they can ask Copilot "Hey Copilot, I accidentally deleted this excel file, can you get it back?" and the OS integrated AI restores it from volume shadow copy, or from %appdata%
or "Hey copilot, I have a meeting starting. Can you turn on do not disturb, and open my xyz presentation for screen sharing"
Yeah, those things can be done pretty fast manually, or even scripted, but the average office worker doesn't have the computer knowledge to do so. A real functioning version of (to use their buzzword) "agentic" AI integrated in the OS means they don't need the knowledge, just ask the computer to do it for them.
It could be huge, but I have my doubts it'll actually work as well as Microsoft wishes it would.
Sure. Except once upon a time ago, Microsoft was really big on dogfooding and it definitively was not ok for Microsoft's developers to not use Windows.
Seeing their employees using macs on stage at conferences sends a very clear message "don't bother with Windows. It isn't even good enough for our own staff to use."
What happened to "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"? Ballmer was not a good CEO, but he understood at least that dev & enthusiast mindshare = your product being chosen and recommended elsewhere.
Developers building things like web apps can use macOS.
Developers developing for Windows, or who need Windows-only toolchains cannot.
CAD/CAM systems. GIS applications. Automatic teller machine software. Public safety dispatch systems. Automotive diagnostic tools. Point of sale systems. List goes on.
Yes you can build a POS system using Windows tech, but you don't really gain much by doing so, other than a whole host of headaches when it comes to deployment and administration.
If you’re in the business of shipping software that needs to run alongside other people’s software on the same machine, it’s a disaster.
Linux userspace backwards compatibility is extremely poor, the “solutions” to this issue (Flatpak, Snap et al) generally create more management problems than they solve. Desktop Linux is already an absolute monster to manage.
Try securely deploying hardware-backed PKI certificates for 802.1x to a fleet of Linux workstations. Takes a couple of minutes on Windows and macOS, but it’s a massive engineering effort on Linux.
There's software that exists beyond the web and SaaS.
Windows is still used widely in all sorts of places you'd never expect to see it. POS systems, ATMs, industrial controllers, digital signage/interactive kiosks, SCADA is largely Windows still. You need software for all of that, and it ain't gonna be web apps.
Windows is also still widespread in finance. The backend systems may be Linux or custom FGPA hardware but the front end finance world is ran on Windows (and Excel on Windows). Plenty of trading software is Windows only.
Heck, MS SQL Server is still in the #2 or #3 spot for database marketshare behind Oracle. Granted, it can run on Linux now but I don't many who are yet.
None of it is "sexy" like HN startups and SaaS so it doesn't get the coverage or discussion, but Windows is everywhere and so are Windows developers. You could argue whether or not Windows is/was the right choice for a lot of those (it's probably not), but it's there nonetheless and probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon.