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Comment by 6r17 | Hacker News Reader

Tbh i'm starting to think that I do not see microsoft being able to keep it's position in the OS market ; with steam doing all the hard work and having a great market to play with ; the vast distributions to choose from, and most importantly how easy it has become to create an operating system from scratch - they not only lost all possible appeal, they seem stuck on really weird fetichism with their taskbar and just didn't provide me any kind of reason to be excited about windows.

Their research department rocks however so it's not a full bash on Microsoft at all - i just feel like they are focusing on other way more interesting stuff

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Kernel improvements are interesting to geeks and data centers, but open source is fundamentally incompatible with great user experience.

Great UX requires a lot of work that is hard but not algorithmically challenging. It requires consistency and getting many stakeholders to buy in. It requires spending lots of time on things that will never be used by more than 10-20% of people.

Windows got a proper graphics compositor (DWM) in 2006 and made it mandatory in 2012. macOS had one even earlier. Linux fought against Compiz and while Wayland feels inevitable vocal forces still complain about/argue against it. Linux has a dozen incompatible UI toolkits.

Screen readers on Linux are a mess. High contrast is a mess. Setting font size in a way that most programs respect is a mess. Consistent keyboard shortcuts are a mess.

I could go on, but these are problems that open source is not set up to solve. These are problems that are hard, annoying, not particularly fun. People generally only solve them when they are paid to, and often only when governments or large customers pass laws requiring the work to be done and threaten to not buy your product if you don't do it. But they are crucially important things to building a great, widely adopted experience.

Your comment gives the impression that you think open source software is only developed by unpaid hobbyists. This not true, this is quite an outdated view. Many things are worked on by developers paid full time. And that people are mostly interested in algorithmically challenging stuff, which I don't think is the case.

Accessibility does need improvement. It seems severely lacking. Although your link makes it look like it's not that bad actually, I would have expected worse.

…and you are implying that Microsoft Windows 11 is a better example of ”great user experience”?

If you have anything less than perfect vision and need any accessibility features, yes. If you have a High DPI screen, yes. In many important areas (window management, keyboard shortcuts, etc.), yes.

Here's one top search result that goes into far more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1ed0j10/the_state_of...

For the general user, yes absolutely.

Linux DEs still can't match the accessibility features alone.

yeah, there's layers and layers of progressively older UIs layered around the OS, but most of it makes sense, is laid out sanely, and is relatively consistent with other dialogs.

macOS beats it, but its still better in a lot of ways over the big Linux DEs.

Start menu in the middle of the screen that takes a couple seconds to even load (because it is implemented in React horribly enought to be this slow) only to show adds next to everything is perfect user experience.

Every other button triggering Copilots assures even better UX goodness.

You can move the menu to left and disable the animations so it opens instantly.

I prefer it. Linux desktop feels a lot more laggy to me on the same hardware.

Of course that is minus all the recent AI/ad stuff on Windows…

> Tbh i'm starting to think that I do not see microsoft being able to keep it's position in the OS market

It's a big space. Traditionally, Microsoft has held both the multimedia, gaming and lots of professional segments, but with Valve doing a large push into the two first and Microsoft not even giving it a half-hearted try, it might just be that corporate computers continue using Microsoft, people's home media equipment is all Valve and hipsters (and others...) keep on using Apple.

I think that's the most likely way it'll go.

Windows will remain as the default "enterprise desktop." It'll effectively become just another piece of business software, like an ERP.

Gamers, devs, enthusiasts will end up on Linux and/or SteamOS via Valve hardware, creatives and personal users that still use a computer instead of their phone or tablet will land in Apple land.

With the massive adoption of web apps in Enterprise I have seen I would expect Windows to become irelevant or even a liability in business use as well.

Still, some sort of OS is required to run that browser that renders the websites, and some team needs to manage a fleet of those computers running that OS. And that's where Microsoft will sit, since they're unable to build good consumer products, they'll eventually start focusing exclusively on businesses and enterprises.

If you just need something that runs a browser, can't you do that with something like Chrome OS/MacOS/RHEL Workstation/whatever SUSE has for workstation users ? :)

Inertia, unless there is a really big reason why, big companies just go with what they have, for better or worse, even if it sucks or is expensive.

My employer only does either Windows or macOS, Linux place is on servers for us.

Game developers still need Windows that Valve then runs on top of Proton.

First Valve has to actually start pushing for proper Linux games, until then Windows can keep enjoying its 70% market share, with game studios using Windows business as usual.

Also Raspeberri PIs are the only GNU/Linux devices most people can find at retail stores.

Add to that all the bullshit they have been pushing on their customers lately: * OS level adds

* invasive AI integration

* dropping support for 40% of their installed base (Windows 10)

* forcing useless DRM/trusted computing hardware - TPM - as a requirement to install the new and objectively worse Windows version version, with even more spying and worse performance (Windows 11)

With that I think their prospects are bleak & I have no idea who would install anything else than Steam OS or Bazzite in the future with this kind of Microsoft behavior.

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