Gaming now works better on Linux than it does on Windows. This must be upsetting for Microsoft, but it was their game to lose.
Stock price growth is their core business because that is how large firms operate.
MS used to embrace games etc because the whole point was all PCs should run Windows. Now the plan is to get you onto a subscription to their cloud. The PC bit is largely immaterial in that model. Enterprises get the rather horrible Intune bollocks to play with but the goal is to lock everyone into subs.
I thought all of them more or less have operated under Ponzinomics ever since Jack Welch showed that that worked in the short term.
I’m not really into this AI shenanigans, but it seems to me that if you want people to use /your/ bot, you gotta give it to people in the most seamless and efficient way possible, and that does not translate well to a desktop OS.
I don’t think they would have dethroned iOS or even Android had they stayed their ground, but they probably would’ve had a stronger base to build upon for their Copilot nonsense. Those that used Windows Phone used it because they loved it, Copilot could’ve garnered some good rep from those already sold on Microsoft’s platform; instead, they’re trying to shove it down people’s throats even though very few people actually use Windows because they actively like it, most use it because it’s the “default” OS and they do not (and care not to) know any better.
That resulted in Windows 8.
More recently they've freaked out about ads, app stores, and SaSS revenue, which has resulted in lots of dark patterns in the OS.
The strength of Linux and Free software in general is not in that it's completely built by unpaid labor. It's built by a lot of paid, full-time labor. But the results are shared with everyone. The strength of Free software is that it fosters and enforces cooperation of all interested parties, and provides a guarantee that defection is an unprofitable move.
This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.
I doubt it's a large reason. I'd put more weight on eg Linus being a great project lead and he happens to work on Linux. And a lot of other historical contingencies.
This flow is basically the bread and butter for the OSS community and the only way high effort projects get done.
Conventional companies just have a lot more money, and it's easier for them to internally 'coordinate' when they want something to get done.
That said, yes, there are certain things that the broader/volunteer FOSS community simply isn't any good at.
This is a far better user experience for Battlefield players than in Windows.
Have you ever actually attempted to play that half-assed buggy piece of shit?
The one thing I haven’t been able to get working reliably is steam remote play with the Linux machine as host. Most games work fine, others will only capture black screens.
Granted, I don't play online games, so that might change things, but for years I used to have to make a concession that "yeah Windows is better for games...", but in the last couple years that simply has not been true. Games seem to run better on Linux than Windows, and I don't have to deal with a bunch of Microsoft advertising bullshit.
Hell, even the Microsoft Xbox One controllers work perfectly fine with xpad and the SteamOS/tenfoot interface recognizes it as an Xbox pad immediately, and this is with the official Microsoft Xbox dongle.
At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion, are online games and Microsoft Office. I don't use Office since I've been on Unixey things so long that I've more or less just gotten used to its options, but I've been wholly unable to convince my parents to change.
I love my parents, but sometimes I want to kick their ass, because they can be a bit stuck in their ways; I am the one who is expected to fix their computer every time Windows decides to brick their computer, and they act like it's weird for me to ask them to install Linux. If I'm the one who has to perform unpaid maintenance on this I don't think it's weird for me to try and get them to use an operating system that has diagnostic tools that actually work.
As far as I can tell, the diagnostic and repair tools in Windows have never worked for any human in history, and they certainly have never worked for me. I don't see why anyone puts up with it when macOS and Linux have had tools that actually work for a very long time.
I didn’t see a performance increase moving to Linux for the vast majority of titles tested. Certainly not enough to outweigh the fact that I want EVERY game to work out of the box, and to never have to think if it will or won’t. And not all of my games did, and a not insignificant number needed serious tweaking to get working right.
I troubleshoot Linux issues all day long, I’ve zero interest in ever having to do it in my recreation time.
That’s a good enough reason for me to keep my windows box around.
I use Linux and OSX for everything that isn’t games, but windows functions just fine for me as a dumb console and I don’t seem to suffer any of these extreme and constant issues HN users seem to have with it from either a performance or reliability standpoint.
For some reason amongst other people, these bits of debugging just "don't count". I don't know why.
I have a console. They can not offer performance I can tolerate. I require 120+ fps for most titles in order to not get motion sickness from modern displays.
> I've had plenty of bullshit fighting with DLL files and registry keys to get games working on Windows in the past.
I've had no such fighting. Shit, the last time I touched a registry to "fix" anything in windows was probably XP.
> I don't know why.
Probably because not everyone has the same experience. None of the major operating systems is free of issue, but in the same vein, neither have caused me particularly more headaches than another.
Game studios will keep buying Windows and Visual Studio licenses, target DirectX, and let Valve do whatever they need for game content.