Even Microsofts esteemed moat (office) is “Web only” on the lowest tier.
But even if all most people want is browser, why go through the hassle of running Linux?
I usually recommended a Windows PC to most people because on the low end, they are cheap, disposable, and if the one odd program they might want to run isn’t available, I didn’t have to hear about it.
If they know what they want, I didn’t have a problem recommending an Air and now for a lot of use cases, a Neo.
Chicken and egg problem.
Valve is making enough headway that game makers take Linux seriously. We’ll likely see a lot more native releases over time. (once the worry about anticheat subsides).
When it comes to games, Linux has an OS/2 problem.
If Steam Deck, the new Steam Machine etc take a significant part of market share, I think it will be more enticing for game developer to release a native version for Linux. Providing a native version should still be more robust and performant.
Why? The only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.
He doesn't really want to care but Microsoft's decisions have made their main product into an annoyance.
There is a new game with no support? So sorry. Can't be done
If you've ever used it before, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that web only Office is only useful for someone writing essays for school.
The moment you need to do anything more complex than that, the document renders completely differently on web vs app-- not to mention there are tons of critical features that aren't even available on the web version.
I meant that Microsoft is intentionally removing their own moat.
That the tools are awful is just the standard microsoft affair. (with some notable exceptions, which ironically include Excel).
My most memorable MS Word experiences are all the times I accidentally put my document into a weird state and didn't notice something was wrong until I've spent 3 more hours on it, at which point I was forced to re-create the document by copy pasting text into an earlier copy.
And the only reason I knew something was subtly wrong was because the weird VB extension I was required to use would stop working correctly. Basically this would happen when some random key element of the document had ended up with a very subtly different style. If I didn't have to worry about the VB extension breaking, I'd just have a document with some weird bug somewhere.
If I wanted a professional looking document, I would use some modern LaTeX variant maybe with Pandoc to generate most of it from something more restricted like Markdown.
If I wanted total control over the content of a page, I would use some kind of graphical publishing software with text and vector graphics.
I have zero idea what kind of Stockholm syndrome you must have to think that Microsoft Office (or any other similar WYSIWYG editor for that matter) is power user software.
It has lots of features, that's for sure. But the features form a Jenga tower. That makes it a toy.
Excel is really The Thing. So many businesses and departments rely on it.
It’s true that most stuff is in the browser, but basically every user has a couple things that are native apps which don’t work on Linux.
Wine has come a long way for gaming, but my experience is for regular programs, most stuff doesn’t work. Even the simple apps are usually critically broken.
I feel like people dramatically overestimate their impact on "the world" by way of making niche software choices or consumer products or whatever.
But this is kind of like the 'great man' theory of history where you can also argue that the markets would have converged on this outcome regardless of what the specific device was that we attribute to it.
This was the same post he said he wouldn’t license Apple’s DRM. But if the music industry would license their music DRM free, the interoperability goals would be achieved an Apple would sell DRM free music.
One of the major record labels and some independent labels took him up on it immediately. It took two years for the rest to come onboard.
iMessage always supported SMS and now RCS. What more did you expect Apple to do?
Even the then CEO of Google used BlackBerry devices years after Android came out as opposed to SJ who used the iPhone before it was released and after it was announced, saw that the screen was easily scratched and publicly did a press release that they were going to change it to use Gorilla Glass from plastic.
So what argument could you give Joe Normal about how Linux is better than Windows ?
I think the reason Windows is so successful is because it's stable, bulletproof and easy. You don't have to burn an ISO to a USB and boot from it, partition a disk and install it. You don't have to grep grub at any time. You rarely have to use PowerShell for much of anything at all, including device management, managing services and even tweaking the registry.
The "desktop environment" is the operating system, not a seperate abstraction around it. There's no research required on what distro works best for you, what package manager is ideal, what file system to use, what window manager to use, what desktop environment to use. There's no messing with repositories either. No issues with drivers that require compiling from source, no marking an executable as "executable" through chmod.
I like Linux, but the Linux community overestimate how usable it is outside of their meta, and underappreciate their own mental model of what a computer is and how it differs from the layman. Most people want to open their laptop, double click a browser and watch Family Guy funny moments on facebook.com without having to troubleshoot PulseAudio because it's suddenly gone super quiet.
Android “won” as pyrrhic of a victory as it is since Android manufacturers besides Samsung make very little profit and every one who has money (again to a first approximation) buys iPhones. It won because Google gave it away, shared ad revenue with OEMs and it bent over backwards to the carriers and Apple wouldn’t.
And yes Linux would save OEMs maybe $30 on licensing Windows. But OEMs make mire than that on bundleware.
None of this has anything to do with the quality of the desktop of Linux or windows. If Linux had 75% market share I promise you all those things above would quickly become true for Linux as well.
There were so many things in previous versions of Windows that were done with thought and care. Probably the blogs helped make me appreciate it (especially Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing). Windows 11 feels like an insult created by people who hate Windows and never use it
I really wish we could keep the modern underpinnings with a prior shell
The right click menu never once showed me “loading…” when I just want to click “properties”
A not too overly flashy UI that made efficient use of your screen space.
It didn’t used to by default shove “news and entertainment” bing suggestions. Nobody wants to open their browser after an update to be greeted by tabloid rags.
The search used to work. You could find files instead of bing results. You could grep text files with the explorer search bar (across the network too) and it just worked. Good luck doing that today.
Search just worked. (It still works if you use ClassicShell / OpenShell). Now it's braindead; even if the start menu shows results, half the time if you click one, Explorer pops up and just sits there broken, contemplating its life choices that led it to this rock bottom
Today, people don't love the iPod or Dropbox. Both products became completely commoditized once consumers realized that there is actually nothing special about using MP3 files or hosted NFS. Windows is a commoditized OS, it's unapologetic post-desktop slopware. And it sells.
Steve Jobs himself said “Dropbox is a feature not a product”. Dropbox is the same cost for 5TB of storage as GSuite + 5TB of storage or Office365 with 1TB each for 5 (6?) users.
Saying the iPod was commoditized is like saying 8 track tape players were commoditized.
I don't really mind Windows that much for non-development use, once you disable all the bloat. But for development... It seems obviously a distant third behind Linux and Mac, and I don't think I've ever heard any developer say otherwise. And I say this as someone who is forced to use it at work, so it's not out of ignorance (thank god for WSL).
But that's why I ask what kind of development you do, because I suppose there are areas where Windows really is a good option.
VSCode with WSL and Docker Desktop was fine.
On the Mac side, either way I spent all of my day in VSCode and the browser - we use GSuite - Zoom and Slack. It wouldn’t make that much of a different either way.
The only integrations I use between my work Mac and my personal Apple life are my iPad for a second screen, shared subset of passwords. I have a separate Apple Account for my work computer and I share work related passwords.