There’s ridiculously little difference between Windows, OS X and GNOME nowadays. Once you realise that most of your Steam library works and you’ve hated Office for at least ten years anyway, that leaves browsers, which are exactly the same. Most users don’t want to fiddle with settings, installers and drivers, they’ll just accept what the machine comes out of the box with.
and various Linux distros have gotten so good at this now. You can install something like Bazzite, PikaOS, hell even CachyOS with their recent update of switching from Octopi to Shelly and you can be up and running within a matter of minutes without having to worry about drivers or fiddling around with settings. PikaOS for example is probably one of the smoothest linux installs I’ve ever tried. easily within 15minutes I can have steam open and downloading games. within 30 I can be playing. and that’s without downloading drivers or playing around with settings.
same, and i have had this annoying problem with network drivers that my internet cuts off randomly and i have to restart. Linux with problems is superior to well functioning windows for peace of mind alone.
Figuring out how to solve a problem on an OS I’d used for a few weeks fortuitously solved a problem I’d created trying to solve a different problem on a different OS a few years ago. We learn by doing!
I loved this bit, I think everyone in tech has a similar story of some kind.
There’s a dangerous bet going on right now that doesn’t make the most sense.
It’s Microsoft.
I just don’t really understand their game right now. They’re still playing like every card in the game is in their hand and they have nothing to lose, so I wonder, Linux friends, fellow enjoyers of hardware sold to the public, what do they know that we don’t know?
It’s almost as if Microsoft and every other hardware and mainstream software developer is secretly betting on the loss of private home computing. It’s almost as if in the longrun, they aren’t worried about our choices.
These Linux wins all over the place are cool and all, but the lack of any sweat whatsoever from these bozos has me on edge. Wtf is their game? From AAA gaming to your email client, it’s all getting worse and they know it, they just keep doubling down.
It’s called incumbency.
I remember a time when IBM had 95% market share of the PC market.
Then Apple and Microsoft innovated them out of the market, in software.
Blackberry had 80%+ market share of the smartphone segment they popularized. In 4 years it was almost entirely gone.
It happens when the engineers are sidelined and the finance and marketing people take over.
They are blind to any trends that they do not control. They are unable to innovate and unwilling to take risks. It kills gigantic companies slowly at first and then very quickly.
It’s almost as if Microsoft and every other hardware and mainstream software developer is secretly betting on the loss of private home computing.
You nailed it. This is what EVERY hardware and software company is hoping for, subscription based everything. Hell HP is already rolling it out on their laptops. If you don’t outright OWN the hardware and you’re using it on a sub then you don’t have any choice but to use Windows. RAM Shortages? who cares. if you and I can’t build our own PCs anymore than we have to sub a machine from Microsoft or HP or Dell or whomever. Those companies will ALWAYS get first dibs on RAM. And of course there’s going to be tiers to this shit. Pay more than the base sub price and you get access to the gaming tier meaning your machine will have a dedicated GPU for gaming. so on and so forth. this is the future these companies want and thanks to stuff like Netflix and Spotify we’ve now been conditioned to accept it.
Microsoft has pretty much lost most of their experienced employees, they’re sitting on a mountain of spaghetti code with tech debt that goes back to windows 3.11 to maintain compatibility, they’ve fired their QA team, and their absolutely out-of-touch leadership is trying to force the surviving employees to use AI anywhere they can for developing the OS to pump up the numbers of AI users to prop up their insanely huge AI gamble so shareholders don’t lose faith.
They’re acting confident because they haven’t had to respond to a credible threat to their monopoly for 30 years, and that arrogance combined with everything mentioned above will most likely be their ultimate demise. The corporate system they have created and perpetuated is no longer capable of righting the ship, both technologically and organizationally.
They made a statement years ago now about how they were going to respond to the success of the steamdeck by creating a handheld mode for windows, but they never did, and Valve ate their lunch and allowed Linux to gain a foothold among gamers. They probably couldn’t manage building that handheld mode (it’s been so many years now, but I read a post from a Microsoft employee detailing how it could take something crazy like a week of work just to add a new menu entry to a drop-down without it introducing major breakages elsewhere).
They haven’t been able to develop a killer app or feature for Windows in over a decade, and I don’t think there’s anything else under their sleeve. I believe we are actively witnessing the downfall of an ossified giant, just as the once great Commodore fell due to incompetence and extreme corporate greed.
They already use Linux for their server division (azure). Eventually, if Linux is able dominate on the desktop in the next decade, they may shift to selling their own Linux distro with a 100% windows compatible container/VM instead, an inversion of their current model of selling Windows with their optional WSL (windows subsystem for Linux).
so I wonder, Linux friends, fellow enjoyers of hardware sold to the public, what do they know that we don’t know?
Oh, you know it, you just don’t want it to be true. Every business out there knows it too. The age of consumerism driven growth is gone, killed by the ever growing financial gaps between the layers of society in all western world. There is no point in playing nice to attract customers if they can’t pay, so businesses are stealing from the poor (mostly data in the case of MS) and selling only to the rich (higher valuation). The products that are marketed are not the products that are needed for the companies to make money off of.
This shift might not be as visible with IT companies, but look at more obvious examples: even fucking McDonald’s has stopped going after customers needing affordable meals and is going after fewer but richer customers. So do hotels. So do airlines. And yes, so do IT companies.
In the case of Microsoft, they have a lot of experience with fucking over low end consumers and then bouncing back too. They were the most hated company in the 2000s and pivoted to one of the good guys by the end of 2010s. They know they can afford to alienate customers for long periods of time with no lasting issues
ya got me! I knew
My prediction is that by 2040, Windows and your entire online existence as a… “normie” will be encapsulated within walled gardens via client access almost entirely.
Those of us still able to host anything will be doing it with ebay finds and crowsourced parts.
…but this is but one of my many branching possible timelines, maybe we get the “America goes KEN mode” timeline, “Mother nature rolls her sleeves up” or the “Humanity finally stands up for itself and realizes a leftist/socialist utopia” timelines. There’s always the “China sics robot dogs with machineguns on everyone” timeline.
Hell, maybe a blend, idk.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s. The only blend I know of is the coffee. (J)
Microsoft isn’t exactly doing anything new. It’s the same strategy that’s worked for them forever ago:
Get kids used to Microsoft products by vendor locking K-12 schools with cheap contracts.
Monetize those kids when they graduate (they never had privacy to begin with, so there is little pushback) and hope they don’t switch to Apple’s subsidized MacBooks in college.
When all else fails, lean heavily on corporate contracts, since corporations can’t change their ecosystem set up 40 years ago.
Linux wins factor very little in the equation… and anyone switching to Linux is quickly replaced by the next kid who has had a Microsoft Windows keyboarding class every year since age 9.
That’s why Linux in schools is so important.
Maybe they’re interested in finding exactly what the public’s critical breaking point is. Without gauging exactly what the demand (for distraction-free, private use) is, they cannot optimize their sales. They sure lost big with France, but we’ll see who else follows suit…
My take isn’t that they’re dumb, it’s that a larger and more malicious bet is being made, that people won’t be able to choose.
They may indeed be dumb, but they’ll do anything they can to chain us to them forever.
What are you going to do? Not use Microsoft Excel? It’s got Copilot now. I don’t see Libreoffice coming with AI. AI costs money!
Well, for one they and their buddies can make new consumer PCs as closed as phones are. Old hardware will eventually run out if they’ll keep the cartel knit tight enough.
Besides that, there is a slow but steady push to get rid of cash. Once it’s gone, the only convenient way to use money for regular people will be digital banking. I think tech buddies won’t have a hard time convincing bank buddies and gov buddies that any device/system not coming from authorized corpo is not safe to support. It would make those resisting assimilate, or quickly fall to the society’s bottom.
It’s already happening. Google’s device attestation means that apps can insist you run a signed OS (signed by Google, or an authorized partner) or refuse to work. I use GrapheneOS and because of this, I can’t tap to pay or use my phone as a car key. No chance they’ll ever allow GrapheneOS to join that program because it undermines their data collection and control.
I imagine that they don’t care for the small segment of users that can install another OS. Even if they stay at Windows we probably hamper and sabotage the telemetry/adware parts of the OS and become less profitable.
When looking at their Q4 earnings the Windows and Devices and Advertisement revenue should be high enough to warrant some effort. That effort is probably to increase the Advertisement revenue though.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2025-q4/segment-revenues
Sunk cost?
The average user is not going with Linux,unless it’s hidden. Microsoft knows this. Go Valve!
once to scan a multipage document that wasn’t scanning right in Linux, and once to print a photo for my kids
This was shockingly bad last time I needed to do it (years ago) and only had access to Linux devices. I now use my phone for scanning and printing and I’ve given up on trying to figure it out on my Linux machines.
I love that there’s a big jump in adoption for Linux, but I feel it is still stuck in the “hobbyist” space, more suited to people who love to thinker with everything.
There would be wider / faster adoption if there would be some desktop environment with coherent user experience available, but this is the hardest problem to solve and unfortunately one people don’t really want to pay for so I doubt we will have it in the near future
Funny enough, my shitbox HP Inkjet is actually faster to install on Linux and Gnome Scan is way better than any proprietary scanning software I’ve used
Last time I tried scanning and printing on Windows, it took me over an hour to get the device recognized, the right drivers installed, the printer to actually receive the print job, and so on. Printers are just shitty pieces of hardware, Linux or not.
Brother printers are pretty miserable. I’m on bazzite and no joke, there is a solid 10 minute delay from when I hit the print button to when it prints. It used to scan, then stopped one day with not explanation. Ive use the same printer on the same version/release of fedora on my laptop and it works fine now but it didn’t when it worked on my bazzite desktop. The driver/CUPS thing shows up nothing sometimes, and sometimes finds the printer after 400 attempts even if I search by mac address, ip address, hostname, doesn’t matter. The little gremlins in the machine decide when I can print or scan.
Brother printers
You’ve had this experience with multiple Brother printers, or is this anecdotal?
My anecdotal experience is that my Brother printer works just fine, after installing the driver of course. Delay until printing is in seconds. 🤷♂️ It’s a WiFi printer, too.
Don’t even need a driver with modern IPP supported printers, they just work. At least with basic printing needs, but probably some gaps for complex stuff.
Yeah, my particular one needs a driver unfortunately, but it’s fairly old I think.
@victorz @Know_not_Scotty_does “Just install the driver”, so you must have a windows with it, too, only to use your own printer…
Yeah I went through the whole process to download the linux drivers and generate the package as outlined on the Brother website. I could never get it functioning properly that way. The generic driver that the bazzite/fedora print manager used occasionally works but again, it does weird stuff sometimes.
I don’t have Windows, no. The drivers are packed in the AUR. If you install the driver on your Android phone you can also print from your phone. Android it’s also Linux-based. 😁
On the contrary, I’ve had exactly opposite experience. Had to use “connection repair tool” every time before printing on windows. On Linux I had to learn what to install at first to make my printer work, but once I did I have never had any problem occur.
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