I don't think Microsoft can pull this off, I think as mindshare is shifting it will continue to do so and its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back and right now its only talking about doing some minor things. Now Nvidia is developing the drivers on Linux seriously there is every chance this transition snowballs and nothing Microsoft does will be enough.
I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows, the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen, and windows search no longer searches your PC.
Deleting "Product" might save windows, short of that, I am doubtful.
Although, surprisingly, built on top of absolutely incredible silicon.
To me that's because thats a capital E "Engineering" driven task that Product can't get their grubby little mitts on and ruin.
If you take a look at the size of widescreen monitors, you can kinda guess why someone decided to move the start button/menu to the middle of the screen.
I know Samsung and Dell have ginmorous 49 inch monitors. Start menu that pops up from the lower left corner of the monitor would be a bad UX - the user might not even notice that a menu had popped up if that lower left corner of the monitor is out of their peripheral vision.
Moving the Start menu to the middle of the screen does go against years of muscle memory... moving your mouse/trackpad to the lower left, using the monitor border as a stop-zone though.
I guess they didn't want to make it an option/toggle hidden in some dialog box somewhere...
Also it should be noted that (at least as recently as September, haven't used 11 since) you could move the start button back to the left side.
The first is coercion. Installing without a Microsoft (Outlook) account is more and more difficult. An attentive steward of Windows would allow older gui themes (xp, Win7 Aero, etc.) to be applied for the nostalgic. And there would be an easy control to disable all Copilot integration. Microsoft is coercive towards their customers with these and other actions.
The second is incompetence. The Windows update process is intrusive, lengthy, and prone to repeatedly bricking unlucky PCs. Linux updates are far more pleasant.
These are big problems, and I agree, it will take great institutional change to curb these abusive tendencies. I don't know if they can.
I install Gimp one time. I like to casual draw on autopilot, usually while doing something else, talking, watching a movie, listening to a podcast etc. For some reason half the icons were missing and the existing set was replaced with the hipster horrifying flat single color monstrosities. This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.
With MS it feels more like intentionally trolling the user
The best spot for the applications sub menu is to not make it a sub menu. The second best is to leave it wherever the fuck it was before. I want to struggle remembering what an application was called and wonder why they are organized so poorly. (Not by file Association) In stead they have me wonder where they even are???
Non tech people don't care about control panel etc. they just go through the pain of entering the WiFi password. Done.
- gamers. Double click install - go on. I know very few gamers that have moved to Linux.
And corporate. Most normies that I know DON'T have own computers. Everything can be done via smartphone these days.
Greatest strength. Greatest papercut.
In a world where consumers have less and less power, products are designed to please CEOs.
Money is power, as inequality grows and concentrates the average user/worker/citizen has less power and their voices matter less. Today's Internet is designed for the needs of big corporations, users are there just as another product to be sold.
Absolutely baffling, when the perfect, magical, instant, high performance search tool has existed for a decade at least: "Everything"
One of THE BEST windows apps.
And yet somehow none of them are as nice as https://eartrumpet.app/ lol
Given the repeating pattern of Apple shipping a hated operating system update in recent year, it feels like it's more “everybody wants to be Steve Jobs and no one actually achieves it including Apple”.
This is about the MacBook Neo coming for the budget laptop market. At 500$ it's an easy choice.
My uncle runs one in Bradford on Avon and they are slapping on an OS for you whilst you supp tea and chat. Often, the user-agent is set to something Microsoftie in the browser. If necessary Edge is installed but that is frowned on 8)
I have not heard of this MacBook Neo thing ... Why would ? I only own a little IT company and hang around on HN.
1. The usage statistics don't reflect your anecdotal Linux usage; Linux desktop/laptop usage share has not grown that significantly in 20 years and Windows remains quite dominant.
2. MacBook Neo was widely discussed on HN not very long ago, and I'd think if anything an owner of an IT company would be more aware of it than an average HN user. It's definitely going to shake up the market for lower-end laptops.
The Tithe Barn in Bradford On Avon was the medieval equivalent to an Amazon warehouse!
Something’s not quite right here.
If you hang around HN you have absolutely heard of the Neo. And I’d be downright frightful to have anything to do with your little IT company (whatever service it provides) if you haven’t at the very least /heard/ of the Neo at this point.
I suspect this is a little white lie just to drive a point home but I fail to see the benefit of such an act when all it does is make you look like you’re lying.
I hadn’t tried Fedora until late last year, and was very impressed. Came across as highly polished and complete.
Hadn’t tried Pupply Linux until a couple months ago, and it’s now my new favourite. I’m now running it on a small form factor desktop HP with no internal drive.
Earliest Macintoshs in the 1990 launched a tutorial on first boot until you explicitly finished or skipped it. This was a wonderful experience as a kid and still warm my heart today thinking back of it.
Today's Mac only display "tips", "what's new" after first boot or major update because people are generally more computer literate. But (unless Liquid Glass changed that too) they never gave on this mantra that the OS should guide newcomers.
So yeah I think Linux distro have room to do better.
When I called them, they had already set it up and was playing Risk of Rain 2. They started streaming for me on the Discord Flatpak they installed from the app store.
I say this as a decades-long Linux user (who has tried to evangelize it many times).
In my experience most people who use a computing device may be able to tell me “this is window” or “this is Mac” by virtue of the branding being all over the stuff but for all intents and purposes these things are appliances.
In the same way most people except ambitious DIYers don’t rip apart their 500-1000 dollar washing machine to replace a worn belt the call a repair guy. Or in your case, have a buddy who knows how to do it.
I guess you might be able to order one or something?
I can not walk into my local best buy and get a computer running Linux.
It's a moot point anyway, since you'll usually have to pay more for a Linux laptop vs buying a Windows one and installing it yourself.
.. which might need a bit of tinkering to install Linux on. Just because it runs a kernel doesn't mean it will be usable out of the box.
For example this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1nc1jui/how_to_actua...
Of course they can. They might be too lazy or ignorant to do so, but it's not really any harder to learn to install Linux than it is to learn to make mashed potatoes once you're motivated to bother -- and billions of people have managed to do the latter just fine.
Normal people are absolutely capable of following basic directions like: "download this file", "insert a USB stick", "run this program", "reboot your computer", "double click the install icon", "click the 'Continue' button (or similar) following the on-screen prompts".
The file in question -- good enough for most people with a Windows computer from the last decade: https://pub.linuxmint.io/stable/22.3/linuxmint-22.3-cinnamon...
The program to run: https://etcher.balena.io/#download-etcher
Detailed instructions here, including screenshots if you need them: https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/lates...
Not to mention Linux is great, things start going wrong. Cool, you found a DE you like, it's on X11. Another application you want to use only works on Wayland.
Ohh, you want to use a Bluetooth headset, your DE might randomly crash upon connect.
The best thing about Linux is you can customize it. The worst thing about Linux is you can customize it. We have no single answer as to what distro a new user should try.
Ubuntu might not support your wifi card. Ok, so you try Arch. A bad update bricks your system.
I love Linux, but I've spent countless hours to understand and use it. Some people might prefer to buy a Neo and then go play with their cat, etc.
That's a very self-important and arrogant way to say "unmotivated".
I think this is in response to slightly abnormal people trying Steam OS and other user-friendly Linux distros as they grow increasingly annoyed with Windows 11 antics.
My personal favorite is a lightly used Thinkpad, you can get a nice Linux machine for under 400$. But it's still a lot of work for most people.
If a Ubuntu update does something weird, what do you do with your 1700$ System 76 laptop ?
With your Neo, you go to the Apple store and they'll sort it out.
I think there is a real chance that there will be an EU push for that to be made available as a way of gradually decoupling national security interests from the US, for obvious reasons.
They won't actually move back to a user-focused OS at all. It's nice for them to declare they will, but their culture and business pressures will prevent any kind of sustained effort. (Their users aren't their customers.)
> dangerously close on performance
sometimes more performant.
That's usually due to:
1. Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance gains)
2. Less OS overhead (usually minor gains)
That's not at all how that works. DirectX12 isn't slow by any stretch of the imagination. In my personal and professional experience Vulkan is about on par depending on the driver. The main differences are in CPU cost, the GPU ultimately runs basically the same code.
There's no magic Vulkan can pull out of thin air to be faster than DX12, they're both doing basically the same thing and they're not far off the "speed of light" for driving the GPU hardware.
You're right. It can't possibly be bad leadership and poor decisions. Sometimes you just slip on a patch of ice and that's how you lost your business.
There's zero intention to improve the fundamentals of the os. These are what a smart group thinks will be the smallest concession to retain goodwill.
Come off it with "bad luck"
They can throw money to tweak some stuff but I doubt they'll fully back off from pushing for software+services or all this recent conditioning for Copilot. This piece is a damage control but wording shows they won't change. I doubt that in last 26 years we had a company that truly admitted its mistakes - that's not in the "nature" of such entities.
Two factoids: Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs and AWS runs more Windows VMs than Azure.
Similarly with "reducing unnecessary Copilot integration." They added it everywhere before, users hated it, and now removing it is considered a feature.
This isn't a commitment to quality. This is just a fix for years of treating the operating system as an advertising platform.
I prefer user experience on Linux so much more (I've been always using Linux laptop as a work PC), its just that I like gaming casually in my free time.
I'd try the migration already, but due to the *** up NVMe prices I don't have a new disk to start with, so I'll have to do the slow and more careful migration.
Reports seem to be of system crashes and degraded performance. I imagine there are lots of 'it works for me' stories, but think: for Linux to eat into Windows user market share (which I would greatly support), critical things like Zoom have to work at least as reliably as on Windows. For nontechnical users who would never figure out which incantations to type into the terminal to fix it -- because they have their next meeting in 15 minutes.
My game controller worked, my BT headset, the media keys on my keyboard even worked.
Lots of stuff was mildly broken but no more so than it was on Windows. It is just differently broken.
How many hours have they put into the Linux client?
My guess is the answer to these questions indicate more of how it got there than anything the distros or upstream components can do.
Users don't really care, do they?
It works fine (tested on Arch), but at the very least you should run that kind of malware as a separate user, or better yet, in a VM.
Linux is never, and I mean never going to be a legitimate alternative to Windows or MacOS on the desktop under the current paradigm. "Switch to X desktop or distro" means less than zero to 99.9% of computer users (probably a few more nines in there too).
"Oh but the Steam Machine!" essentially no one who uses that will actually care what the OS is, it's a shell and a very specific one to do a single task, no-one is buying it as a general purpose machine they can do their taxes on.
Imagine a Linux distro largely displaced Windows and Mac simply due to usability, security, reliability, and the fact that there's no monstrous corporation pulling the strings. That would be awesome.
"Fine" and not amazing because occasionally I have screen sharing issues, but that's like once in a blue moon? Could be down to my specific configuration, but it's allegedly more stable than my coworker's zoom on Mac.
It's just that we accept windows issues as "that's how computers are". While Linux is expected to work
Nice to see them finally admitting user needs might be important to some level, but the way MS operates historically is that no bad idea ever dies, at best they get delayed and then shoehorned in with less fanfare at a later date.
And it really comes down to $MSFT. If the stock keeps dropping, how long do you think any real commitment to “quality” for a boring, low(no?) revenue product will last? Very little when the ad/partner revenue really starts flowing for “ai focused metrics” that can directly tie to windows surveillance (ie recall).
When I first tried Ubuntu decades ago it was like an awakening and I started seeing every developer using Windows and Mac as brainwashed fools. That's not to pick on others because I also started seeing my former self as brainwashed.
For a developer, Linux is far superior for many reasons.
Moving from Windows to Linux reminds me of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
A lot of times, with software, you could be severely constrained but not realize it because you don't know better. The effect is very strong in this industry.
But then you come across things like "movie not playing due to missing DRM support" and crap like that.
Normal users are probably better off with a Macbook.
This is precisely why Microsoft created WSL2
No doubt it’s starting to show its age but it’s like watching a lion die. Win32 amenities just being automatically available is quite sick and I wish there was something similar for Linux.
It’s like windows devs and users live in alternate realities, I’m sure a lot of cool things can happen if they bring some of that dev love over to their UX.
I am curious whether they will "suddenly realized" this after the community feedback process they initiated because they supposedly care so much about their users. Then, out of nowhere, they discovered that users do not want to be spied on or treated as the product. They just want to use their fucking operating system in peace without Microsoft constantly forcing its own products on them.
I wonder when that realization came and why. Maybe they started losing market share to Apple or users just prefer phones to pc even more?
Enterprise users are.
I was using a different tiling manager before and there were all sorts of annoyances, pops breaking things. Behaviorally, this one gets everything right.
As for distros, pick something established that looks good to you. You said you have experience, so you probably know what you want from a distro. I ran arch on my machine a lot but recently switched to fedora for its simpler installation.
Ideally you'd spend at least a day or so trying them all, and about a week reading and watching about their differences, pros and cons.
Unless you are using nVidia for gaming or have an obscure hardware configuration, chances are you're supported wonderfully well at this very moment, by at least 2-3 distributions (Mint, Manjaro, Fedora, Ubuntu, Bazzite, SteamOS, PopOS, CachyOS -- you'll also have a choice KDE/Gnome).
All you need is pendrive. For the super easy transition you'd want an entirely separate system drive (nvme for example). I know, its expensive. I said for the super easy transition, its not necessary. Slow portable disk to store your current documents and game saves should be enough.
We live in the exciting times.
A business exists because its shareholders invest capital with the expectation of a return. As a result, nearly all businesses go through similar lifecycles. The stages are launch, growth, maturity, decline, and sometimes renewal. There is a lot of capital injected in the early stages and to capture market share the firm often produces the best product it can.
Once the market share is acquired, the business puts up moats if it's able, and then it enters the MATURITY phase. That's where the Windows business is. In the maturity phase a business focuses on TAKING PROFITS wherever it can find them. This includes but is not limited to cutting back on its investment in product, as much as it can. If it can cut budgets and quality and give that money to the shareholders it will. If it can inject ads into the product or resell your data it will.
The very purpose of a business is to reach maturity and then take profits.
That's capitalism. The investors provided the capital. In the end, they gets what they wants.
Now if a company leans into this dynamic as hard as Microsoft has, you should know what's coming. No one should be surprised - maybe they're scared of the Neo right now and there'll be a few years of reprieve, but they're a mature firm, they're in profit taking mode, and the goal in this phase is not to make Windows as great as possible, it's to squeeze as much money out of it as they can.
The next stage is decline -- where the squeeze gets so hard that the business actually collapses. All businesses fail sooner or later. Everything becomes lawyers and accountants slicing it up, selling it off, and sometimes it gets restructured and reborn, sometimes it doesn't. This can take years or it can take decades but it's basically a bumpy downhill road from maturity to that point. If you stick around at this point and keep using Windows, keep in mind that's what you opted into. There isn't really any other way. It's just business.
Intriguingly, free software in its more elemental forms doesn't appear to follow this lifecycle. It's not for profit and there are no investors to satisfy. Contributors who build the software do it mainly out of self-interest: they build what they want to use, and as a result they may come and go at any time. But the software remains there, and you are welcome to tinker with it, too.
But it does seem like publicly-owned companies go through those stages. It may be shareholder pressure, but part of it also appears to be when they get people in upper management who went to business school to get an MBA, rather than who have been with the company for years. I don't know what makes MBAs so prone to the nonsensensical pursuit of short-term profits that tank the company, rather than the greater (in the long run) long-term profits available by just continuing to make good products that customers want, but it shows up often enough (in many industries) that I'm starting to think of it as "MBA syndrome". And if a company is publicly-traded and run by MBA-style management? Sell your shares now and get out while you still can, is my advice.
They spend so much time and effort learning the scripture and then are praised as having some sort of intimate knowledge of business practices and working towards the ever growing prophet (read: profit).
Their forecasts akin to divination (but with charts and graphs, oh my!)
In this context, it's helped me understand, or at least create a useful caricature of what must be going on in those spaces where everyone drinks the kool aid of "there is only the next quarter".
It's been fantastic. People always find an excuse but really they are doing themselves a disservice.
.. yet. The absolute roll-over I've seen regarding OS level age verification is concerning and disheartening.
Linux is better than Windows on the desktop because Windows got worse, not because Linux got better.
Unless you mean for gaming. That was Valve's exit strategy from Windows.
