5 ms·

>As soon as one open source player steps up that's 60% as good, it's over. Does this imply that Linux is <60% as good as Windows because it's not over?

Armisael16 7y ago
I think it implies that Windows is not a business based on data-hoarding.
pgeorgi 7y ago
For the use case of running whatever win32 executable is promoted on zdnet.com (or pcworld.com or whatever is out there that appeals to computer users that aren't developers) any given day? Yes.
- owl57 7y ago
  Do they actually promote non-game win32 executables these days? I thought current fashion is mostly services with mobile and web apps, and sometimes Electron ones?
yabadabadoes 7y ago
Windows is not over? I see Microsoft as similar to IBM now. They will make a lot of money from their Rolodex, possibly more than they ever made before, but they no longer own a relevant platform someone would write new software for.
- hossbeast 7y ago
  Are you aware of the video gaming industry
  - frank2 7y ago
    Or the enterprise software industry
    - zimpenfish 7y ago
      Or, to a certain extent, the graphical industry?
    - yabadabadoes 7y ago
      Are you aware of IBM in the enterprise software industry? They manage to do almost all of that with their own software and open source rebundled.. No OS/2, almost no 3rd party programmers who are interested in their platform. That is the future of Microsoft and the non-future of Windows.
  - yabadabadoes 7y ago
    Yes, windows developers with experience are going to go work in the game industry..
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, when a platform is dying its owner: 1. Tries to capture all profit from the edges. 2. Extracts value "unreasonably" both to grab what they still can and to create an explanation for the death. This could be high fees, ads, or extraction of market intelligence. 3. Begins embracing the new platform with compatibility layers. 4. Starts making 2 offers on everything. One with their legacy and one with the rising platforms. 5. Treats their nonfounding CEO as significant and someone to listen to. Plenty of companies make this transition successfully (I chose IBM as the example) and make huge profits from not having to charge uniform prices across the entire market. But the discussion was the windows platform being replaced by Linux, not Microsoft profits.
zelly 7y ago
Linux only lags behind in desktop/laptop use. (Dominates servers and smartphones.) Yes, absolutely, in the case of desktops, it is <60% as good as Windows or macOS. I say this as a nearly lifelong desktop Linux user. The userspace desktop software gets almost no attention compared to the kernel/systemd which actually matters for business. The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks. The alternative to using a DE is to use a tiling window manager and spend hours a day re-implementing what would have been one-click operations on Windows/macOS. This is not to mention the lack of non-development-related software targeting desktop Linux. Will this change in the future? I think it is very likely, but the time horizon is key. There are thousands of possible realities where Microsoft or Apple fails--political problems, economic events, bad management, some black swan startup out of nowhere. All it takes is for one of these to trigger for mindshare to shift to Linux (or BSD or Fuchsia--any free one for that matter) and bring it over the threshold. (But this is kind of irrelevant to the point about data hoarding business models, since Windows/macOS is pure software.)
- protomikron 7y ago
  > The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks. Sry, but that is just not true.
- larrik 7y ago
  As someone who dual-boots, I would say Linux is a better OS, today, than Windows or Mac. Sure, there are areas where it sucks more than the others, but the same can be said of either of the other ones for different areas.
  - zo1 7y ago
    As someone who also dual-boots. I would say that Windows is definitely the better of the OSes. I've tried, so hard, to make it work. It's been almost a decade now since I switched to Linux OSes. But, software/package management is absolutely horrible in the OSS world these days. It's so bad that actually downloading + installing MSI/zip files from the software provider is a better experience and more reliable. Linux has lost almost all the benefits from having a package ecosystem. These days, everything on linux is either random potentially insecure PPA repos, shell scripts loaded from a server via curl and piped to sh with sudo access, or "snaps" (whatever the fuck they are). That all ontop of wildly outdated packages in the supported repos. No wonder everyone rants and raves about "docker", now we know why things moved into that space. I know, this is my opinion and it's biased. Yes I may not have done things properly, or there are other ways of doing things, etc etc.
thenewnewguy 7y ago
For the average consumer, (i.e. not the average HN user, where this is far more debatable), yes.

Armisael16 7y ago

I think it implies that Windows is not a business based on data-hoarding.

pgeorgi 7y ago

For the use case of running whatever win32 executable is promoted on zdnet.com (or pcworld.com or whatever is out there that appeals to computer users that aren't developers) any given day? Yes.

owl57 7y ago
Do they actually promote non-game win32 executables these days? I thought current fashion is mostly services with mobile and web apps, and sometimes Electron ones?

yabadabadoes 7y ago

Windows is not over? I see Microsoft as similar to IBM now. They will make a lot of money from their Rolodex, possibly more than they ever made before, but they no longer own a relevant platform someone would write new software for.

hossbeast 7y ago
Are you aware of the video gaming industry
- frank2 7y ago
  Or the enterprise software industry
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    Or, to a certain extent, the graphical industry?
  - yabadabadoes 7y ago
    Are you aware of IBM in the enterprise software industry? They manage to do almost all of that with their own software and open source rebundled.. No OS/2, almost no 3rd party programmers who are interested in their platform. That is the future of Microsoft and the non-future of Windows.
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  Yes, windows developers with experience are going to go work in the game industry..
yabadabadoes 7y ago
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, when a platform is dying its owner: 1. Tries to capture all profit from the edges. 2. Extracts value "unreasonably" both to grab what they still can and to create an explanation for the death. This could be high fees, ads, or extraction of market intelligence. 3. Begins embracing the new platform with compatibility layers. 4. Starts making 2 offers on everything. One with their legacy and one with the rising platforms. 5. Treats their nonfounding CEO as significant and someone to listen to. Plenty of companies make this transition successfully (I chose IBM as the example) and make huge profits from not having to charge uniform prices across the entire market. But the discussion was the windows platform being replaced by Linux, not Microsoft profits.

zelly 7y ago

Linux only lags behind in desktop/laptop use. (Dominates servers and smartphones.) Yes, absolutely, in the case of desktops, it is <60% as good as Windows or macOS. I say this as a nearly lifelong desktop Linux user. The userspace desktop software gets almost no attention compared to the kernel/systemd which actually matters for business. The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks. The alternative to using a DE is to use a tiling window manager and spend hours a day re-implementing what would have been one-click operations on Windows/macOS. This is not to mention the lack of non-development-related software targeting desktop Linux. Will this change in the future? I think it is very likely, but the time horizon is key. There are thousands of possible realities where Microsoft or Apple fails--political problems, economic events, bad management, some black swan startup out of nowhere. All it takes is for one of these to trigger for mindshare to shift to Linux (or BSD or Fuchsia--any free one for that matter) and bring it over the threshold. (But this is kind of irrelevant to the point about data hoarding business models, since Windows/macOS is pure software.)

protomikron 7y ago
> The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks. Sry, but that is just not true.
larrik 7y ago
As someone who dual-boots, I would say Linux is a better OS, today, than Windows or Mac. Sure, there are areas where it sucks more than the others, but the same can be said of either of the other ones for different areas.
- zo1 7y ago
  As someone who also dual-boots. I would say that Windows is definitely the better of the OSes. I've tried, so hard, to make it work. It's been almost a decade now since I switched to Linux OSes. But, software/package management is absolutely horrible in the OSS world these days. It's so bad that actually downloading + installing MSI/zip files from the software provider is a better experience and more reliable. Linux has lost almost all the benefits from having a package ecosystem. These days, everything on linux is either random potentially insecure PPA repos, shell scripts loaded from a server via curl and piped to sh with sudo access, or "snaps" (whatever the fuck they are). That all ontop of wildly outdated packages in the supported repos. No wonder everyone rants and raves about "docker", now we know why things moved into that space. I know, this is my opinion and it's biased. Yes I may not have done things properly, or there are other ways of doing things, etc etc.

thenewnewguy 7y ago

For the average consumer, (i.e. not the average HN user, where this is far more debatable), yes.