6 ms·

If Microsoft backs off core Windows development, which it certainly seems like they are, this is what we'd expect to see... not a big bang where it suddenly sto

by jerf 3y ago

If Microsoft backs off core Windows development, which it certainly seems like they are, this is what we'd expect to see... not a big bang where it suddenly stops working, but every year it'll just sort of fall a bit more behind Linux, until in 4 or 5 years the difference consensus will slowly just creep over to Windows being noticeably worse than Linux without any big bang switchover... and it'll sneak up on Microsoft as much as it sneaks up on everyone else. To be honest, Linux as a desktop environment is already more usable than many people realize. People kept expecting a Big Bang where someone would put out The Release That Solves Everything, but what happened instead is that it just kept creeping up and creeping up. A similar thing happened to Linux gaming; Valve never put out a big Here's Linux For Games release, it just crept up and crept up to the point that it basically runs my entire library, and single-player gaming is now to the point that anything that doesn't run in Linux is the exception, not the rule. And Microsoft's problem is that if they let this happen, they're going to be in a world of hurt when they decide to get in gear and fix it, because of their reverse compatibility support. Fixing all that up and trying to make everything go fast is going to be hard with all these systems interacting with each other. While we Linux users may piss and moan about systemd transitions or all the audio transitions, in the Linux world, as new subsystems come in, the old ones actually go away, and it isn't dragging anywhere near as much reverse compatibility baggage around. Helps that there aren't any project managers to demand Windows LDAP for COM Apartments Over Embraced And Extended USB to be jammed in to be supported 10 years later because one big client uses it and that mean the rest of us get to be running a WLCAEEUSB service on our computers for the next 15 years, causing occasional mysterious crashes when it spuriously grabs a USB device. It seems to me Microsoft is in grave danger of walking itself into an MBA trap, where investement in Windows doesn't pay off this quarter so they don't, repeat for 15 or 20 quarters, and then waking up one day and realizing that one quarter at a time they threw away one of the most useful business positions in the history of the world.

phpisthebest 3y ago
Microsoft should invest in Proton, make Windows apps work seamless on linux, and then just make a "Windows" replacement for Wayland that runs on Kernel... Then, and only then, will we have "The year of the linux desktop"
- krylon 3y ago
  Hehe, that thought was going through my mind as well just now. It's not really such a far out idea; if Microsoft wanted to, they could certainly put the manpower behind it to make it happen. It would also be the most delicious plot twist ever. But I don't think this is in the cards for the foreseeable future.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I mean, this is actually backwards from a pure engineering POV from what would be actually excellent. The core Windows NT kernel is quite excellent, and was always in some ways far superior to what Unix offered. E.g. proper asynchronous I/O from day one. Dave Cutler and crew did a bang-up job. Linux is only getting competitive things like io_uring now(ish). The problem was the shitty API and user space they papered in front of it with. Lack of a proper CLI shell, slow filesystem, the godawful "registry", a low quality, unsafe windowing toolkit (Win32 API), and then, after WinXP, bad UX / environment stuff. And, of course, the fact that everything was proprietary, closed/closed-source, and the $$ licensing story for running a WindowsNT server was always garbage. As a user operating system none of this mattered so much because the sheer mass of the market meant that driver support and application support was always going to win out on Windows. But these days, with all my attached devices being USB-Cish things that just implement USB standards I have zero issues in Linux. In fact, audio interface support works better for me in Ubuntu than it does in Windows right now. But people who were serious about running servers naturally stuck with Unix, despite it being in some ways technically inferior on paper -- because that experience on NT just wasn't as good. Remote administration via GUI. Anemic CLI. MS proprietary everything. Per-user $$ licensing stuff. Tight coupling with IIS & SQL Server, which has their own licensing stuff, etc. etc. etc. Anyways, I think it would be a shame if MS gave up on the NT kernel. With WSL1 they did an interesting job of getting Linux user space running overtop of the NT kernel, but they dropped that approach with WSL2 and went with a more VM approach.
  - delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
    > Anyways, I think it would be a shame if MS gave up on the NT kernel. I can't say this more. The NT kernel is really the best part of Windows. Almost everything that people complain about in Windows 11 is in the userspace. Start menu nerfed? Right-click menu hidden? Settings versus Control Panel? Cortana, Copilot? There's nothing in the kernel or lower-level OS constructs that require any of these.
gred 3y ago
Interesting thought, but you might be missing the hardware perspective. I switched from Windows to Linux this year, and the biggest issue has been drivers and hardware compatibility: audio available via headphones but not (laptop) built-in speakers, occasional display issues depending on the monitor setup, occasional WiFi issues. If hardware innovation stopped, Linux could catch up easily... but it won't, so there is a constant driver treadmill that manufacturers mostly handle for MS on the Windows side, but Linux has to handle somewhat alone. Perhaps the manufacturers will start to help out more and more on the Linux side too, as more users demand compatibility.
- calamari4065 3y ago
  I've had a much worse time with hardware on windows than Linux these last couple of years. My work laptop runs Windows and will get stuck in a BSPD bootloop if I turn it on with external monitors connected. My USB keyboard and mouse disconnect every few minutes. Windows may as well not even have Bluetooth for as well as it works. Some devices always show as connected, despite not being present. I have to un-pair my headphones every time I want to connect. Sometimes I have to reboot my computer to get them to work. Windows also doesn't even support Bluetooth audio sink. On Linux, I can play audio from my phone to my computer and pipe it back into my Bluetooth headphones. Windows 7 supported this, but 10 does not. I've even used some weird old PCI cards that only have XP drivers, but work fine with Linux. The only hardware I've had trouble with in the last 5 years is Nvidia cards. And that's a deliberate decision made by Nvidia to not support Linux. AMD cards work perfectly. I haven't seen problems with audio or WiFi on Linux in over ten years.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > some weird old PCI cards that only have XP drivers, but work fine with Linux. I will say, supporting old hardware is probably Linux's strong suit, because their model of upstream first means that maintenance tends to get carried a lot further than proprietary drivers ever would.
  - xoac 3y ago
    Recent nvidia (3-4 series) cards work pretty well now.
delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
> If Microsoft backs off core Windows development, which it certainly seems like they are, this is what we'd expect to see... If this is really true, I am deeply saddened. I grew up using almost entirely nothing but Windows since 98, and have used every version (except Windows Me) since. As a desktop and enterprise OS, Windows is pretty fantastic to develop with, natively, contrary to many opinions here. Technologies like COM, .NET (Framework), Win32, Direct{2D, 3D}, and the Windows API are all very powerful and fairly future-proof, too. Core Windows/NT development is extremely fun, interesting, and the choices that the NT kernel developers made in the 90s put it light years ahead of the competition. Consider its advanced permissions model (ACLs versus UIDs and GIDs), its plug-and-play driver model, and its ability to run on a wide variety of hardware.
- anthk 3y ago
  Linux supports ACL's, too, but they are not enabled by default. On plug and play, Linux won by a mile by default, as the kernel has much better support than Windows 10 which often has to connect itself to Windows Update. On COM/.Net, today almost nobody cares. Modern ad-hoc built small-medium Corporateware it's bound to Java as a Hellish curse, and on the rest of the maket here just Direct3D matters; but not as much as before, because for mobile/console gaming Vulkan might work everywhere. Also, on the enterprise, most people it's migrating to Unix backends and web frontends for lots of tasks. Login once, run everywhere. Does your management software work under a phone, tablet, desktop with an adaptive GUI? Then most of the company doesn't even need a Windows device. Heck, most non-tech companies have outsourced their IT to 3rd parties and their user accounta are running under Windows virtual machines hosted on Unix servers. And modern BIOSes can run most of their setup under PXE/netboot and connect to these servers to boot their images; so, well, Windows in the desktop is more and more irrelevant.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > On COM/.Net, today almost nobody cares. Lots of LoB applications in various industries are still developed using .NET (even for new developments). > Also, on the enterprise, most people it's migrating to Unix backends and web frontends for lots of tasks. Not for every task, web applications are a good choice (which is why lots of new LoB applications in enterprise are still developed as Windows desktop applications).
lagt_t 3y ago
In what are you basing that MS is backing off windows desktop development?
binkHN 3y ago
Windows 11 has become an ad delivery vehicle with Microsoft milking what life Windows has left in this fashion. Linux has largely commoditized operating systems and the major DEs here excel over Windows in many ways, further putting the nail in Windows for the desktop. Combine this with many applications being available with any web browser, the only reason to run Windows is for the legacy Windows applications.
J_Shelby_J 3y ago
IMO, once Adobe comes to linux, or they lose their position in the industry to competitors, we will see the shift. And the main reason is Apple doesn't support Nvidia. There are limits to what you can accomplish editing videos without a beefy GPU, so you're trapped on windows if you're using adobe premier. I mean, games like Valorant require anti-cheat root kits will still keep us on Windows forever, but those are edge cases.
- renegat0x0 3y ago
  Adobe is not the only problem. Hardware support, codecs, media support. It all just does not work that well, and I think will not work well for a long period of time. Video editing for years have not been an option for Linux. Sure there are programs, but they often crash, often encode x times slower than corporate paid crapware.
  - throw555chip 3y ago
    > Adobe is not the only problem. Hardware support, codecs, media support. Hardware, old to the newest, works the same or better on my Dell, HP and Lenovo machines and has for close to 2 decades.
  - vetinari 3y ago
    > Hardware support For this, you have to talk to the people you are buying your hardware from. They are getting your money, not linux. They are also supporting that hardware under Windows, not Microsoft. Tell them what your needs are, and vote with your wallet. > codecs, media support Funny; for years, I've been installing ffdshow (ffmpeg-based codecs) into Windows to have decent codec support in Windows; even today, many users still install VLC (or mpc, mpc-hc, mpv, mpv.net, or other clone) to get media playback without any issues.
- vetinari 3y ago
  Adobe won't come to Linux until they would lose money by not getting there. They won't lose money, unless there's a competitor, that eats their lunch. Basically something competitive like Davinci Resolve, but for the other parts of their suite.
hannofcart 3y ago
> To be honest, Linux as a desktop environment is already more usable than many people realize. This will be true once the stability of graphics drivers on Linux improves. On every major kernel update, I am always bracing for everything going blank because of driver issues.
- planede 3y ago
  Apart from Nvidia, this feels like a non-issue for me nowadays.
  - partitioned 3y ago
    "Apart from a majority of graphics cards it's a non-issue"
    - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
      Surely a majority of graphics cards are the integrated Intel and AMD ones. Nvidia maybe has a majority of the high-end ones.
      - partitioned 3y ago
        Fair enough! My desktop bias shows again
  - rcfox 3y ago
    Unfortunately, Nvidia has ~87% of the market share of discrete GPUs.
    - vetinari 3y ago
      Discrete GPUs have ~20% share of the entire GPU market. For the vast majority, this is a non-issue. Additionally, the Nvidia problems under Linux are very well known, so getting a Nvidia GPU for Linux is a self-inflicted problem.
  - 3y ago
UrineSqueegee 3y ago
im sorry but if you have the slightest knowledge of how anything works you know that this is a fantasy land scenario.
Night_Thastus 3y ago
Performance is not the limiting factor keeping people from switching to Linux. If I could take my current desktop PC, swap to Linux, and all the hardware and all the software I like (including games) would Just Work(tm) without me spending weeks to months diagnosing (and inevitably giving up on some of what I want), I'd swap in a heartbeat. But that is not the reality we live in. It's gotten better, but frankly I doubt it ever will really get to the point of usability for someone like me.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by jerf 3y ago

phpisthebest 3y ago

Microsoft should invest in Proton, make Windows apps work seamless on linux, and then just make a "Windows" replacement for Wayland that runs on Kernel... Then, and only then, will we have "The year of the linux desktop"

krylon 3y ago
Hehe, that thought was going through my mind as well just now. It's not really such a far out idea; if Microsoft wanted to, they could certainly put the manpower behind it to make it happen. It would also be the most delicious plot twist ever. But I don't think this is in the cards for the foreseeable future.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I mean, this is actually backwards from a pure engineering POV from what would be actually excellent. The core Windows NT kernel is quite excellent, and was always in some ways far superior to what Unix offered. E.g. proper asynchronous I/O from day one. Dave Cutler and crew did a bang-up job. Linux is only getting competitive things like io_uring now(ish). The problem was the shitty API and user space they papered in front of it with. Lack of a proper CLI shell, slow filesystem, the godawful "registry", a low quality, unsafe windowing toolkit (Win32 API), and then, after WinXP, bad UX / environment stuff. And, of course, the fact that everything was proprietary, closed/closed-source, and the $$ licensing story for running a WindowsNT server was always garbage. As a user operating system none of this mattered so much because the sheer mass of the market meant that driver support and application support was always going to win out on Windows. But these days, with all my attached devices being USB-Cish things that just implement USB standards I have zero issues in Linux. In fact, audio interface support works better for me in Ubuntu than it does in Windows right now. But people who were serious about running servers naturally stuck with Unix, despite it being in some ways technically inferior on paper -- because that experience on NT just wasn't as good. Remote administration via GUI. Anemic CLI. MS proprietary everything. Per-user $$ licensing stuff. Tight coupling with IIS & SQL Server, which has their own licensing stuff, etc. etc. etc. Anyways, I think it would be a shame if MS gave up on the NT kernel. With WSL1 they did an interesting job of getting Linux user space running overtop of the NT kernel, but they dropped that approach with WSL2 and went with a more VM approach.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
  > Anyways, I think it would be a shame if MS gave up on the NT kernel. I can't say this more. The NT kernel is really the best part of Windows. Almost everything that people complain about in Windows 11 is in the userspace. Start menu nerfed? Right-click menu hidden? Settings versus Control Panel? Cortana, Copilot? There's nothing in the kernel or lower-level OS constructs that require any of these.

gred 3y ago

Interesting thought, but you might be missing the hardware perspective. I switched from Windows to Linux this year, and the biggest issue has been drivers and hardware compatibility: audio available via headphones but not (laptop) built-in speakers, occasional display issues depending on the monitor setup, occasional WiFi issues. If hardware innovation stopped, Linux could catch up easily... but it won't, so there is a constant driver treadmill that manufacturers mostly handle for MS on the Windows side, but Linux has to handle somewhat alone. Perhaps the manufacturers will start to help out more and more on the Linux side too, as more users demand compatibility.

calamari4065 3y ago
I've had a much worse time with hardware on windows than Linux these last couple of years. My work laptop runs Windows and will get stuck in a BSPD bootloop if I turn it on with external monitors connected. My USB keyboard and mouse disconnect every few minutes. Windows may as well not even have Bluetooth for as well as it works. Some devices always show as connected, despite not being present. I have to un-pair my headphones every time I want to connect. Sometimes I have to reboot my computer to get them to work. Windows also doesn't even support Bluetooth audio sink. On Linux, I can play audio from my phone to my computer and pipe it back into my Bluetooth headphones. Windows 7 supported this, but 10 does not. I've even used some weird old PCI cards that only have XP drivers, but work fine with Linux. The only hardware I've had trouble with in the last 5 years is Nvidia cards. And that's a deliberate decision made by Nvidia to not support Linux. AMD cards work perfectly. I haven't seen problems with audio or WiFi on Linux in over ten years.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > some weird old PCI cards that only have XP drivers, but work fine with Linux. I will say, supporting old hardware is probably Linux's strong suit, because their model of upstream first means that maintenance tends to get carried a lot further than proprietary drivers ever would.
- xoac 3y ago
  Recent nvidia (3-4 series) cards work pretty well now.

delta_p_delta_x 3y ago

> If Microsoft backs off core Windows development, which it certainly seems like they are, this is what we'd expect to see... If this is really true, I am deeply saddened. I grew up using almost entirely nothing but Windows since 98, and have used every version (except Windows Me) since. As a desktop and enterprise OS, Windows is pretty fantastic to develop with, natively, contrary to many opinions here. Technologies like COM, .NET (Framework), Win32, Direct{2D, 3D}, and the Windows API are all very powerful and fairly future-proof, too. Core Windows/NT development is extremely fun, interesting, and the choices that the NT kernel developers made in the 90s put it light years ahead of the competition. Consider its advanced permissions model (ACLs versus UIDs and GIDs), its plug-and-play driver model, and its ability to run on a wide variety of hardware.

anthk 3y ago
Linux supports ACL's, too, but they are not enabled by default. On plug and play, Linux won by a mile by default, as the kernel has much better support than Windows 10 which often has to connect itself to Windows Update. On COM/.Net, today almost nobody cares. Modern ad-hoc built small-medium Corporateware it's bound to Java as a Hellish curse, and on the rest of the maket here just Direct3D matters; but not as much as before, because for mobile/console gaming Vulkan might work everywhere. Also, on the enterprise, most people it's migrating to Unix backends and web frontends for lots of tasks. Login once, run everywhere. Does your management software work under a phone, tablet, desktop with an adaptive GUI? Then most of the company doesn't even need a Windows device. Heck, most non-tech companies have outsourced their IT to 3rd parties and their user accounta are running under Windows virtual machines hosted on Unix servers. And modern BIOSes can run most of their setup under PXE/netboot and connect to these servers to boot their images; so, well, Windows in the desktop is more and more irrelevant.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > On COM/.Net, today almost nobody cares. Lots of LoB applications in various industries are still developed using .NET (even for new developments). > Also, on the enterprise, most people it's migrating to Unix backends and web frontends for lots of tasks. Not for every task, web applications are a good choice (which is why lots of new LoB applications in enterprise are still developed as Windows desktop applications).

lagt_t 3y ago

In what are you basing that MS is backing off windows desktop development?

binkHN 3y ago

Windows 11 has become an ad delivery vehicle with Microsoft milking what life Windows has left in this fashion. Linux has largely commoditized operating systems and the major DEs here excel over Windows in many ways, further putting the nail in Windows for the desktop. Combine this with many applications being available with any web browser, the only reason to run Windows is for the legacy Windows applications.

J_Shelby_J 3y ago

IMO, once Adobe comes to linux, or they lose their position in the industry to competitors, we will see the shift. And the main reason is Apple doesn't support Nvidia. There are limits to what you can accomplish editing videos without a beefy GPU, so you're trapped on windows if you're using adobe premier. I mean, games like Valorant require anti-cheat root kits will still keep us on Windows forever, but those are edge cases.

renegat0x0 3y ago
Adobe is not the only problem. Hardware support, codecs, media support. It all just does not work that well, and I think will not work well for a long period of time. Video editing for years have not been an option for Linux. Sure there are programs, but they often crash, often encode x times slower than corporate paid crapware.
- throw555chip 3y ago
  > Adobe is not the only problem. Hardware support, codecs, media support. Hardware, old to the newest, works the same or better on my Dell, HP and Lenovo machines and has for close to 2 decades.
- vetinari 3y ago
  > Hardware support For this, you have to talk to the people you are buying your hardware from. They are getting your money, not linux. They are also supporting that hardware under Windows, not Microsoft. Tell them what your needs are, and vote with your wallet. > codecs, media support Funny; for years, I've been installing ffdshow (ffmpeg-based codecs) into Windows to have decent codec support in Windows; even today, many users still install VLC (or mpc, mpc-hc, mpv, mpv.net, or other clone) to get media playback without any issues.
vetinari 3y ago
Adobe won't come to Linux until they would lose money by not getting there. They won't lose money, unless there's a competitor, that eats their lunch. Basically something competitive like Davinci Resolve, but for the other parts of their suite.

hannofcart 3y ago

> To be honest, Linux as a desktop environment is already more usable than many people realize. This will be true once the stability of graphics drivers on Linux improves. On every major kernel update, I am always bracing for everything going blank because of driver issues.

planede 3y ago
Apart from Nvidia, this feels like a non-issue for me nowadays.
- partitioned 3y ago
  "Apart from a majority of graphics cards it's a non-issue"
  - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    Surely a majority of graphics cards are the integrated Intel and AMD ones. Nvidia maybe has a majority of the high-end ones.
    - partitioned 3y ago
      Fair enough! My desktop bias shows again
- rcfox 3y ago
  Unfortunately, Nvidia has ~87% of the market share of discrete GPUs.
  - vetinari 3y ago
    Discrete GPUs have ~20% share of the entire GPU market. For the vast majority, this is a non-issue. Additionally, the Nvidia problems under Linux are very well known, so getting a Nvidia GPU for Linux is a self-inflicted problem.
- 3y ago

UrineSqueegee 3y ago

im sorry but if you have the slightest knowledge of how anything works you know that this is a fantasy land scenario.

Night_Thastus 3y ago

Performance is not the limiting factor keeping people from switching to Linux. If I could take my current desktop PC, swap to Linux, and all the hardware and all the software I like (including games) would Just Work(tm) without me spending weeks to months diagnosing (and inevitably giving up on some of what I want), I'd swap in a heartbeat. But that is not the reality we live in. It's gotten better, but frankly I doubt it ever will really get to the point of usability for someone like me.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]