4 ms·
Most people want a web browser. Even Microsofts esteemed moat (office) is “Web only” on the lowest tier.
by dijit 7mo ago
Most people want a web browser.
Even Microsofts esteemed moat (office) is “Web only” on the lowest tier.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoPC gaming revenue on its own is around $45 Billion a year and there are all sorts of vertical market software that only runs on Windows. 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.
- dijit 7mo agoI work in games (formerly AAA). 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).
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoAnd still why should normal people go to Linux over Windows? Linux support is still not that great from OEMs and for the unwashed masses your local Best Buy or Apple Store.
- dijit 7mo agoOk
- butterlesstoast 7mo agoOk
- mrj 7mo agoHave you read the article? There's real frustration with Windows. It's so bad that my 15 year old, who only really uses his computer to launch Steam, asked me to help him install Linux. He had heard about Bazzite and already knew his gpu would be compatible. He gets about 20 fps more on Linux and can choose when updates are applied. There's no forced online login, ads in the OS or copilot prompts. His browser doesn't revert to Edge. He doesn't really want to care but Microsoft's decisions have made their main product into an annoyance.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoAnd people would be less frustrated with Linux?
- GTP 7mo agoSome people, myself included, are already less frustrated with Linux. Which means it is likely that other people would be less frustrated if they tried Linux. Not 100% of them, of course, but some for sure.
- mrj 7mo agoYes, as I explained. He's happy with it. He doesn't care about the OS just wants it to launch programs like it's supposed to.
- p_ing 7mo agoWhy bother making native releases when Valve/Proton will take care of it? Who wants the headache of supporting another build and directly supporting N flavors of Linux distributions? When it comes to games, Linux has an OS/2 problem.
- lemagedurage 7mo agoSteam runtime already gives developers a single target rather than having to support different distros individually. 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.
- p_ing 7mo ago> still be more robust Why? The only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.
- motbus3 7mo agoI believe this even without checking the numbers. That said, I now own a steam deck and I only buy games supported. There is a new game with no support? So sorry. Can't be done
- bangaladore 7mo ago> Microsofts esteemed moat (office) is “Web only” on the lowest tier. 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.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoI don’t do anything too “serious” as far as writing documents that Google Docs can’t handle - we use that at work instead of Office - is Word that much better than GSuite for most cases or is Office Web worse than GSuite?
- esseph 7mo ago> is Word that much better than GSuite for most cases or is Office Web worse than GSuite? Excel is really The Thing. So many businesses and departments rely on it.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoI believe that. When I was in graduate school in 1999-2001 (MBA) before I dropped out. I learned firsthand the beast that was Excel.
- Arch-TK 7mo agoSome people have some bizarre obsession with having absolute and total control over the placement of every single last character in their document while simultaneously not caring about the fact that this placement is sometimes not reproducible and randomly becomes diseased. 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.
- Gigachad 7mo agoI don’t think I’ve ever met someone who only uses the web browser exclusively. 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.