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Microsoft has spent over a decade swimming against their users interests at this point and during that time frame Linux has been improving its desktop and impro

Microsoft has spent over a decade swimming against their users interests at this point and during that time frame Linux has been improving its desktop and improving kernel performance. We are now at the point where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is dangerously close on performance with none of the privacy invasion and anti user features. Its pretty late in the game for them to start trying to switch back to producing an Operating system users actually want. Users refusing to switch from Windows 10 should have been that wake up call. 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.

imjustmsk 7mo ago
I genuinely wish they woulda gotten beytet, it's always good have some competition Nd alternatives, but Microslop just wanna slop around after all.
scns 7mo ago
> where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is > dangerously close on performance sometimes more performant.
- coreyburnsdev 7mo ago
  most games I'm getting 1% lows that are much higher than windows at 4k resolution
- mitkebes 7mo ago
  > 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)
  - cogman10 7mo ago
    There's really no reason why DirectX 12 can't be as fast as Vulkan. In fact, the fact that converting DirectX to Vulkan makes it faster sort of proves that point.
  - MindSpunk 7mo ago
    > Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance 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.
    - StilesCrisis 7mo ago
      Not all games are DX12 though.
      - simonask 7mo ago
        Emulating DX11 and below, as well as OpenGL, using Vulkan does not confer any performance benefits. In fact, it’s really hard to surpass them that way. The performance benefits of Vulkan and DX12 come from tighter control over the hardware by the engine. An engine written for older APIs needs to be adapted to gain anything.
  - noahbp 7mo ago
    3. Superior CPU schedulers, which do not ever undergo serious regressions that are not ever fixed: https://x.com/SheriefFYI/status/1856356547875541196 https://x.com/SheriefFYI/status/1856356547875541196 https://x.com/itsHemu2K/status/1887359825731899587 https://x.com/itsHemu2K/status/1887359825731899587 https://x.com/fREQUENCYCS/status/2003057996302049603 https://x.com/fREQUENCYCS/status/2003057996302049603
  - L-four 7mo ago
999900000999 7mo ago
Normal people can not install an OS. Aside from like 3 ThinkPads on Lenovo's website, you can't really buy Linux pre installed on a computer. This is about the MacBook Neo coming for the budget laptop market. At 500$ it's an easy choice.
- casey2 7mo ago
  These days it's as easy as running a powershell script. There is 0 functional barrier to installing Linux from any windows machine. Soon the same will be true for the Neo.
- bigyabai 7mo ago
  Normal people can definitely install an OS. Last weekend I set aside time help a friend install CachyOS. They'd never used a terminal before and wanted some help. 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.
  - hungryhobbit 7mo ago
    Define normal. I would argue at least 75% of the US population has zero interest in learning how to install a new OS, let alone actually do so themselves. I say this as a decades-long Linux user (who has tried to evangelize it many times).
    - bigyabai 7mo ago
      > has zero interest in learning Well I can agree with that, but that's not the same thing as being incapable of doing it. Both of my parents could easily install Linux, it's infantilizing to argue that they can't fill out a user wizard and select a drive to wipe.
      - bakugo 7mo ago
        > and select a drive to wipe You are vastly overestimating the percentage of the population that knows what a "drive" is. Not saying that's a good thing, but it's the reality.
everdrive 7mo ago
I wish you were right, but Microsoft has a lot of money they can throw at the problem. Right now they don't care about Windows because their money comes from Azure. There are a few concerns here: if people _really_ moved away from Windows that would actually threaten the Azure ecosystem. Further, since Microsoft doesn't care to make a profit (with Windows) they could also just throw resources at Windows because it supports their Azure business. Microsoft can hire talent if they need to and turn the ship around.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  Azure is only successful because of big enterprise. Consumers using or not using Windows makes no difference Two factoids: Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs and AWS runs more Windows VMs than Azure.
- pndy 7mo ago
  It's possible that due to Azure success they decided that consumer sector is a testing ground for their exploitation patterns, where they can test out how much their userbase can withstand before being seriously annoyed. And this is what happen, people said "enough" by looking for alternatives. 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.
  - PaulKeeble 7mo ago
    I think companies think that once they go past the threshold they will know almost immediately and then returning is a simple matter of returning to the threshold. But it doesn't work like that its more like how tires loose grip at the limit, once they start to slide they loose an enormous amount of grip and you need to roll back your use a lot before they regrip up. In tires its 30%, but the amniosity with customers that all the anti user things they have done its a never ending list of complaints and the last 10% nor 30% is going to cut it to stop the exodus. Once people have left its very unlikely they come back if Linux is still working well for them. People change operating systems like they change banks.
aeternum 7mo ago
Much of big tech became Product leaders running amok. Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best. 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.
- mulmen 7mo ago
  At this point Apple isn't even Apple. Product ate the world. I don't remember the last time someone came to me with a customer problem to solve. It's all warring fiefdoms.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    Perhaps AI is taking off because it is the only thing actually listening to customer problems.
    - Lammy 7mo ago
      Monkey's paw curls: listening to customers, except literally and 24/7.
    - nlawalker 7mo ago
      Best insight I’ve seen today, thanks for this!
    - macNchz 7mo ago
      Great point. Just last week I used AI to build a minimal replacement for a SaaS tool I’ve used in the past that has obnoxious feature gating/price tiers. My version isn’t nearly a complete replica, but it has the base functionality I want without having to feel like someone spent hundreds of hours perfecting price tiers with artificial limitations that annoy me just enough to upgrade. Getting a tool that did exactly what I wanted with no fuss was delightful.
  - 7mo ago
raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
So are you predicting that 2026 will be the year of “Linux on the Desktop”?
- PaulKeeble 7mo ago
  Its going to take a lot longer than that. Hardware companies are very slow to adopt this sort of change, for this transition to happen it requires Microsoft to not get its act together for another decade.
  - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    Just for perspective - that meme started around 1998-2000
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- moffkalast 7mo ago
  Every year is the year of Linux on desktop ;)
- subscribed 7mo ago
  I'm waiting for a better Nvidia drivers/performance in either Ubuntu or Fedora family and that's it for me. 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.
gzread 7mo ago
Linux works about as well on the desktop as it did in 2003 - if you know what you're doing, you can make it work, and if not, you can still run a browser but most things won't work for you. 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.
- bikelang 7mo ago
  I’m relatively new to Linux desktop and this hasn’t been my experience at all. What do you think doesn’t work?
- suhputt 7mo ago
  [dead]
- rstat1 7mo ago
  If that is truly what you think, then you clearly haven't used a Linux desktop distro since then because that absolutely incorrect.
hdivider 7mo ago
I really hope you're right. The challenge with Linux still seems to be practicalities -- like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions? 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.
- asveikau 7mo ago
  How many hours has Zoom put into making the client stable on Windows and Mac? 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.
  - Tomis02 7mo ago
    > How many hours has Zoom put into making the client stable on Windows and Mac? Users don't really care, do they?
    - asveikau 7mo ago
      I'm not talking about that. I was replying to a claim that Zoom is less stable on a platform, as if that somehow happened for free and not as a result of a team tracking and fixing bugs on the application side, likely over the course of years.
- anon291 7mo ago
  I mean... Windows legitimately doesn't work. I work at one of the mag7 and it's a running jokes while using windows that suddenly everyone's microphone quits. We then have to restart. This has been going on years. Our colleagues on Linux don't have such problems. It's just that we accept windows issues as "that's how computers are". While Linux is expected to work
hsuduebc2 7mo ago
Absolutely. Fuck them. 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?
jmull 7mo ago
> its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back 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.)
brightball 7mo ago
I really wonder how much of an impact these AI tools are going to have on the Linux ecosystem. Seems like huge potential advantage brewing over proprietary OSs. Look how fast Omarchy came together and improved…it’s phenomenal.
- trinsic2 7mo ago
  I keep hearing that marketing term beautiful but I'm really not seeing it. It just looks like a tiling windows manager. Feels like we're going back in time.
  - brightball 7mo ago
    It is a very well integrated, smooth and preconfigured tiling window manager that also has a scroll mode like Niri. I was using a different tiling manager before and there were all sorts of annoyances, pops breaking things. Behaviorally, this one gets everything right.
rsanheim 7mo ago
Yes. This. Too little too late MSFT. 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).
xnx 7mo ago
OS was twice made irrelevant by the browser and mobile. AI assistants will make the OS about as important to the average user as the BIOS.
pxc 7mo ago
Are the Linux graphics drivers actually worse, though? I thought it was widely agreed that the open-source user-space drivers, e.g., in Mesa, are actually very good these days.
- M95D 7mo ago
  Could be, but I can't afford the GPUs they are so very good on.
jaimex2 7mo ago
It's been 10 years since I booted Windows or MacOS. It's been fantastic. People always find an excuse but really they are doing themselves a disservice.
- jaimex2 7mo ago
  Microslop employees down voting - lol
reyaaltrooth 7mo ago
It hard to say what went wrong with this company. They were doing all the right things, hiring top notch decision makers like Satya, Pavan Davuluri, Asha Sharma, Sonali Yadav. Then employing tens of thousands of highly skilled H1Bs. I guess its just bad luck that this company's product quality is down in the drain.
- alsetmusic 7mo ago
  > I guess its just bad luck that this company's product quality is down in the drain. 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.
  - bananadonkey 7mo ago
    WSL is great. Its biggest drawback is that it requires the use of Windows.
    - codethief 7mo ago
      I don't know, man. For the past year I've been having the "pleasure" of using Windows again for the first time in 16 years. My coworkers recommended I try the WSL since in their eyes I'm a "Linux guy". Well, the WSL crashed an hour into using it (forcing me to reboot Windows because nothing else helped) and then a couple more times that very same day. On a fresh Windows installation. I ended up installing VMWare and using a full Linux VM. Yes, VMWare. That's how desperate I was.
      - renegade-otter 7mo ago
        Nothing wrong with it. VMPlayer is still solid. I've been working in a Linux guest for years.
- halJordan 7mo ago
  It's definitely not bad luck. It's entirely a driven chosen situation. Read the blog post. They're not improving quality there reverting anti-end user decisions. "Quieter defaults," "more control over widgets" 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"
jongjong 7mo ago
The media is a powerful force. 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.
- CodeCompost 7mo ago
  > For a developer, Linux is far superior for many reasons. This is precisely why Microsoft created WSL2
- zeroc8 7mo ago
  Yes, for a developer it's great. 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.
qingcharles 7mo ago
I've used *nix extensively headless for the last 30 years, but I have decision paralysis when it comes to figuring out what the heck Linux distro is good for a desktop.
- hkt 7mo ago
  Honestly, pick one of the well known distros at random. Personally I use Manjaro with GNOME: up to date software and a polished out of the box experience. I never have to go to the terminal unless I want to.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- subscribed 7mo ago
  There's a handful of the easy ones, all offering slightly different experiences, all good. 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.
- juliangmp 7mo ago
  Just go for whatever DE looks pretty to you, I personally like KDE. Don't be afraid to switch to a different desktop later on, its just a few packages to install most of the time. 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.
  - trinsic2 7mo ago
zaradvutra 7mo ago
> We are now at the point where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is dangerously close on performance with none of the privacy invasion and anti user features. .. yet. The absolute roll-over I've seen regarding OS level age verification is concerning and disheartening.
leptons 7mo ago
Microsoft Windows will be just fine for a very long time. Corporate security systems and IT admin doesn't typically run on Linux well or at all, but it does run on Windows and MacOS. We're using popular auth software at my work, but it does not run on Linux otherwise I'd have switched to Linux on my work machines a while ago. That alone is 3 computers that won't ever have Linux. Anecdotal, I know, but the corporate world does not care about Linux as a computing platform outside of servers and machines that people don't use as a desktop/laptop to get work done. Sadly, Microsoft isn't going anywhere and I doubt they are worried about losing any market share to Linux.
DANmode 7mo ago
Gamers aren’t the table stakes. Enterprise users are.
chanux 7mo ago
Even though MacOS is not terribly better, it's good enough. Add to that the new cheaper macbook and it must inspire pause in the great folks at Microsoft.
- moffkalast 7mo ago
  MacOS has been going downhill as well though, at least from what I hear from long time users.
mxkopy 7mo ago
One thing I will give to them is the MSVC ecosystem. (Something something developers) 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.
safety1st 7mo ago
This is a good time to reflect on how business actually works (as opposed to how hopeful consumers wish it would work). 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.
- rmunn 7mo ago
  I'd argue that although publicly-traded businesses do usually go through that cycle (I would say that it's not ALL, but it's certainly MOST, because I can't come up with a counterexample), privately-owned businesses are more likely to avoid it. For example, McMaster-Carr. Privately-owned, with just a few owners rather than a large number of shareholders. And as far as I know (never having been one of their customers myself, just hearing testimonials), they're still just as good at making quality products that their customers want as they were a hundred twenty-five years ago when they got started. No "TAKING PROFITS" stage, and no subsequent decline. 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.
thienannguyencv 7mo ago
The irony here is that their "commitment to quality" is essentially an admission they never delivered. And half of what they promised—like moving the taskbar—are features that already exist in Windows 10. They removed them, ignored complaints for years, and now they say they're "listening to feedback." 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.
whiplash451 7mo ago
I would love for you to be right. Unfortunately in many cases the “windows” decision is made by C-levels who barely understand what you are talking about (or if they do, pretend they don’t to save their jobs)
jdubs1984 7mo ago
The efforts to make Windows a storefront and user data harvester over an OS will never be suspended, at least not under this CEO. 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.
EchoReflection 7mo ago
100%. It's amazing how unfriendly/hostile MS has become with things like forced updates, trying to force users to use their shitty, bloated "Edge" browser, MS "Copilot", building location "services" as an "on-by-default" aspect of the OS. it's like they were deliberately trying to make users switch to Apple or Linux. But since Linux is a little more for "tech-savvy" ppl, I imagine Apple has been the biggest winner of MS's blindness.

imjustmsk 7mo ago

I genuinely wish they woulda gotten beytet, it's always good have some competition Nd alternatives, but Microslop just wanna slop around after all.

scns 7mo ago

> where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is > dangerously close on performance sometimes more performant.

coreyburnsdev 7mo ago
most games I'm getting 1% lows that are much higher than windows at 4k resolution
mitkebes 7mo ago
> 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)
- cogman10 7mo ago
  There's really no reason why DirectX 12 can't be as fast as Vulkan. In fact, the fact that converting DirectX to Vulkan makes it faster sort of proves that point.
- MindSpunk 7mo ago
  > Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance 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.
  - StilesCrisis 7mo ago
    Not all games are DX12 though.
    - simonask 7mo ago
      Emulating DX11 and below, as well as OpenGL, using Vulkan does not confer any performance benefits. In fact, it’s really hard to surpass them that way. The performance benefits of Vulkan and DX12 come from tighter control over the hardware by the engine. An engine written for older APIs needs to be adapted to gain anything.
- noahbp 7mo ago
  3. Superior CPU schedulers, which do not ever undergo serious regressions that are not ever fixed: https://x.com/SheriefFYI/status/1856356547875541196 https://x.com/SheriefFYI/status/1856356547875541196 https://x.com/itsHemu2K/status/1887359825731899587 https://x.com/itsHemu2K/status/1887359825731899587 https://x.com/fREQUENCYCS/status/2003057996302049603 https://x.com/fREQUENCYCS/status/2003057996302049603
- L-four 7mo ago

999900000999 7mo ago

Normal people can not install an OS. Aside from like 3 ThinkPads on Lenovo's website, you can't really buy Linux pre installed on a computer. This is about the MacBook Neo coming for the budget laptop market. At 500$ it's an easy choice.

casey2 7mo ago
These days it's as easy as running a powershell script. There is 0 functional barrier to installing Linux from any windows machine. Soon the same will be true for the Neo.
bigyabai 7mo ago
Normal people can definitely install an OS. Last weekend I set aside time help a friend install CachyOS. They'd never used a terminal before and wanted some help. 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.
- hungryhobbit 7mo ago
  Define normal. I would argue at least 75% of the US population has zero interest in learning how to install a new OS, let alone actually do so themselves. I say this as a decades-long Linux user (who has tried to evangelize it many times).
  - bigyabai 7mo ago
    > has zero interest in learning Well I can agree with that, but that's not the same thing as being incapable of doing it. Both of my parents could easily install Linux, it's infantilizing to argue that they can't fill out a user wizard and select a drive to wipe.
    - bakugo 7mo ago
      > and select a drive to wipe You are vastly overestimating the percentage of the population that knows what a "drive" is. Not saying that's a good thing, but it's the reality.

everdrive 7mo ago

I wish you were right, but Microsoft has a lot of money they can throw at the problem. Right now they don't care about Windows because their money comes from Azure. There are a few concerns here: if people _really_ moved away from Windows that would actually threaten the Azure ecosystem. Further, since Microsoft doesn't care to make a profit (with Windows) they could also just throw resources at Windows because it supports their Azure business. Microsoft can hire talent if they need to and turn the ship around.

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
Azure is only successful because of big enterprise. Consumers using or not using Windows makes no difference Two factoids: Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs and AWS runs more Windows VMs than Azure.
pndy 7mo ago
It's possible that due to Azure success they decided that consumer sector is a testing ground for their exploitation patterns, where they can test out how much their userbase can withstand before being seriously annoyed. And this is what happen, people said "enough" by looking for alternatives. 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.
- PaulKeeble 7mo ago
  I think companies think that once they go past the threshold they will know almost immediately and then returning is a simple matter of returning to the threshold. But it doesn't work like that its more like how tires loose grip at the limit, once they start to slide they loose an enormous amount of grip and you need to roll back your use a lot before they regrip up. In tires its 30%, but the amniosity with customers that all the anti user things they have done its a never ending list of complaints and the last 10% nor 30% is going to cut it to stop the exodus. Once people have left its very unlikely they come back if Linux is still working well for them. People change operating systems like they change banks.

aeternum 7mo ago

Much of big tech became Product leaders running amok. Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best. 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.

mulmen 7mo ago
At this point Apple isn't even Apple. Product ate the world. I don't remember the last time someone came to me with a customer problem to solve. It's all warring fiefdoms.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  Perhaps AI is taking off because it is the only thing actually listening to customer problems.
  - Lammy 7mo ago
    Monkey's paw curls: listening to customers, except literally and 24/7.
  - nlawalker 7mo ago
    Best insight I’ve seen today, thanks for this!
  - macNchz 7mo ago
    Great point. Just last week I used AI to build a minimal replacement for a SaaS tool I’ve used in the past that has obnoxious feature gating/price tiers. My version isn’t nearly a complete replica, but it has the base functionality I want without having to feel like someone spent hundreds of hours perfecting price tiers with artificial limitations that annoy me just enough to upgrade. Getting a tool that did exactly what I wanted with no fuss was delightful.
- 7mo ago

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago

So are you predicting that 2026 will be the year of “Linux on the Desktop”?

PaulKeeble 7mo ago
Its going to take a lot longer than that. Hardware companies are very slow to adopt this sort of change, for this transition to happen it requires Microsoft to not get its act together for another decade.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  Just for perspective - that meme started around 1998-2000
deleted 7mo ago
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moffkalast 7mo ago
Every year is the year of Linux on desktop ;)
subscribed 7mo ago
I'm waiting for a better Nvidia drivers/performance in either Ubuntu or Fedora family and that's it for me. 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.

gzread 7mo ago

Linux works about as well on the desktop as it did in 2003 - if you know what you're doing, you can make it work, and if not, you can still run a browser but most things won't work for you. 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.

bikelang 7mo ago
I’m relatively new to Linux desktop and this hasn’t been my experience at all. What do you think doesn’t work?
suhputt 7mo ago
[dead]
rstat1 7mo ago
If that is truly what you think, then you clearly haven't used a Linux desktop distro since then because that absolutely incorrect.

hdivider 7mo ago

I really hope you're right. The challenge with Linux still seems to be practicalities -- like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions? 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.

asveikau 7mo ago
How many hours has Zoom put into making the client stable on Windows and Mac? 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.
- Tomis02 7mo ago
  > How many hours has Zoom put into making the client stable on Windows and Mac? Users don't really care, do they?
  - asveikau 7mo ago
    I'm not talking about that. I was replying to a claim that Zoom is less stable on a platform, as if that somehow happened for free and not as a result of a team tracking and fixing bugs on the application side, likely over the course of years.
anon291 7mo ago
I mean... Windows legitimately doesn't work. I work at one of the mag7 and it's a running jokes while using windows that suddenly everyone's microphone quits. We then have to restart. This has been going on years. Our colleagues on Linux don't have such problems. It's just that we accept windows issues as "that's how computers are". While Linux is expected to work

hsuduebc2 7mo ago

Absolutely. Fuck them. 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?

jmull 7mo ago

> its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back 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.)

brightball 7mo ago

I really wonder how much of an impact these AI tools are going to have on the Linux ecosystem. Seems like huge potential advantage brewing over proprietary OSs. Look how fast Omarchy came together and improved…it’s phenomenal.

trinsic2 7mo ago
I keep hearing that marketing term beautiful but I'm really not seeing it. It just looks like a tiling windows manager. Feels like we're going back in time.
- brightball 7mo ago
  It is a very well integrated, smooth and preconfigured tiling window manager that also has a scroll mode like Niri. I was using a different tiling manager before and there were all sorts of annoyances, pops breaking things. Behaviorally, this one gets everything right.

rsanheim 7mo ago

Yes. This. Too little too late MSFT. 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).

xnx 7mo ago

OS was twice made irrelevant by the browser and mobile. AI assistants will make the OS about as important to the average user as the BIOS.

pxc 7mo ago

Are the Linux graphics drivers actually worse, though? I thought it was widely agreed that the open-source user-space drivers, e.g., in Mesa, are actually very good these days.

M95D 7mo ago
Could be, but I can't afford the GPUs they are so very good on.

jaimex2 7mo ago

It's been 10 years since I booted Windows or MacOS. It's been fantastic. People always find an excuse but really they are doing themselves a disservice.

jaimex2 7mo ago
Microslop employees down voting - lol

reyaaltrooth 7mo ago

It hard to say what went wrong with this company. They were doing all the right things, hiring top notch decision makers like Satya, Pavan Davuluri, Asha Sharma, Sonali Yadav. Then employing tens of thousands of highly skilled H1Bs. I guess its just bad luck that this company's product quality is down in the drain.

alsetmusic 7mo ago
> I guess its just bad luck that this company's product quality is down in the drain. 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.
- bananadonkey 7mo ago
  WSL is great. Its biggest drawback is that it requires the use of Windows.
  - codethief 7mo ago
    I don't know, man. For the past year I've been having the "pleasure" of using Windows again for the first time in 16 years. My coworkers recommended I try the WSL since in their eyes I'm a "Linux guy". Well, the WSL crashed an hour into using it (forcing me to reboot Windows because nothing else helped) and then a couple more times that very same day. On a fresh Windows installation. I ended up installing VMWare and using a full Linux VM. Yes, VMWare. That's how desperate I was.
    - renegade-otter 7mo ago
      Nothing wrong with it. VMPlayer is still solid. I've been working in a Linux guest for years.
halJordan 7mo ago
It's definitely not bad luck. It's entirely a driven chosen situation. Read the blog post. They're not improving quality there reverting anti-end user decisions. "Quieter defaults," "more control over widgets" 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"

jongjong 7mo ago

The media is a powerful force. 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.

CodeCompost 7mo ago
> For a developer, Linux is far superior for many reasons. This is precisely why Microsoft created WSL2
zeroc8 7mo ago
Yes, for a developer it's great. 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.

qingcharles 7mo ago

I've used *nix extensively headless for the last 30 years, but I have decision paralysis when it comes to figuring out what the heck Linux distro is good for a desktop.

hkt 7mo ago
Honestly, pick one of the well known distros at random. Personally I use Manjaro with GNOME: up to date software and a polished out of the box experience. I never have to go to the terminal unless I want to.
deleted 7mo ago
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subscribed 7mo ago
There's a handful of the easy ones, all offering slightly different experiences, all good. 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.
juliangmp 7mo ago
Just go for whatever DE looks pretty to you, I personally like KDE. Don't be afraid to switch to a different desktop later on, its just a few packages to install most of the time. 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.
- trinsic2 7mo ago

zaradvutra 7mo ago

> We are now at the point where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is dangerously close on performance with none of the privacy invasion and anti user features. .. yet. The absolute roll-over I've seen regarding OS level age verification is concerning and disheartening.

leptons 7mo ago

Microsoft Windows will be just fine for a very long time. Corporate security systems and IT admin doesn't typically run on Linux well or at all, but it does run on Windows and MacOS. We're using popular auth software at my work, but it does not run on Linux otherwise I'd have switched to Linux on my work machines a while ago. That alone is 3 computers that won't ever have Linux. Anecdotal, I know, but the corporate world does not care about Linux as a computing platform outside of servers and machines that people don't use as a desktop/laptop to get work done. Sadly, Microsoft isn't going anywhere and I doubt they are worried about losing any market share to Linux.

DANmode 7mo ago

Gamers aren’t the table stakes. Enterprise users are.

chanux 7mo ago

Even though MacOS is not terribly better, it's good enough. Add to that the new cheaper macbook and it must inspire pause in the great folks at Microsoft.

moffkalast 7mo ago
MacOS has been going downhill as well though, at least from what I hear from long time users.

mxkopy 7mo ago

One thing I will give to them is the MSVC ecosystem. (Something something developers) 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.

safety1st 7mo ago

This is a good time to reflect on how business actually works (as opposed to how hopeful consumers wish it would work). 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.

rmunn 7mo ago
I'd argue that although publicly-traded businesses do usually go through that cycle (I would say that it's not ALL, but it's certainly MOST, because I can't come up with a counterexample), privately-owned businesses are more likely to avoid it. For example, McMaster-Carr. Privately-owned, with just a few owners rather than a large number of shareholders. And as far as I know (never having been one of their customers myself, just hearing testimonials), they're still just as good at making quality products that their customers want as they were a hundred twenty-five years ago when they got started. No "TAKING PROFITS" stage, and no subsequent decline. 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.

thienannguyencv 7mo ago

The irony here is that their "commitment to quality" is essentially an admission they never delivered. And half of what they promised—like moving the taskbar—are features that already exist in Windows 10. They removed them, ignored complaints for years, and now they say they're "listening to feedback." 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.

whiplash451 7mo ago

I would love for you to be right. Unfortunately in many cases the “windows” decision is made by C-levels who barely understand what you are talking about (or if they do, pretend they don’t to save their jobs)

jdubs1984 7mo ago

The efforts to make Windows a storefront and user data harvester over an OS will never be suspended, at least not under this CEO. 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.

EchoReflection 7mo ago

100%. It's amazing how unfriendly/hostile MS has become with things like forced updates, trying to force users to use their shitty, bloated "Edge" browser, MS "Copilot", building location "services" as an "on-by-default" aspect of the OS. it's like they were deliberately trying to make users switch to Apple or Linux. But since Linux is a little more for "tech-savvy" ppl, I imagine Apple has been the biggest winner of MS's blindness.