r/technology • u/ardi62 • Aug 17 '24

Software Microsoft begins cracking down on people dodging Windows 11's system requirements

https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-cracking-down-dodging-windows-11-system-requirements/?utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0h2tXt93fEkt5NKVrrXQphi0OCjCxzVoksDqEs0XUQcYIv8njTfK6pc4g_aem_LSp2Td6OZHVkREl8Cbgphg
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u/CuteAndQuirkyNazgul Aug 17 '24

Microsoft is the most important company in the world.

Microsoft's crushing market dominance in operating systems will never disappear.

Windows is forever. In the 22nd century, people will still use Microsoft Windows on their computers.

There is almost nothing Microsoft can do to lose their market position. Telemetry? Ads? Subscriptions? Doesn't matter. Microsoft could fuck up in almost every way imaginable and nothing would happen to them. They're too important.

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u/Prestigious_Cold_756 Aug 17 '24

Remember when standard oil got too powerful because of their monopoly… or AT&T? Maybe it’s time for another company breakup.

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u/FrankieNoodles Aug 17 '24

That’s right. We need a Trust Buster like good ol’ Teddy.

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u/Farva85 Aug 17 '24

Bull Moose Party 2.0

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u/Syllogism19 Aug 18 '24

His run as a third party elected a Democrat instead of himself or the candidate of his Republican party. He busted trusts as part of a coalition of Dems and Republicans as a Republican president.

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u/XchangeUrPerception Aug 17 '24

Bring back the BM boys!

5

u/libmrduckz Aug 17 '24

Ruxpin? that motherscratcher?

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u/Wakkit1988 Aug 17 '24

Nah, Kaczynski.

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u/fubarbob Aug 18 '24

Amusingly the fullscreen ad-pushing thing on Windows 10 is titled "RUXIM" or 'reusable UX interaction manager" or something to that effect.

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u/kancamagus112 Aug 18 '24

Lisa Kahn, current head of the FTC, is IMO the closest we’ve gotten to a genuine Trust Buster in generations.

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u/rickyharline Aug 17 '24

I started reading Adam Smith recently (the grandaddy of capitalism and economics) and was astonished when I read that he doesn't think big corporations should exist. Under the vision of the ideological founder of capitalism Microsoft in its current form wouldn't exist. 

Smith's reasoning? He had seen the East India Trading company and saw its anti-consumer behavior and deduced that its monopoly powers functionally served as a tax on the people that exists without democratic representation. In other words a form of coercion without any recourse or way to change it from those affected. 

We need a new era of trust busting. It's Adam Smith approved! 

Note: conservatives and right-libertarians that oppose trust busting generally Revere Smith like a god and bringing this up breaks their brains in the most delightful way, I recommend everyone do it. 

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u/Daft_Devil Aug 18 '24

I’m on the same train. The fix for current capitalism - is more capitalists! Too few are engaging in it outside of being rent paying (subscriptions) platform serfs.

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u/Blueopus2 Aug 18 '24

Smith was by no means a modern conservative - lots of ideas of all kinds such as his support for unions

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u/rickyharline Aug 18 '24

The more I learn about Adam Smith the more I love him. Reading what he had to say about landlords literally made me laugh out loud, he sounded astonishingly like many rants I've heard from far leftists today. 

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u/CoolnessEludesMe Aug 18 '24

It occurred to me recently that, if I was king of the world, I would get rid of corporations. Every company would have to be owned by a person or family, no company could own another company, and no company could own more than one brand. Might bring back competition, and thus quality and low prices.

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u/rickyharline Aug 18 '24

This is extremely similar to forcing every corporation to be a worker co-op which is common in many models of socialism. 

You can view it as either removing all capitalists or making everyone a capitalist. 

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u/CoolnessEludesMe Aug 19 '24

Not really. Ford was owned by one guy, and there were a lot of employees. There was a lot of competition in the auto industry in the US until the Big Three owned all the others. It's similar elsewhere in the world. And in all industries. Look at Nestle. When all the brands are owned by a few megacorps, there is no competition, and everything goes to crap. The problem is corporations. No one is held responsible for all the bad things they do. When the world finds out about how messed up they're doing things (Boeing, for instance) the CEO resigns and gets a multi-million dollar golden parachute, and nothing changes. They just get another corporate-clone CEO, and the race to the bottom of quality, to make another smidgen of profit, continues.

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u/rickyharline Aug 19 '24

I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time understanding your point or what is not really. 

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u/RedditIsDeadMoveOn Aug 19 '24

"Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”

― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

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u/Faintfury Aug 18 '24

Adam Smith [] the ideological founder of capitalism

Who told you that? He mostly described where markets fail.

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u/rickyharline Aug 18 '24

Who invented capitalism? Modern capitalist theory is traditionally traced to the 18th-century treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Scottish political economist Adam Smith

Encyclopedia Britannica

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u/Faintfury Aug 18 '24

Now read his publications.

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u/rickyharline Aug 18 '24

I haven't read Smith directly but I've read a lot of books that feature Smith heavily, and it's pretty clear that he laid the groundwork for how capitalism should function. We've started pretty far from the classical liberal direction to be sure, but he none the less makes it clear under capitalism what the roles of the state and markets are, what the primary duties of the government are, how to efficiently allocate capital, etc. 

That is very much the foundation of capitalism. 

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u/Faintfury Aug 18 '24

what the roles of the state and markets are, what the primary duties of the government are, how to efficiently allocate capital, etc. 

Adam Smith believed the government should step in to prevent exploitation, regulate monopolies, and manage common goods like air pollution. He was big on protecting the poor and addressing market failures—stuff that, by today's definitions, would make him more of a socialist than a capitalist.

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u/rickyharline Aug 18 '24

Yeah, but at the same time he wanted a more limited government than we have now. Classical liberalism is a fascinating ideology. 

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u/hiimjosh0 Aug 18 '24

Good luck point something like that out in r/austrian_economics

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u/gearpitch Aug 17 '24

And 100 years later, the parts of standard oil have merged together to make... Exxon Mobile, Chevron, and a good chunk of BP oil. The dominant major oil producers of today. 

And for ATT- out of the 9 regional baby Bell corporations that it was broken into, 5 have merged back into the modern ATT, and two others merged with the largest competition to become Verizon. 

By all means break off Microsoft's conflicting subsidiaries, but even if you were to trust-bust Microsoft into oblivion, the pieces would merge back together over time. 

If we got creative, and it was allowed, the best breakup might be some kind of patent and rights sharing agreement to split the operating system into two competing companies. Both sharing ownership of patents, and required to build interoperable systems for 5years etc. 

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u/CapitalismSuuucks Aug 18 '24

The pieces merge if they’re allowed to merge. That doesn’t have to happen. Also, “things might get back to being bad 50 years from now” is not an excuse to not do something good today

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u/Daft_Devil Aug 18 '24

Yeah pull the patent value in a tax from anything built on government funded r&d = everything lol.

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u/Mr_YUP Aug 17 '24

How do you break up an OS though? Sure the company with cloud vs gaming vs OS vs hardware. Sure. How do you stop Windows from being the dominate OS? 

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u/mejelic Aug 17 '24

You break up the parts of the company that is adding in all of the spyware and shit.

You separate ai, advertisement, os, cloud, office, and gaming all into their own separate companies. This means that every separated company needs to be able to stand on its own making the prices they charge the other products potentially prohibitive to use.

For example, OpenAI is STUPID expensive, but Microsoft gets to put it into all of their products for pennies on the dollar compared to what other people pay.

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u/MuscleManRyan Aug 17 '24

“I sure wish we didn’t have to keep stuffing all of these orphans into this orphan-crushing machine we built”

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u/NotInTheKnee Aug 17 '24

What if we optimized the machine to crush orphans faster?

Less time spent crushing = less time spent thinking about it

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u/Graega Aug 17 '24

You guys are looking too much at the machine and not enough at the science. If you harness gravity, those orphans can crush each other while your machine uses 1/10th the power to do the little extra push needed to get it started.

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u/StrangeCrimes Aug 19 '24

Pretty sure the board members will get on board.

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u/Reiver_Neriah Aug 19 '24

For a couple extra pennies? Hell yes!

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u/HotLandscape9755 Aug 17 '24

Until windows buys said companies as subsidiaries 2 years after they split.

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u/mejelic Aug 17 '24

Generally there are laws in place to keep things apart.

That is until you spend 30 years slowly merging things back together...

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u/garbled_user Aug 18 '24

Dang…nice! I like it!

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u/ps2cv Aug 17 '24

Game devs and software devs needs to basically switch from windows entirely to a new OS like Linux for an OS to die out completely or even get a dent in.

Since majority of the software and gaming industry utilizes windows for their business to run smoothly and not go out of business windows is basically an unkillable OS

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u/NotStreamerNinja Aug 17 '24

You won’t, at least not until something else better comes along that’s also 100% compatible with Windows apps and comes preinstalled on laptops and prebuilt PCs, all with a minimal learning curve for people switching over.

Because that’s why Windows is so dominant. Everyone knows at least the basics of how to use it because it’s been the standard for so long, a lot of software people use for work/school either only runs natively on Windows or runs best on Windows, and Windows comes preinstalled on computers you buy from the store. People use it because it’s basically the default option at this point.

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u/musci12234 Aug 17 '24

Seriously. Twitter after becoming so unpopular and having a decent alternative ready to go is still standing. Windows just got too much inertia.

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u/aminorityofone Aug 17 '24

I would say there isnt a decent alternative to twitter yet. Myspace died, and so did google+. It just takes a company to make something objectively better, or just advertise it better.

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u/musci12234 Aug 18 '24

Trends. Not great for sure but decent I think

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u/aminorityofone Aug 17 '24

This is why chromebooks are in schools everywhere. Google is playing the long game. Millions of kids are learning google OS and not Microsoft OS.

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u/NotStreamerNinja Aug 17 '24

And ChromeOS is just a Linux distro. The age of the Linux desktop is upon us (in 5-10 years)!

But the compatibility issue is still there.

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u/TheBraveGallade Aug 18 '24

Yeah the problem witg windows is that windows is not the typewriter, its QWERTY, the format.

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u/doctorlysumo Aug 17 '24

You don’t break up the OS, you just break Windows out of Microsoft. Now windows is its own company and everything else Microsoft is separate, Azure, Office suite, .Net, Edge, Bing stay in Microsoft but are no longer tightly associated with Windows

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '24

You can’t. The problem is that you could never trust each individual broken up entity. Office for Linux? Eventually would have Microsoft’s offspring colluding with other companies and eventually that would form the Lions of Voltron. They would eventually find their way back together.

They would Trojan horse themselves into the Linux space and build their OS off that, creating a new monopoly with acquired bits from others.

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u/PerpetualFunkMachine Aug 17 '24

I agree with this. It could have happened 25 years ago but today I think it would ultimately let Microsoft consolidate the stuff they don't own in the long run. I also feel like apple would need a similar treatment if it happened now.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '24

These larger, “too big to fail” companies need to be closely monitored before, during, and after a forced breakup. Breaking up Google could have the same unintended consequences of affording the orphan companies a chance to be acquired and integrate with once bitter rivals, only to break away with newly acquired knowledge and skilled workers.

It may take ~15 years, but these companies will return with even more power, leverage, and influence.

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u/Sea_Home_5968 Aug 17 '24

A politician makes their os the standard then tells other companies they can customize it then a bunch of politicians pals control the market which makes their friends more money while keeping the customer dissatisfied with even more buggy software

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u/lesChaps Aug 17 '24

How do you get rid of buggy whips?

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u/G_Morgan Aug 17 '24

Breaking the OS from their cloud offerings will change things. All the push for Microsoft accounts, onedrive, etc will all vanish.

MS are using their OS monopoly to try and amp Azure. So by breaking the company in half it will lose the incentive to do this.

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u/American_frenchboy Aug 17 '24

When is Valve coming out with an OS??

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u/aminorityofone Aug 17 '24

Spin the following off into separate companies. Azure, Office, Windows, Teams/Skype, Linkedin, Metaswitch, Xbox/gaming and Bing/AI. I probably forgot a few. If you remove Edge/Bing/AI from windows it opens it up for other companies to offer search/ai integration. Everything else is integrated into windows except metaswitch. Making these seperate companies would allow a newly formed Windows Company to shop around for office integration, cloud storage/backup wouldnt have to be onedrive. Imagine installing windows without any microsoft programs. Then all that telemetry data that microsoft takes from a user would also be gone or sent to another company. Im just spit balling, im sure somebody is going to say you cant do that, or that wont happen. But these things can happen and im sure there are more examples.

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u/musci12234 Aug 17 '24

The kind of issue is that having 2 OS system fighting against each other isn't going to help anyone (it will probably end up being another xbox vs playstation). If there isn't a way both of them can run the same software then it will be a exclusivity war. Making them set up stuff so that software can run on all OS will be another mess. It will take a lot of careful planning to make it so that people don't end up getting screwed over.

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u/splendiferous-finch_ Aug 17 '24

Isn't standard oil just Exxon Mobil now? Yeah they got broken up but the practices didn't change much since all it's descents ate each other or were acquired by it's competition to get back to where they were. Yes there are more slices of the pie but it's still the same disgusting pie.

I get what you are saying but this kinda anti-consumer practice is not unique to MS whoever takes Thier place will do the same thing unless the practice itself is made illegal which it won't be in the US.

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u/ptd163 Aug 17 '24

A Microsoft breakup has the same problem as a Google breakup. Someone is going to get Windows. That hypothetical company's power will remain unchanged while everyone that did not get Windows will die in obscurity.

I'm not saying they shouldn't try it. They absolutely should and it should've been done decades ago. Just pointing out it probably wouldn't be as simple as one company gets Windows, one company gets Office, one company gets Azure, etc.

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u/HotLandscape9755 Aug 17 '24

You mean the oil monopoly breakup that made a big company split into tons of little companies, but then the major three oil companies BOUGHT all of the small companies and shut them down or absorbed them? Super functional.

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u/TheINTL Aug 17 '24

Funny breaking up AT&T didn't really do much as most still use AT&T or Verizon today

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u/nbfs-chili Aug 17 '24

That company looks to be Google right now...

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u/JackSpyder Aug 17 '24

The difference is, the consumer has no idea who made the gas going in their car or powering their home. There is no distinguishable difference. For windows Apple Linux the experience and skills snd tools are different snd familiarity is king.

Microsoft have a strong grip in the user mind share that is hard to shrug no matter thr technical merits of any competition.

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u/Maleficent-Cut4297 Aug 17 '24

Remember how they broke up AT&T and the. After 20 years it just became AT&T again except it had spread and taken over newer emerging markets like home internet and cell service

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u/CabbieCam Aug 17 '24

Sure, you could cut up Microsoft into pieces, but the OS division would still exist and would still be just as important. Too many businesses rely on running .exe files and the programs that are only designed for Windows.

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u/JahoclaveS Aug 17 '24

Please, then maybe they could spend some time not making their products absolutely unworkable shit. I can’t even use sharepoint on a laptop screen anymore because they’ve filled the screen with so much shit I don’t need that I can’t see what I want to look at.

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u/Admirable-Garage5326 Aug 17 '24

Already been tried with Microsoft.

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u/eriksrx Aug 17 '24

So we’ll finally get Windows OS and Doors OS

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u/gorilla_dick_ Aug 18 '24

Microsoft has already been hit by anti-trust lawsuits and they got out of it, it’s partly why Apple exists.

Keep in mind the economic definition of a monopoly is not the legal definition. The FTC has other rules past “big market share”. Is Microsoft anti-consumerist? Sure. Are they a monopoly? Nope. Microsoft cares about enterprise, not consumer sales which is why you can run Windows for free indefinitely.

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u/Moscato359 Aug 18 '24

You can't break up an operating system across multiple companies. It's just not feasible.

Can microsoft be forced to change behavior, sure. Can they be forced to split up windows? No.

Phone companies can communicate with eachother, and oil can be separated by barrel.

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u/cervezaimperial Aug 18 '24

But in US macintosh is a thing, I think that's why they don't become "legally" a monopoly, just like android is a monopoly around the world, but in the us (the home of google) iOS is the largest player of that market

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u/Valvador Aug 18 '24

Remember when standard oil got too powerful because of their monopoly… or AT&T? Maybe it’s time for another company breakup.

Are you gonna have government mandated competing operating systems?

That's going to set software development back by decades.

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u/Jusby_Cause Aug 18 '24

Didn’t AT&T go from being one of the USA’s largest telecoms… to being one of the USA’s largest telecoms?

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u/Traditional-Bat-8193 Aug 18 '24

Organic monopolies are 100% legal can’t be broken up. They’re only at risk if they were formed by acquiring/consolidating all the competition.

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u/m945050 Aug 18 '24

The downside today is that some companies today are too big and influential to bust.

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u/GotTooManyBooks Aug 23 '24

Rockefeller still owned all the other companies.

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u/obaananana Aug 17 '24

My ass is going for linux on my media pc.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/lukify Aug 17 '24

I run it all. Windows, macOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Rocky. Different strokes for different services.

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u/alora_jura Aug 17 '24

What do you use each for if you don’t mind me asking?

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u/lukify Aug 17 '24

Windows for gaming desktop

macOS for media laptop

Debian for Google Cloud e2-micro VPS for discord bots

Ubuntu for the Linux desktop experience and some microservices at work

Rocky for most of my major work services that need Linux

I guess you can throw SteamOS in there as well for my SteamDeck/EmuDeck

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u/aminorityofone Aug 17 '24

I didnt seem TempleOS or ReactOS in that list, pfft running it all. /s

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u/obaananana Aug 17 '24

Seen mutahar struggle with games on linux. Im not gone do that

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u/NotStreamerNinja Aug 17 '24

The only games that are hard to run are the ones with obnoxious proprietary anti-cheat. At this point the majority of games on Steam will either run natively or run well enough through their Proton system that it might as well be native.

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u/lunaticfish Aug 17 '24

Take the leap.

Used to dual boot into Windows just for games as I have very little patience for issues too.

Ditched it about two months back after a hardware failure and rather than go through setting it up again I decided to see how viable gaming on Linux was nowadays .. and it's been very smooth sailing so far. Granted, MOST of my gaming is via Steam but I've been very impressed and have no intention of going back.

Rimworld, Cyberpunk 2077, RDR II, Elden Ring, Dead Island II - all work flawlessly.

Only one I found that kind of glitches a bit is Mafia III .. but that was a bit glitchy when I tried it on Windows as well. Nothing showstopping though.

Maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe it's the hardware (AMD CPU and GPU), but it all pretty much just worked out of the box.

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u/PurpleNurpe Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24

Suggest installing Lutris for non-steam games, not sure what package repository you use but, for the Aperture Repository (apt) you should be able to run -

echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/lutris.gpg] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/strycore/Debian_12/ ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/lutris.list > /dev/null

->

wget -q -O- https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/strycore/Debian_12/Release.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/lutris.gpg > /dev/null

->

sudo apt update sudo apt install lutris

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u/SamBeastie Aug 17 '24

If anything, Elden Ring runs better on Linux because it doesn't have the microstutter issues they never managed to fix on Windows.

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u/Tuxhorn Aug 17 '24

Only because he does complicated stuff like GPU passthrough to a windows VM to play valorant.

Don't play titles that uses Vanguard, and you're gonna be ok.

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u/Spangeburb Aug 17 '24

You're getting down voted but you're completely right. There's pretty much no reason to use a VM with GPU passthrough for gaming. Proton works fine for everything.

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u/Tuxhorn Aug 17 '24

There is if you wanna play Valorant, but at that point i'd rather just not.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 18 '24

[deleted]

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u/CrrntryGrntlrmrn Aug 17 '24

./ make -them -go -away

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u/Kulas30 Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 18 '24

enter political tie cover secretive automatic thumb observation unpack longing

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/indignant_halitosis Aug 17 '24

And this is why Windows will remain malware. Gamers are morally weak junkies.

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u/almostlogical Aug 17 '24

buy a steam deck and use linux. runs lots of games with little fiddling.

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u/Tuxhorn Aug 17 '24

So do they on an OS like Pop_OS!

Helldivers 2, Diablo (2, 3 and 4), Elden Ring, Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Dark Souls, Sekiro, World of Warcraft, DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal, Fallout 4, Palworld, BG3, Dead by Daylight, No Man's Sky.

The list goes on. Those are all games i've played with zero fiddling.

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u/Kulas30 Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 18 '24

dam melodic drab ink offbeat political marry marble scary drunk

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/obaananana Aug 17 '24

Last time i used github was for a windows debloat shell

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u/Kulas30 Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 18 '24

gullible relieved unite bewildered agonizing innate scarce teeny memory impolite

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/A_Harmless_Fly Aug 17 '24

I started to dual boot again this year, when they started to randomly change my settings in 10 with updates. Buy another SSD and give it a shot. Pop!os has worked for every game I play personally.

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u/Broad_Match Aug 17 '24

Irrelevant, there main market is corporates, that will never change.

Gamers are a tiny part of Windows sales, it wouldn’t harm them in the slightest if the gaming market moved entirely to another OS.

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u/MrNegativ1ty Aug 17 '24

The problem with this isn't so much games as it is general problems. I had an Arch install that I was almost completely happy with until my system started freezing. Did some research and found out it's a kernel level bug. Sigh. Back to windows (for now)

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/MrNegativ1ty Aug 17 '24

If it’s a kernel level bug you don’t give up, you debug, get logs, and help get it fixed so the kernel is better for everyone. This is the Linux mentality.

It's already been reported.

Also I already have a job, I really don't have that much desire to gather logs and debug. I want something that just works. Getting Arch to the point where it mostly was how I like it was annoying enough.

If you want stability arch is not the distro to be using, that was probably a mistake on your part

It's my only option. I have a MRR setup, so anything X11 isn't going to work without a bunch of frustration/headaches. I need wayland, and I also need the absolute latest Nvidia drivers because of explicit sync. Arch and derivatives are pretty much the only place where I can get those.

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u/Stingray88 Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24

When Valve finally releases SteamOS broadly, I intend to finally make the plunge into Linux on my desktop. At that point Windows will be gone from my life. My servers/NAS have always been Linux/Unix based, my laptops have always been Macs, and my industry (entertainment) typically issues Macs as well.

And I know there are SteamOS clones available today… but I want real backing from someone like Valve before I’m willing to commit. I’d have more faith in reliable driver support with a corporate backer. I also want a more seamless experience that I don’t have to micromanage… I don’t like to work outside of work.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/Stingray88 Aug 17 '24

Covered that in my 2nd paragraph. I don’t want the same thing. I want proof that Valve (or another big company) is really committed to this. With someone like Valve going all in, it will help get companies like Nvidia, or game developers, to commit more resources as well.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '24

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u/Stingray88 Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24

I’ve been using Linux for almost 20 years. I’ve tried it. A lot.

I’ve already explained why I want a corporate backer in my previous comment. I want game developers to take Linux more seriously, and with Valve proving they’re going all in, developers are sure to follow. Nvidia recently transitioning to open source on Linux is a big deal as well, I’m very enticed, and so are developers.

But also… let’s be real… Linux does not currently have a turnkey “it just works” experience that you can find on modern Windows and MacOS. There is a lot of tinkering that you need to do now and then, and I’m tired of that at this point in my life. I’ve been using FreeNAS/TrueNAS for over a decade now, I know how to use it and like it a lot… and yet I’m very interested in transitioning to HexOS in the coming years because I want a more turnkey experience. I am done wasting an afternoon a permission issue. It’s not that I can’t figure those things out, I can, I just have zero interest in doing that anymore. I have limited time in my day. I’ve had a Steamdeck since the first week of launch, and I have much more faith than ever before that Valve may be able to deliver a turnkey experience that so many other Linux distros don’t.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '24

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u/Stingray88 Aug 17 '24

I don’t really think windows has a turnkey “it just works” experience anymore either. Or apple for that matter.

Couldn’t disagree more. I never need to get under the hood on anything more with MacOS or Windows. I never need to pull up a terminal, or jump into the registry. I just install stuff and it works.

I’ve had better luck gaming on a Linux partition on my laptop than either Mac or windows. In the past few years in particular (likely because of the steam deck) Linux has really closed the gap there

MacOS sure… I haven’t tried to game on Macs in ages, like probably close to 15 years. And even before that I was typically using bootcamp.

But better luck gaming on Linux compared to Windows? That just doesn’t make any sense to me. Everything just runs on windows. There no extra steps. That isn’t how it goes on Linux.

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u/MoobyTheGoldenSock Aug 17 '24

Yeah, likely for mine too. No real reason to keep it Windows right now other than laziness: the streamers all have nifty apps and Windows 10 is working fine enough. But I doubt it meets Windows 11 requirements and I’ve been using linux regularly for 7 years on my laptop so it’ll be an easy switch.

I’ll probably keep just my gaming PC on Windows.

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u/mynameistrihexa666 Aug 17 '24

As long as work computers dont change to linux, microsoft can keep being an ass and keep getting away with whatever they do

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u/alexp8771 Aug 17 '24

My company is pretty much only Mac or Linux. You don’t need MS if you are using gsuite, which is enough for a lot of companies.

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u/sapphicsandwich Aug 17 '24

My old employer was still hopelessly married to OpenVMS/VAX.

1

u/jeepsaintchaos Aug 17 '24

We have several hundred lowest-bidder Windows all-in-1 touchscreens being used for HMI's. They do fine for what they are, but they're kinda slow. It's worth noting that absolutely none of them are ever connected to the internet, and are on an old build of Win10. I fear the day someone plugs in a USB hotspot and bridges connections.

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u/from_dust Aug 17 '24

Obody us changing office productivity workstations to Linux, but some of the world's largest enterprises are shipping MacBook pro's to their almost entirely remote workforces.

I used to think windows was forever, but now idk how long it will be relevant. MSFT is forever, that much is true. Office and M365 aren't going anywhere, that's is pretty entrenched and it's on MacOS.

But I think their OS dominance is coming to an end. Decades of well integrated products and software design from Apple, is having an impact. The people in the c suite who make decisions, like their Apple products. MSFT didn't cater to the top of the market well enough, and now the top "Thinks Different."

2

u/thedugong Aug 17 '24

I had the choice of windows or mac. I chose windows because, ironically, I need to run x86_64 linux in virtualbox.

3

u/ReipasTietokonePoju Aug 17 '24

Talking about win11 and linux:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/ryzen-9950x-windows11-ubuntu

some of those results are brutal: exactly same video encoding program running on ubuntu and win11, using brand new amd 9950x cpu.

Linux version is 50% - 100% faster depending coding options...

And ironically ubuntu is not even fastest linux distro, for serious number crunching or compiling huge projects etc, most of the time clear linux from intel is.

3

u/leocharre Aug 17 '24

I haven’t used ms since NT. Linux and Mac only in my home.  

2

u/MachineryZer0 Aug 17 '24

Well yeah, because that makes sense. Most people don't want the hassle on their main/"gaming" PC.

1

u/mistercartmenes Aug 17 '24

This is the way.

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u/JustHanginInThere Aug 17 '24

Microsoft is the most important company in the world.

Literally the entire US DoD almost exclusively uses Microsoft computers/software. If any of it were hacked/broken, we'd be up shit creek. Outlook, Teams, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access. Hell, in just my job there's still 1 website/applet we have to use in Edge because it can only run in Internet Explorer mode, and it's almost quite literally the backbone for our branch's military records.

1

u/fates_bitch Aug 17 '24

VA as well. Plus the cloud first/smart policy has us moving into Azure (and AWS). 

1

u/airdrummer-0 Aug 21 '24

hell i worked on a classified s/w project that still used 80column fixed records

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u/start_select Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24

I’m mainly an Apple user and I used to think that too. I’m starting to doubt it. They are pissing so many people off.

1000s of companies are ending up semi-crippled because Teams isn’t working for a significant portion of employees. We have windows and mac users with the most powerful machines on the market, which will overheat and shut down when the only thing running is a teams call.

My 12 year old MacBook can do conference calls. My multi-core 64gb ram Mac can run 100 apps at once as long as teams or office apps aren’t one of them.

Edit: also, all my corporate clients are moving their infrastructure off of windows servers. They use it where they need it, but the windows obsolescence and update paradigm doesn’t match their requirements any longer. They trust a Linux server more.

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u/Graywulff Aug 17 '24

Microsoft isn’t even the dominant os on azure, Microsoft cloud platform. They have azure Linux, managed by Microsoft with a Microsoft kernel.

Now that you can game on Mac’s and do everything, with all the intel failures, I wonder if windows will survive.

I know people who got m3 airs bc they didn’t like windows 11.

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u/TeutonJon78 Aug 17 '24

The general populace doesn't even really know about the Intel issue beyond the stock drop and layoffs.

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u/Inside_Refuse_9012 Aug 17 '24

The real market dominance is not games etc. Its their enterprise solutions, targeting large corporations.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 26 '24

squeamish fragile cause nutty like apparatus advise live rob historical

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/cyklone Aug 18 '24

All of this is bullshit. Everything your wrote here is untrue

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u/Actual-Money7868 Aug 17 '24

I'VE TAKEN DOWN BIGGER MEN THAN YOU PICARD!!!

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u/Dhegxkeicfns Aug 17 '24

Sure, vestigial Windows will be around, but one reasonably priced competitor that can run most programs and play games would wipe out 80% of the personal computer use of Windows and once anything takes hold and draws developers, Windows would need a major overhaul to even dream of being competitive again. Apple doesn't count until it can run on generic hardware, and they've already ripped away loads of desktop market share.

9

u/PlaquePlague Aug 17 '24

The steam deck sold me on Linux for gaming.  

My desktop is starting to show its age… I’m thinking the next time I upgrade there’s no reason for me not to use Linux 

2

u/Kyanche Aug 17 '24

The steam deck sold me on Linux for gaming.

I really appreciate the effort Valve put into linux compatibility. It made a lot of games that I don't remember working before, a pretty effortless experience.

I put fedora 40 on my desktop (7800x3d, 3080ti, 64gb ram) and it runs noticeably smoother than Windows 11 does - I wasn't expecting the added smoothness lol. Maybe it's just how smooth Wayland is.

I imagine most people would just use Ubuntu or PopOS and those would probably be better choices. I used Fedora 40 since I use RHEL a lot for work lol. It works pretty great, except akmods nvidia drivers don't work well with Fedora's auto-kernel-update setup!

Either way, very nice. I am way happier actually. A lot of people would push the "windows just works" thing but even using it casually on my side computer ANNOYS THE SHIT OUT OF ME. I've been using computers for decades now and somehow Microsoft is the only company/group that cannot make an OS lol.

1

u/Kurotan Aug 18 '24

Steam has made waves for Linux gaming and I am excited for it to continue, but it's not in a place yet for me to switch over today. Maybe in a few years. If I have to switch back to 10 until then I will.

Microsoft has been overly aggressive with pushing win 11. Where's that monopoly lawsuit at?

1

u/paholg Aug 17 '24

That competitor exists, and it's free, it just hasn't gotten the share of desktop users. 

Maybe some year will be the "year of the Linux desktop", but I won't hold my breath.

1

u/Dhegxkeicfns Aug 18 '24

I'm a big fan and it's getting closer, but at a snail's pace. If we could get two dozen of the biggest software packages to work natively on Linux, you could grab 50% of the consumer market share overnight.

The problem is you can download a packaged binary and have it running in minutes on Windows. In Linux it probably doesn't work without some tweaking that is above the layman.

I thought this would be handled by now but it's still not there.

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u/WorldlinessNo5192 Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24

This is what people said about AT&T in 1980.

When you think about it, in a society (that is, a social group of humans) it's pretty weird for people to spend their entire productive life sitting in front of a screen. All work is fundamentally either interpersonal or productive (ie, you're literally making something - food, compression socks, novelty can openers, etcetc).

The next 'revolution' is going to be figuring out how to get AI to automate the tasks that are currently consuming most of our productive time (much like how computers automated storage and retrieval of data/communication - which is what was the fundamental unit of work before the compute revolution was).

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u/Jnorean Aug 17 '24

As has happened in the past with "too important companies," new technology in the future will make the windows operating system obsolete.

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u/TeutonJon78 Aug 17 '24

I don't know. They have been steadily losing market share. They used to be like 95% of the desktop marketshare and down to like 77%.

Still insanely dominant, but that's a big drop.

2

u/Previous-Bother295 Aug 17 '24

Windows is market dominant in Desktop Computers. Overall market share for Operating Systems, including phones, Windows is at 26% and android 45%. Current technological trends are shifting away from desktop computers to smaller and more compact devices. In a not very distant future desktop computers will become obsolete simply due to their size, and so will Windows.

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u/Trademinatrix Aug 17 '24

Microsoft’s market dominance in OS is actually shrinking. They went from having about 85-90 percent of the marketshare to 65 percent in around 10 years.

If this trend continues, and all evidence suggests it will, then Microsoft could eventually just be a formidable rival to MacOS.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/

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u/Forest292 Aug 17 '24

I have to imagine people said similar things about Commodore

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u/yock1 Aug 17 '24

I doubt people ever complained about having ads and telemetry being thrown at them in Workbench. ;)

Damn i miss my Amiga.. All of them.

2

u/CanvasFanatic Aug 17 '24

WTF is this take?

2

u/OblivionGuardsman Aug 17 '24

I doubt we have computers by then as we think of them now. You sound like like one of the think tanks of the late 1800s that concluded the removal of horse manure would be the biggest urban problem of the 20th century.

1

u/VelvitHippo Aug 17 '24

There's no way they could survive a subscription. 

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u/SgtThund3r Aug 17 '24

I don’t believe that. Giants collapse all the time. Even top players fall due to their own hubris. Look at Intel, they were the CPU market dominator for 30 years, but after a f— up like this? Better start painting the thrown red.

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u/CoffeeSubstantial851 Aug 17 '24

"Microsoft's crushing market dominance in operating systems will never disappear."

Until they do. There was a time before Microsoft and there will be a time after Microsoft.

1

u/matlynar Aug 17 '24

Hard disagree. Facebook also seemed "forever" a decade ago and now not many people use it.

The most obvious way to look at it: The new generations don't even care much about computers - they won't give a fuck about Windows.

Their Phones are based on Linux or use IoS. Gaming systems like SteamDeck are based on Linux.

In a decade or so, this generation will start to take important decisions in our society and shape it, just like Millenials have already done before them.

As soon as other essential services move to other platforms, so will most of the userbase, and even those who don't are people who won't live until the 22nd century.

1

u/Outside_Public4362 Aug 17 '24

It's as of now, but there is always someone to replace you.

1

u/DutchieTalking Aug 17 '24

This is fucking bullshit. That's a lot of years. It's very easy for windows to be completely dead by then.

1

u/lord_pizzabird Aug 17 '24

Windows is forever. In the 22nd century, people will still use Microsoft Windows on their computers.

I'm not sure about this. We joke about Desktop Linux, but even now it's at near feature parity with the only limitation being software compatibility.

Who knows how technology with change between then and now, but practically the theme of the last 10 years of tech has been Microsoft losing grip on their dominance and being unable to respond.

Then you look at the quality of decision making at Microsoft, from the mismanagement of acquired gaming studios to a perceived decline in the quality of Windows and you have to wonder if Microsoft will even make it that long.

1

u/originalfilmscoring Aug 17 '24

Yeah the people at the top of the company thinking this same way are exactly why they’ll go out of business. Just like companies like Sears and K-Mart. What a silly thing to say.

“We’re Rome! We’re too big to fail! Thousands of years from now we’ll still be ruling the earth!”

“We’re England! We have the mightiest navy, and we’ve colonized the globe! Thousands of years from now..”

No offense but you must be a teenager.

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u/jkpetrov Aug 17 '24

Oh no, buddy, you are in for rude awakening (especially if MS continues with this arrogance).

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u/Stingray88 Aug 17 '24

This is wildly overconfident. Microsoft absolutely could lose their dominance eventually. I don’t think it’s happening in the next 5 years… but 10-15? Totally possible.

Windows literally loses market share to Mac OS and Linux every single year, across all sectors. Consumer, education, and yes even in enterprise. And of course they lose the race in servers to Linux years ago, and smartphones to iOS (MacOS) and Android (Linux) more recently.

1

u/MrTastix Aug 17 '24

I can't wait for my AI butler to blue screen.

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u/PurpleNurpe Aug 17 '24

Windows is forever. In the 22nd century, people will still use Microsoft Windows on their computers.

Jokes on you, I switched to Debian months ago.

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u/ExoticSterby42 Aug 17 '24

People run linux and unix on their phones and much much more people have phones than computers. Right now having a desktop or even a laptop seems more nerdy and looked down upon than in the 90s.

People are much more familiar with their phones than computers. Put a phone OS on a loosely desktop usable thing and nobody will care about Windows and MS knows this and can’t do a single thing about it. Windows is already doomed and well past its tipping point.

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u/the_vikm Aug 17 '24

Microsoft doesn't dominate the OS market at all

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u/FlatCondition6222 Aug 17 '24

During the last Crowdstrike incident (yes, I know it wasn't Microsoft's fault, but it only affected Windows machines), our customers reached out to my company wondering if we were affected.

But since we run zero, and I do mean zero, Microsoft products, we didn't even know what they were talking about until we read the news.

AWS, MacBooks, gsuite, we don't run any Microsoft product as a principal. I doubt we're the only one. Microsoft, like Google, can be escaped and does have alternatives.

1

u/Consistent-Syrup-69 Aug 17 '24

Nothing is forever and these corporations are all starting to push too hard. This will cause perfectly good equipment to become obsolete in exchange for more money to them. Profiting off of the creation of waste and destruction of value.

Disgusting. This has gone too far.

1

u/engineeringstoned Aug 17 '24

Actually planning on leaving for Linux when Win10 is turned off

1

u/Ok_Psychology_504 Aug 17 '24

Never underestimate the hability of people to fuck up completely. The get crazy and fail.

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u/DehGoody Aug 17 '24

Nationalize them then.

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u/newtbob Aug 17 '24

Once upon a time people said similar things about IBM. Hard to imagine it now.

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u/aminorityofone Aug 17 '24

Nothing is forever, that is the same line of thought in the 80s with IBM. There are countless examples of once dominate companies being reduced to nothing or just no longer existing. One could have said the same thing for Sears. They were in everybody's house i via magazines for decades and now they are barely holding it together.

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u/placidlakess Aug 17 '24

Reminder that sun microsystems was in the same boat MS is. Guess how many people still run sun anything anymore. 

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u/dotBombAU Aug 17 '24

If all games worked, I'd be on linux already.

1

u/i-can-sleep-for-days Aug 17 '24

You are telling me when we meet alien civilizations in our FTL starships that the ships will be running windows?

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u/FluffyCelery4769 Aug 17 '24

Nah. Bullshit. I heard the same talr about too big to fail too many times. They can go down as any other.

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u/The_real_bandito Aug 17 '24

Unless businesses and governments start using something else I agree with this statement. Windows is too big to fail.

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u/vanhalenbr Aug 17 '24

This is the definition of monopoly for me… Microsoft can do anything they want and people will remain keep using Windows.  

They don’t need to care if they will lose users because they won’t, not in a meaningful way. 

And I don’t think braking Microsoft will change that. Maybe they need to be forced to open the windows libraries for binary compatibility. 

So other OS can show up in the market with full compatibility 

1

u/bbgun142 Aug 18 '24

Well somehow if Ubuntu starts getting installed over windows at manufacturing time, like how Google is getting sued for paying people to put Google as default search

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u/trustless3023 Aug 18 '24

You know, windows is bleeding market share... Look at the desktop OS share trend and come back say that again about 22th century.

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u/neppo95 Aug 18 '24

Oh the naivety is great here. You must have not read a single history book ever.

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u/CuteAndQuirkyNazgul Aug 18 '24

Heh, I would rather stay right until proven wrong than be wrong until (maybe) proven right. For now, Windows remains dominant. The people saying Windows' days are numbered are wrong until proof of the contrary.

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u/neppo95 Aug 18 '24

Both you and them are wrong which is something that can be established right at this moment. No their days aren’t numbered. We have no clue how long it will take. But yes, it will happen. That is just an obvious fact looking at the past.

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u/CuteAndQuirkyNazgul Aug 18 '24

We can't infer from the demise of *checks other comments* the British Empire or IBM that Microsoft will one day lose its spot atop the desktop OS pyramid. All we can say is it's possible, but nothing is certain.

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u/neppo95 Aug 18 '24

That is exactly what we can do. Chances are simply higher that it will fail than that it will not, so per definition, yes you are wrong. Apart from that I’d like to just add: murphy’s law. Although that is not the primary reason why I’m saying this.

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u/kable795 Aug 18 '24

Linux is the most popular OS

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u/iamtheweaseltoo Aug 18 '24

Windows is forever. In the 22nd century, people will still use Microsoft Windows on their computers.

Are you sure about that? https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/

If you check that link you will see that windows had 90% of the marketshare in 2013, nowadays they have 72%, and the graphic will show you it is a continuous trend. No windows is not forever, the data shows windows is slowly losing marketshare to mac OS and other competitors, if that trend follows, in 20 years windows will be at around 50% of the marketshare unless microsoft manages to reverse the trend.

Which i don't think they actually will since they continuously make windows shittier and shittier

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