Linux

so I wonder, Linux friends, fellow enjoyers of hardware sold to the public, what do they know that we don’t know?

Oh, you know it, you just don't want it to be true. Every business out there knows it too. The age of consumerism driven growth is gone, killed by the ever growing financial gaps between the layers of society in all western world. There is no point in playing nice to attract customers if they can't pay, so businesses are stealing from the poor (mostly data in the case of MS) and selling only to the rich (higher valuation). The products that are marketed are not the products that are needed for the companies to make money off of.

This shift might not be as visible with IT companies, but look at more obvious examples: even fucking McDonald's has stopped going after customers needing affordable meals and is going after fewer but richer customers. So do hotels. So do airlines. And yes, so do IT companies.

In the case of Microsoft, they have a lot of experience with fucking over low end consumers and then bouncing back too. They were the most hated company in the 2000s and pivoted to one of the good guys by the end of 2010s. They know they can afford to alienate customers for long periods of time with no lasting issues

Microsoft has pretty much lost most of their experienced employees, they're sitting on a mountain of spaghetti code with tech debt that goes back to windows 3.11 to maintain compatibility, they've fired their QA team, and their absolutely out of touch leadership is trying to force the surviving employees to use AI anywhere they can for developing the OS to pump up the numbers of AI users to prop up their insanely huge AI gamble so shareholders don't lose faith.

They're acting confident because they haven't had to respond to a credible threat to their monopoly for 30 years, and that arrogance combined with everything mentioned above will most likely be their ultimate demise. The corporate system they have created and perpetuated is no longer capable of righting the ship, both technologically and organizationally.

They made a statement years ago now about how they were going to respond to the success of the steamdeck by creating a handheld mode for windows, but they never did, and Valve ate their lunch and allowed Linux to gain a foothold among gamers. They probably couldn't manage building that handheld mode (it's been so many years now, but I read a post from a Microsoft employee detailing how it could take something crazy like a week of work just to add a new menu entry to a drop-down without it introducing major breakages elsewhere).

They haven't been able to develop a killer app or feature for Windows in over a decade, and I don't think there's anything else under their sleeve. I believe we are actively witnessing the downfall of an ossified giant, just as the once great Commodore fell due to incompetence and extreme corporate greed.

They already use Linux for their server division (azure). Eventually, if Linux is able dominate on the desktop in the next decade, they may shift to selling their own Linux distro with a 100% windows compatible container/VM instead, an inversion of their current model of selling Windows with their optional WSL (windows subsystem for Linux).

It's called incumbency.

I remember a time when IBM had 95% market share of the PC market.

Then Apple and Microsoft innovated them out of the market, in software.

Blackberry had 80%+ market share of the smartphone segment they popularized. In 4 years it was almost entirely gone.

It happens when the engineers are sidelined and the finance and marketing people take over.

They are blind to any trends that they do not control. They are unable to innovate and unwilling to take risks. It kills gigantic companies slowly at first and then very quickly.

Microsoft isn't exactly doing anything new. It's the same strategy that's worked for them forever ago:

Get kids used to Microsoft products by vendor locking K-12 schools with cheap contracts.

Monetize those kids when they graduate (they never had privacy to begin with, so there is little pushback) and hope they don't switch to Apple's subsidized MacBooks in college.

When all else fails, lean heavily on corporate contracts, since corporations can't change their ecosystem set up 40 years ago.

Linux wins factor very little in the equation... and anyone switching to Linux is quickly replaced by the next kid who has had a Microsoft Windows keyboarding class every year since age 9.

It’s almost as if Microsoft and every other hardware and mainstream software developer is secretly betting on the loss of private home computing.

You nailed it. This is what EVERY hardware and software company is hoping for, subscription based everything. Hell HP is already rolling it out on their laptops. If you don't outright OWN the hardware and you're using it on a sub then you don't have any choice but to use Windows. RAM Shortages? who cares. if you and I can't build our own PCs anymore than we have to sub a machine from Microsoft or HP or Dell or whomever. Those companies will ALWAYS get first dibs on RAM. And of course there's going to be tiers to this shit. Pay more than the base sub price and you get access to the gaming tier meaning your machine will have a dedicated GPU for gaming. so on and so forth. this is the future these companies want and thanks to stuff like Netflix and Spotify we've now been conditioned to accept it.

What if that’s they don’t care, as they’re the evil empire.

It reminded me that scene in Andor (2022) in the first season, episode 9, ‘nobody’s listening’ the protagonist says they’re not listening to prisoners as they don’t care, so much they don’t believe they can lose their domination. You have to be in the context of the show (which I highly recommend, if you like the Star Wars universe) to get the reference. But I think that could be the case here.

Microsoft may not care, not because they know something, but rather the opposite. Them being pedo oligarchs not really caring much. Perhaps they’re still into the illusion Linux is some very niche thing for dorks.

I have an interesting story about it (I’d write it in my blog, it’s somewhat long). If in a few words, at my kid’s school, they (a few teachers) have a very old PC that struggles with Windows (also, It’s HDD there), so I reinstalled Linux there. Prior, I asked what they use. ‘Not much really’ was the reply, and so I explored, and diagnosed it’s just browser (which was obsolete and couldn’t be updated), Word, and Explorer (files manager). Not much else.

Sure thing, Linux can do all of them many times better!

I picked Fedora Silverblue (that’s the atomic version with Gnome) thinking it’s so much better than the KDE version, as it’s simpler. It’s not more complex than Chrome OS. My mistake, even advertising it as a macOS (good, right?) clone did not help, they were terrified. The very next day I rebased it to KDE, and applied some Windows 11 theme. It was very similar in its looks. They said ‘OK, we’d try to use it’ but the very next day they asked me to bring their system back. (I never erased it, just swapped their HDD with my SSD.)

I gave up, perhaps quite quickly, but I have no resources to push them at the moment. For you to understand, their computer switched from being very noisy to being so silent I was asking (every day while it was with Linux, like 3 or 4 days in total) whether it’s on or not. Back to Windows, and it’s super noisy back again. The difference was night and day. Right now, the machine boots within like 5 minutes. A couple of minutes to desktop, and a few minutes for it to become usable. With the SSD and Linux, half a minute tops. And when it’s booted, it’s pretty much instant.

• browser is the same, but updated
• Word is Libre Office Writer, which is simpler. They don’t use it heavily, so it should work for them. I set it to save the files as docx. The icon is from MS Word.
• file manager is many times simpler visually, yet million times more advanced. A Linux user would surely know the difference, especially given Microslop did theirs in Electron, lol.

Yet, they were afraid of Linux. Perhaps, my mistake was stressing that. Maybe I should have Only Office installed (is it more alike? Haven’t used it for many years), and invest some time into tuning the theme to be identical, it had some minor difference. And tell them that’s Windows 11, and I just updated their system. I don’t know. Their concern was they didn’t know how to work with it, not even trying. I explicitly offered to babysit them for a few days, to help them adapt, but they refused.

Perhaps, I should have tried Zorin, if it’s more similar visually. But I have no experience of it, so I’m not sure.

Apart from that, I believe Linux is more than ready to be a desktop OS, it has everything needed, or almost everything. Only some software is lacking, I’d say.

Maybe they're interested in finding exactly what the public's critical breaking point is. Without gauging exactly what the demand (for distraction-free, private use) is, they cannot optimize their sales. They sure lost big with France, but we'll see who else follows suit...

They now earn much more with cloud and ai, getting it all packaged to companies as saas, and are just switching markets. The desktop isn't their target anymore.

Microsoft is betting on technofascism. On an economy where labor - and most importantly military-industrial labor - has been automated to such an extent that consumption is irrelevant. Consumers won't have money to buy their shitty software anyway and governments and private military organisations will be running their increasingly automated mass murder programs on Azure servers. As they already did for the Palestinian genocide.

I ran into this recently lol. You can avoid it by changing your user agent. You can do this is dev tools but there's probably an extension that makes it easy

Do you have a quadro or something? a bunch of gaming GPUs only support 3, worth checking it might not be a driver thing