Microsoft did a tremendous amount of hard work to convince me to make the effort to migrate away from Windows at home and at work. They want to lease me a word processor. They want to put ads in my digital filing cabinet. They want to take 30% of my software revenue, and when they realized they couldn't have it, they said they'd settle for 12%. No dice.
There are zero Windows machines in my home or in my business right now. In fact, there are no Microsoft products. I migrate clients away from Windows when possible, and refuse to work with those who are tightly integrated with MS products. I do occasionally work a job where something has to work on Windows or with MS SQL, but I only accept if that can be done in a platform agnostic way.
I previously held onto Windows at home because despite my age I still love games. At least, I love the idea of them, if I ever get time to play.
Now, recently I had a startling realization: it's actually easier now to get many of the games I love running on Wine (with or without steam) than it is on Windows. The performance is great. (edit: I love you, Lutris, you make gaming easy.)
Even for tools where Windows is essentially mandatory (music production), the situation is such that I now would rather run old software on an old version of Windows as a dedicated DAW machine than to subject myself to new Windows.
Anyway, great job Microsoft, you converted a customer into someone who will take time out of their day to bad-mouth you on the internet.
All that could have been avoided by just not behaving like an asshole.
I could not tell you the last time I had Windows in the home. I would guess around 2013. After then I kind of went (almost) 'Full Stallman' - I had been moving that way for a few years already.
The only Microsoft product I have is an old Xbox 360 that was updated once and then left permanently offline.
Side story - I remember in late 2001 when the 1st Xbox was coming out and I was in a retail store. There was couple looking to see what consoles where around and what to choose. The husband saw the Xbox and the Microsoft name on it. "I'm not supporting that thing! They have made my life a living hell, Mark my worlds they will do anything to dominate the market and I do NOT support that!" Seeing how they are trying to still buy their way to success, his words ring true today.
Took me a few tries over the years but maybe 5 years ago I tried dual booting Linux yet again and that time it stuck. I found myself leaving it on the Linux side for longer and longer stretches of time. Finally last year someone gave me a hand-me-down laptop and I just didn't bother installing windows.
Everything I do takes place in the shell, an IDE (of which there are tons), or by far the most common, in the browser.
I used Firefox because that's what my distro comes with but I also have Chrome installed for just in case. That turned out not to be an issue with the sites I typically frequent.
Today I had a random person look over my shoulder and ask "what kind of computer is that? Must be really old..."
Same here vis a vis Linux for my personal use, but the worse thing from Microsoft's perspective is how it pushed me towards buying Apple and recommending Apple products to everyone I know. As a techie, I used to hate Apple. I can't stand the closed ecosystem, I can't stand the product markups, and whenever friends or family would ask, I'd tell them they could get more powerful systems for a fraction of the cost if they just stuck to Windows. Nowadays I do the exact opposite. I tell them that while they'll be paying a markup, it's worth it because Apple has at least trended in the direction of privacy and has also continued delivering on usability. I'm not bombarded by ads and news when I open my Mac. So while I will never get my family and friends to use Linux, I have absolutely caused them to spend tens of thousands of dollars on Apple products instead of Windows. That's where I think these anti-consumer behaviors could really hurt Windows in the long run, if enough techies start driving their social circle to Apple.
That’s been my experience since the early 2000s: people recommend Macs (or especially iPads) for the people who will be calling them for support, and it’s generally delivered well.
One thing I will note is that the markups have been a lot less in practice than claimed since Apple stopped using PowerPC. Most of the people I know who did comparisons ended up finding the Mac either equivalent or, frequently, cheaper once they adjusted for equivalent quality. Sure, you can buy a $400 PC but you end up buying 3 of them over the same service life and have a shoddy display for that entire time. The bundled crapware PC vendors use to subsidize the low-end stuff is really not helping the impression of their products, either (I know multiple people who had an unusable system out of the box that way. They now use Macs.).
The markup is in the RAM/storage upgrades. Your stuck with Apple's prices at time of purchase for the most part and if you need it fast then you have to go some way more expensive SKU to get it. Only the Mac Pro (which is already insanely expensive) and the Intel Mac Mini (where you can only upgrade the RAM) are user expandable. And who knows if the Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be.
The mistake is buying a $400 laptop. Although anecdotically I've known a lot more people whose MacBook has died than PC laptops.
Just a small quibble — the intel Mac mini dropped upgradeable ram in 2014, with one of the worst apple product refreshes ever. The 2014 Mac mini was worse than the 2012 in almost every way — my theory is some engineer realized they could save money by essentially slapping a MBA logic board in the Mac mini, and that’s what happened.
27 inch iMacs had easily accessible ram upgrades until they were discontinued. 21.5 iMacs (post 2012 refresh) did also have upgradeable ram, but it was a pain to do (dimm slots were on the back of the main logic board, meaning you essentially had to remove every other component and the logic board).
2012-2015 MBP Retinas could have the storage upgraded because it was a discrete SSD. I think they were largely proprietary or specially made, but they could be upgraded.
MBAs up until 2017 could also have the storage upgraded.
I wish that ram was upgradeable on apple silicon systems, but I understand why it’s not (I assume it’s an integral part of the SoC).
Windows-free Ubuntu guy here, for over a year now. I even kept my old Windows box hooked up to a KVM "just in case". So far it only gets turned on if I accidentally bump my foot on the power switch.
I encapsulated my old windows machine into a VM - it gets fired up to run Quicken and another accounting program for which there are no reasonable client based substitutes. The VM boots fast, I have a "safe" copy of the VM image incase of a viral compromise, and it's out of the way of my normal workflow. Windows machine free for about a decade.
Do you have any pointers to how to do this? I have a dual-boot Win7 machine I would like to have run Windows as a VM in Linux, to keep the proprietary executables I need for work running with a smaller security footprint.
If you have Windows installed on separate hard drive (or partition), you can boot it directly with Qemu in Linux. No need to do anything fancy, just use existing installation. If you have two graphic cards, it is even more fancier with GPU passthrough.
Don't worry, a bunch of Microsoft VPs got promoted for showing that this would boost revenue (and, unless MS experiences a serious exodus due to this latest round of shenanigans, such increa$es will materialize).
So, yes, there certainly are MS folks who (unironically) think that they did a "great job" with this.
I think the exodus thing doesn't work the way you think. Sane people leave, and the staff is left with people who want to be there and to be pulling all these stunts, spinning them as success.
I'm really getting to the point that I think we need regulation that bans mandatory advertising features in any product which you outlay cash for directly, or at least requires a realistically priced non-advertising version to be made available (i.e. give some leeway to go "nah, it's not 10,000% more expensive to sell the version with ads...)
It seems like the inevitable destination of all products is to be chock full of tracking and ads, because if you have a large market share, why not also monetize it further by selling ads to your disposable-income identified customers?
I have separate hdd with offline windows 10 installation for gaming. It never gets internet access, never gets updated. Everything totally offline. I dont have a stomache to deal with Wine.
I just use Lutris now and it all works, there's no more screwing around with Wine for me; if you had problems with Wine in the past, I suggest you try Lutris, you might find it is no longer a hassle.
If you use Steam, it's all automatic and transparent in the background, but I don't use Steam for everything.
You could look into LTSC, it's about as close to W7 as you can get in terms of user control (e.g. no forced updates) and still enjoy semi-recent Windows features like D3D12 ""Agile SDK"" (lol)
i haven't used windows since 2008. the writing was already on the wall back then about which direction microsoft was heading.
you see the same thing happening with apple now. they have enough market dominance that they're no longer constrained to advance tech for the consumer, but rather just for themselves (i.e., their head-long dive into content and advertising). this is exactly what antitrust regulators should be heading off at the pass, but they fail time and again (and again and again).
I literally just yesterday super painstakingly "downgraded" to Win10 because W11 was/is so terrible. I had to take my Win laptop into Bestbuy because of this ridiculous situation in which Windoze was telling me I needed to buy a "legitimate" copy of the stupid operating system and I wasn't able to fix it myself without doing all sorts of stuff involving editing registries and God knows what else. The Best Buy guy was like "yeah, I wouldn't have recommended putting Win 11 on it. I can wipe it and put 10 on if you want", which I gladly accepted. Normally I use Ubuntu, I just bought a Win laptop because it seems easier to print from a Windows computer than a Linux PC, sadly.
> I previously held onto Windows at home because despite my age I still love games. At least, I love the idea of them, if I ever get time to play.
I used to think this way too. I have been holding on to a Windows 7 machine at home since 2011 but its days are numbered.
Linux has gotten to the point where it just works and clumsy software can be installed and ran in containers. I have a 12 core threadripper with an AMD Radeon Pro running Void Linux Musl and Steam installed via flatpak and most of my games work. I have Debian running an a NUC hooked to my TV and that plays Hulu in a browser or run whatever I want. I don't miss Windows. If I NEED it there are VM's.
I meant, rather, that I don't think any of the Linux audio production stuff is great. Reaper and Waveform are good, Ardour is not yet (in my opinion, it's buggy and requires too much configuration that is not required in other software, but they'll get there).
The big-name software is genuinely better than what is available on Linux and is worth using, and the latency introduced by VMs makes that idea useless, and using Wine for that task is non-trivial.
I'm just a hobbyist though, my job is not music-related. I have used a midi controller as an industrial process controller though :)
Like everything else on Linux though, it'll get better over time. I do screw around with LMMS on linux because it's completely intuitive to me. It works, it's just not as complex and feature-complete as Ableton / etc.
Second the Bitwig, with a caveat: Read the Manual or Suffer. There are a alot of absolutely non-obvious UI rakes you can step on, can be really off-putting if messing around blindly (from the top of my head: if you accidenly turn on clip player for a track, it will not play the timeline; not disabling polyphony will prevent your Note Grid from running continuously; microtonal notes are being sent to MIDI differently depending on the MPE settings ...)
Bitwig + Pianoteq is the ultimate toy to tinker and relax with.
Just a heads-up: Make sure to have enough time to mess around with it because it's a massive time drain. Especially if you like sound design. Exciting and fun time drain, but a time drain none the less.
I bought a midi controller to make music for a game I'm working on part-time, knowing absolutely nothing at all about music.
It is the most relaxing, pleasant time-sink I have encountered in years, I wish someone had told me the joy of music creation earlier. Even just fiddling with the piano is quite extraordinarily relaxing.
Ah, I remember the joys of discovering music production and the exploration of the audio multiverse. What I wouldn't give to be in your shoes right now :)
I also unfortunately remember trying to RTFM incomplete / incorrect docs and trying to hunt down some obscure forums in search for some nuggets of knowledge. Oh, and YT wasn't quite a thing it is today, so watching potato resolution YT videos (if any) was the norm.
Luckily that's much less the case these days, so you're starting at a massive advantage if you want to learn. In that regard, someone in the BWS community some time ago shared a list of tutorials for people starting out: https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=7515a658a4ec4aee9f40910485a...
Thanks! The problem nowadays is sorting the wheat from the chaff, there's so much stuff on the internet, it's hard to find "the best" material instead of lazy SEO stuff. The list will help, thanks again.
Many work 100% a few may have cosmetic quirks on their UI but remain usable, a few don't work at all, but those are a small number. Take a look at Yabridge, as suggested by another user, it's great.
A nice aspect of running plugins under Yabridge/WINE is that you can run obsolete plugins that wouldn't load anymore on modern Windows versions, so there's no planned obsolescence that would stop you from using that beloved synth or effect that was never upgraded for example beyond Windows XP.
The only problem I encountered with some among really old plugins, and I mean from well over 20 years ago, is that the installer stops as it detects a negative amount of storage available, which is very likely the result of trying to fit a bigger variable carrying the number of bytes free of modern filesystems structures into the smaller one that old code can read. I believe the error could be prevented through a quick & dirty kludge by implementing a WINE executable option that fakes the free storage the installer sees just temporarily until the end of the install procedure.
Next to some awesome open source VSTs (SurgeXT, Helm, Vital etc.) there's plenty of closed source VSTs that run native on Linux (u-he plugins come to mind)
But you could also use something like yabridge [0] in order to run Windows-only VSTs.
One of the reasons I like Bitwig is that the included instruments are really good and you can use the grid to build just about anything. So I find myself reaching for third party instruments much less.
Hopefully this new CLAP plugin format takes off though.
> Now, recently I had a startling realization: it's actually easier now to get many of the games I love running on Wine (with or without steam) than it is on Windows. The performance is great.
I find this hard to believe unless you are talking about older or indie games.
Almost all Steam games (old and new) run on Linux with no further modifications. I'm running Elden Ring, Dark Souls I Remastered, DS2 SotFS, DS3, GTA V, Sekiro, Valheim, XCOM 2, Hellblade, Noita, BioShock Remastered and Infinite, Celeste, and dozens of others. This is a relatively recent development, and the only "technical" thing I've had to do is tell Steam to run games not verified for Linux with Proton. You don't even need to run Ubuntu; I've been using Arch and NixOS.
Proton is a great piece of tech and gaming on Linux is the best it has ever been but we are far from a world where Windows and Linux are equals at gaming.
When you want a play a specific game it is still the case that it might work on Linux. If the game is on Steam and doesn't have multiplayer you can update the might work to probably will work.
However, the comment I was responding to was claiming that running games on Linux was easier than Windows, which is only the case for old games. Their claim that performance is great is also a bit suspect since most games will perform worse on Linux than Windows but performance is usually "good enough" on Linux so I can see where they are coming from.
Anyways, I agree with the people in this thread saying that gaming on Linux is great and a viable option but (as per usual) people are hyping up Proton and Lutris and Linux to be better than they are. Windows is still by far the best choice if you want to play games on a PC.
I don't know what your sources are, but for me Linux recently took over prime position for gaming. I've been dual-booting since forever, but it's many months between every time I boot up Windows, and every time I'm now reminded that the lead it had is gone except for one thing:
- The performance difference is small enough that I don't notice.
- Audio setup is now easier in Linux (using PulseAudio and, since ~6 months, PipeWire). I had the worst time getting Windows to output to the right place.
- I can't remember the last game which didn't work in Steam on Linux, even if it's not officially supported. They do have a huge incentive to improve Linux support now that their handheld console is running it.
- Windows supports more than 8 bits per colour channel. The setup is annoying and fiddly, and it doesn't always work, but damn does Elden Ring look good in HDR.
I've been using the official AMD/NVIDIA drivers (on both platforms) most of this time. The NVIDIA driver kept crashing things so often I switched, and the AMD driver has been rock solid.
Not only do they not care, they don't know I exist. That doesn't mean I have to tolerate their behavior.
Their empire crumbles anyway, that's why they're doing this to Windows, because they know the future is (sadly) on the web, and the OS is less relevant than the browser now, and more replaceable than it was 20 years ago.
Well, the existence of Google Docs in the office, of Chromebooks in schools, of AWS controlling a large share of what MS lusts after, etc indicate to me that perhaps they aren't destined to remained the dominant force they once were, similar to IBM.
Now, I know Microsoft is a near-2-trillion-dollar company, but they would not be the first company to have realized the folly of resting on their laurels.
Microsoft's future over the 20 year term doesn't look as rosy as it could. They'll remain a huge company, but perhaps they'll slip back into the hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars segment instead of the trillion-dollar-titan segment if the investments they're making don't pay off.
They'll have huge income for decades because it's costly and time-consuming to move away from existing systems, but for new companies, Microsoft is no longer a given.
Microsoft is not sliding into irrelevance, they have been growing quite significantly precisely because they have not been resting. Azure is their primary focus, and it's now on the verge of becoming the largest cloud provider.
No, but pissing off people who love computers the most is a terrible idea.
The Windows 98-7 era made me like the system and aspire to be a developer for it. I remember wanting to make my own window!
Now it is simply a hostile wasteland that I regard with suspicion and resentment. There is no love for it left. I now use Linux and bear with OSX when I need to. Windows 8, but especially 10, made a hardcore Unix freak out of me.
Microsoft can't put a quarterly cost on it, but over time losing people who care will cost them everything.
> pissing off people who love computers the most is a terrible idea.
back when balmer jumped up and down in a presentation yelling "developers, developers, developers", they were still good (despite balmer's terrible leadership).
I think they're just losing the battle for mindshare now. Users would more easily move to macs, if they're a casual consumer of tech, and linux if they're more hardcore. Windows has no raison d'etre except for the gaming space imho, and i would hope that the steam deck propels WINE and linux onto gaming and remove the final hold from windows.
I don't know man. Half the developers I know are now using a Microsoft tool to write code (more among web developers). Nearly everyone is using a Microsoft site to host their code, or relies on code hosted there. WSL and the new terminal have removed a couple of major roadblocks to using Windows for development, and Azure is doing gangbusters. Office is cross-platform and still ubiquitous in the corporate world and isn't going anywhere as long as they have active directory and all the other corporate management tools. They may be losing consumer mind share, but I don't think they really care that much. At this point consumer Windows is only valuable to them as a marketing platform so there's no point in retaining it if they don't use it as such.
That seems right. “Processes” (which includes LinkedIn and Office) and “intelligent cloud” are the largest part of their operating income.[1] “More personal computing” (which includes Windows) was less than a third, only 27%, of their total last year:
(In millions, except percentages) 2021 2020 Percentage Change
Processes $ 24,351 $ 18,724 30%
Intelligent Cloud 26,126 18,324 43%
More Personal Computing 19,439 15,911 22%
Total $ 69,916 $ 52,959 32%
VS Code, GitHub, LinkedIn, and their pervasive telemetry are definitely part of a broader strategy.
>Windows has no raison d'etre except for the gaming space imho
Enterprise.
Either cloud with Office 365 + Azure AD + Intune to get Office/Teams/Sharepoint/Onedrive echosystem and manage clients PC settings and updates over Intune.
Or do it on-prem with Windows server, AD domain, Group policy, Fileshare server and all that. Some enterprise software that is not a SaaS may still require this.
Fair enough, but this implies that this use case is for a business context, in a business environment. All my comments are only applicable to the home/personal use context.
I don't care what spyware/crapware microsoft chooses to add to the enterprise setting.
> back when balmer jumped up and down in a presentation yelling "developers, developers, developers", they were still good (despite balmer's terrible leadership).
My memory is probably faulty so corrections welcome, but wasn't "developers, developers, developers" a while before he became CEO?
Or smartphones, or servers on the internet, or IoT devices, or car head units, or the computers that are put into the hands of every school age kid nowadays.
If I tie my skills, products, and services to Microsoft, and they discontinue whatever I relied on, then my investment stops being valuable; worse, the skills I built are no longer useful, and my human capital diminishes. If I build skills and products that aren't tightly tied to some other company, then my future is more certain.
If I don't invest in Microsoft, they can't pull the rug out from under me, and they can't change the terms on me. They might not be as unreliable as Google, but they're not exactly a charity.
I can and should insulate myself and my business against corporate bullying.
There are zero Windows machines in my home or in my business right now. In fact, there are no Microsoft products. I migrate clients away from Windows when possible, and refuse to work with those who are tightly integrated with MS products. I do occasionally work a job where something has to work on Windows or with MS SQL, but I only accept if that can be done in a platform agnostic way.
I previously held onto Windows at home because despite my age I still love games. At least, I love the idea of them, if I ever get time to play.
Now, recently I had a startling realization: it's actually easier now to get many of the games I love running on Wine (with or without steam) than it is on Windows. The performance is great. (edit: I love you, Lutris, you make gaming easy.)
Even for tools where Windows is essentially mandatory (music production), the situation is such that I now would rather run old software on an old version of Windows as a dedicated DAW machine than to subject myself to new Windows.
Anyway, great job Microsoft, you converted a customer into someone who will take time out of their day to bad-mouth you on the internet.
All that could have been avoided by just not behaving like an asshole.