Linux only lags behind in desktop/laptop use. (Dominates servers and smartphones.)

Yes, absolutely, in the case of desktops, it is <60% as good as Windows or macOS. I say this as a nearly lifelong desktop Linux user. The userspace desktop software gets almost no attention compared to the kernel/systemd which actually matters for business. The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks. The alternative to using a DE is to use a tiling window manager and spend hours a day re-implementing what would have been one-click operations on Windows/macOS. This is not to mention the lack of non-development-related software targeting desktop Linux.

Will this change in the future? I think it is very likely, but the time horizon is key. There are thousands of possible realities where Microsoft or Apple fails--political problems, economic events, bad management, some black swan startup out of nowhere. All it takes is for one of these to trigger for mindshare to shift to Linux (or BSD or Fuchsia--any free one for that matter) and bring it over the threshold.

(But this is kind of irrelevant to the point about data hoarding business models, since Windows/macOS is pure software.)

As someone who dual-boots, I would say Linux is a better OS, today, than Windows or Mac. Sure, there are areas where it sucks more than the others, but the same can be said of either of the other ones for different areas.

As someone who also dual-boots. I would say that Windows is definitely the better of the OSes. I've tried, so hard, to make it work. It's been almost a decade now since I switched to Linux OSes. But, software/package management is absolutely horrible in the OSS world these days. It's so bad that actually downloading + installing MSI/zip files from the software provider is a better experience and more reliable. Linux has lost almost all the benefits from having a package ecosystem.

These days, everything on linux is either random potentially insecure PPA repos, shell scripts loaded from a server via curl and piped to sh with sudo access, or "snaps" (whatever the fuck they are). That all ontop of wildly outdated packages in the supported repos. No wonder everyone rants and raves about "docker", now we know why things moved into that space.

I know, this is my opinion and it's biased. Yes I may not have done things properly, or there are other ways of doing things, etc etc.

I really can understand how you have gotten to such a bad place with packaging. What are you doing that needs lots of PPAs?!

Snaps are actually a great security and packaging advance that decouples package dependencies from a common library set, while maintaining a mechanism to patch and upgrade otherwise dangling library deps. It also starts down the long road to confining software, because what you run shouldn't automatically assume all your privs. Basically iOS style apps for Linux.

People who pipe web content to a privileged shell are on their own at present. Arguably they should be warned, but that assumes taint tracking at every level of the operating system, and no production OS has that. If the software is a dependency shit show then putting it in docker (and then into a VM) is a better compromise.

Windows is already deprecating the installer model for the app store and cloud concept, they just didn't make it stick the first time round.

Snaps have been the single provider of crash, breaking the machine or killing ny battery i have ever seen on linux. It is to the point that if all i can find is a snap, i prefer to boot windows to deal with it.

Snaps are a good idea in theory but do not work in practice.

Well, I'm surprised. Snaps have really simplified things from my perspective. Any you'd like to call out? Particularly they shouldn't be able to 'break the machine'.

I have had multiple time uninstalling a snap that installed its own X stack. And discover that it had been swapped for the whole OS to use this one.

No more graphical stack.

This happened to me with not only X. It seems to me that installing is tested. Removing is not. It was also badly documented last time i checked.

Happened with discord last time.

Okay that is seriously bad. Looking at https://github.com/snapcrafters/discord/issues they have several unresolved issues like that, seems this is unmaintained.

Ubuntu needs to more clearly explain whether the app is confined, and force apps to use an API to change the system environment to allow rollback, multiple packages of the same function etc.

You should try something other than Ubuntu. Fedora or Arch are my standard recommendations these days.

Oh, you think MSIs are sticking around? Package manager insanity is taking over Windows slowly too.

> The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks.

Can you give any supporting evidence for this?

> The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks.

Sry, but that is just not true.

When it comes to an OS, being 90% as good would still mean a 10% drop in productivity.

The margins are a bit different here.

I think it implies that Windows is not a business based on data-hoarding.

For the average consumer, (i.e. not the average HN user, where this is far more debatable), yes.

For the use case of running whatever win32 executable is promoted on zdnet.com (or pcworld.com or whatever is out there that appeals to computer users that aren't developers) any given day? Yes.

Do they actually promote non-game win32 executables these days? I thought current fashion is mostly services with mobile and web apps, and sometimes Electron ones?

Windows is not over? I see Microsoft as similar to IBM now. They will make a lot of money from their Rolodex, possibly more than they ever made before, but they no longer own a relevant platform someone would write new software for.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, when a platform is dying its owner:

1. Tries to capture all profit from the edges.

2. Extracts value "unreasonably" both to grab what they still can and to create an explanation for the death. This could be high fees, ads, or extraction of market intelligence.

3. Begins embracing the new platform with compatibility layers.

4. Starts making 2 offers on everything. One with their legacy and one with the rising platforms.

5. Treats their nonfounding CEO as significant and someone to listen to.

Plenty of companies make this transition successfully (I chose IBM as the example) and make huge profits from not having to charge uniform prices across the entire market. But the discussion was the windows platform being replaced by Linux, not Microsoft profits.

Are you aware of the video gaming industry

Or the enterprise software industry

Are you aware of IBM in the enterprise software industry? They manage to do almost all of that with their own software and open source rebundled.. No OS/2, almost no 3rd party programmers who are interested in their platform.

That is the future of Microsoft and the non-future of Windows.

Or, to a certain extent, the graphical industry?

Yes, windows developers with experience are going to go work in the game industry..