Cloud Services is the "cool" Microsoft and their cloud services are now the biggest profit center for them. They have Azure, developer tools and contribute a huge amount to the overall open-source world. The majority of their customers run Linux workloads and things like Kubernetes. Cloud folks at Microsoft don't care if you run Linux or MacOS as long as you run your web apps on Azure that's all they care about and they try to make it as easy as possible. These are the guys that developed Microsoft's first internal Linux distribution.

Satya Nadella comes from the Cloud/Azure part of the business. That's why Microsoft has been doing some really innovative and smart choices lately under his leadership.

The Windows group are the luddites at Microsoft. Instead of open-sourcing Windows and treating it as open technology something the Cloud group would love they still jealously guard it as proprietary. They only put WSL (Windows Subystem Linux) because the Cloud group wanted it. Windows group is living in the 1990's and still thinks you can make money on a desktop operating system. They put ads and use dark patterns because they're desperate to show that Windows can still make money. Their CEO is now one of the Cloud guys and for them that sucks.

I can't speak for others but I'm more than willing to pay good money for a version of Windows that isn't actively user hostile and full of garbage. Like, give me a Windows 2000 UI on top of modern Windows underpinnings and I'll give you $500/year. They can even keep putting out the shitty version of Windows and just make it explicitly ad/creepy-data-harvesting supported. That might still not be enough to actually make them money, I can't say.

What I can say is that I feel like Window's current strategy is less about making money and more about actively trying to kill off personal computing for the sake of pushing everyone to subscription services.

That is what I use and that it what I set up for my less technically competent friends and family who are not good at navigating the ever-shifting sands of the Windows UI, the situation changing on them, a game they had not remembered installing appearing in their Programs. Working on the simple rhythm of muscle memory and repetition, they draw the Worm.

In the context of a discussion about Microsoft’s intentions, it is very clearly asshole behavior by Microsoft to have a perfectly good product that people want, but then put up artificial barriers like having a friend who knows how to get it and install it.

I would not downvote you for mentioning it, but it makes Microsoft look even worse than if they did not have LTSC at all since it removes their plausible deniability.

What, why?!

Means it's TECHNICALLY possible, and Microsoft actively takes away the option after 10 days?

Do people not hate this?

On macos the only way to revert is through full machine backups. That at least lets me think the upgrade is irreversible without backups, and then I am fine with it. :)

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...

The last time I paid for MSDN was 2011 or 2012 but I was able to download and use everything ...

The usage constraints are mostly social/legal rather than technical, of course.

I think at least personally I've finally reached the tipping point where dealing with the annoyance of running windows apps on linux is going to be worth not having the huge host of annoyances microsoft is intentionally pushing onto me.

Because it's incredibly hard to outright impossible to get a legal version of this. AFAIK it's only available for MSDN subscribers, OEMs/ODMs/embedded device manufacturers and large-volume customers and illegal to resell; on top of that unlike regular Windows ISOs there are no public download links that you can then either activate with a key you happened to find somewhere or run one of the usual activation cracks.

No matter what, unless you are in a highly privileged position you do not have a way of obtaining LTSB without exposing yourself to legal or security risks.

ETA: Just had a look on a well-known torrent site - "LTSB" yielded no usable results (> 10 seeds), and "LTSC" only one that matches the seed count, and it doesn't even ship supposedly virgin ISOs but modified ones, so no way to know if at least the install media is free of malware (by comparing it to known MS hashes). Jesus, I didn't know the situation was that bad.

The latter part is the problem. LTSB/C keys are illegal to resell and MS regularly bans keys they suspect of having been sold.

Compared to MS Office, Windows is nothing.

There is no such plan.

Its almost comical.

Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.

Which is completely absurd. Within minutes of Netflix/anyone releasing anything new I can download it via Usenet or torrents. Nothing anyone does will change that reality. They just continue to make it more difficult for the average user to access content via player requirements for various DRM schemes. Which funny enough pushes people back to pirating to avoid all the nonsense.

It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly.

I can't imagine doing this, to be honest if I were asked to implement DRM I would quit, or try to make sure there are fundamental flaws in the scheme, it's the only moral thing to do if you're put in that situation imo.

EDIT: To those upvoting me, software as a service is usually DRM, so maybe hold your upvote if you're complicit.

They already do on Android. Root your device and either play cat and mouse with Magisk and Universal SafetyNet fix, or get downgraded to L3. And even then, it's uncertain how long the USN hack will last, given that all it does is pretend the device doesn't have hardware attestation - once Google decides to mandate HA for all Android 12 and above devices (as all SoCs capable of running that should have some form of secure element), it's game over.

We need legislative action against anti-rooting measures and other shit that takes away control of devices from users, and that fast, but it doesn't look like it's high on the priority list for the next year of the Biden admin, and after that we will likely see, once again, a gridlocked Congress and in 2024 the Rise of the Sith again.

Well, as soon as they do that they become useless for me and I'll unsubscribe.

I don't know how many people are on the same boat, but between badly developed smart tvs and top boxes there are probably a large number.

Your information is a decade out of date. More than half of Azure instances run Linux, and it's a huge source of income for MS now. Billions huge.

The only real direction you can get everyone to agree on is "profit," and the nice thing about the existence of Azure as one of their major profit centers is that Microsoft now has a bunch of business that depends on Linux running well. A company mostly running Linux is already looking at them as third place behind Amazon and Google - if Microsoft risks making kernel developers unable to run Linux, they risk making kernel developers unwilling to accept patches to make Azure (or WSL) run Linux well. I'm not saying they're never going to try it, since the Azure org doesn't control the UEFI signing program, but I am saying there's a significant part of the company that will say that it threatens their profits to a scale much larger than the lost Windows licenses on consumer PCs.

Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). The only thing harder than getting a company the size of Microsoft to agree on something is to get the rest of the industry to go along with it too. The few cases where they've succeeded (e.g., the thing from the 1980s where they made OEMs pay them even for machines that didn't ship with MS-DOS) were when they had a sufficiently technically superior product they could use to bully people. They don't have that power anymore.

You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor.

Netscape is dead (and Firefox is dying), all the historical competitors to MS Office are dead or have negligible market share, Java never got enough market share to make it easy for people to switch away from Windows, AIM/ICQ/whatever are all dead (and worse, nobody really uses XMPP or other open protocols), hardly anybody runs their own email server anymore, etc.

They successfully destroyed all of the independent versions of these things, so that now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

It's also kind of disingenuous to say "IE is dead" and "MSN Messenger is dead" and ignore Edge and Skype and Teams etc.

People arguably use MS Office out of habit and since it's a forced de facto standard at work. But, there is no reason they can't switch to LibreOffice for 95% plus of what people are doing.

Java was released by Sun Microsystems, a Unix vendor with their own hardware architecture. The big feature was "write once, run anywhere." Write the program once and it would run on Windows/Intel as well as Solaris/SPARC.

The Java language wasn't horrible and WORA was a big advantage in the days when there were half a dozen Unix vendors plus Mac and Windows and Novell Netware etc. So it was becoming popular, and every app the developer decided to write in Java was one that wasn't tied to the Win32 API and therefore Windows.

It's also possible to compile other languages to Java bytecode as along as they didn't use OS-specific APIs -- and Java provided platform-independent ones. So there was a real risk that everything would end up running on a platform-independent JVM. Which Microsoft successfully prevented from happening for long enough for Sun to run out of money and get consumed by Oracle.

1. Most programing languages sucked

2. Java was fresh and new

Java had a lot going for it. It was free, with a functioning IDE that had a working graphical debugger! MS had just about finished killing Delphi (which also cost $$) and over in *nix land the GUI libraries were fighting amongst themselves and Linux wasn't something even an average developer was going to install.

So you had Perl, raw C, the horrors that were DSLs and frameworks written in the c++ of the time, then Java came along.

Applets failed, sure. And back then everyone wanted their GUIs to look like the platform native UI (how times have changed!) but Swing was super easy to write UIs in.

I'd wager the majority of programmers, outside of ex-LISP folks, didn't know what closures were, and functions as first class objects wasn't on anyone's mind.

So all of Java's shortcomings didn't seem like a big deal. It "compiled" fast, had actual packages you could distribute and import easily, and the compiler errors made sense.

So yeah Java was a fresh breath when it came out.

Then c# came out a bit later and was basically better in a million small ways from day 1, except it wasn't open source so a community never built up around it in the same way.

Now days we are spoiled for languages to choose from.

Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system. That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality (see: every other OS). Just imagine shipping a computing device today without a browser! Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.

Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode. The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well.

Java was never a Windows replacement. And as a platform it is doing just fine.

Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc. It's not like everyone is using Skype (which MS bought, not built, and long after the IM dust had settled).

Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail. And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach. It requires professional knowledge to get email delivered these days.

They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser.

That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality

That's what BG said in his deposition, but MS was the only company who embedded IE into the OS to make ActiveDesktop and put VBScript and ActiveX into IE.

Java was never a Windows replacement.

AWT and Swing and browser applets were Windows replacements.

Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc.

You're talking about things that happened ten years later. There was a time when one app would connect to every network.

Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail.

MS Exchange dominates email.

All of those efforts failed miserably. They have nothing to do with the actual reasons why Netscape died, why Firefox is trending down, why Java never became dominant, why Open/LibreOffice never replaced MS Office, why open chat protocols were replaced by chat services from Google, Facebook, Discord and Slack, why Java applets never caught on, etc.

The grandparent comment is right on the money with "You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor."

MS bought at least 10-15 years of dominance with EEE, vaporware, and other anticompetitive practices.

Just like Google killed RSS with Reader.

Just like Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to avoid them potentially growing into replacements for Facebook.

The goal was to kill or delay an upstart that would distract users away from their core products, not to produce a successful competitor to the upstart.

Netscape

Netscape no doubt had its own problems, but MS deeply embedding IE into Windows 98 was a huge part of them.

Java

Actually Java was pretty dominant. Interactive web was either Flash or Java. If it was for entertainment, it was Flash, if it was for work or computation, it was Java.

Open/LibreOffice

Have you forgotten WordPerfect?

Java was never widely deployed on the web. The only services that ever used applets in any meaningful way were a handful of Asia-only banks. Applets were stillborn for a large number of reasons, all of which you can blame on Sun.

MS giving away IE for free torched Netscape's business model, but that seems like a strange objection - we all expect browsers to be free (and built into the OS) today.

In the case of WordPerfect, what I recall reading was that this was in small part because WP kept writing everything in pure assembly language for way too long, and in large part because MS gave Word a leg up with internal Windows APIs. This was raised in one of the antitrust suits against MS, but I don't recall which one. Either way, I had used a GUI WYSYWIG version of WordPerfect (for DOS) long before I'd ever even seen MS Word of any form.

Java was never widely deployed on the web.

This is a point that would have to be settled by numbers, and I don't have them. What I do know is that every simple web-based calculator app was written in Java, and that in my circles installing Java was one of the first things one did after installing Windows and a browser.

we all expect browsers to be free (and built into the OS) today.

I think this was a mistake. All that "you're a feature, not a product" nonsense is a distraction from the insane degree of consolidation we've tolerated in technology. There should be thousands of billion dollar tech companies each serving in interoperable niches, not a handful of trillion dollar tech companies.

Name one widely used (in the west) website that used Java applets. I can name exactly one, because I worked on the backend for it, but even in 2002 everyone knew it was an odd duck. Flash was still popular, activex still around, but ajax was a thing and everyone knew it was the future. Applets were a joke.

The market doesn't really care about your opinion of what is/isn't a mistake. Sorry.

Popcan was huge with multi-player games.

Microsoft gets no credit for these tactics.

To this day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_So...

There was a period in the early 2000s where that was everywhere, and that was when Netscape died.

Causing intentional problems with non-Microsoft Office products on Microsoft operating systems is what caused everyone to get locked into Microsoft Office file formats.

Microsoft successfully suppressed Java for long enough for Sun to die.

You can't just say "no it isn't" and make it otherwise.

So it's like Google making their services slow on Firefox? History repeats itself, only the names are different.

> Microsoft successfully suppressed Java for long enough for Sun to die.

Tell me, how did Microsoft "suppress" Java? The main contention of Sun's lawsuit is that Microsoft was harming Java by adding features (most notably, delegate - ie closures). That almost nobody used. I know, I used them. There's no meaningful interpretation of the word "suppress" that applies here.

Furthermore, Java was always a cost center for Sun. There is no alternate history where Java somehow saved Sun. They made their money from selling hardware that eventually nobody bought.

Set aside your blind hate and learn from people that actually worked with these technologies in that era.

One way to suppress something is by diluting it or distracting from it with a bunch of slightly different options. Kind of like the spoiler effect in first-past-the-post elections.

You mean C#?

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#Sun's_litigatio...

Dropbox, which has also been falling apart trying to become a product.

It's hard to decouple the fate of Netscape from their catastrophic decision to rewrite their entire codebase from scratch:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

You're ignoring the actual EEE part.

Microsoft didn't just include a browser, they included a browser that didn't follow standards and had a bunch of its own extensions. Then since Windows was the largest platform, lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls and other IE-specific features on websites, and users had to switch to IE even if they preferred a different browser.

> Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.

Steve Jobs did the same thing. You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers to force developers into making native apps where Apple gets 30% of the developer's revenue and can exclude apps that compete with their own services.

> Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode.

The history of Office goes like this. There were many competitors and many users preferred the competitors, but Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems so that people would use Office instead.

Then, once Office had the most market share and everybody was locked into it because all their documents were in its proprietary format, they used the revenues they denied to competitors to make Office better. Now you say, look how good it is! But how did it get there and why is nobody else?

> The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well.

now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

> Java was never a Windows replacement.

It wasn't supposed to be an operating system. It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems, which Microsoft successfully impaired.

> Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc.

This is the one where they basically failed, because the network effect counterbalanced the leverage of the Windows monopoly. If your friends had ICQ then you installed ICQ even if you already had MSN Messenger installed as part of Windows.

But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE. If they'd succeeded in getting MSN Messenger into a dominant market position then they could discontinue or cripple the non-Windows clients and lock people into Windows with it.

> Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail.

Outlook.com has 400 million users.

> And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach.

Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach, by marking email from small email servers as spam even when it wasn't. Plausibly on purpose.

And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange. Gmail did that by offering 1GB free storage back when that was expensive and subsidizing it with Google Search revenues.

This is not a serious take. Safari on iOS is a very capable browser and crazy things have been done with it. Where it does make it difficult to replace a dedicated app, this can be ascribed to security more easily than "Apple wants one of its major iOS features to be bad".

> Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems

This is not a serious take. I'd love to see proof of this. There are lots of reasons Office became dominant, some of them even anticompetitive; "MS made competitors crash" is probably not one of them.

> It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems

This is not a serious take. Java was never intended to make it easy for users to switch operating systems. Sun did not make "supplant Windows!" one of its KPIs, and the continued dominance of Windows is neither here nor there when evaluating whether Java was successful. Java's pitch was to make writing platform-independent code easier, but at best that's tangentially related to having users switch OS's.

> Outlook.com has 400 million users.

So?

> And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange.

You're replying to a comment about people who run their own web server, so talking about Exchange lock-in is neither here nor there.

Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s

> The history of Office goes like this.

I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.

> Java

Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.

> But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE.

You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.

> Outlook.com has 400 million users.

"Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia

> Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach

Man where do you get this stuff? I wrote a mailing list server that had a brief moment of popularity, and the underlying (Java!) smtp library that lots of other folks use still today. I know a thing or two about smtp, and I gave up running my own email servers a long time ago. Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team. Barring some sort of massive change in the protocols, the home email server is dead dead dead. Microsoft and Google are the symptom, not the cause.

It did take over the web, for long enough to kill Netscape. Then they stopped caring because Netscape was already dead.

> I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.

You're denying that Microsoft caused intentional problems for companies making competing products on Microsoft operating systems?

> Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.

For Java to pose a threat to Windows it had to be a large enough proportion of software to allow people to switch away from Windows. To succeed they only needed to keep it below that threshold, not keep anyone from developing any Java applications at all.

> You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.

Explain Internet Explorer's market share circa 2004.

> "Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia

So a number of users larger than the population of the United States is to be disregarded because one other provider's is bigger?

now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

> Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team.

The problem is completely the other way around. Receiving spam is a minor inconvenience. The biggest problem with running a small email server is that messages you send are marked as spam by large email providers even when they're not.

MS did destroy whole swaths of the industry that threatened it—on purpose. A lot of the initiatives failed later, but I'm sure they cried all the way to the bank and their record-breaking yachts.

That a lot of their competitors stumbled on their own was simple fate. Every company stumbles once in a while. Unlike MS which was bolstered by monopoly, a single significant mistake meant the end of most competitors. MS on the other hand was heavily insured with a river of money after the IBM deal.

And probably wasn't GPL-licensed. That part introduces a slight problem to the EEE process. ;p

However the whole computing paradigm has changed. Laptops/PCs are now 'trucks' and the 'cars' of the computing world are phones, tablets and consoles. Ie. Laptops and PCs are mainly used for work now, and lots of that work is being done on Linux. Lenovo ThinkPads can be shipped with RHEL, Fedora or Ubuntu. Several Dell laptops (including the highest end workstations) can be shipped with Ubuntu. Framework and System76 of course are Linux friendly/default. And most other makers allow disabling UEFI from the BIOS menu.

Considering how much of MS' value is derived from Azure and that their main competitors are Linux-first (Amazon, Google), it'd be idiotic for them to try kill Linux again. You're right though, they'll probably try. I just have faith that enough hardware makers care about their users more than propping up WinTel like the old days (both Linux and AMD have made massive inroads).

To give an analogy, there might have been a time in East Berlin where people could have said: "It's fine that they check papers before crossing into West Germany. Your fears will be reasonable when they no longer permit entry."

Ignoring the question how much revenue they'd lose from such a move I don't think they could easily.

Windows doesn't consist only of Microsoft's code, but there is the whole legacy with OS/2, DEC/VMS and certainly a bunch of external companies contributing device drivers and things. I assume there are notable parts where Microsoft can't easily figure this out anymore. Code was moved and changed over time and for open sourcing they have to be sure about each line being ok to open source.

Look at Sun's process for opensourcing Solaris and where even OpenSolaris still had some binary blobs in some parts in the end after they went through the multi year process of going through it and rewriting different parts.

If anyone has the resources, it is MSFT, however investment in Windows has been on a downward trend, so don't hold your breath.

Personally, I think exactly what is ruining Windows as a desktop OS is trying to cloud-ify everything and render it more like a "future of computing" operating system packed with useless AI, Metro apps, cloud integration, app stores, and locking it down for normal consumers. I mean, look at Microsoft deprecating fantastic apps like Windows Backup or Windows Snipping Tool. They want to transform Windows into a "hip" and "cool" Nadella-vision OS and that vision sucks.

Cloud Services are cool, and Windows are the weird ones. But within Windows there's the kernel team who are cool and customer-focused, and the User layer as the weird ones. Go another level deeper and you have fights between C++ and .Net, or historically the crusade for COM+. Or the transition to UWP, which clearly at most half the Windows UI team got behind.

Obligatory web comic: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...

https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

I agree with the rest of your comment, but I don't think this really works. Windows remaining proprietary is something that makes sense from MS's POV. If, say, Windows 12 were to become open source, would you use it as a development platform or as a server? I for one wouldn't, the reason why developers don't want to be on Windows isn't that Windows costs money, it's that Windows is bad.

It only makes sense for MS to continue milking Windows until the bitter end. Eventually it won't be worth the effort any longer and Windows 19 or something will be a Linux distro.

Desktop Linux is indeed somewhat behind OS X or Windows. I'm currently on (somewhat dated) Ubuntu 18.4 from 2018, and it is more or less on par with Windows 7 from 2009. For me that's not a problem, I liked Windows 7 and actually stayed on it until 2018, but keep this lag in mind.

A user-friendly Linux distro like that was a gateway drug into becoming a terminal jockey though.

Maybe if I get really really lucky Haiku will be usable for my use cases by then, but that doesn't look very likely.

Every other day something breaks. We're spanning the entire range here, from petty stuff like Firefox missing fonts, to straight up the kernel not booting. And obviously everyting in between, like apparently the only way to receive Exchange mail is to pay for a Thunderbird add-on. Or setting up the VPN requiring arcane SELinux magic.

I honestly don't see how one can recommend desktop linux to someone without at least a minimal knowledge of how the OS works and some decent terminal-fu.

As sad as it is your parent is right. Non-technical users should just get a chromebook.

I've been happy running Cinnamon on Ubuntu LTS releases, and I like what I see playing with KDE as well. I've never had a kernel fail to boot (other than by hardware failure), and AppArmor is, IMO, far better at staying out of the way than SELinux. I can't help on the Exchange stuff, I've never had to deal with that.

It would be a little easier to just run Mint instead (Cinnamon being native there), but on Ubuntu you can just "apt install cinnamon-desktop-environment" and then choose Cinnamon the next time you log in.

What SELinux magic you had to do for VPN? All VPNs that I've set up were fine with just clickety-click in the GUI.

When somebody is used to (for example) Windows, he then approaches any problem the Windows way. But the Windows way may be not the optimal one on any other system. But since it was optimal on Windows and the person doesn't know anything else, then he will see suboptimal results anywhere else.

It is not just Windows -> Linux; the same problems will be experienced with Windows -> macOS. Even Microsoft had the same problem, when they redesigned Windows elements and the uproar it caused.

There was a period of maybe three years in the late '00s when Ubuntu was really killing it with their defaults & configs under Gnome2 and it really was quite nice, but before and after that, I've found going minimal and all hand-installed to be the only way not to constantly be angry at my machine and experiencing all kinds of mysterious brokenness.

In fact, accepting that what you can productively and pleasantly do with desktop Linux is a different (though overlapping) set of things than what's productive and pleasant under Windows or MacOS, and not trying to do those other things at all, is the path to contentment under desktop Linux, I think. At least until it gets a lot better, which, with all the Wayland shake-ups, seems really far off, if it ever happens. I think it's more likely Google's replacement will get actually-seriously-no-bullshit-quite-good for desktop use, before Linux does.

For the most part, though, I just stay on MacOS these days. All the time I lost to Linux during my decade or so of using it as my main OS on desktops and laptops taught me a lot, so wasn't completely wasted, but I just can't be bothered anymore. I just want to start up the machine and get stuff done. MacOS gives me plenty of glitches, I don't need even more, plus a ton more crashes and weird behavior. And I do want my computer to just do a bunch of nice stuff for me automatically, without constantly (instead, merely often) breaking or glitching or requiring me to set all that up.

Linux desktop is terrible only as long as you perceive it as an "other Windows" thing. No, it is something completely different. Instead - make a commitment, embrace it - and you will learn to love it.

Azure? Not too much touching yet, I am an AWS guy (I can complain here just as much). But their office software and worse their office software APIs are abysmal. I am not registering an app and describe its function to access their beta graph API just to add a task to Planner. I fired the customer that wanted that.

Desktop does make money since most people use their office suite on a Windows PC. Windows isn't that important anymore, but it is still present. And the direction they go with TPM and notebook camera requirements is predictably bad.

You cannot open-source Windows anymore, that would probably be a legal nightmare. Maybe parts of it of course.

For legacy components that have been open sourced, the only one I can think of is conhost, which they're trying to get rid of anyway in favour of the new (and fully open-source) Windows Terminal and its console component OpenConsole.

[1]: so long as I am the engineering lead. You know how these big companies are :|

(edit to add: This isn’t meant to detract from your point, just to add additional info.)

Office 365 vs Google Suite is not even funny, if you have to use O365, that is. Dynamics 365 looks fancy at first, but make a few clicks towards settings and you can witness 5 different UX languages, one half-assed modernisation attempt laid on top of another. Plus the churn from ongoing attempts, pointless rebrands and nonsense invented by bizdev guys. Add the famous MS back compat policy and you have a special kind of hell.

Would probably be faster if any other programs actually used their newer APIs. I really think burning people with WPF and introducing their shitty store was what many devs drove away. Wasn't really a C# (good language and good APIs in my opinion) guy for too long, but around the time Windows 8 was released, I left for greener pastures and didn't look back very often.

Despite this horrible injustice, you still visit your parents, right? :)

It's just that in the 20 minutes I sometimes have to kill on their computer I went from playing commercial games from my childhood to good solitaire to…bad solitaire. So much for nostalgia.

Once computers (especially windows) became ubiquitous they had to pay for themselves since user training wasn't picking up the bill anymore .

The same goes for lots of organizations, which makes it really hard to vote with your attention, time and money.

Facebook is another example. Yes, React was really cool when it launched, and great innovation comes from the Facebook engineering team. But is it worth supporting their engineering team when at large, the organization seems to contribute more bad to world than good?

I'm torn myself and not sure what to think anymore. Same applies to Microsoft. I really want to like the new Microsoft, but it's hard to just forget the past and see past issues like this, and it makes my view on the rest of their tooling to be less favorable.

While I do run windows at home you can easily enjoy the developer-centric Microsoft without enaging with the consumer side.

I know I could just use and promote React without using and promoting Facebook-The-Platform. My argument was more around that by using React and promoting it, aren't I indirectly promoting Facebook then? Same goes for Microsoft or any other company that has a "good" side and a "bad" side. How can we support the good side without supporting the bad side indirectly?

I don't know what their policy on accepting code contributions from third parties is, but the prospective value of those contributions should speak for itself.

Azure is a total ripoff and I will never use it again.

Nope, there's only one Microsoft, and it's clever enough to know that they had to learn to wear the Jazz hat when dealing with the oldies and the Punk Rock one with the youngsters.

That's why I still run the Windows 3.11 Solitaire.

Yay backwards compatibility, it sill works on Win 10 :D

And the original deck design by Susan Kare is still the best one ever.

https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

Lock-in exists both on the desktop and in the cloud (and all kinds of other places in tech) because that's what the business incentives are. It's a race to the bottom and no company can resist it and still have shareholders. We need regulation to make them knock it off.

Prior to being a SWE or SRE-SE I worked in Network Engineering. Seeing how most companies ran their DCs and treated the devs that were required to use them was illuminating. Everything was a "service desk" staffed with generally ticket handlers. It took ages for them to get things done, and you were almost always hunting for the person on the desk that just "got things done". I worked nights and my engineering line would get clear day-time-appropriate requests at nights because the most qualified engineers were in school and ended up on the night shift. Compute scheduling was no different. You now have APIs for both of these jobs.

My point being that the real innovation that made developers turn to the cloud was APIs. All these "availability zones" didn't exist in most company DCs, usually someone had a lever to throw to switch DCs at best, and even then they really weren't used. Downtime was expected. Those very same APIs could've been made by a coalition of those small and medium companies using the same technique Google used with Kubernetes: open source. By the time such a project started, it was already too late, and public clouds had built what they'd built. Not having open hardware also contributed to the problem, but again, nothing a coalition couldn't overcome.

And yet here we are. I think it’s more likely that Satya wants a perception that he doesn’t want Dark UX and then use it everywhere. Windows and azure is full of this stuff and it doesn’t make sense that people are secretly going against the CEO’s vision and direction.

I don’t expect CEO micromanagement, but if Satya wanted a positive user experience seriously, then the solitaire PM wouldn’t have added ads or at least would have removed them after the backlash.

I think Microsoft has really improved (eg, WSL, vscode, GitHub) but think it’s just PR about how great everything is supposed to be.

It’s like the Amazon ads that show happy workers getting degrees and stuff. I’m glad those things are happening but it’s just PR.

Not trying to start a flame war, but I'm triggered.

Dotnet is probably the most polished, most modern language out there, and I have no idea what would you call sexy... Maybe all quirks with javascript or the mess that python is with special functions and the like?

Please untrigger yourself :)

I probably used the wrong word, but I agree. What I meant is that the entire .NET platform is very solid even though it doesn't get a lot of mindshare. Wasn't meant as a putdown of C#.

It's a non-trivial percentage of the ~25M professional programmers in the world. It has plenty of mindshare, just not within the communities that feed the HN userbase.

They could have kept on the Ballmer path and been a Windows and Office company forever, milking the existing base. That path would have likely turned them into IBM. Less relevance, less R and D, and tons of share buybacks.

Instead they bet the farm on emerging computing models. They pulled their money and top talent from the legacy products, and moved them into the new world. So the newer stuff is improving (Azure isn’t AWS but it’s a credible #2) and the old products lag. That’s just a result of the priority decision. They had the courage to starve their cash cow.

If there was a last straw to me ever using Windows again - I think that info was all I needed.

That’s my final nail in the coffin. It might sound dramatic - but it literally - - clearly - shows that there is no intention on providing value to customers with their software anymore, whatsoever.

It’s only going to get worse from here, and I for one am glad I already bailed.

…damn, but really? That hurts my childhood a bit. I have distinct memories of Solitaire from the 3.11 days. :(

Damn. :(