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.

Even my elderly parents run Linux, supported by me of course. They don't know even know the difference.

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..."

Grrrrr.

Consider that a badge of honor.

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 mistake is buying a $400 laptop. Although anecdotically I've known a lot more people whose MacBook has died than PC laptops.

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).

Something here, might not be the best guide: https://superuser.com/questions/342719/how-to-boot-a-physica...

So, yes, there certainly are MS folks who (unironically) think that they did a "great job" with this.

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.

If you use Steam, it's all automatic and transparent in the background, but I don't use Steam for everything.

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 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.

Bitwig + Pianoteq is the ultimate toy to tinker and relax with.

Read the Manual or Suffer.

Maybe get someone with a God's Booming Voice to speak it in the phone voice mail message , too.

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.

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...

That should get you going nicely :)

But you could also use something like yabridge [0] in order to run Windows-only VSTs.

0: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge

Hopefully this new CLAP plugin format takes off though.

I have a Push 2 as well. I know it's meant to work in Bitwig, but I do love the integration of it with Ableton.

So, Windows for gaming and Linux for everything else it is.

I find this hard to believe unless you are talking about older or indie games.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  (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%

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html

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.

I don't care what spyware/crapware microsoft chooses to add to the enterprise setting.

My memory is probably faulty so corrections welcome, but wasn't "developers, developers, developers" a while before he became CEO?

They care.

And nothing of value was lost

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.

They're platform independent thought.