* macs, which cost an arm and a leg and aren't necessarily better if you've got an axe to grind against corporations with dark patterns
* chromebooks, where you have even less choice over the matter
* various flavors of Linux, which have never quite gotten to 'grandma uses it and it just works with the apps she likes'
Interestingly SteamOS is quite nice, but will it be something outside of gaming on a Steam Deck?
Considering their website[1] still says it's Debian derived but they switched to Arch some time ago, I doubt it's in their plans to do more than enable their own hardware.
Its impossible to compete when the manufacturers are actively hostile and don't provide the firmware/code/specs in a way that the hardware can be supported independently. Some even use this to spy under an umbrella of plausible deniability, there was an article just recently about Qualcomm chips that did this (checked in) at the firmware level.
Open source and free software is a philosophy and ideology. Microsoft is incompatible with it no matter what licenses they use.
Microsoft never embraced open source. You can't claim that until and unless Windows is released with source as free software, which will Never Ever Happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
That would wouldn't change a thing even it happens. No one except Microsoft is going to be expert on 50 million lines of windows code and contribute meaningfully to it. Add to that contributor's licensing agreement, community behavior, sheer capacity to make API changes and get it accepted. It will be impossible to create alternate certified Windows distribution even if all source code was available.
You are not the customer here. You are a cog in an industrial machine. It is the executive management that has power, and you will know it every day. MSFT will sell your management the tools you are required to use every day.
Hostile UI, hostile business practices, hostile legal and growth endeavors
At this point i’m not hust distrusting MS i’m actively doing anything I can to support their demise
Presumably it is to prevent people discussing problems at length. I don't know any other reason they would do that.
It seems to go against how most other organizations use GitHub.
I use GitHub all the time but I never expected it to be mandatory if you wanted to publish a package for a popular open source language.
But as the top says, “If you are interested in helping with this work, please feel free to get started!” (Though only if you’re a contributor or open a duplicate issue)
We are just in the cycle on a modern platform. Heading out of phase 2 and into phase 3.
They stand for weary resignation. Same as Google and Amazon.
For most people, they're just there, and you can't not use them, so what can you do?
They can be as dodgy as they like, because when you point out what they're doing, most people will just be confused about why you're complaining, because you may as well be railing against the fact that rain is wet.
Yes, some techies actively chose Chrome knowing full-well what the alternatives were, but I'm pretty sure the advertising produced much greater numbers.
(Also, the techies who enthusiastically recommended Chrome were the same ones who enthusiastically recommended Twitter a few years later, and are now enthusiastically recommending Signal — which illustrates the quality of their judgement when it comes to monopolies.)
Prior to quantum, firefox was a dog, and let's not talk about internet explorer...
Really though?
It was that easy?
On my shit-list it's definitely way above Facebook, Apple, and Google. A company which has on so many occasions made my life harder and caused me to suffer. I would qualify Microsoft as irredeemably horrible, I can't imagine what they would have to do to make me consider changing my opinion of them.
Is it? The cynic in me feels that the actual currency is "engagement" - how many consumers can you keep ob your platform. Providing a great and trustworthy service is one strategy to archieve this, but by far not the most effective or reliable.
The big players very much seem to prefer a captive audience (through network effects, vendor-controlled hardware, closed ecosystems, etc) that cannot switch away no matter how much they personally dislike or mistrust the platform.
They had a few good ideas early on, and now that open source isn't patent bound (not gonna get into the rediculousness of UI software patents that have been granted where they never met that bar of novel, useful, and non-obvious [grouping items is somehow non-obvious?]).,
If you take that statement you just made, and take it just one step further, asking a why is that when they haven't really innovated in 20+ years?
The realistic answer to that is exactly what I just said. Alternate revenue streams.
Money. How would it be possible for an absolutely gigantic company to stand for anything else?
Actually, they don't. People will continue to keep buying Microsoft regardless of how shitty their products and policies are.
Nobody was ever fired for picking Microsoft. When Microsoft products have issues, people blame Microsoft, but when anything else has issues, people blame the IT person who chose that product. The result is everyone picking Microsoft to shift blame away from themselves.
Microsoft needs to get their brand straight and decide, once and for all, what they stand for. There was this incredible move towards open source, and embracing the modern web, and so many positive developments. I think myself, and many other technologists, were going, "Wait, is this is the same company that shoved IE down our throats for years and got sued for anti-competitive practices?" It was glorious, and shocking.
All of that is now at risk so that some product manager can look good by driving enforced but entirely fake adoption of Edge — that should be nipped in the bud and a clear message sent that this era is over — from the top executives.
Or I supposed they could do nothing, and then it truly is sending a clear message as well. But perhaps not the one Microsoft intends to send, or the one that would benefit the company in coming years in terms of staying inside the good graces they have managed to create.