No, Windows still has Windows tax, which is why I always choose "No OS" when buying a machine. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately, so we can't judge the price. Android sure is subsidized though.

Android does have a cost. While the OS itself is free, any manufacturer that wants to put Play Store, which is almost every company outside China, needs to pay Google a license fee, which effectively pays for Android. Of course there are also ads everywhere in Android and Android apps that helps pay the bill.

Wow, so the only OSs with no money in them are the FOSS ones. Makes sense, though.

(No, at this point Android hardly counts as FOSS anymore.)

Someone has to pay for it because it’s expensive to develop. There’s a ton of money in Linux just like there is in proprietary operating systems. There are like 4000-5000 kernel contributors and most of them are doing this work on some company’s payroll. There’s an enormous amount of resources going into Linux to the point where a proprietary OS couldn’t possibly keep up.

The real genius of Linux is the economic model, getting companies to buy into it and actually delivering value far in excess of what it costs anybody to contribute. It’s winning precisely because the value proposition cannot be matched.

Except many of those contributions never land upstream.

Hence why we usually with the cloud provider distros.

Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob.

> Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob.

What do you mean? Are they violating the GPL by not releasing the modified source?

Most of their stuff isn't GPL anyway, hence why drivers are mostly in userspace.

That’s the wrong way to look at it. Instead, look at how much does land upstream. Linux moves at an incredible pace.

Edit: BTW the figure I cited are contributors to mainline.

Yet it is still a mess to support laptops, because everything still needs to be reverse engineered instead of landing into upstream.

My laptops have been running fine for years.

What I had with Linux did also worked fine, provided I was happy with randomly dropping wlan sessions when doing heavy downloads, using OpenGL 3.3 instead of the OpenGL 4.1, watching YouTube without hardware decoding, and having to take out the battery when it hang during a reboot.

Other than that, it was a great Linux laptop, 2009 - 2024.

There are really any ads in Android itself, even with Google Apps installed. Which, by the way, you don't need to use even if they are installed (except, for example, Chrome to get a different app store or whatnot-, just like a fresh Windows install needing to use Edge to get Firefox or Chrome).

And it's still miles easier to get Android to switch default apps and also respect your choices, than to get Windows to allow you to switch default apps and then shut the fuck about their crap.

> MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately

Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history]

Productivity and Cloud have a revenue of about 30B each while personal computing only was 13.5B (that includes windows Xbox and search + advertising) according to ms earnings report q4 25

Yep! That’s what I was thinking of. It is a cloud hosting company that keeps some legacy software around for sentimental reasons.

The only reason Azure is a success though is because of Windows. Maybe now it's so big that it can exist without Windows but Windows is the gateway into Azure. So many other companies would kill for a platform (aka Meta) and here Microsoft has one and is treating it poorly. In pure financial terms it makes sense but, as a business strategy, I think it's severely lacking.

It's because Satya is worried about next quarter's earnings call, not what Windows looks like in ten years.

BillG had that big meeting with everybody at Microsoft awhile back and basically told them they had about 6-12 months to right the ship. Personally I hope they don't. Nothing makes me happier than arrogant jackasses being utterly destroyed by life, which is what will happen if they continue to enshittify Windows.

Satya seems to forget that Azure exists because of Windows. It's the deep integration into Windows that makes it worth anything, otherwise we could all switch to Linux / Mac OS X and run everything in AWS / GCP. You quite literally don't need Azure at all for anything if you don't have Windows-based machines.

I would imagine a significant portion of the cloud revenue is derivative of windows though. Whether that’s lift and shift workloads or entra id which is picked over alternatives for its compatibility with existing windows and AD infrastructure.

I don't think it's sentimentality, exactly. Who picks Azure or OneDrive or AD or Office 365 or Sharepoint or Teams or any Microsoft product or service if they're not already running Windows? The desktop operating system, "legacy" though it may be, has near universal reach and has therefore been key in pushing people to their more lucrative services. But they pushed too hard, it's too obviously shit, and now people and enterprises are looking for an exit. What then?

Microsoft slowly becomes IBM.

That's "what then".

Meanwhile they have very cool tech like .NET, VS C++ debugging/hot reload, that gets overshadowed by Microsoft being Microsoft.

Then the .NET team asks why there isn't more uptake outside Windows, in spite of all open sourcing efforts, this is why.

If you want the "Home" version of Windows, you'll get ads and crap, but the cost will be free/low. If you don't want the ads and need a more professional setup, then you can pay for Windows "Pro" version. They also have server versions that cost a lot more, so yes, Microsoft can and does make money from their OS. No, it's probably not as much as they make from Azure now, but in the past it made them a lot of money. It's estimated Windows brings in ~$20 billion for Microsoft, which is nothing to balk at. Azure brings in ~$75 billion. $20 billion isn't "small beans" in this equation, it's substantial.

The Pro version doesn't remove the adverts.

What "adverts"? I've been on Pro for over a decade on a dozen machines and have never seen one single "advert".

From https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-wont-show-any-ads-if-yo...

"It doesn't matter whether you have the $140 Windows Home edition or the $200 Windows Pro edition; you'll see plenty of ads throughout your Windows system. There are ads in File Explorer, and you'll even find them in the Start menu."