If Microsoft backs off core Windows development, which it certainly seems like they are, this is what we'd expect to see... not a big bang where it suddenly stops working, but every year it'll just sort of fall a bit more behind Linux, until in 4 or 5 years the difference consensus will slowly just creep over to Windows being noticeably worse than Linux without any big bang switchover... and it'll sneak up on Microsoft as much as it sneaks up on everyone else.
To be honest, Linux as a desktop environment is already more usable than many people realize. People kept expecting a Big Bang where someone would put out The Release That Solves Everything, but what happened instead is that it just kept creeping up and creeping up. A similar thing happened to Linux gaming; Valve never put out a big Here's Linux For Games release, it just crept up and crept up to the point that it basically runs my entire library, and single-player gaming is now to the point that anything that doesn't run in Linux is the exception, not the rule.
And Microsoft's problem is that if they let this happen, they're going to be in a world of hurt when they decide to get in gear and fix it, because of their reverse compatibility support. Fixing all that up and trying to make everything go fast is going to be hard with all these systems interacting with each other. While we Linux users may piss and moan about systemd transitions or all the audio transitions, in the Linux world, as new subsystems come in, the old ones actually go away, and it isn't dragging anywhere near as much reverse compatibility baggage around. Helps that there aren't any project managers to demand Windows LDAP for COM Apartments Over Embraced And Extended USB to be jammed in to be supported 10 years later because one big client uses it and that mean the rest of us get to be running a WLCAEEUSB service on our computers for the next 15 years, causing occasional mysterious crashes when it spuriously grabs a USB device.
It seems to me Microsoft is in grave danger of walking itself into an MBA trap, where investement in Windows doesn't pay off this quarter so they don't, repeat for 15 or 20 quarters, and then waking up one day and realizing that one quarter at a time they threw away one of the most useful business positions in the history of the world.
Interesting thought, but you might be missing the hardware perspective. I switched from Windows to Linux this year, and the biggest issue has been drivers and hardware compatibility: audio available via headphones but not (laptop) built-in speakers, occasional display issues depending on the monitor setup, occasional WiFi issues. If hardware innovation stopped, Linux could catch up easily... but it won't, so there is a constant driver treadmill that manufacturers mostly handle for MS on the Windows side, but Linux has to handle somewhat alone. Perhaps the manufacturers will start to help out more and more on the Linux side too, as more users demand compatibility.
I've had a much worse time with hardware on windows than Linux these last couple of years. My work laptop runs Windows and will get stuck in a BSPD bootloop if I turn it on with external monitors connected. My USB keyboard and mouse disconnect every few minutes.
Windows may as well not even have Bluetooth for as well as it works. Some devices always show as connected, despite not being present. I have to un-pair my headphones every time I want to connect. Sometimes I have to reboot my computer to get them to work. Windows also doesn't even support Bluetooth audio sink. On Linux, I can play audio from my phone to my computer and pipe it back into my Bluetooth headphones. Windows 7 supported this, but 10 does not.
I've even used some weird old PCI cards that only have XP drivers, but work fine with Linux.
The only hardware I've had trouble with in the last 5 years is Nvidia cards. And that's a deliberate decision made by Nvidia to not support Linux. AMD cards work perfectly.
I haven't seen problems with audio or WiFi on Linux in over ten years.
"I've had a much worse time with hardware on windows than Linux these last couple of years."
And I want to emphasize and underline my point here that if Microsoft does just let Windows languish, we are going to gradually see this more and more every year. There won't be a big bang wakeup call. There will always be people who can say "But I haven't had a problem". What you won't be able to easily tell on the forums is that the ratios will slowly-but-surely shift, but again, with no big-bang wakeup.
I just bought a brand-new fully-AMD-based laptop for the family, stuck the latest Ubuntu on it, and almost everything works. The only thing that I've found that doesn't is that if I play a game and push it out the HDMI port, we get audio dropouts. It isn't everything on the HDMI port, we watched a lengthy YouTube video with no dropouts. But wifi, bluetooth, all the keyboard controls, battery, everything else I've seen is working.
I honestly think we've already passed the peak and are already in the slow decline. Microsoft has already pushed too hard and alienated too many users. Now they'll slowly keep losing market share while desperately squeezing the remaining market for all its worth until there's nothing left. Their momentum will carry them for an unfortunately long time.
> some weird old PCI cards that only have XP drivers, but work fine with Linux.
I will say, supporting old hardware is probably Linux's strong suit, because their model of upstream first means that maintenance tends to get carried a lot further than proprietary drivers ever would.
>I've had a much worse time with hardware on windows than Linux these last couple of years.
I don't doubt that as I have had same experience. But somehow Windows has to get worse from non-technical users' perspective to be real trouble for Microsoft. So far my spouse still find think Windows is the normal thing despite using rather trouble-free, fast Mac at home for many years along with horribly slow and problematic Windows laptop provided by employer.
So even with their own first-hand experience with Windows problems they consider Linux or Mac difficult/exotic thing.
I genuinely, truly do not understand how Microsoft, let alone any user, can accept the current state of Windows' Bluetooth stack. It's completely broken, core features are simply not implemented. Microsoft themselves provide a better Bluetooth UI in one of their WPF demo repos than the one shipped with Windows.
Maybe I'm biased because my job involves building Bluetooth hardware and software for Windows, but even just trying to use normal devices like headphones or controllers is absolute anguish.
Bluetooth on Linux isn't perfect: I frequently have to unpair and repair my headphones, but at least it's feature complete. Anything that Bluetooth can do is exposed. Linux even comes with some really advanced CLI utilities to manage Bluetooth devices. On windows you're lucky to find a WinRT function for what you want, and it probably doesn't even work.
Windows 7 had a complete Bluetooth implementation, but Microsoft decided to rewrite everything from scratch. I guess the intern they delegated it to had to go back to their job at Starbucks before they finished.
Linux blows away Windows hardware support on everything except for graphics cards.
I set up dual boot on a newish Dell laptop recently and Windows couldn't even access the SSD or the wifi card without installing extra drivers. I haven't had problems that bad on Linux since about 2006.
Even dual booting is less of an option these days. If you aren't careful, windows will clobber your boot records and force itself to be the default and only boot option.
I've even heard of Windows erasing grub during normal updates.
I just erased windows from my personal machines. I've been exclusively on Linux for 5 years or more
While I agree with you broadly that hardware support is a problem for less popular operation systems, I can personally say that Fedora has been a dream for me, hardware-wise, for a while now. My 7900XT GPU just works. My printer just works. My webcam just works. My headset just works. My audio interface just works (the audio I/O, at least - I haven't actually ever tested the MIDI I/O).
I'm certain I've gotten lucky, and I'm certain there's plenty of edge cases to be ironed out, especially with more specialized hardware. But I think a lot of common consumer goods are in a good place right now, at least in my personal experience.
My latest PC was a pretty randomly chosen Chinese PC from Amazon that advertised Ubuntu compatibility. In other words, except that advantage to slowly slip away from Microsoft too.
It's been years since I really put any effort into checking before buying - it had gotten to the point I could assume that issues would be minor and/or resolved soon after purchase.
Those PC's look like great value and availability and are clearly very popular - have squeezed out other options like Intel NUC. Very tempting.
But I've heard that you pretty much never get a BIOS update and the quality of any such update is going to be dubious. Nothing sinister about this - it is simply a bargain basement option.
So, you are really throwing security out the window.
Security shouldn't be much of an issue with most modern CPUs. The microcode can be updated at boot time by the kernel, even if the one loaded by the BIOS is out of date. So microcode level patches are taken care of.
That leaves attacks on secure boot, which could be feasible with a bad implementation, but I doubt most home users would have to worry about an evil maid attack.
I'm at the beginning of my third desktop Linux year and I managed to install it on all the hardware I have thrown at it ranging from 10+ years old PCs to a recent Ryzen workstation and a Framework laptop.
I'm not a Linux guru by any mean, there's only one distro that gave me problems: OpenSuse. I'm currently on Fedora.
> If hardware innovation stopped, Linux could catch up easily... but it won't, so there is a constant driver treadmill that manufacturers mostly handle for MS on the Windows side, but Linux has to handle somewhat alone.
Hardware innovation hasn't stopped, but there's a lot less diversity than the past. For mainstream desktop, there's only three video card vendors (it's different on mobile, and servers have ASPEED's 2d cards to work with), sound cards are pretty much dead: HDAudio takes care of most of it but jack detection issues persist, Broadcom is poised to buy up all storage card vendors, Networking vendors are limited.
Intel is pretty good at supporting its products for Windows, Linux, and sometimes FreeBSD. If you buy only stuff they make, you can cover all your peripheral needs and move on with your life.
Most other vendors of important devices have code dumped drivers for Linux and sometimes FreeBSD for at least for some of their devices. This gets more frequent as there's more consolidation. The Linux drivers might not be great, and the code is usually full of unexplained magic values, but it's a start.
There's also the potential of running Windows drivers elsewhere; it sometimes works for network drivers (something something NDIS)
On the other hand once something works on linux it may do so for a long time without being dependent on the vendor to release a new version for each new major windows version.
For me it's a cheap old flatbed scanner where the last windows drivers are for XP but it still works on an rolling release distro.
> Perhaps the manufacturers will start to help out more and more on the Linux side too, as more users demand compatibility.
I do believe that manufacturers would be willing to help out if GNU/Linux was sufficiently standardized that they can simply drop some code/binary that works on basically every GNU/Linux distribution (just as they can basically do on Windows). The problem is that GNU/Linux is not some single operating system, but a proliferation of lots of different distributions.
the parent comment explains why dumping a blob is bad, particularly for drivers. it allows vendors to depend on all sorts of undocumented and unreliable behavior and prevents upstream improvements.
Agreed. I have a Linux computer upstairs, and the Wifi dongle (I know, but it's fine!) broke. Buying a new one, or even knowing what to buy, that doesn't require me to USB key some random drivers (probably cloned off GitHub) is a tricky task.
I have a mix of systems, have had for several decades, Linux works on all of them, old and new, no issues, seems odd what you're saying, almost like it was entirely made up.
It goes without saying that your experience is completely irrelevant, unless you can prove that you had my hardware working out of the box on one of those devices.
Have a look at this simple tutorial[0]. Compare it to "plug it in" on Windows.
Without reading your link yet, I don't understand why is it difficult to understand when I say all my devices on all the Dell (and Alienware), HP and Lenovo PC's I've bought the past two decades just work on Linux.
Hey, which Dell, HP, Lenovo laptop you used in this time? I really-really want to know which system doesn't have any issues on Linux. Also what Linux version your used? Pretty please?
Windows 11 has become an ad delivery vehicle with Microsoft milking what life Windows has left in this fashion. Linux has largely commoditized operating systems and the major DEs here excel over Windows in many ways, further putting the nail in Windows for the desktop. Combine this with many applications being available with any web browser, the only reason to run Windows is for the legacy Windows applications.
> To be honest, Linux as a desktop environment is already more usable than many people realize.
This will be true once the stability of graphics drivers on Linux improves. On every major kernel update, I am always bracing for everything going blank because of driver issues.
People want to game, and a lot of gamers want Nvidia. The driver may or may not work, but if it has a reputation for maybe not working, people will decide against it.
It also possible that people who find out the Nvidia cards are unreliable on Linux are making decisions over other systems where this shouldn't be such a big deal.
You may have a good specific point, but I think people will always say "once X is fixed people will switch to Linux".
When windows users try Linux for the first time, they'll (rightfully) point out problems, while their Linux friend will just say "oh that's normal, you just have to do Y" and the exact same thing would be true in the reverse situation.
Some people are just more tolerant to being in an unpredictable environment than others. I find myself highly tolerant to noise, unpredictability and things breaking. Of course I have my limits, but when comparing myself to my best friend, he will literally have none of it (he's a macos user)
I've used nvidia for close to 2 decades on various PC hardware machines, desktops to laptops, Dell, HP, Lenovo and nvidia (binary drivers in the Ubuntu/Kubuntu distribution) work 100%. Zero issues. Old and new machines. Very odd eh?
Even as a gamer, I prefer to use cheap monitors, wasted too much money on expensive ones in my younger days only to see them break after a few years then the money is gone. I can afford better, I'm just cheap. I imagine I will start using a better monitor in coming years and if I see issues, I'll definitely honestly report them and discuss them. Another thing to think about, more pixels means more electricity used to keep them lit and more electricity to shove images around on the screen for the GPU, higher electricity bill, more carbon in the atmosphere.
I wonder how many HiDPI users also complain about global warming in other forums.
That was my experience too, but a decade ago while running NVidia+Intel hardware. Since switching to AMD+AMD my home machines have only run into the issue once or twice, and then only when running something odd like multiple graphics cards.
Performance is not the limiting factor keeping people from switching to Linux.
If I could take my current desktop PC, swap to Linux, and all the hardware and all the software I like (including games) would Just Work(tm) without me spending weeks to months diagnosing (and inevitably giving up on some of what I want), I'd swap in a heartbeat.
But that is not the reality we live in.
It's gotten better, but frankly I doubt it ever will really get to the point of usability for someone like me.
IMO, once Adobe comes to linux, or they lose their position in the industry to competitors, we will see the shift.
And the main reason is Apple doesn't support Nvidia. There are limits to what you can accomplish editing videos without a beefy GPU, so you're trapped on windows if you're using adobe premier.
I mean, games like Valorant require anti-cheat root kits will still keep us on Windows forever, but those are edge cases.
Adobe is not the only problem. Hardware support, codecs, media support. It all just does not work that well, and I think will not work well for a long period of time.
Video editing for years have not been an option for Linux.
Sure there are programs, but they often crash, often encode x times slower than corporate paid crapware.
For this, you have to talk to the people you are buying your hardware from. They are getting your money, not linux. They are also supporting that hardware under Windows, not Microsoft. Tell them what your needs are, and vote with your wallet.
> codecs, media support
Funny; for years, I've been installing ffdshow (ffmpeg-based codecs) into Windows to have decent codec support in Windows; even today, many users still install VLC (or mpc, mpc-hc, mpv, mpv.net, or other clone) to get media playback without any issues.
Adobe won't come to Linux until they would lose money by not getting there.
They won't lose money, unless there's a competitor, that eats their lunch. Basically something competitive like Davinci Resolve, but for the other parts of their suite.
Microsoft should invest in Proton, make Windows apps work seamless on linux, and then just make a "Windows" replacement for Wayland that runs on Kernel...
Then, and only then, will we have "The year of the linux desktop"
I really dunno why people advocate ripping out the kernel and using Linux instead, while keeping Windows userspace. The NT kernel is the best part of Windows. It has built-in asynchronous real-time I/O. A completely plug-and-play driver model. Far more advanced permissions model. It is far ahead of the competition.
The userspace and UI of Windows is very straightforwardly modified; that's why it has changed so much every iteration of Windows. Telling people that we should keep 'Windows apps' and then rip out the kernel and use the Linux kernel instead is like saying one has a small rash, let's do chemotherapy. It is breaking a fly with a wheel.
I want to go back to the Windows 2000-era UI, with the same advancements in the kernel and core Windows technologies we have today.
I mean, this is actually backwards from a pure engineering POV from what would be actually excellent.
The core Windows NT kernel is quite excellent, and was always in some ways far superior to what Unix offered. E.g. proper asynchronous I/O from day one. Dave Cutler and crew did a bang-up job. Linux is only getting competitive things like io_uring now(ish).
The problem was the shitty API and user space they papered in front of it with. Lack of a proper CLI shell, slow filesystem, the godawful "registry", a low quality, unsafe windowing toolkit (Win32 API), and then, after WinXP, bad UX / environment stuff. And, of course, the fact that everything was proprietary, closed/closed-source, and the $$ licensing story for running a WindowsNT server was always garbage.
As a user operating system none of this mattered so much because the sheer mass of the market meant that driver support and application support was always going to win out on Windows.
But these days, with all my attached devices being USB-Cish things that just implement USB standards I have zero issues in Linux. In fact, audio interface support works better for me in Ubuntu than it does in Windows right now.
But people who were serious about running servers naturally stuck with Unix, despite it being in some ways technically inferior on paper -- because that experience on NT just wasn't as good. Remote administration via GUI. Anemic CLI. MS proprietary everything. Per-user $$ licensing stuff. Tight coupling with IIS & SQL Server, which has their own licensing stuff, etc. etc. etc.
Anyways, I think it would be a shame if MS gave up on the NT kernel.
With WSL1 they did an interesting job of getting Linux user space running overtop of the NT kernel, but they dropped that approach with WSL2 and went with a more VM approach.
> Anyways, I think it would be a shame if MS gave up on the NT kernel.
I can't say this more. The NT kernel is really the best part of Windows. Almost everything that people complain about in Windows 11 is in the userspace. Start menu nerfed? Right-click menu hidden? Settings versus Control Panel? Cortana, Copilot? There's nothing in the kernel or lower-level OS constructs that require any of these.
Funny, I just went back and edited my comment to add in filesystem where I didn't have it before and then saw your reply.
Because, yes, NTFS is just slow as hell. I have never been clear why but as I said elsewhere, various *nix filesystems have always outperformed it. I understand that on paper NTFS was technically superior back when Linux was stuck with ext2 & ext3 as standard, but in practice it just made for a really slow system.
Hehe, that thought was going through my mind as well just now. It's not really such a far out idea; if Microsoft wanted to, they could certainly put the manpower behind it to make it happen. It would also be the most delicious plot twist ever.
But I don't think this is in the cards for the foreseeable future.
> If Microsoft backs off core Windows development, which it certainly seems like they are, this is what we'd expect to see...
If this is really true, I am deeply saddened. I grew up using almost entirely nothing but Windows since 98, and have used every version (except Windows Me) since.
As a desktop and enterprise OS, Windows is pretty fantastic to develop with, natively, contrary to many opinions here. Technologies like COM, .NET (Framework), Win32, Direct{2D, 3D}, and the Windows API are all very powerful and fairly future-proof, too.
Core Windows/NT development is extremely fun, interesting, and the choices that the NT kernel developers made in the 90s put it light years ahead of the competition. Consider its advanced permissions model (ACLs versus UIDs and GIDs), its plug-and-play driver model, and its ability to run on a wide variety of hardware.
Linux supports ACL's, too, but they are not enabled by default. On plug and play, Linux won by a mile by default, as the kernel has much better support than Windows 10 which often has to connect itself to Windows Update.
On COM/.Net, today almost nobody cares. Modern ad-hoc built small-medium Corporateware it's bound to Java as a Hellish curse, and on the rest of the maket here just Direct3D matters; but not as much as before, because for mobile/console gaming Vulkan might work everywhere.
Also, on the enterprise, most people it's migrating to Unix backends and web frontends for lots of tasks. Login once, run everywhere. Does your management software work under a phone, tablet, desktop with an adaptive GUI? Then most of the company doesn't even need a Windows device.
Heck, most non-tech companies have outsourced their IT to 3rd parties and their user accounta are running under Windows virtual machines hosted on Unix servers. And modern BIOSes can run most of their setup under PXE/netboot and connect to these servers to boot their images; so, well, Windows in the desktop is more and more irrelevant.
Lots of LoB applications in various industries are still developed using .NET (even for new developments).
> Also, on the enterprise, most people it's migrating to Unix backends and web frontends for lots of tasks.
Not for every task, web applications are a good choice (which is why lots of new LoB applications in enterprise are still developed as Windows desktop applications).
> Linux supports ACL's, too, but they are not enabled by default.
Oh, it is, just nobody bothers (chances are, `getfacl .` in your homedir will succeed). They are also POSIX ACLs, not NT ACLs, so they have slightly different behavior.
To be honest, Linux as a desktop environment is already more usable than many people realize. People kept expecting a Big Bang where someone would put out The Release That Solves Everything, but what happened instead is that it just kept creeping up and creeping up. A similar thing happened to Linux gaming; Valve never put out a big Here's Linux For Games release, it just crept up and crept up to the point that it basically runs my entire library, and single-player gaming is now to the point that anything that doesn't run in Linux is the exception, not the rule.
And Microsoft's problem is that if they let this happen, they're going to be in a world of hurt when they decide to get in gear and fix it, because of their reverse compatibility support. Fixing all that up and trying to make everything go fast is going to be hard with all these systems interacting with each other. While we Linux users may piss and moan about systemd transitions or all the audio transitions, in the Linux world, as new subsystems come in, the old ones actually go away, and it isn't dragging anywhere near as much reverse compatibility baggage around. Helps that there aren't any project managers to demand Windows LDAP for COM Apartments Over Embraced And Extended USB to be jammed in to be supported 10 years later because one big client uses it and that mean the rest of us get to be running a WLCAEEUSB service on our computers for the next 15 years, causing occasional mysterious crashes when it spuriously grabs a USB device.
It seems to me Microsoft is in grave danger of walking itself into an MBA trap, where investement in Windows doesn't pay off this quarter so they don't, repeat for 15 or 20 quarters, and then waking up one day and realizing that one quarter at a time they threw away one of the most useful business positions in the history of the world.