Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

> an understandable engineering reaction

The point about switching to an alternative isn't an engineering reaction, it's a political suggestion that is based on sending the right message. When MS does something you find objectionable, the way to signal that you strongly disagree in a capitalist system is to vote with your wallet. Continuing to use Window only sends the message that the recent changes are acceptable.

> For others it isn't that simple.

I'm sure it isn't, but that was one of the risks in building a business that depends critically on a product you have zero control over. MS has a very long history of doing things their own way, and usually in their own interest.

> What would the Linux proponents suggest we do with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in software not available on any other platform?

Accept that you may have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad investments? You invested in tools that depends fundamentally on a risky platform. Investing in new tools and/or rebuilding your business to not depends on tools that are risky or unavailable will probably be time consuming and expensive. Do you want to start paying those costs now? Or do you want to continue using Windows, encourage MS to abuse their product even more, and generally throw more time and money at your current situation? I suggest paying for past mistakes now, because problems tend to get more expensive when you ignore them.

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Note that none of the above comments mentioned Linux. I do recommend moving to a Free (as in speech) platform, but the point about switching is to leave MS. Often there isn't any alternative; fortunately Linux/BSD and a lot of really good does exist, so you have an alternative, even if it isn't perfect.

Let's just be realistic here, the general public is not ever going to switch a Linux desktop. I've been hearing about it for 25 years, how this year is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. Not ever happening. Mac MAYBE, but Linux, never. And for the handful of us nerds that do switch, Microsoft doesn't care. The Enterprise is where they make their money, and they are DEFINITELY NOT switching away from Windows desktops.

>There are a lot of niches, and no doubt some of them still rely on Windows desktop software or Windows drivers for related hardware, but they're niches because most people aren't that interested in them.

Each individual niche is tiny, but once you add up all the niches, it adds up to a significant part of the market. Windows has a huge "tail" of niche software on it, and just finding substitutes on Linux is a daunting task, to say nothing of actually getting back up to the same level of productivity as one had on Windows.

>Remember one popular switch already is from Windows to Linux, when home users dump the traditional PC entirely and just do things on their Android phones/tablets instead

Is that an actual trend? Yes, PC sales have slowed down. All that means is that the PC market has reached saturation. Pretty much every household already has one PC that meets their needs. I don't see any evidence to indicate that people are throwing away their computers and using their phones and tablets exclusively.

> GUI are infinitely valuable in that case. Windows allows to do quite sophisticated stuff all the way with a UI. You can always observe the state of the system, know what can be done from there, etc.

People from Windows commonly have this impression because in Windows everything is either a GUI or the registry, and nobody wants to touch the registry without a long pole and a hazmat suit but you occasionally have to anyway. So you quickly build the intuition that anything without a GUI is painful and wrong, which isn't the case on other operating systems.

Most configuration files on Unix-like systems have manual pages that list what options you can set and what they do. For example the man page for logrotate.conf says you can add the line "mail address" to have it email the oldest log to address before deleting it. It's no more difficult to read the man page and find the option you want than look through seven pages of GUI settings to find it, and often easier because man pages are searchable. With the further advantage of actually describing what the option does rather than just giving you a GUI text box with the word "mail" next to it and letting you guess whether you're supposed to type an email address or a filename to mail or something else.

> like creating a VM.

There is a GUI program called virt-manager to do this on Linux. Most desktop Linux distributions have GUI programs to do a lot of things like that, people just don't use them as often because the GUI-alternative on Unix-like systems is actually reasonable. Although you picked a good example in the sense that creating a VM directly using qemu-kvm is harder than it probably ought to be.