I think this would have been obvious when Microsoft pushed a "free" upgrade to every Windows 7 Home PC, to bring it to Windows 10. What they care about now are recurring revenues from monthly subscription services (xbox live gold type things), office365 type things, and azure services. And all of the usual tricks used to get people to use Edge as their default browser. Giving away the OS for free to accomplish that is clearly the way they're going about that.
Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
21–30 of 166 posts
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#22I am afraid of EEE strategy of Microsoft . But,Windows having WSL means that Developers can target Linux only without even considering Windows , being sure that all Linux binaries run on WSL . But proprietary extensions of WSL should never ever be used.
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#23> "Ten years later, Azure makes Microsoft most of its money."
Well, no, not yet. Microsoft doesn't break out Azure separately. It's usually included in their "Intelligent Cloud", which is the largest segment, but that also includes SQL Server (a big money maker), Windows Server, GitHub, and other stuff. "Commercial Cloud" revenue (which is all the cloud portions of their products, from Azure to Office 365 Commercial) was $51.7Bln of $143Bln overall. So yes, Azure makes a lot of money, but not "most".
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#24Edge running on Linux isn't that great of a feat, is it? It is built with Chromium as a base, which already ran on multi-platform (including Linux).
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#25I'm buying a new computer. Currently I have only ubuntu linux machines and was just saying to someone that I would actually consider trying windows and WSL because it would let me use the linux tools I want alongside MS office, and it might be interesting to play with windows versions of things. The reason I wont actually do it though is because I'm sure that windows will be filled with commercially oriented intrusio…
> windows will be filled with commercially oriented intrusions and annoyances
And how!
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#26I agree that we'll see the boundaries between Windows and Linux blur, but I don't think we'll ever see Microsoft give up the decades of backwards compatibility that have kept people on Windows since the beginning. There will always be demand for running older Windows apps (games, legacy business software, etc..) on a modern OS, and I don't think Microsoft will cede that space to a competitor (and with good reason!) It will likely continue to shrink as a proportion of revenue, but it will be worth much more than that to keep it as a toehold to deliver other software and services: Xbox game pass, visual studio, azure services, etc...
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#27I am afraid of EEE strategy of Microsoft . But,Windows having WSL means that Developers can target Linux only without even considering Windows , being sure that all Linux binaries run on WSL . But proprietary extensions of WSL should never ever be used.
EEE is not going to have any impact on Linux (and also, EEE hasnt been Microsof's strategy for a while). Once they start extending with proprietary additions, you basically just end up where you were with two operating systems, a proprietary windows and an open source Linux. They can't force the kernel to accept proprietary extensions.
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#28> Linux finally wins the desktop wars ChromeOS is storming along - best desktop version of linux around. If I could easily run IntellJ on it I would switch.
You can't run it in crostini?
Yeah my chromebook doesn't support it and is too weak to really run IntelliJ, I use it for web guis and some shell work. I haven't tried hard because Crostini still seems a bit bleeding edge - I think you can run linux apps directly without Crostini now too. I was waiting to see what the new PixelBook is going to do and how things settle down next year.
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#29> Linux finally wins the desktop wars ChromeOS is storming along - best desktop version of linux around. If I could easily run IntellJ on it I would switch.
>best linux distro around. If I could easily run IntellJ on it I would switch. It's not a Distro.
What makes a distribution a distribution? Wikipedia and others list it as a distribution.
I thought any packaging of Linux kernel + whatever surrounding software needed to make an OS is a “distro”?
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#30What about Linux distro virtual machines? It seems as though some users prefer running a virtual machine on different hardware rigs. I'm not sure if this will increase in popularity, yet it appears as a manageable solution.