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Our commitment to Windows quality

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#531

Post by nout »

idiotsecant wrote: post #508
nout wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are 3 major points that made Linux much more viable option in the last 2-3 years. 1) Somehow both GNOME and KDE got much better in the last 2 years. It's very smooth and polished experience that I now prefer to both MacOS and Windows. I only need to install 1 or 2 extensions and it's good to go for me. 2) AI! It's orders of magnitudes easier to fix any Linux issue now compared to 3 years ago. The issues…

Woooah that's a long way from 'gaming works on linux' to 'this is now suitable as a general purpose mobile OS'

There are more details that make me believe that linux as mobile OS is more feasible in near future. Apart from the Valve&SteamOS push, the one notable phenomenon that I see happening is retrogaming. In retrogaming handhelds ecosystem there are now many devices with form factor close to phones (they often literally use screens from older iPhones, etc) that are running on Linux or in some cases provide option to easily switch between Android and Linux. For example on Anbernic RG35XX using Garlic OS there's a toggle in the UI to switch between Android and Linux. Similarly Retroid Pocket 5 allows switching in the bootloader menu.

As a separate point, it seems quite feasible to run Android apps in VM on Linux based phone and make the experience fairly seamless. Something like what Waydroid provides.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#532

Post by bigyabai »

idiotsecant wrote: post #508
nout wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are 3 major points that made Linux much more viable option in the last 2-3 years. 1) Somehow both GNOME and KDE got much better in the last 2 years. It's very smooth and polished experience that I now prefer to both MacOS and Windows. I only need to install 1 or 2 extensions and it's good to go for me. 2) AI! It's orders of magnitudes easier to fix any Linux issue now compared to 3 years ago. The issues…

Woooah that's a long way from 'gaming works on linux' to 'this is now suitable as a general purpose mobile OS'

Linux has all the pieces. Other commercial vendors like Jolla have put it together before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS

There are open UI shells from KDE and GNOME, multitouch gesture support, Android emulation... it's all there.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#533

Post by GTP »

rolandhvar wrote: post #305
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is not technically inferior to Linux. To the extent it has problems, it is mainly because of top-down anti-user behaviour mandated from corporate. But anyone capable of using Linux is capable of hacking out that BS and getting a generally superior experience. I use both literally side-by-side, two laptops with a KVM switch, and I still greatly prefer Windows for many reasons. Some reasons: Even as a low-level…

+1 on the UI thing. I don't know what it is, but UI on Linux always feels too disjoint from the rest of the system. It's a bit like how Windows 3.11 was just UI-on-DOS. I get the same feeling. Don't get me wrong - I love Linux for all its CLI use but for some reason I've never been able to primary drive it without going insane after a week. Windows just seems to feel more put-together and I guess that's because the k…

10 years is a long time, you should definitely try again. Go with one of the mainstream distros, like Ubuntu or Mint. Regarding Fedora, I heard the opposite, but as I wrote in another comment, users tend to have vastly different experiences with a given OS. If you like Windows' UI, Zorin could be the distro for you.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#534

Post by xp84 »

10000truths wrote: post #452
natas wrote: post #151

I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions. Her per…

Windows' value is as a funnel to the Microsoft platform. Starving that funnel of attention might not have an immediate effect, but it's a slow death spiral for the company because it cannibalizes their long-term mind share. The 10-year-olds today who grow up using Chromebooks in school, Macbooks in college, and iPhones/Android phones in their daily lives, will end up investing in Google and Apple products as a workin…

> The 10-year-olds today who grow up using Chromebooks in school, Macbooks in college, and iPhones/Android phones in their daily lives, will end up investing in Google and Apple products as a working adult at home or at the office.

1. That's not how businesses work - the 10-year-old will be 28 when he becomes an IT manager, and their 40yo boss will say "LOL no, learn to use Active Directory, we're not switching the entire company to Chromebooks/MacBook Neos because you 'grew up with' them." They will then adapt and learn to use what the business has.

2. Even assuming charitably that our 10yo will be founding a company one day and making all purchasing decisions for themselves, it's worth pointing out that neither Google nor especially Apple has shown even slight interest in delivering "Enterprise" anything. Even MDM Apple farms out to third parties, likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though). A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only.

The MacBook Neo is a cute PC for a student or a grandma or indeed any casual user. But despite it giving Apple (for the first time in Apple's existence) a price point for an entire computer that's under the amount where you'd be embarrassed to propose adopting it for your whole fleet... the hardware is but one part of a larger ecosystem, and Apple has demonstrated that they have no interest into selling into "The Enterprise" except for tiny niches (relative to the whole PC market) such as "web and mobile" software engineers, video editors, VFX shops etc.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#535

Post by hungryhobbit »

idiotsecant wrote: post #508
nout wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are 3 major points that made Linux much more viable option in the last 2-3 years. 1) Somehow both GNOME and KDE got much better in the last 2 years. It's very smooth and polished experience that I now prefer to both MacOS and Windows. I only need to install 1 or 2 extensions and it's good to go for me. 2) AI! It's orders of magnitudes easier to fix any Linux issue now compared to 3 years ago. The issues…

Woooah that's a long way from 'gaming works on linux' to 'this is now suitable as a general purpose mobile OS'

Linux has been able to serve most non-gaming use cases for over a decade now (source: I've been running the OS longer than that). The one thing it used to not be able to do was play games ... and now it does that.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#536

Post by bigyabai »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #530
bigyabai wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normal people can definitely install an OS. Last weekend I set aside time help a friend install CachyOS. They'd never used a terminal before and wanted some help. When I called them, they had already set it up and was playing Risk of Rain 2. They started streaming for me on the Discord Flatpak they installed from the app store.

Define normal. I would argue at least 75% of the US population has zero interest in learning how to install a new OS, let alone actually do so themselves. I say this as a decades-long Linux user (who has tried to evangelize it many times).

> has zero interest in learning

Well I can agree with that, but that's not the same thing as being incapable of doing it. Both of my parents could easily install Linux, it's infantilizing to argue that they can't fill out a user wizard and select a drive to wipe.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#537

Post by anonymars »

binsquare wrote: post #16
Someone1234 wrote: post #6

They're saying all the right things here. Fixing long-standing complaints, removing Copilot from obnoxious places, improvements to Windows Update and Windows Explorer stability/microstutter/lag, etc. I congratulate them on seeing sense, and I congratulate Apple on another victory with the Neo. Kind of frustrating that's what it took for Microsoft to finally listen to their userbase.

Don't congratulate yet until you see actual outcomes. The author of this commitment is the same person (Pavan Davuluri) spearheading move of Windows into an Agentic OS: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...

Yeah, as soon as I saw the author, my optimism faded back to cynicism

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#539

Post by icedrift »

stevage wrote: post #326
deng wrote: post #225

If you want to know how serious to take this, just look at this gem: > Enhancing Search: [...] Clearer and more trustworthy results, with results from content on your device easy to understand and clearly distinct from web results So yeah, you still get web results in your search bar, a feature absolutely zero people want and which is just there to fake Bing success, just with a little divider now next to the applica…

Not just me then? Those integrated search features have been around for so long, and always irritating. I use macOS. Same problem. Searching your computer or searching the web are fundamentally different tasks. I'm curious if anyone actually approaches them the same.

I don't like that default on mac either but in their defense it's super easy to customize. I turned off all but applications and my documents folder for spotlight search.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#540

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #469

Microsoft has spent over a decade swimming against their users interests at this point and during that time frame Linux has been improving its desktop and improving kernel performance. We are now at the point where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is dangerously close on performance with none of the privacy invasion and anti user features. Its pretty late in the game for them to…

So are you predicting that 2026 will be the year of “Linux on the Desktop”?
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