The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?
Plus, if countries moving off Microsoft put a fraction of the savings into libre office product development, it might get an even more lopsided comparison!
Lifelong Linux/Unix user here, I love the widespread adoption of Linux.
But comments like this one makes me think people don't realize what a MacGyvere'd together hack job a Linux distro truly is.
The idea on paper is that a company like Microsoft can offer a more consistent and stable experience, but apparently they're even failing at that these days.
But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me.
The truth is that any org that chooses to migrate from Microsoft to Open source will face completely new challenges. And the end result will be +-0, if they're lucky.
This was an issue, but at this point Microsoft is placing ads everywhere, negative news on my desktop, and update nags with changing buttons in every other start. Nothing about it is smooth or consistent anymore.
Seriously I've learned about the death of hundreds of people when I switched on my music PC (the only reason I have one windows machine is music software) - I haven't asked for this, and I removed news before, they just patched it back in
None of those issues are a problem for corporate managed Windows installations, which would be the proper comparator in the case given in the article.
There are other reasons that Windows sucks, even (or especially?) in a corporate environment, just not those.
I do see the same kind of ads (and many many other issues) on corporate computers at the Hospitals I work in. And to think we pay immensely for all this...
Is that true? No stock tickers, no ads, no ai nags? No "news"? No weird notifications that ask for my attention? I guess no regular weird update windows would be the case, but the rest?
Yes, your MDM lets you do almost everything you want to Windows. You can really tell that it is a commercial first offering, or at least used to be. And given that as a company you are also paying them I guess they don't care that much that there are fewer ads.
On any Windows release, you can switch all of those off, and GPE out the update channels for non-system-critical changes. Windows Enterprise doesn't even get the so-called 'fun stuff'.
I only have this one windows PC and I hate it, so correct me if I am wrong but I can't simply turn these off. First I either need to understand the registry or trust some third party software, and second windows just turns it on again in the next updates where I have to go back and trust random third party software again.
Every other onboard tool or software wastes space to advertise for some AI or office subscription. I wasn't able to disable that at all.
And for notifications there is seems barely any control at all. All software is able to constantly nag me with weird notifications.
You make it sounds like I could just turn it off, but I googled a lot and turned out I can't. But maybe it's just me?
Yes; as a home user you have to use some 3rd party script or software to achieve the same outcome, but there are examples that are well-regarded and open-source.
e.g. https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat
This looks less sketchy than what I used. Surprised I found so much sketchy stuff and not simply that.
Guess that's like adblock these days. You need domain specific knowledge or you get not what you expect.
Have you considered going offline for the music PC? I took an old rig off and stuck it with win10.
I have one setup with all my media/games and have removed every piece of Microsoft possible.
I've used plenty of sketchy third party tools to get rid of all that weirdness but they keep patching it back somehow. I never get rid of the ads long term, also sticking to win10. Thing is I DJ straight from soundcloud mostly so going offline is not a real option for me.
Fantasy software: something that uses hooks to intercept internet requests from a specified other program, and sends them through USB to a corresponding phone app using a weird protocol, and the app relays them to the phone's internet connection so it's like a tether, and then your Windows program can be online, but Windows can't.
I don't think you appreciate what a hack job Windows really is. It's just that it's quite visible in the Linux world, but more obscured in the case of proprietary software.
These days it is really visible in Windows 11 as well.
The main thing that has changed isn't that Linux has got much better but that most corporations deliver their internal applications through a web browser. The days of companies being anchored to win32 are long gone.
Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.
> Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.
Excel is still a huge (ginormous) moat, particularly as MS have built basically all of their data tools into it.
Unless someone creates a better Excel, MS will be around ~forever.
And even if only a small proportion of the workforce needs excel, those people tend to be concentrated in the portion of the business which measures money, which means it'll never get cancelled.
That being said, I do think that basically all institutions in the EU/Europe need to get off the US tech stack, as inevitably it'll be weaponised against us.
Economics are becoming less and less important when it comes to switch to Linux. The risk of relying on US companies has gone through the roof lately.
I haven’t used desktop Linux in ages, but I’m a Linux server user as I think maybe everyone here. Is the solution to desktop that some well funded company just needs to fork Debian, build the common application deites like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, messaging apps, etc, and then build a proper App Store?
Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?
Which is basically what Google did with ChromeOS and Android, except that they have little to nothing to do with GNU/Linux experience.
Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features).
I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.
That well funded company already happened 20 years ago. Canonical. Their distribution is called Ubuntu, you might have heard of it.
Yet my mom does not have a Ubuntu desktop. And if I set one up for her, I woudl have to split my time between my job and tech support for her. So well funded, but not sure they are the right company.
My 73yo mom actually runs RHEL 10 on her laptop, uses one of my 16 free developer licenses.
But it would never work without my help. On the other hand, Windows wasn't working too well either and I just couldn't help with that.
RHEL was the most stable alternative I could think of when her Windows computer stopped being reliable.
I have setup rustdesk on it for remote support.
What kind of issue would you expect that the OS she currently uses does not have?
Anything she buys won’t have specific drivers, e.g. Webcams or mice or keyboards or etc.
First, is that so? My neighbors just got their 80-year old parents a Thinkpad. All works. They bought a mouse the week after. Worked right away.
Second, they don't buy this kind of thing every week.
It's actually not really that bad. If you have to split your job likev you said, then you have to do it when she's using Windows too.
Linux has made a lot of progress since 2010.
If low tech ppl in family get phones, I want them to be apple, less work for me (not an Apple user). If they get a PC, I want them to use Ubuntu. Less work for me.
And if there's some work, I'd rather ssh into their PC and fix it using a shell with bash, then get annoyed with Windows and it's quirks.
You're going to have that problem with any kind of change.
> But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me.
I don't understand why. The vast majority of people doesn't have to know about the OS below: they run a handful of apps, that's it. You just need to get them to start those apps and learn to use them. It's not like government employees would have to compile their kernel...
Windows and a Linux distro are not comparable in the extent of the software that they include/provide.
The average person (e.g. my Mom) only needs office software, email, and a web browser. Linux has all of that out of the box.
Id happily pay for a polished, commercial Linux distro, and I’d imagine governments will do too - either outsourced or with an internal team of civil servant sysadmins.
Usually they pay for SuSE or Red Hat Enterprise, with selected hardware providers, not something regular consumers get.
Windows is too at this point; it’s just a little less obvious.
Tbh the only reason I can't put an ubuntu for my parents/grandparents is Microsoft office.
Libre is generally ok, but they deal with lots of documents from different ppl/orgs that just need to have similar rendering. Windows is so bloated it's insane
Even Microsoft can't perfectly replicate MS Office rendering. Despite access to the source code. Lots of stuff renders slightly broken in the web version, especially once headers and footers are involved
As an individual that makes MS Office hard to replace in the workplace. But maybe entire agencies switching over will have enough weight that they can force everyone else to adapt to them
The rendering won't be 1:1 but installing the most common MS fonts already does a lot
The thing is, it needs to be 1:1.
This will be fixed only by a govt push to do full replacement for all doc sharing at all levels, especially schools. But since in this country office is mostly pirated anyway, it's not such a big push
>The thing is, it needs to be 1:1.
I'm not sure about that outside of Excel and even then only for a small proportion of users.
Try saying that to the govt when they send some documents to your university that must be filled by several ppl and suddenly content isn't alligned anymore as it originally was.
That's the same issue I hear Apple users complain about: how it's such a drag to copy paste screenshots from keynote into powerpoint, every time they can't present from their own laptop.
Office in the browser works really well, in my experience.
Functionality is much more limited, more lags and necessity to always have internet connection
I wouldn't assume that moving off Microsoft will save money, or not for a long time. All staff will need a lot of retraining.
Or: if Microsoft are very smart they'll have Office for Linux and a GPO connector to manage Linux devices (and divert logins via Entra) in the wings, so much less retraining will be required.
I am not so convinced: most staff do relatively basic stuff with MS365, right?
People don't like to even try something else, but when they have no choice, it doesn't take them 5 years to understand how to select text in one of the Microsoft Word competitors and click "bold".
No, they're frequently using things like track changes in Word docs and even small variants to that (why not use Confluence with comments instead so we stop emailing docs around?) encounter a lot of tissue rejection. And marketing want their template with the latest branding pushed to everyone's Word as a default template. And it should integrate nicely with Sharepoint. And and and.
No, the risk is that Microsoft loses its de facto monopoly on Enterprise ecosystems. It's pretty hard to switch to Linux, some have tried, bigger entities never stuck to it. So far. Now with the political landscape shifting, the priority to achieve that has gone much higher.
> how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows
As someone who regularly uses both, and even in spite of the ad avalanche that (a bog-standard home install of) Windows has become: [X] to doubt. I regularly have issues on my corporate Linux laptop that I suspect wouldn't ever happen on Windows. Fleet management is easiest on Windows, with Active Directory, Group Policy, images, etc. Maybe package managers make software management easier on Linux, but fleet sysadmin is basically built-in on Windows.
Linux is superb for servers—I use Proxmox VE as the hypervisor on my homelab—but it still has a rather long way to go as a sharp-edge-free desktop OS, regardless of whether it is for home or corporate use.
I suppose it depends. I’ve seen MSFT platforms supported very well and very poorly - with all the things you mention present but permanently broken. I’ve only seen Linux well supported, though ofc that could well be the luck of my draw.
But even when the platform is well supported, you’re left with the user experience.
I think the issues you're having on your "corporate linux laptop" are due to the "corporate" part.
I'm also having a lot of issues on my corporate linux laptop (such as dbus crashing) that just do not happen normally.
They are due to all the proprietary ~~spyware~~ security software they install, that hook pretty deep into the system and isn't as well tested.
> The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?
Firstly, I would wager a large amount of personal computing is now done on a phone/tablet. None of my relatives have laptops for personal use. They may have work laptop (which will be running Windows). I this often with a lot of Linux users where they are still fighting the last war which has long been lost.
Secondly, Every single Linux/DE distro has a bunch of issues. Doesn't matter what it is. There are loads of odd bugs (doesn't matter the DE or Distro) that are present, that simply don't exist on Windows. These are things around device and display handling
e.g.
- My bluetooth mouse needs paired again every kernel update. My solution to this will be to buy another mouse probably.
- One of my USB wireless headsets doesn't work with Pipewire. The solution to this was to buy another one.
- Games while it is great that I could finally ditch Windows for playing games. You have to be using the right DE. This is because Mutter (which is Gnome's Window Manager), completely fucks the frame-pacing in some games. KDE that doesn't happen. This is why Gaming distros exist because all these stupid problems with Gaming are pre-fixed by the distro.
- When I changed from Gnome to KDE, all my browser sessions tabs, logins etc were gone because KDE Keyrings and Gnome Keyrings for some reason don't use the same underlying store.
All of these issues need either new hardware / obscure settings to be enabled via the terminal to fix, or require two large projects to actually talk to each other.
Thirdly, it isn't just the OS. For every application on the computer you have to either see if the program is supported on Linux and/or there is an alternative, or they may have a bunch of stuff tied into the Microsoft Ecosystem. Sometimes there isn't really an alternative.
Finally, Unlike big corporations you get bizarre things happening in Linux-distro land almost weekly due to some personal drama. This is seldom reported on because honestly this happens in smaller enthusiast projects normally, but they have a way of trickling up into the wider ecosystem.
I think any movement is gradual and for it to be significant it would need to be sustained, people love dramatic sudden changes but it's going up against decades of momentum. As you mentioned mobiles, that took a long time to transition and that was with a starting point where a large proportion already had a non-smart phone along with the decisions they made about replacing aging devices.
The point about "fighting the last war" is interesting as there's a lot of uncertainty right now about how personal computing with a PC is going to look in the next few years. The angle I've been wondering about with the pressures on consumer hardware pricing/availability is if manufacturers can use it as an opportunity to establish new standards if/when it's easier to buy new again (eg, a major ATX revision/rethink) or if they keep following the same template. Over on the software side, what could a non-stagnant OS offer that would be attractive to consumers, what can consumer/desktop linux do that isn't following windows/macos, what would create a need for a mirror image of WINE as linux is leading with new features first?
The Linux community needs to embrace being something for the enthusiast.
If you look at things that have got people interested in Linux. It wasn't just that Windows 11 is awful, because a lot of people just install Windows 11 LTSC and call it a day.
Hyprland was/is something that excites people. There was a lot of hype around Omarchy (I don't care about the guys' politics, and please don't bring it up; I find the discussion tedious, and it goes nowhere). Ricing your desktop and terminal can be fun and everyone done it when the first started mucking about with stuff and broke their whole install. "I use Arch BTW" became a meme, much like "The Glorious PC Master race". While I think projects like Debian, Mint, etc., are great at bringing users a boring but stable desktop, you need hype to gain people's attention.
These things swing back and forth. Look up LiMux. Things don't just go in one direction.
It's far easier to disable annoyance of windows than deal with linux for most people and especially for large organisations.
Large organisation, hmmmkay, but for private persons, I disagree. Windows 11 is annoying as hell and removing the annoyances, while possible, is not easy for anyone not tech savvy.
Yes, because when they go to Media Market and FNAC they will only have macOS and Windows laptops to chose from.
Having Tuxedo, System76 and co is great, but what most people care about is what there are in regular consumer shops.
Linux adoption among consumer hardware has only been a success where it is invisible to the user, like the Linux kernel on Android or WebOS, firmware on DVD/BlueRay players,...
The average person walking into these shops has never heard of Linux. If, as I would hope, they find out about it and like it, they’ll ask. Then either the shops assortment will be improved, or as sibling comment says, they’ll look online.
Which is why "The Year of Desktop Linux" will keep being a meme (30 years to 4%), unless we are talking about running Linux Desktops from within WSL and Virtualisation Framework, or for the oldies, VMWare Workstation and Virtual Box.
"Linus Torvalds Explains The Reason Linux Lost The Desktop"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQMujWFUDSg
M$FT revenue is currently around $300bn a year, with a 40% profit margin. Canonical's revenue is less than $300m.
Even if Canonical wanted to create a perfect version of Ubuntu with driver support for almost everything and as many desktop bugs removed as possible, they still can't afford to do it.
A credible Linux-on-the-desktop needs a global or multinational consumer-oriented foundation that can herd all the cats and turn desktop Linux into a professionally-managed project with proper beta testing and some interest in user experience.
That's a 180 from Linux culture, so it's unlikely to ever happen.
The Linux Foundation is not that Linux foundation, because it's not remotely desktop or consumer-oriented. freedesktop.org is a nice side project but doesn't have anything like the budget or the profile or resources required.
That is literally the only way to make a desktop version that can compete with Windows and OS X.
There's an obvious opportunity for someone to do this for governments now - a standard gov-optimised distro with enhanced security and access control and a collection of boring productivity software.
Stores are dead to anyone who is under 35 years of age.
You might want to contact Media Markt, FNAC, Corte Ingles and all the other stores to tell them apparently they have 0 customers yet they pay for rent, salaries and everything else even though no one goes there anymore.
Add CoolBlue (Netherlands) to that list.
Initially a post order-only for consumer electronics, but added bricks & mortar stores because many customers (of all ages, btw) prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
> prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
That did Fry's in, didn't it? People coming in viewing, touching hardware in store and then buy it on-line (elsewhere) so that they could save 2.5%. Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
> Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
Here a lot of places has a sort of price guarantee that I guess is supposed to work against this. Basically, if I know Media Markt sells something I want, but the very same thing is available for cheaper in other (big) store, I'll show them their competitors pricing and they'll lower their price to match it.
Assuming by the fact that the physical stores still exists, don't seem to be going anywhere soon, and these companies tend to get rid of stuff that doesn't make them profit anymore, I think it's safe to assume they at least are net positive on having the physical stores.
Tell that to Apple, glance inside next time you pass by an Apple Store.
Apple stores also do repairs, so I'm not sure what's the point of this comparison.
Which ones? Usually they send the device to some center like everyone else.
Not really, otherwise I wouldn't bump into them all over the place around here.
This is not about Linux.
They are replacing Office365.