The Windows OS Thread - Formerly THE OS for gamers and normies, now sadly ruined by Pajeets

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Since most Linux People don't run businesses to make money, they don't know how to do market analyses or understand customer requirements in order to make successful products. When they succeed, it's largely when they make products for themselves that appeal to people like themselves, e.g. RMS and gcc.

If you can't give your product away, the product is the problem. Linux Mint is free, as in beer, and nobody wants it. "Oh, but Microsoft--" shut up. Linux is now dominating the server space, and 100% free distro, Rocky Linux, is the #1 enterprise Linux:

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Dell could save billions of dollars if they could get people to switch to Linux, and they've tried. They've been selling Ubuntu laptops for like 15 years now, and they're just a non-factor in the marketplace. Since Linux People don't understand what client empathy is and I do, here are the basic things you need to do to compete with Windows:
  1. Run 100% of the user's critical applications. Users have individualized sets of critical applications. No, telling the user, "Well, that's mainstream slop. You shouldn't want that application" is not an option.
  2. Do not require techno-geekery from the user to keep their system running
  3. Do not completely fuck up the computer with an update, requiring heroic user-end surgery to recover
  4. Do not require the typical user to ever open a terminal
Windows is not the only OS that succeeds at all four. OSX and iOS both do. Google's Linux variant, Android, does. Sony's been doing this on the Playstation with FreeBSD-based operating systems for 20 years now. Perhaps Valve might eventually get its own variant to succeed at all 4 as well.
 
The Ugly One said:
  1. Run 100% of the user's critical applications. Users have individualized sets of critical applications. No, telling the user, "Well, that's mainstream slop. You shouldn't want that application" is not an option.
  2. Do not require techno-geekery from the user to keep their system running
  3. Do not completely fuck up the computer with an update, requiring heroic user-end surgery to recover
  4. Do not require the typical user to ever open a terminal
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Chrome OS has been quite successful at telling the user "not to want that application."
 
The Ugly One said:
Since Linux People don't understand what client empathy is and I do, here are the basic things you need to do to compete.
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Story as old as time. Technical people are obsessed with technicalities and want people to conform to the product - instead of the product conforming to the people.

I'm sure that's why the B2B open source stuff is contrawise so successful; it's by nerds for nerds.
 
Telvanni said:
You don't hate Microsoft enough
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"Copilot" is their AI brand name so they're quintupling down on it since it makes the green line go up. Same why they came up with Recall in the first place, made a boilerplate implementation that should've never been published and despite all the backlash didn't fully back down from the idea. Not only did they go balls deep in the whole Copilot+ marketing to just give up on it, everything Copilot is "green line go up" so it takes priority over everything else. Like those agentic features in 11 Dev that for a change require you to go through hoops to enable with warnings that it can be malicious. Chances are Microsoft's dev team knows that this is a bad idea, but AI is what runs the company so they had to add it in despite being rightfully reluctant about it.
The Ugly One said:
Its 1% market share says otherwise.
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The fact that Chromebooks are underpowered e-waste devices that no one wants to buy probably contributes to that factor more than ChromeOS.
 
The Ugly One said:
Its 1% market share says otherwise.
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Globally, but do I really care what pajeets or poles think? It's over 8% in the US because they're dominant in K-12 education in rich countries. Chromebooks are a no-brainer laptop for kids in general, beats a tablet any day and puts off them asking for a phone.
 
The Ugly One said:
Dell could save billions of dollars if they could get people to switch to Linux, and they've tried. They've been selling Ubuntu laptops for like 15 years now, and they're just a non-factor in the marketplace. Since Linux People don't understand what client empathy is and I do, here are the basic things you need to do to compete with Windows
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It really, really doesn't help that the pre-installed distro uses gnome. If these laptops came pre-installed with Linux Mint they would be a lot more popular. Otherwise people will be reinstalling the OS as soon as they get the laptop, and at which point might as well get a Windows license with it.
 
Microsoft is doing this so they can pull some bullshit like, "Look! See! Everyone uses Copilot!"
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Yeah no shit, they're trying to woo investors into believing that people use and want AI so that they can keep the bubble going.

Imagine if you'd be able to successfully educate all the big investors in these corpos on what AI actually is and what it does and how that would instantly pop the bubble. Too bad they're all retards with more money than brain cells that will only ever listen to corpos that are actively lying to them.

Let's just hope that when this bubble pops, so will this fake economy model, so that all of these corpo schmucks will be forced to going back to working on good products to stay afloat.
 
The Ugly One said:
Its 1% market share says otherwise.
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Chromebooks’ main use cases are some businesses buying them for their employees, and schools/sometimes parents buying them for children to use at school. Neither of these demographics are likely to be browsing the open web (at least not on their Chromebooks), which is the main way usage statistics are collected, thus surpressing their numbers.

Slav Power said:
The fact that Chromebooks are underpowered e-waste devices that no one wants to buy probably contributes to that factor more than ChromeOS.
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I own two. I got them off of ebay, already jailbroken with Linux preinstalled, for about $20 each, including a charger for each. Used X86 Chromebooks are now what old Thinkpads used to be like 10 years ago, at least in terms of ultra cheap computing. Ram is pre-soldered, though, which is annoying.

Betonhaus said:
It really, really doesn't help that the pre-installed distro uses gnome. If these laptops came pre-installed with Linux Mint they would be a lot more popular. Otherwise people will be reinstalling the OS as soon as they get the laptop, and at which point might as well get a Windows license with it.
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It wouldn’t make a difference if they installed Mint. Dell’s efforts in Linux have been mainly directed at winning over Linux people and developers, they don’t care about Linux for non-technical users, and so haven’t marketed them that way. If they did, they’d probably be more successful in that market segment, but they’d also have to deal with annoyed customers who can’t figure out how to install Photoshop.
 
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August Levasseur said:
Chromebooks’ main use cases are some businesses buying them for their employees, and schools/sometimes parents buying them for children to use at school. Neither of these demographics are likely to be browsing the open web (at least not on their Chromebooks),
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I've never worked for a business that disabled web access on laptops.

Baraka Obama said:
Globally, but do I really care what pajeets or poles think? It's over 8% in the US because they're dominant in K-12 education in rich countries. Chromebooks are a no-brainer laptop for kids in general, beats a tablet any day and puts off them asking for a phone.
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So it's the laptop equivalent of a TI-84, a useless gadget for a captive market.
 
The Ugly One said:
So it's the laptop equivalent of a TI-84, a useless gadget for a captive market.
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Have you owned a chromebook? They're very usable for like 99% of what most people would want out of a computer, especially when you can install android apps to cover things not handled out-of-box or by a web app. I ran into limitations when I wanted to rip CDs, they just don't support even external CD drives, this was back on a 2017 ARM chromebook where I couldn't set up a crouton vm. I could see non-technical people having issues if they want to use non-web oriented tax software or want to do power user level work with video editing / photo editing, technically oriented people can run full fat linux applications even.

And you can get pretty good $300 - $400 chromebooks now, with good screens, keyboards, trackpads, and 8 core processors. They're not disposable junk like they were 10+ years ago. I'd take one over a used thinkpad for my own use even.
 
Slav Power said:
If you were to swap every single instance of Windows with Linux today, people would complain. But please, do keep ignoring the fact that a good chunk of the Windows market share comes from corporate use where people rely on software that doesn't run on desktop Linux and believe that if XYZ happened Linux would dominate the market right now and it's only because Microsoft forces it out of the market it cannot compete. And not that it has decades old issues Linux devs refuse to fix and just tell people to deal with them, and then every year they just hope that this year is the year everyone will make the switch because Windows got worse. Ever since the 90's it's been the same and nothing ever changed.
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I'd like to thank you for my first MATI rating ever. Though I should tell you, there are things on the internet that make me MATI and you don't even come close. You should try politics or religion instead of being an OS sperg. But those Linux fanboys... they make your blood boil, don't they?

Microsoft has ruthlessly gatekept the PC industry ever since MS-DOS was licensed to IBM. A contract in 1983 forced OEMs to buy at least as many licenses for MS-DOS as the number of computers shipped. They ruined DR-DOS by making Windows 3.1 throw fake errors when run on it. In the 2000s Ballmer had labeled Linux a "cancer" and its users as "communists." They lied about patent infringement, lied about Ubuntu netbook return rates, and turned Best Buy employees into Windows 7 propagandists with ExpertZone. Their history is rife with monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior, and it's somewhat recently that they've even pretended to tolerate Linux (WSL). Gotta fix that PR somehow, I guess.

Those unethical business practices have given Microsoft a stranglehold of the desktop market and a huge momentum that is just now being disrupted. But no, let's ignore the historical fact that Microsoft doesn't deserve to be trusted and stay MATI at the Linux nerds because their faults are the only ones that matter to you.

And this is coming from someone who quite liked Windows 7. It's a shame Microsoft felt the need to run a FUD campaign as if Win 7 couldn't compete against Linux. But there's a reason for that. Microsoft is terrified of losing influence in the computer industry: and because of that. it's terrified of Linux. If not Linux as it is, then Linux as it could be if Microsoft hadn't fearmongered about it.

Nobody really wants or needs an AI-powered MS paint, so to some degree Microsoft doesn't know what it's doing. But the purpose of that AI is to impress stupid investors and sell personal data, so it's not like this isn't intentional. But if it helps more people switch to Linux, then you might actually be right about them not knowing what they're doing--if for the wrong reasons.

There may be no year of the Linux desktop, but don't pretend that there hasn't been any changes. Valve has made gaming viable for Linux. Millions of Steam Decks were sold and others made the switch when Windows 10 lost support, and a lot of "outdated" hardware with it. It's not a big change, but it adds up. So long as Windows enshittifies, it will keep adding up.

But whatever, keep white knighting for your multi-billion dollar corporation.
 
Nickel Silver said:
It's somewhat recently that they've even pretended to tolerate Linux (WSL). Gotta fix that PR somehow, I guess.
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Steve Ballmer left Microsoft 11 years ago. Today, Microsoft makes more contributions to the Linux kernel than most companies, and it's the #1 operating system on Azure.

Nickel Silver said:
They ruined DR-DOS by making Windows 3.1 throw fake errors when run on it.
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This was only in the public beta, and the public release disabled this error. You were either a child or under a rock in the early 1990s, because back then, nobody was on the internet, so public betas weren't tried by millions of people and computer news didn't spread like wildfire. 99.9% of PC users never knew there was a beta of Win 3.1 and even fewer knew it threw a non-fatal exception when run on non-MS DOS.

This is what killed DR DOS:

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This is what Digital Research was working on for DR DOS right around the same time:
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Digital Research never fully grasped that Win 95 was not a GUI running on top of DOS. It did use DOS to boot, but after boot, control was handed to the fancy new (and hilariously unstable) kernel. They still conceived of an operating system as being DOS + GUI and thought that getting Win 95 to boot from DR DOS would save them. It wouldn't have, and nobody cared about DOS features after 1995, because all you used DOS mode for after then was system recovery or running Duke Nukem 3D.

What destroyed DR DOS and Digital Research with it was a lack of vision. All they did was copy someone else's product and add features. They had no idea where to go next with the desktop environment, and that's why Microsoft won.
 
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I notice VLC takes a few moments to open up when opening it through an audio/video file in File Explorer and yet opens nearly instantaneously when opening the program directly. I don't know if this is Windows' fault... but I do think it is Windows' fault somehow. I just know it.
 
Gog & Magog said:
I notice VLC takes a few moments to open up when opening it through an audio/video file in File Explorer and yet opens nearly instantaneously when opening the program directly. I don't know if this is Windows' fault... but I do think it is Windows' fault somehow. I just know it.
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I'm also having this problem, but not on every Windows installation.
 
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