They won't actually move back to a user-focused OS at all. It's nice for them to declare they will, but their culture and business pressures will prevent any kind of sustained effort. (Their users aren't their customers.)

And it really comes down to $MSFT. If the stock keeps dropping, how long do you think any real commitment to “quality” for a boring, low(no?) revenue product will last? Very little when the ad/partner revenue really starts flowing for “ai focused metrics” that can directly tie to windows surveillance (ie recall).

Gen AI has even more power at task generation than at content generation. Imagine running Photoshop or Final Cut Pro via prompts. People seem squeamish because so far the Copilot entrypoints have been encouraging tacky text & image content generation, like Clippy. But imo that’s the weakest and most sensitive application.

V1 is often not very good, for any new application.

I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows, the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen, and windows search no longer searches your PC.

Deleting "Product" might save windows, short of that, I am doubtful.

This is about the MacBook Neo coming for the budget laptop market. At 500$ it's an easy choice.

> dangerously close on performance

sometimes more performant.

Reports seem to be of system crashes and degraded performance. I imagine there are lots of 'it works for me' stories, but think: for Linux to eat into Windows user market share (which I would greatly support), critical things like Zoom have to work at least as reliably as on Windows. For nontechnical users who would never figure out which incantations to type into the terminal to fix it -- because they have their next meeting in 15 minutes.

I think this is in response to slightly abnormal people trying Steam OS and other user-friendly Linux distros as they grow increasingly annoyed with Windows 11 antics.

The problem is that I do not want to mess around to make things work. This is the power of Windows. Everything is built around it and it does not need or want you to keep hacking it.

Don't get me wrong I am working on Mac and my personal dev laptop is a Linux Mint, but sometimes it physically hurt to find something that sends me down a rabbit hole yet again on Linux. I just think the whole "you have to hack it because you can and otherwise you don't really own it" thing is a big hurdle on Linux that keeps mainstream peeps to stay away

Not sure if I made sense, but yeah basically in order to challenge Windows Linux would need to "just work" which is not the case right now (or ever was)

Having said that, I don't begrudge people from using Windows or Mac. As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, Linux has rough edges that most people really don't want to deal with. I'm willing to give Linux some grace because I believe in open source and want to support that world with my actions. But when someone complains about why their fingerprint reader doesn't work, all I can say is "yep, that can happen". I think the little niggles in Linux are worth it for having a free (as in freedom) OS, but as it turns out, most people don't value that.

It's the easiest route. On non-Apple computers, Windows is already installed. (It takes a bit of effort to buy a computer without an OS.) Microsoft makes it easy for a user to get Microsoft 365. With that, users have the computer they have at the office and are familiar with. Most are just surfing the web and writing an occasional letter, anyway. That doesn't include people who are perfectly fine with a Chromebook or just their phone.

Finding a Linux distribution, downloading it, putting it on a USB stick (or burning a disc), then installing it is not simple for most people. (Don't even ask them to verify the checksum.)

Funnily enough, there's a bug that's affecting all MacBook users in my company (does not wake after lid down overnight). Apparently the culprit is windows defender installed in the MacBooks. Corporate, you know...

No, I don't need you to summarize a two sentence email. How about I move emails to folders and you start to learn the patterns? Or which alert emails I want to ignore? Or who asked me something last week and I forgot to respond? Or which emails I should look at first after a vacation? Etc.

Sure both have their quirks, but it's just wild how much Windows goes out of its way to be annoying. From a billion startup notifications to basic UI stuff to copilot and the list goes on.

No. "Commitment" in corporate speak is a synonym for "absolute lack of intention". That's why corps 'commit' to reducing emissions, treating employees fairly, etc, ie. to all the things they will not do. But no suit 'commits' to making money. They just make money. It's just a superficial linguistic gesture. Shakespeare got it.

Saying and doing are very different. They have passed through the "fuck around" phase, and are entering the "find out" phase of this AI journey. Lots of companies are, suddenly.

My employer trained us all on the Gartner hype cycle, tested us on how to remain level-headed before and during the peak of unreasonable expectations and now every single manager in the company is drooling over AI, saying that "this is the future, join us or find another job" and I cannot wait for the curve to come back down to a sane level where intelligence rules behavior as much as it used to. We'll see.

We’ve certainly done the “fucking around” and now we'll see if we "find out" enough to regain our sanity and our humanity.

The continual recall/ai push from Microsoft has not helped at all and is pretty gross. There is a way to do a “recall” style thing that some folks will really want if they can trust it. The msft approach has been the opposite of that.

Windows used to be built for the user. Now, Microsoft builds it for themselves, as a way to help hardware partners sell hardware which includes a windows license.

So if Microsoft makes Windows for their own benefit, and not for the users benefit, I see no reason to use it at all. I don’t like games that much.

MacOS has gone downhill in a hurry but it’s still very good. Far better than Windows for me in every way.

Yet it was the end users that forced enterprise to embrace the iPhone, not the other way around.

If her vision was the only driver, we'd still be rocking Blackberries.

… this was a feature in Windows 95. I didn't even realize they'd removed it! Is the author too young to remember a time when the start bar was positionable…?

… to then follow "we listed to your feedback" with "more AI everywhere" … it's satire … right? Right?!

Although, surprisingly, built on top of absolutely incredible silicon.

And yet somehow none of them are as nice as https://eartrumpet.app/ lol

My uncle runs one in Bradford on Avon and they are slapping on an OS for you whilst you supp tea and chat. Often, the user-agent is set to something Microsoftie in the browser. If necessary Edge is installed but that is frowned on 8)

I have not heard of this MacBook Neo thing ... Why would ? I only own a little IT company and hang around on HN.

Some reasons: Even as a low-level programmer fully capable of resolving problems, I want to spend my time working on my programs, not working on making my OS work, and Linux frequently demands that I spend hours chasing down issues. Windows does a better job of managing memory/swaps, at least out of the box. Windows has a stable userland with 30 years of backwards compatibility. Windows makes good use of both GUIs and CLIs, letting you choose whichever is faster for the task, while Linux distros and devs have some kind of bizarre ideological purity culture and generally refuse to make good GUIs. Windows has a built-in tool for easily making full system images while the system is running, without requiring the image destination be larger than the system drive including unused space. Windows developers are not so in love with dynamically linked system libraries that dependency management becomes a pain in the ass. Windows generally has a polished UX with a lot fewer papercuts.

So the only superiority is that it runs the apps most people want to run?

And this is why geeks are always the “Less space than Nomad. No Wireless. Lame” types or the HN equivalent when talking about DropBox:

“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”

Every time my swap is full the entire system freezes for a good second, sometimes it stays stuck, no way out besides rebooting, I've never experienced that in any other OS ever

It's impossible to get more than a few days of uptimes, it's like the ram is never ever freed, last time I had to reboot my mac I had close to one year of uptime.

A friend sent me a png to print, every time I open it with the image viewer it uses 100% of my memory instantly (10+gb), causing the system to freeze. The image is 700kb and opens fine on gimp

I completely understand why people stick to the alternatives, it's way too easy to "hold it wrong" with Linux

99% of people buy a desktop and don't even consider what the operating system is let alone think about changing it to something else. I would imagine they don't even know that a difference exists between operating systems.

I think that the market (though it is certainly irrational) is moving away from windows. It's very likely the reason why this post was written and they're now (4+ years after the release windows 11) addressing even the most basic complaints (like the taskbar). I have zero faith that the attitudes driving the fundamental problems that brought us to the point where MS has to be genuinely worried about the future of Window's market share have changed.

Microsoft still sees your computer as belonging to them. They still feel entitled to all of your data and the contents of your hard drive. They still want to use their OS as an ad platform. They're still deeply envious of Apple and want an app store with similar control over what you can and can't install on your computer.

Like you, they've lost me. The moment any meaningful amount of gaming was viable on linux they lost the only thing that could have kept me using Windows in any capacity (and even then my gaming PC would have been treated like a console. Almost zero personal info and mostly offline).

They fucked up badly and promises like "you can move your taskbar" or "we'll be less obnoxious with updates" is not going to being me back.

I think OS level integrations that are opt-in, not opt-out, may even be popular. But they have to be done carefully and tastefully.

In fact, basically any feature added since Windows 10 is probably unwanted.

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-...

I see nothing about privacy, spying, forced microsoft accounts and continued locking down of windows that they've been doing.

I see that they're bringing back _some_ of the taskbar options you had in windows 10 (termed it as "introducing"), they promise to make Explorer faster, great. But they also say they're bringing more AI into windows and something about widgets that I don't think anyone cares about.

And lastly they're promising to revamp the place where you go to rant at microsoft, but they're not promising to actually listen to feedback.

How is it even possible to spend 4-5 seconds to show a list of files in a local freaking folder?

(that's an overstatement, early OS X were buggy too, but they just switched to Unix after OS9, so, understandable.)

it's just better than Windows, which is just aggressively bad. (and I guess Linux is eating their gamers market with Proton? but I am not a gamer)

They are not saying "we will remove the mandate to use a Microsoft Account." By itself, that shows their "care" is purely corporate, likely driven to calm down furious OEMs who will happily remind them Apple doesn't need an Apple Account to use a now-cheap Mac.

Also, because Nadella can't stand the word, I'll say it right here: Microslop is still making Winslop to help people make Officeslop to then upload to Slopdrive.

Windows 11 is finally catching up to MATE desktop (which is maintained possibly by a single guy from their basement), what a time to be alive!

My game controller worked, my BT headset, the media keys on my keyboard even worked.

Lots of stuff was mildly broken but no more so than it was on Windows. It is just differently broken.

How many hours have they put into the Linux client?

My guess is the answer to these questions indicate more of how it got there than anything the distros or upstream components can do.

It's just that we accept windows issues as "that's how computers are". While Linux is expected to work

That's usually due to:

1. Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance gains)

2. Less OS overhead (usually minor gains)

This is one of the points where people have vastly different experiences. I'm one of those that has fewer issues with Linux, and I definitely don't spend hours fixing problems. And this despite the fact that I use Arch, which is supposed to be an unstable distro. Why is that different users report so different experiences I don't know. I think that this might be partly due to perception: we tend to forgive more the OS we like. But your case doesn't seem to be just about perception. So I wonder how much the hardware could play a role here. I think Linux has quite good hardware support nowadays, but maybe I was just lucky so far.

You can really sense the SF-centric bubble HN lives in.

The first is coercion. Installing without a Microsoft (Outlook) account is more and more difficult. An attentive steward of Windows would allow older gui themes (xp, Win7 Aero, etc.) to be applied for the nostalgic. And there would be an easy control to disable all Copilot integration. Microsoft is coercive towards their customers with these and other actions.

The second is incompetence. The Windows update process is intrusive, lengthy, and prone to repeatedly bricking unlucky PCs. Linux updates are far more pleasant.

These are big problems, and I agree, it will take great institutional change to curb these abusive tendencies. I don't know if they can.

I hadn’t tried Fedora until late last year, and was very impressed. Came across as highly polished and complete.

Hadn’t tried Pupply Linux until a couple months ago, and it’s now my new favourite. I’m now running it on a small form factor desktop HP with no internal drive.

I install Gimp one time. I like to casual draw on autopilot, usually while doing something else, talking, watching a movie, listening to a podcast etc. For some reason half the icons were missing and the existing set was replaced with the hipster horrifying flat single color monstrosities. This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.

With MS it feels more like intentionally trolling the user

The best spot for the applications sub menu is to not make it a sub menu. The second best is to leave it wherever the fuck it was before. I want to struggle remembering what an application was called and wonder why they are organized so poorly. (Not by file Association) In stead they have me wonder where they even are???

1. The usage statistics don't reflect your anecdotal Linux usage; Linux desktop/laptop usage share has not grown that significantly in 20 years and Windows remains quite dominant.

2. MacBook Neo was widely discussed on HN not very long ago, and I'd think if anything an owner of an IT company would be more aware of it than an average HN user. It's definitely going to shake up the market for lower-end laptops.

That's a problem right there.

Even the Server Core edition, which has a much smaller "surface area" needs reboots almost every month.

Even if you're not leaving the ecosystem anytime soon, you should always know where those lines are and what the landscape looks like on the other side of things.

I also have set the classic right-click menus.

There are some things about Windows 11 I like but a lot of it seems to be designed by people who use Mac OS (graphic designers).

And I could tell that. In one instance where I asked it to write a script that does a bunch of things, it provided a series of steps to do in the terminal. This is very off my typical experience with other chatbots. I immediately went to Claude which gave me a complete script that does exactly what I need.

    s/2000/1995/

But also, why wouldn't UI changes be possible if the source was open? I remember WindowBlinds and patched uxTheme.dll in the XP days, and that was /without/ source being available. So in this hypothetical, what's stopping hackers from backporting the things they like about 7 to 10 or adding more rounded translucency?

This article is so disconnected and uninterested in the actual needs of users who despise windows in its current form today.

Just like the dialog that searched for a solution to why my program just crashed. Of all the times I saw that (maybe every other day), it found something precisely 0 times, but wasted my time every time.

Did it work for anyone or am I alone?

BUT

I don't actually understand your sentences for the most part. I really had to work to glean what you were talking about.

I'm not trying to be insulting here; sometimes I write in inscrutable ways too. But - could you reword a few things so I know what you're trying to say?

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

But every Linux distro has its own UI, and pretty much every distro makes it easy to configure it to look how you want, with tens of thousands of themes out there developed over the past 20 years by people wanting their os to look a certain way.

The most glaring inconsistencies are going to be user-inflicted. If I spend a weekend tweaking defaults to look just right I need to be ok with possibly tweaking any new software I download to fit my theme.

But even from a non-power-user perspective, if my mom runs into problems with her computer it's much easier to walk her through a fix over the phone if she's on Windows or a Mac.

My dad, who is very tech-literate, once tried Linux and all the trouble shooting guides required him to open a command prompt (because there isn't a consistent GUI you can use to fix things across distros). He never forgave it.

proxomitron is a rewriting proxy, which I always thought was a very nice approach to webpage filtering. again, I remember it having very good UI/UX as well as being fast and capable.

There is a new game with no support? So sorry. Can't be done

I meant that Microsoft is intentionally removing their own moat.

That the tools are awful is just the standard microsoft affair. (with some notable exceptions, which ironically include Excel).

Android “won” as pyrrhic of a victory as it is since Android manufacturers besides Samsung make very little profit and every one who has money (again to a first approximation) buys iPhones. It won because Google gave it away, shared ad revenue with OEMs and it bent over backwards to the carriers and Apple wouldn’t.

And yes Linux would save OEMs maybe $30 on licensing Windows. But OEMs make mire than that on bundleware.

None of this has anything to do with the quality of the desktop of Linux or windows. If Linux had 75% market share I promise you all those things above would quickly become true for Linux as well.

On the Mac side, either way I spent all of my day in VSCode and the browser - we use GSuite - Zoom and Slack. It wouldn’t make that much of a different either way.

The only integrations I use between my work Mac and my personal Apple life are my iPad for a second screen, shared subset of passwords. I have a separate Apple Account for my work computer and I share work related passwords.

I don’t know that i’d expect windows to be much better either, but that’s my experience.

What is the benefit of 'GUI native' if things are broken and people cannot fix them?

Time for some Internet researching...

Anyone with any illusions about this name quickly the top vendor for the third item in the materials itinerary of the first thing with a materials itinerary you get your hands on (for me it’s usually food. Who is the main vendor for citric acid? Or sugar. Or that red dye that causes adhd. I have no clue)

General consumers could not care less about open source.

It’s component.

Not a product.

I don't care about the hem on my pants. My pants either work, or I get a new pair. This is most people's relationship with their computer.

I'm telling myself that this is an intentional "blind hem" joke.

I don’t use it often, but occasionally use the proofread option. Other than that, it stays out of my way.

However if your interests lie in indie games or games that require a keyboard and mouse interface (precision shooters, grand strategy games, RTS games, etc) then having a PC that can play games is completely necessary. (I say this as someone who runs linux btw, not a windows defender).

Edit: but I am somewhat surprised that it’s qt and not the typical react electron bloat that Microsoft is slopping out. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

What stands out to me is the organization needs to be accept that change is needed and 'walk the walk', and also that those efforts take time. I've no idea what things are in motion in MS, but I wonder how quickly they can turn the ship, how much momentum is in their current direction and how much force is in turning. Moving the taskbar seems like addressing a loud persistent talking point, but it's one among many. What's the timeline (even though windows version timing seems like 'when they need branding')? Win12? Win13?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20020204233701/http://www.comput...

I think you and I have very different meanings of "intelligent", "understands" and "gets it done"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV01B5kVsC0

See how that sounds a bit silly? It's because it presents a false dichotomy. That our choice is between either the current state of interfaces or an agentic system which strips away your autonomy and does it for you.

There's everything wrong when "agentic" means that the regular bread-and-butter functionality of the OS becomes unusable.

Communicating and predicting desires, preferences, thoughts, feelings from one mind to another is difficult.

Fundamentally the easiest way of getting what you want is to be able to do it yourself.

Introduce an agent, and now you get the same utility issues of trying to guess what gifts to buy someone for their birthday. Sure every now and then you get the marketers "surprise and delight", but the main experience is relatively middling, often frustrating and confusing, and if you have any skill or knowledge in The area or ability to do it yourself, ultimately frustrating.

When that completely didn't work, we thought that augmented reality was the future of the computer, which also didn't work out.

You need a screen to be able to verify what you're doing (try shopping on Amazon without a screen), which means you also need a UI around it, which then means voice (and by extension agents which also function by conversation) is slower and dumber than the UI, every time.

Meanwhile I have yet to see any brand excited to be integrated with ChatGPT and Claude. Unlike a consumer; being a purely "reasoning-based" agent, they're most likely to ignore everything aesthetic and pick the bottom of the barrel cheapest option for any category. How do you convince an AI to show your specific product to a customer? You don't.

I'm sorry, this is very funny to me in the context of the person upthread arguing about how great "agentic OSes" are. Some people seem to believe that we're living in the future, but I'm pretty sure we're still stuck in Windows '95.

Surely you don't mean remove all columns, and if you did you wouldn't have to also specify removing media metadata columns?

When such basic tasks are failing spectacularly, nobody can have any confidence that complex things can be achieved reliably. Instead of spying on their users and trying to squeeze more and more money from them, they should first focus on making a great product and work on making it better, not researching ways to enshitify things.

- The OS is getting buggier, with every large update getting press coverage on scary bugs.

- The OS is getting overbearing; constant nagging for upsells on Microsoft products with terrible attach rates.

- The OS is getting focused on hype; the latest trend is AI?Let's force a new button on people that will break decades-old workflows. Let's put AI everywhere.

- The OS is getting slow; there's no focus on speed and the place where 85% of the market resides (laptops) is getting completely trounced by Apple Silicon.

- The OS is getting squeezed; under 300$ it's all terrible e-waste in six months Chromebooks. Over 500$ Apple is aggressively entering the market with the Neo. Over 1,000$ Apple has owned a commanding share of the profits there for decades.

There are 994 more problems with Windows but I've made my point; there's just no end in sight to the problems with Windows. I haven't mentioned it's become a minor part of Microsoft's profits!

source: been there.

2. Missed it or perhaps blanked it. It really will not shake up the lower end because anyone wanting a lower end laptop (whatever that is) will insist on it running Windows and not Apples.

There is a really good reason why car manufacturers run multiple marques - the budget, standard and premium ones. Attempting to put the Apple "premium shine" on a budget effort may backfire spectacularly (and devalue the entire brand) or maybe they will somehow manage to re-invent marketing.

Imagine a plumber talking about how much better his toilet is than everyone else's - bc everyone believes only a plumber can install it (which was truth for most of Linux history and general PC users).

Nobody took it seriously bc they took it as mostly an odd humblebrag for niche Windows haters.

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.

You can run KDE but depending on the app and containerization you open you'll get a Qt environment, a Qt environment that doesn't respect the system theme, random GTK apps that don't follow the system theme, random GTK apps that only follow a light/dark mode toggle. The GTK apps render their own window decorations too. Sometimes the cursor will change size and theme depending on the window it's on top of.

That is an unforgivable sin in my eyes.

Chicken and egg problem.

Valve is making enough headway that game makers take Linux seriously. We’ll likely see a lot more native releases over time. (once the worry about anticheat subsides).

But this is kind of like the 'great man' theory of history where you can also argue that the markets would have converged on this outcome regardless of what the specific device was that we attribute to it.

There were so many things in previous versions of Windows that were done with thought and care. Probably the blogs helped make me appreciate it (especially Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing). Windows 11 feels like an insult created by people who hate Windows and never use it

I really wish we could keep the modern underpinnings with a prior shell

I don't really mind Windows that much for non-development use, once you disable all the bloat. But for development... It seems obviously a distant third behind Linux and Mac, and I don't think I've ever heard any developer say otherwise. And I say this as someone who is forced to use it at work, so it's not out of ignorance (thank god for WSL).

But that's why I ask what kind of development you do, because I suppose there are areas where Windows really is a good option.

Not sure I can buy that one

And do you mean hardware issue or hardware incompatibility?

The former would most likely manifest itself across many operating systems, but if you mean the latter... why would that matter in terms of a given person deciding whether to switch to Linux?

It's like asking why a non-mechanic would ever need to use a car.

Do you know what you'll be moving to to replace what Workspace provides (email/IdP/calendar/Chrome policy management?)

Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.

We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.

And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.

typing "open hackernews" into copilot instead of clicking the browser and typing hackernews?

99% of OS interactions already boil down to 2 clicks and a search phrase.

That's a why, but it raises more questions than it does answers.

Apple made a significant number of tradeoffs to reach $500, but for a budget user, they're reasonable tradeoffs.

The performance benefits of Vulkan and DX12 come from tighter control over the hardware by the engine. An engine written for older APIs needs to be adapted to gain anything.

The happy path has improved a lot. When Linux is working it's reasonably usable. But once something breaks it breaks HARD and recovery is still miserable.

For reference I've been using Linux since Red Hat 5.2 circa 2000. I cut my teeth debugging problems without internet access. I ran an LTSP lab at my high school. I remember the hell that was XF86Config (I was there, Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago).

....and like the previous commenter I run Windows on my personal machines because I want to spend my free time using them, not debugging them.

My most memorable MS Word experiences are all the times I accidentally put my document into a weird state and didn't notice something was wrong until I've spent 3 more hours on it, at which point I was forced to re-create the document by copy pasting text into an earlier copy.

And the only reason I knew something was subtly wrong was because the weird VB extension I was required to use would stop working correctly. Basically this would happen when some random key element of the document had ended up with a very subtly different style. If I didn't have to worry about the VB extension breaking, I'd just have a document with some weird bug somewhere.

If I wanted a professional looking document, I would use some modern LaTeX variant maybe with Pandoc to generate most of it from something more restricted like Markdown.

If I wanted total control over the content of a page, I would use some kind of graphical publishing software with text and vector graphics.

I have zero idea what kind of Stockholm syndrome you must have to think that Microsoft Office (or any other similar WYSIWYG editor for that matter) is power user software.

It has lots of features, that's for sure. But the features form a Jenga tower. That makes it a toy.

Even the then CEO of Google used BlackBerry devices years after Android came out as opposed to SJ who used the iPhone before it was released and after it was announced, saw that the screen was easily scratched and publicly did a press release that they were going to change it to use Gorilla Glass from plastic.

The right click menu never once showed me “loading…” when I just want to click “properties”

A not too overly flashy UI that made efficient use of your screen space.

It didn’t used to by default shove “news and entertainment” bing suggestions. Nobody wants to open their browser after an update to be greeted by tabloid rags.

The search used to work. You could find files instead of bing results. You could grep text files with the explorer search bar (across the network too) and it just worked. Good luck doing that today.

VSCode with WSL and Docker Desktop was fine.

But why?

The premise of Waydroid seems to be to bring Android apps you want to your Linux desktop. But why would you want the phone in your pocket to run Desktop Linux so that you could then run Android apps on your Desktop Linux mobile phone instead of just running Android on your phone?

What desktop Linux features do you want on your phone that would justify this complexity?

When it comes to games, Linux has an OS/2 problem.

Excel is really The Thing. So many businesses and departments rely on it.

So what argument could you give Joe Normal about how Linux is better than Windows ?

https://serverfault.com/questions/337082/

"My favorite toilet is the Ultramax by TOTO." , "Its model number is "xxx-xx-etc" - that man definitely believes in Ultramax!

This was the same post he said he wouldn’t license Apple’s DRM. But if the music industry would license their music DRM free, the interoperability goals would be achieved an Apple would sell DRM free music.

One of the major record labels and some independent labels took him up on it immediately. It took two years for the rest to come onboard.

iMessage always supported SMS and now RCS. What more did you expect Apple to do?

My hope is that installation of the Android apps on Linux phone could be made seamless.

If Steam Deck, the new Steam Machine etc take a significant part of market share, I think it will be more enticing for game developer to release a native version for Linux. Providing a native version should still be more robust and performant.

He doesn't really want to care but Microsoft's decisions have made their main product into an annoyance.

I’m sure Google would deny Google Play Services to any popular fork that didn’t follow their rules. But they would do the same to any Linux desktop or whatever that didn’t follow their rules, too, if it became popular.

Why? The only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.