Is windows obsolete now?

[CiH]

A few random thoughts from my disordered brain.

Microsoft's mid to late nineties moment of genius with Windows was capturing the mass consumer market. That is the "Don't really want to own a computer, but feel they *have* to" population. We're going back to the Win'98 'Soho' home office era. For those people, they could have quite happily lived with Windows XP forever and no changes made to it whatsoever.

Where Microsoft failed was with following up. The techbro "Let's completely change the UI, 'cos it's *Transformational* and people will love it" approach, which f*cked things, as we all know.

Latterly, the non-enthusiast population has discarded the lumpen boxes and the faffy operating system that goes with it. Smartphones are all most folk are needing now.

There is a separate discussion to be had about over-dependance on that and the enshitification of 'apps' on that platform, of course.

From a personal superficial point of view, I've found Windows simply gets in the way when I just want to switch on and do something quickly. Especially with the mandatory updates that give you the option to schedule those but in reality they don't.

I work for a government office and the faff factor even affects my work laptop, when you would have assumed that a corporate version would have provided a more streamlined and unobtrusive user experience. When you get a mandatory update happening when you start to shut down, right at the *end* of your shift, it's another little stab to remind you that Microsoft are neither convenient or helpful.

I don't think Windows is going away, it's too embedded in the corporate world, but I can see it falling away at home with Windows enthusiasts a dying breed.

For your information, it's been MacOS for me, since I started to need a grown-up computer, back in the mid-2000's.

[Steve]

Did you guys hear about governments transitioning to Linux: https://www.howtogeek.com/why-governmen ... ernatives/

[CiH]

We did, none of that mentioned the UK.

We'll probably be the last, once Windows has got to the stage of intentionally planting malware and sending data to Trump the Kremlin and only really reluctantly then.

[Kochise]

Perhaps Windows as a Ubuntu WSL launcher :

[Cyprian]

my son just switched from Linux to Windows for stability reason.
I don't know the details, but he mentioned that that some OS or drivers updates were causing him a lot of problems.
Personally, I use both systems Linux and Windows (my main one is Windows) and I don't see the need to abandon Windows.

[Kochise]

Indeed, up to everyone's taste :

[exxos]

I think there is always going to be pros and cons. I mean the gamers probably don't care at all and just download the latest version of Windows install their steam library and carry on regardless.. They are not likely to be the people who are even aware of what is going on or even care to even try Linux. The only time they may care as if their system starts doing updates during their gaming session and slows down the computer or even reboots it meant gaming session or something stupid like that. But even so they may just even put up with it and trying a Linux distro. All hypothetical of course.

I have had stability issues in Linux, but those issues seem gone in recent times. But I have also had my fair share of issues in Windows as well. It is a open-ended book as to what problems what users will specifically have.

I think the MX engine isn't particularly bad overall. But like many people say, the GUI needs a lot of polishing, which is what I have been working on. There are of course endless desktop solutions etc, but id rather just "roll my own" and have it how *I* want a OS to look and work. For the most part I did that in Windows anyway.

I mean I couldn't even find a "create desktop shortcut" in the right click menu. So I just got AI to add one. Similar with many other annoyances, maybe I have missed where the settings are, but that by itself thing should be obvious in particular for us Windows users who just expect things to be there and work.

Linux users are probably used to how it all works, but for windows users like me, I really don't care to "find my way" around another OS again. I just want things to be how they been for the past decades. That was entirely the issue when I was fiddling around with Windows 10 before. Trying to find where basic settings discovered move to and I just quickly gave up as I really could not be bothered any more. It's one of my pet ace just unnecessarily changing things and moving things about and hiding things all over the place it just creates in my opinion a extremely bad user experience. I have had enough headaches with software when people started making stuff look like the Windows 10 theme which just drove me nuts. I don't want to go looking for things in Windows or multiple other programs every time it updates, I just don't have the patience for it any more.

It's like when the Paragon backup software updated, and gave to whole new look, they tried to simplify the whole thing I taught me absolutely ages to work out how to access my backups and restore files because they basically hid the whole feature under a simple "dash".. a dash means back all good and done. I just took it as a indicator is a pass or fail for the backups not the actual clickable thing which is just tiny and totally unobvious. They actually made restoring backups even more complicated than the previous interface! The whole thing just drives me nuts.

Being completely facetious, but if I've used the right click copy and paste menu option for the past three decades or whatever, and if Linux menu was missing those options, and you had to be double jointed and have do 20 different key combinations to copy paste a file, the Linux users would be used to it and it will be normal, but for Windows users they are simply not just not going to do it or even try, they want the right click menu options and everything be simple.

My Windows setup is basically as optimised as it could ever be and that is why I'm super reluctant of moving away from it. But if I can create my own desktop and have it work and behave exactly how I wanted to and ends up being better than my Windows setup then I would be more encouraged to use it as my daily driver.

[Kochise]

You know what ? My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20, before the C64 : 3.5 KiB of memory, B/W tv, cassette recorder, booted in mere seconds and you'd have a basic interpreter from the get-go, able to do pretty much everything you want, PEEK/POKE memory at weird locations if you wanted.

I miss those days and when I got my first Atari ST (1040 STf with B/W SM124) I expected to find the same ease of use. Instead a blank desktop if no diskette was in the drive. Not even an integrated basic interpreter to do things out-of-the-box. Such an interpreter weight about 8 KiB of ROM, that could, that SHOULD have been added into the TOS. That could also have served as script like batch/bash. Instead we got several version of BASIC : Atari BASIC, Omikron Basic, GFA basic, STOS Basic, ... But only if you got the right diskette, and of course these were basically all incompatible with each other ("Hurray", such a win).

I learned to "like" Windows when using version 3.11 at school in 1992-1993, on DX4-100 MHz with 8 MiB or RAM, that could do what my Falcon030 with 14 MiB of RAM in 1995 couldn't : multi task properly (no MultiTOS with my Falcon), do MCGA (320x200 in 256 colours) DOS games (Wing Commander, Fate of Atlantis, X-Wing, Stunt Island, Loom, Eternam, etc), display 16 colours in 640x480 fast, print vector graphics (got no Speedo GDOS with my Falcon), etc.

I was taught by the ST Magazines (French) to despise x86 architectures, that the Falcon030 with its DSP outperformed PC at 100 MHz and so on, etc. In 1996 I discovered Doom playable on PC at 66 MHz. Not so much on Falcon030 with its DSP at 32 MHz. And Windows 95 was something else, even if not quite finished at its first release (98 SE2 was way better).

So I learned to adapt to the platform and architecture without caring much about the "underlying architecture". After all a x86 can compute just as well as a 68k, even if its memory model is screwed. This is leveraged by the operating system and the programming language : coding in C on Falcon030 or Windows just produce the same useful executable.

Hence now I have Windows on some of my machines : it works, I only tweak it to remove the useless cruft and just update it from time to time. And then I have Linux as well, I try to use it the same way as Windows, avoiding to dig too deep in its internal and just as a "launcher" for more productive software : web, office, coding, LLM, etc. Both works the same way if you don't play with the system.

On Windows you may have to deal with various .Net framework versions and redistributable, but once installed (often automatically) everything works. The Visual Studio environment is phenomenal, the documentation complete, C# a great language, but you also have Python, Go, Rust, Bun, Nim, Zig, etc. And of course a shit ton of legacy software, mostly with GUI, that can allow you to do everything for free.

On Linux, it's a mixed bag of available repositories and up to date software available for your "desktop" (Gnome, KDE, ...). Otherwise it is command line for the bearded geek, not the household mom. With most of them having different set of parameters, not always well documented. And maybe changing from one version to another. And in last resort to compile it yourself, having to install a bunch of libraries and compilers, not automated at all.

So Windows remains the "King" of the out-of-the-box you can drive almost exclusively with the mouse : how many time do I have to open the console to fix things ? Well, barely just to "dism" and "sfc". Or PowerShell things into the network interfaces for really specific purposes.

Linux on the other hand, can indeed allow you to tweak things at your heart's content, just like the Vic-20 / C64, but at the expense of a needless difficulty by the sheer complexity of the system (the FHS) and lack of overall cohesion of the system, being made of parts delivered by the many for free, glued together in a distribution, or compiled by yourself (Arch, Linux from scratch, etc).

Two approaches of a same problem : operating a system. One made is "simple" and "uniform" (*cough* *cough*), while the other made it, well, do whatever you want, there is not even a "reference" implementation, just a kernel as the main and common ingredient, then everyone can spice it up the way they want.

I chose the Tuxedo OS version because it came with my laptop and works pretty much like Windows : I do my usual stuff, but have to open the console way too often to my taste (manage files, bash scripts, ollama, etc).

But even Tuxedo have their own struggles to deal with Linux :

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/A-ne ... ian.tuxedo

And now Windows is going K2 to save the sinking bloat boat :

https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-k2-pivot/

[exxos]

Two approaches of a same problem : operating a system. One made is "simple" and "uniform" (*cough* *cough*), while the other made it, well, do whatever you want, there is not even a "reference" implementation, just a kernel as the main and common ingredient, then everyone can spice it up the way they want.

Yeah, good many hands on it, but bad, because many hands on it..

I think ultimately all the lesser ones will probably fade away over time as people lose interest in maintaining them. Only the "kings" will become popular and continue over time. Ubuntu being more commercial may stand the test of time better than those that I get the impression a lot of people even use it.

Then by the time a genuine top distro becomes the main one globally, Microsoft will swoop in and buy it and will all be back to square one again!

Android was great until Google got their hands on it, and now it has just become annoying with stuff oddly broken all the time each update and full of bloat you can't get rid of. I just hope Linux itself doesn't go down that road...

[Kochise]

I think ultimately all the lesser ones will probably fade away over time as people lose interest in maintaining them. Only the "kings" will become popular and continue over time. Ubuntu being more commercial may stand the test of time better than those that I get the impression a lot of people even use it.

Well, well, well, what do we have here?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... meline.svg

The problem with Linux : lack of guidance and too many egos fighting against each others.

As for Microsoft, they can't buy something "free".

Android is now "closed sourced" because Google mostly killed AOSP.

We're already back at square one in a way.