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Most experts agree Linux is safer than Windows
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All scientific supercomputers use Linux
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Professional hackers use Linux
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Linux is the undisputed backbone of internet servers
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Critical military infrastructure relies on Linux
Microsoft’s revenue was $300 Billion last year. They have unlimited ressources.
So why is Windows still worse than Linux ?
I agree with all your points. The quesion is why is Windows still dominating in market share?
The answer is user awareness, brand loyalty and fear of the unknown. Windows is the devil you know, most of the people I game with are scared of the instability of Linux, despite it being roughly equal if not better.
I think standardizing the user experience, making things less scary and generally more welcoming are major hurdles, but the good news is that should come with time and a larger userbase.
- Linux isn’t driven by a profit-first motive, so user-centric decisions come first
- There is no number 2
Linux is setting out to make an operating system. Microsoft are setting out to make a data capturing advertising billboard that sometimes runs programs.
too many spoon is the bowl spoil the batter
Windows is better in compatibility with many commercial products, but the gap is quickly closing, and I think Microsoft is feeling the pressure.
If you include the entire history of Windows programs, I have my doubts about this. For instance I’ve had more consistent results running old Windows games on Linux through WINE/Proton than I had in Windows 10. Linux may have better backwards compatibility with Windows programs than modern Windows does.
Priorities and objectives.
The search bar just doesn’t work. It’s right in the middle of the screen so I keep clicking it and even type things in but it simply doesn’t populate with any results even if you wait. Absolute joke of a company
Microsoft and the like are doing a great job to prove they don’t have to release anything quality and people will still throw them buckets of money. It’s wild to watch, but hey it’s better they stay there than come to Linux in the masses to encourage the enshitification of stuff that’s still good.
Microsoft has pretty much lost most of their experienced employees, they’re sitting on a mountain of spaghetti code with tech debt that goes back to windows 3.1 to maintain compatibility, they’ve fired their QA team, and their absolutely out-of-touch leadership is trying to force the surviving employees to use AI anywhere they can for developing the OS to pump up the numbers of AI users to prop up their insanely huge AI gamble so shareholders don’t lose faith.
They’re acting confident because they haven’t had to respond to a credible threat to their monopoly for 30 years, and that arrogance combined with everything mentioned above will most likely be their ultimate demise. The corporate system they have created and perpetuated is no longer capable of righting the ship, both technologically and organizationally.
They made a statement years ago now about how they were going to respond to the success of the steamdeck by creating a handheld mode for windows, but they never did, and Valve ate their lunch and allowed Linux to gain a foothold among gamers. They probably couldn’t manage building that handheld mode (it’s been so many years now, but I read a post from a Microsoft employee detailing how it could take something crazy like a week of work just to add a new menu entry to a drop-down without it introducing major breakages elsewhere).
They haven’t been able to develop a killer app or feature for Windows in over a decade, and I don’t think there’s anything else under their sleeve. I believe we are actively witnessing the downfall of an ossified giant, just as the once great Commodore fell due to incompetence and extreme corporate greed.
They already use Linux for their server division (azure). Eventually, if Linux is able dominate on the desktop in the next decade, they may shift to selling their own Linux distro with a 100% windows compatible container/VM instead, an inversion of their current model of selling Windows with their optional WSL (windows subsystem for Linux).
Their business isn’t to make an operating system better than linux.
Linux has devs in charge instead of managers.
Corporate culture. Microsoft may be one company to us outsiders, but internally they are a ton of different divisions divided into teams. All those teams have their own agendas, priorities, and competing visions.
If you just look at the Windows kernel project, it’s really good.
Came to say “culture”. This is the thing most average Americans struggle with. We’ve had capitalism drilled into us from birth. Want something better? Pay more. Full stop.
Somehow we miss there is so much more to being a society than just transactional interactions. Not that the open source community doesn’t have its problems but it fundamentally is approached differently. With no profit motive why would you spend a single minute of your precious time doing anything for another person, especially a stranger?
That is at the heart of it, but you can decompose it into leadership (or a lack of it), misaligned incentives, intercompany politics, atrophying innovation, and on and on with the corpo buzzwords.
Different design priorities - MS devs aim to make the OS a marketing tool for other products, which are continuously obsoleted to encourage repeated re-buying. Linux devs aim to make stuff work.
I guess that explains why Poettering went to work for Microsoft…
Can’t win them all
Apart from what everyone here is saying, which is probably mostly true, I want to add that the Windows division in microsoft isn’t the biggest either in terms of revenue or funding; it’s not even second. The office team is much bigger for instance - so Windows has not been Microslops priority for a good 15 years i’d say. My 2 cents
Also the number of developers and amount of money put into something doesn’t make it is necessarily better. I almost want to think that fewer developers and less money on Windows is a good thing considering Microslop only ever wants to increase operating costs in order to make more revenue.
True but my impression is that in contrast to other divisions it probably doesn’t get the focus, resources or the vision it needs. It’s just a means to sell their other stuff, so all the great people will choose to work for other teams. I remember seeing a discussion with Dave Cutler (if i remember his name correctly) a few years ago saying he left the windows team to work on xbox and azure because it was much more interesting - i know the guy has done it all and was looking for something different but it didn’t seem very encouraging
Easy, their objective is to make money, not develop software. Linux is made and maintained by users, for users…
