I use a Windows 10 desktop for 1/2 my work. The other half I use macOS on a MacBook. They're both great (and the latter is fantastic for virtually any sort of work, whereas with the former I am constantly encountering Windows-specific limitations that demand that I fire up a Hyper-V instance --- WSL is very limited in a variety of deadly ways).
(1) Those who consider Microsoft to be reasonably trustworthy based on recent behavior.
(2) Those who will need Microsoft to continue its current behavior for a longer period before they're ready to trust.
(3) Those who consider Microsoft's current behavior to be at best a partial improvement over the past, or at worst a charm-offensive meant to distract from their ongoing bad behavior. E.g., Windows 10 with unavoidable snooping, and ongoing stealth patent attacks on Linux.
Let's hope the good guys win this one, but I personally don't see it happening unless they get hit with governemental regulation on a regular base.
Seriously. Everyone else is doing it, why shouldn't they?
If it wasn't for our iOS projects, they wouldn't be even around the office.
When I first set up my Mac, I thought case-sensitivity would be a good idea just in case I ever had to copy files from another case-sensitive file system. I never did need the case-sensitivity, but I did have to repartition to get Steam working. It thought me a good lesson about switching away from defaults "just in case."
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft on Windows.
Also the availability of kernel headers, config tools cross compilers and the scripts compatibility.
I'm curious to see how they will act once they regain sufficient market share. Will the old MS appear and will they implement the extinguish phase?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
That doesn’t make Windows suddenly any less of a mess.
I agree that there are all kinds of issues with Apple’s Mac hardware pipeline, but this is just hyperbole.
There's something about computing that makes us want to cheer for these big companies as if they are sports teams, no matter how many times they screw us.
But for the uninitiated the biggest problem for some time has been that Microsoft was and still is a big patents troll. They also continued fighting open standards such as the OpenDocument format, even under Satya Nadella. To their credit they did join the Open Invention Network, but it's still unclear what parts of a Linux OS are covered and what aren't. The FSF rightly asked for clarifications on whether the multimedia components are covered and to my knowledge there have been no clarifications thus far.
But forget the years of trolling Android phone vendors with patents such as for the FAT filesystem, here's a story from 2017: http://techrights.org/2017/02/27/microsoft-novell-v2-via-azu...
Also Windows 10 is a piece of spyware shit.
Windows 10 has been intercepting Chrome and Firefox installations and harassing people into using Edge (and this has been my own experience): https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/12/microsoft-intercepting-fir...
Microsoft is reportedly planning to make Edge indispensable: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/windows-1...
Windows 10 has been displaying intrusive ads: https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft-window...
Windows 10 has been blatantly disregarding user choice and privacy: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-b...
Windows 10 collects everything you do: https://www.techworm.net/2014/10/microsofts-windows-10-permi...
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> "Investing in making Edge work like Chrome (more important to developers and consumers than your ideological quandries with Google owning the web will ever be)"
That's incredibly naive. First of all they aren't "making Edge work like Chrome", that's an overstatement, the new Edge is going to be only a shell on top of Chromium and nothing more.
Microsoft adopting Edge is either them throwing the glove and admitting that they can't develop a browser, or them pulling another embrace, extend and extinguish. After all, as we've established already, they don't really like that users have a choice when it comes to the browsers they use. This is important to mention, because even for the Chrome fans out there, Edge switching to Chromium provides the perfect opportunity to disallow alternatives on top of Windows. This is just a possibility mind you, when it is far more likely that Microsoft will simply place Edge on life support.
In either case, whether they end up contributing to Chrome's ecosystem, or not, consumers lose for a myriad reasons. And heralding this move as something good is ignorance for the whole history of computing.