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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Who cares about operating systems any more? That seems like a solved problem and frankly all the major ones are fine these days.

Computers are chosen based on applications. If you want to play games, you are probably buying a Windows PC. Developing iOS apps? You want a Mac. If you just need a browser, then a Chrome Book or iPad is probably a good choice. I'd bet a lot of people here use three or more operating systems every day on different computers doing different things.

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> frankly all the major ones are fine these days.

No Windows version since XP has been fine. They varied from utterly unusable crap to barely tolerable. I honestly never understood why people use Windows, is there an argument other than "I'm used to it"? I still have a small Win partition installed for rare Win-only things and every single time I interact with Win 10 I remember how utterly broken it is. Like the moment you boot, you're bombarded with crap that has flashy colors, animation some even sound too. It feels like that one Futurama episode about AOL.

> is there an argument other than "I'm used to it"?

Yes. The argument is "I want to run X and it only runs (or runs best) on Windows|Linux|macOS. People don't fire up their computer because they want to use Linux or Windows, they fire it up because they want to play Assassin's Creed or XCode.

Can confirm, one of my friends really wanted to use Linux (because she doesn't trust microsoft and tired of windows being bloated, she has a rather slow laptop), but her colleagues constantly send her some .docx/.xlsx files that simply won't work with openoffice or other alternatives.

She tried very hard with Wine, PlayOnLinux, tried all sorts of alternative offices, VMs, but gave up and had to install Windows anyway because majority of people simply refuse to use open data formats and use proprietary closed formats.

I'm also running Windows because I have to do some CorelDraw drawings and don't want to bother with wine etc. Otherwise I would be running Linux for sure.

I consider Windows 7 about the only acceptable version of Windows after XP. Everything else between XP and 10 (inclusive) has been a failure to some degree (with Windows 8.1 perhaps being a minor failure compared to what 10 became later on).

> all the major ones are fine these days.

I think the very point of this thread is that is not the case and many users are very unhappy with Windows telemetry.

Many users? I'd be surprised if it's even 1%.

I have never met a single person in my entire life who likes using Windows. Everyone I know claims "yeah it's crap but this CAD/Industry standard software works only in Windows". I would guess they exist but I'd bet money they don't make up 99% of users.

You're kind of making the same point I was. People don't choose an OS for the sake of the OS, it's for the application support.

I like using Windows as much as macOS or Linux. For different parts of my day I'll be using Windows or Linux or Android or iOS and at on each system the OS is there to support the applications I want to use.

It's called "walled garden" actually.

No it isn't. If you wanted to call iOS a walled garden, I wouldn't argue. I would also say it's not necessarily a bad thing.

I wouldn't call Windows, Linux, or macOS walled gardens.

> I have never met a single person in my entire life who likes using Windows. Everyone I know claims "yeah it's crap but this CAD/Industry standard software works only in Windows".

If this is not a walled garden, I don't know what is. Linux is certainly not a walled garden.

In computing, a walled garden is a closed ecosystem controlled by the platform owner.

None of Windows, macOS, or Linux are walled gardens because all of them allow anybody to publish software for those platforms. You don't need approval and you don't need to distribute through a central authority.

iOS, on the other hand, can only load apps from the App Store and that store only carries software approved by Apple.

What you are talking about is proprietary software. That's a different beast.

Maybe you are right in terms of strict definitions, but in reality the proprietary software effectively creates the walled garden from which the users can't escape.

First, you have to be able to afford so many different machines for all these different tasks. Good luck if you are from a working class background.

It's unconscionable to suggest that one needs multiple computers for various purposes when they are all general purpose computers on the inside.

It's no more unconscionable than to suggest that a person may need a pickup truck for their job in construction during the week and a sports car for their racing hobby on the weekend.

Except that the very point of a general purpose computer is that, to use your analogy, your car can spontaneously sprout parts and reform the chassis as needed. Aluminium frame with a pair of wings and four jet engines one week for that overseas trip, a heavy duty frame with a winch for the construction job on Friday, a napalm launcher for fighting kudzu in your front yard (a stretched analogy, but you can see where I'm going with this).

All of this is enabled by software, which costs nothing at all to replicate unless it's restricted via copyright law. This is very much unlike every other hobby, where specialised tools cost money to duplicate.

I wish it were just a matter of software. It would be nice if my iPad could magically have a GPU as good as my gaming PC or my gaming PC could become a 12" tablet with a 10 hour battery life.

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