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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's days as a 'primary' desktop operating system are numbered. The OP doesn't seem to understand this, but even Microsoft itself does, which is why most of its major moves the past few years haven't been improving its own desktop, but positioning itself to control "open source" the best it can.

More people within the MS ecosystem should understand this.

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One can argue that desktops are no longer the primary computing environment, but I don't think there's any evidence that Windows is about to displaced within the desktop world.

What are you proposing will become the primary desktop OS? Some Linux flavor of the month? MacOS? Neither seems at all likely in the foreseeable future.

There won't be a "primary" and people will perhaps not pay much attention to which it is, any more than they pay attention to e.g. what Javascript framework their favorite site is using.

I've come to realize while there may never be a "year of the Linux Desktop," there will likely be "years of Linux Desktops" -e.g. Ubuntu, but then also SteamOS, ChomeOS, maybe Android if you're being REALLY inclusive, etc.

I agree with everything but the "controlling open source" bit. I think what they are actually doing is trying to create new platforms they can control, because that's a great business model. Open source, via Github is just a small piece of the pie they want.

Think MS teams/Office365, Linkedin, Gaming, Github, etc. These are platforms they are interested in controlling and deriving revenue from.

I don't think what you and I are saying conflict from a business point-of-view, but I think also it would be naive to "wave away" the incentive for MS to continue EEEing.

Fair enough.

Better check those desktop market share numbers.

I suspect if you restrict it to developers the numbers would look very, very different

on the stackoverflow survey windows is 41.2%: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-popular-...

If you toggle that response to "All Respondents" instead of "Professional Developers" Windows goes up to 45%. Plus, 3% of users are using windows subsystem for Linux. So 48%. Whereas Mac and Linux are both at 25%. Even for developers, Windows is still the clear majority.

it's very interesting to see Windows at less than 50%

20 years ago that would have been 95%+

and its market share for developers is way, way, way less than its share on desktop (which was my point)

Interesting. So 50% Unix and 48% Windows (and 3% are targeting Unix anyway). That's quite a swing over the past 20 years - there was a time where aside the occasional web developer with a Mac, everyone was on Windows. Leaving out Linux, the interesting part has been how much market that Apple has chiseled away.

Cloud workloads mean UNIX has effectively won the server room for classical deployments, however UNIX !== Developer.

There are plenty of other workloads and platforms to target.

Desktop, mobile devices, IoT, medical, game consoles, infotainment, unikernel, serverless....

Mobile is almost all IOS and Android... and mostly but not all devs use Macs due to xcode.

The only places that Windows seems to persist are developer markets where tooling choices are limited to Windows (games, medical, embedded) or corporate standards dictate tooling.

> Mobile is almost all IOS and Android... and mostly but not all devs use Macs due to xcode.

Indeed and trying to use UNIX for mobile apps won't bring you far.

> The only places that Windows seems to persist are developer markets where tooling choices are limited to Windows (games, medical, embedded) or corporate standards dictate tooling.

The remaining 99% of the market where UNIX GUIs don't matter.

I use macos to make mobile apps every day. Last I looked its bsd unix.

Also ios and android are unixes too.

How much UNIX do you think powers your beloved XCode implementation based on AppKit and Objective-C?

Android uses the Linux kernel, nothing on the userspace is UNIX. Tomorrow it can use Fuchsia's Zircon and no one will notice.

I cannot find any reference to Objective-C, Swift, UI Kit, CoreData, Metal, OpenGL ES,... on POSIX standard specification.

"POSIX has become outdated", page 6

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/issues/login_fall1...

If you look at desktop os share from tracking general web use rather than surveying people on a dev-focused site windows is 75%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

Yeah, because the software developed for 80% of the desktop market appears out of thin air, no developers required.

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