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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft really needs to take a real hard look at Windows and figure out what its place is in the world.

I know very few people outside of gamers that have a full computer outside of one given for work.

This is one of the many reasons that my windows computer is solely for gaming (and I use a debloated Windows 10 LTS install) and never has anything sensitive on it. Any general computing tasks happen on my Mac.

I would love to ditch Windows and go to Linux for gaming but as good as proton is. I value being able to play my games without hassle more.

This is seriously disgusting behavior from Microsoft (and not the only example of Windows turning into an ad machine) but they also realize they have a stronghold so what is the choice for most normal consumers. It’s not Linux as much as technical people love to say it is.

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> Microsoft really needs to take a real hard look at Windows and figure out what its place is in the world.

They did. But they looks in the wrong mirror from the wrong angle. They probably asked a few business people in microsoft what can the company do to increase revenue, and that's what they came up with.

> I would love to ditch Windows and go to Linux for gaming but as good as proton is.

The more people that play on Linux and leave negative reviews for products that don't work the more vendors will spend time on it. Id's say voting with our wallets is worth it.

I disagree with the idea of leaving negative reviews just because a game doesn’t support a specific platform. It’s the same toxic fanboy wars we see if a game doesn’t come out on a specific console or available on a specific store.

Doing so costs money for a small portion of the community. Ultimately these studios are businesses and have to make financial choices.

I do fully recognize that this is a chicken and the egg problem. But proton is not a perfect solution and I even had to install Windows on my steam deck to play some of the games I want to play.

At the end of the day I’m a gamer first and a fanboy second. I want to play the games.

Leaving a negative review of the product because it doesn't work where you want it to work is absolutely not "toxic fanboy" behavior, its called being an advocate for your own interests. As the person paying up to 70$ for the game, consumers deserve to have their voices heard. Besides, is anyone actually worried about the rampant "toxicity" in the reviews section on a games steam page? Seems a bit pearl clutch-y.

> Leaving a negative review of the product because it doesn't work where you want it to work is absolutely not "toxic fanboy" behavior

You can also call it free market research. Here's someone who wants to play your game enough to go through this extra effort.

Um... "review bombing" is a thing that is often talked about. So... yes people are worried about it...

You knew what the game did and did not support when you bough it. If you choose to do something outside of what it says, it's your problem not theirs.

Personally, I think using aggregate review scores to make decisions is foolish - and this was true even before user scores and review bombing were a thing. To paraphrase George Carlin - the average reviewer is dumb and half of the ones Metacritic is aggregating are even dumber than that. Why do you give equal weight to their opinion?

My approach: Find someone whose opinion/taste I trust. Make decisions based on the full text of their review. Ignore Metacritc/Rotten Tomatoes/Steam User Reviews like the plague.

And review bombing is almost always a legitimate outcry by fans that have very little leverage against an industry riddled with anti-consumer practices. The only people that are worried about review bombing should be the creators of the games, and they should do their best to avoid making decisions that force the fan base to resort to tanking their game's score.

I paid for a product and I expect that product to at least not intentionally restrict use on proton. If you intentionally restrict its use on whatever platform i see fit then you are getting a negative review. The wine folks and valve have put serious effort into patching your product to work on linux, but when you actively undermine their effort and intentionally limit its use - either by banning players on linux or hacking your game to not work - then that's not nice.

There is no fanboying in wanting to use a product whichever way I see fit. It's mine.

The problem is that the more people buy Steam Decks, the less understanding the average Linux gamer will be of bugs.

For every hardcore Linux gamer who would leave a negative review on a game because it's not available on their platform, there will be several regular gamers who would leave a negative review because it doesn't work well on the Steam Deck. Enabling Linux support without actually working at supporting it for real is a risk that game studios rightly avoid.

Steam could probably help with this by giving you a way to bypass the publisher's recommendation with lots of warnings (and maybe disabling negative reviews if you do), but that that doesn't exist is on Steam, not the publisher.

>the less understanding the average Linux gamer will be of bugs.

Linux gamers have NEVER been tolerant of bugs. They are the exact people who make bug reports to niche indie developers on an ultra specific, custom configured system that some small part of the game doesn't work, and get extremely entitled and pissed when the dev says "I literally can't afford to take the time to fix that, even if I knew what the hell in your system is borked".

I partially agree, however considering you are mentioning banning players I think that when we are talking about an online game it is entirely within their right (and we should expect them too) to ban someone from playing in an unsupported manner. Cheating is a problem with online games. If they feel like (wether or not the community agrees doesn't matter) that configuration is not secure they don't have any obligation to support it.

However, when you paid for the product you should know how something is supported. If you buy it to do something that is not supported you should not leave a negative review. You are punishing them for your choice.

There needs to be a serious discussion about what exactly steam did with the steam deck and proton. They put out a new platform and basically told developers, it's now your job to support this. Yes a lot of the work is done by proton but it is not a silver bullet but normal consumers don't understand this. If your game breaks on proton most likely the company just doesn't consider it a platform to test, which is perfectly valid when they never said they supported it int he first place. Yet consumers go to the developers to complain? That makes no sense.

Do you agree with this statement? "If you paid for a product with a known platform restriction, don't expect it to Just Work, & don't leave a negative review if it doesn't."

I'm asking because IMO you initially claimed something more broad than your second comment indicates.

> If you intentionally restrict its use on whatever platform i see fit then you are getting a negative review.

The flip side of this coin is that when they don't restrict it, it's viewed as supported, and they get bad reviews when it doesn't work perfectly on those platforms they don't test on.

Their current approach to Windows seems to be to milk it as much as possible before the desktop dies out.

>Their current approach to Windows seems to be to milk it as much as possible before the desktop dies out.

I'm starting to think that this is what Microsoft's goal is.. pushing people to the mobile platform deliberately and getting people use to it. where there is less control over the experience.

I'm so glad I switched to PopOS[1] Last year.

[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...

That seems to me to be begging the question.

I see no evidence that the desktop will "die out". It may change form, and it may be used by a smaller percentage of the computing public, but the idea that we're going to see a time without significant usage of desktop (or laptop) computers within the foreseeable future just seems laughable to me.

It smacks, to me, of the idea that the only thing worth being in the market is the very top: the company selling the biggest product, making the most money—otherwise you might as well not even bother.

This is toxic thinking.

I do agree that "desktop" computing is not going away any time soon. But there is no point denying that PC market is shrinking and the average user is migrating towards smartphones and tablets. There is no more space to grow here and is no longer MS's priority like in the 90s. I mean, they tried to actively kill desktop PC with Windows 8.

> Microsoft really needs to take a real hard look at Windows and figure out what its place is in the world.

But they did! It's the thing that the browser runs on. And since ads in the browser belong to Google and Facebook, MS has only the OS and their own apps left to cash in on ads. /s

> I would love to ditch Windows and go to Linux for gaming but as good as proton is. I value being able to play my games without hassle more.

I play all my games on Linux via proton without hassle. I made the switch 2 years ago and haven’t run into any major issues. At one point, I was playing Elden Ring hassle-free while my friends playing on Windows faced stuttering issues. I am unable to play sim-racing in VR because iRacing uses a Linux-hostile anti-cheat, but that’s the only time I’ve had an issue. Personally, I’m fine avoiding anti-cheat because I don’t like how it interacts with my personal device. Currently, I am playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on ultra settings, and it has worked phenomenally since day one.

Overall, I would say my gaming experience is surprisingly better on Linux than it was on Windows, and I’m absolutely shocked that’s the case.

For certain games it's still borked. Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines is among my favorites and it's unplayable.

I’m with you on proton. It’s totally hassle free and I’ve been using it for everything but call of duty and non-steam games (even though they should work with wine I think).

I think you mistake gamers and normal consumers who do have a choice. Maybe they don't want to pay more for Mac, and that's the only leverage. If they don't play games, they lose nothing.

I don’t think I am? I specifically mention that I know very few people outside of gamers that have a computer.

So I feel like most normal consumers have already made that choice and they don’t need windows or Mac.

What do they do with just a phone...?

Are students just using ipads these days? I guess I'm getting (am?) old. Without a general purpose computing device in the home, my life would have been radically different.

It ultimately depends on what the student is doing I think. If you are just writing papers, doing research, taking notes. Just use an iPad. Maybe get a keyboard to attache to it.

Obviously if you are going for programming thats an exception but thats not everyone.

Most people that I know do the vast majority of their computing tasks on their phones. I think it's very telling that apps like Threads launched first as an app and the website came later.

Gaming is basically the exception for most people that I know.

You might be able to argue that some of these tasks are better on a PC, but is it worth it if you already have a tablet or you just want fewer devices.

And again to be clear, I am talking about a personal computing device vs a work supplied computer.

> I think it's very telling that apps like Threads launched first as an app and the website came later.

This isn't new, Instagram itself did the same over a decade ago. It was phone-only until shortly after Facebook bought it.

But I agree with your other point, PCs (mostly laptops if you want to make that distinction) are for business use, while phones and iPads (because other tablets suck) are general purpose devices. And to take it from there: browsers are increasingly irrelevant, and videos won over text.

But I don't think laptops are going anywhere for business use, as merging them with tablets never really took off.

> But I don't think laptops are going anywhere for business use, as merging them with tablets never really took off.

I definitely agree with that for the vast majority of use cases, I do think there are a few outliers where the portability of tablets likely outweighs any benefits that could be gained from a laptop. Particularly if you are in a setting that you don't often sit and work at a desk. But those are the exception.

But that does mean that the usage of Windows (and Mac) is further and further switching from general computing and more constricted use.

We are seeing that change in some situations. Like with doctors or just yesterday I went to a therapist who uses an iPad instead of a laptop (however both of those I think bring up a question if did they ever use a laptop or did they just skip over that step since it really wasn't that long ago that both would have been paper based).

Given that I work in tech its kinda hard for me to really comment on what is happening in other more traditional office settings

Instagram was one step further, iPhone-only.

You have to realize that we are now far enough away from the debut of the iPad (2010) that it is possible that high school students and college freshman do not remember a computing world without it.

Many of these students grew up using a tablet first and foremost, so it is the device they are most accustomed to.

> but they also realize they have a stronghold so what is the choice for most normal consumers

Did I misunderstand this somehow?

> Microsoft really needs to take a real hard look at Windows and figure out what its place is in the world.

I wish it would just quietly die in a corner.

As a developer Windows has brought us such highlights as:

* backslash instead of forward slash

* magic paths with drive letters, spaces, and tildas (for you kids, that 8.3 DOS compatible path names)

* its own custom C/C++ project format rather than make, that accidentally gave birth to CMake

* VBA, and all associated viruses

* exclusive file locks

I can't be bothered to go on, but the man-hours/years/decades/centuries spent on making code work on Linux and Windows is spectacular.

> "backslash instead of forward slash"

Why not try Start -> Run c:/windows and see what happens?

> "magic paths with drive letters, spaces, and tildas (for you kids, that 8.3 DOS compatible path names)"

Linux systems have magic paths like /sys and paths with tildes (isn't that where /~username in URLs came from?) and path/filenames with arbitrary byte sequences which cannot even be displayed safely: https://dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html

> "VBA, and all associated viruses"

VBA is Visual Basic for Applications, it came from Office not Windows.

And yet, with all that supposedly terrible cruft, it's still a more stable and reliable interface to program against than pretty much anything in Linux world.

The best Linux api is Win32.

Oh, and that also means if you wrote Windows API compliant code in 1998, it still works today.

I still can't get over how wild it is to look back at even Windows 1.0 documentation and see familiar functions.

Microsoft owns or has partnerships with many game studios, and they'll always keep that advantage. You can easily ditch Windows if you ditch video games, which is what I did.

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