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Comment by materialpoint | Hacker News Reader

It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it. What still shocks me is that the current developers and management on the Windows teams are so extremely bad at everything they do. It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow. It's not like they couldn't make Explorer use less memory and start faster, even with preloading, which was introduced in Vista, opening Explorer remains painfully slow.

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> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does

And sadly, the backbone of the majority of quality, paid software... if windows starts losing market share to Linux, things will start becoming interesting when the adobe's of the world start eying the Linux desktop as a platform where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling.

"where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling"

They can probably still sell software there. The problem is that too few people overall are using Linux.

It looks a lot like the recent record-breaking enshittification of Windows may be a subtle ploy to deprecate it and shift everything over to Linux.

Consider that this "Linus Poettering" turned out to be a Microsoft mole as the conspiracy theorists always maintained that he was. Some say RedHat as a whole was created by Microsoft.

> Some say RedHat as a whole was created by Microsoft.

Presumably people who never read the Halloween documents?

People who consult numerous sources before reaching a final, definite conclusion.

Mac would be the preferred alternative platform, as it already is. Linux might take gaming away from Windows, though.

Don't get me wrong, macs are certainly the computer for people who like to pretend to be smart for tv... but seeing where the economy is going, nobody is going to be able to afford Apple hardware, let alone the software...

We're talking about Adobe and other paid software, which is generally for professionals. They make back more than the entire cost of the software and the computer by doing a job for just one client.

And Apple computers are incredibly affordable, rumored to get a budget laptop which will be even cheaper. Computers in general are dirt cheap, including Apple. And paid software is not expensive on Apple either. There are tons of quality pro software for $50 - $100 per license. And affordable subscription models of pro creative software for those who are just getting started.

> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it.

If a corporate customer is running their stuff in the cloud they don't care if people are using Chromebooks/MacBooks/Linux to develop the software with. They just care that you are using Azure. Ultimately they want you to do everything through a web browser (just like google), even some dev environments are going that way.

Outside of corporations when interacting with non-tech people, none of them use a laptop. It is phone or tablet. A laptop running Windows is a work machine. I wonder what the stats are for home usage of Windows vs other things and honestly I don't believe a lot people are using a laptop/desktop running Windows.

> It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow.

I have a stripped down Windows 11 on my second disk (I will be removing it at some point). The OS is reasonably fast. I've removed most of the telemetry and other rubbish like the web search on desktop. So I can only assume it is that. I don't really care though anymore. I am running Debian on pretty much everything except for the work machine which I don't own.

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