alt Hacker NewsI mean... At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? End users don't care, companies don't care so MS just gets away with piles and piles of slop.
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The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity.
Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.
> At this point, what even would make people switch from MS?
Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I use Linux all the time, I have servers to host my websites and a NAS, and I install Debian on all of them and have no problem administering everything, but you have to be blind to not see how Linux is an extremely hostile environment for consumers.
I would never consider installing Linux on my personal desktop for those reasons. I honestly do not even know which distribution would be suitable, given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
"Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
> End users don't care, companies don't care
Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but ....
End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn.
Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense.
So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really.
In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.