It’s fair to say that there are many people in our community who just love to dunk on Microsoft Windows. It’s an easy win, after all, the dominant player in the PC operating system market has a long history of dunking on free software, and let’s face it, today’s Windows doesn’t offer a good experience. But what might the future hold? [Mason] has an unexpected prediction: that Microsoft will eventually move towards offering a Windows-themed Linux distro instead of a descendant of today’s Windows.
The very idea is sure to cause mirth, but on a little sober reflection, it’s not such a crazy one. Windows 11 is slow and unfriendly, and increasingly it’s losing the position once enjoyed by its ancestors. The desktop (or laptop) PC is no longer the default computing experience, and what to do about that must be a big headache for the Redmond company. Even gaming, once a stronghold for Windows, is being lost to competitors such as Valve’s Steam OS, so it wouldn’t be outlandish for them to wonder whether the old embrace-and-extend strategy could be tried on the Linux desktop.
We do not possess a working crystal ball here at Hackaday, so we’ll hold off hailing a Microsoft desktop Linux. But we have to admit it’s not an impossible future, having seen Apple reinvent their OS in the past using BSD, and even Microsoft bring out a cloud Linux distro. If you can’t wait, you’ll have to make do with a Windows skin, WINE, and the .NET runtime on your current Linux box.
” let’s face it, today’s Windows doesn’t offer a good experience”
Really?
Go fire up a copy of 95 or Vista or shudder ME.
Defense of the company or it’s policies aside, by an large my experience with windows is everything just WORKS, and it chugs along just fine. Not sure what kind of “experience” you’re looking for from an operating system, but I’m looking for a foundational platform from which I run my chosen applications, and from that lens I’ve had a perfectly fine experience.
What people are objecting to are the ads baked in, the Microsoft account being mandatory, the telemetry, the AI “features”, the cloud “features”, the whittling away of any user control, the hardware requirements in service of the “features”, and that’s just a partial list off the top of my head. Strip all that away, and yeah, it might be a decent “foundational platform”.
Yeah. Probably they’ll just strip away the crap in next version again.
+1
Windows 2000 used to be considered a well designed release, for example.
It was small, stable, had a clean UI, had no product activation, no spyware or ads.
Many Linux users respected Windows 2000, which I think means a lot.
I still use Win2K occasionally in a VM on my Linux laptop. It was the last version of Windows that I actually liked; later on I used XP at work, but even then I felt that Microsoft was starting to make spurious less-than-helpful changes to the way they did things. I did a fair amount of Registry hacking because of that, and it was the last version of Windows I ever used on a daily basis.
yeah that dog-based search made zero sense. when i want to search, i want a place to type a search term, not an animated dog
Sounds like the internet in general. You all have your adblockers set to stun, right?
My adblocker is set and locked on “kill.”
People gripe and complain about how overrun everything is with ads. I don’t. I nearly never see any.
Unfortunately, I’m seeing a lot of websites that I’ve accessed in the past on a regular basis block their content because of my adblocker.
it’s amazing to think that Windows still randomly reshuffles my desktop icons — what is so completely unfixable about that bug? if the desktop metaphor means anything at all, it means leaving things where the user left them so that they can use their spacial memory to find them again
NSFW: https://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE
Windoze just needs more sort icons options.
I use Stardock software to keep some of that tamed.
yeah i use DTOK.. but these are hacks we shouldn’t have to install on every windows computer we use. macintosh has never had this problem — or if it did it fixed it in 1984
For that I have really stopped having anything on my desktop.
But one bug that still affects me is that with a multi-screen setup, the open windows will just switch screen when the screensaver (black screen) activates. There is no logics to is, the windows on screen 1 end up on screen 2 and vice versa, some of the ones on screen 3 go to screen 1 and the other on screen 2, but some also remain on screen 3. It also doesn’t do it every time, sometimes it only moves Excel but not Chrome and other times it moves only Chrome but not Firefox.
One would think that it is the screens that move, but it is only the applications. The icons and sequence of the screens is unchanged.
In other words, the problem isn’t Windows, it’s Microsoft.
The only reason why they can keep abusing their users is because the competition is a disorganized mess with internal and external compatibility issues and missing or bad functionality and UI/UX, or pricing themselves above the common user.
Point in case:
By offering a Windows compatibility layer to make the games work on an otherwise heterogeneous platform that is very difficult to target directly. It means games are still primarily targeted for Windows if they are to work on Steam OS.
..windows… more like 10 diferent installed libs of microsoft c++ redistributable 2xxx.yy and 7 more of .Net x.YY :) oh well and 5more compatibility layers which are used to run a lot of apps (switched on by developers until they upgrade app, you can change this btw). really not much difference, they just do not say it to you :)
And yet somehow this is not a visible problem to users because Windows itself is not split in ten different ways.
You start with market logic (competitor) and then talk about Linux distros. Weird, that nobody can spin up their own little commercial distro like TV vendors do, no?
ltsc in a nutshell. too bad they only sell that to enterprise licensees. i just want an operating system, all that other stuff should be another product that people pay for if they need it. conflating ai, cloud storage, etc with the os just makes the os more expensive to develop. i should not have to pay for stuff i dont use.
Windows 2000 was top achievement as “platform that just works”. Every successor added new bloatware, problems with stability and compatibility and ridiculous requirements
I must admit that besides Windows 2000, the Windows Server 2003 had a quiet good reputation, too.
It wasn’t something a non-server person would use casually, though. Not sure if it counts, thus.
That disparity aside… “it just works” is a statement about your tolerance… not quality. Company ethics rants aside, Windows is technically inept compared against its competitors.
Windows seems fine if your workload is a browser, Excel and a couple “normie” desktop apps. That’s not a “foundational platform” though. It’s an appliance. The moment you step outside that paradigm, the cracks are no longer subtle.
The UI is incoherent by design. Windows doesn’t really have an interface… it’s a museum of abandoned ones. Control panel vs Settings vs MMC vs vendor-specific dialogs, three different context menu systems, half the OS is win32 and the other half is UWP… neither of which fully owns anything. Search behaves differently depending on which subsystem you hit. System config is scattered across a dozen incompatible paradigms, none of which works with the other.
Routine everyday tasks turn into archaeological digs. Need to change something non-trivial? You’re bouncing between deprecated panels, registry edits, “reboot and pray”, and dialogs that haven’t been visually updated since Vista. That’s not “just works”… it’s throwing darts in the dark and hoping something lands.
It gets even nastier when you get into real work. Scheduler incompetence, for one… where SMT and NUMA are first class failures. Windows routinely packs heavy threads onto sibling SMT cores while leaving physical cores idle, thrashes L1/L2 instead of spreading load, and oscillates threads between cores destroying cache locality. Linux solved this a decade ago, while Windows faceplants once you cross the “desktop CPU” threshold. NUMA awareness? Windows memory allocation regularly lands on remote nodes, latency spikes are routine and bandwidth collapses under real non-synthetic load. Windows actively fights hardware topology because “Microsoft knows better”.
My Windows QEMU/KVM with just a single CCX routinely beats Windows on bare metal… on the same hardware. That means Linux + KVM + virtualized hardware topology beats Windows with native access to the silicon. That should be embarrassing.
Windows’ update system is operationally reckless. Forced reboots, silent driver replacements, regressions shipped globally, feature updates masquerading as “security updates”, no transactional rollback that you can actually trust, and no meaningful staging model. It’s not maintenance… it’s roulette.
Even I/O + storage + filesystem stack is backward. NTFS is fragile under crash conditions, diagnostics are vague/opaque, it’s slow to repair and hostile to snapshotting and is poorly integrated with modern CoW or checksumming models. Windows storage is “don’t touch it and pray it keeps working”.
The tooling is duct tape. Anything serious on Windows involves third party driver stacks, vendor-specific kernel modules, unsigned hacks, mystery background services, registry edits and reboot cycles.
And lets not forget the engineering masterpiece that is Windows SxS… an operating system so incapable of maintaining binary compatibility that its solution was “hey, I’ve got it! let’s ship every version of every DLL forever and hope nobody notices!” Stunning. Revolutionary. Truly the pinnacle of “it just works”.
“It works for me” is not a technical argument. A toaster “just works” too. Windows is just fine if your definition of “just works” is “yeah, it opens Chrome without catching fire.” As a serious “foundational platform” it’s a scheduler/NUMA-incoherent, confused mess of a liability that actively wastes modern hardware… to the point that running it virtualized on Linux performs better than running it on bare metal. If “just works” means “it boots, launches Chrome and hasn’t bluescreened TODAY”, then congratulations… the bar has been successfully buried six feet underground.
Please don’t post AI slop.
Is it? How do you know?
Please don’t assume impassioned writeups are AI slop, especially when it’s firsthand real world experience and has exactly zero markers of AI slop. In a world of AI slop, not everything is AI slop. I was bitching about Windows’ NUMA-incoherence before AI slop was even possible. Best of luck though.
It matches my experiences as a Systems Hacker nature. At one point i just figured that making the system my own is a uphill battle against a hostile maintainer and moved to Arch Linux.
I for one preferred at least the look and feel of Windows 95/98 (or rather Windows NT4) to the look of XP and later. In particular I find the way Windows 10 did away with colours and frames (e.g. around edit fields) in favour of a “cleaner” UI very annoying. It made it less usable for me instead of more.
Yes, there were quite a few improvements too, but the look and feel of Windows 8 and later definitely wasn’t one of these.
The Windows 8 Beta without Metro UI was still fine, really.
It basically still was looking like Windows 7 (more boxy),
but shipped with built-in USB 3 support, new task manager and software-renderer for Aero Glass (using WARP rasterizer).
Unfortunately, the final release of Windows 8 wasn’t exactly great. 😞
Geez. Cannot believe a fellow ‘Brian’ said that.
It does not ‘just work’. The las time I allowed any windoze box run for over 36 hours, it made a mess of things. I have one Slackware 14 box that has been running for > 3 years. Even WIndoze Server has been problematic without periodic re-boots.
Everytime some youngster employee of a former client insists on converting a factory automation box to windoze, I get another 10-20 billable hours to replace what the cult of mickeysoft has doth ordained as infallible.
Why would I buy the Windows version of Linux when I can get a different version for free? I’m barely okay with buying a Windows version of Windows, and I like Windows. Have always been closest to being “a power user” in the office, but that’s more a commentary on my workmates than a paean to me. Different people are different but BSD-based Mac SOX is more understandable to me, structurally. Things are easier to find, maybe I was just never given the Windows decoder ring. So you’re offering me an opportunity to pay for Linux. This is truly my lucky day.
The fact that you are unable to type Windows correctly shows that it is more that you don’t have much experience with it and the problems you had are really down user error.
Linux is equally frustrating to get to work when you don’t have the experience with it.
The spelling was intentional. Your troll is irrational and infantile.
I’ll echo Bob A., but from another angle. ’95 -Me, even 7 and 8, I OWNED. They were purchased. I was even able to own Win 10 because it was updated from 8. Just plain leasing rather than owning makes the Win 11 experience bad.
Hard disagree. Windows 95 was very usable out of the box. I used it as recently as the early 2010s on old laptops and it was absolutely fine, even going on the internet. Sure there might be odd combinations of hardware that brick it or something, but the same could be said for linux (which I use currently). I mainly liked Win9x because for the most part, it minded its own business. An operating system should really only serve to get things off the disk and into RAM. Anything more is bloat.
Hi, I think it depends a lot on hardware and Windows revision.
Windows 95 had many versions. RTM, A, B, C.
It also was differentiated by all the OSR versions.
The original Windows 95 (unpatched) ran okay on Windows 3.1x era hardware.
Meaning 386/486 PCs with ISA bus or MCA, EISA, VLB or Opti bus.
Without PCI (PCI on 486 mobos was considered buggy) and without ACPI/APIC (found on 586s or ATX mobos).
Provided that enough RAM was available (8, 16 or more MB)
and that original intel processors or their second-sources were used.
Weird CPUs like Cyrix 486DLC, Super 386, NX586, WinChip, AMD K5 etc might have caused stability issues,
because they had extra instructions or weren’t 100% intel compatible (reserved registers etc).
The problem wasn’t the processors, though, but bad coding
and the use of undocumented opcodes by Windows 95 itself or by its drivers.
The crux with Windows 9x was the excessive use of virtual device drivers, the so-called VXDs (*.vxd).
In Windows 3.x days, they had been *.386 driver files.
Windows 98SE tried to introduce VDM drivers, but still carried a large library of older VXDs.
That’s why Windows was the #1 OS on the hardware testbed, it had so many drivers for vintage hardware.
When eBay was young, 20 years ago, old or used hardware had been tested primarily with Windows 98SE to show that it works.
it’s usable? ok try the following. try copying a file between two maximized explorer windows. or drag a file from explorer into an application. you know. click, drag over taskbar, hover over the apps icon so it comes out front, and then drag over the file. let me know how it goes.
(for non windows users: windows 11 removed this feature. you have to arrange your windows beforehand so both are visible, or you have to use the keyboard. a feature present for 30 years gone because someone at Microsoft decided so)
Uh, I’m not sure that is true. I just tried on my Win11 (23H2) box here at work and that seemed to work just fine.
W11 doesn’t “just work” though, it’s actively hostile to users and their interests / privacy and is well down the enshittification curve in the zone where it’s doing what makes more money not what makes a better product.
We’re now at a point where businesses have to really consider the security risks of Windows due to the amount of data it exfiltrates for whatever purpose, the heavy-handed push to put everything in their cloud by default, as well as the non-optional AI nonsense – AKA “features” pushed by the marketing department that are harder and harder if not impossible to fully deactivate / avoid.
I’ve been dailying Linux Mint for over a decade now, alongside whatever version of Windows is current for work purposes, and I can say that Mint is the one of the pair that “just works” more consistently and with minimal swearing / frustration. It’s also the one that’s on an upwards curve of user-friendliness, simplicity, and polish.
Hanging out on r/LinuxMint there’s been a noticeable influx of alienated Windows users staggering blinking into the daylight and asking “Why was that so easy? What did I miss?” and “Why didn’t I do this years ago?”
Yah, sorry. Current Windows do suck. It’s just so messy. It’s easy to find the things you use regularly but to browse through the start menu and find all your stuff… major pain in the ass.
Obviously to be serious contenders today one would have to at the very least port over modern web browsers. But Windows XP Kicks everything after it’s ass on a traditional desktop form factor. And Win98SE isn’t much behind it and what little it does lack in UI vs XP it makes up with being even lighter weight and having a more functional device manager.
The only way I see this happening is in an utterly dystopian fashion. Microsoft has clearly decided that their desired way of generating revenue is to use their users: spying on everything they do while simultaneously selling the data and feeding it to the AI which they’re cramming down users’ throats in order to train said AI even faster. Microsoft is trying to revert the entire consumer computing experience to a client / server model wherein Redmond has all the control.
So yes, they could leverage some Frankensteined version of Linux to achieve the same ends while simultaneously erasing a couple of decades’ worth of technical debt. But calling the resulting beast “Linux” would have even less validity than calling Android “Linux”.
Yes, that’s what I was thinking. Since they would have to add a layer to continue collecting data, this would become very much like Android. And OBTW: having a Linux variant becoming the dominant consumer desktop OS would shift all of the black hats over to targeting the Linux kernel.
If we’re being honest, desktop linux doesn’t really have a good security model. You use and run everything as a single all-powerful user and routinely type your credentials into a program that gives you even more power than that. It’s not like root is even needed to trash a computer: execute rm -r ~ and your computer is now functionally indistinguishable from a fresh install. Qubes is a partial attempt to change this, with a carefully considered sandbox for every application, but 1970’s unix really just doesn’t lend itself very well to this model.
It has worked so far, because the apps come in from the distribution. And Flatpak adds sandboxing. Wayland doesn’t make it trivial to hijack other app windows like X did, so in reality the security model is steadily improving.
I go all the way back to original DOS and IBM 360. So, lemme see, 37 or 38 years on NIX and roughly the same on MSFT. I run both at home (Debian, Fedora, Win10, Win11, *not Arch).
I do loath many things about MSFT but I think true *NIX devotees forget how much tweaking a *NIX system requires compared to Win.
Fedora pushes out a “minor” update and boom, my WiFi card stops working. Now I either have to rollback or find that one deprecated library that has been keeping my exact Intel WiFi chip happy and find a replacement. Hours go by. I don’t mind. It’s part of the game.
But that doesn’t really fly for most people. “Windows applied a patch and my PC stopped working” is a very big deal for most people. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (hi, Crowdstrike) but it’s way less frequent. And yeah, I know about immutable and LTS distros but sometimes even something presumably minor, like an update to the power management daemon, means suddenly my battery is discharging at 300% and I will spend the next 5 hours on forums figuring out why. I get it. Volunteer community mostly and building for a bazillion configurations. It’s the dog walking on hindlegs. You don’t ask why it doesn’t do that all the time, you ask how it does that at all.
And yes, *NIX is amazing for highly stable carefully curated hardware and software builds — servers that run for years without incident.
However, for the “everyday” user where people install and uninstall stuff constantly it’s got some real challenges that MSFT, even with adware dreck like W11 has less of.
Thanks for mentioning DOS, it’s another alternative.
At least for running a small selection of specialized applications needed at work place.
Such as Predict or Dillo, for example.
I like the fact that there are a dozen of MS-DOS compatible OSes, also.
Diversity is almost as high as with Linux distros, maybe.
FreeDOS is most up-to-date version, maybe.
https://computer.fandom.com/wiki/MS-DOS_compatible_operating_systems
The list is incomplete, though. There are more DOS-like OSes that come to mind..
Paragon DOS, PTS DOS, PC-MOS/386 (now GPL’ed), Wendin DOS, X-DOS, DIP DOS, L3 (has DOS sandbox), DCP (former East Germany), etc.
Sure. But I think Titus was talking about DOS/360 (for the IBM System/360), not MS-DOS.
Ah, I see, thanks for the info! 😃
When I replied, I wasn’t sure, I guess, because Windows was also mentioned.
My bad, though. Should have read it more carefully!
With the original IBM DOS, you had to tell the system what tracks and cylinders the output file occupied.
Which, if you were juvenile and had sysadmin rights meant you could make the Winchesters dance.
I tried Fedora 2 years ago after using Mint, Debian, Ubuntu,… for years. Very soon I run into dependency issues when installing something. So yes, Fedora is not a mark of modern Linux experience, sadly. Red Hat is old hat, worn out.
Sounds like your chosen distro has issues – I have been dailying mint for a long time and their principle of least surprise seems to be pretty reliable.
I know where you’re coming from. I have a Ubuntu 22 laptop, updates disabled, stable for years.
Another laptop with Ubuntu 24, updates disabled, I added one program (apt-get) and BLAM! it wouldn’t boot.
Ubuntu are no longer stable. I can see the attraction for Micro$haft.
Run windows on an old machine that and compare that to how linux performs on it……
Let’s make sure the “old machine” has plenty of RAM, though.
Linux eats it by the GhibliBytes.
I don’t find that the case at all. Although I’ve been using linux since ’99, when it was all about the page partition (or pagefile) It amazes me what 4GB has been able to do for, like a decade now? Tried a Puppy Linux derivative yet? It has to do with tweaking, but once you know how…
No, GNOME and KDE gobble it up. Use lighter desktop and the idle RAM consumption is much lower. Linux itself is fine on a friggin router with tens of MBs.
[citation needed]
For example…
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/1qn0gyj/its_good_to_see_an_os_that_doesnt_guzzle_my_ram/
Even the worst offenders for RAM eating as a complete Linux OS as shipped by the distro of choice are very happy in XP levels of RAM, the bit that will kill it is then doing what you always do with any computer these days and opening your web browser, as all the browsers are rather RAM hogging even before you tab fiend a few hundred pages…
Windows XP SP3 can boot on as low as a Pentium MMX with 64 MB of RAM and 1,5 GB of free HDD space.
Good luck finding a recent full-size Linux distro that boots up with a comparable level of functionality.
If you call that level of technically boots so is functional for XP working it won’t be too bad to match/exceed that performance with a Linux distro focused on the lightweight end at least – actually quite a few that target the 64 or 128MB, a few even aim lower still (though I don’t know of any off the top of my head aiming for the 32 or less ballpark that are actually shipping with desktops rather than targeting headless embedded use in routers etc).
But I was meaning the level of RAM you’d actually want to make XP work reasonably well, and in those small handful of GB I’d suggest you won’t find a single Linux distro that really struggles to work to the limits of the system – though obviously practical use with the need of opening the browser RAM hog that they are these days is another issue.
My Acer Aspire One has 1 GB RAM runs PiDesktop (and Slackware 15 for a short moment) – because Windows XP was too sluggish and fresh install made no sense in 2020.
My 15 year old HP with 4 GB of RAM runs recent Ubuntu – because Windows 7 (originally installed was OK) and Windows 8 were so slow I was sure it was hardware issue. I notice that some Windows installations deal better in time than others.
None of my machines runs out of RAM after booting or takes more that 50% of it. And straight after installation I have more software packed in less storage space.
Remember this goodie from the 90’s: Oh if we could have seen the future.
I just did a web search and picked this version out of the 50 different “original” versions I found.
Comparing Microsoft Windows With Cars
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon”.
In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.
The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.
I don’t like cars too much and prefer the airline comparison.. :)
https://2bitsabyte.com/airlines
I’ve had to press the “Start” button to turn off my last 3 cars.
I have to shut down and close my car to fix the bluetooth connection to my phone…
The irony is that a lot of GM cars work exactly like that.
As a corporate user of Win 11 I find it works a lot better than 10 or 7, for the B2B activities. It’s a lot better than the alternatives, at least for a large organisation. All the high end CAD tools run on it fairly well.To be fair I’m pretty sure that our IT department strips a lot of the annoying stuff mentioned in these columns out of our installations. I would think the main reason why windows is losing the OS market has more to do with the migration of most people to tablets and phones for internet browsing. As the family tech support I’ve noticed that since most of my family have stopped using laptops etc, the number of support calls has dropped significantly. :-). Although I do run a win laptop at home, most of the time I use one of my Linux laptops. The raspberry pi desktop for PCs works quite well for me and provides an easy migration for pi development.
I too have to use Win 10/11 at work. Wish they’d just go Linux … but isn’t going to happen. Windows free here at home for years. Laptops, desktops, workstations, servers, SBCs … All Linux based and nothing left on the table as an ‘I wish…’.
I think M$ going to Linux as the underlying OS is a good thing, even for them. No longer would they have to ‘maintain’ the inhouse code base. Let Linux developers do the ‘heavy’ lifting, leaving M$ to just ‘support it’ and add their own DE features. Simple and good for the stock holders as well. They already use Linux in the back room … next up the Desktop market.
I agree that dependency on Windows and US companies/services in general should be reduced, that’s reasoable.
Switching one monopoly for another isn’t exactly the solution, though.
That’s a character traith I don’t like about Linux users, personally, by the way.
To me, they act sect like, as if Linux was the only one and true messiah.
In practice, there are also BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD etc), macOS (Darwin/BSD based), BEOS (Haiku),
ReactOS (free Windows implementation, unfinished), QNX, MinuetOS/KolibriOS (fits on a floppy), RISC OS, various Unices (Solaris, HP/UX), OS/2 (eComStation, ArcaOS) etc.
Sure, some are absolute niche OSes, but they do have gotten support for SDL library or X11 and are in principle able to host full-size applications.
They can be alternatives to Windows in certain work environments, without having the security issues of Windows.
Even with all network ports open or if beeing directly exposed to the information super highway, they aren’t vulnerable same way as Windows.
I’m a Linux user but if I had to manage IT at a company, I’d run windows. Active Directory just works. it’s a no braiber.
I hear a lot of Unix nerds saying that Unix doesn’t need that because you can write your own scripts. to which I respond: GO AWAY. if you’re in IT, you’re paid IT salary. not software developer salary. if I have to write programs I expect to be paid accordingly. and the board will say, with good reason, “why are we paying someone to write scripts every time we need to change something if on windows you click Apply template and all of the company is updated”?
also, Unix nerds, have you really, really tried to use Kerberos? because that thing doesn’t work. it doesn’t work from BSD to Linux (there are different flavors of Kerberos, betcha didn’t know that eh?), and it doesn’t solve a lot of the issues AD solves
the sole idea of “writing scripts” to do common tasks… smh
“oh but you can use Ansible”. really? yet another tool that is just a framework to do things and it’s not really what AD is?
thanks. for work, I’ll stick to AD
Yes but if Microsoft moved to a linux or BSD kernel they would rewrite their tools to go with it. IT would be closer to what MacOS and Android do.
The biggest problem would be compatibility layers but that is still a big problem today as others have mentioned. If they did get everyone to stick with their app store compatibility, even if not distributed through it, eventually windows would be a much better place. The problem is they don’t keep these things, they give up after a few versions and throw it into a compatibility layer and move on to the next making the OS support more legacy variations.
I really wouldn’t call the sort of stuff AD does turned into script writing actually writing programs, really those scripts are way way too simple for that. And for the job of managing a company of IT I’d suggest Linux is vastly more capable and flexible with far fewer M$ style stupidities that break things on you automatically – suitable for everyone’s needs if you put in the work.
If you want to keep using the tools you know the way you know I have no objection of course – What works for your company’s needs is fine, and the pain of changing over to a new system is always high enough there needs to be a good reason. However actually get as familiar with Linux management and deployment and you’ll be able to do more having better control, faster and easier I’d suggest, but certainly more – there is nothing really wrong with the tools available, in similar vein to CAD folks hating all other CAD packages but theirs its familiarity with your existing tool that makes you not want to use anything else as it doesn’t do things exactly the way you expected.
Linux fans treat Linux as “the true messiah”, because people aren’t accepting ANY alternative desktops, unless Microsoft foists it on them, and considering Linux has multiple ones to choose from… Using linux since ’99, I’ve come to accept that people are absolute total morons when it comes to PCs. It might seem arrogant, but just try converting people to ANY of the alternatives you mention. You can have pages of logical, cogent notes, FREE as in beer!, and I’ve heard all the whining of needing Windows for games. If you want to hear linux promoters being irritating, STOP BEING F’N MORONS!
Fine. But spoken in pictures, it doesn’t make much sense to exchange one disease by another..
In a sane or responsible society, it would be rather so that the patients get a treatment that heals them.
In terms of users, that would be good education, investment in schools or the education sector as such.
To make them understand how to properly operate a computer or any other modern appliances.
Just my two cents.
So if I STOP BEING A F’N MORON I will hear linux promoters being irritating? You may be in coding, you may be in sales, you may want to reconsider. Whatever it is you’re doing or selling, your’re not.
Well, my experience with BSD hasn’t been that good. I’ve tried it in a VM a few times over the years, but it just never quite as easy to use as Linux is (for my purpose anyway). MacOS is just another closed system on Apple for Apple. Tried RISC OS too. No go. Liked OS/2 during it’s hay day, but our company stayed with M$ . Kicked around QNX for awhile at work a long time ago. Coherent was another Unix like… Used VRTX, Wind River OSes in the RTU/IED domain as well. So no stranger to other OSs and kernels. That said, Linux just seems more practical across all platforms from SBCs to high-end workstations on different CPU platforms. And no one can ‘lock it up’ behind a paywall, either or force one particular DE down your throat. Pick one that fits your workflow. Very flexible. Seems like a win win. Oh and if not satisfied with any, build a linux system from scratch if that floats your boat (I did that only once, never again ) . Note, I’ve used DOS, CP/M, and most of all the Windows platforms through my career, but when I loaded Linux I knew this was the direction for me. It finally stabilized enough that I started using full time. Win 7 was the last M$ OS I bought, before going Windows free. Never looked back.
That’s the advantage Windows really has: A lot of business software out there is really only available for Windows. All your good mechanical CAD packages, some of your ERP and accounting software (although we’re starting to see that moving to cloud based software), a lot of oddball specialized technical software. And there’s presumably a lot of tools available for enterprise level IT there as well. So a lot of people are going to see Windows at the office, which also means if they want a computer at home using a Windows box will minimize what they have to relearn.
Trying to overcome that advantage with another OS would require convincing all sorts of software companies, from big dogs like Solidworks or Intuit down to companies that make a software package for an obscure lab test, to offer Linux friendly options. At larger companies you may encounter a bunch of institutional inertia; at the shallower end of the pool you may have a situation where the original programmer retired and now you have one person trying to sustain the package in between their regular assignments.
That’s true, that’s why Windows VMs can help to continue to run certain inportant applications.
Such as AutoCAD or other professional software.
In addition, there’s LOSS32 distribution of Linux.
The compatibility layers WINE (*nix, KolibriOS) and ODIN (OS/2 Warp and beyond) can execute Windows applications.
Then there’s ReactOS which can be used as s subsitute for software relying on device drivers written for NT4/NT5.x.
While ReactOS is still unfinished, it can be use as a base for forks or custom builds.
Companies or business could compile their own ReactOS builds that can continue to run unsupported, specialized hardware/software.
I’m thinking of labs or factories with special equipment..
Looking at these alternatives: A VM would still require maintaining a version of Windows of some sort and add extra steps.
I’m not familiar with LOSS32. Is running a Windows application there something that would truly feel like running it natively, or is it also a case where the application runs in its own sandbox that follows different rules from the main OS and requires its own drivers and configuration?
ReactOS has potential, but potential means it hasn’t been done. Compiling a custom build of an OS that doesn’t have a finished stable release would be a nightmare for IT.
Linux advocates often come across as a car guy telling a typical person “For the same price as that new Hyundai, you could get a really nice ’67 Mustang!” This could be great if your goal is to drive a 1960s Mustang. It is not so great if you just want to get from home to work and back with low running costs and reasonable reliability and safety.
People who use Windows seldom use it out of fandom for Windows; they use it because they want to run software that is available for Windows with minimal fuss.
Hey, Windows CE wasn’t that much different! :D
It basically was a do-it-yourself kit and didn’t feel very consistant.
I remember running crippled versions on netbooks or thin clients.
Windows XP embedded or ReactOS would be less of a pain in niche places, such as automation or industry halls, maybe.
Because in such places, software compatibility with NT devices drivers might matter
(drivers often had been available to both Win 3.x/9x and NT line).
That’s what ReactOS differs from WINE. ReactOS can load the *.sys drivers of NT line.
If you have, say, a machinery or a lab equipment that use a PCI or ISA card and rely on a closed-source Windows NT driver for control. 🙂
The good thing about ReactOS is that it doesn’t phone home like an actual Windows does.
It’s not under control by MS or the US gov, either.
Also, being open source it has the chance to keep up with modern hardware which a real Windows NT 4/5.x hasn’t.
In the future, ReactOS might be able to boot from UEFI and GPT media etc,
while simultanously being able to support old devices drivers.
That might become relevant if the period-correct vintage PC hardware for replacement will be more scarce. 🙂
Microsoft did take that approach with former “XP-Mode” on Windows 7.
It ran a Windows XP VM in Windows Virtual PC (basicallly a crippled VPC 2007).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_PC#Windows_XP_Mode
If Microsoft created a version of Linux, there is no doubt that it would force a Microsoft login and do away with any local accounts. Telemetry would be required, and ads would be incorporated in multiple places. AI would be included in everything, and it would take screenshots every few minutes. You would be limited in what you could install to whatever is listed in the “Microsoft Linux” repositories. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint would work worse under Linux, and you could only use Linux Edge as your browser. Only a Microsoft technician would be granted root status. If you tried to work around any of this, your distribution would be bricked and if you tried to post anything about circumventing any of these features, you could face legal consequences. Your “Microsoft Linux” would be just as bad as Windows 11, even worse.
The crazy thing is, microsoft invented android almost a decade before it existed. In 2001 they were sending guys to college campuses to tell CS majors about how dot net would become The One runtime, would let apps run the same code on mobile and desktop, true cross-platform, ARM and x86, blah blah blah. And i looked at the technical decisions they were talking about and i said “yeah right”, i knew it would never happen. But Android made all of those same decisions and won the mobile space at least. I’m still in awe that microsoft had a huge lead on everyone else and still hasn’t even neared the finish line. Meanwhile, Android has become so mature that all of its recent innovation is antifeatures.
Surely Java was The One runtime, from the 90s? Microsoft only ever copied. They never innovated.
lol. I’ll take the developer experience of the “bad copy” that .NET is over Java any day.
I don’t care for the jvm or .net. I can point at either of them and see how one is marginally better at something but overall I don’t enjoy either of them. They invested so much in corpratifying their tooling for so many years that it’s just unpleasant compared to a lot of modern languages. I don’t blame people for running to and being dragged around by python over the last decade. There’s so many more reasonable tools out there though.
imo copying is the core of innovation. I have nothing against C# as a copy of Java (and after Oracle’s litigousness, it almost looks like a good choice). Android famously copied Java completely, and to dramatic success. Microsoft failed to succeed, despite their copying.
That assumes MS copied something, they didn’t.
(dot)NET wasn’t a copy and had other design goals. And the idea of a general format is like very old so not innovative in itself, maybe one could argue Java baking in the assumption of object orientation could be but I doubt it.
UCSD Pascal provided an universal executable back in the 70’s and like Java it was stack based, provided with interpreters for a number of architectures, and there were attempts to make special hardware to execute the pseduo-code directly.
A later example of the same idea was TAOS (later developed into intent) in the early 90’s. As an object oriented, multi-processor design that could support a system with heterogeneous processors one could argue that it was not only earlier but more capable than anything Sun had dreamt up, and well, it was up and running in 1991.
Nothing new under the sun and all that, it was an idea that was yet again attractive to try out, that’s all.
Eh….C#, at least, looks like a clear copy of Java to me. I mean, i’ve heard this argument before and it didn’t convince me then. And it doesn’t fare any better today.
Java isn’t really all that novel but it has some distinctive choices. Garbage collection, static typing, dynamic typing by everything inherits from java.lang.Object or System.Object), single inheritance instead of multiple, interfaces to satisfy the vague desire for multiple inheritance, a uniform reference type for objects vs a small collection of ‘simple types’ for numbers, byte code, adding generics/templates in the 2000s, i could go on.
When i look at the Java family of languages, what stands out to me is the decisions they made that avoid the colossal failure that is C++. Which really comes down to just a few tricks: a single type of object reference, universal inheritance from base Object, single inheritance, garbage collection. That’s really all it takes to avoid replicating the ongoing C++ mistake factory.
I know there are other differences but “i made an OOP language in the 1990s that isn’t as bad as Bjarne’s” is a prize that i give to the Java team, and i’m giving that team credit for C# as well.
W95 was fine (ironically about 95% of the time) ie when it didn’t crash, and you kinda learned how to avoid that by managing the workload and programs running.
XP and W7 were the pinnacles. It’s been downhill (very fast) since then.
Even office peaked around 2003.
Ever since then it’s been more and more $hit to the point the stuff isn’t useable.
Win95C was stable if you kept off SiS or Via chipsets. I only moved to 98SE for multi-monitor support.
They used to eat their own dogfood. IE run the OS they were building. 11 has been so many steps backward, hiding all the things I use daily behind dark patterns and extra clicks.
Provided you can debloat it enough 10 and 11 are still fine. But the incessant indexing and scanning and it still won’t find what I need 🤦🏼♂️
My favourite artefact of W10/11 is that I have WinSCP installed but if I try to find it by typing S..C..P.. in the start menu it pretends to have never heard of it and instead offers me the Wikipedia article for the SCP Foundation.
But sure, this is progress and adding AI will solve everything.
“S..C..P..” The problem is you typed periods. This is easily reproducible. In what universe does the command have periods?
Personally, I think that Windows 98SE was much more polished and friendly than Windows 95.
It had support for then-new technologies such as MMX, USB, Firewire, many network protocols etc.
It rightfully deserves to be remembered as the least bad version of Windows 9x, I think.
It almost felt like a real OS, rather than a self-hosting GUI on sugar.
Also, it had a vastly better memory managment over Windows 95.
It could run programs directly from VCache on HDD, if they had been aligned to 4K boundaries.
The only downside was the fatter (albeit prettier) Windows Explorer.
That’s why 98Lite came to be, for example.
Want a better OS? Quit whining about the existing ones and go MAKE the better OS. Hackers of the world, unite, man.
Don’t make yet another OS – pick an existing one that’s pretty good and help make it better.
We don’t need yet more niche Linux distros or other OS’s, we need a few really good ones that normal people can use. Hell, just helping keep documentation up to date or writing a few basic GUI helper apps would be more impactful than inventing yet another OS.
Windows problem is: they think that it is their computer, and now data. Unpinning that attitude will not help that.
I agree with you Brenda. They fell into the business trap of “every product will have endless growth as a product”. Once they started giving the OS away for free and trying to commoditize everything else they have desperately decided that now infact their customers are their product but they still have tons of subscriptions and otherwise.
Their next steps in my opinion look more in line with surveillance capitalism. People can say oh how dare Microsoft, but they’ve already been doing it, so have their corporate competitors. Breaking everything down to a Linux distro seems unlikely to me except for a small segment of their business unless they finally decide their AI coding at scale tech debt and churn model is completely unsustainable. I just doubt they would go there unless things were somehow more or less compatible. I don’t see that happening either.
As long as they don’t start turning the Linux kernel into crap or something I don’t care what they do. I’ll use whatever os my bosses make me, and if they are terrible it’s not my financial loss.
Thank you for triggering me. Bill Gates will always be THE guy that embodies ms (sic) and I used to make these mental apologetics: “At least he’s a philanthropist.” Then, in the recent past, it turns out he’s quite the philanderer, too.
I thought this was obvious for 5-10 years now? What did you think WSL and Chromium internet browser were about?
I’m not sure it will be a bad thing, but people might jusr move to Steam. Because Valve doesn’t seem to need to spyware you to death. And will sell you the games instead of a subscription to them 🤷🏼♂️
Defacto Monopolies are a beautiful thing. ;-)
Agreed. Then they added WSL with a GUI. The logical next step is to start committing to WINE and then quietly replace everything under the hood while increasing the garbage on top of it.
They just released the news that it was found out MS gave people’s bitlocker keys to the FBI.
I’m sure we all can’t wait to install a MS Linux..
according to: https://www.techpowerup.com/345597/microsoft-provided-private-bitlocker-recovery-keys-to-the-fbi
“Microsoft has confirmed that it provides BitLocker keys to authorities when presented with a legal order. This means your data is technically safe on your device unless you commit a serious felony.”
Regarding the “unless you commit a serious felony” this doesn’t fly when the government suddenly goes crazy… And looking at the current state the states are in the definition of “being a felon” seems to be shifting.
Please remind me of the advantages of cloud services. Are they called clouds, because they can suddenly disappear? Because they are overpriced hot air? Because everybody can see/access them?
as long as you are an ardent supporter of the current government, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about
I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time, and I’m getting to the point where I’m fairly certain this shift is one CEO change away. MS is never going to offer a “Windows flavored Linux distro”, but they’re going to copy Apple’s play (as suggested in the article) more or less. A forked version of the Linux kernel, or even the mainline one, with the whole UI and userland stuff redesigned and rebuilt from scratch on top of that. They might even build their own window manager, or even fork Wayland. The one thing I cannot place within this framework is PowerShell. They’ve invested so much time and money on something that will be rendered unnecessary the moment they make the switch to -nix. Sure you can have PowerShell working there (it is right now), but everyone will start asking for Linux-y replacements for every CMD-let that’s ever been released.
I like Windows 11, I even paid for it not long ago. Some things were better in previous versions, some were worse.
I don’t use my computer to run Windows – I use Windows to run software. Once configured I don’t really notice anything that different.
YMMV – meh.
“But we have to admit it’s not an impossible future, having seen Apple reinvent their OS in the past using BSD”
Well.. Yah. But it’s not like Microsoft hasn’t already done this with Windows.
Look how they tossed their in-house kernel and went with their Multics-derived Windows NT kernel for the 9x to XP transition.