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Most experts agree Linux is safer than Windows
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All scientific supercomputers use Linux
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Professional hackers use Linux
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Linux is the undisputed backbone of internet servers
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Critical military infrastructure relies on Linux
Microsoft’s revenue was $300 Billion last year. They have UNLIMITED ressources.
So why is Windows still worse than Linux ?
Easy, their objective is to make money, not develop software. Linux is made and maintained by users, for users…
If windows is worse than linux then why are dev companies holding us all hostage on Windows?
Wdym? In my experience, everything Windows can do, Linux can do better
So why are all these companies holding the majority of the market hostage on windows?
Inertia
And paybacks.
Linux and their users absolutely have reputations that make the mental move more difficult. Plus marketing. If more people, that are continually getting sick of Windows, knew that there was a plug and play Linux distro that’s as easy to use, they’d probably be a lot more likely to move over.
Marketshare
Windows isn’t trying to do what Linux does.
On the server end, Linux beat every competitor out there, including Windows Server, because it was free and development occurred along the lines of educated users making improvements. So, at first Linux was worse to use, but it was cheaper. Then, Linux was about as easy/stable as paid for versions, but it was cheaper. When it became easier to use to educated users and more stable and cheaper, all paid server OS’s died.
That said, I bring up educated users because Linux is only a kernel and Windows by itself does more than Linux does by itself. On the consumer end, no one has been able to threaten Windows without a DRM’d app store. Consumers won’t do bug fixes at the scale that enterprise users will. Consumers generally need more developed on the UI side to make the OS functional while you can run Linux in terminal mode. Most of Windows’ development went into this, making Windows easy/desirable for consumers. In contrast, most Linux development time went to making Linux more easy/desirable for enterprise users/servers.
This is really the first year that Linux for consumers is viable and a lot of that work packaging Linux for consumers came from Valve putting the various pieces of open source software together and sanding down the right edges. In contrast, Microsoft has been doing that for a generation.
When it became easier to use to educated users and more stable and cheaper, all paid server OS’s died.
10b in UNIX revenue in 2012 https://www.tahawultech.com/news/the-last-days-of-unix/
https://cioafrica.co/the-long-slow-death-of-commercial-unix/ one vendor drops from 1.6b to .6b revenue in four years
https://www.matrix42.com/en/blog/2016/10/17/the-cost-punch-of-core-based-licensing-for-microsoft-windows-server Microsoft moves from per processor licensing to per core licensing, to prop up revenue on server OS products. Revenue reported bundles all cloud and software services in with licensing, so any increases in this revenue bundle are most likely attributed to cloud and infrastructure revenues, considering the reported CapEx of Asure infrastructure.
I think even Microsoft is in trouble for OS sales. I have seen an increase in Linux based applications in my industry, at the expense of Windows. SOC appliances are more visibly Linux based as well.
Because you have a bias?
I think it’s spelt ‘opinion’.
Tomato, tomahto. OP is still presenting it as fact.
This is the only correct answer in this whole thread!
They’re a B2B company first and foremost. What they’re selling is the Microsoft ecosystem to companies, like their Office suite. Companies don’t care if each individual products sucks - just that they integrate well with other products. In particular, companies want good integration with Active Directory (Microsoft’s permission management system). Companies love controlling who gets access to what.
Consumer operating systems is more or a side hustle for them.
For the 4th time in my career, I’m selling something that competes with a Microsoft product or feature everyone purchases in end user license bundles and literally nobody gets configured and working.
Because they are prioritizing data collection over performance.
Windows is no longer about giving customers a good operating system. It’s now a vehicle for Microsoft to collect data from you for them to use and sell to other parties at a profit. It’s why Microsoft hasn’t cared much about pirated versions of Windows much anymore. They’ll do small things to annoy you, but overall, you can still use it and they still get to collect their data.
Microsoft is only starting to be more concerned as Windows loses market share and Linux gains some. The Steam hardware survey has only gone up a few points of percentages but this accounts for thousands of losses and this only shows gamers who use Steam, not all the other use cases.
So Microsoft is finally starting to make some promises to improve performance now that they have some real competition. And they’re only doing that because they want to continue collecting your data.
That is what Windows has become, unfortunately. Your performance while using it is very secondary, if not at all a priority of theirs.
Why worse? It’s not a better or worse race.
SW Compatibility? Windows wins hands down. Try run decade (even years) old binaries on Linux, good luck.
Security and privacy? Well🤣… Maybe here Linux wins by a small tad /s.
And so on.
Microsoft focus is on different aspects than Linux, like monetization, lock in, business apps like office, store apps, and who knows what other crap. Linux efforts are usually focused on what is actually needed for a better quality of usage.
On the long run Linux is doomed to success, because Microsoft like all companies will die one day. Linux will never die because it cannot be killed …
Winblows fanboy spotted.
Are you /s or you didn’t read my post?
Try run decade (even years) old binaries on Linux, good luck.
I’ve actually had a case where something old didn’t work on Windows, but was fine on Linux with wine, lol
Right, that which is dead can never die.
(I kid, I kid)
Well, old software doesn’t run on windows anymore.
Not sure what you mean by old.
10 year old Windows software? Will definitely run.
20 year old Windows software? Will run but might require admin rights or compatibility mode.
30 year old Windows oftware? Might run but probably need a VM.
For Linux the focus is more on improvement, less on compatibility. That’s a deliberate decision.
Why do you need to run 10-30 year old software? This is a big red flag in my book: if your software can’t be bothered to be upgraded then why would you expect your OS to be?
Sometimes software is just… Done. Feature complete and sometimes still just the best way of doing something. It’s a rare thing, but sometimes happens.
I guess a good example is WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS; it’s to this day a great WYSIWYG word processor, and the most feature complete TUI word processor for people who like distraction free writing. There are still proponents meticulously documenting how to get it working and integrated with modern OS’s so that it can access modern printers.
What is the problem of running 10-30 year old desktop software locally? This is actually very common in some sectors, such as governmental infrastructure or industrial use. It’s not like those applications are reachable from the internet or even contact a server. Windows itself ships with applications that haven’t changed for decades, such as the character map and resource monitor.
Then run it on the relevant (outdated) OS? Why should the OS be constantly held back because the software sucks?
If the developer would just address the issues as they come and recompile for OS upgrades it shouldn’t be a problem — but if you’re using software where the developer can’t bother to recompile after 30(!!!) years I think there’s a more serious problem.
Ideally you want the OS to be updated, because old OS are vulnerable when the computer is networked. In fact most IT departements require every PC to have an up to date OS.
It’s not always a matter of bothering - many applications are customized and made for a specific purpose. An application could have been sold to only one company as a one off, or even developed by a long retired employee. Want an update after 20 years? Sure, after paying another invoice, provided that the developing company still exists and is still willing to support such old tech.
It is just a given that many companies are stuck with some old software somewhere in their process. That explains the policy for Windows.
Windows: “if we stop shipping this 25 year old library 5% of corporate users will experience problems which will cost us money and reputational damage, so we keep it compatible.”
Linux distro: “we are going to replace X with Y because it is better. Things will break and it is partially up to the community to solve it.”
Games comes to mind.
Not true.
It really depends. And I say this as someone who’s spent years in the enterprise software management space.
In the last few years, older software has become less capable of running on Windows. Tried to run a 2006 app the other day and it won’t even install. So had to run it in a VM of Windows 7.
What is the application you had issues with? It’s very uncommon for a 10 year old application to not run on Windows. And if it doesn’t, it’s usually not the fault of the OS but of some obsolete technology.
Their main goal is to extract maximum revenue, not to provide good products. Also, they’ve grown fat on the monopoly profits they enjoyed for decades. It’s very hard to pivot back to competitiveness from that and as of now, they’re not really compelled to do that.
This is it. For profit companies exit to make a profit, not a product. Any time you ask “why did they do this thing that makes the product worse?” remember that the product doesn’t matter to them, only the money it makes. If a change makes more money, they’ll do it.
Some might think a worse product means worse sales and less profit, but they’d be wrong. Enough people buy products regardless of their qualify that it’s often more profitable to simply make the product as cheap as possible while maintaining just barely enough of the most basic functionality to meet the definition of what they’re trying to sell.
Aren’t most for profit companies like this tho?
Not the ones that face actual competition. Younger people have probably never experienced this but markets in general used to be much more diverse and less concentrated.
Oh damn
true but to do that they have 100s of layers of variously documented backward compatibility and work-arounds. all their stuff is a mountain of deliberate technical debt that will affect the quality of their software
Because Microsoft’s goal is to make as much money as possible for their investors.
Linux’s goal is to make a good (and mostly Open Source) OS for the community.
But to be fair, Windows, at it’s core, isn’t a bad OS. It’s all the bloat, that makes it almost unusable.
It’s subjective. I’m not trying to be dismissive or something, but it’s that simple. Windows is more successful than Linux for what Microsoft wants it to be more successful at.
I’m not saying Windows is better. I like Linux more. I use it. I’m just saying that for the personal computing market share that Microsoft wants, Windows is more successful than Linux.
To be honest, if Microsoft wanted to affect other stuff with Linux, they’d probably just contribute the changes they want into it. It wouldn’t surprise me if they already did. They contributed many features to git for things they wanted to use in git.
It’s worse than macOS, Linux not so much
Vibe coding.
Enshitification
If you ever worked on any big corporation, it becomes crystal clear why things suck. Megacorps value money first, second, third, fourth and fifth. Sixth comes avoiding being caught by their crimes.
So, Microsoft doesn’t have a vision for Windows as an operating system, it sees Windows as a way to maintain a stranglehold in office computers the world over. It doesn’t matter that most people on lemmy will say “switch to linux”, they’re not companies, they’re not bosses - these are the vast majority of Windows users and South America + Asia + Africa make up a fuckhuge market. Sure, Europe and USA have more money, but the rest have sheer numbers.
Another thing that matters a lot is that many decisions come from the top and are enforced. If Satya Nadella or the director of whatever bullshit says something, those below have to comply. If the order from above is “cram bullshit ads in Windows Explorer, this has the highest priority”, that has to happen.
Regarding resources, having them and allocating them in a decent manner are not the same thing. The same could be argued about USA having trillions of tax dollars and having so many people living in poverty without healthcare or even basic education. Lots of that money go to keeping their armed forces. Microsoft is not too different, they have to pay people who keep their datacenters up, pay for the energy of said datacenters, maintain several other apps they have - oh, and the CEOs bonuses, because he’s such a great leader who totally deserves billions every year!!! Of those 300bn, how much are they diverting for Windows in general? 50b? 20b? 1b? Of that, how much is going straight for security, bug tracking and quality assurance?
Passion vs corporate.
Corporate suits just sell surface promises and support contracts for corporate environments. It’s a totally different mindset than Linux engineers have. Theirs is that of passion for excellent software and that’s all they care about.
