I work in games (formerly AAA).

Chicken and egg problem.

Valve is making enough headway that game makers take Linux seriously. We’ll likely see a lot more native releases over time. (once the worry about anticheat subsides).

I believe this even without checking the numbers. That said, I now own a steam deck and I only buy games supported.

There is a new game with no support? So sorry. Can't be done

Sorry, I think I didn’t make myself clear enough.

I meant that Microsoft is intentionally removing their own moat.

That the tools are awful is just the standard microsoft affair. (with some notable exceptions, which ironically include Excel).

And you’d be making the same mistake as all those people that claim Windows is too awful to use for real work. Web Office is limited, but it is more than enough for the majority of business users.

I don’t do anything too “serious” as far as writing documents that Google Docs can’t handle - we use that at work instead of Office - is Word that much better than GSuite for most cases or is Office Web worse than GSuite?

If you follow the reasoning that the iPod led to the iPhone which made mobile internet use dominant and common, you can also follow that line to social media and attention economies which many would argue have caused the world to be worse.

But this is kind of like the 'great man' theory of history where you can also argue that the markets would have converged on this outcome regardless of what the specific device was that we attribute to it.

iPods are the main thing that allowed iPhone (the bigger brother of iPod Touch) to be successful. I'm reasonably convinced that without the iPod craze, Apple's phone wouldn't make such a big market impact, if they would release it at all.

As long as you think of "quality" as "something that is not quality". bad logic. There are many systems that are only usable because they are popular but everyone hates them and thinks they are garbage. Market capture doesn't equal quality, sorry, that's a horrible take.

ChromeOS did not poke a hole in the consumer space. It’s the B2B of hardware where the user is not the buyer. To a first approximation, no one wants a ChromeOS based computer for their home anymore than they want to run Salesforce at home. It is cheap and from what I have heard, Google’s MDM software is top notch.

Android “won” as pyrrhic of a victory as it is since Android manufacturers besides Samsung make very little profit and every one who has money (again to a first approximation) buys iPhones. It won because Google gave it away, shared ad revenue with OEMs and it bent over backwards to the carriers and Apple wouldn’t.

And yes Linux would save OEMs maybe $30 on licensing Windows. But OEMs make mire than that on bundleware.

It's so simple. It's because windows DID have a much better desktop experience in the past, for decades, and they built a trillion dollar company around it. It's no longer the clear winner though, and they are simply surfing the momentum of having an existing user base that doesn't want to relearn apps and UIs, apps and games that only work on windows due to the size of the user base, and general marketing and sales and existing corporate contracts.

None of this has anything to do with the quality of the desktop of Linux or windows. If Linux had 75% market share I promise you all those things above would quickly become true for Linux as well.

Same here. With Windows 11 I feel like, "look how they massacred my boy"

There were so many things in previous versions of Windows that were done with thought and care. Probably the blogs helped make me appreciate it (especially Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing). Windows 11 feels like an insult created by people who hate Windows and never use it

I really wish we could keep the modern underpinnings with a prior shell

Thats a little revisionist isn’t it? iPods and all music players started dying in popularity after the iPhone.

Steve Jobs himself said “Dropbox is a feature not a product”. Dropbox is the same cost for 5TB of storage as GSuite + 5TB of storage or Office365 with 1TB each for 5 (6?) users.

What kind of software development do you do?

I don't really mind Windows that much for non-development use, once you disable all the bloat. But for development... It seems obviously a distant third behind Linux and Mac, and I don't think I've ever heard any developer say otherwise. And I say this as someone who is forced to use it at work, so it's not out of ignorance (thank god for WSL).

But that's why I ask what kind of development you do, because I suppose there are areas where Windows really is a good option.

I was forced to use Windows recently for a year between late 2023-2024. Windows itself is fine. It’s the hardware that sucks with it still being forced to be on x86. The heat, the bad battery life, the fan noise, etc.

On the Mac side, either way I spent all of my day in VSCode and the browser - we use GSuite - Zoom and Slack. It wouldn’t make that much of a different either way.

The only integrations I use between my work Mac and my personal Apple life are my iPad for a second screen, shared subset of passwords. I have a separate Apple Account for my work computer and I share work related passwords.