Apple achieved it with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Apple then spent ~15 years un-achieving it. It started with iOS 7, and has culminated in the Liquid (Gl)ass era: a mess of unintuitive menus, terrible and inconsistent UI patterns, the lobotomite twins Siri & Apple Intelligence.

Although, surprisingly, built on top of absolutely incredible silicon.

I've never been bothered by Windows's changes, and I mostly think they were reasonable. But for a number of reasons it's never going to be easy for them to gain total acceptance: 1) the massive backwards compatibility back to Windows 95 stuff, 2) the willingness to try new and/or silly things that Apple is too stuffy to try, and 3) the fact that there's only ever going to be one "flavor" of Windows; if we were stuck with one single Linux distro people would be complaining about that one too.

> windows search no longer searches your PC

Absolutely baffling, when the perfect, magical, instant, high performance search tool has existed for a decade at least: "Everything"

One of THE BEST windows apps.

At this point Apple isn't even Apple. Product ate the world. I don't remember the last time someone came to me with a customer problem to solve. It's all warring fiefdoms.

> and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows

And yet somehow none of them are as nice as https://eartrumpet.app/ lol

> I guess its just bad luck that this company's product quality is down in the drain.

You're right. It can't possibly be bad leadership and poor decisions. Sometimes you just slip on a patch of ice and that's how you lost your business.

Valve and devices like the Steam Deck and soon the Steam Machine are also grabbing the gaming segment away from Windows. Distros like Bazzite also are enticing to those technically inclined enough to boot from a USB drive and run the simple installer.

There are an awful lot of groups installing Linux on Win 10 cast offs around the world.

My uncle runs one in Bradford on Avon and they are slapping on an OS for you whilst you supp tea and chat. Often, the user-agent is set to something Microsoftie in the browser. If necessary Edge is installed but that is frowned on 8)

I have not heard of this MacBook Neo thing ... Why would ? I only own a little IT company and hang around on HN.

That might be what they think. I just installed windows and it had countless dialogs. Most have a reason to exist but it's a lot of work. The Ubuntu live usb on the other hand just boots into the desktop environment. It just works? There is nothing to do?

System76 sells some pretty nice computers with Linux preinstalled. Not to mention every Chromebook is a Linux machine.

Those and System76 of course. Plus the SteamDeck is Linux, as are a number of other handheld gaming systems. The new Steam Machine is as well.

Yes they absolutely can. Nowadays it's as simple as clicking "install" from inside windows to try a linux distro

Correct. And they usually don’t install windows on their computer either. The 8 year old laptop they got at Best Buy had it pre installed. So if Linux is going to go mainstream it’ll be because stores start offering PCs with Linux that are at a $140 discount.

Normal people can definitely install an OS. Last weekend I set aside time help a friend install CachyOS. They'd never used a terminal before and wanted some help.

When I called them, they had already set it up and was playing Risk of Rain 2. They started streaming for me on the Discord Flatpak they installed from the app store.

These days it's as easy as running a powershell script. There is 0 functional barrier to installing Linux from any windows machine. Soon the same will be true for the Neo.

Normal people will be expected to upgrade to Windows 12 next year after seeing "your hardware isn't supported" Windows Update messages, without any idea of what an NPU is or why it's a system requirement to receive a system upgrade.

I think this is in response to slightly abnormal people trying Steam OS and other user-friendly Linux distros as they grow increasingly annoyed with Windows 11 antics.

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> sometimes more performant.

That's usually due to:

1. Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance gains)

2. Less OS overhead (usually minor gains)

most games I'm getting 1% lows that are much higher than windows at 4k resolution

Honestly, pick one of the well known distros at random. Personally I use Manjaro with GNOME: up to date software and a polished out of the box experience. I never have to go to the terminal unless I want to.

How many hours has Zoom put into making the client stable on Windows and Mac?

How many hours have they put into the Linux client?

My guess is the answer to these questions indicate more of how it got there than anything the distros or upstream components can do.

I installed PopOS (22) and zoom worked fine right off the bat. So did steam and all my steam games. Heck even my printer worked. (It has since become more temperamental and now only works with one of the 3 print dialogues on my Linux box...)

My game controller worked, my BT headset, the media keys on my keyboard even worked.

Lots of stuff was mildly broken but no more so than it was on Windows. It is just differently broken.

> like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions?

It works fine (tested on Arch), but at the very least you should run that kind of malware as a separate user, or better yet, in a VM.

Zoom works fine for me on Ubuntu. Or at least, it's no more flaky than it is on Mac.

I mean... Windows legitimately doesn't work. I work at one of the mag7 and it's a running jokes while using windows that suddenly everyone's microphone quits. We then have to restart. This has been going on years. Our colleagues on Linux don't have such problems.

It's just that we accept windows issues as "that's how computers are". While Linux is expected to work

Its going to take a lot longer than that. Hardware companies are very slow to adopt this sort of change, for this transition to happen it requires Microsoft to not get its act together for another decade.

It's possible that due to Azure success they decided that consumer sector is a testing ground for their exploitation patterns, where they can test out how much their userbase can withstand before being seriously annoyed. And this is what happen, people said "enough" by looking for alternatives.

They can throw money to tweak some stuff but I doubt they'll fully back off from pushing for software+services or all this recent conditioning for Copilot. This piece is a damage control but wording shows they won't change. I doubt that in last 26 years we had a company that truly admitted its mistakes - that's not in the "nature" of such entities.

Azure is only successful because of big enterprise. Consumers using or not using Windows makes no difference

Two factoids: Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs and AWS runs more Windows VMs than Azure.

I’m relatively new to Linux desktop and this hasn’t been my experience at all. What do you think doesn’t work?

If that is truly what you think, then you clearly haven't used a Linux desktop distro since then because that absolutely incorrect.

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