this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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I swear to God I hate Microsoft so much I'm going to seriously look into it.
It's so easy for you young people. Back in my day, in order to hate Microsoft, we had to understand the virus risks of Windows, we hand to have needed to go into the registry to make some minor customization change; we had to know about Microsoft's nefarious dealings bribing game dev companies to use Directx when they saw the threat of opengl. We had to know about Bill Gates's dark side (which he did, really well - but we have Behind the Bastards now). We had to be mad about crap like how they locked down gui customization, killing litestep and bb4win. We had to deeply care about the deep innards of your computing experience (read: ricing) to understand why Microsoft sucked so bad.
Today, you kids have it so easy - they're putting ads in the operating system, their core software is all subscription, they're talking about making the OS itself subscription based. These days they make it so obvious that we're not their priority, making good software isn't their priority; their priority is getting our money.
(I feel like I made the joke already - Microsoft's really easy to hate these days, you get it - but I'm having fun, so I'm going to keep going.)
They used to put freecell right on your computer - I'm telling you, we had to go seriously digging to find reasons to hate M$. Freecell, minesweeper, solitaire, that weird pinball game my dad liked - we had to be seriously ungrateful shits to head over to Ubuntu dot com.
And now, with one click installers, active discord help channels, eager, excited, and friendly people all over, just happy to see the FOSS community grow - engaging in a healthy relationship with computing has never been so easy - 3 or 4 clicks! Asserting your self respect and aligning your daily experience with your ethics was never like this when I was young.
We used to have to ask on the arch forums where 99% of the time we were told to rtfm (because we hadn't); we had to be super careful not to let on that we were asking the arch forums about our Ubuntu issues. We had to search for random forum threads that inevitably ended with "nvm i fixed it" - if there was any follow-up at all. We had men whose back sweat trickled down through their unkempt back hair before disappearing into their plumber crack; you guys today have stunningly beautiful men and women who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be "developer advocates" - there are twitch streamers who are getting paid super well at their fancy Netflix jobs but still spend hours and hours of their day sharing their knowledge with newcomers - literally just because they enjoy helping people learn about computers.
Kidding aside Linux is pretty ok, I hope you enjoy it.
Windows has been getting shittier, but I feel that Microsoft as a company has better products now. WSL, GitHub, ChatGPT, even VS is enjoyed by many people.
they didn't buy wsl. they bought sfu way back when but wsl is all fresh code since sfu had been depreciated for ages by the time they got around to doing wsl development.
They stopped being dumb assholes with their war on open source and understood that they can make money with it, but they are still greedy assholes.
This exactly. All the things they've bought they've slowly started pushing towards monetization, away from users.
Old Microsoft was specifically fighting Bill Gates's personal crusade for IP law; now that his influence is diminishing, they're seeing the dollar signs that are written all over the phrase "free code."
("So I can just.. take it? And.. sell it?")
They finally accepted that the real money is in being the world's datacenter rather than trying to make the default operating system for every computer, especially when some crazy nerds will do that for free
I don't buy the datacenter argument. The Azure is in the market minority, while Windows and Office are still their main cash cows, even in a slowly diminishing market. Seems like their current play is at some form of videogame dominance with ActiBliz purchase and whatever the deal they have with Ubisoft and others to host all their servers on Azure, but that's a very dubious strategy given how gaming industry has been eating itself last decade. Honestly, they should've kept pushing the windows mobile instead.
So I've never looked up Microsoft's financial reporting before but from what I can glean they report 3 business units with the following revenue for 2023:
It's not very clear where the gaming and Windows business units fall in there nor how they compare to eachother, but what is clear is that Azure is absolutely killing it in revenue for Microsoft
Here's a report of the current market breakdown. Azure is over 23% of the entire cloud market and gaining ground rapidly.
I've probably made some errors in this quick data grab, but it's extremely clear that azure is a significant portion of Microsoft's interests right now.
edit: formatting, embedded chart
Huh, the more you know. I was under impression that google and amazon had much bigger market share and Microsoft was at 10% at best, but I never actually looked that up. Now looking at it, what you've said makes much more sense, thanks.
You can install it onto a USB key. A search for it gives a lot of results. That's, ah, about as far as I've gotten into the process (oh and I've bought a couple of usb flash drives), but it's looking promising. I might even make some progress and click one of those links tonight, though not sure if I'm feeling that ambitious today.
You can try it out before you install. Most Linux distro offer a "live USB" for install where it will boot a full copy of the distribution that you can verify all of your hardware is recognized and even try out the OS without touching your disk
If you've got a sizable USB drive, try Ventoy! Then you can put a bunch of .ISOs on it and boot from any one you want. It's good for trying distros, or sharing Linux with others, or even putting recovery/rescue software on it. Like if you want to run memtest or alter partition data with Gparted or rescue a system that's not booting.
Great tool to have. You can even use the leftover space like a normal flash drive and it doesn't mind!
Ventoy is so awesome! It's the tool I wish it existed a decade ago. The entire process of creating botable usbs was so tedious and time consuming, and now it's just copying the isos just like any other file. It works for almost any iso or img file, and even allows us to have windows isos as well.
We will be here if you need help.
Yeah, Linux community got you bro.