Submitted 1 day ago by Wurzl@lemmy.zip to [deleted]
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 the software design decisions are made by engineers, not executives.
And the install decisions are made by people with options.
Easy, their objective is to make money, not develop software. Linux is made and maintained by users, for users…
Only partially user-centric decisions because the @someRandomOEM.com and @redhat.com people will send drivers with no documentation to go with it due to NDAs. Also only partially user-centric decisions because if someone is backed by a company, their solution will be pushed faster.
People on free software adjacent forums (probably originated on linux {.} org {.} ru?) thought of a standard unit of measurement for how much pedantic force a person is able to apply. It is called “1 Poettering”, named after Lennart “Harry” Poettering. Values greater than 1 have not been observed; it is often assumed to be the highest constant similar to the speed of light. Here’s a table from (my very subjective) consensus:
Maintainers of random projects that everyone takes for given are <=.1 until they riot when it becomes .6 temporarily.
Because their management structure is horrendously overbloated and their internal culture is horrific.
I used to work for them. Every manager, every team lead, at every level, is viciously trying to climb to the top of the crab bucket, and pull every one else down at the same time.
Look at Asha Sharma’s recent statment on reorganizing Xbox.
14 levels of management. 14. You have have a boss, who has a boss, who has a… up to fucking 14.
… the entire company is like this, not just Xbox.
Thats why everything is insane broken nonsense.
Oh, that and extreme over reliance on contractors to most of the actual work. This results in a situation where half of any project in the new contractors just trying to understand the code the previous contractors made.
Nothing is actually properly documented, there are very, very few people who actually understand a codebase and have been maintaining and growing it for 10 years, no, its 10 years of 10 different sets of contractors, and maybe 3-6 different managers ‘overseeing’ this.
still has UI menus from Win 7, possibly fucking XP, if you dig deep enough.
Yeah, those are the good ones.
Yeah that’s the worst bit tbf
If you’re not going to make better UIs and you’re going to keep the old ones around anyway… Why not just… add new items to the old ones?
Instead, you have like 3 or 4 different generations of control panel and they do different things so you go to the correct one based on what you need to do…
I’m just happy to not own any Windows machines anymore, not even dual boot. I actually liked 7. Like really liked it. 10 felt like a downgrade (I suspect because the UI was uglier and it had an extra layer of control panel added in either 8 or 10 that was more dumbed down so you’d usually want to go to the old one, which gets you thinking “why exactly did we need a new Windows version”). 11 is shit even on a brand new machine, even if it looks pretty-ish. It’s slow, the reduced context menu is annoying… Yeah I could change a lot of things via registry keys and whatnot, but KDE Plasma just gives me a single system settings application that configures almost everything I’d want to configure on my machine, the rest is application specific stuff for which I’m fine just editing the conf files
I laughed, then cried, because I still have to use this heap of shit operating system at work.
Amazingly, Windows 11 still has some settings menus directly from Windows 3.11, which is from 1992.
… jesus christ.
I did not know it was actually that bad, that it went back… god damnit.
This is the answer. I work in a big company which has a similar issue. The boots on the ground devs like me know how bad some cascaded orders and ideas are but when you try to bring it up it’s like trying to talk to a brick wall with 13 other brick walls in the way
Its so cathartic to read this after dealing with the exact same bullshit with my own employer. Management has no clue what is actually going on, but refuses to listen to us peons because they’ve ‘made it’ to middle management so obviously they know better than all of us always.
it’s like trying to talk to a brick wall with 13 other brick walls in the way
I’m gonna have to use that saying, lol
Star Citizen was ahead of its time lol
Microsoft’s mission isn’t to improve the public good. Microsoft’s mission is wealth extraction for its shareholders.
Windows is worse for you as an individual consumer. But I would argue Windows is a better product for advertisers and other interests that go beyond you. You need to look at the bigger picture.
In a word: enshittification.
Honestly, people should have to go back to school when the turn 70 for a year to get updated. Plenty of folks still think capitalism runs on “make a good product at a good price.”
Honestly, people should have to go back to school when the turn 70 for a year to get updated.
Maybe two months every decade? I’ll be honest, it’s pretty easy to be out of touch long before you’re 70.
Plenty of folks still think capitalism runs on “make a good product at a good price.”
It does!
Trouble is in the digital world we don’t have products anymore, we have services. And those run on “make it shit without a subscription”.
And “good product at a good price” only works without advertising if it’s SO good that it gets advertised by word of mouth.
So it’s like 20-30% true.
Microsoft has pretty much lost most of their experienced employees, they’re sitting on a mountain of spaghetti code with tech debt that goes back to windows 3.11 to maintain compatibility, they’ve fired their QA team, and their absolutely out-of-touch leadership is trying to force the surviving employees to use AI anywhere they can for developing the OS to pump up the numbers of AI users to prop up their insanely huge AI gamble so shareholders don’t lose faith.
They’re acting confident because they haven’t had to respond to a credible threat to their monopoly for 30 years, and that arrogance combined with everything mentioned above will most likely be their ultimate demise. The corporate system they have created and perpetuated is no longer capable of righting the ship, both technologically and organizationally.
They made a statement years ago now about how they were going to respond to the success of the steamdeck by creating a handheld mode for windows, but they never did, and Valve ate their lunch and allowed Linux to gain a foothold among gamers. They probably couldn’t manage building that handheld mode (it’s been so many years now, but I read a post from a Microsoft employee detailing how it could take something crazy like a week of work just to add a new menu entry to a drop-down without it introducing major breakages elsewhere).
They haven’t been able to develop a killer app or feature for Windows in over a decade, and I don’t think there’s anything else under their sleeve. I believe we are actively witnessing the downfall of an ossified giant, just as the once great Commodore fell due to incompetence and extreme corporate greed.
They already use Linux for their server division (azure). Eventually, if Linux is able dominate on the desktop in the next decade, they may shift to selling their own Linux distro with a 100% windows compatible container/VM instead, an inversion of their current model of selling Windows with their optional WSL (windows subsystem for Linux).
Linux was built by engineers and professors based on idealistic values like progress and collaboration. Windows was also built by talented nerds, but at the direction of suits with the goal of making money.
And now they’re ripping all the shit the talented nerds made out and replacing it with AI slop and ads.
Yep! Like every other tech company.
Engineers want to make something work with the stability to last a long time.
But lasting a long time cuts into profits.
Different design priorities - MS devs aim to make the OS a marketing tool for other products, which are continuously obsoleted to encourage repeated re-buying. Linux devs aim to make stuff work.
I guess that explains why Poettering went to work for Microsoft…
Can’t win them all
Linux has devs in charge instead of managers.
Apart from what everyone here is saying, which is probably mostly true, I want to add that the Windows division in microsoft isn’t the biggest either in terms of revenue or funding; it’s not even second. The office team is much bigger for instance - so Windows has not been Microslops priority for a good 15 years i’d say. My 2 cents
Also the number of developers and amount of money put into something doesn’t make it is necessarily better. I almost want to think that fewer developers and less money on Windows is a good thing considering Microslop only ever wants to increase operating costs in order to make more revenue.
True but my impression is that in contrast to other divisions it probably doesn’t get the focus, resources or the vision it needs. It’s just a means to sell their other stuff, so all the great people will choose to work for other teams. I remember seeing a discussion with Dave Cutler (if i remember his name correctly) a few years ago saying he left the windows team to work on xbox and azure because it was much more interesting - i know the guy has done it all and was looking for something different but it didn’t seem very encouraging
Their business isn’t to make an operating system better than linux.
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 www.tahawultech.com/news/the-last-days-of-unix/
cioafrica.co/the-long-slow-death-of-commercial-un… one vendor drops from 1.6b to .6b revenue in four years
matrix42.com/…/the-cost-punch-of-core-based-licen… 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.
Is this a real question ?.One is about maximising profit extraction, one is not.
Passion vs corporate.
It’s a lot easier to fins bugs when literally the whole world can review the source code.
Commercial closed source loses because of the profit motive to cut corners and make anti-features. Plus little to no independent peer review. Also legacy stuff can’t just be recompiled or ported by anyone, so ABI has to be stable for a long time. Even new stuff, can’t be all compiled to the same one version of every lib, so basically ever program has it’s own version each lib it uses.
Plus they have a big user base locked in, so they have to take whatever they are given. So motivation to be good is low.
Just so many reasons!
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 …
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.
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
Winblows fanboy spotted.
Are you /s or you didn’t read my post?
Right, that which is dead can never die.
(I kid, I kid)
Linux benefits enormously from community review.
Corporate culture. Microsoft may be one company to us outsiders, but internally they are a ton of different divisions divided into teams. All those teams have their own agendas, priorities, and competing visions.
If you just look at the Windows kernel project, it’s really good.
Came to say “culture”. This is the thing most average Americans struggle with. We’ve had capitalism drilled into us from birth. Want something better? Pay more. Full stop.
Somehow we miss there is so much more to being a society than just transactional interactions. Not that the open source community doesn’t have its problems but it fundamentally is approached differently. With no profit motive why would you spend a single minute of your precious time doing anything for another person, especially a stranger?
That is at the heart of it, but you can decompose it into leadership (or a lack of it), misaligned incentives, intercompany politics, atrophying innovation, and on and on with the corpo buzzwords.
First off, it’s different not just better. Windows comes out of the box usable and compatible with everything. It minimized flexibility and most of it just worked. This is kinda changing recently but anyone who says Linux just works better is selling your something.
Second Linux desktop has only become usable and working on a critical mass of hardware recently. Even 5 years ago Nvidia was broken (still is, less so) along with lots of hardware.
Finally, valve is putting in hundreds of millions of dollars into Linux because Gabe has made it his mission to take his 30% cut on Linux.
There is tons of money being spent making Linux usable for normies.
Windows comes out of the box usable and compatible with everything.
Flat out wrong. Microsoft made sure that Windows 11 would not be compatible with older hardware, at this point, there are many more systems that will run Linux than will run Windows 11.
Not to mention, as a recent Linux user, the most profound part of switching, was how easy it was to setup my system. Anyone who has done a clean install of Windows, or built their own computer, can tell you what a pain it is to find and configure drivers for a lot of your hardware. In 5 minutes, Linux had my system up and running, and even setup my networked printer.
…anyone who says Linux just works better is selling your something.
The irony here is that Linux is free, there is nothing to sell, vs Microsoft, a closed source multi-billion dollar company that charges the consumer to have literal spyware shoved into their systems, and you’re out here defending it with “points” that are, in my experience, 100 percent the opposite of what you claim.
I put Mint on my mom’s laptop, because it was easier and safer for her to use than Windows 11, and it has led to a lot fewer (zero really) issues for me to resolve on her computer.
OK, we all know “compatible with everything” was more so software and most hardware. Installing windows is not difficult at all, not like it used to be. A clean install, hit windows updates, 90% of drivers are done this way, no problem. Maybe back in XP days you needed the driver discs and whatnot.
I’m not trying to stick up for Microsoft, but you sound like you just hate the simplicity of it and are looking for the negatives. Windows has long been the “easier is” to use, install, or compatible with software. Most regular people are not going to want to do CLI for software, updates, or other functionality.
Linux is getting easier to install, easier to use (less CLI bs for the masses), and more compatible with applications. So that’s a good thing. Like Mint, you pointed out being very easy, but also it looks functionally similar to Windows which helps with comfort using a new system.
Last thing I’ll touch on. Windows ditched x86 hardware (32-bit) which was necessary, I think, due to RAM requirements. I was a tad disappointed with the 8th gen Intel rule, but that’s easily bypassed even today for older hardware. That’s for the TPM2.0 support, and again, from a security standpoint for the masses, it makes sense.
👌👍
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.
Ive used Linux for years as a daily driver. That said, windows is the “better” desktop OS for people who use the OS to open chrome and then buy things from Temu while browsing facegram on their phone with their off hand.
Linux is the better server OS, which answers all your other points.
Years ago I installed Mint on an elderly parents laptop and said “that icon is your web browser”. They’ve used it for 8 years without a single problem.
I disagree. Linux is as good of a desktop OS too. Linux is better than microslop in every way
I have to disagree. Linux desktop is perfect if you’re just using it for browsing, emails and documents. It’s when you want to game or use special software, you might run into issues.
By design.
I can only conclude that they change stuff just to make it seem like they’re keeping busy, and they’re vibe coding it without any QA so it doesn’t perform as intended either. For instance, I have to use Teams at work, and I have certain projects prioritized over others. These have alerts and notifications set up, or at least they did until last week, when teams inexplicably turned them off because they’re trying to get people to tag ID’s more.
Stupid. Just stupid.
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!
I think Microsoft has grown too large to deliver a coherent product, and has probably forgotten how to do so. Beyond a certain point, knowledge just completely breaks down, without near perfect knowledge management, senior developers leaving just leaves an understanding gap too big to ever fill. Windows has been around so long that people have had entire careers working on it and have retired and it’s all falling apart.
Individual teams still deliver decent stuff, dotnet, WSL all stuff pushing in the right direction… But no unified approach. The core windows teams seem paralyzed to implement real change. By all reports the code is now a spaghetti mess and no real endeavours to fix anything can get budget approval. Any budget that might exist to fix it is being redirected towards copilot projects
That and layoffs. When someone is with a company for a long time and becomes senior, not only do they have immeasurable value in their institutional knowledge but they are also the “person” for their area of expertise. They know things or know the person responsible for things. When they leave or are forced out, less senior people don’t have a way to bridge the siloes (outside of dealing with layers of management), so problems go unaddressed.
Windows is only like 10% of Microslops business.
why is no one talking about this point. MS shows its financials, its all Azure which is run on linux. Why would you fight for market share on a thing that is the biggest drag on your money maker. You spend how much in lawyers and PR on a product that MAYBE hit 10% or your overall costs. You wanna spend how much on drivers for everything, when the big boy in the room can dictate what devices work on YOUR OWN SERVERS that makes 75% of your cash. Nah milk that base for all its worth til it goes away.
Three things: Bloat, Greed, Capitalization.
It also depends on what you mean by worse than Linux. A lot of the criteria that you’re evaluating definitely have Linux as better than Windows, but Windows is better than Linux in other ways that I notice on a day-to-day basis when I’m switching between the two.
Performance under memory pressure is the biggest one, I think. I don’t know why, but Windows handles extreme memory pressure and heavy page filing incredibly gracefully, whereas any Linux device I’ve used, and Macs, seems to stutter, slow down, and really struggle under memory pressure, even when there is superior hardware involved. I usually have to wait several minutes before my daily Linux driver recovers from heavy page filing, whereas it’s usually just a couple of seconds with my Windows box.
That behavior with Linux is absolutely real, and it’s very weird that it hasn’t been fixed in over a decade. It’s due to the default OOM (out of memory) killer being way too conservative with killing an application when the memory is completely full and disk swapping. Some people have solved this with an app that watches for OOM situations and acts with more decisiveness to kill an offending application before it swaps and brings the system to a halt, called EarlyOOM.
That still isn’t quite as good as Windows handling though, as Windows can generally handle those situations without killing the application at all.
TIL!
Awkwardly, I find that the largest memory pressure tends to come from a particular web page that continually gobbles up more memory the longer it is open.
There’s always one of these somewhere, and I’m bad at closing tabs. I usually notice pretty quickly when I come back to my computer. As soon as we start hitting page filing, since everything is stuttering and slow, but if it goes overnight, it can literally be 15 to 20 minutes before the system is responsive again after I kill the offending process.
Whereas on my work device, which is Windows, I usually might not even notice until I’ve maxed out my page file, which can be 64 or 128 GB depending on the device. And even then, I only notice because file operations start getting slow because the SSD is being thrashed. Killing the offending process results in responsiveness usually within a few seconds and a full clear out of the page file in a couple minutes.
The explanations that I’ve gotten from another commenter make a lot of sense. That Windows has just always had to deal with high memory pressures, so has been forced to mature in that sense. It is rather odd that Linux is behind on this, though, given its overwhelming representation in headless environments
Windows has had to deal with memory pressure a lot more than Linux. Some of this is bloat, but historically there’s also just been a lot of low end systems sold with Windows. All of the Windows 7 systems sold with 1GB, the Windows XP systems sold with with 256MB, running Windows 98 in 16MB, and so on.
Windows is always looking for memory it can page out and does a lot of preemptive paging so that if it suddenly needs a bunch of free RAM - like if the user suddenly launches some memory hog of an application, Windows has it available. Windows is also a bit smart about it - it’ll page things out but still keep the data in RAM too. So for example an application idle in the background will be paged out in case Windows needs that memory, but it’s also kept in RAM so if the user pulls the application back up, Windows doesn’t have to read everything back from the page file either.
This has lead to complaints about Windows constantly thrashing the disk and doing things in the background, but there is some method to the madness. Though I will complain that Windows still seems to do this even in situations where the PC has a lot of RAM and large amounts of it aren’t being used.
The Linux kernel, on the other hand, doesn’t do a lot of this like Windows does. Which is fine so long as you have enough RAM. But in a situation where there isn’t a lot of free RAM and suddenly the user launches a big application, the kernel suddenly has to do a bunch of swapping to free up memory and that can take a bit, especially if the drive is slow.
The Linux kernel does have a “Swappiness” setting that can modify its behavior, but I’ve never really played around with that myself.
Thank you for thoughtfully engaging. I appreciate your knowledge.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Signtist@bookwyr.me 1 day ago
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.
jimmy90@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
true but to do that they have 100s of layers of variously backward compatibility and work-arounds. all their stuff is a mountain of deliberate technical debt that will affect the quality of your software
Amdouni@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
Aren’t most for profit companies like this tho?
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
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.