KDE:

“The Unix philosophy favors composability as opposed to monolithic design”

Xorg is a monolith with essentially one implementation. Wayland is a modular system with almost every component available from multiple sources.

Saying adopting Wayland means you “hate UNIX” is one of the least thoughtful arguments I can imagine.

Regardless of your stance on GPL or not, I find the firmware stance very strange.

If software is made available to you, you must reject it. But as long as the hardware runs it behind closed doors, you can use it.

The CPU microcode situation is a good example. You can run your CPU, having no idea what it is doing or how it works. No problem. But if they ship an update to fix a bug, you cannot apply that update unless it is open source. The “free” choice is to run known vulnerabilities on top of the black box. And the in-chip behaviour is complex enough that Intel chips included a whole UNIX-like operating system in them (Minix) and people did not even realize it. The same is true for every chip in your system. Crazy.

If you are not going to demand open hardware, there is no point in being so absolutist about the firmware. That is even if you want to be truly hard core about the software running on top.

NORAD (North American Air Defence) does not differentiate.

The closest NORAD jets were in Washington State. It is not complicated.

The same thing could happen in reverse.

Long before you get to 100%, everybody stops buying it. Zero times anything is zero.

Look, I agree with you in regular situations. I am frequently frustrated that racism is perpetuated by those claiming to abhor it.

However, you cannot credibly claim that race did not matter in this example.

Leading by example for the next generation by never making race an issue yourself is noble. Refusing to acknowledge naked racism when you encounter it is wrong.

This is the same kind of argument as violence really. Take a lesson from martial arts tradition. Never be try one to bring violence. However, knowing how to defend the weak when violence comes to them is something else.

It is a good list ( from an “alternative to Windows” point of view ). In particular, you make a good case for the gaming side of things.

Unfortunately, even if that is all Linux needs, the hordes take time to arrive. The big impact of changes this year will be seen in the migration numbers 3 years from now. The biggest opportunity is probably the Windows 10 EOL and that is not until the end of next year. By then, many gamers will have Windows 11 capable hardware.

I do think that gamers and devs are the two groups likely to lead the charge on the next wave of Linux adoption. .NET dev in particular already has a lot of momentum on Linux with the transition from desktop to cloud and the primacy of Linux in container based workflows. Things are not quite there yet for .NET mobile dev on Linux. I bet most .NET devs that have left Windows are using Macs these days though. That said, that means they are already using tooling quite easily migrated to Linux including bath Rider and VS Code as you say. In the cloud, .NET must be “deployed” more to Linux than to Windows by now.

That last point is the most important I think. Windows is no longer the most important platform for Microsoft—Azure is. Microsoft is quite happy to let you use Linux on Azure. In fact, Azure pipelines and .NET itself are faster on Linux at this point. It is still “developers, developers, developers” for Microsoft but it is now more cloud than desktop. That changes the role of Windows at Microsoft.

I think it is perhaps less what we think about Windows and more about what Microsoft thinks about Windows that matters.

The other crown jewel is Office. Office 365 is a subscription. It is increasingly a “cloud” offering as well. Soon, they will not care about Windows as a delivery vehicle for Office either.

As Windows starts to matter less strategically, the question will increasingly be how to monetize the Windows user base more heavily. That is more ads, more data mining, more AI, and an increasingly crap experience. More and more, Windows Product Managers will be rewarded for their short-term gains and incremental revenue. Stewardship of the platform will move further and further into the background.

That is how Linux will win.

It won’t be this year though.

Linus Torvalds is author and maintainer of one of the most successful pieces of software ever written ( software that is decades old and still growing in popularity ).

What does Linus says about your philosophy that “Sometimes you do need major changes that break stuff to upgrade the base”? I think his first sentence explains where he stands but he expands on his initial point.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

The Intel GPU drivers have been improving rapidly. If you buy one, you are making a bet that this will continue.

The other comments here are typical of feedback overall. People who actually own the hardware report that everything is basically fine although there are still a few small issues and performance from game to game can vary with some much better than you would expect and some quite a bit worse. You are betting on the drivers closing that gap.

Only you can say if the above means they are ready. If you are going to be frustrated by any issues and the titles with lacklustre performance? If so, Intel is probably not for you at this time.

Are you going to be happy today and increasingly happy as the platform matures? If so, go for it. It is clear that, for the money, the hardware punches above its weight but is held back by the software. The software is likely to improve. Does that sound good or bad to you?

I remember Corel Linux. It offered one of the nicest Linux desktop experiences at the time. If you wanted WordPerfect, it was also a great deal.

Leveraging your word processing market share to establish an OS presence is the opposite of what Microsoft did.

What is amazing about Corel these days is the museum of once market leading software that they still somehow sell. In addition to WordPerfect, who is using Quattro Pro ( spreadsheet ) or Paradox ( database ) these days? Who ever used their Presentation software?

For that matter, who is using CorelDRAW? It was right up there with PhotoShop at one point but you never hear about it anymore.

Like Nortel and Blackberry, it seems like Canada is able to grow massively successful tech companies but it just cannot hold on to them.

“a decade after support had ended” for Windows XP is not until April next year.

I thought this was an article talking about how Wayland makes it possible to perform deeply low-level optimizations to improve the performance of things like high-resolution video playback. Thank you for clearing it up for me.

Mozilla is the name of the Open Source version of Netscape Navigator. It is the pre-cursor to Firefox.