As I saw it, there are 4 things that lock people in the windows platform today.
- Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting better day by day;
- Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high end business printers only work on windows.
- Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully migrate to mac.
- Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements.
But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.
Don't forget general familiarity. I don't know about today, but Apple was once very big on giving large discounts to education specifically for the purpose of getting students familiar with their machines.
This was the biggest blocker for me. I've only used a windows DE. I have managed various headless linux systems though. I decided to try cachyos (plasma) a few months ago by dual booting and a few weeks ago I backed up my W11 install and no longer run Windows. I've ran into various issues but overall it was less scary than I thought. The issues range from figuring out which package manager contains what software to flickering issues when using Citrix. Luckily LLMs make these issues fairly painless.
Excel is the biggest blocker for my dad, and why I keep losing the argument to get my parents to move to Linux or Mac.
Pretty much all their other stuff is stuff that either works fine on Linux or is just in the browser anyway, but the only thing that I don't really have a rebuttal to is when my dad points out that he uses the full-fat excel and a lot of the more modern features.
I would so rather they move to Linux, and just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't have it. Annoying since I'm still expected to play tech support for them and Microsoft's recovery tools do not work, and as far as I can tell have literally never worked for anyone in human history, and I'm not entirely convinced that the people at Microsoft have ever tested them.
This is exactly what I do with my personal computing. I would prefer to be on linux, but a lot of people still sends me data in excel spreadsheets for processing, and lets be honest: apple hardware is fucking awesome.
The feeling of being able to work away from my desk and dont care about battery, is so goooooooood.
And I have to admit. Even if I dont like macos, my macbook with m1 and 16gb ram is probably the fastest laptop I ever own.
Excel for Mac has gotten a lot better - but I'm not surprised if it is still its own thing - with edge cases in format, macros, visual basic, linking to databases and data sources etc.
I imagine excel under wine is better than the port to Mac in some respects.
I'm honestly not sure. I'm sure my dad Googled something to use it as an excuse to not change.
As I said in a sibling comment, I think they really just don't want to change and they are looking for excuses; I suspect even if I could prove that there's absolute feature parity between the two versions they'd just find another reason.
> just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't have it
Just curious, is it about different tools / workflow / the new thing to learn (and those are valid reasons!) or are there some technical issues with for example Winboat?
They've never used Winboat (or anything Linuxey really), so it's definitely not a fault with Winboat itself.
Honestly I think they really just don't want to change and they're trying to look for ways out because they know that "I don't want to!" isn't going to fly with me if I'm expected to be tech support.
It very depends on which part of the software is needed. SOLIDWORKS is usable on a windows VM via Parallels thanks to their GPU acceleration (it's totally unusable via Virtual Box/VMware on a Mac). Would love to hear the other thousand smaller ones. Davinci for professional video editing is a multi-platform. No idea about Mastercam.
Out of those I think Gaming might be the biggest, and some games like League of Legends (all Riot games) need Vanguard, their anti-cheat which only works on Windows. So it's not easy for Valve but hopefully it will get there sometime.
The biggest reason I don't just migrate is because gaming. Most steam games could work on Linux but then if you want to play one that doesn't you have a problem. I'd rather just use Windows and never have a problem, because the game was designed for my platform.
Gaming is a problem of chicken and Egg. Devs wont support Linux in anti-cheat if theres no larger enought installed base. With the Steam Deck and soon the steam desktopo, tI think this can fially change, as they will see linux pc like any other platform, like ps5 or Xbox.
Valorant runs on the ps5, that is pretty much a very customized FreeBSD. If they could bother to run it there, theres no reason it could not run on linux.
Another thing that I consider hard tonreplace from microsoft is Active directory. This thing is universal. And after tring alternatives its easy to see why. Is its probably the most complete tool I used for humans and device managers. But linix and mac had done a good job adapting to it in the last decade.
>Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.
I was thinking about this compatibility problem the other day. Usually someone moving between office suites (MSFT Office, Google Drive, LibreOffice) complains stuff broke, then they give up / drop it / work around it. I was imagining an ideal path would be to document these cases of incompatibility as bugs/issues in LibreOffice. Describe the difference and how it should work, then LibreOffice fixes their software to better match. I don't know if this already happens. Personally I avoid all office software like the plague and try to work with plain text files and vim. I just hear about these issues enough that I'm mildly invested in the situation by now.
I tried to tell a friend about WYGIWYM stuff like LaTeX, groff, and Typst the other day. He seemed more interested in "figuring out" why stuff broke when changing between office software. I tried to tell him that MSFT doesn't follow their own spec and everyone else has to reverse engineer it, resulting in implementation differences. Plus MSFT's own implementation being proprietary so it can't be easily copied. I'm not sure the weight of the situation got across to him.
I tried this onece. But I have to do it digitally because my caligraphy is terrible and I have to write in a slow manner if I want to understand what I wrote latter.
In the end it would take too much of my time just writing everything, so I stop doing. Maybe I give a go if I find a better way in the future.
I think is funny, because is not the first time I hear about microsoft employees not using the company products.
I worked on a project with some microsoft engineers to create a chatbot plugin for Salesforce, using Microsoft Power Virtual Agent, and the comunication tool they used was Slack and not teams. And I was obligated to use teams because of the consuting company I worked at the time.
And also the version control they used at the time was I think SVN, and not TFS.
In the end is hardto see why they banked so heavy into it. When open AI started t o make promisses and everybody saw what it could do, Microsoft invested heavily on it, seeing some of the largest increase in its shares, and in consequence on big fat bonus for its executives.
NOw that the hype is naturally going down, and people are encountering limitations in what modern AI can do, and having more realistic expectations, Microsoft hype train stoped in middle of the hill climb.
They pretty much exchanged gradual increases in revenue for a quick but ultimally short term profit.
I genuinely think that an "agentic" (I hate that word) OS would be incredibly useful. But both how Copilot was integrated into Windows and it simply being a terrible model destroyed that possibility.
I think it can work. In about what? 10 years, maybe more. Tech is simply not yet on the same page as a star trekk computer that you can talk and make it work.
And the main thing that needs to change for it to work is, that AI agents need to run locally, with your own agent without needing cloud processing. Maybe when we get into this point, is when it will make sense, from a pratical and private way.
Now what could work is making a traditional OS, but exposing ways of its power users maketheir own IA agents with the OS data, and this way choose what they want to share wth the cloud.
Too be honest, thres is too much wrong with win 11 to save it at this point.
Is not only AI bullshit in my notepad.
The excess adds, intrusive online stuff, terriblee performance for basic tasks like the File Explorer or even opening a menu.
Making everything a damn web page...
One clear example is outlook. Talk wathever you want, outlook, is the indistry standart for e-mail. And while not perfect it was very usefull. Then they keep pushing the new interface on everybody throats. The new interface takes like 1 gb of RAM when in use, agaisnt 200mb of the traditional one, while offering less options. Why would anyone who really cares about e-mail use that shit? People who just casually use e-mails dont use Outlook, they use the webmail.
They choose to ignore the users, and push top down changes into them. But the market dont really works this way for most people. Not every tech company needs to be like Apple.
It’s amazing how much worse outlook got and how fast it got so much worse. It also can’t handle screens with different scales, it sometimes inexplicably fails to render an email, printing can produce files of different size - using the web version produces smaller pdfs than the desktop version. I miss thunderbird a lot since the company forced Outlook use and also removed the classic outlook option - or maybe it only has the weird white space version now.
The problem with windows is not the kernel, as it is preety solid, but user space.
Wathever problems windows have today, retro compatibility was always a strong point in favor of windows. Breaking it with such a change in the kernel, would make most of its users even bitter than they are today.
Windows NT is indeed a pretty solid technical foundation. But I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to destroy that in a push to use AI for ongoing development. Perhaps the kernel team will have enough political sway to avoid that outcome. We'll see.
At this point I dont trust common sense in anybody inside Microsoft.
They are doing dumb shit for about 5 years now, and killing MS Office, a brand thats market leader for more than 30 years prooves that anybody who had conservative opinion on how software should be built have already abandoned the ship or was kicked out of it.
Now is being run by "visionary" marketing people, and the only way left is down.
Wifi routers are little magic devices that work only when they want. I talked before here, but I had a Dell Vostro notebook that everytime it connected with my router using windows it would just kill the entire home wifi. It was a TP-Link mesh network. The only thing that would bring the thing up was to reboot every single router in the network and not connect that notebook.
I tried update my routers, tried to update my notebook wifi firmware, tryed to change the router config, the router position, the router order, the wifi channel, the wifi name and password. Nothing worked. But if I connected using linux, things would work just fine.
In the end I divorced my wife and brought a Thinkpad. She keeped the cat, the house, the routers and that dell vostro notebook.
- Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting better day by day;
- Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high end business printers only work on windows.
- Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully migrate to mac.
- Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements. But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.
Its the curse of the power user.