It always infuriates me when people say Windows is all about games. Techies are so detached from reality they forget that people have creative hobbies and have to use industrial grade software. Doing creative hobbies on Linux is an act of sadomasochism. And on top of that, Linux and MacOS cannot run software from 3 years ago while Windows can run software from 35 years ago. And on top of that, Linux is completely unusable to Japanese/Chinese speakers due to how hard it is to input the moon runes, and on top of that Wayland breaks the least painful setup that you could have earlier. And on top of that, Wayland people shown a middle finger to all the people who need accessibility features.
No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.
A fair comment, but the argument I'd make against that is a lot of those creative tools are moving to the web. I personally work for Figma, and have seen that first hand. UI/UX design was entirely OSX/Windows centric for the last 40 years, and now it's platform agnostic. Even video editors are just at the nacent stage of looking at the web as an editor surface.
Totally hear you though for things like CNC milling software that's meant to stay static for the lifetime of the mill - that's not going anywhere.
No, it's definitely a win for Linux. I get it. I've dabbled in software minimalism. I love native dev. I know the web "sucks." But the range of mainstream software available for Linux has exploded now that software is moving to the web (including Electron) and I can't see how that's a bad thing from the perspective of a Linux user. Of course I'd rather open a web browser to run an app than change my entire operating system to run an app.
By using non-free software, you're compromising on politics that don't really affect anything directly - not unless great many others suddenly embrace the ideas behind Free Software.
The compromise of using SaaS in the cloud in lieu of regular, native software, is affecting both you and society directly.
Yeah, I really like my Mac, but third-party software isn't its strong suit. It's hilarious how often Apple will wholesale break like half the software in existence.
How many months can you use a Linux desktop to do daily externally mandated processes and not drop down to a bash shell at some point?
Average consumers and users do not want to use the unix utilities that Linux people love so much. Hell, developers barely want to use classic unix utilities to solve problems.
Users do not know what a "mount point" is. Users do not want a case sensitive file system. Users do not want an OOM killer that solves a poor design choice by randomly culling important applications at high utilization.
Users do not care for something that was designed in the 60s before we understood things like interface design and refuses to update or improve due to some weird insistence on unix purity.
Users do not care about ABI stability. They care about using the apps they need to use. That means your platform has to be very easy to support, Linux is not at all easy to support, and at least part of that is a weird entitlement Linux users feel and demonstrate in your support queue.
Hilariously, users DO WANT a centralized app repository for most day to day apps! Linux had this forever, though it had mediocre ergonomics and it was way too easy for an average computer user to manage to nuke their system as Linus Sebastian found out in a very unfortunate timing situation. Linux never managed to turn this potential victory into anything meaningful, because you often had to drop into a bash shell to fix, undo, modify, or whatever an install!
It depends, a lot (I use Bluefin, so I'll grab that one as an example)
Assumming everything is setup the way I usually do when someone asks me for a new Windows PC (Setup an account, install basic utilities, Office suite, automatic updates, etc)
More or less everything
- ThunderBird + OnlyOffice is close enough for regular usage (Coming from Outlook + Office)
- Flatpaks and system updates are on the background by default and only take when you restart, so they're more or less invisible (And for someone else, I'll usually do the oldest channel available, maybe even the CentOS based LTS when that's out of beta)
- Discord, Teams, Stuff like that is electron based anyway
- Steam for games is reasonably good (Depending on your library, Everything in mine works, but not everything in my wishlist)
- Windows only utilities are on a case by case basis (Depending on the program, they'll usually call me to procure it, because god knows, no sane person wants to deal with the likes of adobe)
For the sake of transparency, I would use the CLI to setup quite a lot, but I wouldn't expect them to use it for anything
No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.