The one with DevDiv and stuff, which has amazing and mostly free development tools like VS Code, VS 2022, Windows Terminal, WSL, Azure, the .NET ecosystem, the MSVC C++ STL, PowerShell, TypeScript, and so on.
And then there's the bean-counting, irritating part of Microsoft that has stuck around since the 90s and doesn't seem to go away. This part justifies adding advertisements and crapware to Windows, pushing for SaaS (while still charging a LOT), changing the UX of Office programs every version, not being able to implement and release a proper UI library after a decade or so, and pushing laggy Electron apps like Teams instead of developing fast, native ones.
Like many others here, Windows is a daily driver for me. I actually like using it, because a lot of hardware and configurations that need painful finagling on Linux (just try using a multi-monitor high-DPI, mixed-DPI setup on Linux, or any game that has anti-cheat, or touch fingerprint sensors, or HDR and wide colour gamut displays) just work on Windows. It has a massive repository of programs that I use frequently. But some changes are just... irritating.
They are not that different. Look at Azure and tell me with a straight face that it’s not the biggest clusterfuck of all time. Look at it. Azure is the single biggest reason why .NET developers have high blood pressure around the world. Azure is so bad people actively filter out jobs where the company uses Azure. The only other software which triggers this much aversion in people is MS Teams.
it's insane how good Microsoft sales people are, if they manage to make Azure sell this well when GCP and AWS are objectively better at basically everything, including cost considerations.
Having seen Microsoft, Google and Amazon people 'pitch' their cloud solutions to a mid sized company I used to work for with quite 'normal' cloud needs, I can tell you it's not that MS sales people are great, but rather that Google and Amazon are terrible and can't be bothered to even make a serious effort for anything but the largest of deals.
From what I understand you do have the option to pay more for more assurances and higher touch support. It's just that the pricing will be the same, or even higher, than Azure.
Bundling licenses was what finally levered our management to Azure at a previous job. They didn't care what the OpEx was as long insane MSSQL license costs went down -- and they did. Azure was a PITA in all other ways, but they achieved that metric.
I also assumed "referral agent awards" also played a part.
Sharepoint is the worst piece of software I've ever used.
I think its central problem is that it doesn't know what it's supposed to be, so it tries to be everything, and feature creep has turned it into a slow, bloated mess.
>Sharepoint is the worst piece of software I've ever used.
>I think its central problem is that it doesn't know what it's supposed to be, so it tries to be everything, and feature creep has turned it into a slow, bloated mess.
I think Sharepoint is exactly what MS envisioned it to be. A development platform to integrate other MS tools/platforms for presentation to internal end users.
If you want something you can just install, tweak and run with, Sharepoint isn't (and never was) an appropriate solution.
But if you want something that (with significant effort) can bring all your MS tools together (encouraging the purchase of even more MS software), Sharepoint and development effort can create something useful.
N.B.: I hate Sharepoint. It's needlessly complicated and overly dependent on other MS products. As such, please don't take this comment as an endorsement of it.
I mean, ignoring our personal preferences, which of those two halves of the business sounds like it's sustaining the other? I see a bunch of (cool) tools in one column, some of which admittedly might encourage people to use Windows or other paid MS products, albeit less so than in the past; in the other I see a lot of solid recurring revenue streams.
I think Azure is a bit of an awkward fit in the group, but just sticking with it, it's still eclipsed if we combine Windows, search advertising, "enterprise services," and Office, which would all seem to fit in the originally-provided "bad" group.
I long for the day when someone will dissect the numbers, and show how much of Windows' vaunted desktop share is due to corporate licenses. I think it would show that -- when people are buying with their own money -- they're preferring Macs 2-to-1 over PC's now.
I would suspect the people looking for computers under 1k will get the plastic hp because they need a computer, and will get the cheap android tablet when they want a tablet.
source: all my relatives and acquaintances that can't afford apple take those exact choices.
I like to using Window because of its advantages about UX, which I cannot find in Linux or macOS. For example: the consistent keyboard shortcuts, the explorer's UX and UI when accessing by mouse and keyboard, the window management including tiling flow, the muti-monitor management...
I feel that there is power at Microsoft forcing Windows including terrible adware as now, just for profit (look at Bing AI). It can be good for short term but I don't think it's good for long term.
Windows has (for programs that follow it of course) good tab management shortcuts. Ctrl pgup/pgdown to go left/right (equivalent to MacOS's shortcut mentioned above), and ctrl+tab to cycle through historical tab order (which many Mac programs have as well IIRC).
But for me the nicest shortcuts in windows are Win+# for applications. Win 1, 2, 3, etc. to select a program in that slot on your taskbar regardless of whether it's already open, and holding Windows and cycling through that number's windows, along with your standard alt tab for all windows in historical order. That, combined with the non-centered taskbar icons means you get great muscle memory on both keyboard and mouse, better than Mac OS's dock IMO.
Of course, MS is doing its best to kill this for some reason by insisting on limiting how you position the taskbar, trying to center everything, and randomly sticking "Search" into the taskbar periodically. Also for whatever reason sometimes the keyboard shortcuts are not reliable in Windows 11 lol.
I can't say I like all of Microsoft's plans, but the fundamentals are there, and they were solidly designed at some point.
Funny, I remember working at a Linux shop a few years ago - two higher-ups in tech there were fairly against paying for any software, but both used Windows for this exact reason.
> I feel that there is power at Microsoft forcing Windows including terrible adware as now, just for profit
Her name is Amy Hood ;)
In seriousness, Finance in no way dictates product decisions directly. Instead, they tell product owners "You are responsible for $XXX million dollars in revenue over the next N quarters. Tell us how you plan to achieve this goal." Product owners run the gamut from amazing to unimaginative. Guess who populates the Windows PM org these days.
Except those numbers are…wrong? I mean, they’re not far off, but they’re not actually right either. You should probably never trust ChatGPT outright with facts.
I am able to do a perfect multi-monitor high-DPI/mixed-DPI on Linux using wayland+gnome. The support for wayland on KDE is getting better and would probably work with KDE as well. This was a huge annoyance, but is fixed. I don`t even remember I am using wayland. Everything works.
With Steam progress on proton, most games run on Linux without problems and with the same performance.
Another huge pain in Linux was installing commercial programs. Now with flatpak, you can be sure it will work no matter what.
Not until extremely recently[1] for fractional scaling. In my books, this is non-working HiDPI, because on Windows, my 15.6-inch full-HD notebook display is at 1.25× scaling, and my 27-inch UHD monitor is at 1.75× scaling. And since this is so recent, most DEs don't have support for this yet.
I was using mixed-DPI set-ups with no fanfare with Windows 8, 11 years ago. And Windows had initial HiDPI support with Windows 7.
I used to do this on Windows and found a ton of apps either broke their layout or got blurry when moved between monitors, so I wouldn't class Windows as 'ideal' here either :/
Not only moving the app itself between monitors. I fairly regularly get mis-scaled icons in the task bar when I've unplugged my laptop from its screen while it's closed.
I have yet to figure out how to get QT apps (and FreeCAD is particularly awful here) how to play well - there's always something scaled wrong no matter what I do.
The question isn't possible to answer, what one person expects to work another person might not consider it important. Likewise, what does "compatible" mean?
I have used Wayland exclusively for over a year and not found any software I could not run.
For example, JAVA doesn't have native Wayland support, so if you launched GUI JAVA software Wayland will run it in a sandboxed X11 server (XWayland) that behaves mostly like Wayland in the context of the rest of your system but is just X11 under the hood.
However, because that JAVA software is technically running in X11 and X11 doesn't have the level of support as Wayland does for HiDPI then that specific GUI program can't inherit your pixel config. This will probably just mean the default layout for that program will be too small or blurry.
This is a good example because it's not unreasonable that in 2023 you may not be running any GUI JAVA software and you may never even realise this was an thing. Equally, GUI JAVA software may be the only software you run in which case this may be unacceptable.
There are other things Wayland does differently to X11 (because it's different software). For example, Wayland doesn't have a method for a program to register a global hotkey - if you want a global hotkey you have to register it in your WM or DE. This is because the tighter security model stops one program from capturing inputs to another AND because the developers can't come to a consensus on the API to enable this.
You may consider Wayland not supporting arbitrary global hotkeys to be incompatible with what you expect. I don't because I have no issue with the centralised global hotkeys in my WM.
It's not compatible with Talon voice for voice to text. I was going to move to Wayland a year back, but I also had hand issues that meant I needed to use Talon.
Apparently per the Talon developer Wayland makes something like Talon very difficult or impossible to implement? Not sure of specifics.
This gave me the impression that Wayland isn't as friendly with regards to accessibility, but not sure if that's a fair takeway or not.
Nope! I used it for a while and had issues with screen sharing/capture in Firefox and OBS (it did work in Chrome but then my webcam didn't work there - classic Linux).
I never thought it would take 3 decades for Wayland to be mature.
How long ago was this? Screen sharing[0] and capture[1] works fine in wlroots.
[0]: Supported with workarounds circa 2020, most were merged by 2022 - https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/wiki/Screencast-Compatibility
[1]: I've had success using `wf-recorder` https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
Right now. On RHEL 8 admittedly, and it Firefox screen sharing did work at first, but it randomly broke at some point. OBS capture never worked in Wayland for me.
The one with DevDiv and stuff, which has amazing and mostly free development tools like VS Code, VS 2022, Windows Terminal, WSL, Azure, the .NET ecosystem, the MSVC C++ STL, PowerShell, TypeScript, and so on.
And then there's the bean-counting, irritating part of Microsoft that has stuck around since the 90s and doesn't seem to go away. This part justifies adding advertisements and crapware to Windows, pushing for SaaS (while still charging a LOT), changing the UX of Office programs every version, not being able to implement and release a proper UI library after a decade or so, and pushing laggy Electron apps like Teams instead of developing fast, native ones.
Like many others here, Windows is a daily driver for me. I actually like using it, because a lot of hardware and configurations that need painful finagling on Linux (just try using a multi-monitor high-DPI, mixed-DPI setup on Linux, or any game that has anti-cheat, or touch fingerprint sensors, or HDR and wide colour gamut displays) just work on Windows. It has a massive repository of programs that I use frequently. But some changes are just... irritating.