https://www.computerworld.com/article/1626871/microsoft-to-b...
This one youtuber, I forget his name, was fired as part of that layoff. He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.
This really sucks for him. Through should Microsoft _not_ layoff specific people due to health conditions? Is that something we require from companies?
The practice persisted because employer paid health insurance is tax-deductible, while it isn't if a person pays it out of pocket.
The obvious solution is to make it tax-deductible.
Or make employer paid health insurance count as income and therefore not tax-deductible.
Typical accounts of employee compensation only measure wages and salaries. I've only seen the WSJ using total employee compensation, which is a far more realistic figure.
Let's think through the implications of that.
The US healthcare system is non-functional for a month: what happens?
Hospitals and providers start running into cash flow problems and begin having difficulties providing service.
Fraud skyrockets because everything is getting blanket-approved because none of the data used for verification is available.
And about a month after that, people start dying from lack of care, after the last financial reserves of the system are exhausted.
Because that's the path the system was on when Change went down for several weeks, only averted by HHS/CMS saying 'Here's money, just do procedures, we'll worry about it later.'
Are you okay with 1000x as many people dying to make a point?
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
"But where would the money come from" is one of the wildest questions to ask about a system that already costs double the average. I'd say, give or take, the same place its coming from now, but like, less.
i imagine its already doing the most expensive part, treating people who are almost dead who have lots of procedures that could be done.
picking up people that need basically no care sounds pretty cheap by comparison
Tax deductibility is only a very minor reason why most private insurance is employer provided; the much larger reason is that employment is a decent way to get a reasonably distributed group (of people generally healthy enough to work) and that’s one way of getting balanced risk pool if you’re not doing community rating or a societ wide pool.
From what I saw, the combination of "no exclusions for pre-existing coverage" and "penalty for not having health insurance" worked pretty well to balance the risk pools without nationalized healthcare.
I would still like nationalized healthcare, but I think there are other ways to fix the problem at hand of people being dependent on their jobs for healthcare.
Universal insurance could be better, and perhaps the day will even come when the American electorate recognizes priorities like this and candidates who will advance that kind of policy, contrary habits of the past notwithstanding.
* You must pay the premiums with after-tax money.
* Your total qualified, unreimbursed medical and dental expenses (including premiums and costs like co-pays, deductibles, prescription medications, etc.) must exceed 7.5% of your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI).
* You can only deduct the amount of expenses that exceeds this 7.5% threshold.
* You must choose to itemize deductions instead of taking the standard deduction.
Most taxpayers use the standard deduction as it is often larger than their total itemized deductions.
Yes it is. The system has some very deep issues due to government involvement/meddling with both healthcare and insurance, but at least you can still receive life saving treatment in a timely manner.
They can be in disbelief all the want, but when people in countries with socialized healthcare get cancer or other life threatening medical conditions they come to the US and a private healthcare to get treated.
The American system is also not looking so good as our wait times have been going up and access has been worsening for much of the country, especially over the last year.
Never paid a single dime out of pocket as a diabetic.
> so wonderful death pods in Canada?
propaganda at it's height.
If you are saying they are covered either way, why not just have consistent healthcare coverage for them and for everyone, all the time?
The Czar of health-care in the US today is a brain-worm addled, drug-addicted, vaccine-denying, conspiracy mongering, incompetent jackass. And the overall current administration has shown itself to be hostile to basically anyone who isn't a cis-gendered, white, heterosexual, Christian male.
How many of us really trust these people to make good decisions regarding our health-care? A position that they (or their delegates) would find themselves in if we "nationalize health care".
I think this is a classic example of an idea that sounds good on paper, but doesn't survive contact with reality.
I know in years past we all though the US government was somewhat immune for really radical swings in direction and what-not, but I think now we have an existence proof that really sudden and radical changes can happen.
This is the reason you see sweeping cuts without regard to age, sex, etc.
There have also been lawsuits in the past that have settled out of court where a company's layoffs appear to overly inflict damage on one class vs. another, even if the intent was not to do that.
I am not defending these companies at ALL btw. I just have a bit of experience in this area due to the legalities, and I wanted to share it.
I am also not saying that companies don't do this, but the smart ones don't, and the smart ones at least try to at least avoid making it look obvious.
Which—for the folks not following along aghast at everything—has been sabotaged by recent federal political changes.
https://www.epi.org/blog/trump-is-making-it-easier-for-emplo...
In Germany, yes. For mass layoffs, this absolutely has to be considered. In general, the older the employee is, or if the employee has dependents, the more difficult it gets to both fire them or lay them off.
The regulations that make it hard to lay off someone have an equal and opposite effect of making companies very reluctant to hire. This impedes the efficient allocation of labor, resulting in a poorer GDP.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02...
The US has 13.3% growth and Germany 0.1%.
1) GDP is, while very important, not the only measure of country's prosperity
And
2) how much of those 13.3% is being hoarded by a single-digit amount of companies?
Productive companies do not hoard wealth. They invest it. GDP is not a measure of wealth, it is a measure of production.
Over 1 trillion dollar invested in total. Where is the production?
Where? Where is the growth in other sectors then?
Without the incestous web of the AI bubble, the US would actually be in a recession, especially due to the tariffs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiymTzsZfoA
How much of this years GDP growth in the USA went to average citizens? What does GDP growth matter if your citizens have zero access to healthcare, can't improve their conditions, can't innovate, can't try new ideas because they are tied to healthcare via their current job?
How much of American GDP growth goes to Billionaires and isn't a useful health metric?
See: Billionaires added record $2.2tn in wealth in 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/dec/31/billionaires-ad...
[note] For example, you might contrive to purchase the entire supply of some valuable resource with inelastic demand, and then sell it back to people, perhaps at an inflated price.
See Microsoft, Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Pixar, Lego, and on and on.
> you might contrive to purchase the entire supply of some valuable resource with inelastic demand, and then sell it back to people, perhaps at an inflated price.
Example?
I guess you want to point out that choices are subjective.
That subjectivity is relevant within their classes (air—food-water, security-health-plumbing-heating, smartphone-car-vacation, yaht-designerBrands) Definitely there will be one person who choses to die, just to get latest smartphone, but most people will not.
These classes get less clear/useful as you go up, but most people will agree on the basics.
Tangent: it is important for me personally for my neighbour to have the basics (and more), as that increases my basics like security, sanitary conditions.
[1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market...
> the richest 10% of Americans own 93% of the stocks
Most prolly got that way by buying stocks!
To expand on the latter point - say you have automation enabling more economic growth. A significant amount of people lose their jobs, others are afraid they'll be the next ones on the chopping block, and people hold their money together as a result - if you ask general people on the street or in representative surveys, you'll get the feedback that the economy is going to the dogs, but "the numbers" don't reflect that.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/washington-states-tax-blitz-497e...
For the most part none of us has any “required” obligation to anyone else.
Is it something we require of companies? No. But being a responsible, compassionate human being that considers the totality of circumstance is something I expect of that company’s leaders. Especially a company that has the money and need for technical skills elsewhere in the org.
The golden rule does not stop being true just because you are at work.
Preemptively: duty to shareholders is broader than short term profit maximizing. Avoiding bad PR like this is also in the service of MS shareholders.
As a side note: Nadella moved his home to Canada, while working at MS, so his special needs kid could go to a specialist school. That is absolutely the right choice. The argument that MS should not consider the health of their employees children is horseshit when they allow the CEO to set up house hours away in a different country for that exact reason.
At the end of the day, a kid suffered unnecessarily through no fault of his parents or his own.
You want society where its everybody for themselves, fuck the rest, be lucky with ie your health so you and your family can have a decent life and one problem big enough can wipe you out? The benefit is more money, economy works better, is more agile to ever-changing situation. Just those extra money often go to that healthcare (since we all end up with various issues over time, the only exception is early death), or university for kids, or cost of properties.
Or something glacial, without real pressure to improve, more poor, but with additional safety nets.
I keep saying it over and over - EU should take over system (and mindset, good luck there) of Swiss folks. They strike the best balance between predatory capitalism that often grinds unlucky individuals and various safety nets (free top notch public education, almost free public healthcare, very good but not ridiculous social system etc). Unsurprisingly, mix of European competency and a bit of proper capitalism creates one of best stable living standards in the world, and arguably still The most free nation in the world (TM).
Its a place that french or germans just can't swallow - neighbor showing them how much better a similar society can end up functioning with few rather minor tweaks.
What I wrote is reality about EU, whether you like it or not is another topic. I dont mention russia at all, that medieval shithole has (hopefully) no say in how European future will look like.
Even so, while it's not a good argument against layoffs, the fact that it's even considered as such is in itself a reasonable argument against health care being tied to specific employment.
Google's QA is pitiful too.
He's a super smart programmer, but seems to be suffering from depression since Microsoft laid him off. He often talks about his issues when he livestreams Tech Talk on Saturdays.
Ty, that is him.
One is Microsoft releasing shitty software.
The other is a deeper societal problem with healthcare and loyalty between companies and their employees.
For me, they are unrelated problems. In a welfare state, the QA team may have been reaffected to some other tasks within the company and have the health benefits provided by the state, but it wouldn't have made the software less shitty.
I live in Washington. My accountant told me stories, one of which was a Microsoftian who got the big job, and promptly bought the most expensive house he could swing. He soon ran into trouble because he didn't have enough left to pay the property tax, and was forced to sell it.
BTW, Microsoft has unusually generous benefits for autism. Many autism clinics have sprouted up around the campus to take advantage of that.
Never, ever, EVER assume that a high paying job is a guarantee for life.
> I live in Washington. My accountant told me stories, one of which was a Microsoftian who got the big job, and promptly bought the most expensive house he could swing. He soon ran into trouble because he didn't have enough left to pay the property tax, and was forced to sell it.
> Never, ever, EVER assume that a high paying job is a guarantee for life.
I do not know why you wrote this. This wasn't a guy who blew all his money on a big house and was forced to sell it when he lost his job.
The guy's kid was born with a low functioning level of Autism that required expensive therapy to treat. You do not choose that. He had savings, but he may be taking care of the kid for the rest of his life. What is he suppose to do? Eat ramen to save up 40 years of out of pocket therapy treatment when he was fired from a position that Microsoft should have kept? No, that is ridiculous.
That applies to 'any' job and is besides the point since I mentioned above he did keep savings. Your comments comes off as insensitive since few jobs will make up for the generous Autism therapy benefit.
As for sensitivity, it is neither sensitive nor virtuous to demand that other people fund one's sensitivities. It is sensitive and virtuous to freely donate one's own funds.
Microsoft has, for decades, been known to provide generous funding for autistic family members of their employees. It's sensitive and virtuous. Criticizing them for not giving more is a bit unfair.
I never demanded anything. You have an issue with reading comprehension. I took issue with your offtrack comment.
> As for sensitivity, it is neither sensitive nor virtuous to demand that other people fund one's sensitivities. It is sensitive and virtuous to freely donate one's own funds.
Your opinion-that is not mine. My other opinion is you need to up those reading skills.
> Microsoft has, for decades, been known to provide generous funding for autistic family members of their employees. It's sensitive and virtuous. Criticizing them for not giving more is a bit unfair.
Once again, improve your reading skills. I criticized them for firing people that they clearly needed to maintain a good product; one of them happened to have a kid with severe Autism. If they were not a monopoly; people would stop buying their product.
> Your comments comes off as insensitive since few jobs will make up for the generous Autism therapy benefit.
My interpretation of what you wrote is reasonable. If you wish to clarify what you actually meant, I'll be happy to read it.
The Azure Linux friendliness play was essential and smart. Again, Microsoft felt like they were opening up to the world.
But they've backslidden. They've ceded Windows and gaming to their cloud and AI infra ambitions. They're not being friendly anymore.
Microsoft spent a lot of energy making Windows more consumer friendly, only to piss it away with Windows 11.
One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.
They'll continue to win in enterprise, but they're losing consumer, gamer, and developer/IC support and mindshare. I've never seen so many people bitch about GitHub as in the last year. You'd swear it had became worse than Windows 7 at this point.
No kidding, the totally threw it all away. It used to be that Windows was already the place for gaming. And the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation. But that was a long time ago. Has any Microsoft gaming release exceeded expectations lately? Call of Duty will always sell like hotcakes, but the latest Black Ops is a hot expensive mess that underperformed last year's title.
Maybe it won some battles in your part of the world, presumably North America. But the PS3 outsold it globally as its contemporary, and even the PS5 passed the 360 in global lifetime sales as of November 2025: https://www.vgchartz.com/article/466599/ps5-outsells-xbox-36...
Slightly related, they also discontinued most of their PC peripherals in 2023, many of which were quite good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748645
I think by moving onto the cloud they've left themselves open to being disrupted, and when it comes it'll be like Lotus Notes, an extremely quick downfall.
I think I first came to that realization with windows phone 7/8? The UI was cool looking, but functionality was half-baked and third party app availability was dismal. HOWEVER! You could sign a windows phone into an active directory/365 account and manage the bloody daylights out of it via group policy and the tools to do that were SUPER WELL MADE.
Same is/was true of Microsoft Teams - an utter abomination of a chat client, the search is garbage, the emoji and sticker variety sometimes weird, the client itself randomly uses up 100% CPU for no reason and is just generally buggy... but gosh darnit, MS made sure sysadmins could ban memes and use of certain emoji via policy and gave insane amounts of detail to auditing and record keeping. So sure it's a pile of shit to use, but awesome if you wanna spy on your employees and restrict their every move.
Windows is fun because with the enterprise version, they give all that control to the employers, but with the consumer version they give all that control to advertisers, developers, and themselves.
I think this is also why every consumer-focused product they make either fails instantly, or ends up rotting on the vine and failing after whoever evangelized that product leaves the company (possibly being forced out for not being a "culture fit"). Do I have to go on about zune/windows phone/xbox? Or surface? Or the way they randomly dumped their peripherals product line on another company? lol.
If you take a close look as an user, all their products is half-baked in some way (inconsistent behaviors, dark patterns, poor support, etc.), good enough so they can lock you in and hold your data hostage with time.
And government bribes, and piracy, and giving Windows for free to some Universities in exchange for being included in curriculum.
Same reason why Google Chat and Meet are super popular now despite Slack and Zoom being infinitely better (free with Google Workspace)
Do you mean Windows Vista instead? Because Windows 7 was probably the last (half-)decent windows (no UI though for tablet, no ads in the OS, no ubiquitous telemetry, no account BS).
I've been using all three major OS families recently and I'm not enjoying my time on Windows. It's so full of ads, and the Linux / Unix bits feel bolted on.
Forget being “friendly”. GitHub has enormous mindshare and has frankly quite reasonably pricing (far cheaper than GitLab, for example), but the product just sucks lately. The website, while quite capable (impressively so at times) is so slow and buggy that it’s hard to benefit from any of its capabilities.
It’s gotten to the point where, every time I try a newish capability, I ask myself “how bad can this possibly be,” and it invariably exceeds expectations.
GitHub needs to take a step back and focus on fixing things. Existing features should work, be coherent, and be fast. If it takes longer to load a diff in the web viewer than it takes to pull the entire branch and view the diff locally, something is wrong.
If a coworker reviews my code, I should not sitting right next to them, literally looking at the same website they’re on, and wondering why they see the correct context for their review comment but I don’t.
So "developers, developers, developers"?
In my LinkedIn post I questioned if they can’t be trusted with a $30 game license how can we trust them with a multi million dollar copilot rollout? I pointed out that it seems like this is more than just a lack of human support. It is a company that: does not care about their own brand, the up-time of their own systems, their own employees, or their customers.
I question if their goal is to simply extract money under unethical conditions. I question whether they expect the customer to just repeatedly purchased the game every time the company fails to deliver it. I also questioned to him why he has hiring managers bragging on LinkedIn that they expect people to output 1 million lines of code per month, so they can rewrite the operating system in rust, while their systems are off-line.
Microsoft is just profiteering off of their defacto monopoly, selling more is their only metric, the "what" is secondary.
I wonder how many real top-tier engineers are there at Microsoft and how hard they have to work to prevent it from failing. It’s not uncommon in any bigger than probably 200 people company - the belief of having a lot of talents while having maybe 1% of the company capable of doing anything working.
Acquired podcast had Ballmer on this past year. Gives interesting take of how he was never a true CEO, always had Gates still running things.
I imagine Microsoft probably has about 5-10 CEOs running it right now. Nadella is just the face. Amy, Brad & Kathleen for sure. Would not be surprised if Bill still has a lot of say. Guthrie probably doesn't have enough say.
If I had worked for MS I would have hated him and the company he forged. I don't like Nadella much (note, there's very few 'leaders' I like) but at least he seems to be a nice person.
Nadella is doing his job of shareholder value maximization quite well.
It's just exceedingly bizarre watching this AI stuff and not except that global capitalism is deranged dick measuring.
So far so good! Some smaller hiccups, like chrome won’t use dolphin, but I installed rustdesk so I can help them through whatever.
Over Christmas the in-laws were asking about Linux because of windows issues, which was surprising since they’re technologically literate but in a layman sense. I didn’t try to switch them over since the parent experiment is still ongoing but a couple more months of seamless use and I’ll consider it a success.
All this to say I’m very glad for Microsoft leadership!
I was both amazed and proud. She's daily driving Linux now
(to be fair, it's just tv shows and web apps like chatgpt or docs, but still, Linux is now a good-enough alternative, at least anegdotally)
I told him that Ubuntu was probably the best fit for someone changing/doing one's own install. And that was pretty much the extent of the conversation, we went on to talk more about raising beef on land without petrochemical fertilizers, and how he missed the flavor from his youth, circa 1930's vs what he could get in the store today.
A few years later, the next time I was in his living room, his somewhat older - the same - laptop was on his kitchen table with OpenOffice spreadsheets and something he was working on, running the latest Kubuntu flavor. I asked who he had asked to install it; he has a number of technically proficient descendants who live much closer and who visit far more frequently than I did, so I presumed one of my cousins had helped.
He acted a little gruff, told me he had switched to Ubuntu+gnome by reading and following the instructions, and had then decided he tried out the K Desktop and preferred it enough to just make the switch without reinstalling.
Had a bit of fun hearing him explain how he "hadn't been fond of some of the Ubuntu decisions with window managers but liked having both environments installed as somethings were better in K, and other things were better from Gnome."
In thinking about how ready he was, in his 90's, to fully read and follow instructions reminds me that he was from a generation whose automobile user manual came with instructions for adjusting the piston timing as well as how to bleed and adjust brake pressure.
Why does everyone act like switching to Linux from Windows is just too hard for "Kathy and Wayne"? The fact of the matter seems to be we have lost either the _ability_, or the _willingness_, to read-and-follow-directions in the general population. The end result of either is the same.
1. Understanding they have to back up their current hard drive somehow. What even is a back up? How do they do it? What do they need to back up? How does it get restored? I tell them to put their important files on a flash drive, but it's not obvious.
2. How to boot into the flash drive with the Linux image on it, and what that even means. The instructions for this are usually sparse because every laptop enters BIOS with a different key and has a different way of choosing the boot device from there.
3. The disk configuration in the installer. They have no idea what to do here. There is usually not a simple default with friendly text to click through. It's impossible to write coherent instructions for this if the user doesn't understand what a drive even is, conceptually.
(This post brought to you by YouTube, who keep putting Dr Geoff Lindsey in my recommendation queue, and now I’ve become a part time linguistics enthusiast. Other interesting facts: “chr” and “tr” are also almost entirely homonyms in most speakers. Try saying “trooper” and “chrooper” and see what I mean. In fact my 4 year old, who is recently learning to write, drew a picture of a truck and wrote “chruck” on the paper.)
Canuck here. Color and colour are pronounced differently(mildly), and ant and aunt wildly different. Suite and suit are different pronunciations too.
Yet to some US speakers, those words are the same.
But the difference is almost meaningless in this case because in practice the c blends to the d, which is voiced.
I'm sure for some workflows it isn't sufficient but for basic edits and raw development it works quite well.
Are there cases where the old scheme worked well that none of the systemd schemes properly address?
Is the scheme Windows uses to bind configuration to physical network interfaces even documented?
there are a lot of other things stopping people from migrating besides gaming though. sure, there are alternatives for professional audio/photo/video editing/producing, but they all mean losing some functionality if you migrate.
If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that normies don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. Normies care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs. The interface is paramount for non-technical users.
A family friend recently called me for advice on her old decrepit laptop. I told her about my work "laptop": a Surface Pro tablet with Linux. I just sold one to her (I work in e-waste recycling), partially on the security and privacy advantages of Linux. Lets see how that works out.
Her router is running Linux. I can tell because of the speed of the WLAN alone.
Her STB runs Linux, specifically Android TV (Nvidia Shield TV). Thanks for adding the fantastic ads in the newest Android TV, Google! /s
Her vacuum cleaner runs Linux, I know because I slapped Valetudo on it.
Her NAS runs Linux (DSM), Synology.
Her printer runs Linux (Brother).
Her Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant runs Linux (DietPi).
Her tablet runs macOS variant, iPadOS.
Her smartphone runs macOS variant, iOS.
Her smartwatch will run macOS variant, watchOS.
OK, fair enough. Her laptop! Her laptop still runs Win... wait a sec, she hasn't had a laptop for more than a decade. She's been using that super expensive hardware keyboard for iPad. My mum never even used Windows 10 or 11. Her laptop came with Windows Vista back in the days, it was terribly sluggish.
I don't know which year it is, but it isn't the year of the Windows OS.
And yes, I am super happy with Microsoft using thumb screws like these. Squeeze them tight. The more computers will slip through your fingers, grand moff Nadella.
> Her smartphone runs macOS variant, iOS.
> Her smartwatch will run macOS variant, watchOS.
None of these platforms run a variant of macOS, rather a variant of Darwin.
So I think Xbox becomes a brand for video games with Windows and then gradually it loses relevance until one day the question is "Why isn't Minecraft on Steam like a proper video game?"
All I know is that I own both an Xbox Series X and a PS5. I use the PS5 more. I also own a PC, and it sees more than 1,000 times the usage of either. I bought the PS5 for exclusives, and Sony began changing that. However there are still alot of older PS4/PS5 titles that are fun to play, and some games are just better with a controller and a TV.
That being said, I'm likely not going to purchase any other consoles.
The PC means there's a wireless keyboard and some sort of pointing device, but they're just for launching games & basic admin.
Edited to add: Also WTF for refreshing the Xbox. Who is the audience for this product? What is your lead title? Another Halo? But there's going to be an excellent Halo for the PS5 and for PCs, right? A GTA? But people want the newer GTA which won't fit. Maybe I just don't understand the vision here.
Windows is not at the core of their strategy anymore. With Azure, they are as much of a Linux company as they are a Windows company now, and most of their software runs in a browser now. Windows is just a gateway to their services.
If it was easy for them to have their users run Linux instead of Windows and sell Office 365 subscriptions, they would prefer that instead of having to maintain a full OS.
I think my crowning achievement came early on when I managed to follow Linux From Scratch all the way through.
I say all of this to say that I am finally off Windows for good. It has become my daily driver. I've no obstacles. Not in gaming, software dev, personal work, media consumption (beyond streaming services degrading streams for a non-supported OS), or anything else. I've found open source apps to be quite a bit better than their closed source equivalents.
Things have really shifted in the past 5-10 years, and I dig it. KDE + CachyOS is great! Although I hear Bazzite is better for new users (I have some decent experience using Arch so I prefer Cachy)
I don't foresee ever moving back to Windows. The AI and constant push to Microsoft Edge, Second OOB experience, and other nonsense (including Diablo 2: resurrected, a [now] Microsoft owned product that still gets a few updates, hard locking my system), I decided to take my ball and go home...to Linux. A few people I know who aren't even remotely computer literate at all have done the same, and they've been surprised at how much better everything is, particularly on somewhat older hardware.
I know approximately zero people who still tether an iPhone to a desktop for any sort of backups.
Now, AirDrop support is a completely different beast. But it requires hardware support (promiscuous mode, iirc) that many common chipsets simply lack.
Oh, and USB tethering, but in my recent experience that's harder to get working on Windows 11 than on Linux (had to find the correct driver manually on catalog.update.microsoft.com as neither Windows Update nor any of the Apple Windows apps installed it, only to have some update or other remove it without my knowledge or consent a few weeks later).
You literally claimed these are exclusive to Windows if not a Mac. Not only do very close to zero Mac users do this on their Mac -- do you understand we can copy and share photos and files right on the iPhone? -- on Windows the dominate way people do this is a web browser. You know, exactly the same web browser that works on basically any computer.
As a longtime iPhone user with Macs and Windows, I was legitimately confused by your weird claim of a dependency on Windows. The more comments you've made, the more certain I am that you actually have no idea what you're talking about.
One of my sons has a desktop that is quite powerful and overwhelmingly adequate for what he does. As Windows 10 hit the end of support we were considering how to move forward as Windows 11 refuses to work on his device. We realized there is absolutely nothing keeping him on Windows, and perhaps we just replace his PC with a Mac Mini. But in the meantime he's rolling with Ubuntu and has lost absolutely nothing and gained plenty.
If Microsoft is alienating people like me, using Windows for 35 years, they can alienate anyone.
The forced buying of new hardware just to run Windows 11 is going to be the last straw for a lot of people. And Apple is really no better, their existing x86 machines have the same problem. We could no longer update a MBP, and other software stopped working due to the inability to update (and sorry, no we're not going to use hacky solutions to force it to update).
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
We should be happy it has a solution.
And even if Microsoft does that, it isn't any different than the 2394923th time a library breaks its API on Linux - Linux as an operating system isn't some monolithic project, it is a combination of hundreds of separate projects that for the most part work together like -sometimes misshapen- bricks on a wall. Wine/Proton is just another of those bricks (and history has shown that it tends to be among the more stable ones).
What is there are Linux users playing Windows games.
There used to be one, sadly the likes of Loki Entertainment are now gone.
b) Driving widespread adoption of gaming on Linux is a chicken and egg problem---without a significant market of Linux gamers, developers and publishers have no reason to publish native versions of their games on Linux, and without games to play, nobody is going to install Linux on their gaming system. Proton directly solves the latter problem, and may indirectly solve the former when Linux sees widespread adoption by gamers.
Not a windows game.
Amiga games running on UAE on GNU/Linux are still Amiga games.
Very hard to falsify such a statement.
The echo in my mind from the statement was along the following lines:
I can do everything at work remotely from my Linux laptop as they use Microsoft365/Sharepoint/Teams/Outlook and all. I can just log in via Chromium and noone knows any different with one exception: the finance portal. I have to be on an employer owned Windows PC to do that one thing as it is the last 'native program' needed. Moral: enterprise-ish stuff is happening via the Web browser.
Steam et al financing WINE/Proton and generally hammering all the sharp edges out of the compatibility layer for running Windows software on Linux. Moral: Complex Windows native software can be run under Linux.
So, at some point in the future, does Microsoft just phase out Windows? Replace it with a really well engineered Linux with compatibility environment for legacy software?
The smartest Extend phase they could do would probably be a "Windows" GUI on top of Linux kernel, possibly with some customized locked-down systemd, to replace the aging X and the mess Wayland created. If it gets to be at least as functional as Win11 is, it will instantly wipe out the other two alternatives - Exterminate.
Microsoft already has their own distro.
And they don't need to bother with anything else, Valve with Proton, makes Windows, Visual Studio and DirectX the way to go for the large majority of game studios.
WSL on Windows, alongside Virtualization framework on macOS, are the Year of Desktop Linux, regarding the latops I can actually buy on a random shopping mall computer store.
2. Above being said, translation is not emulation and has much less overhead So many pointless semantics to dismiss something genuinely good and useful
In contrast, most desktop oriented Linux distributions have a simpler installer and provide at least enough hardware support to leave you at a functional desktop. (There may be issues with more esoteric hardware, but chances are that hardware wouldn't work under Windows until vendor supplied drivers are installed anyhow.)
The official solution for non-technical users is to buy a PC with Windows preinstalled.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
That being said, I installed Windows 10 on Framework 12 by mistake and SHIFT+F10, "explorer", right-click on INF and "Install" also worked.
But on latest Windows 11 installer such witchery is not needed.
When did this come up?
I know tons of people who run Windows unactivated. The key difference is there's a watermark. Otherwise, it seems to work fine.
I just install and type in the key. no network.
I use it for VMs no network necessary.
I still have an M1 laptop with a broken screen that is going strong in clam shell mode, but once it dies or I can no longer run Sequoia for whatever reason, I'll be tempted to abandon macOS if Apple can't move beyond the mess they've made with Tahoe.
My wife works for a large corporation that is 100% Windows. I first used Windows 11 a few weeks ago when I was troubleshooting a connectivity problem on her laptop. To some extent my lack of experience with Windows 11 was a factor, but configuring network settings shouldn’t be so obtuse and fragmented. It didn’t feel serious. It felt like a parody of an operating system.
Gatekeeper & notarization, System Integrity Protection, hardware level security enforcement, all of these shifts reek of security paternalism, platform convergence, and ultimately ... control. This frog is starting to feel the water boil, and to mix metaphors, can see the walls of the garden getting higher.
Ultimately, choosing macOS is choosing to trust Apple. So the real question is: what do I get in return for that trust? As a "1 percenter" you’d think I’d resent ceding control. But when I look at Gatekeeper, notarization, Signed System Volume, and the rest, my reaction is: thank you, Apple, for doing your fucking job — for doing what I pay YOU to do for ME. I don't want to think about kernel extensions or rootkits, just keep my computer secure. Even as a 1 percenter, I still treat my main desktop as an appliance. Any time I want to go deeper into a computer, I'm in an ssh terminal to Linux machines under my control.
For me the logic is simple. If I don’t trust Apple to manage the security of my computer, then I shouldn’t be running macOS, period. Personally, I do trust Apple as much as I can trust anyone, including the presumptively honourable neckbeards who oversee your favourite Linux distro.
Is it possible to activate via a web browser on a separate computer, similar to the flow for phone activation?
1. Supply the code given by the "slmgr /dti" command to Microsoft over the phone or online from a non-air gapped machine.
2. Apply the resulting activation code with the "slmgr /atp" command.
Even in Enterprise by the way. No way we pay the amounts listed on the MS website.
Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"
By logging in with your account, it will not associate the account to the licenses.
Or a Windows 11 IoT image, that only enables some specific features, and is stripped down for a specific purpose.
For individual use I guess the solution is to set it up once with internet connectivity and air gap afterwards.
That's simply not good enough for some purposes. Once a computer is connected to the internet, at all for any amount of time, the system could be considered to be less secure.
This is a small roadbump to home/smb free activations.
VAMT proxy activation is airgapped in the exact same way the “old” telephone way was; VAMT acts as the server that you used to call on the phone. It trades one token for another. You side channel the tokens across to and from the airgapped machine.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...
Only risk would be to not have suppport available.
I knew a number of companies who were using a handful of RedHat servers and many more running CentOS and whenever they encountered issues on a CentOS system they would just replicate it on a RedHat one before asking for support and sending logs. Morally dubious but contractually OK.
Edit: We only wanted to buy around 20 licenses, so their motivation was also not that big to figure it out.
The bastion of Windows installations will still be the corporate market. Outside of developer circles, Macs are only used by executives - the drones still get underspecced Windows laptops.
As far as macOS goes, Linux is so good but I also like my peripherals to work for my job where I don't have time to tinker all day.
Even technical users can succumb to Apple's Reality Distortion Field.
283 comments
Be warned that they employ extreme amounts of dark patterns to try and trick you into converting the offline account into an online one.
Online activation of the Windows license is separate from an online user account.
I've held out for literal years, but that was the thing that finally made me log into an online user account (and start figuring out how to finally cut the last bit of Windows out of my life)
> Be warned that they employ extreme amounts of dark patterns to try and trick you into converting the offline account into an online one.
The main tool for me is https://www.startallback.com/
O2O Shutup ( https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 ) is also pretty useful for disabling anything you don't like all in one place -- it doesn't even install.
https://github.com/flick9000/winscript https://github.com/ramensoftware/windhawk
Disclaimer: I have no personal knowledge of that site, but it is commonly recommended when this subject comes up.
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
If they wanted it removed from GitHub they would have done so.
If someone wants/needs Windows, I would absolutely recommend windows 10 right now, it's probably the best time for using that version.
Though admittedly $1,176/16 cores is a bit steep for a desktop OS, and don't forget the CALs if you plan to use file sharing or Remote Desktop (or third party alternatives like Steam Remote Play).
Actually, I should place a bet on Polymarket for that.
People here hating on Nadella and loving Ballmer are missing the point. This is not a partisan issue. Windows stopped being good a long time ago. Arguably XP was the last good version of Windows.
Windows becoming an OS mostly for corporate types is beneficial for the world. Let us celebrate!
The other flaw in your logic is assuming that markets are free. A free market is one that is both informed and consents. In this market, there is both misinformation and a lack of consent.