Well, one of the biggest drivers of consumer Linux adoption in recent years has been the Steam Deck, and compatibility with Steam games. The article explicitly calls out how this improves performance for this use case. I think your opinion is an unpopular one.
Yeah, I know multiple people running Linux at home and Windows compatibility us a critical feature for them. For the people I know not in tech about half would switch if Linux got up to par in:
1. Ability to play any video game
2. Compatibility with hardware (e.g. one of my friends is booting windows temporarily as his graphics card has an issue on Linux)
3. Usability/looks. This is subjective but for people used to Windows for the last couple decades people often find Linux more difficult to use and honestly uglier (Linux is customizable but most people I know are not confident enough to go far from the defaults).
This is just my friends, some of whom are engineers and some are normal people when it comes to technical ability, but currently a lot of them want to like Linux but have specific requirements holding them back.
I’m genuinely curious why you think this post is appropriate or beneficial for this topic or even this subthread? Linux isn’t a windows clone; everyone knows that.
Linux isn't a Windows clone but compatibility and parity with Windows are the biggest blockers to adoption for a lot of the potential userbase. This thread is specifically about compatibility with Windows so talking about how it's the most important feature for people I know (and also mentioning a few other ways people view Linux as generally a worse experience) is not off topic entirely. This thread is part of a broader context of driving Linux adoption by poaching a specific subset of Windows users, which this change is directly in service of.
"On June 8, 2016, a standard FreeBSD 10.3 image was published into the Azure Marketplace. Microsoft published the image working as part of the FreeBSD community and in collaboration with the FreeBSD Foundation. This was a milestone
representing the culmination of several years of Microsoft collaboration with the FreeBSD community. FreeBSD is leveraged as the base OS for a number of virtual appliances running in Azure, and so Microsoft has a natural interest in making sure it runs well."
Your points are factually incorrect in several ways. But if I steelman your argument, Linux driving Windows compatibility for gaming could be bad for several reasons:
- adoption of NTSYNC may distort the technical roadmap of Linux. That's arguable, it comes down to technical details.
- we should ask game vendors to support Linux, not enable them to not support Linux. Unfortunately that ship has sailed and we already know that Linux gaming is not a market they care about.
- Windows and Microsoft are bad and Linux is good. That's an emotional argument. When MS was truly anti-Linux, this association would rightly trigger suspicion. But MS is not behind this effort.
I think the best hope for native Linux gaming at this point is that the Steam deck and Proton in general becomes so popular it makes it worth it to consider native Linux too.
Do you think MS still wants to be in the consumer OS market?
It's low revenue, fairly high expense, and the relevance of "which operating system do you use" is going down rapidly (see linux gaming getting good with MS's help). Businesses.. sure they'll keep using windows and paying for it, since they already have a huge amount of legacy systems/software and IT procedures/institutional knowledge - like IBM still doing mainframes - but consumers don't seem to care about that.
Most people basically seem to use their computer to run a browser, maybe some games, and maybe some office suite stuff, OS doesn't matter too much anymore.
Honestly I don't see any evidence that Microsoft wants anything. Every little fiefdom within Microsoft wants their own thing and no one cares about what is good for the company as a whole. There is at least one team that just wants to sell as many games as possible, and are no doubt looking at SteamOS as potential platform to target.
"The division owns intellectual property for some of the most popular, best-selling, and highest-grossing media franchises of all time, including Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Warcraft, Halo, Minecraft, and The Elder Scrolls."
Your point was that Microsoft "gives a couple of hoots" about which platform Gamepass is on, implying that they specifically care about making Gamepass not accessible on Linux. Them having a guide for Gamepass access on Linux proves the opposite.
But you're just nitpicking looking for an argument. So, goodbye.
I hate to break it to you, but Linux has always had a very significant amount of development done by and for various corporate interests. There are whole companies that exist solely to commercialize Linux.
Microsoft did not push these changes. Valve (and places like Collabora) did, because it meaningfully improves performance for emulated Windows games. You should probably at least get the basics of your story straight if you're going to scare yourself silly over something you don't understand.
Not really, Sony and Apple are good examples of how BSDs would have looked like if the AT&T lawsuit never happened, and UNIX vendors would keep using BSD on their UNIX flavours, also most likely no one would have cared for Linux if it wasn't for that lawsuit.
Without providing examples, like no giant lock (mostly gone on Linux, now), IOCP, less monolithic kernel, inherit async I/O in the kernel, et. al., your assertion going to be lost on those who see "Windows == bad", which it certainly is closer to the surface.
In what way do you view this as Microsoft taking control of Linux? This is an effort to support more users leaving Microsoft for Linux and taking their software with them.
To me, anything that emulates windows primitives is a bad thing. Again these changes being pushed by Microsoft make me glad the BSDs exist.
Lets hope the BSDs can continue staying independent of Large Corporations.