If you install LLM stuff or the relatively stable atom clone vscode. You are seeing dependencies that are also maintained by Microsoft.
No issue so far, except when you run a bleeding edge system and realize that all required M$ libs are outdated and either you downgrade or can't use that tool that has that single M$ made python dependency that won't build on a modern system...
More often than not the dependency issue was already reported months ago on their issue tracker, many people put their thumbs up and someone already wrote a patch. No active maintainer to comment, merge and release tho. This is exactly how we don't want our libs managed.
You can run linux on Windows but still can't install a dual boot system with Linux first. IMO that says it all
MS only warmed up to Linux/Open Source, cause they were getting obliterated by Google on search and Apple with smart phones. If they don't do anything to warm up to the open source developers community, they would be obsolete.
Personally I still don't trust any open source or close source products from MS or any corporation. There is ALWAYS some strings attached. However, good thing about open sourcing software, is that you can always find alternative version that is compiled by the community or CE edition.
e.g:
Use VSCodium instead of VSCode.
Use ungoogled-chromium instead of Chrome.
Use WebKit instead of Safari
Just look how often the vscode extensions break for the open-source variants of the IDE.
I basically have to sit down every few months and rejig my settings.json file to match the latest syntax used by the IDE.
Microsoft hasn't changed its character, only how it presents itself.
Your annual reminder that globally, it is Android that dominates the phone market, not iOS. I know that isn't the case in the USA, but that's not the global marketplace.
MS lost (or rather, made essentially zero head way in) everything except desktop computers.
> MS lost (or rather, made essentially zero head way in) everything except desktop computers.
Microsoft's booming business numbers would like to have a discussion.
$26 billion in quarterly operating income, about to overtake Apple in profit, and practically none of their growth over the past decade has come from desktop computers.
They have an extremely lucrative business across cloud everything these days and it has very little to do with Windows on the desktop.
Over the past decade that Windows desktop has largely been stagnant as a business, their total sales have gone from $78 billion to $218 billion. Operating income was stuck for 6-7 years in the ~$14-$22 billion range (the later Ballmer stagnation years), until after 2015. They'll cross $100+ billion in operating income over the next four quarters. All of that leap has happened from 2016 to now and basically none of it has to do with consumer Windows.
> Microsoft's booming business numbers would like to have a discussion.
My gut feeling is Microsoft is making money by moving old Active Directory servers into their own cloud offering, Azure. Their revenue is booming because they make more money from hosting a server than selling a Windows / MSSQL / Exchange licence that runs on someone elses hardware. To give them their due, they do it well, facilitating a smooth transition that allows you to move one machine at a time into the cloud, while the patient is still going about their normal business.
That's all well and good, but it doesn't mean the proportion of people / businesses out there running Microsoft software is growing. Maybe it's dropping? I don't know. But if it is dropping, it's going to come to an ugly end in a few decades time.
Fair enough. They got in to the cloud business. Substantially behind AWS but ahead of Google Cloud. So I'll grant them that, which is good since "consumer Windows" is probably the fastest shrinking market in computing.
yeah with the Jedi defence contract who knows how MS is actually making money. MS making money is NOT necessarily a good thing for users or their own share holders.
And thanks to the Steam Deck and the damage that is doing to the last bastion of Window supremacy in gaming, they may not have that much longer either.
I mean, would you rather have an OS that turns your computer into a personal space invasion device that helps a multi-trillion dollar megalith monetize your every breath while consuming a huge portion of the performance of your $1,000 personal computer, or would you rather have a lightweight customizable OS that only does what you tell it to do, doesn't cost you anything, and can do almost everything that the other guy can do just as well for free with no tracking?
Sadly a lot of people "rather" have the former. Of course MS does everything in their power that these people don't know better or don't have the option to select the latter.
MS has always been about forcing subpar tech with shady tactics, and they are very good at it.
Regarding your last point: I've (finally!) switched from Windows to Linux last year. I have, however, decided to set up a dual boot system, and have installed Linux first. Worked just fine.
Just remember to install Linux AFTER Windows, or unplug your Linux drive when installing Windows, because MS does not play nice with including other OSes in their bootloader; you're gonna have to mess with your UEFI boot order or add the Windows boot to GRUB after the fact.
I agree that it should be enough. On my setup using the UEFI boot manager is much more annoying than it should be, though.
I have configured password protection for my UEFI settings (so that a potential attacker could not easily disable Secure Boot, for example) and GIGABYTE's UEFI implementation requires that password for the boot manager as well. In other words, when booting using this setup, I need up to three passwords: 1. UEFI password, 2. Disk encryption password, 3. User password.
Hence I use systemd-boot to set BootNext and reboot into the Windows boot loader.
Another reason for having a bootloader is that you may have more entries than the built-in manager can handle, for example if you can boot into automatic snapshots.
I think parents point still stand. Windows overwrites any boot related stuff to use it's own. You need to either install X after Windows, or disconnect the proper boot drive when installing Windows, otherwise your system will just boot Windows directly.
All Windows does it set itself first in the boot order whenever you start it. What happened to pressing F9 during POST to open the boot menu? Is that too advanced for people that are dual-booting different operating systems?
Each operating system has its files in their respective directories on ESP, and each operating system registers its own boot entries pointing to bootloader in these directories. With UEFI, there's nothing to overwrite, except setting the default entry.
That's not an issue, since you can both easily boot non-default entries and change, what the default entry is.
No it doesn't REMOVE the Linux's UEFI partition or files on the drive, but it sets itself to #1 in your UEFI boot list. And since their installer does not add other OSes to the Windows bootloader automatically, you have to either change your UEFI settings or your Windows BOOT.INI (for Windows MBR setups)
Depending on your hardware UEFI boot manager can be a PITA. I have a Dell one where a normal boot to grub/sd-boot takes 5s. But if I want to go to the uefi boot menu for some reason it takes 30+ seconds and from what I can observe, an intermediary reboot. And I end up in some monstrous UEFI GUI with an abysmal mouse cursor behaviour.
Because GRUB still ships with the vast majority of Linux distros, and not every UEFI implementation is good about asking which image you want to load every time you boot.
Nitpicking on dual boot. I just went ahead and got myself a system76 laptop. All Linux, no whiff of msft on it. Works awesome.
You don’t need a dual boot. You don’t need windows today. In a sense that’s what the Halloween papers predicted. I don’t have a single windows device. Apple for phones and work laptop, system76 for home laptop.
I haven't used windows or even came in contact with it for a long while :)
IMO the dual boot example just shows how little they actually care and always cared.
However my whole family is on linux only and on the rare occasion where they need to run some weird software they prefer dual boot to VM, because easier or because old machine.
I have both GRUB and Windows Boot Loader available on my PC, installed Linux first, GRUB even auto-detected the Windows partition without any additional setup
That doesn't make any sense. If you installed Linux first, there would be no Windows partition for GRUB to autodetect when it was set up. And GRUB doesn't probe for operating systems automatically on boot, only when you run "update-grub" from inside a running Linux OS, so it wouldn't magically fix itself once you did install Windows. And besides, the fact that we are talking about GRUB autodetecting things, not Windows Boot Loader, only proves the parent's point.
This is what worked on my laptop with one drive: I installed Fedora. Before rebooting I used GParted to resize the disk creating space for a Windows partition. After that I rebooted and installed Windows on the new empty partition. Done.
With MBR (master boot record) partitioning, Windows had to be on a primary partition, and it was only possible to have four of them. Linux could be installed to a primary or extended partition, of which there could be more.
As far as I know the order never actually mattered as long as Windows could have a primary partition. The newer GPT system doesn't have such a distinction or low limits (Windows is limited to 128 partitions per disk; I think Linux can handle more).
With UEFI, it is easy; each operating system has it's own bootloader in its own directory in ESP, and the UEFI itself contains boot manager, so you can boot whatever you want. It just doesn't show menu by default like grub does, you have to press a key to show the menu. That's about the difference.
If you install LLM stuff or the relatively stable atom clone vscode. You are seeing dependencies that are also maintained by Microsoft.
No issue so far, except when you run a bleeding edge system and realize that all required M$ libs are outdated and either you downgrade or can't use that tool that has that single M$ made python dependency that won't build on a modern system...
More often than not the dependency issue was already reported months ago on their issue tracker, many people put their thumbs up and someone already wrote a patch. No active maintainer to comment, merge and release tho. This is exactly how we don't want our libs managed.
You can run linux on Windows but still can't install a dual boot system with Linux first. IMO that says it all