World hunger can't be cured for profit. The hunger of the many is directly caused by the greed of the few.
But I'd love to see them try of course. The billions Musk has evaporated with his purchase could've also been spent less egotistically.
Windows can definitely be a nuisance these days especially during the setup. But you mention a key aspect at the end. Touch-based devices these days are super intuitive compared to what we've grown accustomed to on our desktops for decades. And they aren't just miniature PCs anymore, they can do all the same stuff, regardless of whether they're actually being used for the same things we associate with desktop-work.
Linux has a huge userbase in the form of Android and therein virtually no entry-barrier or learning-curve to speak of. I feel that that's where we need to go. Mac OS is already there. Windows is just living and breathing off the fact that its market share was once virtually 100%. I think a good example of what I mean is how Valve are leveraging Linux on their Steam Deck. It's still intimidating when you switch over to the KDE desktop, but as a regular ~~user~~ gamer you won't ever need to. Everything this device has been built to do can be done in a tailor-made UI for its purpose. Or think ChromeOS. I can install a virtual Debian beneath ChromeOS if I want more control over what I can install but other than that the OS is dead simple to use.
Linux deserves mass adoption but it needs to think user experience first just like the big corporations do. I firmly believe that that's possible even when the big bucks aren't being thrown around.
I have a middle aged customer who is legitimately using Mint on one of those old Athlons today in 2024 for her day to day. There literally is no reason for her to upgrade hardware unless her usecases evolve into something more demanding.
I agree Linux is a lot more accessible than it used to be, but if I understand you correctly the people you helped transition still needed at least some initial holding of their hands. If for example you buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled that initial hurdle could be cleared but I still believe there's a learning curve at least as steep as it would be for someone learning Windows for the first time. The difference being that everything out there takes Windows into account.
If you just wana surf the web Linux can probably be as easy as ChromeOS these days but that isn't really a usecase where operating systems can make a difference one way or the other.
Is that an Enterprise version at work? I mean even if you pause updates for as long as they allow you to on consumer versions, at some point you do have to do it. I do get nagged on one of my installations but not on my main one. Both Windows 10.
I was planning to transition to Linux completely by this autumn but laziness strikes as per. I guess autumn 2025 is the new deadline now.
I didn't understand the "forced upgrade" argument until now. Yea I guess you're right, at some point you have to do updates (they nag about upgrading to 11 but you can skip that indefinitely). But with how popular Windows is you have options for a lot of problems (including forced updates which to be fair shouldn't be ignored when it comes to security patches).
If you open up Chris Titus Tech's Windows Utility (https://christitus.com/windows-tool/) you basically have a comprehensive list of all the ameliorations one could ever want at their disposal. That's really the main thing Windows still has going for it, it's a decades-long mainstay which means there are plenty of knowledgable people out there who know how it can be made to heel even if Microsoft decide to force a Microsoft account on you, telemetry, whatever it may be, there will probably always be a way around it.
For example one of my main gripes with Windows 11 is how you can't make the taskbar show all tray icons anymore by default. They removed window titles in the taskbar so now everything is basically a square down there meaning there's all this empty space between my open windows and the tray. But of course someone out there has written a program to automatically unhide all tray icons and thrown it on GitHub.
To me personally it doesn't matter how crappy the design choices are as long as they can be mitigated. If bad corporate decisionmaking is a dealbreaker (which is also a fair assessment) then you have to ditch the corporation entirely and go Linux or what have you. Not trying to be smart or anything but there really is no reason to stay on Windows left anymore. Maybe if you absolutely need Microsoft Office or something but ever since Proton came out the issue with Windows-only games has pretty much evaporated.
Switching to Linux without prior experience will challenge even the most tech-savvy, but it's an investment worth making many times over.
Do Apple still sell Music in that app?
I wouldn't even know how to hold a local music library on macOS these days. The app that used to be iTunes is now just called Music right? It's way confusing for me but I also don't daily drive the OS anymore. I have my stagnant library in Subsonic which in itself is a stagnant product but you know how it is with Spotify these days.
I didn't know MOV has a more accessible license than MP4 but yea MP4 in itself is hardly what one ever wanted to hold their content in. All I know about MOV is that back in the XP days obviously Windows couldn't play them out of the box. Not that WMV (lol) was any more desirable. I guess most of my stuff back then was AVI.
Yea ... no, sorry to say but this one's on Microsoft. I get it, hurr durr Apple expensive and elitist, but they know where to put up their walled garden and where not to. For example they used to have their own video container .mov but they're way past forcing something like that onto iPhone users. And even back then, the actual codec they committed themselves to in those days was H.264, a standard that's open to adoption by anybody. You can easily turn an old .mov into an .mp4 or .mkv without needing to alter the actual content of the file and that content is playable by pretty much every media device built in the last 15+ years.
HEIC isn't Apple's thing it's from the MPEGroup, also easily licensable by anybody. I guess the reason why it wasn't part of Windows 10 from the beginning is because they both came out in mid 2015. Windows 10 seems to have adopted it for viewing (and later editing) in 2018 but they make you hit a stupid download button in their store to get it so that's lame.
What if they meant DC.
I used Nextcloud for both files and my PortableApps for years but it always had a hard time managing all those tens of thousands of small files. Lots of sync overhead. So I found Seafile and couldn't be happier. I don't just have my PortableApps in there now, I sync my Windows Documents, Pictures, Videos and Downloads folders. Seafile is very good at tracking partial changes in files so it doesn't always need to sync an entire file when just part of it changed.
Also: It's just a file sync service without any auxiliary features.
Basically the only answer that takes the question seriously and brings facts to the table instead of an opinion.
This is the only take based in reality. Nobody (except us) cares about openness, federation or business models. What matters are ease of use and adoption.
Of course that doesn't mean that the other takes are missing the mark in terms of history possibly repeating itself in the future. But if it does, that just means that (as is to be expected) the people don't make momentary decisions with a bigger (collective) picture in mind. Design needs to address individual needs first and foremost especially when it comes to social media.
Nobody joins a platform to beat corporate ownership of people's digital lives. BlueSky manufactured adoption by starting out as an invite-only cool kids club. Having to pick a fediverse instance is an entry barrier. There will always be a lot less money to throw around when you're trying to create something under the umbrella of freedom and openness. I don't see how these movements could ever win, even if they provide an arguably better product.