Quoting: m2mg2

Quoting: mylkamaybe microsoft knows, that the desktop market is shrinking. mobilphones are the future and ms has no chance against android and apple. not tomorrow of course, but can you imagine what phones can do in 10 years? 10yrs agao we played snakes and now fortnite. in 10yrs we may have a complete office PC on our phones and tablets
even we gamers are a very small market compared to consoles. PS4 has way more sellings than pc games. so who needs a desktop OS in 10yrs?

cloud is the future. maybe cloudgaming and servers have linux. all you need is a tablet and a bluetooth gamepad to play cyberpunk... or a switch and you can play everywhere
even smart tvs could handle streaming. you don't even need a console anymore

Cloud is just a catch phrase. It is nothing new, just extending your local network into the internet. Offloading your management and hardware overhead by sacrificing security. I'm constantly amazed by how much worse the breaches keep getting while simultaneously the push for the cloud, the very thing enabling these massive breaches, keeps getting pushed harder. I had a vendor that was quoting a job for me say, "yeah but they're really getting better with the cloud security". Um, no they're not, not really. The breaches are still getting bigger and bigger. The guys keeping their LAN's local and secure keep sitting back laughing at all the breaches, until the executives force "the cloud" down their throats. Then they sit back and wait for the walls to cave in.

The cloud is great for things that need to be on the internet (internet services) and horrible for things that don't.

Urgh, tell me about it. At my library we got a new system for all our info, and it's in the bloody cloud. So where it used to be if we checked out a book the reaction was instant, because the database was in the buiding, now there's a couple seconds lag on every single action because we're in Vancouver and the server is in bloody Toronto. It's also browser based, and the people who wrote it cunningly set it up so that if you open a new tab to do two things at once with it, your actions on the two tabs write to both or something so it corrupts your data. So we can't do that. And it breaks if you use browser controls like the reload or back button, you have to use their little "back" control instead, which varies its position depending how the browser is laying out the page. Has all the disadvantages of a web app but few of the advantages. But, you know, web apps and the cloud are fashionable. Gah.

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Quoting: mylka

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: mylkamaybe microsoft knows, that the desktop market is shrinking. mobilphones are the future and ms has no chance against android and apple. not tomorrow of course, but can you imagine what phones can do in 10 years?

Have tiny screens? Oh wait, they already do that.

The barrier for phones eating the rest of the desktop market is not mostly things like processing power; they're already powerful computers by the standards of not too many years ago, and anyway you can outsource computing power. It's the form factor itself; there are things for which you want the bulk of a desktop--the big screen or two, the comfortable keyboard, the many connections for peripherals and so on. Note the way tablets ended up having all these things to let them act like laptops you put together, with little keyboards and thingies to make the screen sit up.

big screen -> glasses, like VR now but smaller. OR foldable OLED displays
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo6nF-T58PA [External Link]
keyboard -> special gloves, or laserkeyboards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3P5DZvn7mA [External Link]
peripherie -> all wireless

All that will doubtless happen, but look: Our perception of the rise of the phone and the fall of the desktop is shaped by markets. But that's about the pace of sales. In terms of actual use, there aren't a lot of places where there used to be desktops but they stopped using them in favour of phones. It's just that the market for desktops got saturated and planned obsolescence for them has weakened (who needs the latest and greatest to do spreadsheets at work?), while phones established a big new niche of their own and have so far been hanging on to planned obsolescence like grim death. So, sales of phones have grown and sales of desktops have shrunk. But the two things don't in my opinion have nearly as much to do with each other as people tend to think. It's just that desktops are a mature technology, not a new growing one.
So, sure, those snazzy technologies of which you speak will put in an appearance, phones will become cooler and more powerful . . . and people will continue to use desktop computers.

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Quoting: mylkamaybe microsoft knows, that the desktop market is shrinking. mobilphones are the future and ms has no chance against android and apple. not tomorrow of course, but can you imagine what phones can do in 10 years?

Have tiny screens? Oh wait, they already do that.

The barrier for phones eating the rest of the desktop market is not mostly things like processing power; they're already powerful computers by the standards of not too many years ago, and anyway you can outsource computing power. It's the form factor itself; there are things for which you want the bulk of a desktop--the big screen or two, the comfortable keyboard, the many connections for peripherals and so on. Note the way tablets ended up having all these things to let them act like laptops you put together, with little keyboards and thingies to make the screen sit up.

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Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: GuestI expect them to turn Windows into a Linux distro + proprietary libraries/API/DE at some point. It will be cheaper for them to maintain, will be able to enter most markets Windows can't enter/dominate now, like mobiles/servers, and will still allow them to be top dog, assuming they create a good and polished Linux based desktop OS and make linux-compatible versions of their stuff like Office...

Man if Windows becomes a Linux distro it's going to become tricky telling people they should switch to Linux.

Tricky but in some ways easier. I mean, if you're going to be running Linux anyway, why not use the real thing? If you're going to be using Linux anyway, why not one without spyware, one that doesn't lock you down, one that isn't trying to turn you into an integrated sales bundle, one that doesn't constantly give you a hard time for not making its browser your main one, et cetera et cetera et cetera?
Instead of it being a matter of Windows (familiar, "reliable" in a certain emotional sense, runs the software you use where other OSes maybe don't) vs. Linux (strange, different, might not run your software, might have device driver problems)--suddenly Windows would be just another Linux distribution, the one sold by a bunch of corporate greedheads who can't resist screwing with you.

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Quoting: jensI'm pretty sure that this is just a rationale long term business decision and that there is no huge conspiracy behind it.

You're probably right. Now if only I were clear on the exact difference between those two things.

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Quoting: razing32Like jarhead_h mentioned , the CoC Linux added seems to value politics over code quality.

Oh, god, let's not get into that again.

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I'm really not sure what to make of this. Some of the suggestions about what Microsoft might be up to that's nefarious make some sense, but others seem a bit unrealistic. Maybe they do have plans to reduce "Windows" to basically a desktop environment a la KDE or Gnome running on top of Linux. And OK, maybe their cloud server business is really so big now, or big enough and so fashionable inside the company (the sexiest department often gets its way) that they're just doing this because they really want to be Linux citizens. Or maybe they'll just not attack Linux with patents themselves, but somehow lend their patents to trolls who will. Maybe maybe maybe.

But none of the takes on it really feels solid to me, I'm quite nonplussed.

One thing I will say: If they are planning something nefarious with this move, I'm not convinced it will work the way whoever is planning it thinks it will. MS have never really wrapped their heads around how Free Software, the GPL etc. work and their plans to mess with it have never to date been entirely effective. They always seem to underestimate or misunderstand Open's ability to work around Closed. I don't see why this time would be different.

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Well, my lid is officially flipped.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: GuestI still think Valve should release a SteamOS/Linux exclusive title, say, for a month, before hitting losedoze. If you want to play it within the first month you'll have to do it on SteamOS/Linux. Would shake things up a bit for sure.

More than anything, it would be a shot across the bow that doesn't just threaten the Windows/Microsoft Store's potential monopoly, but would threaten Windows' existing monopoly itself if any AAA title was a SteamOS/Linux exclusive.

Granted, I know most people hate platform/OS exclusives. But literally everyone else has done it except SteamOS/Linux (ok, excluding the small FOSS games out there). What better way to show the market potential; or better, to show that for many gamers, there's no such thing as platform/OS loyalty if there's an awesome game out there to be played.

Fairly soon, there'll be a day where enough devs use cross-platform tools and APIs. Compilers and Debuggers will work the same for all targeted platforms, API calls work the same across all platforms (Vulkan<3<3<3). Middleware won't rely on some archaic, unstable and proprietary framework that is only supported on the big OS.

We're not there yet, and have a ways to go. But look at how far we've come?

Valve wont do that thought the bigger market by far is on the windows platform they would lose so much money making a big game like half life 3 linux exclusive. The issue is if they did that you would get a bunch of dual booters the majority of which would ditch linux as soon as they finish the game.

Well, yeah . . . but they'd be sort of acclimatized. They might keep the Linux partition around in case of another exclusive. And then, they might use Linux to browse for a bit next time Windows did something annoying. And then, who knows? After a while they might notice Linux was better.

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Mind you, I have to admit there's something fitting about Microsoft owning Tyranny.

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