Unless you are strictly talking next quarter's immediate profits/stock price, this is just bad for Microsoft. They are sabotaging their already anticompetitive golden goose.

Late Stage Capitalism dictates they'd try to keep their lock-in, but this is more executive dysfunction.

Yeah. But the barrier of installing linux makes that a kind of non-concern now, they can only change so much without breaking Win32.

It'd be hilarious if Windows shrinks and Wine/Proton become the de facto dev target on linux (which is honestly where things are headed now).

They could keep on developing updates to DirectX and whatever frameworks/libraries CAD software and the like might need. Keep the UI as is, but as 3rd party developers use the new APIs, Wine needs to adapt continuously.

Yes, ‘enthusiasts’ are going Linux but they are a rounding error, hardly worth trying to capture compared to the revenue capture from the rest of the market.

Agreed, it's a rounding error.

But it won't be if OEMs get fed up and start shipping it as an option, like Valve is already doing.

Microsoft has already done some questionably 'OEM hostile' things like pushing the Surface line, shutting out some OEM bloatware in favor of thier own, pollute performance-sensitive devices like handhelds, and such, and it seems MS isn't slowing down.

95, 98, xp, and 7 were all great; each improved on the last. But 7 was the true peak. 10 was pretty good and unfortunately was the turning point into enshitification.

Is it though? From a privacy perspective I think Windows 10 quite clearly started introducing some shady surveillance practices which were absent in earlier versions. Of course, 11 took that waaay further, but 10 was a turning point imo.

I think it's a hard case to make that 7 wasn't objectively better than XP.

Windows 10 did roll back some of the more egregious stuff from Windows 8, but still was sort of committed, sort of not. You had a platform with multiple personalities, multiple right click context menus, multiple 'control panel' with a new one being emphasized, but not actually completed, so it's an awkward mix of the platform they had suceeded with and a platform they wished it could be (combined with telemetry). Forced microsoft accounts and using the desktop as a platform to promote products and services....

Yeah I think a fair argument can be made that WIndows 7 was the ultimate execution of the general vision that started with Windows NT, and what came after was something else that also happened to have bits of that original product hanging on.

I'm not too terribly excited by any Windows in particular, but I can recognize something categorically different they wanted to do starting with 8 that remains partially executed to this day, starts to emphasize Microsoft's interests at the expense of the users, and a direction that no one really asked for.

Nah. XP was huge when it came out because NT was so much smoother and more stable than the Windows 9x product line: it was nearly as stable as 2000 with a more modern DE than Windows 95-ME.

But Windows 7 did everything XP did bigger and better. It’s no shocker that all the Windows-like Linux DEs look like forks of Widows 7.

As a programmer, my world changed when Windows 95 came out, what with being 32-bit and having an extremely powerful (if difficult-to-use at first) low-level audio API, since I mainly wrote software synthesis and music composition apps. I have not given two fucks for anything that has happened since 95. Quite amazingly, that audio API has remained in existence, unchanged, all the way until today. 30 years of not having to change what I'm doing at all has been absolutely amazing. That shit even worked, without modification, for Windows CE (Compact Edition) and Windows Mobile, so I was able to make versions of my software synthesizer that ran on shitty smartphones from 2005. It worked on Windows Phone as well, albeit it quite uselessly.

I've got Windows installed on a separate drive in case I wanna play Forza Horizon 5 (which I stupidly bought on Microsoft store because stepdad had an Xbox at the time and it was nice to be able to play on that as well when I was visiting - now even he moved to PS5). I haven't booted it in over half a year despite missing the game at times. If it was Windows 7, I'd probably boot every now and then.

At this point I've forgotten if I have Windows 10 or 11. Chances are I did some enterprise version of one of them to get longer support, as I did the OS install like 8 or 9 months ago.

In a way you can. Install ZorinOS or Linux Mint. Add WINE, and you can set wine to "emulate" an version of Windows. I was using it to run some old engineering program and WinAmp

I agree. This is why I think literally all software should be FLOSS. People should be able to use a platform as long as they like on their own hardware.

They tried going tablet/mobile-first with 8. I don't know if they want to try again so soon. But I mean it's Microsoft.

Hell, maybe they'll use their experience with WSL to get Android apps working on Windows, solve the problem they had with Windows Phone. Fuck I miss Windows Phone. I never had one, but it looked so cool with the squares. Unlike desktop Windows, where it looked like shit.

I think about that joke all the time, good ol' CEMENT

ME was crashing by the phases of the moon or if you hit the keyboard too fast.

Had ME on my home computer. I could had installed 98 but thought ME was newer than 98 so must be better (wrong). But nothing was lost when crashed, you reboot and could start over in no time.

Probably a hammer with nails sticking out of the handle.

Windows actually migrated to the NT kernel when XP launched - AFAIK, ME was a dead end.

Oh shit.

I didn't even notice.

First I forgot about Dre and now I forgot about windows 95. Smh my head.

Or a jack-in-the-box. You crank the lever hoping it'll work this time around, and *BLAM*: BSOD.

Yea, I can never forget this logo

The slowly boiling pot.

I've never used Windows as my main machine, but even before WINE/Proton were as mature as they are now, I never did personal or important work on my Windows installation. It might seem silly to care that Windows was sending back system specs in Win98(or earlier?), but it did it without asking or even informing. It was just such a huge sign of disrespect to the end user and Microsoft has only doubled down on that disrespect for the end user.