It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it (Excel 2010 is the last version that has Platinum status). It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.
> It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.
Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output. MS Office is using every single corner of Windows: every feature in the XML libraries, tons of .NET type stuff, all the OLE and COM and typelib and compound storage features, tons of Explorer integrations, auto-updating stuff via Windows patching mechanisms... there's almost no corner of the Windows OS that MS Office doesn't use.
Outlook is now basically an Electron app, they've deprecated the old desktop Outlook in favor of a port of the web app to desktop, so it's basically just Excel remaining.
Yeah, that's because Microsoft can see the writing on the wall. They don't want Windows to die, but they know the whole OS is at a point where it's probably inevitable that it will.
Developers don't want to use Windows anymore. They all want to run Linux because servers do. Ballmer was right about one thing: It was about the developers.
Microsoft can't compete with Chrome at the K-12 level. A Chromebook is a fraction of the cost at twice the runtime, so nobody is going to learn Windows growing up. There won't be a generation of new ready-trained Microsoft consumers every year.
And the average consumer? Oh, they're running an iPhone and maybe an iPad that's it. If Apple were really smart they'd have released an iPhone screencast dock, but Apple still thinks the iPhone doesn't need multiple user profiles. However, even with Apple's stupid behavior, they're losing their core consumer audience.
Steam is tired of Microsoft, too, so they're pushing for compatibility. Video games are either cross platform, console exclusive, or easy enough to emulate. If nVidia's graphics drivers weren't so proprietary, it wouldn't be nearly as difficult.
The big holdouts are the same people that kept COBOL a live programming language in the 21st century: The business office folks.
Microsoft has missed the boat on smartphones, tablets, budget laptops, smart TVs, video game consoles (which is a little surprising), server-side infrastructure, development, and now AI. Their market prospects right now are Millenials and older that don't want change, people who need exactly Excel or Outlook, and PC video gamers that aren't interested in change. Their best product is VS Code and it's free, their second best product (SQL Server) is pricing people out, and their third best product (.Net) is also free.
At this point I think they're mainly hoping Adobe doesn't jump ship.
I've been programming just since ~2010, but I've only ever saw majority prefer macs due to hardware (with exception being late intel macs) and linux on the regular PCs.
With exception of game devs, I've not seen person who _happily_ defaults to windows, not due to fact that they have to because of company policy or because company is too cheap for an Apple device.
Yes, developers used to like Microsoft. That was where all the money was, and Visual Studio was an extremely good IDE in the late 90s and early 2000s. And at the time, Microsoft's documentation was the best. C++, VB, and then .Net development combined with Sql Server (then a budget option) was a very enticing stack. Using ASP instead of Perl or ColdFusion or PHP was also attractive.
At the time Mac was still largely dominated by PowerPC and Classic OS. And Linux was still seen as an OS for hobbyists and universities. It was not taken seriously until well into the 00s and the 2.4 kernel. Sun was struggling with Java, and the unices were well into their decline from the 80s.
I would say that the transition was how much better Apache was than IIS when it came to operational and security issues.
If the Electron app is pure JS with no native extensions it can be doable. However, many Electron apps contain platform-specific js code, since features for stuff like Dock on Mac and Taskbar icons on Windows differ. Electron apps like Notion also contain native extensions - compiled C/C++/Objective-C code that are platform specific. For example in Notion, we use sqlite via better-sqlite3 (potentially replaceable since it’s open source, but will need more work than “just” repackaging js), but we also write our own native support libraries to use OS-specific APIs for microphone recording in meeting notes feature.
> Could it be possible to make the relatively new AI meeting notes feature to work?
> Right now I get the following error when I click the "start transcribing" button:
Error occurred in handler for 'notion:get-media-access-status': TypeError: s.systemPreferences.getMediaAccessStatus is not a function
at /usr/lib/notion-app/app.asar/.webpack/main/index.js:2:631015
at WebContents.<anonymous> (node:electron/js2c/browser_init:2:87444)
at WebContents.emit (node:events:524:28)
Not my area of expertise so I could be wrong but Electron apps just use Chromium underneath (which already works on linux), so in theory it should be easier to get them running on linux than a native Windows app
Electron is basically just a GUI framework. The application itself can be arbitrarily complicated, nothing stops you from building a Java + .NET + C++&COM app that includes three Windows Services that interfaces with the Electron runtime just for UI.
Having worked in non-swe enterprise for two decades I would argue that this is less true today than it was 10 years ago. It used to be that new hires would come with a basic knowledge of windows and office, but that's no longer the case. At the same time, you have things like Smartsheets and so on, which are more popular, at least with our employees, than Excel and everyone seems to hate Outlook these days. I don't think it was ever really the case though. What Microsoft sells to enterprise is governance, and they really don't have any competition in this area.
Being in the European energy sector we're naturally looking into how we can replace every US tech product with an EU/FOSS one. It's actually relatively easy to buy the 365 experience through consultants which will setup a NextCloud, Libre/Only Office, Proton and a teams replacement I can't for the life of me remember the name of. Beneath it there is a mix of Identity Management systems, often based around Keycloak, at least for now. It works, from what we've seen in Germany (specificlaly with their military) it's also possible to roll it out relatively quickly. It's all the "other" stuff that gets murky. There isn't a real alternative to AD/Entra, yet, from a governance perspective. There are great tech solutions which does the same thing, but they require a lot of IT man hours. Something the public sector is always going to be more willing to deal with than the private sector. If we collectively decided that trains in Denmark should be free for passengers, then that would happen. You can't do that in a private business, though security obviously does factor into it.
This is the general story really. Microsoft's copilot studio is relatively new, and it's probably been flying under the radar in a lot of tech circles because it's basically what power automate always wished it could be. Having used it to build a HR flow, where an AI model will receive the applications, read them, auto-reply to irrelevant ones, create a teams site with files and the relevant people for the relevant applications, and invite the applicant to their first appointment. Well... I gotta say that I'm not sure what we have that's an alternative to that. It took me a couple of hours to build it, and it frankly works better than I thought it would. Granted, I did know the tool because I had previously done a PoC where I build a teams agent which "took over" my teams interactions. Everyone noticed because it spelled correctly and wasn't capable of posting Warhammer 40k ORK meme's in any form of quality, but it was frightenly easy. What Microsoft sells in this area is again the governance of it all. You can do these things because of how EntraID lets you connect services seamlessly with a few clicks. While behind the scenes all of those clicks are only available to you because your IT department control them... Again... without hundreds of manhours.
I'm sure we'll eventually get there, but it'll likely come down to change management. Because even if you're willing to retrain your IT operations crew, it's not likely that they will want to leave the Microsoft world where they are well paid and job-secure. Well, maybe I'm in a cheese bell, but I've never met an Azure/Microsoft IT person who would want to work with something else, and having been forced to work a little bit with it behind the scenes, I sort of get it... well not really.
Which boils down to why Microsoft has always been good with enterprise customers. The decision makers in your organisation will listen to everything, but their own IT departments will often sort of automatically recommend Microsoft products and at the end of the day, it'll all boil down to risk. Which is what Microsoft really sells... risk-mitigation. Sure their licenses are expensive, but is it really more expensive than losing your entire IT staff? (this isn't an actual question I'm asking, it's what goes through the considerations.)
This probably reflects my own prejudices, but it always struck me that MS based IT people wouldn’t work with anything else, basically because they couldn’t.
That stack optimises for not really having to understand what you’re doing, but also avoiding any major foot guns (and having the general arse covering that buying IBM used to provide, but which MS now does). The price you pay is that everything is horrible to work with. But if the alternative is not really being able to get anything done at all then so be it?
The Windows ecosystem does a lot of things that, to me, as a Linux/MacOS user, seem like a weird bunch of crazy decisions that are different just because.
Whether that's true or not, it does mean that a lot of people who came up on Windows IT don't have a mental framework for how to run or manage Linux systems. Likewise, when I'm trying to diagnose something on Windows it just seems like the entire thing is a disaster; where are event logs? In the event viewer! How do I filter them? It's a mess! Can I search them? Kind of! Do they have information to help me diagnose the problem? Almost never!
On Linux, I know all the tools I need to solve all the problems that come up; on Windows, I have only minimal concept of how things work, and very little way to diagnose or debug them when they go wrong, which is often.
For example, when my Windows gaming machine comes out of hibernation my ethernet controller insists that there's no connection. I can't convince it otherwise except by disabling the device and re-enabling it. I can't figure out where I might find information that tells me why this is happening, so I just wrote a powershell script to turn it off and then on again. I bet some Windows IT dork could figure it out in 30 seconds, but I'm a Linux IT dork and I have no clue.
> For example, when my Windows gaming machine comes out of hibernation my ethernet controller insists that there's no connection. I can't convince it otherwise except by disabling the device and re-enabling it. I can't figure out where I might find information that tells me why this is happening, so I just wrote a powershell script to turn it off and then on again. I bet some Windows IT dork could figure it out in 30 seconds
Windows and Linux dork here (heh). It has to do with how various computer manufacturers implemented the Sleep/Standby State (S3/S4), how they've resisted implementing a common standard at the hardware level, and how Microsoft eventually gave up arguing and patched around it with their own Modern Standby system in the S0 state.
Tbh, though, the only computer I've ever seen Hibernate work well on are Macs. Every x86 computer usually has some sort of issue with it, except for maybe business laptop models (eg HP's Elitebook line).
> Tbh, though, the only computer I've ever seen Hibernate work well on are Macs. Every x86 computer usually has some sort of issue with it, except for maybe business laptop models (eg HP's Elitebook line).
This has always been my experience, going back I'd say at least to the early 2000s on cheap laptops, and all the way back to the earliest days of sleep and hibernate on desktops, where sleep just doesn't matter that much.
When I started dabbling in boot code around 2006, I read a bunch of the specs and one of them was ACPI, which I only scratched the surface of.
I think until then it had just not occurred to me that a modern paged protected OS would even want to call into any code supplied with the computer, vs. having it come from a driver disk, or be built in to the kernel where everyone can see it.
The whole idea of a bytecode interpreter running random code supplied by a fly-by-night system builder is a little unsettling.
All that law says is that the applicant 'shall have the right to obtain from the deployer clear and meaningful explanations of the role of the AI system in the decision-making procedure and the main elements of the decision taken.'
And even then, only if a job application rejection 'produces legal effects or similarly significantly affects that person in a way that they consider to have an adverse impact on their health, safety or fundamental rights'.
So as long as the company is recording the decisions taken and the reasons for those decisions, and providing those to candidates on request, they're in the clear.
If they're using a LLM to make those decisions, then they're fundamentally unable to provide the reasons for those decisions, because of how LLMs work.
Not to mention you can't trust that the AI is actually filtering out applications properly. I've run into that myself when I was responsible for hiring at my last role. The AI solution my boss insisted we use was awful. It highly rated completely unqualified applicants and ignored the few good ones.
> Which is what Microsoft really sells... risk-mitigation. Sure their licenses are expensive, but is it really more expensive than losing your entire IT staff?
There's an old saying in IT that was pretty popular in the 70s and 80s: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
You're onto something but that's not entirely true for all games. There's plenty of vintage games, made before DirectX standardized everything into the late 90s, that don't work well under wine because back in their day, they would try to bypass windows by "hacking" their way to the hardware via unsupported APIs and hooks, to squeeze every bit of performance from the hardware, and also because every hardware vendor back then from graphics to sound shipped their own APIs.
90s Windows ran inside of DOS, and you can run e.g. Windows 98 games (through Windows itself) in DOSBox. Look up exowin9x where they're trying to compile all of the necessary configs for one-click launchers.
I tried running the elder scrolls Redguard, on wine, which launches windows version of dosbox with glide support. Redguard is a weird beast which is installed only with windows installer, but the actual game runs in dos mode
Everything works but the frame rate isn't great
If anyone knows a good Redguard setup for Linux please mail me, you can guess my mail easily. Now I just run the gog version
So that's what's keeping Microsoft from just running WINE on an MS-flavored Linux or perhaps a clean slate kernel as their next OS. I've been wondering for a while, this is by far the best explanation.
The Windows Kernel (and arguably the Windows APIs) are the only good part of Windows; they should dump everything else and run Linux above it; wait they did do that and then changed it to a boring VM.
I was disappointed when Microsoft dropped original WSL.
I'll admit I wasn't a Windows user at the time, nor since for that matter. But I had been before.
I knew the history of the "Windows Services for UNIX" and thought that it was incredibly interesting to have the Windows kernel, full driver support, NTFS, and the ability to just use Windows normally, but also be able to just do UNIX-type stuff more or less normally.
Which is what I've been doing on my Mac since the early 2000s.
Then Microsoft had to make Windows a complete shit-show. Not like it hasn't happened before, but they really got themselves in deep this time.
For games, part of that mere „output” is 3d graphics, so replicating the internals of Direct 3D exactly right and getting the Linux GPU drivers to cooperate. That’s a hardcore task.
Yeah but Windows is a more stable api to develop against than Linux (at least when it comes to stuff that games need to do) - it doesn't feel "pure", but pragmatically it's much better as a game developer to just make sure the Windows version works with proton than it is to develop a native Linux version that's liable to break the second you stop maintaining it.
Yes, they are easy to port a lot of the time. Especially now because you can use DXVK to translate DirectX calls into Vulkan, so you don't need to write a Vulkan renderer. Input is sometimes a trickier one to deal with but a lot of the time games are using cross-platform libraries for that already!
Despite all this the Unity engine has spotty Linux support. Some games run better under Wine vs. Unity's native Linux builds. It's Vulkan renderer has had a memory leak for a while now. Input has randomly decided to double keypresses on some distros.
The hard part of Linux ports isn't the first 90% (Using the Linux APIs). It's the second 90%.
Platform bugs, build issues, distro differences, implicitly relying on behavior of Windows. It's not just "use Linux API", there's a lot of effort to ship properly. Lots of effort for a tiny user base. There's more users now, but proton is probably a better target than native Linux for games.
It’s not really about OS differences - as the GP said, games don’t typically use a lot of OS features.
What they do tend to really put a strain on is GPU drivers. Many games and engines have workarounds and optimizations for specific vendors, and even driver versions.
If the GPU driver on Linux differs in behavior from the Windows version (and it is very, very difficult to port a driver in a way that doesn’t), those workarounds can become sources of bugs.
Meanwhile I had to pirate Dark Souls 1 because Microsoft's own DRM prevented the legitimately purchased game from saving on Windows, and download official no-cd patches for two other games because their DRM stopped working.
Steam and CodeWeavers contribute a lot of code to the Wine project, because it underpins their business models of supporting Windows games on non-Windows platforms.
Between them they make up the vast bulk of what actually gets attention and improvement in Wine, and neither one has any interest in supporting non-game applications.
> neither one has any interest in supporting non-game applications.
I don't know how much of their business it is today, but CodeWeavers spent their first decade or so supporting only non-game applications. Their product Crossover was originally Crossover Office because it was optimized around productivity applications.
Also a big part of the marketing for the SteamMachine/SteamDeck/SteamFrame is that it has a desktop mode and can be used like a pc, so i think they also have an interest in that
i didn’t buy a steam deck since so i can run Microsoft Office. i like that there’s freedom to open up desktop mode to tinker / install 3rd party software, but not to use it as a business machine.
I just talked about using it on Desktop mode like a PC. I never said anything about doing business on it or using it as your Work PC.
Even the announcement "trailer" of the steammachine showed it getting used on a Computer monitor with mouse and keyboard in desktop mode. They even said they want to improve the "Desktop mode only" experience iirc and for there more apps than just games are important.
And i personally probably wouldnt have bought a steamdeck if it wasnt possible to just go into desktop mode and do whatever.
I find it difficult to believe that someone with enough technical knowledge to run a Linux desktop for business purposes in 2026 would be reliant on the MS Office suite. Other people have given plenty of technical reasons for the difficulty. I don't think it’s a useful goal to get them running when practical alternatives like libreoffice exist.
Games really only usually rely on standardized libraries and APIs, whereas application software relies on system libraries to do things like paint their UI.
these apps are all like web browsers, and likely needlessly complicated due to patching the same codebase for so long. its MS afterall. there will be code in there that they themselves hardly understand.
Churchill's "We will fight them on the beaches speech" at the start of WW2:
Output:
I’m fully confident that if we all lean in, stay hyper-focused on execution, and optimize our current workflows, we’re going to successfully defend our core market, navigate this industry disruption, and outlast any competitive threats—even if it takes years of grinding it out solo. That’s the mission-critical objective for the entire leadership team. That’s the vision we’re scaling nationwide.
Even as key regions and legacy players face major headwinds or fall under hostile management, we aren’t pivoting. We’re doubling down. We’re going to show up in every channel. We’re going to compete in the field, we’re going to dominate the airwaves, and we’re going to protect our brand equity, whatever the burn rate.
We’re going to hustle on the beaches, we’re going to grind at the landing zones, we’re going to perform in the streets and in the boardrooms; we will never exit
I've used it for many years. It only fixes physical hardware faults, not timing errors. For example if a RAM cell is damaged by radiation, not if you're overclocking your RAM.
>The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error.
Yes, if you analyse revenue (not profit), sales of Windows count 9% of the total. Microsoft makes around the same percentage from LinkedIn and Xbox as they do from Windows sales.
Cloud is by far the the biggest contributor to revenue.
Beverages and pet food combined make up almost half of Nestlé's sales, with chocolate at around 7.6%. But I certainly wouldn't consider almost $9 billion in chocolate sales per year a rounding error.
Teams is a terrible app, although Electron isn't the only reason for that: It needs a Gig of RAM to do things that older chat apps could do in 4 Meg.
The free ride of ever increasing RAM on consumer devices is over because of the AI hyperscalers buying all fab capacity, leading to a real RAM shortage. I expect many new laptops to come with 8GB as standard and mid-range phones to have 4GB.
Software engineers need to start thinking about efficiency again.
It's very hard to tell the difference between bad models and stinginess with compute.
I subscribe to both Gemini ($20/mo) and ChatGPT Pro ($200/mo).
If I give the same question to "Gemini 3.0 Pro" and "ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking + Heavy thinking", the latter is 4x slower and it gives smarter answers.
I shouldn't have to enumerate all the different plausible explanations for this observation. Anything from Gemini deciding to nerf the reasoning effort to save compute, versus TPUs being faster, to Gemini being worse, to this being my idiosyncratic experience, all fit the same data, and are all plausible.
You nailed it. Gemini 3 Pro seems very "lazy" and seems to never reason for more than 30 seconds, which significantly impacts the quality of its outputs.
It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it (Excel 2010 is the last version that has Platinum status). It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.
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