Everyone acts like it’s all about gaming, but people want to use Lightroom, Photoshop, Excel, their banking and tax software etc.
They don’t want the alternatives because they’re not integrated well, they can’t access their Dropbox/Apple Cloud/whatever and they gave Linux their Google password already, why does it need it again for that mail software that has some stupid bird name instead of “mail”.
If you’re setting up an email client you’re almost certainly doing work on the computer and anyone who has setup outlook can setup any other email client so that’s maybe not the example to use. But you’re right in the sense gaming, office environments and schools are the major groups that train window users.
Competitive gamers want edges - a better mouse, a better keyboard, a better internet connection. The latest performance metrics show linux running many games better than windows so this means a major inflow to windows is losing out to linux.
The weird part about all of this is that macbook sales are also up like 4%, suggesting overall a move away from windows. And for most of those apps you listed they also work on mac.
If linux is eating the gaming environment and the mac office experience is better than windows (due to MS enshittification)… the thing keeping windows in place is legacy software, corporate products, oem deals and like historical precedence.
A bunch of the issues you mention aren’t issues anymore, thanks to fully featured web applications.
Sure. There’s always an exception like graphics editing.
We talk about exceptions a lot. But being in a niche professional can lead to either early or late adoption. A job is a job, and we just use the tools we need.
But for stuff like email, banking, and various document services, the average user’s experience is identical:
Type the product name into Google.
Register or Sign in.
Use product.
I do think a good file backup service is one of the big remaining challenges.
Ironically you mentioned two that are I believe are still fully Linux native (Dropbox and Google).
But to your point, people need file backups that just work, and plenty of popular cloud sync services choose not to provide Linux support.
Yup. Although I’ve become a fan of things like GIMP, you do need to learn a new software and depending on who you are, it might take a while. Lucky (?) for me, I was too poor to afford it for school and since it was for official assignments, I didn’t want to pirate.
That said, Microsoft integration is more a curse than a blessing at this point. Privacy and junk aside, it’s dumped hundreds of GB of files onto my tiny SSD C: since it kept changing settings and ignoring my preferences. That’s why Microsoft messing things up is converting people who even prefer integration, when there’s an option to anyway!
Everyone acts like it’s all about gaming, but people want to use Lightroom, Photoshop, Excel, their banking and tax software etc. They don’t want the alternatives because they’re not integrated well, they can’t access their Dropbox/Apple Cloud/whatever and they gave Linux their Google password already, why does it need it again for that mail software that has some stupid bird name instead of “mail”.
If you’re setting up an email client you’re almost certainly doing work on the computer and anyone who has setup outlook can setup any other email client so that’s maybe not the example to use. But you’re right in the sense gaming, office environments and schools are the major groups that train window users.
Competitive gamers want edges - a better mouse, a better keyboard, a better internet connection. The latest performance metrics show linux running many games better than windows so this means a major inflow to windows is losing out to linux.
The weird part about all of this is that macbook sales are also up like 4%, suggesting overall a move away from windows. And for most of those apps you listed they also work on mac.
If linux is eating the gaming environment and the mac office experience is better than windows (due to MS enshittification)… the thing keeping windows in place is legacy software, corporate products, oem deals and like historical precedence.
A bunch of the issues you mention aren’t issues anymore, thanks to fully featured web applications.
Sure. There’s always an exception like graphics editing.
We talk about exceptions a lot. But being in a niche professional can lead to either early or late adoption. A job is a job, and we just use the tools we need.
But for stuff like email, banking, and various document services, the average user’s experience is identical:
I do think a good file backup service is one of the big remaining challenges.
Ironically you mentioned two that are I believe are still fully Linux native (Dropbox and Google).
But to your point, people need file backups that just work, and plenty of popular cloud sync services choose not to provide Linux support.
Yup. Although I’ve become a fan of things like GIMP, you do need to learn a new software and depending on who you are, it might take a while. Lucky (?) for me, I was too poor to afford it for school and since it was for official assignments, I didn’t want to pirate.
That said, Microsoft integration is more a curse than a blessing at this point. Privacy and junk aside, it’s dumped hundreds of GB of files onto my tiny SSD C: since it kept changing settings and ignoring my preferences. That’s why Microsoft messing things up is converting people who even prefer integration, when there’s an option to anyway!