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u/CaptSharn 18h ago
What planet do we live on?! What is this alternate reality?!
I truly don't understand it at all!!!
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u/Vaping101 17h ago
I know how you feel. It’s like the movie ‘don’t look up’. The truth is staring everyone in the face and they refused to look at it. Now I truly understand the need for divine justice.
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u/flashliberty5467 14h ago
Better use Linux or apple as the alternative then
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u/xilanthro 13h ago
People with math or CS backgrounds mostly do. I stopped working with Microsoft back when they distinguished themselves as the world's biggest violator of antitrust legislation and have not regretted it once. I would caution that Apple is not better. The difference is that they censor for a different agenda, and sell what they harvest from the user for a higher price.
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u/tuvokvutok 9h ago
Honest question because I'm in IT (though I'm just a noob admin): I keep hearing people use Linux. Why isn't it more popular with consumers?
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u/xilanthro 9h ago
I think there's 3 easy answers to that:
- marketing: one of Microsoft's most classic antitrust violation shenanigans (other than can't separate the browser from the O/S, of course) was to buy OS/2 and immediately butcher multitasking and the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) making it impossible for hardware vendors to write their own Windows drivers (it was NT at the time, all Windows is forked from that same code-base now). This way they held hardware manufacturers hostage by not writing them drivers unless they agreed to install Windows as the default operating system on all their systems. Product placement, advertising, and the preponderance created by active promotion like that make commercial operating systems more in-your-face
- incarceration through obfuscation: both Microsoft and Apple compete to repackage functionality into arbitrary groups and rename functions and operations, creating lock-in. A Windows user trying to use MySQL has a hard time because MySQL is a database server and a Windows user expects a database server to have ETL facilities as part of the server like MS-SQL, and doesn't understand that this is in principle something completely unrelated and lacks the vocabulary to describe the atomic functions.
- automation: using Linux productively requires knowing a lot of secret pathways that are relatively invisible to the community because they become transparent with familiarity. Hunting for drivers on vendor sites, knowing how to rip something out and replace it when it doesn't work, dealing with the idiosyncrasies of presentation managers (graphical desktop environments), etc. There's a lot to understand, and the automation in Linux is very clunky in places, but most of all, arcane without warning. With commercial OSes you either don't have a problem, or the problem is completely out of your hands and you just wait for an update doing nothing.
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u/tuvokvutok 8h ago
So Windows just feels more comfortable for consumer users, right?
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u/xilanthro 8h ago
I would say macOS feels more comfortable. Windows locks people in and dumbs them down, so they understand less what they are doing and what is being done to and for them. Much more rote.
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u/tuvokvutok 8h ago
that's fair--I've never personally used Mac, but that's what EVERYBODY says apparently. The company I work for is a MS vendor so I'm gonn be stuck to it for a while, but my boss does encourage diving into Ubuntu and Linux and all that crap😅
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u/Sir-Poopington 13h ago
That's tough for gamers...
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u/flashliberty5467 10h ago
People have already figured out how to translate windows API calls to Linux and MacOS API calls
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