Will they lobby for laws that prohibit Linux or make it difficult to install? What actions might they take in the future?
Microsoft already lost the home OS battle when people switch their main devices to smartphones with iOS or Android.
Exactly what they’re doing right now. What cable companies did. What every dominant business does when something better starts to eat their lunch.
Become increasingly abusive and scummy towards the customers who are left, because they’re either too deeply ingrained, spineless or lazy to change and they’ve already self-selected.
Honestly fine by me. I prefer Linux remain non-mainstream. It has integrity like this. The moment any suits see dollar signs on it, it’s as good as ruined.
I’ll drink to that, my friend.
Salud, cheers, prost, l’chaim!
Work with hardware and software vendors to break linux compatibility.
They’ve been busy doing that for the past 20+ years. It’s been an annoyance, but not really a deterrent.
Secure boot and anti-cheat.
MS already doesn’t have a monopoly in any meaningful sense anymore.
- https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202507 - in early 2009, almost 95% of web usage was from Windows, by now it is at around 28%, no longer even the most popular OS, which is now Android around 42%
- https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202507 - even looking only at the desktop and ignoring the shift to mobile devices, Windows fell from ~95% to ~72% during the same time period, mostly losing to macOS but more recently also Linux
Windows isn’t the main way Microsoft makes money anymore anyway…
They might not make much money from windows but it’s still a very important point of control. If they control the os then they can control what’s pre-installed. They can control what office suit, cloud service, ai slop, spyware to use before any other conpetitor has a chance to advertise.
Linux has been becoming a “serious threat” for 20+ years now. I’ll wait.
Don’t get me wrong I like Linux a lot. But if you step back and look objectively, it has a lot of issues trying to grow outside the hobby/enthusiast community for the desktop.
The desktop has been losing market for a while. I feel Windows is already under serious threat (if not already in the minority) when you think about all the devices that mainstream audiences orbit around (phones, tablets, portable consoles, etc), often using the Linux kernel. Only about a third of most website traffic comes from desktops.
Many of the people who frequently use Windows desktop do so because of their job, and often avoid using it outside of work as much as possible, since it feels like… well, work.
Microsoft has been desperately trying to appeal to those other bigger sectors of the pie and has failed every time.
PC Gaming was one sector they had advantage on, yet that has already started to crumble thanks to Valve. I feel that MS will just try to push for integrating their xbox with Windows OS more and more…
I feel it’s a battle with many fronts, since PCs have many uses… so MS is likely to run their typical spiel: copy what the competition are doing and try to centralize/integrate it with their OS in a way that gives them an advantage, as they are famous for doing.
Another sector they can do this is with the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)… they could turn Windows into a frontend for running Linux apps… so if Linux apps became popular, they could try to advertise Windows as the “best” way to run Linux software without losing the full first party support of legacy Windows software.
Well the Xbox app that suspends Windows processes is a reaction to this threat. The threat not being Linux in general but SteamOS and Proton specifically. I don’t think anyone imagined it would be gaming that would usher in the era of Linux but it does seem that that will be the case.
Hear me out on this one “Microsoft Linux”
Yes exactly. Embrace and extinguish has always been Microsoft’s strategy. They’ll release their own distribution and either make it slower and more complicated than Windows, so that everyone thinks Windows is the better OS, or they’ll make it a cloud OS like Chrome, requiring recurring payments to use Office 365 and everything else.
I see this as the most likely outcome as well. It’s the preferred route, seen all of the place lately. Want to privatize a public service? Cripple the public service enough to “prove it doesn’t work” to convince people privatization is the best option. I suspect most people would switch to Microsoft Linux over something “tech” sounding like Debian or Ubuntu. When the trial of their slowed down and crashy “Linux” comes to an end, Microsoft will offer an easy solution to switch back to Windows.
That’s just neutered Ubuntu container
Already exists as a VM option on azure
Emulation should always be Linux emulating Windows. Windows emulating Linux is just weird.
Its not emulation, it’s a Microsoft distro
Two things, I was under the impression that Azure can emulate a lot of different Linux distro. Second, I thought the hypervisor ran on cut down version of Windows server.
VMs aren’t emulation. Its a full OS running on virtual hardware. Also, yes, azure offers several distros, not just Microsoft’s.
The OS of the bare metal host shouldn’t matter much, if at all, to the guest. If you have a philosophical issue with the hypervisor running under windows I doubt you’d be using azure to begin with.
That makes sense. Thanks.
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It’s a Linux distro that’s called Azure Linux and it looks like it’s based on Fedora if the length of package attribution is anything to go by.
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it never ceases to be mind boggling that IT in most institutions are still so closely married to windows when it’s clear that the landscape has changed and it makes me suspect that they will be the last bastions of windows dominance.
Businesses live and die by if it broke don’t fix it.
They’re still a non insignificant number of businesses using Cobol applications.
Mostly die.
i would put ruby in that category too since it now feels like a fad that i have never seen since. lol
Make a version of Office that works on Linux natively.
That works on their version of linux.
Why? Office is such shit.
It is (unfortunately) their primary foothold into the market. Microsoft also knows this which is why some many other projects at Microsoft have been killed and absorbed by the Microsoft office team. They have a cannabalistic corporate culture. Its clear that at Microsoft the only threat to Microsoft… Is Microsoft… No one else on the radar registers.
pays even more to hardware manufacturers to add windows by default, and make drivers windows only.
Desktop users (except for business) don’t make Microsoft any money, so they probably don’t care.
Just my guess here, but…
The desktop/laptop sort of form factor is associated in people’s minds with unlocked bootloaders. People expect to be able to install Linux on them if they want to. Tablets, game systems, and other sorts of consumer electronics, not so much. I’m thinking Microsoft will do what it can to push hardware manufacturers and the software industry as a whole more in the direction of the kinds of devices that consumers already expect to be locked down like tablets or game systems that are “streaming” game systems. And that way, the bootloader will prevent folks from switching to Linux.
Honestly, ms won’t do anything.
unofficial statement out of Microsoft have Linux VMs overtaking the Windows VMs in Azure.
Why should they worry about losing a once off $1100 sale of a Server 2025 license when they can sell you a 2 CPU 8Gb ram Azure VM for $150 a month? Or $113/m commited for 3 years ($4000 total)
