Year of the Linux desktop

Recently, Mason Remaley wrote a blog post about Microsoft doing the funniest thing imaginable, and I recommend reading it. I mostly agree with what's written there, except maybe the conclusion - I am not 100% sure if that could fly in Microsoft, but it's definitely a possibility. Windows really is struggling, and they are IMO completely clueless about their product (for some time already). And 15 years is a long time.

But let me expand a bit on the topic of people leaving Windows: I am 100% confident that in a few single-digit years (soonish), people will massively start transitioning from Windows either to macOS or to Linux - I am already starting to observe that in my tiny social bubble.

The sad thing about all of this is that I don't think Linux, or macOS got significantly better, not at all - every time I upgrade to a new macOS version I'm just disabling whatever they've decided to introduce, simply because it's not what I want, nor what I need. They just lost the clue completely, or I am not in their market anymore, IDK.

It even went that far that I'm only upgrading whenever I buy a new machine, but this year, I had to update to Sequoia because of the new version of Metal, and I regret that every day, because now it's impossible to suppress those upgrade notifications which I was able to kill easily using the command line.

I mostly want to use my machine for doing the work, I don't want to spend time configuring it, and I certainly don't want to spend time waiting until it finishes updating. This is the thing I have bought, with my own money, and it should be 100% mine.

Waiting for upgrades (or forcing them) is just a way how Apple/Microsoft is telling you that the machine is not yours anymore, it's theirs. You are 100% at their mercy.

Furthermore, nobody is happy about using Windows anymore (also mentioned in the blog post), I only keep hearing complaints. And in some cases it might be because it's a work PC, and they have a nice collection of corporate spyware pre-installed there, but in lots of other cases it's just their personal computer, and it's not considerably better - I wonder which Windows version after 7 was really good. I mean, showing ads in the operating system, really? They are clearly focusing on milking every last penny from you instead of making a good operating system.

So, I expect that unless something radically changes in Microsoft, people will start leaving somewhere else massively - after all, you are paying for something which is actively hostile to you, why would you keep doing that?

And there are options, it's not like you can't go, most of what people need/want is already accessible using a web browser, so?

I have been a long-time macOS user, and I was considering leaving before (after their keyboard fiasco), but then they came up with Apple Silicon and those machines are really beasts, so I'm staying for the hardware, not for the software - well-played, Apple, at least for now.

But things might change, Apple is not the only chip company out there and the competition can and will yield better machines - and I might be re-considering this again, and Linux is really more compelling than ever.

If there is even a slightest chance that LLMs might help OSS maintainers to improve the Desktop environment a bit, and at the same time I can let LLM use the shell to configure whatever I had to do (and google) myself previously, then Linux might be bearable enough - because the "I don't want to spend my time configuring" is not really an issue anymore.

BTW: I recently did just that for my old Ubuntu machine, I just set up keys and let Claude to SSH there and figure out everything, and yes it worked.