>Today Wine/Proton have come leaps and bounds and Linux still ends up excluded from some of the largest gaming titles out there.
It is due to anti-cheat. Whose fault is that? The developers refuse to support linux even if we meet them halfway.
>The reality is Windows won on desktop, and a very small minority of people still want to dump on Windows. For all its warts, it's clearly made the tradeoffs that benefit the largest number of desktop users.
Windows "won" because it was there first and it's stayed there due to its anti-competitive behavior (see halloween documents, windows refund day, etc.). You would be hard-pressed to buy a laptop or something without paying for microsoft's license- they have deals with all the manufacturers to stop competition before it even happens.
Microsoft is sitting on top of a massive cash cow. They will continue to plunder their user-base with ads and spyware, and they will continue neglect their responsibilities as a custodian to the extent that it improves their numbers in some board-room meeting. The "value-offering" of windows will get so bad that users might switch to linux/wine or reactOS. They might not switch now, but here's the way I see it: linux will only improve and windows will only get worse. It's not over until the fat lady sings.
> It is due to anti-cheat. Whose fault is that? The developers refuse to support linux even if we meet them halfway.
Windows meets them all the way. Not having to deal with LSB, Glibc, different distros, etc.
> Windows "won" because it was there first and it's stayed there due to its anti-competitive behavior
Why does every pro-Linux statement devolve into an anti-Windows statement the moment it meets resistance.
If Linux is truly "better" for whatever useful meaning of that word there is, I cannot for the life of me understand why the invariant that Linux cannot actually be promoted on the desktop without tearing down Windows to do so.
>Windows meets them all the way. Not having to deal with LSB, Glibc, different distros, etc.
Windows doesn't do shit besides stand there.
>Why does every pro-Linux statement devolve into an anti-Windows statement the moment it meets resistance.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Imagine I build a robot that does your job faster than you, better than you, more reliably than you, and I distribute it for free. One small issue though: it only speaks French. Are you really going to suggest that in a sane market, you would stand a chance against this robot?
You have to conclude that a market in which windows defeats linux is irrational. If windows did not wield its' reverse compatibility and did not have anti-competitive dealings with manufacturers, it would just be another corpse in the pile of defeated unixes (solaris, etc.).
Microsoft has a unique market position due to its business relationships. That's no attribute of the windows operating system, and it is an advantage that can slowly erode over time. My problem is that you're asserting that there's some characteristic of the windows operating system that is superior. Reverse-compatibility is a anti-feature, It's just not obvious in the short-term.
> Are you really going to suggest that in a sane market, you would stand a chance against this robot?
Yes! Because if no one speaks French, and it's not so much better that people are suddenly willing to learn French, then no one will want to use it!
And Linux is not some vision of perfection either, there are still warts around the quality and polish of userspace applications compared to Windows, so meeting the incredibly high bar of "throw out your entire method of thinking for this" is nearly impossible.
You've just perfectly summed up why "the year of the Linux Desktop" has been coming up for nearly 2 decades now.
There's never a been a year of the anything desktop. That's not a thing that gets proclaimed by anyone at any time. Who would have to say it for you to suddenly accept that Linux desktops are awesome and have been for 20 years. Would you accept it if Steve Balmer said it? Gates? You wouldn't even then because this is a sports team to you.
It is due to anti-cheat. Whose fault is that? The developers refuse to support linux even if we meet them halfway.
>The reality is Windows won on desktop, and a very small minority of people still want to dump on Windows. For all its warts, it's clearly made the tradeoffs that benefit the largest number of desktop users.
Windows "won" because it was there first and it's stayed there due to its anti-competitive behavior (see halloween documents, windows refund day, etc.). You would be hard-pressed to buy a laptop or something without paying for microsoft's license- they have deals with all the manufacturers to stop competition before it even happens.
Microsoft is sitting on top of a massive cash cow. They will continue to plunder their user-base with ads and spyware, and they will continue neglect their responsibilities as a custodian to the extent that it improves their numbers in some board-room meeting. The "value-offering" of windows will get so bad that users might switch to linux/wine or reactOS. They might not switch now, but here's the way I see it: linux will only improve and windows will only get worse. It's not over until the fat lady sings.