5d ago

Linux comes for Windows at 40 — and gaming can't save it

www.makeuseof.com /linux-coming-for-windows-40th-birthday/

To not much official fanfare on Thursday, the Windows operating system turned 40 years old, marking four decades since Windows 1.0 debuted in the United States on November 20, 1985. Its midlife milestone comes with a crisis, though. Diehard Windows users are switching to Linux for a variety of reasons.
For one, gaming is finally better on Linux machines, which makes the moat Windows dug for itself a little more passable. Add to that the end of support for Windows 10 in October, the growing frustration among power users about Microsoft Recall, and the growing number of polarizing features, and power users are finding plenty of reasons to make the switch to Linux.
It's unclear if the wave of Windows power users loudly moving to Linux has crested yet, or if this is just the beginning. That said, the past year has seen a flood of articles like this one, scores of posts on Reddit, and YouTube videos documenting and occasionally evangelizing the conversion to Linux.

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Nah. The growth of Linux will barely make a dent on Windows user base. Windows is still huge in enterprise settings.
- I wonder what must happen to roll out more Linux in the public sector. There is still software required by scientist of various professions that need a tool only available for Windows. Installing a VM is not an option; too complicated for the average user.
  And there is Windows software not compatible with Windows 11. Here is a small chance to use wine, but will the setup be practical and installable by the users themselves? I doubt it and it will put more work on the admins.
  I hope at least, that Linux maintenance will be smoother despite the need for compatibility for older Windows software in the future.
  
  Digital sovereignty. Even Europe is looking at replacing Windows now. I know that attempts have been made before, but there are stronger pressures now and there are better alternatives for Windows-only workflows.
  Most new apps are web based nowadays. Many companies are even ditching the desktop Office apps now (which is insane for its own reasons, but still). Engineers under 40 prefer Python over Excel. Word is good for WYSIWYG printing, but with a small government program it should be possible to make that irrelevant quickly and ditch PDFs along with it.
  I'm hopeful.
  
  It’s a massive initiative. Entire staff must be retraining. IT infrastructure has to be replaced.
  Worst of all, it will face a lot of resistance from stubborn people with a ”if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality. The public sector has a tendency to be quite slow moving.
  
  I would suggest that the vast, vast majority of companies that use Windows do so for two reasons
  1: Because the software is (mostly) interchangeable with what their customers use. Office docs can be opened in any Office application without any formatting errors. Generally speaking. Open an .odt in Word and it could (will probably) end up buggering up the formatting.
  2: Because most business owners don't want to go to the expense of hiring a dedicated IT guy to manage a bunch of computers that their staff don't know how to operate.
  
  In the public sector in a few fields Linux just isn't an option at all, full stop, because of key pieces of software that are industry standards/straight up required for that field. CAD programs for example just makes linux a no go. Any fields that are dependant on Adobe products is another one.
  I mean there are some work arounds. Winboat is promising. I've tried it with a few things but it's still buggy here and there i.e. sometimes it insists on launching the full VM for whatever reason. Bottles is just...I don't know it's not there yet and can be frustrating. Honestly I've had more success running non-gaming windows applications through Steam than anything else.
  Plus as others have said the public sector can be...very slow when switching to new things. Look at how long companies held on to XP and Vista to the point they had to be forced to upgrade while kicking and screaming. Hell I buddy of mine is an IT consultant, runs his own business, and he's had new clients that were STILL on Vista and it took A LOT of convincing and work just to upgrade them to something slightly more modern.
  
  I wonder what must happen to roll out more Linux in the public sector.
  Endpoint (device) management is mostly a solved a problem, the challenge lies in integrated systems that allow secured, controlled, and constant access to data in a way that is manageable at scale by hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users.
  That is where it gets wicked difficult and is what @Alaknar@sopuli.xyz is referencing. To my knowledge there is no real F/OSS equivalent to the tooling that MS Entra provides for IAM, DLP and MDM. You can maybe get close with a full deployment of NextCloud but that's really only replicating M365 functionality from 15 years ago.
  Is it ultimately possible if you piece enough packages and systems together? Probably but it would be a massive plate of spaghetti that only a team of highly experienced *nix managers could hope to properly support.
  You can definitely use a full F/OSS stack to replicate the functionality of a Windows Active Directory network but that's so last century. Today's organizations, no matter their type or size, demand more and they won't move to F/OSS unless they can get it.
  
  I wonder what must happen to roll out more Linux in the public sector
  Management tools. There's barely any IAM, DLP or MDM available for Linux, and whatever there is requires tremendous effort to manage compared to... just registering with Entra ID and Intune.
  
  An Outlook replacement. The new web Outlook is absolute garbage with zero addin api like the old one had
  Make a replacement Outlook that connect to imap service or something that's close to feature matching (calendaring ect) and its game over for two huge revenue streams. it's a cornerstone of Enterprise 365 and they refuse to listen to clients.
  Everything else is "good enough" in FOSS but nothing gets close to Outlook functionally.
  
  Speaking from personal experience with family? Quicken. Yes you CAN get it running in Wine but not everything works. Also I could get it running in exactly one distro and then I could never seem to get it installed again, even following advice from someone on WineHQ.
- Microsoft would kill to have linux's install base
These articles always remind me of 80s Hulk Hogan with him taking about how big Hulamania is getting.
- BRUTHA, IF YOU WANT TO GET IN THE RING WITH THE HULKMEISTER, YOU NEED TO START GETTING ON MY LEVEL OF RACISM. I'M TALKING ABOUT FULL ON DISPLAY FOR EVERYONE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD TO KNOW YOU'RE A DRUNK SON OF A BITCH WHO HATES ANYTHING NOT WHITE BECAUSE YOU CAN'T COMPREHEND HOW ANYONE COULD BE BETTER THAN WHITE SUPREME LEADER HULK HOGAN.
  ALSO DRINK A LOT AND SLEEP AROUND UNTIL WHEN YOU DIE THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD COULD ABSOLUTELY GIVE A SHIT.
  THAT'S WHAT HULKMANIA IS ALL ABOUT BRUTHA.
- Hulamania is getting
  I hate hulk hogan, I hate AI videos....
  but now I'm feeling a strong desire to see hulk hogan talking tough about his insane hula hoop skills.
Yeah…
I think most non-PC-gamer consumers will just go to Android and iOS :(. It’s the simplest path.
Not sure about business. Sheer entrenchment aside, I’ve heard conflicting reports ranging from Windows management systems being so good they're utterly unparalleled, to Windows systems breaking so much IT is getting frustrated.
- Both can be true at the same time, it's when new features get added that things become a problem. I had a perfectly well functioning plotter and photocopier using a TCP/IP ports, windows decided that all printers and the computer should now use IPP changed the drivers and everything, that was a fun afternoon
- Did they update the title on you or something? Why are you asking about 30?
  
  Oh shit I think so.
  That, or my ADHD completely misread the title.
- Windows 1.0 launched in 1985. Which was 40 years ago.
The year of the Linux desktop, finally! Does this mean I can play Battlefield One now?
- Only if you promise not to pay for it.
  https://www.npr.org/2025/09/30/nx-s1-5557158/video-game-publisher-electronic-arts-going-private-in-a-deal-valued-at-55-billion
- If it doesn't require a kernel-level anti-cheat system, then yes, you can.
  
  They added kernel level anti-cheat retroactively to all the modern Battlefield games like a year ago. It's a game from 2018 that I was priviously playing an Linux, but it doesn't work now.

51 comments