Windows As A Service (WaaS)

[Night Wing]

@ frostknight

I know you think 70% is still a huge marketshare for the Windows operating system. But in 23 years Windows has went from a 97% marketshare down to a 70% marketshare. This is a 27% loss in 23 years which equates to slightly over 1% per year. I am sure you have heard of the old saying; "Death by a thousand small cuts". This is what Windows is going through.

As for "antiX, I think it is related to MX Linux.

But I do not know anything about "antiX". Since I like and prefer Xfce over other desktop environments (Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate); I seek out distros which offer Xfce because I am quite familiar with Xfce. I do not think "anitX" offers Xfce and this is probably why I haven't tried "antiX."

[athenian200]

As for usage wise, smartphones being popular makes me cringe. I cannot state this enough, touchscreens are crap and I absolutely detest them. If I had a choice, I would buy a bigger phone that has a keyboard if that was possible even if I couldn't put it in my pocket.

Off-topic:
Same here, I would much rather have an old school PDA or Pocket PC with pen input and a keyboard than what we have now. The smartphone is a terrible device, and I cannot understand why people are so happy with it.

[frostknight]

I know you think 70% is still a huge marketshare for the Windows operating system. But in 23 years Windows has went from a 97% marketshare down to a 70% marketshare. This is a 27% loss in 23 years which equates to slightly over 1% per year. I am sure you have heard of the old saying; "Death by a thousand small cuts". This is what Windows is going through.

As for "antiX, I think it is related to MX Linux.

antiX is a linux distro and is related to MX Linux.

I do however hope that windows does get more cuts but I also hope the closed source non-free proprietary situation gets better at the same time.

Off-topic:
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Redhat and their corrupt ways and similar need to be put to death. Obviously I speak of the corporations and ways not the people btw just in case that wasn't clear.

It would be very awesome if this could happen during my lifetime even halfway. I would tend to think it happening completely wouldn't happen in my lifetime. Not sure about any of it, I just hope that people stop feeding these ghouls as much as possible. Their data centers need to be starved because it is killing the planet itself anyhow. They don't need more water for their towers, all they need is boot up their ass till they stop wasting resources.

[suzyne]

Off-topic:

I cannot understand why people are so happy with it.

Maybe because of predictive text and no expectation of ever entering more than a couple of lines of text?

Because I don't hope to use my phone as a tiny laptop or something, with the above two points I am more than happy to trade a keyboard for the larger screen space.

Any action that needs a physical keyboard of some sort can wait until I am back home.

[Night Wing]

Off-topic:
Same here, I would much rather have an old school PDA or Pocket PC with pen input and a keyboard than what we have now. The smartphone is a terrible device, and I cannot understand why people are so happy with it.

Off-topic:
Think about it. With a smartphone, people text using two fingers which are the left and right thumbs. With a laptop keyboard or with an external keyboard, you have to use "all" ten fingers. And most people these days, they do not know how to correctly "type" using all ten fingers. I type with all ten fingers and I type fast with very little errors.

My next door neighbor is an example. He is a two finger whiz when using a smartphone to text. But when he has to use one of the desktop tower computers with a 105 keys external keyboard and a external monitor at the computer shop he owns and where I volunteer at, he types with two fingers. The right and left index fingers. I call that type of typing "hunt and peck".

[moonbat]

I know you think 70% is still a huge marketshare for the Windows operating system. But in 23 years Windows has went from a 97% marketshare down to a 70% marketshare. This is a 27% loss in 23 years which equates to slightly over 1% per year. I am sure you have heard of the old saying; "Death by a thousand small cuts". This is what Windows is going through.

Windows' declining marketshare is of no consequence to Microsoft since it hasn't been their main revenue source for years. Azure is where it's at, followed by Office 365. Mobile phone internet usage overtook desktop p usage around 10 years ago, so as of now the biggest users of Windows are office goers, programmers and the small niche of gamers. The normie crowd has long moved away from PCs to smartphones, so the numbers you quote are more likely for PC internet usage as a whole. Microsoft will continue with rolling releases and keeping users as unpaid beta testers while they change everything over to a subscription model.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

The smartphone is a terrible device, and I cannot understand why people are so happy with it.

It's exactly because it is always "at their fingertips". On average, I'm sure the number of individual interactions with a smartphone will be in the hundreds of times per day. This will condition people to it, forms habits, and the interface of a smartphone and general goal of short-form data entry is exactly in line with that type of use. Emphasis is put on quick swipes and taps, not long-form accurate manual input. A pen would be better but that would make it cumbersome: people will lose the pen, and will have to use two hands instead of one to operate the device (many people use one thumb, not two, for half of their inputs -- all smartphones even cater to single-handed input with specialized keyboards etc.)

[Night Wing]

Here is another article released today (Oct 8th) what Microsoft has in store for Windows in 2024. The term "Refresh" is the new buzz word.

https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/08/windo ... is-coming/

But what I thought was spot on was the lone comment (at this time) after the article, from the user (John C).

[Mæstro]

While Apple has claimed up to a third of desktops in some of the rich countries, nobody expects, and Apple would not even want, to make like gains in the rest of the world. We know the Year of the Linux Desktop has been three years hence for twenty years; Microsoft’s position remains secure, even as it has been most aloof from my life since 2020, when I had installed Linux instead of Windows 7.

A pen would be better but that would make it cumbersome: people will lose the pen, and will have to use two hands instead of one to operate the device (many people use one thumb, not two, for half of their inputs -- all smartphones even cater to single-handed input with specialized keyboards etc.)

Off-topic:
I have always hated the compulsion to use smartphones with one hand. Such early smartphones as the Milestone (Droid for Yanks) were well and good; I liked using the physical keyboard and keeping the mobile in landscape mode, treating it as the handheld computer that it was; later smartphones tried to force me out of these comfortable habits, and I could never adapt. The original iPad was also sound even in portrait mode, as though it were a clipboard, but the same interface in a fifth the surface area or less is madness. Small touchscreens are literally painful for me to use: my motor control is poor and my arms and even ears will jitter whenever I try to make too sensitive movements. I had given up smartphones in July 2019, and since then, I have only used feature phones with physical buttons that can indeed be used in one hand. Now that I am back in Germany, I am using the Nokia 105.

[frostknight]

Perhaps I am more interested in laptops, netbooks because I know how to type without looking at the keyboard pretty damn well.

I only look at keyboard if I type in a password that is somewhat complex/long.

I am more than content with laptops.

Smartphones have no physical enter button on them which annoys the living daylights out of me when I try to scroll to change a word somewhere, etc... it acts like I told it to send. No dumbass phone, I did not.

That's my major issue with phones, they make scrolling/changing words impossible and sometimes prematurely send my messages which makes me really want to knock the crap out of them.

Where as laptops, not so much. there is a physical enter button and each button can be learned by memory mostly.

Just requires patience to learn and then the headaches will be much less, which it seems most people detest. *sigh*

I would rather have a harder learning curve that doesn't constantly annoy me than an easy learning curve then one that annoys me often. Its no good for instant messaging type stuff. I consider texting to be like instant messaging btw.

I have heard of Azure and subscriptions for that being a huge money source, but I didn't know it was that giant. SMH. I mean if people need something for virtualization, microsoft is very far from what any sensible person should use even if its a linux based system.

Debian, though they are elites same as archlinux, aren't the only options. Even ubuntu has more brain cells in their builds than microsoft. Although that is not saying much... microsoft is rock-bottom on that list and others as well. They do security like they get rid of bloat, very badly.

[moonbat]

I mean if people need something for virtualization, microsoft is very far from what any sensible person should use even if its a linux based system.

Virtualization isn't all that Azure offers; it is a direct competitor to AWS.

[frostknight]

Virtualization isn't all that Azure offers; it is a direct competitor to AWS.

Forgive my ignorance then, but what does Azure do that ubuntu doesn't that AWS does?

[moonbat]

Azure & AWS are cloud application platforms, Ubuntu is a Linux variant. Earlier if you wanted to set up a hosted website you would have to buy and set up your own server etc, now with these platforms you can focus on your web application and purchase plans depending on expected website traffic while they take care of server/data center etc. It has nothing to do with desktop OSes.

[Tharthan]

Off-topic:

I would much rather have an old school PDA or Pocket PC with pen input and a keyboard

When PDAs were still around, I used to think that they were pretty neat.

And when touch screens were really coming into fashion technologically (think, for instance, the Nintendo DS and some early touch-capable desktop computers) I thought that it was a cool concept. It was another manner of input——an additional manner of input.

But Steve Jobs had to go and ruin it and leave us with the infuriating tech trends that are fashionable right now and show no sign of going away.

[frostknight]

Azure & AWS are cloud application platforms, Ubuntu is a Linux variant. Earlier if you wanted to set up a hosted website you would have to buy and set up your own server etc, now with these platforms you can focus on your web application and purchase plans depending on expected website traffic while they take care of server/data center etc. It has nothing to do with desktop OSes.

Oh... got it, hadn't known this.

So are those the only ones? Or do others exist that are worth considering?

Those ones are so mainstream, that it makes me shake my head a lot.

[suzyne]

Those ones are so mainstream

Google Cloud is another big mainstream company service, but I have also heard of DigitalOcean which is said to be good?

[athenian200]

So are those the only ones? Or do others exist that are worth considering?

Off-topic:
Well, if you're the Department of Defense and you need a huge cloud service, maybe only AWS and Azure could meet your entire contract... but otherwise, there are plenty of other options, like Oracle Cloud, or IBM cloud, or even Google Cloud. Google Cloud is actually third in line after AWS and Azure, I checked. Stuff like Linode and DigitalOcean is near the bottom of the top 10, though, way less availability than the top 5.

Just look here:
https://dgtlinfra.com/top-cloud-service-providers/

[frostknight]

Off-topic:

Well, if you're the Department of Defense and you need a huge cloud service, maybe only AWS and Azure could meet your entire contract... but otherwise, there are plenty of other options, like Oracle Cloud, or IBM cloud, or even Google Cloud. Google Cloud is actually third in line after AWS and Azure, I checked. Stuff like Linode and DigitalOcean is near the bottom of the top 10, though, way less availability than the top 5.

Just look here:
https://dgtlinfra.com/top-cloud-service-providers/

Linode and Digital Ocean probably are less corporate surveillance though probably. Although I could be wrong, but yeah I would avoid most of the others if I needed any cloud type.

That however is me

[Basilisk-Dev]

Off-topic:
I've had professional experience with Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure (been doing DevOps [ I hate the term DevOps ] work for almost 8 years now).

At my current job we use AWS to host the vast majority of our infrastructure, we use a lot of their managed offerings like OpenSearch, Elasticache, and RDS. We write all of our infrastructure in AWS CloudFormation so everything is easily reproducible. Cloudformation is like Ansible or Chef, but for the entirety of the AWS stack. In my opinion AWS is the best supported since it's been around the longest, but has the worst customer service. It's decent in terms of pricing, but it's not the cheapest.

We use Azure's managed database service to host a 20+ TB MSSQL database. Works great, almost 100% uptime. We also are looking into using an OCR service that Azure offers to parse text from health insurance cards so our customer support doesn't have to manually look at pictures customers send us. In my opinion, Azure is only the right choice when you need it for a specific niche task like the massive MSSQL database or the OCR service that has specific training data for US health insurance cards. Azure is super expensive.

I used Google Cloud at a different company in the past, and it was alright. It definitely is the cheapest service of the big three, and has the best customer support. I had a direct contact at Google that I could contact at any time, and I did contact them very often. We were essentially beta testers though, we had to stay on top of changes they were making to services that we were using and make configuration changes or outright reconfigure things from scratch often. We used their cloud server, networking, and managed database offerings.

For hobbyists I recommend something cheaper like Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, or Hetzner. Basilisk infrastructure as well as my personal stuff runs on Vultr.