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Considering retail for the OS is $199 I find it insane the way Microsoft is pushing such a dystopian freemium model on their users. When you buy a new computer with Windows, the manufacturer pays Microsoft for that license too (obj not the same cost as a retail one, but a cost nonetheless)

Meanwhile essentially every version of macOS is free (gotta go back a few years to find retail upgrade copies, which are still far less expensive than Windows and never contain advertisements)

macOS being free is sleight of hand. The cost is just baked into the margin on their hardware. Maybe if you could run macOS on hardware of your choice (i.e. "hackintosh") it would be an apples-to-apples comparison.
GNU/Linux is Free as in Freedom, Windows is free as in free beer, MacOS is free as in free airplane pretzels.
> The cost is just baked into the margin on their hardware.

Oh no! Wait, why is this somehow a concern? You buy a Mac and get an OS with years worth of free updates to that OS and additional years of security updates to the OS. Where's the problem?

MacOS does show advertisements for the iCloud services.
I think… in settings? Once below Apple ID, if you’re not signed in, and once by iCloud. There also are AppleID and iCloud direct integrations, which can be thought of as advertisements. And if you are using iCloud and there’s not enough space, you’ll see a banner on every app that uses iCloud (except Finder) that hey, there’s not enough space.

I think this is an advertisement, but it’s for a service people might actually want, that doesn’t necessarily cost money, and only asks for money when needed for functionality. It’s also a first-party ad.

The "ads" on a mac are a drop in the ocean compared to the experience on Windows.
> Meanwhile essentially every version of macOS is free

If that was true I could download a macOS version to run in my VM. Rather macOS is unavailable, the only way to get a valid license is to buy a machine running MacOS. Which isn't that different from buying a Windows PC.

The only reason no money changes hands from OEM to Apple is that Apple makes both the OS and the hardware, and they don't have a reason to pay money to themselves.

Windows upgrades used to be a big thing, but have been effectively free for the last 8 years.

You can virtualise macOS (in Fusion) from the installer from the App Store, which is just a .app you can get anyone to download
I believe $199 would be for Windows 10/11 Pro, not Home.

Which a) you probably don't need and b) actually has better options to get rid of ads etc.

The retail price here for Windows 10/11 Home is around $110.

Mac OS X Tiger for example was also around $129 (but yes, this was a long time ago). Then ago, you obviously already pay premium for the Apple hardware. And maybe also sign up for their services.

You need a pro version in order to be allowed to sign into your own computer with your own user and not involving the internet.
In Europe there is no reason to pay $199. You can buy a second hand Windows 11 Pro license for $10. Office Pro for $25.

Despite what many will say, it's completely legal, EU highest court ruled that companies can't forbid the transfer/re-sale of legitimately owned software licenses.

I have never received a single code from any reseller that wasn’t being sold to multiple people, resulting in blocks.
> Office Pro for $25

Really? I’ve seen OEM Windows licenses for about €15 on a German website (IIRC the practice of selling them was specifically declared legal in Germany), but Office went for €50 there.

The more people who use Linux, the more software will be available to use. If you are in any way technical, do society a favor and switch to Linux.
I have to pay my bills today, not whenever the professional software I use gets released on Linux. Also, the Linux experience is so miserable that if Windows were to die, I'd just switch to MacOS tbh.
> Linux experience is so miserable

This is just not true. I switched back to linux recently https://punkx.org/jackdoe/linux-desktop.html and honestly the experience is amazing. I even did dist-upgrade and everything still works, including all my pytorch stuff.

Windows experience is hundreds of times worse.

MacOS is quite good, I would recommend it as well, but don't dismiss linux without trying.

Using debian (and with an upgrade to 12) with gnome feels very polished. I think I'd call it close to a "default" linux experience. That doesn't sound sexy but it means it's the happy path, thoroughly tested, no surprises. The closest thing I've had to an issue in 6 months is extrepo duplicating some repo keys, it was as easy to fix as deleting the file once.

Modern linux can be a boring and productive place if you want it to be.

When was the last time you tried it?
Genuinely curious to what makes it miserable. I mostly love my basic Ubuntu setup (and especially compared to the clown show that is modern Windows), and although I’m a software engineer I am neither particularly good at nor have any interest in tinkering with my Linux setup. It mostly just works (except for distribution of apps outside of the package manager - that sucks!). That said, I’m on desktop - I think anything with batteries and touch interfaces is often more buggy.
And get confronted with Apple’s version of enshittification? The grass is not as green as it used to be in cupertino world.
excuses excuses

spoken like someone who hasn't used Linux in a decade. The experience is much better in Linux than the other OSes these days

If you need to use software in Windows for work that's one thing, but you probably don't need that software on every personal device and your opinion about using Linux is definitely just your opinion

I'm not sure if this is true. Just having people use Linux does not produce or port any software to Linux.

Now you could argue that it increases the market share of Linux, but for that, it needs to be a market, i.e. software vendors need to have a way to monetize. And the question then is if you're not ending up with the same issues you have on closed-source proprietary software.

Generally speaking, I mostly had better experiences with commercial software in my life as a "user", both professionally and in private.

So much stuff has moved to the web anyway that I think a very large percentage of people could move to Linux and it would largely have no negative effects at all.

My sister in law, who is not technical in any way, ran Ubuntu for multiple years (to keep using a Macbook that didn't get any more updates) because virtually everything she did was in the browser anyway; she did her homework with Google Docs, she listened to music with YouTube Music, she talked to her friends with Google Chat or Signal, she did her taxes with TurboTax online.

We can (correctly) complain about how Google is eating the internet, and that's fair, but at least in the regards of making Linux viable, Google has (probably inadvertently) done a very good job.

You'll know we hit it big when malicious actors start developing more threats against Linux.
Most servers already run gnu/linux, and are juicier targets than the average consumer device. The incentives are already huge.
Every time I have to help a friend on Windows, I'm horrified by how even worse it got. The ads, bloatware, the performance, the bugs, and user-hostile philosophy.

They have been too big to fail for too long, but their greed will bite them back one day.

Unfortunately, I think ads are going to get worse before they get better. The huge hotness in marketing right now is using AI and the trove of data to write personalized ad copy for every recipient. Right now it's expensive enough that not a ton of people are doing it, and the ones who are are only targeting a small niche of people, but I expect that the economics will improve quickly.

Given Microsoft's full dive into gathering personalized information, integrating those collection pipelines deeply into the operating system, and integrating AI into the OS, it seems likely to me that personalized ads are coming to a Windows system near you.

On a related note, gnome weather is minimalist, very lightweight, and entirely ad free.

I'm convinced marketing is one of the most harmful professions to society. Yes, some amount of marketing is important, so people know who you are and what you do. But the number of times our marketing department asked for creepy spyware tracking in order to "better serve our customers" makes me sick to my stomach.
This is true, but I also think software technology corporations play a huge role in accelerating the destruction of society. I'm having a hard time being convinced this boring dystopia we're in right now is all that much better than when we didn't have huge software companies destroying society (mostly Facebook and Google).

I'm a software engineer (of course) but the way corporate software is going is bleak. FOSS sometimes feels like the only light we have. Social media destroyed society, made everyone confused and neutered.

Sorry, slightly off topic rant. But day by day I get increasingly frustrated with where the software industry is going.

The incredible thing is how pain accepting the microsoft user base is. Any other product, people would have switched over or at least trained into alternatives a while ago, just out of spite and to avoid the pain. Why not more people have a linux-vm to alt-tab between, i shall never know. It really shows how far away linux as "desktop" addition, not even replacement really is.
Windows has had personalized ads for a long time now, they just mask it as "Recommendations". They're in the start menu, the search bar, the task bar, and even your lock screen! I remember many years ago when dynamic lock screen for Windows 10 was turned into a giant ad for Disney's Minions. It's everywhere in the OS.
Will be really interesting to see how people react when the personalized copy reveals a little too much of what the ad platform knows and crosses over into creepy territory.
Personalised Advertising products are likely to be short-lived considering the swathe of Privacy legislation that's out there.
And every article like this just convinces me that switching my personal desktop to Linux a couple years ago was the right choice. I do wish that Affinity or another PS competitor had a good Linux or at least WINE support. Seems to be one of the greater gaping holes imo.
We need more professional software for Linux. I can't switch my work PC because Autodesk, Bentley and Dassault products to name a few. Personal machines that just run Firefox and things like handbrake or VM stuff, linux works great.
Photoshop is the one kicker for me, too. Nothing comes close. GIMP is a dumpster fire.

Lately I have been doing pretty well with Figma though. Been daily driving Debian 12 w/ KDE for about a year now and it has been rock solid and quite enjoyable.

I never imagined I would ever admit this - but I find myself frustrated by the latency of macOS on my Macbook Air more and more after how instantaneous certain things are on my workstation.

Guess what, Microsoft's Outlook.com shows ads that's 40% of your screen composition.
I'm more upset that the Notification thing on the left taskbar side in Windows 11 seems to have a mind of it's own - sometimes it displays the weather, othertimes the NVDA stock price, now it displays that in 4 hours Spain plays against France in Euro 24.

I just wish it displayed the weather, but it seems to ignore my configuration or I have skill issues.

Only when I am getting paid, must I use Windows. The inefficiencies of Windows is passed to my customer.

At home, for all of my work, I use Fedora.

Poor ancient companies using Windows/Microsoft services. They were too slow to adjust to Microsoft's turn to anti-consumer behavior. Now fortune 50 employees are subjected to Microsoft clickbait.

> Welcome to Ghacks! Consent Management

> We and our [165] partners place cookies, access and use non-sensitive information from your device to improve our products and personalize ads...

Definitely a bit of hypocrisy here. "Company X makes money from ads and that's anti-consumer!" "We make money from ads and that's good."
Just uninstall the Weather app and never see or use it again.
I haven’t had to deal with nearly as much bullshit from Microsoft since I switched to AtlasOS, which is a trimmed down version of Windows.

Then again, I know better than fully trusting a third-party patch for an operating system, of all things… so I only use that for games and absolutely nothing else. My main daily os at the moment is Manjaro.

First time I heard of Atlas OS. How is it different from Windows LTSC?
Great! Now I can keep up to date on recent trends in whatever buckets ad companies keep me on!