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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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How bad is Microsoft? (www.gnu.org)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was curious what the Linux people think about Microsoft and any bad practices that most people should know about already?

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Microsoft is definitely the corpoest of them all.

Probably not the worst corpo, likely even, but out of the corpos, they are the most corpo corpo of any corpo.

They own LinkedIn, and I could just stop this list here.
They're the founding fathers of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.
They are the vanguard of videogame studio consolidation, after buying Activision and Bethesda.
AI
Everything they do is soggy bread: you can eat it, it's probably mostly healthy, I think, but if a product is not the minimum viable product then it will be; take the Halo franchise as a reference for blandness, Windows for end user tolerance - both are controversial yet functional and popular software that people complain (and do nothing) about. Halo took quite a hit in popularity, but still...
Remember when a software company got in trouble for monopolistic practices? That was a thing that happened at some point, and it was Microsoft. Not that it will ever happen again, nowadays all the cool kids have some slice of the tech landscape on a chokehold.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Ok but look on the bright side of things! you get great futures with this big tech concentration and control of the market. For instance, who else doesn't want a operating system hotkey to Linkedin, baked into their settings? How did I use a computer without that before?!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Worse than Apple?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Apple is highly restrictive on their OS and over priced. They are extremely pro consumerism with heavy marketing and engineered obsolescence to ensure you are always pressured to buy their new tech, and they are historically very strongly anti-right-to-repair.

Microsoft is bad. But at least they are primarily a software monopoly.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Apple is from the walled garden of Eden.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Fortunately I have a ladder

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'm not sure, at least the unrepairable mess made by Microsoft is software rather than hardware - you can reinstall a janky OS but you can't unexplode a phone that disassembled itself when you sneezed in its general direction.

There's no fine line between the two companies.

Edit: they continuously fucked up Halo in unexcusable ways, fuck them, they're worse than Apple. Forgot about that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Yes. Microsoft is the king of “good enough” software. DOS was good enough (and had a free C compiler!). Windows gets the job done 95% of the time when it’s not freezing up or needing rebooting. Office is okay - and nothing else is 100% compatible so you get a bonus of vendor lock-in. New features are few and far between, as are bug fixes for non-critical issues.