Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

This Microsoft hating article misses that now, Microsoft couldn&#x27;t care less.<p>They have their own Linux distribution, all these years after the lawsuit they have become a Java distribution provider, recently added their own Go build for Azure, speaking of which, even if powered by Hyper V&#x2F;Windows Host OS, 60% of Azure workloads are Linux based, more so if count ChatGPT&#x2F;CoPilot stuff.<p>Then there is Github holding a big deal of FOSS universe as well.<p>VSCode and its forks used by cloud providers as Web IDEs, completly outshadow vim&#x2F;emacs clones, to the point JetBrains felt pressured to come out with Fleet.<p>Their sales champions in 2023 were XBox, Azure and Microsoft 365.

Many people use the term &quot;open-source&quot;, but this is truly a matter of software freedom. Microsoft won&#x27;t ever be able to compete with free&#x2F;libre and self-determination because their business model is predicated upon capturing and exploiting their customers, and it&#x27;s gotten to the point where governments -- perhaps their most lucrative and complacent customers -- have had enough.

The reason the plan always fails is because the actual secret plan is just to get an extra discount, the plan may succeed if Microsoft stop doing that...

This is funny considering I live in the center of Schleswig-Holstein and work in IT. People barely know how to work with Excel, they most likely won&#x27;t figure out anything remotely different...

Any article that brings up LibreOffice as the driving force behind a move away from Microsoft has me both skeptical and amused.<p>Sure, it’s wonderful that LibreOffice exists, don’t get me wrong. It’s a piece of software that’s famously better at opening ancient Word-formatted documents better than Word itself. It’s lovely that it’s free and supported by a great community.<p>But I’ll be damned if it isn’t my very last choice for productivity software. It just is not somewhere I want to spend my time.<p>Idealistic prose about data sovereignty is nice and all but I’ve never seen an organization have an ounce of hesitation about Microsoft’s enterprise data privacy and security.<p>Really this manifesto is limited to organizations who have specific need to avoid things like search warrants, and in many cases all you’re doing is changing the search warrant from Microsoft to your company’s servers. Really if your information is that sensitive you probably need a more bespoke solution anyway.<p>Finally, this article misplaces the value that Microsoft provides. Software as a service means that the software is providing a service: in other words, companies aren’t subscribing to 365 because they need a better spreadsheet program than LibreOffice, they’re subscribing so that they don’t have to administer servers for email, documents, communication, etc. Open Source offers no such thing.

&gt; upping hardware specs for Windows 11 for no good reason<p>This could very much be the main reason for this transition to succeed this time, more than any ideological points. In October 2025 millions of perfectly good computers will become obsolete. Windows 10 reaches end of support and Windows 11 won&#x27;t work on other CPUs and mainboards without TPM. And everyone will have a choice to either throw them all away and purchase new ones, or to start paying Microsoft a yearly fee for extended support.<p>I don&#x27;t think we ever saw this kind of forced upgrade with so little benefits for the end user. In 80s and 90s when upgrades were more frequent a new computer was substantially more powerful than the old one and you were very much looking forward to upgrade. Not this time though. If your 10 old computer has SSD, 16+ GB RAM, and 4+ core CPU, for many use cases it will be as powerful as the new computer. I can easily buy a cheaper new computer that will be worse than one of my 10+ year old higher end machines - less storage, less memory, etc. Sure, if I buy higher end it will be much better for video encoding and few more tasks, but for general office use or even development there won&#x27;t be much difference.

The passing of years and historical dynamics have perhaps changed the nature of this debate. The conflict has evolved conceptually, and although equivalent to the previous spirit, it now seems to be characterized as local [F&#x2F;OSS] vs cloud [BigTech].

There is no try. :D

FYI: The most premium OS I&#x27;ve ever had was Fedora Cinnamon.<p>I had thought Windows was the nicest because I had been dabbling in Ubuntu&#x2F;Mint and free software was... cheap... Nah: I had been using Debian-family.<p>If you ever thought Linux was worse than Windows, I challenge you to use Fedora. You most likely had used a Debian-family distro, and those are not designed for the average user.