And the hardest part of it often ends up being "We can replace most of Microsoft's apps and services except one (and it's usually Excel) so we might as well just keep everything else."
Microsoft is king at "Good enough." It's rarely the best option of anything, but what they do put out is bundled aggressively and is generally "good enough."
So, you have a business where a large portion of the user base needs Excel. So you have licensing for that. Sure you can still use other services - you can use Okta instead of EntraID, some other MDM besides InTune, some other EDR besides Defender but once you have 1 product, why would you, when it's significantly cheaper (both in terms of actual cost per user per month and in terms of employing talent that can administer a MS ecosystem) to just go all in with Microsoft.
Because of the way Microsoft designed their suite of software and services, the only realistic choice is either all in on Microsoft, or no Microsoft at all, and to fix that we need antitrust action.
InTune/MDMs are finally eating away at the need for GPOs for most use cases. Someone already familiar with AD & Group Policy should be able to easily transition to InTune Configuration Policies. MS even has a tool now to import your GPOs.
There's still a few that don't have direct equivalents, but the list is growing smaller and smaller.
InTune is part of Microsoft's strategy to make everyone dependent on their cloud. It's like switching from Heroin to Fentanyl because you want to get off of your addiction.
Interestingly enough, I've had games that had both a native Linux port and Windows version, and the Windows version through Proton ran better than the native Linux version. This ended up being true for Civ5, Civ6 and Cities Skylines (1).
With those admittedly limited examples though, I don't experience the same ranking in performance, but I attribute that to my non-gaming hardware vs. any problem with Linux or Proton/Wine. I play on a laptop with an Nvidia 3050 laptop GPU, and I get much better performance in Windows still. In Cities Skylines, for example, I'll get ~20 fps on Linux via Proton (but I do experience what you said, it's consistent no major spikes or drops) while on Windows I get between 45-60fps up until about 15k population or so.
Other games, despite working, remain unplayable to me due to performance. I can play Diablo 4 on windows no problem on medium settings, but even on low it's just too unresponsive on Linux.
Anyway, just my anecdotal experience. Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.
Linux port if there is one is usually done by a third party porting studio, which is not necessarily at the same quality as the original codebase. Also the devs just don't have the manpower/bandwidth to spare for Linux users given how small this community is.
It's better value for money for both the gamers and the devs if the devs just choose to engage with valve and get their game running perfectly under proton.
These ports are also not usually source ports, so they're not much "more native" than the Proton ports. They often use the same kind of API translation layer, probably also built on WINE. I think as Proton sees more investment and becomes more advanced, it's probably becoming difficult for competing compatibility layers to keep up.
A source port that is optimized as lovingly as its Windows counterpart will probably be faster than the Windows version running via Proton, but the incentives aren't generally there to justify the costs/difficulties. Maybe some day it will be! That would be wonderful.
But until then, Proton seems like an increasingly compelling option for these compatibility layer-based ports of Windows games.
Factorio and Minecraft (Java edition) are two of the few games that come to mind where the Linux port got comparable effort to the Windows port, and I don't think people are in a rush to play either of them in Proton.
Your latest AAA open world RPG on the other hand? Yeah, you're probably going to have better luck in Proton even if it gets a native Linux port.
> and get their game running perfectly under proton
Even better would be to compile for linux, but use DXVK-Native (https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk#dxvk-native) if you think migrating from DirectX to Vulkan requires too much effort.
They probably QA mostly for windows, so they run into bottlenecks and edge-cases of windows APIs during QA. Linux-native APIs probably have different bottlenecks and edge-cases.
I think the reimplementations of Windows APIs in Linux, even though alternative to the original, should have similar bottlenecks and edge-cases. So the extra QA on Windows helps the Proton version more.
The answer is pretty simple here - hire CodeWeavers to work on supporting your game in Proton/Wine rather than some other porting shop doing an old rewrite-style port.
To be you should compare the windows version on windows, no proton against the Linux version.
DXVK, which proton uses, makes some games run better in windows than "native".
> Anyway, just my anecdotal experience. Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.
On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.
It does matter, because people will then go on to blame the linux developers for the lack of the feature, when they should instead be blaming Nvidia's antagonistic stance and stop supporting them.
> On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.
> HDR
Already supported
> Nvidia GPUs
You have it the wrong way around. NVIDIA had issues supporting Linux, not Linux supporting NVIDIA. AMD drivers work fine, so its not a linux specific issue.
Is it though? I confess I haven’t tried in a few weeks but until last time I did, to get HDR in games you had to start a session with `gamescope` rather than a DE, and still had to set a bunch of flags - and in some ways have a very subpar experience with problems with mouse movements and other issues I can’t recall.
I exclusively game on Linux and I find the experience far superior than doing anything on the other OS, but last I checked HDR was not actually supported.
KDE has supported it for a while on the desktop. Still needed Gamescope to make it work in games. Like I mentioned, I haven't tried it in some time so it may have changed.
For gaming and general desktop on Linux AMD is best if you want a dedicated GPU.
If you want a laptop with good battery life Intel is generally the way to go.
A lot of this is due to the enormous amount of effort Valve put into improving the open source AMD drivers, which is what is used on their Steam platform.
Of course if you want CUDA you need Nvidia, but if you use Nvidia to drive your Linux desktop expect some suffering to go along with it.
For what it’s worth I’ve been using an RTX 3090 and it’s been mostly smooth sailing for a couple years now.
Running NixOS with a pretty vanilla configuration and it has been hassle free.
I did have to disable power management at the system level because framerate suffers severely if the system sleeps and wakes back up, but I shut the system down when I’m not using it, so this was a non factor for me.
It's getting there though. I own a high-end PC with nvidia GPU and I play VR on my Linux setup via ALVR (I own Quest 3)
It's not straightforward and full of workarounds I have to do, but once you're in the game it works great
I think Windows isn’t that different, just that there's more motivation for NVIDIA or Microsoft to fix those things. I recall not that long ago a combination of Windows 11, my NVIDIA RTX 40xx, my previous Dell Alienware monitor also had some issues with switching between SDR and HDR (and later Dolby Vision brought even more of a mess).
Meanwhile Android and iOS phones have been able to do it flawlessly for a while now…
There are indeed nvidia drivers for Linux and they're reasonably good for gaming, but the feature set sometimes lags far behind windows. There is no DLSS 3 for Linux, for instance. (as of a few months ago anyway - I haven't checked recently)
Nvidia support across the desktop ecosystem is poor, for example practically nonfunctional in Sway. And just buggy in other Wayland based desktop environments (kde seems to be the best in my experience).
WRT Nvidia+Sway this was certainly true not so long ago. But since the latest Ubuntu release and with a recent driver I am running this combo and it works flawlessly.
Really! I'm happy to hear it, I'll give it a try on my desktop this weekend. I would love to get all my machines on the same desktop environment once and for all.
I'm doing PCI passthrough of a 1080 to an archaic tiling X11 window manager and so far it Just Works with noeveau. XFCE also worked fine before I decided I don't want a full DE. Rock stable. I will move dists before I move to Wayland by the looks of it.
i3 should be pretty easy switch from sway if you haven't tried.
It doesn't have anything to do with graphics in the Linux ecosystem. Netflix specifically blocks Linux from having decent quality so it's kind of pointless to discuss. If you want high quality, you can pirate it or rip from disc. Dirt cheap n100 minipcs are capable of playing UHD bluray rips in Linux just fine for example, so Netflix's relatively low bitrate media aren't an issue.
Not an ecosystem issue at all. There's no "yet". Linux computers even on the very low end are already perfectly capable of playing 4k Netflix videos. You can easily prove this to yourself by downloading one via torrent (you can generally get exact stream rips with DRM removed if you want). Netflix just won't send UHD streams to Linux users. That's a political choice, not a technology problem, and it's easy enough to get the media elsewhere DRM-free if it's that important to you since Netflix evidently specifically does not want Linux users as customers.
I wonder of this might be due to your Linux nvidia driver (nouveau?) pinning the card on baseclock by default while the Windows one will allow it to scale up? Something I heard somewhere that seems applicable here.
In that case it might not be anything the game devs or Steam can do anything about but something you'd have to fiddle with on your system.
Happens with whisky and macos in my experience. It is like as soon as a game is installed and you do something like chuck a grenade, no explosion the first time ever you do that.
> Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.
That’s interesting and good to know. I’m running an 10th gen i9 with an RTX 3090, so I have plenty of headroom performance wise. I’ve been wondering about Linux gaming on lower end hardware for my younger brother’s sake, and hadn’t assumed it would be worse.
One thing to note: I’ve had all kinds of issues with power management impacting performance. If I let the computer sleep/standby, I’ll get 50% slower framerate until I reboot.
Given the fact that you’re on a laptop, I wonder if power management has contributed to the slowness.
I have a laptop with the same GPU, and Diablo 4 runs really well out of Lutris. Graphics version 570, and the CPU is an AMD with a Radeon 680M integrated. I often play games with FSR on, which probably keeps performance higher?
Hear, Hear. We are seriously missing out over here in the US and continuing to be protectionist over the big 3 automakers is not going to improve our climate situation.
I consistently hear 2 main arguments against electric vehicles in the US. Range, and cost.
BYD & China is solving both. Range is important because we lack charging infrastructure still, and anyone who rents at an apartment complex, you are screwed and have to rely on public charging stations. Big batteries are important for these folks. People also still have range anxiety, so when a fuel efficient gas car will get ~400+ miles per full tank, only having more expensive cars with a ~250 mile range is a non starter for a lot of people in the US.
Cost is self explanatory. One of the better electric cars sold in the US, the Ioniq 6 STARTS at $38k, which is already more than a significant chunk of the population can afford - you're looking at close to an $800/month payment at current rates for entry level. BYD could sell in the US at around $20,000.
Not to say EV charging has been solved, it is still very much in progress, but 64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public charging station. We should continue to use policy to encourage "EV ready" infra in residential and apartment settings, places of business, commercial/retail, government, etc, but lots of folks can be served today. The vast majority US housing stock is single family homes (attached and detached combined), and those can, in most cases, be upgraded to support a dedicated circuit for charging. And, to your point, you'll also want to mandate new apartment building build outs are EV charging ready for their tenants.
> The number of EV charging stations has more than doubled since 2020. In December 2020, the Department of Energy reported that there were nearly 29,000 public charging stations nationwide. By February 2024, that number had increased to more than 61,000 stations. Over 95% of the American public now lives in a county that has at least one public EV charging station.
> EV charging stations are most accessible to residents of urban areas: 60% of urban residents live less than a mile from the nearest public EV charger, compared with 41% of those in the suburbs and just 17% of rural Americans.
2 miles is an awfully long way, and 36% of Americans are even further away. That’s 4 miles round trip. Presumably many of those charging stations aren’t that big and disallow you leaving your car overnight. The rest of the numbers are similarly bad.
Some of the new 1000v infrastructure has 10-80% charging occuring in 5 minutes.
These arguments are kind of like horse and cart owners stating that gasoline powered vehicles will.need to be able to get fuel and that's impractical. Its infrastructure and innovation that is still being built out, the that build out is now 10-12 years along for most first world nations.
It’s not insane to hope many cars will be able to go and charge themselves at 2am, when roads are quiet and chargers are free, a few years from now. Optimise over the entire system, schedule it, car ready for the morning.
This is going to be a long time coming. Owners of EVs overwhelmingly live in houses not apartments. No one is going to send their car off to pay many times their home rate per kWh when they could get a home L2 charger and charge it themselves. It would pay for itself in under a year.
My comment is not solving for people who would be better served by charging at home, because they don’t care about the distance to a charger. Waymo’s can already find their own way to a charger, so it’s not a huge stretch to imagine people innovating around this problem for owned cars.
Waymo might build a waymo specific solution, but the general case for the general population won't exist for a long time.
The demand isn't there. The group of people who buy EVs and don't have a home to charge at is too small. And that won't change until the economics of purchasing an EV fundamentally change.
I’m making very loose claims. Hope, it’s not an huge stretch, etc. My error bars are very wide, intentionally, because it’s hard to predict the next 5 years. Your position is a lot more brittle. If self driving works, cars can go fill themselves up. That can change demand, so the demand argument falls away. If taxi’s work and scale up, costs drop, so the economic issue falls away. For you to be right, no innovation must happen.
The point I’m primarily trying to make, repeatedly: distance to a charger is not some universal rule that prevents uptake. The least likely thing to be true is that the market stays the same. If it remains the same in the US for a few years, China will crush this market.
I disagree, you're missing a really important part. If self driving exists, then cars can drive themselves to the spot where the chargers are, which is necessary but not sufficient.
Either a human needs to be employed overnight plugging in and unplugging these cars ($$) or else every single charger that supports this needs to have new fancy robotic arms and some agreed-upon protocol that cars can use to request a charge.
Considering that so far the story of EV chargers in America has looked like "download my app!" people struggling and failing to get credit card readers reliably working, I have no faith that this would happen in a few years.
I’d considered it but assumed a person in one place is cheaper than many people wandering around to fill their own cars. Just bake it into the price. This is not an insurmountable problem compared to “require all buildings must be upgraded to power EV charging”. If I paid you a million dollars to figure it out I think you could make a plan in under a day.
The benefit is that you can power the cars when there is least demand on the grid, on the roads, on the need for the vehicles themselves, on the time of people who currently wait at chargers for their cars to charge. Fix one thing (and build upon the main innovation of cars driving themselves) and you unlock all this other waste. The charging location can even manage this by setting availability to align with staff, eg 5am to 11pm, or 24/7 if they want to hire up. You can even have roaming staff, eg wander between three locations and just switch the cars out.
It's certainly not an insurmountable problem, I just think we're in a local minimum that will prevent it from being a thing in, say, the next 5 years. I would agree with your other statement that China may well figure it out.
The current state of affairs in the US is that having a L2 charger at home and paying $E for 100kwh of electricity is massively less expensive than paying $E*5 for the car to go charge itself via some third party. This will not be a cheap service. The places where people tend to buy electric vehicles, generally coincide with high electricity prices and high labor costs. Maybe the high electricity costs can be somewhat offset by using off-peak power, but that's also off-peak generation due to solar panels, so who knows.
This also relies on the innovation of "cars that can drive themselves to the charger", which has been 18 months away in Teslas for what, a decade now? And Teslas are now a tiny proportion of the EVs sold in the US. Something less expensive and better price-per-range like the Ioniq 5/6 or the Equinox EV don't even have the hardware to take advantage of a system like this if you could snap your fingers and make these overnight charging facilities exist.
I don't think the economics work in the 2020s. Someday, sure.
> 64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public charging station.
If this includes AC chargers, leaving your car for 8 hours 2 miles away is an absolute pain.
If it doesn't, the question becomes are the chargers occupied? Are they operational?
Waiting at a gas station takes a minute, waiting at a charger takes 30.
I've been driving an EV for more than 5 years and pretending that charging isn't a significant hindrance to EV ownership is disingenuous. It's actually gotten worse because more EVs are on the road and the chargers haven't kept pace with the rising demand.
I’m currently on a road trip and was leaving the car at a nearby charger which was walking distance from where I’m staying - I can’t imagine owning one where either this wasn’t available or there wasn’t a fast charger I could spend 10 minutes at.
The actual long distance drives were super easy thanks to Superchargers - 5-10 minute stops keep you driving for hours! It doesn’t feel disadvantaged compared to gas so long as the infrastructure is there.
I think the difficulty is the installation process. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the challenge of getting that much run to convenient places isn't always that easy and, combined with the regulatory burdens likely involved in something providing that much power is scaring away potential installations.
You have to think a lot of the low hanging fruit locations are taken by now and, even if it's profitable, it doesn't make any profit while you're building it and I've seen a "coming soon" sign on top of what looked like a finished installation for more than a year at a mall near me.
Byd recently came out saying the hyper competitive landscape and low prices needs to end soon. The Chinese government is propping up a lot of their auto industry right now. So some protectionism is needed if you don’t want one of the last bits of manufacturing strength to disappear in the US.
Genuine question, we have manufacturing strength in the US auto industry?
Even among Americans, American cars aren't considered that good. There's a massive reliability premium you pay for Honda and Toyota. Even cars with 100k miles on them (frustratingly as a buyer) keep their value. And they're manufactured in the US, inasmuch as any car can be said to be manufactured in a single location.
I've been searching around and I can't even find data about other countries importing our cars which to me would be the biggest signal of strength.
I own a Chevy Bolt EUV, made in the US. After 18 months driving it, I was happy enough with it that we leased a Chevy Equinox EV to replace my wife's gas car. The Equinox is made in Mexico, not the US but we've also been happy with it for 9 months so far.
We've owned Hondas (Odyssey) and Toyotas (Camry, Prius, Corolla). They've been great. We also changed the oil whenever the car's display said to and did whatever other servicing our independent mechanic advised. I suspect that a lot of cars would also be reliable if they were maintained.
Toyota is recalling 100,000 Tundra trucks because debris was left in the engine. https://www.haleytoyota.com/blog/the-2022-2023-toyota-tundra... There's no perfect vehicle although I'd say EVs get a lot closer when you can refill at home and do basically no maintenance except tire rotations and cabin air filters.
I have a 2018 Model 3 and your description of BYD is exactly how I would describe my Tesla. It feels cheap and plasticky and it creaks. I also briefly had a Model 3 rental car that was newer than mine (but I don't know what year it was) and it also felt the same.
I had thought about throwing an exception for Tesla because they did manage to create cars that people outside the US want. So I guess that does count but I doubt they're what anyone thinks of when they think of American car makes.
Oh I would for sure buy a BYD today if I were able. The ones I've ridden in have been really nice. I mean they are literally plastic but so is every car in the "economy" price range. I don't think their interiors were noticeably different than any other non-luxury car. I've been told that their higher end models don't have this problem.
The hyper competitive landscape only exists within China.
However, the much higher prices these companies are selling their cars outside of China are still much lower than the prices American cars are available at.
Hopefully this will allow cheaper cars to get ~400mi of range but I doubt we'll ever see much more in mainstream cars. Batteries are simply too expensive and too heavy. Fuel tanks are cheap to build, but we still see no gasoline passenger cars with large tanks. The manufacturers sort of standardize around a "normal" capacity, and just want the one option to design, manufacture, crash test, etc.
Not only the climate situation, the economic situation. If the US protects the old tech for another decade it’ll never catch up. The US needs to move along the experience curve as fast as possible, build skills and volume and charging stations and suitable power grids and sources. I would much, much rather be China than the US in this fight right now.
My car gets ~500 miles/800 km per tank. My wife's car, which has a more efficient engine and transmission and is also smaller, but with the same huge tank, gets ~600 miles/960 km per tank. I will have to stop for a bathroom somewhere along a route that long, but only once or twice. I used to have to stop three times for a ~900 mile/1500 km trip that I did a few times.
This is a problem with EV proponents who try to argue that "you'll stop every couple of hours for half an hour or so anyway, so charging isn't an issue". No, I won't. I'll drive 1000 miles with less than 45 minutes of downtime on the whole trip. I don't stop every two hours. Maybe 15 minutes every 4 hours, of which 10 is fueling and going to the bathroom and 5 is getting off and back on the highway.
That's not a slam against EV's, but let's acknowledge their weak points honestly.
I think the argument is not whether EVs will take an extra 65-80 min to go 1000 miles, it’s whether that matters to the average driver. Realistically for my family it doesn’t. I’m sure for some (predominately) solo drivers it does. But then there’s the question of how often you’re driving 1000 mile trips that an extra 1.5hrs max actually impacts anything real in your life…
I guess if you’re trying to follow an ICE car on a road trip then yeah it might be a weak point. If you’re already stopping every 200 miles then it’s no matter. For us, we enjoy travel days more with the built in stretch/bathroom breaks.
You can do 1000 miles in one day, but it is a really unpleasant trip. Doing it in two is so much nicer. Take a hotel one night. Have a really nice meal at a slow restaurant a couple of times. Visit a couple of roadside attractions.
Those are five long charging opportunities, which is two more than you need for a 1000 mile trip.
Ah, yes, that’s the ticket. Spend far more money and time than you would with an ICE to do your trip.
I get the concept, and I am not an EV hater. But let us not pretend that long-distance driving is an imaginary thing. I don’t stop - ever - for more than fifteen minutes, unless it’s to sleep.
I've done 1800 mile trips in 36 hours. Stopping for 20 minutes every three hours to charge, bathroom, and grab food would not have added significant time to the trip.
I've also done the same trip in 3 days, and in 5 days. The longer trips were far more pleasant, and were not slowed down at all by charging.
Overnight charging at hotels is awesome. 5 years ago if a hotel had EV chargers it was very likely one was available. Unfortunately, it's more common that they're all busy now.
Your 500 and 600 miles per fill-up is the kind of outlier that isn't much worth discussing. That kind of range can't be more than about 5-7% of US autos.
My car (Mazda3 hatch) gets 24 mpg, which is actually typical for US mid-sized cars.
I have a 3-5 minute gas station fill up every 260 miles or so, basically once a week. The Chinese MG4 does 435 miles on a charge, 95% of which I could charge at home, the remaining 5% of my miles are my twice a year road trips @ ~400 mi (to LA) and ~800 mi (to Seattle).
The MG4 makes LA without a stop and Seattle with 1 stop.
That's a once a year stop for ~30 minute in the EV compared to 3-4 hours a year sitting at smelly gas stations for my Mazda ICE.
I would certainly trade never having to ever take my car into a gas station, ever again, for one brief stop once a year on my leisurely road trip if I had the cash to buy a great EV.
I hear you, and your concern is real for your context.
But to be fair, not every product has to perfectly fit every context. To be successful a product can fill a small niche, or it can appeal to a large market- it doesn't have to satisfy every use case.
So you're right - driving 1000 miles with no downtime is not an EV strength. But the percentage of the market doing that is tiny. Conversely the proportion of people who live in a house (home charging) and drive < 100 miles a day, is huge.
Even for those doing a "once a year road trip" - well, hire cars exist.
So I completely agree that an EV is not useful to you. I would suggest though that a product can be massively successful, while at the same time appealing to a subset of the market. And appealing to a subset does not limit validity or indeed profitability.
Lipstick seems to be a successful product, despite only appealing to something less than 50% of the market.
Why not? -200 miles each way is in the realm of day trips unless you’re driving very congested corridors. I drove 400+ miles each way last Christmas with two overnights in between. I did the same distance a month or two ago and again last week, though I did stay for about a week each time.
That sounds like you have a more efficient car than many of us. When I switched to an EV I actually got a range upgrade due to having a really inefficient ICE vehicle. Regardless, most of us aren't spending our days doing multi hundred mile drives. We shouldn't be optimizing for that scenario.
You’re an outlier. Most people don’t do long road trips often, and when they do they don’t care to drive 1000 miles with minimal stops, and their gas cars don’t have that much range in a tank of fuel.
Yes, EVs do slow down long road trips a bit. But it’s really not much of a difference. I just did 3000 miles in 10 days in one.
Agreed but this car would solve that for just $25,000 if we didn’t have 100% tariffs on Chinese vehicles. 1,200 mile range, can charge 800 miles in 12 minutes.
There's still an agreement on what's beneficial, even if the how isn't standardized. TO use your bicycle analogy, it's widely accepted that clipping into pedals is beneficial, we've found it improves power transfer and efficiency - the idea of clipping in is standardized, but the implementation (cleat design) is still open for interpretation.
We see this in open source too - we can coordinate and all agree on a core idea or problem that needs solving, but still end up with different, competing implementations. It's not a bad thing, choice is good and often leads to innovation as different approaches compete and evolve.
I do think you are right on your first point - that inertia of user base is the predictor of what will stick. Even Linux, stuck around due to licensing and availability (and then user inertia from that) rather than any technical superiority.
In theory yes? But the point is still to use shared API and models for 2-3 platforms. In practice it could go unused if it’s too different. Most real world app developers don’t like to spend maintenance cycles on platform specific stuff, especially if there’s no functional benefit.
> I get that big money interests (like DRM) are constantly pressuring you to remove user control and give it to them, but if you just said "no, our users are more important" they would just have to take it because they can't turn away 45 or 50% or whatever of the US market and 80+% of the global market.
I'm not so sure of that, at least in the US anyway. Users would absolutely switch operating systems/mobile phones if one suddenly stopped playing Netflix, streaming music, or even working with banking apps. DRM interests have all the power here because if content platforms are pulled from a platform, that platform dies for the majority of the population.
The only way out is regulation - laws that mandate devices be open, and alternative app stores, side loading, root access, and alternative OSes are supported by order of law.
> Users would absolutely switch operating systems/mobile phones if one suddenly stopped playing Netflix, streaming music, or even working with banking apps. DRM interests have all the power here because if content platforms are pulled from a platform, that platform dies for the majority of the population.
Consider what happens if they actually do this. Millions of people have that phone platform and aren't going to buy a new phone for at least a couple years. Switching phone platforms is a large time investment for most people because all your stuff is on that platform's cloud services etc.
Meanwhile most of that stuff doesn't need a phone. You're watching Netflix on your big screen TV rather than your tiny pocket device most of the time, aren't you? Your bank has a website. So if it stopped working on your phone, you wouldn't immediately buy a new phone, you would just use the website. But now the streaming service and the bank are immediately getting millions of user complaints that their app is broken.
Either of the major platforms could also use any of the malicious compliance schemes they use for other things. Find some over-broad or unreasonable contractual provision in the "must supply DRM" agreement that you don't like anyway, point to it as a justification for making a change to the DRM system in the brand new version of the OS, and disable the DRM in the older versions of the OS that are on 95% of existing devices, blaming the services for putting that term in the contract and obligating you to do it.
Then the users don't have to switch platforms, they "only" have to buy a new device and can avoid the platform transition cost. For the ones who do, the vendor gets to sell more devices. For all the ones who don't, the DRM pushers still get millions of user complaints and a strong incentive to release the app without the DRM in it.
And if they do release the app without the DRM in it, now the new devices don't need the DRM either ("we found a vulnerability in the later version too and had to disable it as well"), and now the users have no reason to switch platforms over it so the DRM can stay gone forever.
This is the same problem the incumbent duopoly causes for all other app developers. And that's bad -- the duopoly should be broken up -- but it does currently exist, and it could, if it wanted to, use that to do something good. (You might also consider what would happen if they both decided to lose DRM at once.)
> blaming the services for putting that term in the contract and obligating you to do it.
I think you're vastly overestimating customers' willingness to listen and care about whose fault it is. In practice, if Netflix (or whatever other app) suddenly stopped working on Android phones, people using Android would complain about their phones being broken whilst their iPhone-using friends continue to use the app just fine.
The media companies know that they will win that game of chicken every time. It would take a concerted effort across tech companies to really take them down, and nobody is interested in waging that war because the cost of simply implementing DRM is too low for it to be worth the struggle and the risk.
> In practice, if Netflix (or whatever other app) suddenly stopped working on Android phones, people using Android would complain about their phones being broken whilst their iPhone-using friends continue to use the app just fine.
Complaining about it and immediately buying a different phone are two different things. And in the meantime, what are they doing? Watching YouTube or whatever other service doesn't use DRM instead of Netflix, and then continuing to watch the things they started watching on that service on their TV when they get home, and then wondering why they're still paying for the one they're not using anymore.
Notice also that a huge proportion of these people don't have an iPhone because they can't afford one -- cheapest new iPhone is ~$600, cheapest new Android is ~$50 -- so switching platforms was never an option for them. And conversely, that the people whose identity and sense of self is tied up in having an iPhone are certainly not going to buy an Android over Netflix.
> The media companies know that they will win that game of chicken every time.
Evidence to the contrary. Every time one of these popular DRM systems gets cracked, do they stop using it and lose all of the customers who have that platform? No, they just keep using the broken one because not losing a lot of customers is way more important to them than the DRM.
If you think regulation is the answer then why not use those regulatory powers to de-fang DRM and update copyright law. People gave up their right to make copies to incentivize publishers as that was that only way to get copies. Publishers are no longer necessary for this and people should be demanding their right to make copies back.
Yeah, especially considering how long they already are supported by Apple.
Sure it'd be nice to continue to be able to upgrade the software on out of support devices, but how long can we really expect a for profit company to support old stuff? I personally think 5 years is fine for a phone.
Time will tell what they do about apple silicon Macs though. The M1 is 5 years old now, and is still capable for pretty much all workloads if you have one with enough RAM. I could see it being still useful for 5+ more years. It's there I would expect at least 10 years of support, I think.
Especially in the US, where non-tech folks have shown time and time again they don't care about privacy, and will happily trade all of their personal information over for useful products and features.
I know several people who were actually excited for Recall, rather than horrified by it.
It's a reminder that generally, what techies on HN (and especially Reddit) think is generally the opposite of the general population.
Microsoft is king at "Good enough." It's rarely the best option of anything, but what they do put out is bundled aggressively and is generally "good enough."
So, you have a business where a large portion of the user base needs Excel. So you have licensing for that. Sure you can still use other services - you can use Okta instead of EntraID, some other MDM besides InTune, some other EDR besides Defender but once you have 1 product, why would you, when it's significantly cheaper (both in terms of actual cost per user per month and in terms of employing talent that can administer a MS ecosystem) to just go all in with Microsoft.
Because of the way Microsoft designed their suite of software and services, the only realistic choice is either all in on Microsoft, or no Microsoft at all, and to fix that we need antitrust action.
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