I mean, you're right, but stop and look at it from Microsoft's perspective. They don't really care. They're pushing Windows with every release to be more like a mobile OS because that's what the average casual tech user knows and uses daily. They've moved productivity software from local machines to the cloud as subscription software, which is basically OS-agnostic. It doesn't care if you log in from an iOS tablet or somebody running Haiku or FreeBSD.

They're actively trying to replace most of their actual, human developers with AI, so losing their larger developer ecosystem is clearly something they no longer consider a major risk.

They have major vendor lock-in in the large corporate spaces because of regulatory and compliance lock-in, plus inertia. PwC, Goldman Sachs, and Lockheed Martin aren't moving their office drones to Linux Mint any time soon. Some of them can't even if they wanted to because Windows + certain security solutions are required as part of various regulatory compliance modes for their field.

Basically... Microsoft is only doing Windows anymore because it sort of gets them other things they actually want, and the days of it still being the key to those things are very much on the downswing.

I think part of the problem is that even Microsoft doesn't really care about Windows anymore. It's an obligatory means to their actual goal. The key computing markets are corporate customers and gaming; mundane everyday users have shifted mostly to mobile or web stuff (like Office 365), and corporate customers are the 900 lb gorilla because gamers are vocal but small as a group in comparison. Big data centers are mostly running some flavor of *nix (even MS or Amazon ones), and let's just skip the MacOS folks. Don't get involved with cults.

So for MS, Windows is a thing they have to do to keep large corporate customers who buy tens of thousands of licenses and service contracts every year for hundreds of millions of dollars. They don't even really care about Bob Smith, basic PC Owner. There's no money for them there and it's a shrinking market anyway.

You can either use the flexibility of a free project - not driven by profit motive - to displace an uninterested party with motivations elsewhere, or you can threaten their piggy bank by displacing their larger cash cow (corporate level bulk use). But gamers as an OS market will not swing Microsoft. Microsoft will just keep doing Xbox stuff (possibly even on Playstation). They're too sclerotic to meaningfully tackle a smaller market like PC gaming. Maybe 20-25 years ago, but not these days.

Quit selling dual-use technology to a nation that wants to destroy us with it, Huang. It's pretty simple.

Your quarterly earnings won't matter if the West Coast takes AI-coordinated cruise missile strikes from the Chinese Navy.

I have a strong suspicion that historians 100, 200, maybe 500 years from now won't look at Apple as a technology company and Jobs as a leader and inventor, they will look at them as harbingers of disastrous unforseen consequences, like Whitney and the cotton gin or Nobel and nitro.
Jobs created a device that has directly and indirectly unraveled centuries, and in some cases millenium, of painstaking civilizational growth and development... and he will be remembered for that, not one company or a UI innovation on desktops.

Also he was an asshole.

Altman is the most flat-out sociopath of all the techbros and it's not close.

When even Elon Musk thinks you're a lying two-faced snake, that's called "a clue".

Look up their concept of "help vampires".

Basically, if you ask for "too much" help or don't try "hard enough" yourself first (which is entirely subjective), they ban you.

Utterly toxic elitist bullshit and I actively steer new Linux users away from Arch because of it.

...maybe if their users weren't such raging sneering dickholes in their user forum, people wouldn't have the notion to do stuff like this.

Free speech is a contract between rational people of a common society who have agreed to resolve their debates peacefully.

Right now we have Russian, Chicom, and Iranian botnets spewing deliberate lies and disinfo ops into our discourse with the sole and specific aim of creating strife and chaos, to harm our society. Their ultimate goal is quite literally to crash our nation so that we are no longer in the way of their goals - goals which we work to stop them from accomplishing because those goals are vile to our morals.

Do you really want those bad faith actors included in our discourse? Because I don't. I want them shot.

The problem is that a social network is a natural evolution of hyperconnected personal devices that are everywhere across the planet. It's something that is going to occur at some point. You can't unsqueeze that toothpaste.

The more pressing issue is that kind of network is the perfect weapon for a closed society to use against an open society, and we have a couple of toxic, authoritarian closed societies whose existence we've tolerated for way too long. They're the source of this problem on those networks.

Take away Russia, China, Iran, Qatar, and North Korea (and then glare menacingly at Venezuela until they get their shit together) and a huge number of problems, global-level problems, disappear overnight.

Those handful of screwed up governments are literally dragging humanity down with them. We used to solve those kinds of problems... forcefully. Permanently.

And it's also about 95% certain that most or all of those source accounts are information / social warfare efforts run by nation state actors.

,..because its original name is the Coeurl, from the novella The Black Destroyer by A E van Vogt (it showed up later in The Voyage of the Space Beagle, which was ripped off for Alien). There's no specific public record I can find of van Vogt or his estate providing an exclusive license (or ANY license) to TSR or WotC for them to claim ownership of something derived from the Coeurl.

How are the UK news networks and papers of record doing with accurate and honest reporting on that whole "nationwide Muslim rape gang scandal" subject?

Because it kind of looks like they failed that litmus test of journalistic integrity in spectacular, disastrous fashion.

"The game received an unusual number of user reviews with a clear negative bias (including a large percentage of "zero" reviews), despite seeing acceptable review scores from reputable review sites," Wedbush analysts Michael Pachter, Alicia Reese and Kade Bar wrote in a note last week. "This is a case of a rare incel victory that led to Ubisoft having to take down its numbers," they added."

"Well of COURSE it has to be the fucking incels. We couldn't possibly make a shit game, just look at the scores in all these reviews we paid for!"

There is no OS that will fix those users.

Conversely, Linux is probably easier to properly lock down so those same users can't really break things.

Youtube can serve me ads when Youtube also takes 100% perpetual responsibility for everything their servers send to my machines.
That includes malware from compromised ads and ad servers.

Oh, they won't do that? They can't guarantee they'll never serve malicious compromised ads, like they have previously? And they won't guarantee to make me whole if they do?

Then I don't give a dry squeaky flying fuck what they whine about. I will protect my devices and my data, and they can suck it.