How else could they make their shareholders happy in the usual MBA style exponential growth that is expected from public companies at the stock exchange?
Most of my coworkers on Windows use none of these desktop applications, there's very little value in their features if you're already using WSL2 and the docker integration of your favorite IDE.
As someone that was once upon a time a FOSS zealot with M$ on email signature and all, the only reason I care about Linux on the desktop is exactly Docker containers, everything else I use the native platform software.
Eventually I got practical and fed up with ways of Linux Desktop.
The thing is.. I am forced to use windows for my current job and it is so much worse than Linux desktop has ever been in the last 10-15 years, I'm honestly buffled.
Like, suspend-wake is honestly 100% reliable compared to whatever my Windows 11 laptop does, random freezes, updates are still a decade behind what something like NixOS has (I can just start an update and since the system is immutable it won't disturb me in any shape or form).
My corporate Windows laptop is awful, but it is because it being corporate. At home I have used Linux exclusively from 2019 to 2024. Then I switched to Windows 11 LTSC IoT (yes yes, piracy bad) and I don't look back.
> Eventually I got practical and fed up with ways of Linux Desktop.
I was in the same boat and used macOS for a decade since it was practical for my needs.
These days I find it easier to do my work on Linux, ironically cross-platform development & audio. At least in my experience, desktop Linux is stable, works with my commercial apps, and things like collaboration over Zoom/Meet/etc with screen sharing actually work out of the box, so it ticks all of my boxes. This certainly wasn't the case several years ago, where Linux incompatibility and instability could be an issue when it comes to collaboration and just getting work done.
Yet, just last year I ended up getting rid of a mini-PC, because I was stupid enough not to validate its UEFI firmware would talk to Linux.
I have spent several months trying to make it work, across a couple of distros and partition layouts, only managing to boot them, if placed on external storage.
Until I can get into Media Market kind of store and get a PC, of whatever shape, with something like Ubuntu pre-installed, and everything single hardware feature works without "yes but", I am not caring.
I'm not trying to convince you, I'm just sharing my experience.
IMO, just like with macOS, one should buy hardware based on whether their OS supports it. There are plenty of mini PCs with Linux pre-installed or with support if you just Google the model + Linux. There's entire sites like this where you can look up computers and components by model and check whether there is support: https://linux-hardware.org/?view=computers
The kernel already has workarounds for poorly implemented firmware, ACPI, etc. There's only so much that can be done to support bespoke platforms when manufacturers don't put in the work to be compatible, so buy from the ones that do.
> Until I can get into Media Market kind of store and get a PC, of whatever shape, with something like Ubuntu pre-installed, and everything single hardware feature works without "yes but", I am not caring.
Yes, I know those as well, my Asus Netbook (remember those?) came with Linux pre-installed, the wlan and GL ES support was never as good as on the Windows side, and once Flash was gone, never got VAAPI to work in more recent distros, it eventually died, 2009 - 2024.
Notice how quickly this has turned into the usual Linux forums kind of discussion that we have been having for the last 30 years regarding hardware support?
Ah yeah, isn't that the definition of something you don't directly depend on? Of course they "could just replace the OS", I can also just write a new web browser and use it to browse the web as it's supposedly a standard.
Except neither will support even a fraction of the originals' capabilities, at much worse performance and millions of incompatibilities at every corner.
Don't mistake company politics between ChromeOS, Android and Fuchsia business units, and the technical possibility of actually bothering to do so.
Also don't forget Fuchsia has been mostly a way to keep valuable engineers at Google as retention project.
They haven't been trying to replace anything as such, and Linux kernel on Android even has userspace drivers with stable ABI for Java and C++, Rust on the kernel, all features upstream will never get.
Or on Rust's case, Google didn't bother with the drama, they decided to include it, and that was it.
On the server room yes, but only in the sense UNIX has won, and Linux is the cheapest way to acquire UNIX, with the BSDs sadly looking from their little corner.
However on embedded, and desktop, the market belongs to others, like Zehyr, NutXX, Arduino, VxWorks, INTEGRITY,... and naturally Apple, Google and Microsoft offerings.
Also Linux is an implementation detail on serverless/lambda deployments, only relevant to infrastructure teams.
BSD has nothing to feel mournful about. Its derivatives are frequently found in the data center, but largely unremarked because it’s under the black box of storage and network appliances.
And it’s in incredible numbers - hundreds of millions of units - of game consoles.
The BSD family isn’t taking a bow in public, that’s all.
There is probably going to be a session later this week, the reference seemed to imply they are integrating Swift into Webkit project for new development.
Most likely not, for Apple what matters for Swift on Linux, is being a good server language for app developers that want to share code between app and server, with Apple no longer caring to sell macOS for servers.
Everything else they would rather see devs stay on their platforms, see the official tier 1 scenarios on swift.org.
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