Microsoft Is Practically Giving Users to the Competition

Over the past year, Microsoft have been on a real spree of shooting themselves in the foot, leg, torso, and eventually - head. Apple has hit the industry with quite a punch in the form of the Macbook Neo making all other sub-£1000 Windows machines look like eWaste out of the box, Microsoft are releasing updates for Windows 11 that are of questionable stability alongside features that no one asked for, while on the sidelines Valve and tech influencers are fanning the flames of Linux.

For context of, if not already clear, I am definitely not a Microsoft customer. Nor am I the target for their product, I use Windows and M365 for my day job, and Linux/FreeBSD based OSes for all of my own computing needs.

I am not expecting a company like Microsoft to collapse, but we are already seeing that they are diversifying. Windows was their flagship product, everyone used it, significant market share, dominance in the productivity and gaming spaces (exceptions of multimedia work being the MacOS domain). The Linux desktop has had slowly but steadily grown over the course of its existence, this had a small bump with the release of the Steam Deck in 2022 - much more impactful than Valve's first foray into Linux-based Steam Machines back in 2015 that ran Debian with Steam Big Picture, game compatibility at the time was severely lacking outside of indie and Valve's own titles.

Electron apps get a lot of flack on their resource usage vs native applications, but they are also partly responsible in my eyes for the growth of Windows-alternative platforms. Take Visual Studio Code, widely considered to be one of the best free, and open source code editors that is widely available. It is an electron app, but it is incredibly well optimised to a point that I feel that it outperforms some of my native editors. These are becoming incredibly common, and if there isn't an electron app, there are web app versions of most software (M365, Google Suite).

Between Electron and web apps, there are few scenarios where the majority of users can't be perfectly comfortable using a Windows-alternative OS (whether this is MacOS or Linux) and be able to undertake normal day to day tasks without disruption from the operating system. To note a few Windows 11 issues that have come to my attention from colleagues and family members:

• Microsoft Edge insisting on it being a the default browser.
• Excessive telemetry.
• A full standard license costs over $100 for the home edition.
• Contains advertising and a selection of unnecessary applications.
• Requirement of a Microsoft account, and actively attempting to block users from creating local accounts.
• Cannot be installed on hardware earlier than Intel 8th Generation (TPM 2.0).
• Broken updates.
• Copilot, but also being re-installed/re-appearing after an update.

Other operating systems are by no means perfect, but they are definitely becoming more appealing options to a point that some countries have decided to switch away from Microsoft and US corporation solutions and focus on their digital sovereignty. France being the most recent, they have stated they will be switching to a blend of Linux for desktop (distro unsure at this time - I'm guessing SUSE) and a modified version of Jitsi for encrypted communications.

With Microsoft pushing both consumer and enterprise customers away from it's monolithic Windows operating system, 2026 and beyond will be a very interesting time for the desktop platform.