They are making things but the case for them being worth an order or magnitude more than a normal EV company is getting weaker by the day

There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros with decades of history and support in addition to the cool new “hey guys I made a OS!” types.

> There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros

Exactly. "WTF?! There are a dozen distributions?!" Users love customization and choice when they understand it. No one wants to be confused. The Linux desktop world is a confusing mess right now.

Also note that the distinction between "very stable and reliable" and "hey guys I made a OS!" is only obvious to people who know how the distro is put together.

But that's the point. Choice and customization. It's the natural result of FOSS and the as-designed modularity of the Linux ecosystem.

Exploring popular options and finding what works for you is easier than it has ever been, and fun too. The difference between Linux today and the Linux of old is that for most setups, all the pieces you choose can fit together nicely and "just work." Despite all the different flavors and variations and distributions and desktop environments and window managers and the like, pretty much every popular distro uses a recent or near recent version of the monolithic Linux kernel + system-d, so all the important stuff is more or less the same (with tweaks here or there.)

Unity works fine for example. I used it for a bit over a year on a project we did for multiple platforms

There are many really good ones these days that will have a much better experience than windows. I’ve used Ubuntu, Pop, Mint and Fedora workstation in the last 5 years and all worked great. Personally Mint Cinnamon had the least issues so I tend to run that on my machines now.

Once SteamOS becomes generally available I’ll switch to that. It’s incredibly polished on Steam Deck

Every company I’ve worked at has used Google Docs anyway so the experience for me is the same on Linux. What’s so appealing about the classic Office suite?

Well, it's mostly annoying if people store office docs on some samba share instead of in SharePoint/Teams. Also Teams has issues on Firefox, and sometimes also in Chromium. But overall works well enough (even with my AirPods on Linux). Things like drawing in PowerPoint in the Browser have become significantly better over the last year, before that I avoided it like the plaque. Whats missing in MS365 online is numbered captions for figures (unforgivable!), or reference management. That just really annoying if people use those features. Also, I worked in an org still on Office 2019 but mixed it with MS365, that also lead to lot of pain. It's papercuts mostly, nothing fatal.

Windows is under 10% of their revenue these days. It’s simply not important to leadership. Just like Xbox - just let it slowly die as you squeeze any last remaining cents out

Windows is a small part of their revenue on purpose, because the OS monopoly enables them to sell and push a lot of their other revenue streams. Windows has always been easy to pirate for the same reason.

But make no mistake, it is very important for Microsoft and leadership, or they wouldn't keep updating it so much and talking about it so much on their keynotes and marketing.

And how many other parallel work streams are going. So many times I’ve estimated something to be “5” and it’s gone into my queue. Then people are wondering why it’s not done after “5” estimation units have passed and I’ve got “10” points worth of more high priority tasks and fires at every moment of my career

Excellent example why anything else than work hours is pointless to estimate in.

This is an extremely cherry picked example. One liner with only attributes?

Retirement accounts are more like social security than 401k. There’s no set amount of euros set aside for me it’s all in the pool paying for older peoples retirement

> But is not NVIDIA more of a software company than a hardware one?

No? That’s why they have almost no competition. Hardware starting costs are astronomical

But the actual manufacturing foundry is TSMC no? And they create the whole software environment based on their chips.

Apple doesn’t make hardware either, but they make a lot of money selling it.

It costs eight figures to create the masks (patterns) to use in the process of creating a modern chip. Just because it doesn't cost the eleven figures of the factory itself doesn't make it cheap.