Comment by pjmlp
1 day ago
I think that just like it happened with Apple after they made it out of bankruptcy, Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac, what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and WebAssembly workloads.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
A proper cross platform IDE experience requires getting Rider.
Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Github even with the previous CEO was already a delivery mechanism for Azure and AI efforts, now it will be full steam ahead, as per new org chart.
VC++ after betting other compilers in C++20 support, seems to have lost its resources struggling to deliver C++23, and also probably affected by the Secure Future Initiative, and decisions for safer languages.
But hey 4 trillion valuation, so from shareholders point of view, everything is going great.
Microsoft being the cool guys? The cool guys? Mwuhahahhaa.
This gave me the good belly laugh I needed.
For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
- being the no. 1 enemy of free software
- shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share
- making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite
- creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)
- making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The last time they might have been considered the "cool guys" was sometime in the 90s.
This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Idk i can think of a long list of awful stuff coming out of ms that is modern. They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.
I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
The only side of ms that i have any love for is xbox but that is also waning with all the studio acquisitions.
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Having gotten tired of subjecting windows users to a phishing campaign to trick them to use edge under the auspices of it being chrome, they're now moving on to obsoleting all windows machines without a TPM so they can cryptographically secure their right to use their users' need to authenticate as an opportunity to sell data about that user to the third party.
They have no respect for the agency of their users. We're no different than cattle to them, an asset to be squeezed until no more money comes out of it.
>Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
It's so sad that this is all it takes for some of you lol. A collection of public relations code bases.
> They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
That's not a cool guy thing
and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
That should be a good clue that it's not worth much to them anymore, and tjat they'd rather rely on random free labour from the "community" than their own developers.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
Which is a horribly bloated pig that only helps forced obsolescence of hardware. It should be a very disturbing sign that Microsoft itself doesn't seem to know how to do native code anymore, as they invented Win32 and Windows.
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Businesses don't and shouldn't operate as charities, but Microsoft is the only big tech company that manages to be a negative in every way. The only thing they've ever innovated on is lock-in. Now exploring the frontier of how bad Windows can be without people leaving.
The open-source stuff is whatever, only a tiny part of the picture.
No, IE has not been dead and buried for ages. Not everyone's a US corporation.
A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
And just for reciprocity, here's Indian Defense Review (5/2025) "These People Never Moved On: They’re Stuck 24 Years in the Past and Have to Use Windows XP" : "Thousands of workers across the US and Europe still depend on a system from 2001. From hospitals to railways, entire operations run on technology long considered obsolete."
https://indiandefencereview.com/these-people-never-moved-on-...
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> IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
Because we remember the evil Microsoft. Many young people still follow advice from the elders.
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> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
Try using VSCodium legally with the same functionality as VSCode; remote development, Python language server, C++ debugging, and so on.
People who think Microsoft is doing open source work for the good of their hearts are still in for a lesson in EEE.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
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VsCode is in a weird licensing limbo, or some of its microsoft plugins are anyway
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> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
VS Code?
https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-ar...
> they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now
Windows has been going out of its way to be hostile to users for over a decade now.
I would add to your list that MSFT also makes decent hardware now - surface laptops and xbox have both done well
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With time, they will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
> a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
Simply releasing corporate projects under a permissive license is not what many people understand to be the fundament of "open source."
> to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
What do you think their entire operating system is?
Not really. They still have the same sales tactic as they always have: make an inferior product that barely ticks the boxes, then manipulate everyone to ditch their competitors in all kinds of ways except for making a better product. These manipulative tactics are sometimes fair game, most are quite unethical and some even illegal.
You can make a product that pleases its users, or just cater to the interests of the ones with the buying decision, for enterprise users they are almost never the same. Microsoft, like Oracle, leans heavily on the second strategy. Their developer tools are often (not always) an exception to this principle. I think this is the true reason Microsoft is so disliked as a brand.
> And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Only if you have no soul or morals
I don't know why you are apologizing for them. Is it because extensive system telemetry might trace your comment back to you?
IE and it's embedded derivatives are still used in many US healthcare institutions. So dead and buried, not so much.
> And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Except that their macOS software still is non-parity with Windows for really no good reason other than anti-competitive. They’ve also had the opportunity to open-source Windows, but won’t go that far willingly, with the exception of those that did it without approval.
Literally the same leadership including the CEO who held a senior leadership position during prior malfeasance.
They aren't better people just bad people operating in an environment where better behavior is beneficial.
This comment could not be more actual. The tools changed, even the methods changed, but Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is still Microsoft's strategy.
> they have behaved relatively nicely
That is some damnably faint praise re: Windows 11, and any experienced m$ users know exactly what’s meant by that.
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> Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
two things can be true at the same time. MS doing some open sourcing and being truly evil too in many other ways. why do you need to settle on one or the other?
Holy shite what I just read. It's like telling people: mafioso people are not so bad, they keep the streets clean and there is discipline around the city. They only pickpocket the foreigners...
> They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
you mean shit software like Teams that crash the whole time?
> For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
- Creating a language (typescript) that took the front-end web community by storm.
- Becoming one of the real adopters of "progressive web apps". Apple is actively hostile to them, because they would eat into the 30% cut they are making from the apps distributed via the app store; Google, once a champion, has grown kinda tepid, because it also gets a cut from apps distributed via Google Play; but Microsoft now behave as if they are a believer.
- Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
> - Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
Which feels sluggish compared to how it used to be. They keep tacking on too much cruft to it. I used to call it a lightweight IDE, but now its just a bloated editor.
These are the kind of claims that make some Linux users tiresome to talk to. (Full disclosure: I am also a Linux user).
I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!
You are defending Microsoft.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...
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Skepticism that is informed by history isn’t being hateful
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> but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era
Why does this matter? How does that invalidate anything? Are global companies only accountable for their actions so long as they maintain the same CEO?
>but don't be hateful!
Won't someone please think of the poor global technology conglomerate!
The grandparent was also wryly highlighting the crevasse between post-Nadella Microsoft's PR, which you seem to believe, and their actions.
Despite "MS <3s Open Source" they never changed, you're just referencing a very successful era of marketing.
And poor Linux users are out here catching strays. Very "don't you say that about the $1T company!!!" of you to defend them, "fellow Linux user" (also very hi fellow kids..)
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Microsoft continues to produce absolute garbage (except now it's also adware) and continues to utilise aggressive tactics to gain market share.
They deserve plenty of hate.
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Nadella has worked in senior leadership positions at MS for 33 years. His era began in 1992 not when he became CEO.
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
Add the most recent lineup of Xbox consoles to this
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased
Their keyboards were arguably the best ones around. I'm literally typing this on a 20 year old MS keyboard right now.
I'll disagree loudly with my IBM keyboards (my old model M as well as the thinkpads I've used).
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they were better than the $20 crap you could buy in staples
but definitely not the best ones around
Likewise the Intellimouse Pro is my favourite mouse. Sadly they seem to have discontinued it in favor of the Surface mouse which has atrocious ergonomics.
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> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
I don't personally get too attached to devices I purchase or begrudge others for what they buy so, I'm curious what made them "cringe hardware" in your opinion. Adoption aside, they looked like pretty compelling devices to me. Is this a case of buying anything that isn't Apple isn't cool? Or is there something deeper there?
It's always better when companies are hungry for business. I thought that in 2016ish it was super cool for Microsoft to get into Linux, build VS Code, and make bets like the Surface Studio.
For comparison, I think Mac OS in 2008 was also at a bit of a golden age:
- You had native file support for .iso, .zip without needing to install crapware like Winzip.
- You even could preview *.psd files out the box.
- You had first-party apps like Image Capture to scan documents without needing to install extra software.
- There was an amazing third-party app ecosystem with things like Yojimbo, OnyX, Little Snitch, Quicksilver, Handbrake, Coda, Adium.
This was around the time of the "I'm a Mac" campaign when Apple was _hungry_ to win business away from Windows. All of these small, polished advantages made me fall in love with the experience.
OSX today is still good but there definitely isn't that same level of "underdog hunger" showing up in the products as of late.
Anyway I'm just trying to say companies being hungry for business shows up in its products and that's better for consumers.
This "Microsoft are good guys" is a bizarre recurring comment that has appeared on HN for quite a while now
It's like pretending people must choose from Russia, North Korea, South Sudan or the Central African Republic
Who are the good guys
None of these companies are "good guys"
These "Leave Microsoft alone" HN comments will undoubtedly persist
Perhaps there are MS employees who comment on HN and they are sensitive about criticism
The idea Microsoft is somehow benign is truly hilarious
It is not difficult to argue the damage this company causes today without retribution is far worse than what they did in the past
IME, Microsoft is very cult-like; the employees believe that Microsoft has a solution for any problem, and there is never, ever any contemplation that the company creates problems ;this does not stop with the employees, it can extend to others who are "bought in" to the Redmond ecosystem
> This "Microsoft are good guys" is a bizarre recurring comment that has appeared on HN for quite a while now
Well, yes, that's called generational change. A lot of people have never experienced the bad old Microsoft, only the pretty cool guy Microsoft.
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The 25 year window you picked actually coincides almost exactly with the time since the original X-Box was launched. Seems an odd omission from the list of hardware MS released in that time period.
Also the IntelliMouse Explorer was released in late 1999, which nobody who has ever had to clean the gunk off a mouseball roller would describe as ‘cringe’.
Windows Phone was solid. Actual innovation in mobile UI.
Commercial success hasn’t been an argument for technical supremacy since Betamax.
I think you may have been under a rock for the last 5-10 years
Zune was actually kinda nice - although I agree nobody bought it!
The same was reportedly true of Windows Phone 7. "Cringe hardware" seems to simply mean hardware that was good, but couldn't gain market share.
Unfortunately for their timing, the Zune HD was them finally getting their idea of a music player spot on. It just happened to be 2 years after the release of iPhone.
Talk to some developers with 3-5yoe, they do see Microsoft as a cool company. For them it’s a company that created TypeScript, supports open source, runs NPM, created VSCode etc. None of them thinks of Internet Explorer, Zune, or anti competitive behavior. You will always associate MS with these failures, the generation after you won’t
ActiveX plugins? MSJVM? Last 25 years? You might need to update your script.
>For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
That was 10 years ago
> Zune
The Zune was 100% uncool, but man did I like the hardware and software sooo much better than the iPod / ITunes. I was just sad that I never found anyone to "squirt" at.
Hey! I liked my Windows Phone. Original Xbox and the first half of Xbox 360 where also cool. End of list of good things however.
30 years, not 25. A lot of early contributions to Linux basically came with a "PS: Fuck Microsoft" at the bottom.
While I mostly agree with your assessment, I feel like the Xbox is pretty cool.
At this point it's an open secret that there won't be another Xbox. So yeah, they made something cool, and managed to fumble it.
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As a Windows gamer, it was the worst.
Not the Xbox itself, if it was just the standalone device, but the way they had chosen to modify Windows to have Xbox compatible APIs, which are worse than the previous Windows APIs.
The enshittification of Windows gaming started with the removal, or sometimes deprecation, of the Windows gaming APIs.
Much as it was all true and a lot of us were there, Microsoft moved on and so must open source. These aren't the Bobs anymore.
eh, they had short blip in the relatively recent history, especially with developers, in mid 2010s.
With dotnet core 1-3 - open source cross platform .net, that was modern, fresh and clearly a project done by developers for developers. add vscode to this and it seems nice.
but as soon as 5 hit, if you look into details, they went to their usual bullshit, starting with stapling together winforms and wpf to it. the feel of the project shifted from 'developers for developers' to usual top down management.
vscode is also a weird case - it looks open source, but isn't at all(the builds you get aren't just from the same codebase + no access to extensions legally if you build your own, or fork it)
>shipping the worst web browser in existence
Which? IE6? IE6 is the best web browser in existence though. You confuse standard with good.
This is bullshit, the Zune was great and was doing incredibly well, at least around here.
It was THE device to have, people were going crazy for them; there was enough pent up demand that people were breaking windows and sliding into cars to get them.
I still miss that thing.
At least in Germany at the time of the release of the various Zune generations, Zune was both hated by hipsters for not being "fashionable" (these users strongly preferred iPods), and by free software advocates (who were very vocal at the time, and also had at that time much more influence on the sentiment and feelings of "average users" than today) for its in-built DRM system.
> For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
That's true, but there is a catch in your wording. For the last 15 year, Microsoft has:
- Adopted open source/free software and gave contributions to various project (e.g. Linux in 2012 https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTEwNzE)
- Abandoned the worst web browser in existence. That they created :)
- Abandoned ActiveX (29 years ago), Silverlight (4 years ago)
+ Opened .NET to more platform than just Windows. It can now run very well on Linux, Mac, etc.
+ Made many of its locked down stuff open source - .NET, Z3, hell there was that few weeks ago open sourcing of the WinUI framework, etc.
+ Pivoted towards the cloud where OSS software synergizes with their cloud offerings.
Do they do corrupt deals with governments? Well yes, but so does every other big corp. And making cringe hardware isn't a crime in itself.
Do they still do a lot of shady shit? You bet, but they only started getting worse a few years ago. You are thinking it doesn't come in waves and it was all evil, all the time.
Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
Yep and that is part of why I don't use them either.
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25 years? Try 40.
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The Surface looks cool to me, but since it runs Windows, I will never use it. Does it only look cool, or is actually a cool device?
In addition to being able to run any regular Windows application, it had the best and most intuitive feeling UX of any tablet in history. Amongst many other features, window management was gesture controlled and Internet Explorer had an alternate UI that moved the tabs to the bottom of the screen to make them easier to reach.
Sadly, Windows 10 removed all the good parts of Windows tablet mode, but its ideas were so good that Apple is still slowly copying bits of its interface for the iPad to this day.
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Linux runs perfectly fine on most of the Surfaces:
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supporte...
There's the usual asterisk here or there, as with most laptops; but, outside of some golden devices, it's about on par with most.
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Can't they be forgiven? For taking the shit show JS was/is and turning it into magical TS?
I don't know where you've been the last decade, but it's clear they have been perceived this way. Him describing that perception only to be ridiculed by you is a pretty low blow.
Microsoft is also LinkedIn, GitHub, Typescript, NPM (NPM! Where do you host your dependencies?), games and OpenAI.
I love how each sector they’re invested in is a practical monopoly.
>LinkedIn, [...] NPM [...] and OpenAI
Your honor, I rest my case!
I agree with you
And today they are even complicit in genocide and avid supporters of fascist USA dictator Trump, can hardly get less cool then that
Microsoft has for the longest time been about business only. Any virtue signaling was just marketing.
Years back they were gloating about how their AI systems (pre-LLM stuff) could allow for great oil production while at the same time talking projecting the image of a clean green future.
As is half the US who voted for him…
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This is such a typical HN low IQ comment.
I'm not sure what you mean by some of the things you write, but the part about Microsoft being "cool guy phase" was hilarious.
I'd say Microsoft buying GitHub was part of a strategy to not lose relevance in the world that moves slowly towards Open Source Software. Or put another way, the world moves in a direction away from Microsoft, and by capturing GitHub they can manipulate the outcomes that would otherwise have been adversarial to Microsoft interests. It's just like when Microsoft forked Java back in the 1990s, and later created .NET. The whole VSCode or Visual Studio thing... it's just Microsoft Word for software engineers, and the whole point is to create an ecosystem that locks people into the ecosystem.
To think in terms of what Microsoft does, you have to step back and look into economic theory, at least a little bit. There is this idea in economics about isolated economies, and integrated economies. For example, Europe or North America relies on cheap manufactured goods from China, and so China's economy is intrinsically linked (integrated) into the economies of Europe or North America. THAT is the idea of what Microsoft does. They start by adding value, a soft-dependency you might say, and then make moves to becoming a hard dependency... to put into terms of a dependency graph. Then they link to dependency graphs together GitHub into VSCode, OpenAI into VSCode, One Drive into GitHub or One Drive into Hotmail...
I'll say for sure, at least Microsoft has a strategy, unlike Google where they seem to have a lot of failed projects.
Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies. Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful.
In terms of coolness, Microsoft peaked right around the time they were hiring the cast of Friends to promote their OS.
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Wait, do they?
I mostly remember:
- A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
- Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as
- Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc.
- Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass
It's the laptop to get for compute/battery, which definitely is not nothing, but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
You forgot things like shipping decades-old free software with their OS because Apple are so implacably opposed to their users having freedom to use, examine, modify and share that software.
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If that's what you "mostly" remember, your memory is awfully selective. It's totally fine for you to have a bias, but you're overlooking decades of massively successful products and services.
Having owned plenty of Thinkpads (Linux), Dells(Windows and Linux) and plenty of Macbook Pros, I can say, Apple's superiority of hardware is so far beyond the rest. Having an OS with a BSD-ish experience is really nice as well. I've spent 27 years in engineering and during most of that time I get the random "Linux is far superior", "I like Windows better" folks... but by and large, yes, Apple's tech has a ton of good will.
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> but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform
And probably fewer still consider switching to the alternatives. Apple is, for better or worse, usually the least bad option.
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> > Wait, do they?
The echo chamber is still reverberating. People say that MacOS is good because other people have told them so. The people claiming that is better don't have an earnest effort outside of the ecosystem to support their claims. I was forced to use MacOS at work up until a little over 1.5 years ago, I have perspective on both, and it is categorically incompetent. It doesn't hold a candle to dev on Linux.
As for Windows? Windows 7/11 are probably still better than MacOS (as you implied with your comment about neglect), but it's probably as bad or slightly better than Win 11.
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In my business (partly home studio support), it's hard to support MacOS for new-ish users.
If the OS is old, things like FFMPEG will not work with things like Audacity. And to use an old version of FFMPEG, you have to guess which one, then install a variety of dev tools to compile it, waay beyond the capability of the average "I just want to record my podcast user". Audacity itself has an extensive help article devoted to this issue for Mac.
If you have a new Mac, you'll find companies have given up going through the cost and time of certifying for each new Mac OS, like Evoluent (early vertical mouse maker), who gave up several versions ago and won't support using all the extra mouse buttons their product has on Mac.
If you want to use many audio plugins, you'll have to deal with special permissions if it didn't come from the app store. If you want to use zoom to let a remote tech control your screen, you have to find and set two security permisssions.
For all four of these issue on Windows, it just works.
UPDATE: As commenter below pointed out, experienced users have a different experience than new users, which doesn't invalidate the specific issues I've mentioned, and which I encounter every month, and sometimes weekly.
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Apple is certainly fumbling in recent years, and it's clearly behind in some games (Siri, AI in general, iPhones turning into a yearly snooze-fest). But of all the FAANG, I'd say it's the only one I trust, simply because they're not trying to sell my data and have a consistent stance on security.
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> A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.
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We have different ideas of what qualifies as tech people if we're talking about Liquid Glass, Siri, and Vision Pro
IMO, "consumer electronics enthusiasts" != "tech people"
They aren’t doing a great job exactly, but what is there to recommend to somebody who doesn’t want to use the command line? SteamOS, maybe, haha.
> I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
Maybe you're speaking for yourself? I absolutely love my Macbook and the M-series are the best devices I've ever owned.
> - A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
Really? I haven't noticed.
The rocky start for apple intelligence is what excites me
....and their tools are very flash, bright colours and buttons...and they mostly work
"Mostly" is not good enough. The user experience of Apple is still good, the developer experience is woeful
It's also amazing that they convinced developers that running a non-standard CPU instruction set through a laundered Rosetta layer was somehow battery or compute friendly lb for lb when an AMD processor (or even Intel) is plenty efficient and cool.
Are any applications on your Mac touching Rosetta right now? You'd better hope not because those single percentage gains from ARM evaporate fast.
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> Even among tech people, they have good will
Do they? I feel like this is a bimodal thing from what I've seen of other peoples opinions - they're either amazing and all you ever use, or they're the worst company ever.
As a developer I've always seen Macs as a necessary evil - they were the only polished "working out of the box" unix-like system you could buy for a long time but you had to put up with locked down software, comically bad pricing and cooling issues.
Now with the Mx stuff the hardware is amazing, and pretty fantastic value for money if you avoid the weird points in the price scale where they massively overcharge for RAM. But you still have to use their locked down software stack and ecosystem.
> Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies.
They are very different companies in very different businesses. Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company. That affects everything (and is why the two are not fundamentally competitors).
I don't think one has ever been better behaved than the other at all, though. The main difference is that for most of their time, Microsoft was just in a position where it could do more harm than Apple.
Apple does plenty of harm every day when they force Safari as the only web browser engine allowed on iOS.
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> Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
This love for Apple seems to be a very US-American thing.
I dunno, I haven’t been to Europe. What do they favor, Linux? Sounds like paradise.
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Neither of them respect their users, and their major products are all black boxes that you're not allowed to change, inspect, understand, etc.
They're both the polar opposite of "tech friendly".
But I've yet to meet a person that said, "Oh, Rachel and Chandler from Friends... maybe Windows IS cool!". It wasn't cool, it wasn't anything. Apple was trendy with the designers and creative types, and Windows was what you probably used at your doldrums day job. The only place where MS has ever been "cool" is with gamers. I think your "Walmart" analogy is a perfect one.
The joke was supposed to be that the “coolness peak” was incredibly lame. Haha.
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Only among people who don't have to develop for the Apple ecosystem.
> Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will
Good grief. Sometimes it's good to get a reminder that there are still people who think this way.
On my office, only folks like myself that also do Windows development, have Thinkpads with Windows.
Everyone else carries Apple devices.
GNU/Linux only exists on local VMs for containers, or servers on cloud instances.
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Yeah, I laughed audibly when I read that sentence...
I used to think that way, and I’m not rushing to apply to Microsoft, but I do notice the various divisions, studios, stock price growth and comparable RSU packages that all make me totally forget about its antiquated branding and association
lol
[flagged]
Microsoft is so in bed with the government that bribes are far from necessary.
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You forgot to mention the gaming section.
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
I guess generating hype by acquisition and increase valuation cause more profit than developing a real product.
I'm beginning to think that using Microsoft services(yes, GitHub included) is morally questionable behaviour right now. I can't support the current Microsoft behaviour of laying off many employees so casually.
Yes, the whole XBox division has been a mess, especially after ABK.
However XBox plus Microsoft Gaming Studios, is still one of the biggest group of AAA publishers, they have a big enough slice of the market.
Hence why now they're dominating PlayStation charts with cross-platform games.
Many Microsoft haters don't have an good enough idea of how big they have become on games industry, regardless of layoffs and such.
SteamOS keeps being around until they feel like doing a netbooks like move, taking all their games out of Steam, or whatever else Microsoft might think of.
Hence why I regularly complain Valve should keep trying to bring developers to target GNU/Linux natively instead of translating Windows games.
I would not be surprised if Steam came to Xbox
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> Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
FTFY, Microsoft is even killing studio with successful games, like Tango.
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
Sounds like they just bought the IP.
which begs the question is it just good old EEE?
I’m glad Gitlab is still an option, just sitting there waiting to absorb the market pivot if Microsoft takes it the wrong way.
I see more people jump for Codeberg these days.
Or even better, claim full sovereignty (again) and install Forgejo (https://forgejo.org/) on your own hardware.
You'll get the same experience as Codeberg, because Codeberg is in fact running on Forgejo
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I love Codeberg, but they're struggling with growth/scaling -- if folks want to see Codeberg succeed, they need to open their wallets.
Big limitation on private repos there.
Among enterprises I work with, I'm seeing way more migration to self-hosted Gitlab than I was a few years ago. Even among Azure-dependent orgs.
I think there’s some risk with this though too - more and more is behind the enterprise tier. People try to work around this in various ways but its an unsatisfying experience. For e.g. trying to enforce merge request approval with pipeline stages.
Gitlab is not really an option for me. Their pricing is absolutely out of this world.
Additionally there is Codeburg/Forgejo, and for the atproto-enjoyers, tangled.sh is a new face that feels like it could be good.
And gitea (originally a Forgejo fork).
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As a Deno user, this news also makes me see more value in JSR. (Relative to npm's ownership, that is.)
Left Gitlab after they changed the UI nearly every month, it's still very cumbersome to use.
Yes, as long as you don’t look at their pricing :/
https://www.opencode.net/
I can see Gitlab in the same position in the near future. Only a matter of time...
It's funny. Nobody complains that there is a lack of free multi-platform desktop GUI profiling tools for Go, Python, Ruby, Elixir etc. Somehow we just accept those languages are only for web services, web apps, and command-line utilities.
What is the problem with Microsoft keeping "nice to have" desktop GUI stuff for their own proprietary ecosystem when everything else has open sourced? Including the primitives needed for the community to build their own GUI and developer tooling stuff, just like JetBrains did with Rider.
Yeah guys, what's the difference between organic projects that have been open source since the start and a global technology conglomerate open sourcing things later that compete for mind share against those projects.
What could be the difference? Oh dear, I just can't think of anything.
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
On HN I keep hearing that associating .NET with Windows is outdated perception.
Writing JVM languages I feel that the developer experience is pretty much the same on any OS. It seems this cannot be said for .NET?
If you're writing a server or a web app then its good and runs well.
Visual Studio is still not ported to Linux or Mac, you need to use Rider or VSCode. If you use JetBrains for Java, using Rider will feel good no matter where you are.
The GUI library situation is a tough one. In many ways its far more advanced than other languages but their newest attempt is not as good as the older Windows only API. But what other language is graded for its great native GUI library?
I'm not calling MS cool but at the same time I think the goalposts are different.
I do not understand the hungup on visual studio.
We dont do the same for java, rust, or c… there are good IDEs for each of them and none are made by the maintainers of the language.
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Re: GUI library situation, are you implying that they finally came up with something that's cross platform? What is it?
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It can. DX is pretty much the same for backend and CLI stuff using VS Code on Mac, Linux and Windows. I'm working daily on C# backend and CLI stuff on a Mac (those are the dev machines at my employer). DX is on par with Go and Rust (at least dotnet CLI, LSP, Debugger, I can't speak for the profiler as I've never used it). I like the Rust tooling most, but dotnet CLI is not far behind.
Language and std lib wise, C# sits in the sweet spot.
Mh, I'm not the most experienced guy with .NET.
We have a few .NET applications running on the infrastructure on Linux hosts and it's just like every other thing.
But in some contexts, e.g. PowerBI, it pulls in a dependency and BOOM it's Windows Only to the point that not even Wine or Proton can help you. For something, that should be, mind you, a dumb SQL proxy like the PowerBI Embedded Gateway.
I think the success of Proton and Wine in games clouds the vision of Linux community. The contributors did great work on them. However the gaming API of Windows is a very limited slice of the vast API.
Games are quite standalone programs they don't depend deeply integrated Win32 stuff. They don't even use standard UI stuff from Win32. With Vulkan, porting DirectX became very viable and that was the grunt work. There are no DCOM servers or OLE stuff in games which is where Windows API actually becomes huge and sometimes nastier. Business apps however deeply depend on those.
The server deploy experience for .NET is pretty much the same on Windows or Linux. The developer tooling experience has more options on Windows.
Pretty much no, it can't be said for .Net.
It currently supports Linux as a running target for servers. It supports both running desktop software and development very badly.
It supports Linux as a running target for console apps, which can be servers, background apps, systemd apps, etc. So everything except UI apps.
The development experience with Rider is also great on Linux. I think you need to be more specific with the complaints because I have many beefs with Microsoft's approach to many things, but I could not pick up on what you meant.
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I love C# and .NET is amazing for some specific use cases like REST APIs but there's so much stuff that just doesn't work or needs a lot more effort to get somewhere.
MAUI is a mess.
Blazor will never work as a general solution for full stack web apps. Even if a small app didn't have to download like 10MB of WASM code the DX is terrible and performance just as bad. Elixir Phoenix developed with a fraction of the budget is just so far ahead.
C# hot reload has been broken for years. I doubt it will ever be as good as what you get in JS with Vite.
Minimal APIs are a great idea but 4 years later and still fundamental features like validation are missing (it's coming in .NET 10).
They've been investing a ton of effort into Aspire. It's cool but is it more important than core features?
And now with AI, Microsoft is more distracted than ever and I'm starting to regret getting into .NET at all.
Is MAUI now just a simple wrapper for Blazor projects?
> A proper cross platform IDE experience requires getting Rider.
I seem to remember a lot more .NET IDEs before .NET Core... This frustrates me.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales - I think MSFT doesn't care just as they don't care about GUI workloads, because only thing they care now is having developers run their stuff on Azure. You don't need VS for those cloud .NET apps and you don't need front end frameworks like Forms, Xamarin or MAUI. Seems like C++ is also something they would not be interested investing into when they can get people into cloud easier with C#.
Why do people need to create anthropomorphising narratives around companies? Don't be any company's cheerleader, use the stuff that's best for you (and the environment)
I built my career on MSFT stack I am going to be their cheerleader, don't want them to go down or stagnate as I would have to switch stack.
I don't understand people who are just consumers and have no actual business to root for MSFT or AAPL or any other company.
>I don't understand people who are just consumers
They're not just consumers, they're actual engineers. People who simp for companies like MS are just acolytes in developer's clothing.
If you only know one stack from one company, then you built your career on esoteric, arbitrary knowledge. Not on engineering things.
Agreed, but apparently company cheerleadering never goes away.
The same way cheerleading USA presidents doesn't go away, but if you look around you see things like Switzerland with direct democracy that just works without it.
Is he creating or is he relating what people think? I don't see this is him arguing so much as reporting.
Microsoft not being terrible was a zero interest rate phenomenon. The news today is a lot worse than just Github not being independent anymore. It sounds like literally the entire development division is being rolled into this "Core AI" business unit.
When Nadella announced plans to double the company's revenue by 2030, it was pretty clear that the enshitifiction was going to ramp up significantly, but it doesn't seem like it will ever relent now that they have to squeeze out more free cash flow to cover all of this AI capex. Windows is practically malware at this point, they've made extremely deep cuts to .NET engineering headcount, and it's just going to get worse.
fifteen years ago I predicted that if we ever have a bloody AI revolution, the most likely case would be that it would be Microsoft's fault because they are the kings of unintended consequences.
The second most likely case being some AI figuring out how to hack AWS to steal compute time, probably by getting access to billing information.
Microsoft seems to be slowly pulling ahead at the moment.
> Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
That happened three decades ago.
There was a new wind after Satya took over, but apparently it is slowly gone now.
To me it never made a difference. There was a concerted effort to put lipstick on the pig but it was still a pig.
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That was a mask the corporation put on in a bid to lure in the younger crowd who doesn't remember all the underhanded stuff Microsoft did in the past. But they haven't really changed at all.
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I think Jetbrians Rider and vscode being “good enough” to stop Microsoft investing in another IDE for Mac
I remember all the PR about Satya Nadella making the company cool, modern, user-friendly, and open source friendly. Thought wow, he must also be a hypnotist.
I couldn't believe the number of people who were saying that "Microsoft are the good guys now" or "Microsoft loves open source now".
Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when open source was clearly winning:
- most servers were running linux
- most phones and tablets were running android
- people were buying tablets instead of desktops
- Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC
- large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as open source
Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding the industry back (remember IE6?).
So they did what any good corporations does - they went along with the winning side.
And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs' minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do what corporations do best - making money by abusing their position with barely any competition.
---
The lesson here are: - Corporations should simply not have this amount of power. - Corporations are amoral, they don't have values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-system interaction.
I think big corporations are not amoral, they are immoral. There is no wealth that has been built obeying morality or showing emphaty. Once them two become obstacles for profits, they will be thrown out.
The people in charge or corporations certainly are very often immoral.
I don't think ascribing morality to a system is useful when it's comprised of many people who can be replaced at any time.
But, I also think that top down hierarchical power structures are fundamentally harmful, abusive and exploitative so you do have a point. Cooperatives are much healthier structures.
If Github/Copilot wins the war of coding assistant and becomes the next growth point in MS, the story will be total different.
We shouldn't ignore the influence of trend, it's like the facebook in mobile era.
This is an odd comment. Xamarin has never been relevant. GitHub is historically OSS focused. Xamarin was some weird niche product for Windows devs. Hardly any overlap with GitHub’s core audience. I don’t know what will happen next, but hodgepodge of weird MS tech isn’t the lens to view this through.
Didn't the Xamarin guy became the CEO of GitHub at one point?
One of them, yes.
Miguel never did, and is now focused on Swift and Apple.
Yes, and that was an incredibly odd decision.
Do you work in devdiv at Microsoft? I can see the org chart in this comment haha
No, but I code for Microsoft platforms since MS-DOS 3.3, so one gets to know how it all works, when having read so many docs, MSJ articles, MSDN, PDC and BUILD sessions, podcats and what not.
Wait Microsoft was cool at some point?
Yeah. Xbox, GitHub, Sataya's early days embracing open source, Zune (admittedly not cool but i loved the product).
Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable despite its many many flaws.
I always wonder at these attributions. Like all windows versions gave you bluescreen and ran Microsoft excel. To me not one stood out particularly bad or good compared to the others maybe after Windows 98 service pack something
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I was on Windows 95 until a few years ago :D. That for me was the cooler one, given the improvements (in visuals at least) over Windows 3.11.
I think XP is nostalgic and was everywhere but back when I used XP linux was still the coolest... even mac was cooler
> Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable
That is very puzzling... Did you compare them to anything else?
Did you missed the whole Microsoft <3 FOSS, right after Satya took over?
No way anybody really believed that. Or did they?
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did anyone believe it?!
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How is Rider v. VS?
This is the sort of question I don't trust AI with yet.
I have been a .NET dev for the past 8 years and have switched fully to Rider. The only thing I miss from VS is the quick nav to see all the properties and methods in a file on the top bar. Everything else is vastly better:
- Auto complete is a bit smarter (even the free AI suggestions are better) - Refactoring across files is often faster - Package management is undoubtedly the latest performance difference. I would go from taking 1-2 minutes from using VS's "Manage packages for solution" to under 10 seconds in Rider. - In VS there's always a noticeable delay when the debugger hits a breakpoint / exception and the IDE takes a few seconds to actually display. This is about halved in Rider. - The built in terminal is vastly better than VS's, though not as good as Windows Terminal
does gemini code assist work with Rider? Since its a jetbrain ide? I would drop VS2022 in favor of anything, but vscode isn;t cutting it.
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> How is Rider v. VS?
Rider is far better than VS for everything apart from Desktop UI Apps and perhaps Blazor WASM hot reloading, which is itself far behind the UX of JS/Vite hot reloading, so I avoid it and just use Blazor static rendering. Otherwise VS tooling is far behind Intellij/Rider for authoring Web dev assets, inc. TypeScript.
I switched to Rider/VS Code long before moving to Linux, which I'm happy to find works just as well in Linux. Not a fan of JetBrains built-in AI Integration (which IMO they've fumbled for years), but happy with Augment Code's Intellij Plugin which I use in both Rider and VS Code.
the debugger is a tiny bit nicer in VS, but otherwise Rider has much better ergonomics and features that are actually useful.
Rider is where I live for dev work.
If you do web work it's night and day compared to VS, it pretty much includes all WebStorm features in it as well.
VS - great if you are Windows only shop for dev and want all the bells and whistles
Rider - has all of the the nice things JetBrains does and the best option on Mac if you need advanced refactoring; UI feels a bit cluttered at time (though they improved this).
VSC - for whatever reason, I always end up back to VSC for .NET for backends. Good enough, fast, and lightweight enough. Plays nicely with Node and full-stack monorepos.
I would commit to VSC and try to make it work. If you find you need advanced refactoring support, then try out Rider.
Rider is very nice and a perfectly competent development environment. It gets first class support and often has the ability to test preview features from dotnet upcoming language and runtimes.
It's biggest problem is that it's not Visual Studio, so it is very hard for people who have lived in VS for a decade to move over.
It does away with some bloat and also provides some features of Resharper natively instead of as an extension.
You can quite literally use this as your primary development environment.
I’ve been in the industry for 30 years professionally and 10 years as hobbyist who paid as much attention to the industry as one could before the internet in the 80s early 90s including lying as a 9th grader pretending to be a big spender to get a free subscription to MacWeek and PCWeek.
At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.
No one wants cross platform.
They're releasing a feature on Windows which literally records your screen every few seconds!
These guys are extremely bad guys.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework. I mean, their Win32 API is still alive and well, as well as MFC, ATL, etc. WPF still gets some minor updates too here and there.
I have no idea what you mean by web, too. ASP.NET is perhaps one of the better maintained web frameworks around. What exactly do you interptet as a concern?
Blazor is also Microsoft's alternative to JavaScript and it's main value proposition is being able to write webassembly apps using Microsoft technology exclusively. What do you think is replacing this?
Pointing out Aspire is even weirder. It's a containerization framework to help with observability and manage distributed applications. What exactly is the overlap?
I sense a great deal of confusion in your comments. What exactly are you trying to say?
> I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework.
WinUI3 is dead, lol. I tried to migrate from UWP to WinUI3, but it is literally dead. There doesn’t seem to be any team at MS actively working on it, the community calls have died, and the last build conf didn’t have any WinUI3 talks, all AI stuff. Yes, you can build apps with WinUI3, but development and support for it has stalled and I couldn’t justify moving the companies product over to WinUI3.
No they aren't placing all their chips on WinUI3, only those that never went through all reboots since Windows 8, believe that.
WPF got taken out of legacy mode at BUILD 2024, exactly because hardly anyone outside Redmond cares about WinUI 3.
Anyone that has been long enough around, has seen ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Core MVC (not compatible with MVC 5 predecessor), Razor Pages, Minimal APIs, Blazor,...
So it is a mess doing consulting and depending on what .NET version the customer team is allowed to use, and existing code, what gets to be used by that portfolio.
Minimal APIs have been designed to bring in Python and JavaScript developers into .NET, which many of us see as not working at all, while having created the need now everyone creates their own controllers infractruture, as means to tame having minimal APIs all over the place, there are even MVVM like frameworks now for that purpose.
Blazor is really only usable as path forward for those still stuck in WebForms, due to the similar approach to do Web UIs, and to .NET shops without frontend teams.
In the age of distributed computing with microservices and frontend teams, it is a hard sell to make them adopt Blazor and learn C#, instead of React, Angular, Vue.
At least they have adopted TypeScript, the next language that Anders Hejlsberg decided to focus on.
Aspire is something that has been pivoted, now they try to sell it as Microsoft's Pulumi, but everyone has to write the orchestration code in C#, thus only relevant to .NET shops.
Maddy Montaquila has said in a few .NET podcast interviews that they are trying to use Aspire as means to sell .NET to UNIX shops, given the low adoption numbers outside the traditional Microsoft shops, even after almost a decade being open source.
first time I've ever read "Microsoft" and "cool" in the same sentence.
Technically not true. We were muttering "Not cool, Microsoft, not cool!" quite regularly back in the 90s and early 00s. :)
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
... what?
They could do a better job with the native frameworks, but the rest of these are completely unrelated. For web, MVC is pretty much dead and you might want to use Blazor SSR instead. Web API via controllers is still supported, but minimal API endpoints are the hot thing. Blazor is being treated as a first class product. Aspire is there to assist in local orchestration of distributed applications... and is built on Blazor.
Exactly that, now try to pick the best one of all of those on enterprise projects, depending on the version they are using, and there is no budget for updates.
What about Wine? Is that still a thing?
Visual Studio Code seems to be their big open source push, besides GitHub. Everyone uses it, and most development environments and UX are based on it. Used to be Atom, I remember.
Pedantic, but VS Code does not share a lineage with Atom, besides the fact that it is built on Electron (which was, admittedly, originally built for Atom.)
I meant Atom used to be the base, and now it's VSCode
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I don't understand how VS Code is an "open source push". It's technically open source, but open source doesn't seem to be strategically important to it.
Not all of it is OSS. The core language servers are closed, I think.
> Visual Studio Code ... open source
Pick one.
They meant VS Code (which is at least partially open source).
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
Heard of Apple Game Porting Toolkit? That's built on the back of Wine.
Microsoft has been open sourcing a bunch of their programs for a while now too. Majority are inconsequential but they are still nice to see. People on Linux OS's are excited about Microsoft calculator being open source but these open source projects still show that some people there have interest in the push.
Valve's steam deck runs on Linux/Wine. Wine is more popular than ever.
Wine, as part of Proton/SteamOS is a huge success.
Wine is still active, but I think mostly with Valve's proton, if that's the Wine you're talking about.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
This is Microsoft's primary strategy. There are a lot of victims out there.
... he says after spending several months porting a win32 app to Silverlight as part of a Gold Partner/MS case study with much fanfare, only to have to spent the next few years backporting everything into the win32 app it never replaced, and then it was shit canned and only the win32 version remains.
We're planning to rewrite it in Qt at some point as some of our customers use RHEL.
I once worked for a company which outsourced the development of a Silverlight app for $1 million and then canned the whole thing one year later. It's just crazy how these life-changing amounts of money are thrown around like garbage in this industry.
Oh and I didn't mention how these founders went on to raise more and more funding. It's like there is no connection to performance.
No need to extinguish what you can infinitely embrace with capital and extend into a puzzle.
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only,
The monetisation of .NET is less about selling Windows licences, and more about selling Azure compute etc. The OS used on Azure is less relevant, you pay MS either way.
You can run .net without azure very easily. I personally have 4x web apps written in .net 8, razor. They used to be on a aws windows instance years ago but it was overly expensive for what I needed. Then I switched them to a small digital ocean server running ubuntu. When I started these apps I wrote them on windows 7 for windows server. I switched the server probably 2 years ago. I recently made the switch off of windows to ubuntu as my daily driver, instead of going to 11. Everything still works great. I do miss visual studio, but I am getting used to linux and its tools now. Point is, server is running and there is zero azure involved.
> You can run .net without azure very easily
That's true, and we're all well aware of it. I've done that for a job too.
Nevertheless, the point stands. MS gives away a lot of the .NET tools for free. It is a "Loss leader", "to draw customers into a store where they are likely to buy other goods." (1).
"You can't run .NET without Azure" is not what I said, what I said is that .NET is free, but MS believes that continuing to invest in it, drives Azure sales. Ask yourself why MS spends money developing tools such as Aspire or YARP.
The fact that you specifically didn't buy some Azure today means little: this is still the plan, and it still seems to be broadly working. I have heard MS people say as much, and also say that the side-effect of some people running .NET on AWS etc is fine too.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
You really think Microsoft has been ”cool” for the past decade or so?
First the rampant spyware, then they gradually wreck every single piece of software into unusable buggy AI-slop-mess just to play the trashy MBA valuation games.
I still hold nostalgic value for the old OSes (say up to XP/7) but everything after has been nothing but maximal profit extraction.
Dont get me started on Azure
Not OP, but I do.
The '90s/00s era of people hating on M$ and picturing them as the Borg had left room to the 10s/20s of MS being "friendly" and releasing open source and free things (typescript, vs code, core.net, wsl, work on python etc) and not completely screwing up acquisitions like GitHub or Mojang.
Windows became adware, and office became some crappy online thing, but _microsoft_ had became nicer and gained goodwill.
This seems to have started evaporating in the last year or so.
Only people without any sense of reality believed this. Being exploitative is a core feature of MS, since its foundation. It's like believing a serpent won't bite you. They're in the middle of the embrace, extend and extinguish cycle for open source technologies.
Yep, that is more of less the point I was making.
They didn't become cool, some people just let themselves get fooled by what they were offering for free.
Windows was already adware with WIndows 98. Active Desktop anyone?
Yeah that.
HN has a short memory. About 10 years ago everyone was all over Satya like he was Jesus' second coming.
Look where we are now.
Microsoft hasn't been the cool guys since at least 1995, and probably long before that.
Not just that, but Microsoft's reputation is in the process of taking a nose dive over its human rights record
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
Like IBM in the forties.
That's true of most of tech in general, these days. You have to pick your poison now.
You really don't have to.
And as a developer you have the option to go for otherwise trickier alternatives, like not using iOS nor Android.
But of course someone that uses the word 'tech' for a tiny subset of it might not see that...
Nobody even knows about this, no one thinks "Microsoft, hell no, they are a key player in the gaza conflict."
No one really associates human rights with Microsoft's reputation. That is the domain of Palantir, Meta, etc.
I guess you speak for everyone?
I very much do look very negatively on Microsoft as a collaborator with modern fascist regimes, along with Meta, Palantir, X, etc.
What about Apple there? Bringing golden offerings to their god-king and so supporting the further corruption of the regime. One of the few with the power/money to stand against them instead kneeling before Trump like a teen beauty pageant hopeful.
Yet. How do you think Meta acquired that reputation ?
as a former MSFT employee (who quit for reasons, well before the layoffs) I am not permitted to disparage or portray my former employer in a negative light.
I'm just mentioning this for no reason whatsoever. It popped into my head, for some reason.
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nothingburger
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
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