A Perfect Storm For Windows

As someone who has been a software freedom advocate for my whole adult life, there have been few companies that has been higher on my black list than Microsoft and no software that has been higher on that list than Windows. Windows has maintained a stubborn dominance on the desktop computer market that has had a sustained negative effect on technology in general. Microsoft's domination has given it the status of being solely in control of PCs for 3 decades now. During that time they have done a lot of damage, including but definitely not limited to that time where they tried to control the web by extending it, that time they used their monopoly to kill BeOS or that time they tried to funnel all software purchases through their own store.

Windows seems like an impenetrable fortress controlling a vast land. For so many years it has been able to remain dominant to the extent that some children have grown up only using Windows. Microsoft executives should have taken comfort in that, especially since the Linux desktop, the only competitor in this space has struggled to gain traction for the same amount of time.

The stubbornness doesn't go one way. The Linux Desktop has refused to die. For some reason even though it would have long since been abandoned by corporations (and this has happened a few times already), it just keeps living, changing and evolving. The Linux Desktop movement is so stubborn that they tried and succeeded to some degree to translate Windows system calls into Linux system calls using wine. For the most part however, it was just a fly at the banquet for Microsoft, not a real threat. At least not on the desktop.

Linux has won many times over

In the fight for computing dominance, Linux is the king and queen of cheese. Android is still Linux, and it destroyed any chance of Windows phone ever having a chance. Servers, routers, iot devices and appliances and supercomputers are mostly on Linux, with Windows not even being relevant enough in those sectors to be the butt of a joke. The desktop has always remained safe, however. Until now.

The Windows Ship

From a corporate executive point of view, the Windows agentic OS is a revolutionary step and they are probably very optimistic about the future. I'm saying this because we know that it's not like big corporates don't know what is going on. They are not oblivious to people posting on social media about abandoning Windows. It's that they don't care. I could go into more detail but not to distract from the present issue, I'll leave it at overconfidence, overoptimism and hype about AI "value".

Why people are jumping ship

There are very specific types of users that are jumping ship. The reasons include concerns about privacy, affordability of new computers which are required for windows 11, updates and breakages from Microsoft resulting in productivity loss. Microsoft has always pushed things users don't want, but this time it's easier for users to leave and the balance of considerations between leaving and staying has for many people shifted to the leave side. How is that?

The AIlephant in the room

AI has numerous parralel destabalisings effects on technology and the market.

Democratization of Tricky Technical stuff

If you gave the average user the task of installing Linux by themselves just a few years ago the failure rate would be considerably higher than now. With LLMs that have stolen decades of forum posts, code bases and documentation an inexperienced user can effectively have a helping hand in moving from Windows to Linux. It's not that it has been hard to install Linux at all, but I've heard of many instances where people gave up because they faced a problem and didn't know where or how to get help. An LLM has all the time and patience in the world to help someone take control of their computer back.

Reading and watching content created by recent Linux converts this has come up quite a few times. You can use AI to help you if you have a problem. This is a staggering force multiplier for the army of Linux users that have up to this point been responsible for helping people out online or in person. The fact that the LLM is text based and Linux can be configured with a command line interface supercharges this ability even further. Users can basically paste commands supplied by the LLM and fix problems on their newly installed Linux desktops. Some users have even succeeded with installing Arch, which has always been a more technical distribution that required at least some experience to install. Some of them have even reported that they enjoyed the puzzle of getting some things to work for them. The psychology of that is fascinating, but let's shelve that tangent here.

Money and Prices

AI has also caused a massive spike in RAM prices, making it even more expensive for users to upgrade their computers for Windows 11. Some people just can't afford to replace their perfectly working computers because there is a new version of windows and the old version is going out of support. We've entered a weird phase where people don't really need all that much more power, finding their existing computers perfectly fine for their needs. And new computers don't offer that much of a noticeable difference. All this while people are generally struggling after Covid and with the jobless or laggard growth in developed economies.

They also don't see the benefits. Windows 11 doesn't have anything users really want, and the idea that people want co-pilot everywhere is really just not landing with the public. Even if people can afford it, they are looking elsewhere because whatever disposable income they do have could be better spent on something else.

We're all poorer

Real wage stagnation, automation, inflation, increasing housing costs and numerous other factors have just left people with less options than they had. Being forced to spend money is no longer fun because we simply cannot afford it. This is true even for people with good salaries. Once your expenses are paid you have to make tough choices if you have any disposable income left.

Stock markets are soaring but people are worse off. Confidence in institutions and corporations have also dropped off dramatically. This is what happens when you keep getting told things will get better but instead they keep getting worse. This distrust encourages people to keep their money because they might need it for some emergency in the near future.

Competition

Microsoft lost so many battles when competitors found ways to leapfrog them. The ingredients have always been the same, they just need to be put together and voila. Free software enables competitive software markets because new entrants to the market don't have to start from scratch or shelve out massive mountains of capital in order to pay for software.

Google couldn't have afforded to build Linux before their little search engine went up. They couldn't have created Android without Java and Linux. Chrome and Safari were based on free software. So was MacOS. Valve has deep pockets but building wine, linux, kde plasma, flatpak etc would have been a significant stretch of those resources and the time they would have needed to take would have been gargantuan.

This has been part of the poor timing for Windows. Valve already fired the first shot accross the bow with the Steamdeck, and keen observers suspected that a console would be next. And it happened. The side effect of this effort has been exposing more people to Linux while also taking wine for gaming over the finish line. Gamers now not only could use Linux for gaming, they wanted to. SteamOS does things that Windows cannot, and catching up will be extremely difficult if not impossible for Microsoft. Valve has played the long game and they saw the recipe. The recipe goes beyond Linux vs Windows too. Practically any piece of software can become absolutely dominant this way. If all the marketing agencies in the world decide they no longer wanted to use Adobe products, they could fund free alternatives and put Adobe to sleep for good. The only reason this hasn't happened yet is that the recipe has only really been seen in the technology industry. With more Linux users now, it could dawn on them wherever they are that this is a formidable recipe for success.

Control and Agency

I don't think Windows is fundamentally a bad piece of software. The problem is that Microsoft makes Windows. They have always tried to break the mold with a new version of Windows that users hated. Windows 98 was a broken mess. People hated Vista. They also hated Windows 8. Windows 11 is just a continuation of Microsoft see sawing between angering users and appeasing them. But Windows 8 was a turning point.

It became clear with Windows 8 that Windows was no longer the product. Microsoft wanted Windows to become part of the Microsoft Ecosystem. My guess is that they realised that nobody wanted to buy operating systems anymore. Windows users are very late to upgrade Windows, because unlike MacOS and Linux new versions cost money. This is why they were so willing to offer free upgrades. Windows became the store front. In order to achieve this however, they had to take control from the user. At least that is how Microsoft thinks in general. They don't seem to grasp something like getting people to buy things because they actually wanted those things.

This left Windows users extremely disappointed with Windows 11. The advertisiments and the automatic installation of additional products wasn't the problem. The problem was that people lost control of their computers in the process.

Changing how things work for a user is something that is neccesary sometimes, but never easy. In the case of Microsoft however, they feel completely unphased by user reactions to their choices. In their minds, they probably think that users have no other choice but to stick to windows. Well, that's no longer true.

From binging on reddit posts and YouTube videos of people that switched to Linux, one of the big reasons people stayed on Linux was that they felt that they owned their computers again. Some are even okay with some of the struggles they've had because the effort was worth it to get control and agency back.

Politics

The USA has not only been the provider of physical security for allies, it has also been the supplier of technology. Companies and governments have trusted US technology products because of stable geopolitical relationships and strong institutions that keep government and corporate interests separated enough.

The second Trump administration has pierced this veil. That much was clear when tech CEOs stood behind the president at his inauguration like neonoble lords.The USA is increasingly seeing it's tech business and politics as a single monolithic element. This places foreign and domestic users at risk. People have always been a little worried about government espionage, but the US has never acted maliciously or threatened allies before in such a direct manner.

Rule of law has also been signficantly weakened. Entering into long term contractual agreements with foreign entities can already be challenging to navigate, but when a country sanctions judges in foreign countries for doing their duties everyone in every allied country will have to ask themselves honest questions about the risk they are exposed to with US technology, and Microsoft is no exception. In fact between cloud providers and Windows, risk exposure is massive.

There is also a consumer backlash to the Trump administrations threats and actions. They have managed to threaten so many allies that practically every country has a significant number of citizens that don't want anything to do with US products, and especially not US technology products.

Regardless of your politics, it should be understood that threatening to invade another country will make the people in those countries at least circumspect with regards to your loyalty.

The Linux desktop is ready

I've been using the Linux desktop for more than 20 years, and it's not always been sunshine and rainbows. The problem has been chronic underinvestment. Buggy desktops that crashed, poor hardware support, broken sound, broken graphics. Packaging problems. KDE 3 to KDE 4 was a nightmare. Pulse audio was better but never quite good enough, X11 was good but clunky in annoying ways.

What has happened over the past decade however are some really good choices and changes that have made the desktop experience so much better. Three technologies are crucial here:

Wayland

Whether X11 could have been fixed or not is a matter for debate, but that things were messy was an undeniable fact. The Wayland transition was a messy and failure prone process. I kept trying it every now and then and then quickly abandoning it. NVidia does get a lot of the blame, but they also didn't feel particularly interested in helping at the time.

Wayland has not been ready for a long time. Ubuntu 24.04 still doesn't run KDE plasma smoothly out of the box with some NVidia GPUs. But it is very ready. The smoothness is something I genuinely see and feel when I use a Wayland session vs a X11 session.

Flatpak

Flatpak may be contentious for some people. It can take up a lot of disk space, the portals and apps sometimes need tweaking, and there are still some missing features.

But flatpak makes it easy to install a lot of applications. It has become a de facto app store for Linux. Most applications just work fine out of the box and differences between distributions are no longer as problematic. The overall experience is smooth and universal. Something that wasn't true in the past. Why?

If you wanted a newer version of an application, you had the options of building it yourself, which is very difficult for average user. Or you would have to manipulate your packaging system somehow, which was an easy way to break things you never meant to touch.

It's success is obvious when you see Valve choosing it for SteamOS. It solves problems that made commercial software extremely difficult for Linux desktops.

Pipewire

For recent converts, they may not know the pain before Pulse audio. GNOME and KDE had their own sound "servers", and it happened quite often that a GNOME app couldn't access your sound card because you were using KDE app that occupied it. Pulseaudio solved this problem, but for reasons beyond me it had an endless number of issues. I can't remember how many times I had an audio problem. Buffer settings causing glitchy audio while copying files, a USB headset having audio that had audio that was at the wrong pitch (this happened with the mic too), zero support for low latency use cases. If you wanted low latency audio, you had to use a completely different sound system (JACK). I never could quite get both playing along nicely.

Pipewire just kind of solved all the problems. Even better, it was a drop in replacement. Even though there have been bugs, it has become much more stable much more quickly than Pulse audio.

The amazing thing about it is not just that, though. I get lower recording latency on pipewire than I did on Windows 10 with the same hardware.

Everything else

Those three were definitely big ones, but there have been countless other improvements to the Linux desktop experience over the years. The desktop environments keep getting better, the graphics drivers keep getting better, there are more useful applications now than ever before, you can buy a computer with Linux preinstalled. Canonical did a lot of hard but unnoticed work.

It's over?

Does this mean Windows is going to lose? Well, no. The truth is that Microsoft has vast resources. They will maybe walk back some of their controversial decisions with Windows 11.

Some people will return to Windows from Linux for whatever reason. But less than before. And people won't forget that they have an alternative that isn't Apple.

Microsoft will lose its unassailable position on the PC platform, and 2026 looks to be even worse. In 2026 Valve will release the Steam Machine: