Check out the behind the bastards episodes on Gates. Even his charity foundation is just another way to exert control.
I literally was gonna call him a bastard.
Microsoft has been pulling this since the 80s… Bill Gates was personally responsible for destroying WordPerfect, dbase,etc competing office software.
They also did that stuff with DR-DOS, they’ve been pulling dirty tricks with all their competition since the beginning with little or no consequences.
And people whine because their laptops sometimes don’t work with Linux when it’s actually a fucking miracle that almost all machines currently work flawlessly despite all the hardware having been specifically designed to be hostile to anything that isn’t Windows.
Does anyone use Microsoft because they like the software? Because all I ever hear is “I need it for games”, “I need it for work”, or “It’s the only system that works with my hardware”.
One wonders what the market share for OSs would look like if people were able to freely choose what software they liked.
I use a system 76 laptop.
To be honest… If tomorrow WINE was 100% perfect, we’d probably see laptops start moving the direction of phones and it would be terrible for consumers. You’d get your AceOS on your Acer laptop and DellSys on your Dell and so on and they’d all have little marketplaces where you could install LibreOffice next to an ad for some other office suite that costs $100 for some reason and that’s all people would know.
Yes, techy people would have more options but for the average consumer, they have no idea what an OS is. Many don’t know what Windows is. They don’t care or want to care. If presented with the average Linux install screen, supposing they could make it that far by figuring out how to make a bootable flash drive, they’d freak out at all the options and information presented. They’re at the mercy of the manufacturer, and the manufacturer will want to squeeze out every last dollar, and being given control over the OS would be terrible.
The problem is that apart from a handful of geeks (a lot of which tend to gather on sites like this one), nobody is interested in computers. Which admittedly has consequences since computers are definitely interested in them. But then getting people interested in anything nowadays isn’t very easy.
At one point 30 years ago, yes
And then I accidentally found this article on ACPI debugging, which references the memo written by Bill Gates in 1999:
One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows-specific. If seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. … Maybe we couid define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something relaled to this.
What. The. Heck.
This is insane… Isn’t it like the textbook definition of lobbying? I wasn’t expecting to find a whole conspiracy while trying to fix my Deck, perhaps the memo is a hoax or something, but this all just lines up so naturally. If it really was his plan, then he succeeded.
Given that the the memo was submitted in court as evidence in a 2002 case, Comes v. Microsoft, it’s probably real. If anything, it didn’t succeed enough. It probably would have been possible to lock Linux out entirely, but by 1999, there were already too many Linux and *BSD x86 server deployments. Couldn’t ignore them. Had to make it just kinda shitty rather than battening it all up.
Didn’t they recently try it again, with pushing S1 sleep, making sure S3 just couldn’t exist in many laptops?
I remember they once tried some similar shit with the Kerberos protocol, sneaking a patented feature in there so they could then seize the whole thing in the name of Active Directory, but I think they were forced to back down(?)
I’m actually having difficulty finding details on it now because they’ve done a solid job drowning the story out from the search results…
Licenses, not patents. Same effect though. Classic embrace, extend, extinguish.
https://lowendmac.com/musings/kerberos.html
https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-microsofts-dirty-tricks
This is par the course for Microsoft. Gates is/was such a piece of shit.
I almost miss the type of asshole he represents, though. Comparatively to Bezos and Musk, Gates’ brand of evil is almost refreshingly honest and straightforward…
Gates and Jobs were ruthless business owners, but as least they’re not Nazi supporting fascist dickheads.
It’s not a very high bar, but it is a bar.
Maybe just because they were not active in the correct time period.
The largets farmland owner in the US amd a major driver for keeping covid vaxines under patent? I think that term is highly accurate as he statistically is responsible for many deaths.
and many african countries, which hes pretty obssevilely donated to, has criticized the patents, because they are forced to buy US/europe patented vaccines which arnt cheap to these countries.
Its all colonialism, sorry.
Billionaires are the fucking devil.
thats why people said he is not genuine as he looks when donating to africa, hes just hiding behind the guise of charity to reinvent his image.
yeah, i fell for him too until recently. I cant blame people for not knowing. We need to do something though. These billionaire leeches need to go.
Kind of half related, but Microsoft loves to fuck with dual booting as well in various ways. Just last year a security patch broke dual booting, required a complicated workaround to get out of, and was only properly fixed 9 months later. Historically some “fast boot” shenanigans have been known to actually be “fucking with linux dual boot”. At this point if I need Windows for some adulting, it’s done in a virtual machine. Microsoft has simply lost their privilege to bare metal access on my PC.
EDIT: Stories like this post are disheartening though, since they show that Microsoft can use their weight to make everyone else’s experience worst even if you completely avoid them.
Billionaires are a cancer on society. No healthy economy can survive the corruption that billionaires create. These people could do amazing things and change society for the better … but all of them decide that evil suits them.
One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows-specific. If seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. … Maybe we couid define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something relaled to this.
This is insane… Isn’t it like the textbook definition of lobbying?
No, that’d be something along the lines of racketeering and/or bribery. Lobbying is trying to influence someone to do something. If you do it with nice words that’s not typically much of a problem. But when you say you’re going to make sure they’re going to earn a lot of money from doing X then that’s bribery.
I[t] seems unfortunate if we do this work and […] the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. …
Man I just don’t get this mindset of “it was hard for me, can’t have it be easy for someone else. Even if it takes additional work, I’ll make sure the next person struggles at least as much as me”. It’s like companies designing a great product and then spending additional develpment time making sure it’s not user repairable, even if it means compromising a good design.
We’d still be in the stone age if everyone thougt like that.
I wasn’t expecting to find a whole conspiracy while trying to fix my Deck, perhaps the memo is a hoax or something, but this all just lines up so naturally.
My experience is that it is intentional, just like countless other examples of monopolistic anti-competition behavior. Especially with gaming, where a duopoly of video card manufacturers has spent the last several years intentionally crippling virtual GPU support on consumer-grade hardware. There are many others to blame though since Windows is designed to collect as much telemetry as possible, making it near impossible to fully disable its collection. There are entire forensic analysis toolkits dedicated to the troves of data that Windows stores on nearly every activity you perform. So while Microsoft’s actions may clearly violate antitrust legislation, the intelligence agencies saw Microsoft as their biggest ally & worked to help them maintain the status quo.
That OS is spyware that just gets better for Microsofts bottom line.
After digging a bit the rabbit hole I’m still not sure I understand… But this issue is mostly related to portables devices (Laptops, Steam deck…), battery mangement and legacy BIOS?
After going through this written blog post that’s what I “understand”.
Another reason to hate Bill Gates !
Still better than Device Tree though right?
How’s that workin’ out for ya’, billy boy?
Considering his wealth, pretty well I’d say
Not bd considering that Linux is still less than 5% of the market share.
Server Linux has exactly the same ACPI problems and manages fine there.
Linux is higher marketshare than windows. Most phones run linux and phones out number othercomputer styles-
android is a very very sad deployment of linux
…on billions of phones. How is that sad?
It’s not sad in terms of numbers. It’s sad in terms of the implementation. It’s pretty much only the kernel… Yes I know all the utilities and applications is really GNU and not Linux, but that’s what people think of when they say they run Linux.
So yes all android phones technically run Linux, but you’re not getting a Unix flavoured experience at all. It might as well not have been linux.
Hence the sadness.
The point being that it doesn’t matter whether it is Linux.
Because when we talk about Linux, we don’t attribute the name just to the kernel, but to the openness that comes along with it.In case of Android phones, the user:
- is unable to install their own version of the OS, based on their own compiled version of the Kernel. Because locked bootloader and all
- They might even be unable to use the Google’s stock OS if they wanted to on another vendor’s device.
- has to use components of Android studio, if they want to build anything for Android phones
- Even if the code is C++
- Although, it seems to be possible to use the NDK and Gradle locally, so maybe this particular concern is unfounded.
- most often, is lead to believe that they don’t have much else to use other than what is available on the App store that is there by default on the phone.
- and what is that full of anyway? I send a plain text file to others on their phone and they say they can’t open it. I open the Play store and try typing “plain text” and the top applications are ad-full
- Would you pay/watch ads on your Linux computer to open a txt file?
- btw, check out “Simple Text Editor” by maxistar. That seems legitimate to me. Others had suspicious permissions (then there is a Text Viewer by pangola, which seems to be good with 0 permissions, if you only want to look at the file)
- The Phone app removing useful features with iterations
- and what is that full of anyway? I send a plain text file to others on their phone and they say they can’t open it. I open the Play store and try typing “plain text” and the top applications are ad-full
Ok, I’ve written enough… bye
- is unable to install their own version of the OS, based on their own compiled version of the Kernel. Because locked bootloader and all
Not sure if this is sarcasm but do you actually think android is great? Their comment is not about the numbers but the state of android and how google ruined it.
Not sarcasm, I was commenting on the number of installations.
the number makes it more sad
Being first does not equal being better.
