I don’t recall how bad it was when they cut mobile, but I wonder if in hindsight it would have made sense to just keep going as it was clearly the next platform war and surely MS were always going to have a potential foothold through desktop integration
If i remember, what killed windows phone was the lack of 3rd party apps which is especially ironic since they now own the entire developer experience. They have vscode, github, azure, they could have made windows mobile a compile target and get more apps if they played the long game.
Apple is dipping their toes into XR, I wonder if microsoft will follow them later for another chance of the mobile market
@darkkite@maegul From the outside, it also seems like there was some corporate politics involved.
Apple was making its comeback thanks to Mac OSX, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.
Samsung was toying with its own OS (Tizen), apps, and online services (Bixby).
Google responded by toying with hardware itself, including Glass, Nest, and at one point even buying Motorola.
So it looked like all the big tech companies were going to try to copy Apple by trying to own the full tech stack.
The then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, responded by trying to reposition his firm as a "devices and services" company. So he ended up with the XBox, Zune, Kinect, Kin, and Surface.
Then he went all-in with a takeover of Nokia.
Soon afterwards, Ballmer stood aside, and Satya Nadella took over.
Satya wanted to reposition Microsoft as a cloud-first company, competing against Google and AWS rather than Apple.
He kept the XBox and Surface, let the rest bleed money for a couple of quarters, wrote off their value as a loss, and then killed it off.
I go back and forth between Jerboa and PWA (from Chromium). I find both missing features I really like, but that just might be from the features to which I got accustomed from Slide and Infinity and not features that are must-haves. On Jerboa, the most annoying thing to me is during commenting, where the cursor jumps to somewhere else in the paragraph and deletes a word. It’s very annoying. I thought it was my keyboard, so I switched, but nope. Maybe an incompatibility with autocorrect features. Whatever. Lemmy is still growing up, while Reddit is 18.
Every couple of years I kick up the original Diablo game. The game didn’t have all the features of Diablo 2, but it had an amazing creepy atmosphere with an awesome theme… and I had to pull it up. Haunting.
Master Of Orion. Both the original, it’s sequel and the modern remake. It’s nice to play something with different pacing from other games. And the random outcomes from AI throughout the game’s progression keeps things spicy from playthrough to playthrough.
You can use most desktop environments on most distros.
If a distro has its own GUI and it doesn’t exist on other distros, usually that means either it isn’t free software or it’s not good enough that anyone has bothered to package it for other distros.
Probably any distro that ships KDE Plasma 5 as default - I’m stuck with GNOME for now as I need to use Evolution for work (EWS mail accounts), but if I had the choice I’d probably be on Plasma.
Ultimately they both use the KDE Plasma desktop environment, which is the only DE I’ve ever seen that has a proper modern look by default (others IMO look like either the 2000’s or an OS 4 Kidz), as well as being pretty featurful for multi monitor productivity
Arch+KDE Plasma is what I personally am gonna switch to this summer
Its also pretty easy to get it setup to a semi-customized basic look and feel. Use one of the bigger themes, a popular Icon pack and a nice matching wallpaper as well as a little task bar customization and some widgets and youre set, and all this takes less than two hours.
Check out KDE Debian spin too. I booted the live iso to check some stuff and was seriously impressed. Gave me the early ubuntu 10-11 vibe where the OS just stays out of your way.
Linux Mint Cinnamon. Stable, yet tons of customizations possible and makes the jump from Windows a whole lot easier (I jumped 1.5 years ago and will never look back).
I dislike Cinnamon because it doesn't "just work" if you have multiple monitors like I do.
Apps don't sync properly on the taskbar across both of them. The only way to get them to sync properly is to disable the grouped taskbar. People have mentioned this to the Cinnamon devs for years now, and they don't appear to use multiple monitors so they don't care.
KDE Plasma works great with multiple monitors and has been 100% an upgrade over Cinnamon. Plus there's more third-party support for Plasma than there is Cinnamon.
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