Linux is a joy to use. Self hosting is easy as hell, with an abundance of tools and applications available. You can buy old refurbished machines that are still pretty amazing home servers for cheap.

Hell, even AI help with that. It's pretty good at making scripts and detailing step-by-step what you need to to get things running.

Things improved slightly for a while and maybe the generation of Mac/linux using tech workers never suffered through the worst of it, but Microsoft seems to be back on track with their old ways.

Can I play Kingdom Come II on Mint now? If not, are we moving there?

Windows was only ever better than DOS, by the same vendor. It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had. Really. I don't see a non-gaslighting argument for Windows anywhere.

So the makers of tired old PC operating systems look enviously upon the success of smartphones and think: We must do as they do. And thus S3 suspend gets replaced by "modern suspend" - just like a smartphone, not really suspended, just in a low power, always online, always ready to act mode. And local storage gets replaced by cloud, and local accounts get replaced by cloud accounts, and the cloud reaches in and modifies features and apps. Does this really make sense? Does it matter? Smartphones blazed the way and are successful. Must copy the formula, of your device just being an extension to the cloud, nothing more.

I sit here in front of my old school Linux machine, with terabytes of local storage and as little cloud dependency as possible. Heck it's part of the cloud itself, hosting an ancient cobwebsite right here from the basement. But I feel increasingly like an anachronism. Want to pass a photo dump to computer-neurotypicals? Not even a USB stick will do. Not even a USB-C stick that will plug right into their smartphone and allow the pix to be copied off easily from its UI. The whole concept of non-cloud stuff has become alien to most people.

Don't even get me started about getting photos from them! Anyway if that's how the world works now, why would anyone bother making a traditional operating system any more?

With the rise of Linux and ChromeOS the operating system is becoming a free commodity. Applications with real revenue are becoming web bound, google here as shown the way. Google's productivity software is a major threat to Microsoft. Here there is monthly recurring revenue.

There is no significant profit left in producing the operating systems. It is a necessity, sure, but it's not offering a USP. It just is.

So, the corporate thinking goes, switch investment into monthly paying applications, like Office 365. Reduce the investment in the OS, while using the established user base as a way to push new customers toward the online services Microsoft provides. Sure, MS can extend it to ARM, but this is because they are chasing the Chrome OS users.

Of course, Windows, like MacOS can still host "native" applications like desktop versions of office, or adobe products. But the real revenue is in the online monthly subscriptions. Games will fall into this section too.

In the end to the user, Windows becomes just like Chrome OS, a launch pad into online services.

Valve seeks the direction of travel and creates it's own OS designed to launch games and drive users to its store... it's the same story, and play book.

For developers, and creatives, the only home left is Linux (and maybe *BSD). This is acknowledged, as both Windows and MacOS can now run Linux applications via WSL and Apple Containers. Why? = because this helps developers create applications that can be hosted in the cloud... something that has recurring revenue.

AI? - Well, it's a possible accelerator down this path, as the hardware needed to host the inference is huge.

So what's going to happen in the future? - Well, the cost of AI is a limiting factor. Add in the political moves between China, the US and the EU are going to limit the growth of US owned cloud. Digital sovereignty is key, and the US government can get access to anything held on US owned servers. China is moving forward with plans to remove US technology from its ecosystem.

The result, well, AI does offer great productivity gains with costs so high, and latency of online services, tasks specific small models will be pushed to the desktop. Laptop and hardware manufacturers will add accelerators for this. In the EU there will be new opportunities for competitors to Microsoft / Google to stand up solutions, open source will be key to this, so NextCloud, will be popular. But overall there will be a pull away from the very thin client toward a slightly thicker client. The EU will probably want to sponsor, or help create a version of an AI agent similar to DeepSeek in China, they've shown what's possible with a smaller budget.

This won't run on Windows, or MacOS, it's all going to end up running on Linux. A Linux disto from China, and one for the EU.

I'm only very slightly less reluctant to get an Apple machine (though the M* chips tempt me) and there will probably be incompatibilities between the versions of Quicken.

I think I should probably rip off the band-aid and migrate to:

+ spreadsheets (more control/future proof) + gnucash or similar (and risk that going unmaintained) + Wine + something I've not considered