To not much official fanfare on Thursday, the Windows operating system turned 40 years old, marking four decades since Windows 1.0 debuted in the United States on November 20, 1985. Its midlife milestone comes with a crisis, though. Diehard Windows users are switching to Linux for a variety of reasons.
For one, gaming is finally better on Linux machines, which makes the moat Windows dug for itself a little more passable. Add to that the end of support for Windows 10 in October, the growing frustration among power users about Microsoft Recall, and the growing number of polarizing features, and power users are finding plenty of reasons to make the switch to Linux.
It’s unclear if the wave of Windows power users loudly moving to Linux has crested yet, or if this is just the beginning. That said, the past year has seen a flood of articles like this one, scores of posts on Reddit, and YouTube videos documenting and occasionally evangelizing the conversion to Linux.
Digital sovereignty. Even Europe is looking at replacing Windows now. I know that attempts have been made before, but there are stronger pressures now and there are better alternatives for Windows-only workflows.
Most new apps are web based nowadays. Many companies are even ditching the desktop Office apps now (which is insane for its own reasons, but still). Engineers under 40 prefer Python over Excel. Word is good for WYSIWYG printing, but with a small government program it should be possible to make that irrelevant quickly and ditch PDFs along with it.
I’m hopeful.
I otherwise agree, but what’s particularly wrong with PDFs? Almost anything can generate a PDF these days.
My biggest issue with PDF it’s hard to read on screens. On top of that PDF forms are notoriously buggy, tables are almost impossible to machine-read without specialized software, and even copy-pasting can be a hassle.
I get that print will continue to be a thing to some extent, but I don’t think that business or government documents need to be typeset with static pages. I think it’s time we move on to a much simpler standard that is made for free-flowing text.
PDF has also been problematic as a standard format, since it referred to proprietary features up until 2023.
PDF forms are often horrible when done wrong; however, PDF files are really good for when you really need a document to look the same everywhere and don’t want to worry about what fonts the recipient has.
The accessibility issues are legit, though.