Microsoft is the reason the Linux desktop is still not a thing in 2022. At every step of the way for many years Microsoft has always done some psychotic ill-intentioned thing to monopolize the PC. Even in 2022.
- OpenGL is crossplatform, we could have crossplatform games... but no. Microsoft didn't like that. So they made sure nobody used OpenGL so that Windows became the de-facto platform for PC games: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-an...
- Regulators demanded Microsoft to define an open format for Office documents. They did, by creating the most complicated standard they could in a 6000 page document, and then decided to not use it by default in MS Office so that they could keep an advantage over competitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
- Internet Explorer for many years was the standard browser and internet browsing experience on non-Windows platforms had compatibility problems. They didn't pass Web Standards Compliance Acid Tests, so that a website that respected standards didn't render properly on Internet Explorer. Sometimes Microsoft websites would deliberately send broken CSS stylesheets to non-IE browsers.
- They tried to lock down the PC with Palladium, they failed. They now did it with Pluto and succeeded. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html
- They tried to compete with google by stealing their top results. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/
- They have bought every major PC game publisher: Bethesda, Activision/Blizzard, Mojang, and countless others.
But there's hope...
- Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL, and there is an open source Direct3D implementation on top of Vulkan. Wine/Proton uses this to run Windows games with a very low performance overhead.
- There are Open source office suites other than OpenOffice/LibreOffice with a proper UI that do not look like developer art. There are also cloud office suites like Google docs you can use for free.
- Internet Explorer is dead and their successors are dead.
- Nobody uses Bing and it will likely never be the top search engine.
- OpenGL is crossplatform, we could have crossplatform games... but no. Microsoft didn't like that. So they made sure nobody used OpenGL so that Windows became the de-facto platform for PC games: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-an...
- Regulators demanded Microsoft to define an open format for Office documents. They did, by creating the most complicated standard they could in a 6000 page document, and then decided to not use it by default in MS Office so that they could keep an advantage over competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
- Internet Explorer for many years was the standard browser and internet browsing experience on non-Windows platforms had compatibility problems. They didn't pass Web Standards Compliance Acid Tests, so that a website that respected standards didn't render properly on Internet Explorer. Sometimes Microsoft websites would deliberately send broken CSS stylesheets to non-IE browsers.
- They tried to lock down the PC with Palladium, they failed. They now did it with Pluto and succeeded. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html
- They tried to compete with google by stealing their top results. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/
- They have bought every major PC game publisher: Bethesda, Activision/Blizzard, Mojang, and countless others.
But there's hope...
- Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL, and there is an open source Direct3D implementation on top of Vulkan. Wine/Proton uses this to run Windows games with a very low performance overhead.
- There are Open source office suites other than OpenOffice/LibreOffice with a proper UI that do not look like developer art. There are also cloud office suites like Google docs you can use for free.
- Internet Explorer is dead and their successors are dead.
- Nobody uses Bing and it will likely never be the top search engine.