2
DylanG
7y

I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?

Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?

Comments
  • 1
    (Oops. I forgot that you guys probably have no idea what Social Forums is xD. It's a website I work for, and it's called Novanius nowadays)
  • 3
    What is it exactly that you want to do? I don't know what system programmers do. My googling resulted in contradictory definitions.
  • 0
    Well, my dream is to be able to work with a team to develop proprietary low-level software like drivers, libraries, and OS software. But that could be a stretch in today's market. There is no shortage of software development needed, so I'm sure I'll fit in somewhere.
  • 2
    I can totally understand where you're coming from. You could definitely have a look into Linux - it is the most important OS for servers after all.
    You should probably focus on servers or offers to companies though if you look into Linux - most of the basic consumer software/systems is community based and FOSS.

    However, in terms of developer friendliness you won't find any better system.

    *edit:* I forgot to mention that working on FOSS doesn't necessarily mean, there's no money to earn (with most big FOSS projects there's a company involved and fulltime dev's are being payed). Just for the sake of clarity.
  • 0
    To add to what @theCalcaholic said.
    Try installing arch first to get a bit comfortable with it and the you might go onto Gentoo. With Gentoo you get the source code for every thing you install. So you want drivers you can edit the source to only install what you want and you can tweak that code. Atleast that my understanding, this means you are free to do what you want. Feedback is being listened to and people are helpful. Take a a look at arch wiki. A company like red hat(linux) is huge, Android.

    Focusing on linux is gonna be worth your while. For instance a graphic designer wants to render. Send it through our high speed internet and a server with x GPU renders it in a few seconds send it back. This reduces costs of having every work station with a heavy duty GPU. Don't know if it's already being used but I think it's coming. Why not design 3d from you browser when the internet speed is as fast as going to you're local GPU.
  • 0
    @Triskelion Got don't even need Gentoo or Arch for that. The same is true for ANY Linux distro. :)

    Only that with most distros you have the option to either compile everything from source (which you don't want, seriously) or use a package manager.

    For the sake of convenience you will want to only compile packages yourself of your unhappy with available precompiled configurations or if you want to alter the source.
  • 0
    @theCalcaholic
    But he want to work on drivers etc.
    With Gentoo you have full access. With arch less but you can work around it easy if you use Ubuntu or mint or x those drivers are prepackaged(harder to work around) this works for a normal user but if you want to go in deep Gentoo is the way to go
    Imho
  • 0
    @Triskelion Once tried installing Gentoo. Didn't turn out too well๐Ÿ˜•

    Meh, I got a lot to learn. Definitely excited to learn it though.
  • 0
    @DylanG
    I've not made it to Gentoo I'm self educating my self to webdev. In the meantime I've dabbled a few Linux distro's DE/WM. atm I'm running Manjaro xmonad and I like it alot extremely stable and a joy to finally work with a solid tiling wm.

    Gentoo is on the list though, but I need alot of time to wrap my head around it so for now it's shelved
  • 0
    @Triskelion All prepackaged drivers are optional with Ubuntu/Debian. The only reason for using them is convenience.

    I know a good number of people who compile their own debian kernels and/or drivers.
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