Forget about web development. All profession-specific software except web and app programming still runs best on Windows. Engineering, simulation, city planning, accounting, complex management, supply chain optimization, media production, statistics. If you're getting paid for some output where computers play an extra-boost tool role, simply being a means to the job, the software you'd use will be on Windows.
If a piece of software is specialized enough that people maintain it for decades, if it has nice detailed and complicated GUIs to handle complex tasks, it will be on Windows. It will rely on Windows' stable API. Those software goes back to 80s and 90s. They have organically grown. Linux kernel requires thousands of developers to keep alive. Linux kernel is much simpler than profession-specific software. Windows Stable ABI allows much fewer people (low 100s) to maintain much more complex software than the kernel.
Even without the stable ABI, Linux is hostile to the closed source software unless that software is served via a TCP socket.
Web can challenge this with Web Assembly and some combination of edge / datacenter computing now. Still quite the way out for demanding things like local simulation and CAD/CAM. There should also be strong economic reasons to throw actually trillions (unlike AI and other SV bullshit balloons) worth of software and entire systems out, not just to spite MS.
It's nothing inherent about Windows (not even one-click .exe files), it's existing programs and drivers that only run on Windows, which of course only run on Windows because it was already popular.
For me it's MS Office. Sorry, but OpenOffice.org and the Google apps still don't come close. (And of course Office file formats are their own lock in, very analogously to the programs that run on Windows.)
The lockin is that you buy a new computer, and when you turn it on Windows is there. Like 1% of people have any concept that they could change that or how they would go about it. It doesn't suck enough yet for them to try changing it.
If you want to talk about why not macOS or Chrome, there are different reasons, but of the people buying PCs, that's why they're on Windows.
True e2e makes it hard to sync a new device and makes it easy to lose all your history. The company also can't help you recover your messages and it's unclear for normal people why (often met with anger or disappointment).
Unencrypted messaging is easier and more convenient, just login from anywhere and done. So there are actual technical and rational reasons to choose against e2e.
I have so many problems with using Matrix with multiple devices and most of them are caused by its encryption. If there was a magic wand that would add encryption to a system without changing anything else there would be no reason not to use it, but the reality is that E2EE does place limits on the overall functionality of the system.
This is why Telegram and Discord are so popular. They are popular because they work well, and part of the reason they work well is not bothering with E2EE. For instance, when you join a group chat, the server can just send you the message history (if enabled) and there's no need to negotiate keys with every other participant. There no "joining...", there is no "message will appear shortly...", you just press the button and you're in.
I've never seen an E2EE group chat that could remain stable with more than a few hundred participants. Even Matrix gives up and just makes it unencrypted at that point.
This is not correct. People are happy to give up privacy in exchange for the convenience of being able to restore message history remotely, even if they lose their key.
When will Youtube
- Block "unverified" browsers?
- Force KYC or Youtube premium to watch videos?
In their ongoing fight against yt-dlp and others i can already not watch videos using VPNs.
Adblockers has made most tech people unaware of the enshittification of most web services. For most normal people when they eventually make this change it will not affect them at all.
Stability is basically same too..