That is what he means, but I highly doubt that’ll ever be the case. Who would do that?
As for me, I keep wanting to switch to Windows, but I’ve finally got my workflow so nailed down with OSX + homebrew that time is really the limiting factor. Trying to find a replacement for all of my particular applications (most of which are OSX-only, OmniFocus in particular) is just not the best use of my time right now.
I never thought about this, but I could see it being possible… though I don’t think they will.
I’d like to see them make their OS free and change their marketing strategy. Surely they see that there isn’t going to be nearly as much money in PCs in the next 10-15yrs as there was in the last 10-15yrs.
I think it will be a free upgrade, at least for the first year or so. I was delighted when OS X became a free upgrade. Makes a lot of sense to me.
There’s already been a very clear announcement that it’ll be free - at least for the immediate future - as an upgrade from 7 or 8. If they went back and instead made it subscription it’d be a PR suicide. I could see them trying it on another version, later… but the rest of this discussion seems to be pretty out there since it’s already public knowledge?
As far as Linux… I’m teh same as everyone else. Try it, go back to Windows, rinse/repeat. My main laptop is a Mac, and I love it. I still occasionally do a little gaming that I need PC for; that and Photoshop are pretty much the only non-starters for me, but even for development I sometimes find myself shifting back to Windows or Mac without much reason… not sure…
I don’t think the discussion is “out there.” And I don’t think that MS will renege on the deal; i.e., offering an OS update for free (for a year,) My questioning little pea brain is just wondering why? Why am I seeing articles that MS will offer their product for free, even to pirates? …when in the past, they appear to have been trying to prevent piracy of their OS.
I understand that they need to earn money to support their development costs. But on the other hand for my home use, I don’t need many of their upgrades. (For example, I keep paying to upgrade Office, but really for what I do in a non-work situation I could easily type 'er up in Word Perfect or some other outdated program.) I understand that “they” need to keep making money to keep their investors happy, but after that year is up and MS (potentially) wants me to buy a subscription service, I’ll have to figure out whether it’s worth it to me. I speculate (obviously) but it better be darn cheap or I won’t want to afford it.
There are more than one way to get income.
Have you seen these?
Dell just released a new XPS laptop that looks to be competing with the Mac Air. It comes with Ubuntu preinstalled.
For that price I think I’d probably just get a Mac Air. And it looks like you’re stuck with 8gb RAM.
I WISH Dell would let you do that. 
Too much work.
An OS, to me, is like a table that you put other things you actually use on.
It should just work, with as close to zero tinkering as possible.
Windows comes far closer to that that Linux.
Compare if i get a new kitchen-table from IKEA.
I accept putting it together, getting it up and running.
But after that, it better damn well just stand there and do its thing quietly.
If a kitchen-table suddenly stopped working just because i bought a new brand of marmalade, and demanded that i took time of to reconfigure it for that brand before i could have breakfast… I would probably smash it to bits and burn the remains.
If I understand your analogy here, that’s very far from my experience. We bought a new all-in-one printer/scanner for our dual-boot system, and it was a lot less trouble configuring it on Ubuntu than it was on Windows. Similarly, no problem changing the router, using external drives - everything just works.
How many years ago was that? I recall that sort of effort and “recompiling the kernel for each new graphics card/kernel upgrade” back in the early 2000s, but since 2008-ish, that experience has greatly improved. I’ve plugged in multiple graphics cards over the past year with zero issue, same with external drives, scanners, printers, etc. Everything continues to work through kernel upgrades too (a pain I remember all too well).
I think that is probably Linux’s biggest struggle right now. Correcting the misnomers that it is still a very hands on operating system. It really isn’t in that state anymore.
Though I will say, I had to fiddle with getting my Network Adapter to work (as the firmware it required wasn’t readily available in any Linux repository – at least for Debian).
It’s not too far from mine though. Part of it I think, is that the Linux way of doing things is just different enough, that it feels clunky to those of us who were brought up on Windows. I find I have to refer to the manual to do straightforward task, or even find features, with Linux way more than I do on Windows. Windows isn’t perfect, but after all these years, finding things seems far more intuitive.
Awww, but Linux fixed that too (I think). You simply click the Search box at the top of Ubuntu and type what you want, or in KDE press ALT + F2 and type what you want. It goes and finds it! 
(it is seriously the feature I use most)
I do admit, it took me a good 2 years to get used to Linux in the early 2000s. I nearly gave up, but I had a friend who gave me the best advice then that probably still applies today: “If you give yourself an option to go back to Windows, you will always take it, as it is familiar. If you remove that option and dive into Linux for a good month, you’ll likely stick with it as you’ll be forced to figure things out so you can get your work done.”
And in the early 2000s, it was a LOT of work to get some things done. I recall late night sessions with him trying to figure out how to get Driver X to play nice with Driver Y on Kernel Z. Or having to compile application version A so it didn’t have a god awful bug that caused it to crash easily.
I don’t think everyone should switch to Linux, but I think the effort required now-a-day is far less than what it was 5 to 10 years ago. The one thing I will say for certain is, don’t buy the latest and greatest hardware and expect Linux to just work. If you really want Linux to just work, buy the hardware of last year. That seems to still be a fair statement for Debian, YMMV for Ubuntu.
I think to many of us oldies remember what Linux used to be like.
You can always recreate some of the experience with Gentoo or Slackware.
I remember what Windows used to be like - Fatal Exception errors, the Blue Screen of Death…
Somewhat alarmingly, I had one of those on my work Win7 laptop a couple of weeks back - it was somewhat unexpected…
Been ages since I have one of those. I feel more comfortable with Windows because it is what I use the most and that’s what I have at the office (and the software I teach is Windows based) but I’m comfortable enough with Linux to use it too
I agree with this, there are some things that linux simply does not do well:
I somewhat disagree with your last statement although you did mention debian specifically. Distros which aren’t so focussed on LTS (Ubuntu, Mint, etc) run much newer kernels and Arch runs the newest kernel pretty much as its released. Hardware support in the kernel is not an issue for most hardware. AMD, Intel, Nvidia and chipset manufacturers actively contribute to the kernel releasing code well before their products are even launched. For example, the current linux kernel supports Intel’s skylake architecture which isn’t even going to be in a consumer product for at least a year or so.
Gaming is pretty pathetic on Linux. I was hoping for more push for Linux when they released their SteamOS, but they didn’t really push that hard until recently. I actually have access to way more games on my Mac than I did on Linux.
Photoshop runs fine in a VM and I actually prefer running it this way. You can boot a VM from a saved state where it’s already running faster than you can boot it normally from disk (I do use a SSD) Or you can use Wine if you want a more native feel to it, but you’ll need to spend more time on this. Wine usually ends up just pissing me off and I tend to just steer clear of it all together.