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Comment by binkHN | Hacker News Reader

> ...it appears the company has transformed its email app into a surveillance tool for targeted advertising.

It's not just Microsoft's email, it's all of Windows too. I tried Windows 11 for the first time not too long ago and it's an abomination of an ad delivery vehicle that makes ChromeOS look magnificent.

After too many years of Windows, I finally bit the bullet and installed Linux on my desktop. Within a few weeks I was more productive than I was on Windows and my OS is no longer trying to sell me something constantly, and I should have done it sooner.

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Microsoft is betraying user trust with their Windows strategy. A lot of people trust Microsoft, but I wonder if there's a critical mass where the narrative switches to one where the default for most people is to distrust them.

Their products behave too similar to those of bad actors. Recently I had a relative over and was helping them with some computer stuff. They had an odd PDF viewer on their laptop and, when I asked them about it, they called it Adobe. It was not Adobe Reader.

I assumed it was the result of clicking through a paid search result and installing something from the internet, but they insisted they got it from Microsoft. I was confused for a while because it wasn't an app from the Microsoft Store.

Then they explained to me how they got it. They clicked on start, searched for "PDF", and "installed Adobe Reader from Microsoft". The icon for the app they had was obviously made to look similar to Adobe Reader and they had no idea the start menu search is a free for all of Bing results.

They're not stupid and I can't really blame them for misunderstanding. When they showed me, I could see how it would be reasonable to mistake the search result (or ad?) for an app recommendation. The result had an icon and everything. The weird thing is that I can't reproduce it on my PC. I don't get the same results that look too much like recommendations, so either I'm on a different release cadence for Windows or I've disabled some of those unwanted features.

The user should be able to trust everything in the OS. A built-in search feature that exposes users to bad actors is extremely frustrating to see.

To be fair, I've had similar things happen to my relatives with the iOS and Android app stores as well. Installed some random 3rd party app instead of what they wanted because it looked convincing.

This is worse because the user in question had the "recommendation" pop up in the Start Menu - i.e.one of the most fundamental pieces of Windows UX - not even in the app store.

App stores are literally where you go to install third party apps. Meanwhile, people don't expect crucial system UI to push ads. It's not even comparable in terms of user hostility. Even more so when dark patterns are used to effectively conceal that it's an ad.

very frustrating, gonna have to be on the lookout for this with family. Thanks for the tip.

Windows is dead.

Most games can run on Linux fine ( https://www.protondb.com/ ), some even run better.

After some problems with pop-ups I nuked my parent's Windows install and put Linux on the machine. They had no problems using it.

Between those two use cases, why use Windows at all?

A strong warning, the direction Microsoft is going with Windows, Apple is heading in now. I'll put down money that by 2026 iOS and MacOS will no longer be usable. It's good that desktop Linux is now ready for prime time. We can win on mobile too.

> why use Windows at all?

I wish I had the same optimism. I have a Fedora partition that gets wiped and reinstalled every release and there's always some showstopper or things are slightly worse that make me unable to commit. I'm not settling for 'slightly worse'. The display server situation on Linux is depressing.

I don't like were Microsoft is heading, but it's way too early to claim Windows is dead.

Why do you keep reinstalling Fedora? It might be worth trying a different distribution, although whatever it is thats forcing you to reinstall every release might affect all distributions. Its not something I've experienced with Mandrake, Suse, Mint or Endeavour.

I agree with your point though - Windows is not dead; for me its a lot of the photo editing applications that I want to use don't run well on Linux.

> Windows is not dead

I think that's exactly the problem. It's too alive, so they can bastardize the experience in any way.

> Why do you keep reinstalling Fedora

Because it's a partition I use to test Linux and rather than upgrade I'd rather start over from scratch.

As for the distro choice, Fedora is ahead of Ubuntu but not as bleeding edge as Arch.

I'm sure there's plenty arguments for using x distro over y. Fedora is just what I landed on.

Mandrake - my third or fourth distro. Rather old school these days 8)

> Windows is dead.

Yes, with WSL to keep it afloat just long enough to steal your private data before it sinks.

It use to be the case that your private data would be sold to advertisers but that model is changing with the privacy laws, user starting to not tolerate it (e.g. see poor Google search results), and moats that are starting to fall apart (e.g. Apples app store).

Just in time for the next frontier. This time, the goal is to to feed GPT models with your private data. Windows and Outlook seem like excellent funnels to do just that. The best GPT model will require the most intimate data and at the lowest price possible. MSFT is positioned to do just that.

OMG I switched to Qubes OS and haven't looked back! I value privacy and operational security over gaming and smooth 4K playback. Snowden showed that, yes, we do live in that kind of world today...

What device are you running Qubes on? Its unfortunately a little hard to find a powerful laptop that can run qubes due to Xen.

Lenovo 20tk- Thinkpad line. It is an i7 6 core with 64GB RAM 2TB SSD RAID1 Intel primary gpu + nVidia GTX 1650 Ti secondary (which I have passed to Windows Server 2022 for Siemens NX 10 when I fancy playing with a toy which costs as much as my house to fully all-the-things license).

Why do feel Apple is going in the same direction as Microsoft? Do you think in 2026 Apple will be selling users data to advertisers and have spam search results show up in the Finder?

Ironically the longer and more trusted a company becomes, the more data it gathers, the more potential money it can make by going to the dark side. It only takes one bad CEO thinking of short term profit to see the $$$ and cash in that data and goodwill. Similar to MS it will take 5-10 years for people to realise what's happening and spread the word. By then that person may have cashed out. Is every CEO of Apple or any company for 100 years going to have a long term privacy mindset. I think the only viable way is for the company not to have the data or for them to only service highly knowledgeable users that would move quick if things went to change. But that means the majority must always lose their privacy. It feels similar to the trade off for adblocking.

Sure, I think most people would agree with you but why the strong warning about macos being unusable by 2026? They're making plenty of cash and seem pretty privacy focused under Tim Cook.

Emphatically yes.

Multiplayer and games requiring anticheat are still troublesome, some don't work at all.

When the games run however, I agree they typically run better.

VR is still very very difficult on Linux though. I still run Windows on my gaming pc for that reason.

previous $JOB needed to support Autodesk products. Said products only run in MS windows. Sad pikachu face ensues.

It just seems like a stupid move this late in the ad game when people are starting to figure out they hate it a lot. I've never heard more techno-laymen talking about privacy and advertising than now and MS is just hopping on the train.

It's like they're drug dealers adding fentanyl as if it's a sales perk after everyone's learned about it killing the users.

You know what people hate even more though? Paying for Windows.

Very few people have ever paid for Windows in a way that was visible to them. The majority of Windows users have always just used the Windows that was pre-installed on a computer that they bought.

The cost of the Windows license was part of the overall laptop cost. So buying a new laptop with Windows installed means Microsoft gets some profit from that.

Windows is dead the day I can play all modern PC games with anticheat in Linux using Proton or similar, without also getting my account banned for 'hacking'.

If we look at Bethesda, Activision, and Xbox game studio, given the hundreds of titles combined with some of if not the largest franchises in video games, I would be doubtful that day is coming. Something drastic would need to occur. A part of me thinks think we're further away today then we were 10 years ago.

> A part of me thinks think we're further away today then we were 10 years ago.

I don't see how that can be true. Valve has made huge strides in pushing Linux gaming forward, and thousands of Windows-only games are playable on Linux, sometimes even with better than native performance.

The small percentage of games that have anti-cheat mechanisms or intrusive DRM (Steam notwithstanding) that are problematic on Linux are likely games that don't deserve my money or attention anyway.

Disclaimer: I do still game primarily on Windows, but mostly because I find dealing with Linux issues (whether that's related to games or otherwise) much more annoying than dealing with Windows' spyware. I can reasonably handle the latter, but nothing is more frustrating than having non-working software when I just want to unwind for a while. I think these are not unsurmountable issues and am pretty hopeful the state of Linux gaming can only improve.

This is why I just hypervisor all the things. Passing through GPU, sound, and USB devices is easy.

This is the way for sure. I use my main OS as a hypervisor and pass through to various VMs as needed.

I'm against DRM and to an extent, anti-cheat.

If we are talking about games whose compatibility will increase Linux adoption though, most of those have anti-cheat and DRM.

I agree. Gabe Newell doesn't forget. It's a long march, but it could happen. Interesting that the Switch supports Vulkan, as well.

He doesn't get younger either. So one day the direction may quickly change.

Once proton works on everything, the companies that make the software than bans you will fix their stuff to work in those confines as well. Valve makes the biggest, VAC (edit: I was told EAC was bigger below, but that it supports Linux), and they also make proton, and they own steam, so they’ll be able to force other companies to submit in any case. I’m more worried about peripherals myself, since there are some gaming peripherals that were made with windows in mind only. AAA game developers only have the power if people choose to load their launchers (EA's for example) but most people I know avoid those and use Steam or Epic stores or GOG or whatever for non AAA games.

Edit: I am "posting too fast" it seems (a few messages per hour, I guess?), so here's a response to a comment below here about the mixed-OS household:

I wouldn't mind using macOS or Linux, and I actually would pay if I could install macOS on my PC tower. I might be the idiot here, jumping out of the MS frying pan into the Apple fire, but I find macOS to be just fine for my use, and not too locked down overall when it comes to running the software I need on it and it's very well integrated with some of my other tech stuff. Sure, I can't tweak every aspect of the OS, but I don't mind how it works out of the box so I am cool with that. It would also be nice if I could use some of the macOS features on other platforms, like iCloud, Messages (whatever the blue-bubble messages are called), and iPhone integrations.

I'm saying that the companies that make these games, many have been swallowed up by MSFT, so it would fantasy to believe they're going to change their position or hire people to make changes to a game that is a decade old.

Kernel level cheat engines (not VAC) will catch you on a different OS 100% of the time. EAC is vastly more popular for detecting in game cheating, versus VAC which scans the users computer for possible cheats and typically doesn't work well when it comes to preventing cheating if at all.

Many companies invest heavily in kernel level anti-cheat and having to support multiple OS's when the other two big OS's account for less 0.5% of the profit, I just don't see business folk lining up to ensure non-windows users can play video games given the fact it's probably Microsoft making or publishing the game in some capacity.

There are a few Microsoft games that have received patches to enhance Linux (Steam Deck) support, like the Halo game collection.

Could change if Linux numbers on Steam hit double digits, though.

Even EAC has Linux support though, and enabling Linux support basically amounts to a config change for devs.

It does, but they're not kernel modules and run in userspace so no game studio that values their game or protecting players from cheaters uses it, and it is not just a config change.

There isn't any reason it can't be a kernel module, it could even be dynamically loaded if you wanted to.

Anyways, from what I am seeing from tech trends, the future is multi-platform, and it's only becoming easier to code for everything all at once. Smart people are taking time and energy to research things like WASM and APE (which supports Cosmopolitan Libc), not to mention long-running initiatives such as containerization, the various JS engines and other languages which run anywhere, etc. Even with ARM vs x86 happening, software runs cross-platform more and more.

I’m not sure whether you’re aware of this, but EAC is a joke anyway. It’s pretty ineffectual, and often causes more problems for legitimate players than cheaters. At least having devs enable it would enable Linux users to play without obstacles.

I'm guessing dual boot will be the transition step. I don't game so I just got a used dell without an os installed and went with Linux, printing and scanning are my only difficulties so far. So I'm totally a mixed household, Wife and our TV are macs, Teen son is windows, and I'm Linux, using boot-camp on a Macbook for the occasional scanning.

> A part of me thinks think we're further away today then we were 10 years ago.

I am more optimist than this, mainly because of Valve. They contributed a lot to Linux gaming and are now in a position where they can pounce and steal Microsoft's cake.

Microsoft simply cannot allow themselves to slip up on this anymore and I feel like we are at a point where one more major blunder or a scandal from Microsoft could irreversibly sway the tide towards Valve and Linux gaming in general.

Not sure I share this opinion, I game on a combination of Linux w/ a Windows 11 VM every day. I'm only really aware of two titles that are actively user-hostile with anti-cheat: Rainbow Six Siege and Valorant. Thankfully I'm not interested in playing either of those. I definitely will not run them, out of principle, unless they reverse their stance on considering a VM to be cheating.

The hoyoverse titles used to detect VMs, but it seems to have calmed down. (I was able to try Honkai Star Rail with no obfuscation effort on my part.) NVIDIA stopped caring about VMs in their GPU drivers a few years ago. FatShark almost made the anti-VM mistake with the new Warhammer 40K Darktide anti-cheat; I refunded the title during early-access and told them why. They reversed course before launch and that also works in a VM. - I've played many Blizzard properties (but not WoW) in a VM as well, though they tend to hate networked storage, for reasons I don't yet understand. (Had to setup iSCSI because my CIFS share over 10Gbit/s paravirtualized NIC was "not good enough", I guess.)

Windows runs in a Hyper-V VM by default now, anyways, so "running in a VM" as a heuristic is of questionable utility to me. (It's how the "Core Isolation" feature is provided.) The real irony is I can't even use the VM to cheat, anyways. The guest's memory is encrypted by default. Modifying it, or even reading it, from the host-side would be prohibitively painful. I guess a VM would perhaps obfuscate emulated/scripted inputs, but I use real devices, and a real USB hub on the guest anyways, because the latency and functionality of the emulated HIDs is awful.

Thankfully Steam is very pro-consumer: if a title I purchase does not run in the VM, or on Linux via Proton, it gets instantly refunded. The nice thing is it is actually in Valve's interest financially to push back on these devs: both to prop up the value of the SteamDeck, and to stop people like me from getting refunds.

I think we're DRAMATICALLY closer than we were 10 years ago, especially given Android has become such a common development target for games.

I hear about this all the time and it's yet to happen to me. Granted I don't play many triple A online multiplayer games, but those seems to have fallen off the cliff anyways.

>an operating system capable of doing basically anything from physics simulations to movie editing is dead once people can play videogames elsewhere

isn't that something

The other problem is video streaming. Last I checked, some of the popular platforms wouldn't serve even Full HD content to Linux clients (this despite having Widevine etc enabled).

there are dozens of us. dozens!

The big question is how are they going to do it without giving the vultures root access

Windows 11 looks like how IE6 would get after installing too many “toolbars”.

At a previous job, we used Macs to do Java and Ruby development, and I thought that was an OK compromise to not having to maintain a bunch of Linux workstations, but still a compromise.

One time the shop took a subcontract for a bigger local shop. They were all Windows. Whenever we had to work with their devs, it seemed we fought Windows as a platform on which to run development tools as much as we did actual application problems. I know there's massive shops that live like that, but I know neither why nor how.

(n.b. this was around 2014, I don't know how Windows has changed since then)

Ran a small software dev shop (~100 staff) inheriting windows. My god, never again... The amount of lost productivity was insane. Soon as went out to start my SaaS company, back to Mac, without a shadow of a doubt. I might actually reboot once every few months on Mac whereas my IT manager at the windows shop suggested as a solution to some problems shutting down everytime people were finished for the day !

The windows shop was non stop hardware, software issues. Laptops (whichever brand) are absolute junk with very short lifespans. Blue screens...

Yeah, the inefficiency was incredible -- and not just on the actual development side. We exceeded their throughput goals by double on the first try, before even attempting to optimize anything. The dataset we were running on was actual production data from their historical busiest day. We managed this on three 2011 iMacs running as the "servers." Their stated throughput goal was 50% higher than the actual busiest day when their architects came up with the design spec. They were just barely able to keep up with their busiest day on a cluster of 100 Windows servers.

I did a contract gig for a Windows shop recently, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well everything worked. WSL2 made a lot of things soooo much easier.

I love hearing that from people :P

I’m curious to know where your productivity boosts came from, as those are always a good motivating factor for me to try something new.

I feel my productivity boost comes from KDE/Plasma, a surprisingly good desktop environment (DE) that's almost too configurable. The ability to tweak almost every element of the DE, especially as it relates to shortcuts, has already allowed me to move around the environment faster and more readily. Also, *nix has always had the ability to do "Focus follows mouse," and I used something similar in Windows, but it just works better in not Windows. Combine this with a superior file manager in Dolphin and an extremely configurable launcher in KRunner and I'm flying around the desktop in ways that Windows just can't. There's more too, but these are probably the biggest.

Watching this "fall of Gnome" with KDE's recent popularity makes me feel strangely vindicated about liking a configurable OS.

I've been using kubuntu for ~2 years now at work and I feel like I need to watch some KDE tutorial videos so that I can learn these tips and tricks too, because I love KDE and what you describe sounds wonderful

For me, i3wm makes me a lot more productive. Instead of mashing alt tab, I have dedicated hotkeys for every virtual desktop, which is dedicated to specific apps/workflows. With one hotkey I always go to the program I’m looking for. In windows I have to just mash alt+tab. But also if the window was in split screen it gets separated from whatever it was paired with, so I have to scramble to bring both windows into focus briefly so they are in front. It’s such a mess of window management.

In Linux. If I had something setup on desktop 3, win+3 takes me to it every time. No matter if that’s one window or multiple. It’s always one hot key away. And then one to get back. I never get lost in a sea of applications that look identical in the alt+tab thumbnail.

I haven’t found a way to replicate this in windows. The closest is “never group things on taskbar” so I can at least click specific firefox windows directly. But that no longer exists in windows 11, so I guess I won’t use 11.

I tried virtual desktops for a while and I'm pretty sure I was using this app for hotkeys to each desktop. https://github.com/hwtnb/SylphyHornPlusWin11

(I don't use virtual desktops anymore so I don't remember that well)

I've always described i3 as like being efficient in vim. Once you've learned the hotkeys and settled on where things live it just gets out the way and muscle memory takes over.

EDIT: (For being downvoted about steam and now the ease of install games on linux - read my whole post. Also, I dont put steam on my linux machines specifically to have my own walled mental garden from my distraction proclivity ADHD game mind - Games are what built my career - and as much as I have loved them - as I get older, I can only play less and less)

For me; Its harder to fall into the "Oh - Ill just intall a bunch of these old games" distractions... or "what new games can this bitch run (slaps laptop's lid)"

Also, since Linux has evolved to effectively run an F-ton % of the internet - thousands and thousands of devs, techs, ops, indies, etc have just made the experience so much better.

When I first started with Linux in the mid-90s - I had to hire four promising consultants to help me transition a ETF process by FTP from SUN Microsystems to my company where I was head of IT, to build scripts to create manifests from SUN to us, via FTP - watch the directory, and parse the new-fangled XML that SUN was trying to establish.

Ill never forget the first call with SUN and our execs (we physically manufactured all Software Box Sets of SUN's software, manuals etc - then packaged them and shipped it - so if you bought SUNos/Checkpoint or any Intuit or certain games' companies physical products - we manufactured and shipped it)

So we were using flat files for the transfer or order information for SUN and had some wonky scripts on these four linux FTP servers.

I was not to familiar with Linux at this time - but hired Dave Sifry, Chris DiBona and some others to re-do our FTP flat file ETF process to access SUNs new XML requirement.

We didnt know what XML was at the time - and I infamously said on a call with SUN "OK let me understand. You have your current crappy etl process and you want us to rebuild our pipeline to support your new XML standard.

(The sales people were jumping up and down at me on the call because I called SUNs current practice "crappy" while I was on the phone with a bunch of execs...)

Anyway - I went to our Linux Consultants and I talked to Sifry and I said "If I were you, I'd take your team and start a Linux Support Company."

A few weeks later Sifry and I have a sit-down, and he told me that him and team had created a new company - called "LinuxCare" to offer some of the first enterprise support....

We talked about me joining, but we never came to an agreement, and I believe Dave was one of the first 100-millionaires in the linux space on paper after LinuxCare took off a bit....

(they used to be in the Macromedia building's basement level in SF after that...).

So back then, productivity came from the server side for workflows...

Now - you can achieve exceptional productivity because you're not at the Childs Table when it comes to the UI-first (windows) vs UX-first (linux) utility platform that became a desktop.

But that took decades and millions of people contributing to how Linux can be empowering.

---

But if you just look at the productivity in technological evolution Linux has contributed to computing, I personally feel its a Tier-1 level contribution, and now you can just rely on FN awesome tools, for free, written by millions of smarter people than an induvidual, to make speed to deployment of anything (even if its to gaming) faster, easier and you arent spinning mental cycles on "what the fuck is /usr/sbin?" "Where the heck do I grab these dependencies from? What the FUCK is a make file?

--- Neither of the people replying to me read my whole post.

> For me; Its harder to fall into the "Oh - Ill just intall a bunch of these old games" distractions... or "what new games can this bitch run (slaps laptop's lid)"

Not to ruin your productivity but it's actually insanely easy to install a bunch of old games on Linux these days. And plenty of new games run just fine thanks to the advances Valve has been making with Proton.

I know - but its just another step of effort...

top 100 games on some torrent sites tell the story of where games are landing

https://i.imgur.com/1rT2wCL.png

EDIT: YOU REPLIERS ARE KILLING MY PREMISE! MAKING HARD TO NOT INSTALL GAMES ON MY LINUX DISTRO! So by making it "insanely easy" you are promoting why I dont want to install them!!! xo :-)

Thanks for keeping the DNA of my comment alive!!!

if you've bought it on steam it's exactly the same effort as windows

double click to install, wait a few minutes for the download, press play and it launches

as someone who grew up compiling different forks of wine with various patches to try to play half-life in the 2000s the improvement is quite incredible

You can just open it straight into steam with proton and that's it, there's no effort nowadays. And being old games, the compatibility might even be better than Windows 11...

But that took decades and millions of people contributing to how Linux can be empowering.

But then someone created systemd, the end.

As someone having to write .NET Framework for his day job, I made the switch back to 10 when I started noticing the small things that affect my experience. Edge was aggressive when I would try to download Chrome, Windows 11 updates prompting you to reset your browser settings, lack of taskbar customization options from 10 (I like my system tray minimal).

Everything shows a company too complacent and focused on their own business needs. C# and .NET are the exception because they fought hard to antagonize Java in the corporate world, and while they missed the "billion devices" train for being too forceful with pushing Windows Server instead of going multiplatform, they still won over a decent market share.

>After too many years of Windows, I finally bit the bullet and installed Linux on my desktop.

Use Linux at home since 2020, and have recently switched to a Mac for work. Windows is gone from my life, relegated to doing maintenance-work from a VM for the poor saps still stuck on it.

There's no separation of concerns at Microsoft: the allure of recurring revenue from ad-tech and online-services is polluting Windows and Office in a really bad way. I need my operating system and productivity software to (a) work, (b) function reliably offline (Office doesn't), and (c) work in perpetuity for as long as the hardware lives. (Windows hasn't since 10, arguably 8.)

Apple seems to understand that the core stuff needs to be free, and the free stuff can't compromise on their privacy & security core-values to be free. They also come with apps that are reasonably worth using, and they use iCloud to sync and integrate that stuff seamlessly across their device-family.

What Apple charges money for is actual value-added service. You want Music? They've got that, streaming or purchased. You want TV? Same deal. You like books? Yep, got that too. Want some curated news? They'll sell you that. - Signed up for all this stuff and have run out of storage? Predictably they'll sell you more of that, too.

What's more is Apple understands _the meaning of no._ - I can turn that stuff off easily, and permanently, right when & where the nag occurred. No resorting to things like registry edits, group policy hacks, hacking the installer, etc. No gamification of the fucking Settings screen. No ads in my fucking Start menu. I can hide or remove their apps just like any other app. (As a concrete example: for ages I have had to hack Explorer to get rid of personal-OneDrive, which I don't/can't use since I am not even logged into a MSFT account. The equivalent to disable iCloud is a very clearly visible setting in Finder's settings.)

I won't lie, it hasn't been perfect, but the amount of UI polish, the ease of cross-device integrations, and the feeling of Apple actually valuing the customer-relationship, are miles ahead of whatever the fuck Microsoft is doing. Modern Microsoft feels like a Facebook or a Google, and that's really not meant as a compliment.

If Microsoft wants recurring revenue, they need to start providing real services. Windows isn't a service. Office isn't a service. I highly suggest they start emulating Apple, or they're going to get left behind.

Redmond, start your photocopiers.

It’s for state surveillance too

:%s/state/MIC/g

Which distro are you using?

In my experience with desktop Linux for a family set of users, only some of which are computer-savvy, LinuxMint was a really good option that provides a familiar UI/UX for Windows users, and generally "just works". I preferred mucking about with KDE and was also generally happy with Kubuntu.

Currently running Debian (Trixie to handle new hardware), as it was the first distribution I played with many many years ago, but I don't know if it's my final destination (though I don't care to "distro hop" either so).

After Ubuntu began to use all those snaps I tried Debian in 2020. Switched to Debian Buster (10) and soon back to Ubuntu because it was not usable for me. In 2023 I tried again with Debian Bookworm (12) and I'm not missing anything. It's a great distro.

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