Because they make it easy and do a few cool things.

“Do you want a mic in your home that can record everything you say and do and send that data off to wherever the company chooses?”

“No of course not.”

“What about of it will also turn your lights on and off and play despacito on demand?”

“You son of a bitch, sign me up”.

I agree but technology hasn’t really been “ours” for a long time. Rooting, jailbreaking, and open source is the only way to take back a modicum of control.

Do you tolerate the TPM/fTPM in your computer? Can you deactivate it? Can you query it? Can you tell it to do something?

The Elon Musk Maneuver.

They will certainly succeed at driving some people away. I was a lifetime Windows user and I currently don’t have it installed on any of my machines now. I think the average Joe is blissfully unaware other than the occasional dialog about a new feature coming their way.

I think they are going to lose more of the hardcore tech community with decisions like these, but I don’t know that they care.

Yeah but I think most of us have already… We are not many enough to matter though. Microsoft and Google will continue to do what they want with 99% of users.

The problem is like that xkcd comic about experts underestimating the common person’s knowledge in their field. Linux is still not user friendly enough for the vast majority of people. Linux users just don’t seem to understand that most people are in the “wtf is a distro?” level of knowledge and would absolutely panic at the mere sight of a terminal.

They are doing a lot better about baking stuff in these days. If you uninstall edge on windows you unironically break a lot of systems, can’t even play Minecraft or use teams lol

I agree, I don’t think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they’re still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don’t care at all. They’ll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there’s no evidence to suggest that they’ll ever stop.

One of the biggest “mistakes” Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there’s a good chance that it’s not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.

It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.

This is the same false analogy people make as to why Americans drive giant trucks to shift blame… it’s not the manufacturers who are pushing these cars to circumvent taxes, it is the users for demanding it.

Very few people actually like these invasive shit Microsoft pulls, but the vast majority either do not know about them, understand them or feel they have another choice. For example, I hate MS, I understand what dog shit this Recall feature is, yet my job will provide a Windows machine with it and I have no choice but to use it.

I am a nerd so at home I do have everything running on Linux. But for the majority of people that would be a unknown option or just an unobtainable one

There is no such thing as a line, it seems to be a long gradient and its about how fast you move on the gradient. If you ever so slightly introduce more and more crap slowly enough, people don’t care as they forget how good they had it much earlier.

Nah, loot it for the magnets at least. Frisbee the platters, save the chassis for the scrap bucket (it’s solid aluminum).

Ah the ol’ defenestration uninstallation.

And yet - should you have to actively work against the design goals of OS installed on your hardware? It’s great that some folks have found a way to successfully disable it, but that doesn’t give MS a pass.

Stop threatening. Commit. Take the leap. A lot of us here are already on the other side and we’ll help you find your footing.

There is a Mac app called Rewind that came out a couple of years ago that does the same thing. There was also an open source thing for Windows. Everyone is desperate to show that they are hip and can do AI. It looks like someone at Microsoft saw a demo of one of those apps and thought that putting it into Windows would let them brag about how much AI Windows can do. They clearly tried to rush it out in time for their Copilot PC marketing push.

The idea is that you can use local LLM models and image scanning to talk to your computer. You could ask it to summarize your day, ask what you were working on last week, or find those articles you vaguely remember reading last year and can’t find anymore. I can almost see the merit, but the security risk is so high.

I wonder if people will eventually stop caring about the security risk of features like this. Those AI girlfriends some people dream about will have access to so much private information. Give this thing a voice and you can market it as a companion who learns the things you like and can talk with you about the things you are reading. Hackers might be able to see literally everything you’ve done on the computer for the last few years, but you’ll get to feel like Iron Man with your own personal Jarvis.

China?

Good choice on Mint.

I have been using Linux exclusively (personal) since 2008, distro hopped for a few years then settled on Ubuntu, until they shot themselves in the foot with 22.04 and the snap debacle; moved to Mint (after trying Pop, MX and a few others).

I have to say a big well done to the Mint devs, it is better than Ubuntu ever was; part of this is newer drivers etc…but it is very polished and it gets out of my way and lets me do my work.

Been working with the various flavors of Windows in a work capacity over the same stretch, in my opinion windows peaked with XP, 7 was ok, and 10 is also ok. But it really has been down hill since XP was retired.

If you have dual GPUs or an iGPU plus a GPU, you can use passthrough and play your games with near native performance in an isolated Windows virtual machine under Linux.