My entire career has been supporting and designing Microsoft server solutions for large companies. I am not anti Microsoft. Yet I switched to Linux last month for my daily driver. I encourage you to do the same. Linux Mint is a good place to start for anyone no matter your experience level.
It’s just going to keep getting worse folks. These intrusions won’t stop. Microsoft has lost its way. You aren’t the customer anymore. They will exploit you in every way they can.
It isn’t so much that they lost their way it’s just that the PC OS market has flat lined (if it isn’t already trending down)
A public company is incentivized to increase profit (the stock must rise) which means that everyone working there must seek growth.
They never left the way, it’s just the way used to be selling license keys and now it’s selling users.
First the money was in the hardware. Then, the money was in the software. Then, the money was in the services. Now, the money is in the data you can harvest from the users.
If being a sponge for ads, and a source of data to sell and use for training LLMs, is not your thing, using computer systems produced by for profit companies is probably out.
Enshitification isn’t driven by some new and unique greed. It’s the only way left to earn money in the space. Customers WANT subsidized hardware running free software and cloud services. If MS doesn’t give them that somebody else will and that will be that.
I don’t want to blame customers for all this. But to most folks trading something they didn’t know had value (their data and attention) for something that they know has value (software and services) seems like an awesome deal. The corps are following the customers to some extent, and we have to acknowledge that.
They are producing a product that sells for real money and people use it in every scope of their lives. If that isn’t enough money to sustain the corporation then allow me to be the first to ask why?
I think it’s disingenuous to keep pushing this idea that corporations cannot survive without ever increasing income. It is that precise philosophy that is destroying our world.
Jesus tap dancing christ. 50% of this website is giving Linux long, wet, sloppy blow jobs.
Maybe that’s because it’s actually really good and doesn’t force you to do it, unlike windows
you know linux is about to take off because I’m just about fucking done with “EvErYtHiNg Is A fIlE”. and I’m always too early or too late to just about everything.
it’s certainly been consumer ready for a long time though and I recommend Pop!OS because it fixes everything I hate about Gnome and has a toggle-able tiled windows manager.
