I was curious what the Linux people think about Microsoft and any bad practices that most people should know about already?
Microsoft is evil, but are they more or less evil than Google?
They took down the fucking don’t be evil sign! Google used to be a good company but I don’t trust their actions. I’ve only found out about the spyware level chrome browser, not to mention that Google has been coloring my searches on the internet.
But what do I expect from a ADVERTISING company first and for most?
Don’t authenticate to a search engine.
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One pet peeve of mine is how in Windows 10 switching between virtual desktops was flawless, and somehow in Windows 11 they fucked it up. At first it had no animation when switching, the taskbar kind of glitches. Now it has an animation but it’s kind of delayed and the taskbar still kind of glitches, it seems to reload or something. Kinda crazy honestly
Could it be the new taskbar? It’s the worst part of W11, I don’t understand why they had to replace the old one.
Working there is apparently pretty nice. Microsoft on the inside is not Microsoft on the outside.
But regardless, terrible company with terrible products. Even if they didn’t do anything shady, they still aren’t great.
my favorite bit was how no one at microsoft actually understood their own licensing pricing. for decades, you could call microsoft for pricing and get different answer from people in cubicles next to each other or even from your own rep.
it was as if they were making it up as needed.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
They also wrote the book on user-hostile everything
And set the bar super low for other tech companies
Came here to say this. They wrote the playbook that has spelled the end or at least shitification of so many standards, open-source or otherwise(but usually still free-to-use or at least cheap).
IIRC It’s on their Wikipedia
Undoubtedly
It used to be pretty bad, back when it was using all the dirty tricks it could invent to build its monopoly. By now though it’s just obsolete.
Obsolete? Hardly. The Surface, GamePass, Xbox, GitHub, Skype and just general market dominance says otherwise. They only lost their effective monopoly due to antitrust lawsuits.
Currently, there’s lots of better options out there, true, but it’s far from obsolete.
Is Skype still a thing? I thought it died soon after MS bought it!
It’s a phone service and business communications. I have to use it for work
Huh, didn’t realise they were still bothering to sell it
It’s Teams, now.
Ugh, Teams. I can’t believe Skype and MSN died for this!
Sure enough, it’s up there with Facebook and Saudi Aramco.
Yes. During the entire history of MSDOS, Windows and Internet Explorer, there are so many things you can pick why Microsoft is bad. Now they even integrate Recall into Windows. I want to say that I always disconnected Xbox from Microsoft; and I’m not entirely sure why.
The question of this post is a bit misleading, because it implies that someone could answer with “no”. Better question (in my opinion) is “How bad is Microsoft?”.
pretty much.
If you need a point for developers: all public code repositories hosted on GitHub are harvested, at least in 2021, and used to train copilot regardless of their license. Furthermore, GitHub is OWNED by Microsoft now.
I would argue that all companies are bad. But Microsoft specifically abuses their de facto monopoly to engage in gross invasion of their users’ privacy, and continues to try to wrest their users’ control of their system from them by altering system settings after updates, and making some settings nearly impossible to change. And that’s to say nothing of MS’s attempts to turn their operating system into and advertising platform.
I don’t think the world is black or white. Of course Microsoft can make bad choices and prioritize profit, but Microsoft isn’t a person or and entity. MS is an enterprise driven by people that work there.
Linux community or any other community can also make bad choices, afterall it’s also people-driven and people are flawed.
I don’t excuse MS for really bad choices, but also don’t blame it. I just think that’s better to see the world complex as it is, not by judging stuff as ‘bad’ or ‘good’.
You can’t compare a general community to a company. Linux community isn’t a single community. It’s like talking about the gaming community and putting everyone into one soup. Linux community isn’t a single entity. However Microsoft is a company and is an entity. Microsoft is an organization, which is one definition of entity. With a clear leadership, goal and driven by making money.
You can say if a company is bad or good, just like you can say if Google and Facebook is good or bad. But you cannot do this with broad collection of different communites, who act independently from each other, such as the “Linux community”. Each part of the Linux community has its own goals and does not even align with the other. Therefore it is not a single organization and not an entity. That’s why you cannot take this as an example as a counter argument to criticize/judge Microsoft.
You totally missed the point I was trying to say. And I’m not going to explain because of laziness.
I did not miss the point and corrected your statement not being applicable, because the comparison is totally wrong. And I explained why. You claim me being missing the point and not trying to explain, then I have to assume you have no explanation.
Linux community does not have a hierarchy that resolves to a single entity controlling the system. However Microsoft is a narrow company. And you are wrong when saying that Microsoft is not an entity.
Assume whatever you want. I don’t care
Just like Microsoft.
That’s because…
I’M A MICROSOFT EMPLOYEE IN DISGUISE!!!
My good sir… if their modus operandi is rotten to the core… then you could generally say the enterprise is affected by it… (a few bad apples can spoil a bunch…)
What does “bad” means to you exactly? They are the hypocrites just like any big corporation, value only money, they reinvent wheels all the time, but their products pretty good despite being non-free, and making programs is much easier for Windows then GNU/Linux.
It would be even better if they didn’t force you to use only their products.
You value simplicity or free of choice and privacy? The “bad” definition depends on it.
I do lean to having privacy and freedom to do whatever with my tools as “good” things
Then it’s very unusual question that GNU/Linux user could ask. If I may ask, what is your story with Microsoft? What was the last drop for you?
My last straw was the privacy and lack of control.
I didn’t like software being released by Microsoft telling me my choices were bad or unoptimal, I like my software, I made my choices from listening to others and forming my own opinion. I had a shift in thinking recently, I wanted to start selecting my software based on my values rather than just choosing whatever works.
It really depends on your perspective if windows is „easier“ to produce for. They are fully and redundantly vertically integrated which means they have the means to produce IDEs and even create programming languages.
But it is hugely easier to create a small app on linux imo. The simplicity of linux and the modularity of the different desktop environments is pretty great.
Is it tech illiterate friendly like windows? No! It would be great if everyone would be able to use linux now but we‘re gonna have to be patient.
I wish everyone use GNU/Linux too. Mostly agree with you. Except of calling Linux simple. I wish it was simple… (Unless you mean simplicity of use?)
In this particular case I meant that linux is the same in all regards: open source. You can look everything up if you have the time. This makes it possible to change everything and anything you need. Even through different DEs you still have the same structure.
Now if you go try that with windows, you‘re properly hosed. Different package manager? No! Different desktop environment? No!
Simple might not have been the best choice of words though. Modularity might be better.
Impossible to know it, there isn’t any other corporation who fight with M$ it is a perfect monopoly so it’s impossible to figure a world without it.
Microsoft is definitely the corpoest of them all.
Probably not the worst corpo, likely even, but out of the corpos, they are the most corpo corpo of any corpo.
- They own LinkedIn, and I could just stop this list here.
- They’re the founding fathers of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.
- They are the vanguard of videogame studio consolidation, after buying Activision and Bethesda.
- AI
- Everything they do is soggy bread: you can eat it, it’s probably mostly healthy, I think, but if a product is not the minimum viable product then it will be; take the Halo franchise as a reference for blandness, Windows for end user tolerance - both are controversial yet functional and popular software that people complain (and do nothing) about. Halo took quite a hit in popularity, but still…
- Remember when a software company got in trouble for monopolistic practices? That was a thing that happened at some point, and it was Microsoft. Not that it will ever happen again, nowadays all the cool kids have some slice of the tech landscape on a chokehold.
Yes. Microsoft is the king of “good enough” software. DOS was good enough (and had a free C compiler!). Windows gets the job done 95% of the time when it’s not freezing up or needing rebooting. Office is okay - and nothing else is 100% compatible so you get a bonus of vendor lock-in. New features are few and far between, as are bug fixes for non-critical issues.
Worse than Apple?
Apple is highly restrictive on their OS and over priced. They are extremely pro consumerism with heavy marketing and engineered obsolescence to ensure you are always pressured to buy their new tech, and they are historically very strongly anti-right-to-repair.
Microsoft is bad. But at least they are primarily a software monopoly.
I’m not sure, at least the unrepairable mess made by Microsoft is software rather than hardware - you can reinstall a janky OS but you can’t unexplode a phone that disassembled itself when you sneezed in its general direction.
There’s no fine line between the two companies.
Edit: they continuously fucked up Halo in unexcusable ways, fuck them, they’re worse than Apple. Forgot about that.
Apple is from the walled garden of Eden.
Fortunately I have a ladder
Ok but look on the bright side of things! you get great futures with this big tech concentration and control of the market. For instance, who else doesn’t want a operating system hotkey to Linkedin, baked into their settings? How did I use a computer without that before?!
Very bad
