Why do you hate Microsoft?

I’m helping a friend of mine writing a long essay exposing the abusive, monopolistic and anti-consumer practices of Microsoft. First, we’ve created some sort of table of contents with the different topics we want to cover and now we’re gathering sources for each of these topics.

Microsoft is a huge corporation with a big influence on media and although if you dig enough you can find useful sources, they’ve also made an extremely good job at hiding bad press from search engines.

We’ve scrolled through Hacker News, other links aggregators and sites like TechRights and we’ve found a good amount of articles against Microsoft. But we’re sure there has to be more. So that’s kinda why we’re asking.

Bullet points for the sections we’ve thought of (suggestions are welcome too):


<span style="color:#323232;">* The Microsoft Monopoly
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Microsoft and the web
</span><span style="color:#323232;">				* Internet Explorer
</span><span style="color:#323232;">				* Microsoft Edge
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Microsoft Windows Monopoly
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Microsoft and the Governments
</span><span style="color:#323232;">				* Education
</span><span style="color:#323232;">				* Healthcare
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Microsoft Gaming Empire
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Windows Backdoors (not sure where this section belongs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Work with the NSA
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Microsoft loves Open Source (microsoft infiltration in foss)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Microsoft and the OSI
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Github
</span><span style="color:#323232;">				* Github Copilot
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* VSCode
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* War on GPL
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Microsoft loves Linux and BSD?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Embrace, extend, extinguish
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Our lord, Bill Gates
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* The media empire
</span><span style="color:#323232;">				* Twitter censorship
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Bill Gates the philanthropist
</span><span style="color:#323232;">				* Big Pharma
</span><span style="color:#323232;">		* Bill and Jeffrey Epstein
</span>

Edit: typos and removed the pun “Kill Bill Gates” because it seemed inappropriate.

d3Xt3r, (edited )
  • The disaster that was Vista (increased system requirements, “vista capable” lawsuit)
  • Trusted computing controversy
  • Secure boot
  • Decision to remove the Start button in Windows 8
  • UWP apps - about how bloated they are
  • Replacement of lightweight win32 apps to bloated UWP (eg Sticky Notes, Notepad, Photo Gallery etc)
  • The new Settings applet and the deprecation of the old Control Panel
  • Complete removal of certain Control Panel applets, with no GUI replacements
  • Deep integration of Explorer.exe from Windows 8 onwards, making it near-impossible to have a complete shell replacement (affecting the third-party shells such as BlackBox)
  • Locking down of OS features in the name of “security” (eg requiring a hack to apply custom themes)
  • Aggressive nagging to upgrade to Windows 10 (including forced upgrades)
  • Windows Update: specifically, how it hijacks your PC
  • Windows Update can sometimes remove Linux as a bootable option
  • Lack of a rolling release model
  • Aggressive telemetry and user data collection
  • Increased bloatware and unwanted features
  • Ads in Start Men and File Explorer
  • Print Nightmare bug mismanagement
  • Bug that caused the deletion of user documents
  • Microsoft Pluton
  • Forcing new Windows users to sign in with a Microsoft Account, requiring a hack to use local accounts
  • The constant push towards Microsoft cloud services, which are not only a privacy nightmare but have hidden costs and is unreliable (eg frequent outages, lack of troubleshooting features, clunky)
  • Microsoft Intune sucks and isn’t a replacement for SCCM, in spite of them claiming otherwise
  • Constant product renames (eg: SCCM > MECM, Azure AD > Entra ID etc)
  • Forcing driver apps to be distributed and updated via Microsoft Store
  • Microsoft Store
  • Artificial TPM and CPU requirements for Windows 11 (planned obsolescence)
  • Removal of useful features from Window 11 (eg: taskbar customisation options)
  • Forced integration of services such as Teams
  • Fake Bing ads targeting Chrome users, pushing Adware/PUP
  • Malware-like popups in Windows 11 for Bing
  • Microsoft Teams (specifically: it’s UI, and how bloated it is)
  • Claiming that .NET MAUI is cross-platform, when you can’t build Linux apps with it
  • Microsoft PowerShell on Linux is a joke
  • Lack of Microsoft Office for Linux, in spite of Microsoft claiming to love Linux
  • Lack of VBA support in Office 365 browser apps
  • Limited BIOS features in Surface Laptops
  • Microsoft support is horrible, even their premium enterprise support sucks
  • Microsoft News Portal posting factually-incorrect, AI generated articles
1st,

SCCM > MECM, Azure AD > Entra ID etc

Wait... I'm only 3 years into it. Is SCCM the direct predecessor of AAD/EID? I follow the SCCM group on Reddit because they usually have good opinions on updates, but have never understood what the fuck they actually did.

d3Xt3r,

No, AD is the predecessor of AAD. SCCM is the “predecessor” of Intune, or at least that’s what some camps at Microsoft want you to think. Oh wait, I forgot that they also renamed MECM to MCM now.🤦

bender,

They probably stalled computer evolution for two decades.

TootSweet,

Bill was a big part of how proprietary software became a thing (and not just “a thing”, but “the default”) in the first place. Just think what the world would be like today without that particular form of artificial scarcity.

ciferecaNinjo,

The Halloween papers

sir_reginald,
@sir_reginald@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks!

DeadlineX,

2 words: Visual Studio

2 more words: teams statuses

ciferecaNinjo,
nicman24,

because i have to use windows and for me to use windows i need to run like 4 different powershell scripts and a start shell to make it bearable.

ram, (edited )
@ram@lemmy.ca avatar

I hate them because they invented Proprietary Software at a time that all software code was shared between hobbyists and built upon freely. en.wikipedia.org/…/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists#Op…

sir_reginald,
@sir_reginald@lemmy.world avatar

this is perfect, thanks!

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

I don’t think about them enough to hate them.

riskable,
@riskable@programming.dev avatar

You need a chapter on “Microsoft and Kerberos”. They adopted Kerberos for Active Directory and at the same time literally wrote the Kerberos RFC saying specifically how to use it across a large enterprise.

Then they didn’t implement it that way.

They intentionally made it so that Active Directory doesn’t follow the Kerberos standard they they wrote. So if you follow the standard you won’t actually be compatible with Active Directory. It’s one of their more subtle, “Embrace Extend Extinguish” maneuvers. Most people don’t know about it because the only company impacted at the time was Novell (and they won their legal stuff against Microsoft… with a settlement).

sir_reginald,
@sir_reginald@lemmy.world avatar

do you happen to have a link? this sounds very much like Microsoft’s tactics yeah

ripcord,
ripcord avatar

Because they killed my boy.

Knifed him. He was just a baby.

thericcer,

R.I.P. Gary Kildall 😥

MossBear,

They kneecapped Linux in the early days because they were afraid of what people accepting FOSS as a standard would do to their profits.

PlexSheep,

I don’t particularly hate MS (yet), but I hate some aspects of it.

I hate windows. I’m not even sure if I’m objectively right but it does not even matter. GNU/Linux is just a superior software system. I hate how Windows is not Linux and find most things they do different stupid. I’m not going to make an exhaustive list here, but for starters:

  • Windows, especially before 11, is so ugly. On Linux I can install themes, fancy WMs, entire DEs, etc etc. MacOS is famously overdesigned, never used but from what I hear it seems good too.
  • Windows does not support links. They have some weird thing, but it’s not the beauty of Symbolic and Hardlonks on Unix like systems.
  • Backslash in paths. Come on. And yes I know regular slashes work most of the time nowadays, but the default is just bad.
  • Multiple roots. C: D: and so on. Probably an okay design choice, but I like the UNIX way better.
  • No central package Manager. There is windows store, and it’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not the same as apt, dnf, pacman and so on. Installing things is just annoying, every time.
  • Terminal sucks on windows. I hate PowerShell with it’s weird verbose syntax. Installed programs are most often not usable and I have to manually add them to PATH. Common things, like ctrl-d for EOF does not work.

There is probably much more than that. I find windows to just be a bad OS. And this is subjective, I know. Some people don’t care, some even like windows better for some reason. It’s probably not as bad as I feel it is.

Here is another completely h related thing: Microsoft naught Rare, a software studio that developed games for Nintendo. And oh boy, what games. During the N64 era, they made timeless classics like banjo kazooie, until MS bought them and drove them against the wall.

muddybulldog,

The backslashes were actually IBM’s fault. MS DOS 2.0 README

OfficerBribe,

As a Windows user for quite some time, I have couple comments about some statements.

Windows does not support links

Do you mean these things or it’s something else?

Multiple roots. C: D: and so on.

If you have 1 disk, it will be just C:, partitioning is not really a thing anymore for most. And if you have multiple disks, doesn’t UNIX separate each (I think they were called devices /dev/ or something like that)? And if you want, you can put multiple physical disks under 1 logical partition so you end up with 100TB of C:\

No central package Manager

There’s a new native thing called winget. There are also 3rd party options like Chocolatey.

Terminal sucks on windows

New Windows Terminal is pretty good. There are also 3rd party options like ConEmu.

I hate PowerShell with it’s weird verbose syntax

It is logical and easy to understand without memorizing some arcane strings. There are also aliases that even match UNIX commands like ls or man, but using those is bad practice unless you do some quick thing interactively.

All in all, if someone grows up with specific OS, they will probably prefer that OS and when comparing it with another one, try to do same operations same way as on their primary OS ending up with bad experience.

GigglyBobble,

winget is a poor excuse of a package manager, misses lots of applications, doesn't handle OS updates and AFAIK also no dependencies.

WSL is Linux on crutches since the file IO is done with the subpar Windows API and bloated NTFS killing one of Linux' most effective performance advantage (it runs much faster in vm on Windows even). It's basically the reverse of Wine which makes some Windows applications run even faster than on Windows itself.

if someone grows up with specific OS, they will probably prefer that OS and when comparing it with another one

Cannot say anything about probability but I grew up with DOS and Windows (starting from 3.1). I tried Debian in the 90s and hated it. Tried again almost 20 years later and eventually moved all my machines to Linux (Windows 10 telemetry was the last straw). Still use Windows at work though and hate it even more now that I know how smooth a modern OS can run.

PlexSheep,
  • Links

Cool that they have that. Why is there no cliggidy click option to quickly make one? I’d also just take an ln command.

  • Multiroot

On Linux at least, the dev directory contains the actual devices. It’s not where they are mounted and accessible. Everything is a file on UNIX, so this is where the physical device is, as opposed to its contents.

  • wt

I know and use wt at work. It’s pretty okay, but a major issue that I have with it is that it scales italics weird (at least with FiraCode NF). Also no custom or vim keys for the mark mode thing. For me, kitty is the most usable terminal, and there is no alternative for windows which does everything right (for me, or that I have found).

  • pwsh

I won’t step down on this one. Shells are made to be used interactively, and PowerShell feels like coding in C#. It’s good that they have some aliases, but that’s not enough.

Also, new software needs to be added to PATH manually, completion sucks compared to zsh with minimal plugins. Controlling a pwsh session just feels bad.

I’m probably still biased. It’s good if you’re okay with windows, you got less to worry about I suppose. I just really dislike it, and WI does dislikes me back.

OfficerBribe,

Links

There probably is some shell extension that could add this in context menu. In Windows you use mklink or New-Item commands. Links are not really popular in Windows environment, I would say an absolute majority do not even know about them or never think about them. Shortcuts are the ones that people generally use.

Shells are made to be used interactively, and PowerShell feels like coding in C#

I can accept a compromise of slightly more verbose and standardized syntax for interactive use when compared with unix/linux and ability to easily automate pretty much everything you can in Windows / Microsoft ecosystem. I am not a professional coder, but I thoroughly enjoy scripting in PowerShell for work and private tasks.

Also, new software needs to be added to PATH manually

True, that’s just how Windows programs work. Executables probably will never be available from shell as they can be from Linux without manual tinkering. Start menu is essentially the alternative here. For those couple programs I need to be easily lauched from terminal, adding paths to PATH variable does not seem too much of an problem.

bernieecclestoned,
Deconceptualist,

Forced Windows OS patches were the final nail for me. One of them in the early days of Windows 10 Pro conflicted with graphics drivers and completely soft-bricked my PC.

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