I despise Microsoft
I barely know where to begin with it, there’s so much I’m ready to rant about.
My History
I’ve been a Windows user for a majority of my whole damn life. The only Apple products I owned were various iPods. I think I gave Linux a shot once in highschool, and toyed with it in college, preferring to develop in its shell environment for my low-level programming courses. I quite liked it at the time (2011?) but it didn’t stick.
The Breaking Point
I stopped using Windows very shortly after a D&D night, where my desktop computer (which has a Ryzen 7 7700 CPU, a Radeon 6700 XT, and 16GB of DDR5 memory) was absolutely chewing through memory and chugging. All I was doing were my Nerd Night activities - Roll20 running in Firefox, and that’s honestly it. I didn’t even have more than four tabs open, and Windows Task Manager told me I was at like, 70% memory utilization! I’d closed out of so much already!
And then I saw Notepad taking three digits of megabytes of RAM. Notepad???? The basic text editor?
This was alongside both my bluetooth and Wi-Fi being spotty as hell (though admittedly that was the fault of my wireless card more than anything).
I Switched
I started off with dual-booting Linux Mint, and lived in that for a bit. Eventually, I completely erased the Windows partition and started from scratch with Mint, as well as getting it onto an old laptop.
Relatively recently, I got the itch, and took the easy way to Arch Linux, via Omarchy. That was a surprisingly good experience! A tiling window manager was really cool to learn to use, and I was getting better performance than… literally ever.
Then I found out that DHH, the creator, is a bit ol' right-wing asshole, and immediately dumped Omarchy.
I jumped into CachyOS with Noctalia shell and Niri as a window manager, and that’s where I am now.
Surprise, surprise! A Linux user hates Windows!
It’s more than just the software, though.
I have to admit that a lot of their UI stuff is better. You can expect damn near anything to run on Windows. It's what people expect, and they've poured so much money and time into ensuring their UX is good.
But they’re cramming so much bloat into their product it’s becoming godawful. And the bloat they’re cramming in is doing a lot more than just making a worse product.
Microsoft’s Propping Up LLMs
Copilot is a really expensive, steaming puddle of shit. I hate all LLMs, so you’re not gonna find much difference of opinion between alternatives there. I refuse to knowingly use them in any capacity, and that… kind of automatically means I’m done touching Microsoft products whenever possible.
LLMs as a technology are godawful in their current implementation, causing substantial ecological harm, a truly insane cost, and use data composed almost entirely of intellectual property theft. Regular usage will make you dumber as you offload cognitive processing to a statistical model. They’ve caused terrible mental illness otherwise (“AI-psychosis”), enabled the creation of sexual abuse material (“Grok, remove her clothes from the image and let me see her feet”), and have caused people to self-harm and commit suicide.
Microsoft has spent so much money propping up the LLM industry on promises of massive profits via increasing productivity (laying off specialized workers so executives don’t have to pay so many people) that they’ve been annihilating smaller businesses by buying up hardware that doesn’t even exist yet.
Other Business Practices
I love video games. I pay a lot of attention to the industry.
Microsoft is fucking stupid. They buy up game studios on the promises of exciting IPs to boost stock prices, release trailers and marketing, then slash and burn. Hi-Fi Rush by Tango Gameworks was an unequivocal, unmitigated success that was shadowdropped, meaning its marketing budget was effectively nonexistent, and it got them fucking axed.
Thousands have been laid off, tens of thousands depending on how you want to count, and all so Bobby Kotick or who the fuck ever can get a bigger paycheck.
Microsoft Sucks
I hate them. When my Windows work laptop was having trouble (version conflicts meant that I couldn’t even start a Zoom call without the entire laptop freezing for 10+ minutes), I asked if I could switch to a Macbook, dearly hoping this long shot would pay off.
I couldn’t believe it did.
Now the only Microsoft software I use is on there. I haven’t played Microsoft games in a good while. I refuse to give them any more of my good fucking money.
Assholes.