Why do you hate Microsoft?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨sir_reginald@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

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 a 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 have to be more. So that’s kinda why we’re asking.

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

* The Microsoft Monopoly
		* Microsoft and the web
				* Internet Explorer
				* Microsoft Edge
		* Microsoft's monopoly on videogames
		* Microsoft and the Governments
				* Education
				* Healthcare
		* Microsoft Gaming Empire
* Windows Backdoors (not sure where this section belongs)
		* Work with the NSA
* Microsoft loves Open Source (microsoft infiltration in foss)
		* Microsoft and the OSI
		* Github
				* Github Copilot
		* VSCode
		* War on GPL
		* Microsoft loves Linux and BSD?
		* Embrace, extend, extinguish
* Kill Bill Gates
		* The media empire
				* Twitter censorship
		* Bill Gates the philanthropist
				* Big Pharma
		* Bill and Jeffrey Epstein

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Alchemy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
[deleted]
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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  an anti-microsoft manifesto? That sounds nice, but I doubt it will ever reach that many people, we’re planning on putting it on a quick website of it’s own and just let it float around the web.
  
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  - Alchemy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You know that’s not why I said that.
    
    Edit: typos and removed the pun “Kill Bill Gates” because it seemed inappropriate.>
    
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breadsmasher@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Kill Bill Gates

the fuck?

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- exohuman@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yeah, that’s weird. Outside of Microsoft as a company, Bill Gates has done a lot of good in this world. He isn’t perfect, but he is one of the “better” billionaires (if such a thing exists).
  
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  - sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I don’t believe better billionaires are a thing. Bill Gates has done a lot of shady stuff, but he’s incredibly good at covering that up on the media. Anyway, I changed the title of that section because it was inappropriate (even if it was a reference to the movie).
    
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  - ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Bill Gates is throwing his resources into the #warOnCash (effectively, war on privacy) via his involvement with the betterthancashalliance.org scumbags. I’ve heard all the charity expenditure is 100% tax avoidance strategy & not a dime more, unlike William Buffet who gets credit for donating more than tax optimums & also getting other billionaires to give more (just a rumor… that bit is beyond me).
    
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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  it’s a pun with the Tarantino movie. Maybe not totally aproppiate
  
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  - 601error@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Inappropriate, IMO. I read it as [discussion of] a desire to murder the actual person.
    
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  - bh64@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I don’t perceive that as offensive
    
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theKalash@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Because I have to use Teams.

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- mPony@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  maybe you just hate your coworkers? :)
  
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  - theKalash@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    No, it’s definitly just the software. I miss slack.
    
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Peanutbjelly@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
When they switched the window exiting x button on the “upgrade to windows ten!” Notification to accept the installation rather than just exit the notification.

I’d been exiting that window every day to set up our work computers, as our point of sales solution didn’t support the newer version of windows.

My horror when our shop doors open and the screen turns to “updating to windows 10”

We basically lost a day of sales since we had to do thing sans POS.

When I told the owner that I definitely didn’t accept the installation, he called Microsoft which told him I must have accepted the installation.

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d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The disaster that was Vista (increasws system requirements, “vista capable” lawsuit)

Secure computing fiasco

Decision to remove the Start Button in Windows 8

UWP apps - about how bloated they are

Conversion of lightweight win32 apps to bloated UWP (eg Sticky Notes, Notepad 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

Aggressive nagging to upgrade to Windows 10 (including forced upgrades)

Windows Update: specifically, how it hijacks your PC

Lack of a rolling release model

Aggressive telemetry and user data collection

Ads in File Explorer

Print Nightmare bug mismanagement

Bug that caused the deletion of user documents

Microsoft Pluton

The constant push towards Microsoft cloud services, which are not only a privacy nightmare but have hidden costs and is unreliable (eg Exchange Online outages)

Microsoft Intune sucks and isn’t a replacement for SCCM, in spite of them claiming otherwise

Artificial TPM and CPU requirements for Windows 11 (planned obsolescence)

Forced integration of services such as OneDrive and Teams

Microsoft Teams (specifically: about 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
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- 1st@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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  - d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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.🤦
    
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dan1101@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The set the standards, and then break them. They have been doing this since early versions of Office.

They don’t finish porting old applets to new Windows before they release another new Windows.

They unfairly use their market position to push their products and services. Edge, Onedrive, Teams, etc.

Windows Updates, need I continue?

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- oleorun@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The System applet side by side with the legacy Control Panel sucks so bad. Is that setting here, there, or everywhere? Want to combine task bar icons? Fuck you, we haven’t rewritten that part yet.
  
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riskable@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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).

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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  do you happen to have a link? this sounds very much like Microsoft’s tactics yeah
  
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ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
[Dirt on Microsoft](https://git.sdf.org/humanacollaborator/humanacollabora/src/branch/master/github.md

#Microsoft

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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  this is just what I was looking for, thank you!
  
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kubica@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
For me it's the monopoly. Because of their domination they can push whatever change they want because people is locked in to their services and must accept it.

And well kinda independently I don't mind vscode that much, but github until a few weeks was able to show much better info on the home page than now.

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- PlexSheep@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  GitHub is a great thing but oss being mostly hosted on a Microsoft platform gives me chills.
  
  I Selfhost.
  
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scorpious@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Ugly, clunky, inelegant.

Windows = designed by engineers.

Mac = engineered by designers.

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- PlexSheep@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  What makes you think windows is designed by engineeres? I suppose you mean software engineers with that. I’d think that Linux is the system designed by engineers.
  
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MossBear@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
They kneecapped Linux in the early days because they were afraid of what people accepting FOSS as a standard would do to their profits.

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MaliciousKebab@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
They also killed Atom text editor in favor of VSCode.

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- lettruthout@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  In all fairness, VSCode is awesome. And I used to be ABM (Anything But Microsoft).
  
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  - PlexSheep@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Vscode is not bad, but the pinnacle if textediting is neovim. That’s a war for another thread, greetings emacs guys.
    
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  - linusl@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I didn't have much interest but there was enough hype that I tried it but found it too slow being used to sublime text. I know lots of others like it a lot though.
    
    last I heard though is they are removing the macos version. which would mean that anyone who likes it enough would need to switch from mac, which sounds too convenient for me to be an accident. I don't know how many would actually make this switch, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I'm sure there are scenario where development teams are very used to vscode and the ecosystem and perhaps ingrained enough into their workflow that it makes more sense to them to have the team switch to windows to keep using vscode instead of rewriting solutions and/or having the developers spend time to relearn and get up to speed with another editor and plugins etc.
    
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  - MaliciousKebab@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yeah but they hide some really useful extensions behind official VSCode with telemetry wall. Other than that it’s a cool editor.
    
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jabberati@social.anoxinon.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
@sir_reginald https://wetdry.world/@ipg/110576188177924299
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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  this is useful, thanks!
  
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ram@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I hate them because they invented Proprietary Software at a time that all software code was shared between hobbyists and built upon and freely. en.wikipedia.org/…/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists#Op…

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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  this is perfect, thanks!
  
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treefrog@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Turning my OS into an ad server is at the top of my list. Switched to Linux for everything I can.

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mPony@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Microsoft submitted video evidence during their Antitrust trial in the late 90's that had been edited together, but was being presented as unedited. i.e. they tried to pull the wool over the DOJ's eyes, because why not? https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-on-trial-ms-videotape-not-what-it-seemed/

They included IE4 in Win98 - that was seen as anticompetitive. Compare that to everything they do today. Or everything Apple does today (like, literally everything). It's shocking that something like including IE with win98 was worth pursuing, but yet everything since then was just how big business does big business.

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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I had a few things about the 90’s antitrust but I hadn’t seen the edited video evidence. Thanks for the link, appreciated!
  
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PlexSheep@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.
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- OfficerBribe@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - PlexSheep@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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  - GigglyBobble@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- muddybulldog@mylemmy.win ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The backslashes were actually IBM’s fault. MS DOS 2.0 README
  
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MonkderZweite@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Read about Microsoft and standardazion of OOXML as ODF got standardized. Caution: rabbit hole

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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I have sources about this, although I still have to read through them. It’s definitely going into the essay, yeah
  
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phx@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Two things come to mind for me:

one of the more recent issues I’ve had is the exercise in pain that is Teams for Linux when not using a corporate account

second is that they looooove to build proprietary products to compete with existing ones in attempts to build their own “standard” that only works on their systems, thus crushing competitors. See: (early) MSOffice, Internet Explorer+ActiveX, DirectX

Third: buying out products and removing compatibility. RAV antivirus was popular for Linux users as a fileshare/mail/etc scanner. MS bought it and shortly after killed Linux support
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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  this is useful, thanks!
  
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linusl@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
old article from 2010 about ms spreading fud http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

I still remember this specific article and it struck a nerve with me when I first read it.

I'm sure there are much older examples and also much newer examples but this one is always in the back of my head.

latest example I can think of off the top of my head is ms adding their bash compatible terminal or linux subsystem, not sure how it technically works, but it allows running bash scripts and I think linux terminal commands and tools to some extent. which sounds great on the surface for anyone who wants to do this and might bring some value to the eco system, but it makes me scared because I only see ms infiltrating foss and trying to make it their own and reducing the need to use linux at all, and I suspect eventually they will introduce new things that only works on windows and fragment things. even more scary I commented about this on reddit and only got downvotes. I guess I'll keep all my tinfoil hats for myself and not share with the rest of the class.

another example is xbox trying to buy up every game company and put playstation out of business, with their latest comment being about how they would want to buy up nintendo. I guess technically not ms, but pretty same to me.

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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  awesome, I missed the DirectX conflict. the rest is also useful, thanks!
  
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TootSweet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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HidingCat@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Because they keep on releasing Surface devices with less efficient Intel CPUs.

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bh64@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
just created an account on Lemmy and this is the first thing that catch my eyes lol. great stuff. I would love to read it when it is done.

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elouboub@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Do Apple next!

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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’d love to, but let’s see how this one turns out first. It’s a lot of work and we haven’t even started writing.
  
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Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I don’t think about them enough to hate them.

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Defaced@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Embrace, extend, and exterminate, 'nuff said. They can fuck off with their shitty business practices.

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ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The Halloween papers

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- sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Thanks!
  
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Halafax@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Meh, hate the game, not the player. I've spent half a life and my whole career adjacent to MS, my anger about their products and practices has long since turned to cynical acceptance. Yes, they have over stepped the bounds of fairness and good taste many times, but I've seen other vendors do so much worse. If you don't like Microsoft products, advocate for something else. The bottom of the bottle is that Microsoft has a duty to pursue profit for it's shareholders, and some of that will be ugly. These days there are workable alternatives for everything they sell, which wasn't always the case.

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ripcord@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Because they killed my boy.

Knifed him. He was just a baby.

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- thericcer@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  R.I.P. Gary Kildall 😥
  
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Deconceptualist@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Forced Windows OS patches were the final nail for me. One of them in Win10 conflicted with graphics drivers and completely soft-bricked my PC.

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