I used to work on Windows at Microsoft, prior to Windows 10. I've always kept some Windows machines around because I felt that Windows was actually not that bad of an operating system, having personally reviewed a good amount of its source code and seen what the engineering culture was back at the time I was there.
I gave ChromeOS a try for some machines I might otherwise have run Windows on, but I kept the Windows machines around for gaming and for the occasional oddball proprietary software package that some family member just had to have. About the time Google dropped its unofficial motto "Don't Be Evil" I started moving away from ChromeOS and back to trusty old Debian.
I've recently purchased a Framework 16 with an AMD Radeon RX 7700S GPU and installed Arch Linux and Steam on it. All the games I care about playing at the moment, including Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3, run phenomenally well on it. It's 100% stable driving a 2560x1600 display at 60+fps with high graphics settings. I can plug in a PS5 controller and it "just works."
With that I now feel truly free of anything Microsoft, in the sense that I don't feel like I'm making any compromises at all with how I want to use my computers by using Linux rather than Windows. I'm going to be installing Arch or Debian Linux on my remaining Windows boxen over the summer.
So this is my final adieu, my old friend Microsoft. How far our paths have diverged since we first parted ways. Hit me up again when you've extricated your OS from your cloud and stopped showing ads and integrating privacy-hostile features. I won't be holding my breath though.
> I used to work on Windows at Microsoft, prior to Windows 10. I've always kept some Windows machines around because I felt that Windows was actually not that bad of an operating system, having personally reviewed a good amount of its source code and seen what the engineering culture was back at the time I was there.
I'm curious how the culture was though. I always get the vibe that Microsoft has never been "end user oriented" if that makes sense. They always seemed to be making a product for other businesses. To this day, Windows, Office, and especially stuff like MS Teams feel like they were designed from the ground up for a heavily managed business environment with heavy surveillance and tight controls.
Stuff like Telemetry and requiring MS accounts for logging into Windows 10+ seem more of a nod to employers. It's really amazing how much MS has been able to convince users to give controls of their own devices to MS/employers/others. Stuff like using Outlook on a personal phone giving the employer the ability to wipe the employee's phone.
Like I don't think they have ever, in their years, seen end users of their products as "customers". I think they see businesses, sometimes independent developers, and advertising firms as their real customers.
Since getting a steam deck and discovering for myself how well proton works, I think I'll be parting ways with windows on my next round of upgrades of computers at home.
In fact I'm thinking of getting rid of my windows workstation tower and just using a docked steamdeck deck instead.
The privacy and advertising nonsense is just ridiculous.
I'm primarily work as a c# dev, but now that dotnet is properly supported on Linux the only reason for not leaving windows is full fat visual studio. I find vscode to be a bit shit in comparison.
If you're not averse to paying for an editor - Rider by JetBrains got me through my C# + Unity courses in university (using Linux), I still use visual studio to this day at work and I think I prefer Rider overall actually, but obviously it comes with a fair price tag.
My problem with rider is that most c# shops are visual studio. It is a time investment for me to learn and my current employer has made a cost cutting and ended our jetbrains resharper licenses, they won't pay for rider. This is pretty annoying. Vscode is free, so I can use it where ever. I don't like vscode, but it is proving useful to know due to the number things that it can be used for.
Interestingly enough, this does not track with experiences of most of my network - employers are usually happy (and sometimes mandate, which is not that good) to pay for Resharper, which carries over to Rider without issue.
> I'm curious how the culture was though. I always get the vibe that Microsoft has never been "end user oriented" if that makes sense. They always seemed to be making a product for other businesses.
I started on Windows XP and left on Windows 10 (skipping Vista and Win 8.0, and part of 8.1). Windows was always a tool to get things done. Buy a software license and you can be pretty sure you can run things indefinitely on it. Everything (almost?) was accessible by clicking, so ultimately discoverable. No need to learn arcane commands, just follow and imitate. And you mostly have to do the training once. Linux was an expert tool and macOS (I used it since Mojave) always felt like it's for people who compute, but mostly as a secondary activity (shiny and pleasant, but always lacking the remaining bit).
I've never thought of myself of being a Microsoft customer, just like you don't think of being a Dell customer or HP customer when using their monitors or printers. You need to get something done and Windows was the bedrock for that. Especially if you were hiring people to do it.
But now it's like seeing your workbench animating and contorting itself in new shapes every time you come close. Insulting your intelligence all the while.
The amount of times that Teams has gone down, or Teams broke, or Teams wouldn't let me do something literally every other chat program did because of policy or management or because Teams wasn't built that way for compliance reasons or lalalala.
You can't even search messages more than a certain age because they're gigantic Microsoft Exchange objects. Somehow Discord can give you instantaneous results but Teams is a giant piece of crap.
That's kinda what I was getting at. And don't even get me started with Windows file permissions, or Windows' way of doing symlinks, or Windows' way of doing keyboard hotkeys that no other OS on this planet does.
Clippy: I see you keep your #2 Phillips screwdriver in a dedicated slot on your workbench. We've replaced that slot with an ad and moved your screwdriver into a box in a drawer in a closet in the shed. Aren't we so helpful?
To be fair, MS has done an incredible amount of work to keep backwards compatibility. It may not 'show' to the end user, but they put in significant programming hours/effort $$$s for this. Now, this doesn't mean it was all for the 'end user' but they did benefit a bit from this.
I gave ChromeOS a try for some machines I might otherwise have run Windows on, but I kept the Windows machines around for gaming and for the occasional oddball proprietary software package that some family member just had to have. About the time Google dropped its unofficial motto "Don't Be Evil" I started moving away from ChromeOS and back to trusty old Debian.
I've recently purchased a Framework 16 with an AMD Radeon RX 7700S GPU and installed Arch Linux and Steam on it. All the games I care about playing at the moment, including Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3, run phenomenally well on it. It's 100% stable driving a 2560x1600 display at 60+fps with high graphics settings. I can plug in a PS5 controller and it "just works."
With that I now feel truly free of anything Microsoft, in the sense that I don't feel like I'm making any compromises at all with how I want to use my computers by using Linux rather than Windows. I'm going to be installing Arch or Debian Linux on my remaining Windows boxen over the summer.
So this is my final adieu, my old friend Microsoft. How far our paths have diverged since we first parted ways. Hit me up again when you've extricated your OS from your cloud and stopped showing ads and integrating privacy-hostile features. I won't be holding my breath though.