
At this point I can only assume that Microsoft is actively trying to punish me for using their products.
Linux Mint Cinnamon is incredible, free to try/move to, and reversible.
No, it’s not. Horrible and outdated in many aspects. Much better options out there.
Go on… Pop!_OS? KDE Fedora? And why? I was about to move to Mint Cinnamon 22.2 until you said this, but I’m open to recs.
Why? Who’s asking for this stuff, is there somebody out there who is really pleased with this news or is Microsoft really just that out of touch.
I don’t want to have to start wearing rainbow knee-length socks, but Microsoft are pushing me towards it.
Consumers are not the main driver of profit, speculative value is. Microsoft knows that Windows is guaranteed to be on the majority of PC’s, which means they can afford to implement hostile features that increase the speculative value on data collection and AI investment.
This is well said. So many people don’t get that of course these companies know you hate this shit.
They’re just trying to boost their stock value and violate your privacy harder.
🐧
Yeah exactly. Sucks if you have a job that forces you to use Windows though, which is largely how MS has this stanglehold on PC share. Once this becomes an expensive security risk, maybe more businesses will switch to paid Linux OS’s.
I’ve read this exact questions tens of times now. This is capitalism. Now why would a for profit company ever do anything? I leave you to your deductions.
Won’t they make more money if they don’t piss everyone off.
They can’t think that far ahead. Quarterly earnings are king.
Woah woah woah, lot’s not compare fabulous knee high rainbow socks with the malware MS is putting in their OS. That’s not fair to rainbows or socks.
I don’t want to have to start wearing rainbow knee-length socks
it’s pretty obvious that you do
put the socks on >:3
I’m not sure what’s worse, the greybeard stereotype or the socks.
Oh, the greybeard stereotype, for sure. Carrying the weight required for the ‘classic RMS’ look isn’t good for your health. Cute twinks in knee-high socks carrying a blahaj are much better, everyone loves them.
Now, the fully-actuated fursuit for if you want to be taken seriously as a sysadmin? That’s an expensive hobby.
wdym worse? the socks aren’t bad
Just a bit misgendery for my tastes. Also some right wing people have glommed onto the whole femboy thing. There is 100% a femboy-fascist pipeline.
Not heard of any femboy-fascist pipeline
I’d assume that fascists would hate femboys for being unmanly men
The basic idea is that it can stem from the incel world, the attitude that if they can’t have women, they can become them. It can be a way to affirm hypermasculinity, not challenge it.
So it ends up being dominance, forcing men into subservience.
Microsoft is forcefemming en masse.
I work in IT for businesses and the number of times I’ve had to debunk AI slop hallucinations as actual troubleshooting information is not zero.
“Yes, I can see the instructions say to check that checkbox, however, that checkbox does not exist” (screenshot of relevant control panel).
This is just evidence, to me, that business types are already relying on AI instead of doing any actual thought or research on any topic they don’t already have a deep understanding of, or are too lazy to bother with.
Consumers are not driving this change.
The worst part is that it’s an echo chamber of yes-men that seem to be pushing for it. The AI enthusiasts trying to sell their crap, convincing the middle managers that they need their AI crap, and them buying it and asking for more/better AI crap, and the cycle continues. At no point does any of the output of any AI system provide any unique insight, or value, to anyone. The rest of us are being dragged along for the ride, regardless of what we want.
The tech industry puts bazillions of dollars into AI development and now it has to put AI literally everywhere to make it look somehow useful. Whether the customer / user wants this or not. I guess they are hoping that people will eventually like it.
Isn’t it so they can train their AI on your personal files?

The LLMs demand more data, so MS is providing it by scraping our personal hard drives. Well, not mine, but still most peoples.
I still have Win10 running on an air-gapped laptop because there are no Linux drivers for my cheap auto-feed scanner, which I’m using to scan a raft of old photos. Once that project is done, I’ll put Linux Mint on it, and use it for something fun.
Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, Steam, LibreOffice, Obsidian, and Jellyfin do everything I want from a desktop.
I have a dual-boot with Linux Mint. I don’t access anything personal from my windows installation. It’s just for games that don’t work on Linux.
Dont forget “Everything”
Oof - that reminds me - I have a LOT of scanning / digitizing to do.
“I see you are dual booting with Linux? I’ve reformatted that partition for you.”
I had this happen before but not in recent times. Not sure if others have experienced the same.
For a while I had my bootloader on a single drive but I now have my Linux bootloader on /dev/sda and my windows on /dev/sdb and toggle it in the bios when I need to use Windows. I haven’t had Windows overwrite anything in a long time. Could be a coincidence though.
It’s mostly an issue when you have them sharing boot drives via partitions. If you keep them isolated to their own separate drives, Windows doesn’t tend to muck with things. It’s because Windows is bad about killing bootloaders, and automatically setting itself as the default in the boot order. So if you have it sharing a drive, it’ll nuke your boot. But if you don’t have them sharing a drive, and boot via a loader on the Linux drive, there is no boot loader on the Windows drive to nuke.
I’ve read that dual booting Windows and Linux can have temperamental quirks and I’ve had my share of them.
Now, if I’m doing that, Windows fs gets isolated and I refuse to even connect it to the internet. But, outside of a legacy automotive shop program meant for XP, I’ve not needed Windows for a couple years.
One of the reasons why I never dual boot. Unfucking GRUB is not on my priority lists.
How long before you can’t turn this off or uninstall it, just like Edge, or Bitlocker, or TPM, or mandatory Microsoft accounts?
Just pirate windows server or other enterprise editions which can be used only by business
I’d give it another year at best.
Windows is the security risk
As if recall wasn’t bad enough.
Step 1, delete Windows 11. Step 2, install Linux Mint.
Important to note here that if you are running Windows or a dual-boot, the new version of O&O ShutUp has a utility that allows you to delete CoPilot.
Time to regulate the shit out of them. They don’t know what consent is, they flaunt the abuse of privacy laws.
Scammers won’t need to social engineer grandma into giving out her SSN, they can just ask her AI many times and eventually, it will spit out absolutely everything.
Interesting Defcon presentation about how AI is a security nightmare:
DEF CON 33 - Exploiting Shadow Data from AI Models and Embeddings - Patrick Walsh
I never bought Windows 11 for AI shit. It wasn’t even what came with 11 originally. Hey Microsoft, why not make a version of Windows 11 with all the AI stuff fully turned on and call it Windows 11-AI. You sell it separately and up charge as much as you want. Just reset 11 to no AI and have it be the bare bones 11.
Edit: 2 things too. Violating user privacy could carry a risk as far as attorney-client privledge goes because attorneys work on 11 from home. So just ransaking all data could cause that right to be waved. Subpoena much?
Also, the AI-Windows could be upsold as a luxury, which means you can charge more for AI-11.
Because they make so much more $ from selling your data. Microsoft would rather push these AI programs in an update, and bank on their users not noticing. The majority of users operate in a walled garden, they aren’t editing registry files or manually running commands, so they are less likely to notice the changes. It’s the power users that notice this shit, and sound the alarm.
They can’t do that. They have all of their money riding on AI. They can’t possess any data that might show the all-mightly Shareholders that they bet wrong.
lol
they just keep piling on justifications for switching away
cackles maniacally in Linux




















