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):
* The Microsoft Monopoly
* Microsoft and the web
* Internet Explorer
* Microsoft Edge
* Microsoft Windows Monopoly
* 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
* Our lord, Bill Gates
* The media empire
* Twitter censorship
* Bill Gates the philanthropist
* Big Pharma
* Bill and Jeffrey Epstein
Edit: typos and removed the pun “Kill Bill Gates” because it seemed inappropriate.
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.
The backslashes were actually IBM’s fault. MS DOS 2.0 README
As a Windows user for quite some time, I have couple comments about some statements.
Do you mean these things or it’s something else?
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:\
There’s a new native thing called winget. There are also 3rd party options like Chocolatey.
New Windows Terminal is pretty good. There are also 3rd party options like ConEmu.
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.
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.
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.
Cool that they have that. Why is there no cliggidy click option to quickly make one? I’d also just take an
lncommand.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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.