Microsoft's decision to push ai features into their OS got me to remove windows and install Linux this year. After gaming on windows pcs for 30 years, I'm now gaming on Linux and honestly, couldn't be happier.
Windows 10 was spooky enough that I held on to Windows 7 as my work operating system until 2020. The constant telemetry, settings that would switch themselves back on a reboot without any indication, forced updates with forced reboots that followed, and Cortana intermixing your file system with web results were all giant pier spanning red flags that told me Microsoft had turned fully hostile instead of just adversarial. The main thing to remember is that everything I just listed was there from the start in June of 2015. Then Microsoft stopped trying to be Wilson Fisk with Windows 11 and just came out as Kingpin.
I installed CachyOS (KDE) about 2 years ago and I’m obsessed with it, it’s so satisfying to tinker with. I also game on it every day. Recently invested in a AMD GPU just because it has a better driver story in Linux. I can’t imagine going back to Windows.
Edit: Shout out to SteamOS for getting Linux to where it is for gaming, incredible.
Agreed, also on CachyOS and loving the momentum Linux has lately! Let's finally all be free of Microsoft's bullshit "maybe later" tactics etc.
Gaming on Strix Halo in Linux is an absolutely amazing experience, even though I have a 4090, just because of how silent and low power it is. Valve and the rest of the Linux infra guys really performed a miracle.
The combination of hardware requirements and AI pushing by Microsoft is succeeding in finally making "Year of the Linux Desktop" a reality. Continual attempts at forcing AI on users, that don't want it, is only going to help more rapidly decrease their desktop OS market share.
I have a basic music player web app that can run decent on the cheapest android phones. It's buggy but has been pretty solid on my 3k$ pc (lmao).
Yesterday it was so sluggish I had to disable every other app on Windows AND restart AND disable my network (bcus who knows wtf windows is doing in the background). It ran fine (normal) after that.
Windows is so unbearable, my Mac and Linux (former ms) laptop from 6+ years ago operate better than this pc it's driving me up a wall.
MS is literally stealing my pc specs, they don't know wtf they're doing
My big company is all in on Copilot. So far it’s actually been a net plus. I like it and it makes my life easier. That said, when offered a PC or Mac I chose the Mac, because Recall. And all the Microsoft shenanigans on my home PC made me switch to Linux permanently.
If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better. They’re biffing that hard.
Not sure why you are down voted so much. I have a Mac for work, and I'm told that the chips are literally the fastest thing you'll experience. By a margin.
I have 3 different security scanners forced by security and it is much slower than my personal Linux Lenovo. Even just the basics with UI responsiveness that in my experience Macs have always been pretty good at, to the detriment of applications.
My experience of the ARM Macs has been through work, I personally owned Intel Macs and they were generally crap but felt faster than this.
This heavily depends on your company "policies". In general, it is not even really IT's fault - most of them would like to optimize performance and user experience, but the C-suite has mandated shit on your computer.
I’ve just always experienced them as a road block. They’ve only ever wanted to make their jobs easier. They’ve never wanted to enable me and make my life easier.
If you have 3 security solutions installed and get pwned, oh well, it's not your fault. If you had none and get pwned, you get the blame, even if the attack vector wouldn't have been protected by most security solutions.
> "If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better."
People here on HN are willing pay Google (monthly even!) to remove ads from YouTube. People here are willing to pay for RHEL Workstation or Ubuntu Pro Desktop for enterprise deployments. Yet people here are unwilling to pay Microsoft for the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want. Their problems are self-inflicted.
> the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want.
The correct Windows edition is LTSC or IoT or whatever BS name they've since come up with. It's a license that can only be obtained from a reseller (since putting up a form that takes credit card details and spits out product keys is too complex for MS) and has a minimum order quantity (I believe you can pad the order with cheap "client access licenses" to get around that).
I ran the version that shipped with my Dell. It was paid for. And mostly I want the ability to turn things off that retail Windows won't let you turn off.
People use the OS that came preinstalled on the machine. Not even Windows took off until Microsoft started armtwisting OEMs to preinstall it (Windows 3.0, 1990). And coming soon from Microsoft: locked bootloaders that prevent you from installing another OS! You know, because security, and no one installs alternative operating systems anyway.
Locked bootloader was making sense when PC was a huge investment, and the whole household was sharing it. Windows XP introduced fast account switching. And Windows still has it, but do you remember when was the last time you left your session active locked out and allowed someone else to log in to the same PC? Is there any other user at all on your current home PC? PC was standing for personal computer long before it was, but then it became. We don't share PC anymore in average.
Not only we don't share PC anymore, but PCs started to share us. We possess several PCs per single person, and we needed Dropbox to manage files on multiple PCs. Dropbox can be perceived as second turning point in time, and it was more than decade ago. Now it's one goal = one device era. We buy device and we sincerely don't intend to install anything else on it. We don't risk our data using NTFS shrinking tools to make spare room for another filesystem. We don't dual boot losing access to programs in another partition. There are ways to mount NTFS in other OS and vice versa, so documents may stay accessible, but programs are not runnable. This is now ridiculous. We just buy two, three, whatever devices and have all programs runnable simultaneously.
If we need something from another OS, we'll precisely buy compatible hardware without locked bootloaders or any other possible obstacle which are numerous. To name a few.
For DOS retrogaming we need DOS ISA DMA sound, and we pick PC with ISA slot and making sure motherboard chipset has DMA on ISA, which is not true on latest chipsets. For another DOS retrogaming option we consider VDMSound, but last OS to support it was Windows XP, and we choose hardware that is Windows XP compatible. Most likely UEFI-only boot will be a problem for Windows XP. For Mavericks Forever we are not going to look for random incompatible Mac. That is going to be either real compatible Mac selected from known list, or else compatible Hackintosh. On Hackintosh there was a big problem with software upgrade, but there will be no upgrades for Mavericks Forever. Tim Cook drives company away in direction we don't appreciate, and Mavericks Forever stays forever the same version.
Nowadays people are not using OS anyway. Nowadays people are using browser. I wish I could drag and drop documents in Mavericks Forever like I did in 2007. But document is now likely to be draw io, rectangular embedding for browser that cannot support drag and drop outside its rectange. And so messenger is also rectangular embedding for browser, not respecting Mac OS X multi-window paradigm, not supporting previously established gestures. In 2007 I thought that Qt programs on Mac were ugly. Those happy days I have not seen Electron yet.
People I know often report that they got rid from "dust collector", the PC. They are now all-Android. As time goes by, it is harder and harder to find someone with PC. So whatever Microsoft preinstalls or bootlocks on PCs, it goes to people less and less.
Sounds like an AI could be writing the Pro AI social media posts.
I believe this is literally what was warned about by the super intelligence expert, When talking with Bernie Sanders at the Georgetown something something conference this November: that AI will be persuasive to humans, and basically it will talk the humans out of disabling the power for the AI machines.
> Users brutually reject Microsoft's "Copilot for work" in Edge and Windows 11
It is because the Windows UX has become a mess of dark patterns and bad design. (gray on gray, bad titlebars, no scrollbars, no borders, no "yes/no" dialogue, notifications, bugs).
People are sick of it and every annoying change will be rejected.
Uninstalled Windows for Ubuntu a few months ago and never looked back. The constant coercion to get you to use their shitty products is unbearable. I want my operating system to get out of my way and let me work.
Users have "brutally rejected" pretty much everything that Microsoft have done since MS-DOS. Some cohort of users will get incredibly angry about any conceivable change to mature software. Add in the people who passionately hate anything AI-adjacent and you've got a recipe for a social media firestorm that probably doesn't accurately reflect the sentiment of the average user.
Personally, I think that Copilot for Work is a good product that does useful things. I use it daily. It isn't particularly groundbreaking, but it's nicely integrated with the wider 365 ecosystem and it has saved me a bunch of time on tedious tasks. The usual LLM caveats apply, but I just don't get why someone would be so annoyed by an entirely optional feature.
Microsoft has a bad history of actually making things optional. Required Microsoft account, Edge automatically importing your browser history and syncing it to Microsoft, OneDrive automatically copying your files and sending it to Microsoft, the repeated attempts after every update to make Edge default again...
They haven't given a fuck about the user experience for years and that's colliding with AI exhaustion. There's well over a dozen different things you need to turn off in various parts of Windows at this point to make it accept your decisions and stop throwing ads in your face, all tucked behind multiple layers of dark patterns.
But in the end, you could run what you needed, and move the garbage they threw in, out of the way. Now, I can't run Minecraft without logging into the MS Store. That was the last straw for me, and I built my entire career on Windows and .NET.
Microsoft's decision to push ai features into their OS got me to remove windows and install Linux this year. After gaming on windows pcs for 30 years, I'm now gaming on Linux and honestly, couldn't be happier.
Windows 10 was spooky enough that I held on to Windows 7 as my work operating system until 2020. The constant telemetry, settings that would switch themselves back on a reboot without any indication, forced updates with forced reboots that followed, and Cortana intermixing your file system with web results were all giant pier spanning red flags that told me Microsoft had turned fully hostile instead of just adversarial. The main thing to remember is that everything I just listed was there from the start in June of 2015. Then Microsoft stopped trying to be Wilson Fisk with Windows 11 and just came out as Kingpin.
I installed CachyOS (KDE) about 2 years ago and I’m obsessed with it, it’s so satisfying to tinker with. I also game on it every day. Recently invested in a AMD GPU just because it has a better driver story in Linux. I can’t imagine going back to Windows.
Edit: Shout out to SteamOS for getting Linux to where it is for gaming, incredible.
Agreed, also on CachyOS and loving the momentum Linux has lately! Let's finally all be free of Microsoft's bullshit "maybe later" tactics etc.
Gaming on Strix Halo in Linux is an absolutely amazing experience, even though I have a 4090, just because of how silent and low power it is. Valve and the rest of the Linux infra guys really performed a miracle.
I did the same on my gaming machine in early 2025 to get well ahead of the Win10 EOL. I installed Nobara and have been really happy with it.
The combination of hardware requirements and AI pushing by Microsoft is succeeding in finally making "Year of the Linux Desktop" a reality. Continual attempts at forcing AI on users, that don't want it, is only going to help more rapidly decrease their desktop OS market share.
Literally doing this now.
I have a basic music player web app that can run decent on the cheapest android phones. It's buggy but has been pretty solid on my 3k$ pc (lmao).
Yesterday it was so sluggish I had to disable every other app on Windows AND restart AND disable my network (bcus who knows wtf windows is doing in the background). It ran fine (normal) after that.
Windows is so unbearable, my Mac and Linux (former ms) laptop from 6+ years ago operate better than this pc it's driving me up a wall.
MS is literally stealing my pc specs, they don't know wtf they're doing
My big company is all in on Copilot. So far it’s actually been a net plus. I like it and it makes my life easier. That said, when offered a PC or Mac I chose the Mac, because Recall. And all the Microsoft shenanigans on my home PC made me switch to Linux permanently.
If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better. They’re biffing that hard.
> If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better.
How much of that experience is a result of your corporate IT removing all the bullshit with group policies that Microsoft has introduced
Corporate IT, with enterprise site licences, has access to turn things off you can't turn off with retail Windows.
I’ve always found IT to add bullshit, break things, and just make life harder.
Not sure why you are down voted so much. I have a Mac for work, and I'm told that the chips are literally the fastest thing you'll experience. By a margin.
I have 3 different security scanners forced by security and it is much slower than my personal Linux Lenovo. Even just the basics with UI responsiveness that in my experience Macs have always been pretty good at, to the detriment of applications.
My experience of the ARM Macs has been through work, I personally owned Intel Macs and they were generally crap but felt faster than this.
This heavily depends on your company "policies". In general, it is not even really IT's fault - most of them would like to optimize performance and user experience, but the C-suite has mandated shit on your computer.
Just IT folks rubbing their hands together evilly, “Yes! yes!! This will make our users’ lives miserable! Mwhahahahahahah!”
I’ve just always experienced them as a road block. They’ve only ever wanted to make their jobs easier. They’ve never wanted to enable me and make my life easier.
It's just extreme levels of ass-covering.
If you have 3 security solutions installed and get pwned, oh well, it's not your fault. If you had none and get pwned, you get the blame, even if the attack vector wouldn't have been protected by most security solutions.
They sometimes display shocking disconnect from what others need to do.
> "If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better."
People here on HN are willing pay Google (monthly even!) to remove ads from YouTube. People here are willing to pay for RHEL Workstation or Ubuntu Pro Desktop for enterprise deployments. Yet people here are unwilling to pay Microsoft for the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want. Their problems are self-inflicted.
> the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want.
The correct Windows edition is LTSC or IoT or whatever BS name they've since come up with. It's a license that can only be obtained from a reseller (since putting up a form that takes credit card details and spits out product keys is too complex for MS) and has a minimum order quantity (I believe you can pad the order with cheap "client access licenses" to get around that).
I ran the version that shipped with my Dell. It was paid for. And mostly I want the ability to turn things off that retail Windows won't let you turn off.
People use the OS that came preinstalled on the machine. Not even Windows took off until Microsoft started armtwisting OEMs to preinstall it (Windows 3.0, 1990). And coming soon from Microsoft: locked bootloaders that prevent you from installing another OS! You know, because security, and no one installs alternative operating systems anyway.
Locked bootloader was making sense when PC was a huge investment, and the whole household was sharing it. Windows XP introduced fast account switching. And Windows still has it, but do you remember when was the last time you left your session active locked out and allowed someone else to log in to the same PC? Is there any other user at all on your current home PC? PC was standing for personal computer long before it was, but then it became. We don't share PC anymore in average.
Not only we don't share PC anymore, but PCs started to share us. We possess several PCs per single person, and we needed Dropbox to manage files on multiple PCs. Dropbox can be perceived as second turning point in time, and it was more than decade ago. Now it's one goal = one device era. We buy device and we sincerely don't intend to install anything else on it. We don't risk our data using NTFS shrinking tools to make spare room for another filesystem. We don't dual boot losing access to programs in another partition. There are ways to mount NTFS in other OS and vice versa, so documents may stay accessible, but programs are not runnable. This is now ridiculous. We just buy two, three, whatever devices and have all programs runnable simultaneously.
If we need something from another OS, we'll precisely buy compatible hardware without locked bootloaders or any other possible obstacle which are numerous. To name a few.
For DOS retrogaming we need DOS ISA DMA sound, and we pick PC with ISA slot and making sure motherboard chipset has DMA on ISA, which is not true on latest chipsets. For another DOS retrogaming option we consider VDMSound, but last OS to support it was Windows XP, and we choose hardware that is Windows XP compatible. Most likely UEFI-only boot will be a problem for Windows XP. For Mavericks Forever we are not going to look for random incompatible Mac. That is going to be either real compatible Mac selected from known list, or else compatible Hackintosh. On Hackintosh there was a big problem with software upgrade, but there will be no upgrades for Mavericks Forever. Tim Cook drives company away in direction we don't appreciate, and Mavericks Forever stays forever the same version.
Nowadays people are not using OS anyway. Nowadays people are using browser. I wish I could drag and drop documents in Mavericks Forever like I did in 2007. But document is now likely to be draw io, rectangular embedding for browser that cannot support drag and drop outside its rectange. And so messenger is also rectangular embedding for browser, not respecting Mac OS X multi-window paradigm, not supporting previously established gestures. In 2007 I thought that Qt programs on Mac were ugly. Those happy days I have not seen Electron yet.
People I know often report that they got rid from "dust collector", the PC. They are now all-Android. As time goes by, it is harder and harder to find someone with PC. So whatever Microsoft preinstalls or bootlocks on PCs, it goes to people less and less.
I am so happy that my current employer is farther on its way to deploy Linux on the desktop than deploying windows 11.
I’m amazed they’re still posting about it on social media.
They have to try and claw back some of the sunk cost somehow. Microsoft made a trillion dollar bad bet and have decided that it's your problem
Alienate the people who carry your water, end up in the dumpster with the rest of the trash.
Why? Cause those are the people who know you better than you know yourself, and who know how to beat you at your own game
Sounds like an AI could be writing the Pro AI social media posts.
I believe this is literally what was warned about by the super intelligence expert, When talking with Bernie Sanders at the Georgetown something something conference this November: that AI will be persuasive to humans, and basically it will talk the humans out of disabling the power for the AI machines.
> Users brutually reject Microsoft's "Copilot for work" in Edge and Windows 11
It is because the Windows UX has become a mess of dark patterns and bad design. (gray on gray, bad titlebars, no scrollbars, no borders, no "yes/no" dialogue, notifications, bugs).
People are sick of it and every annoying change will be rejected.
Uninstalled Windows for Ubuntu a few months ago and never looked back. The constant coercion to get you to use their shitty products is unbearable. I want my operating system to get out of my way and let me work.
Users have "brutally rejected" pretty much everything that Microsoft have done since MS-DOS. Some cohort of users will get incredibly angry about any conceivable change to mature software. Add in the people who passionately hate anything AI-adjacent and you've got a recipe for a social media firestorm that probably doesn't accurately reflect the sentiment of the average user.
Personally, I think that Copilot for Work is a good product that does useful things. I use it daily. It isn't particularly groundbreaking, but it's nicely integrated with the wider 365 ecosystem and it has saved me a bunch of time on tedious tasks. The usual LLM caveats apply, but I just don't get why someone would be so annoyed by an entirely optional feature.
Microsoft has a bad history of actually making things optional. Required Microsoft account, Edge automatically importing your browser history and syncing it to Microsoft, OneDrive automatically copying your files and sending it to Microsoft, the repeated attempts after every update to make Edge default again...
They haven't given a fuck about the user experience for years and that's colliding with AI exhaustion. There's well over a dozen different things you need to turn off in various parts of Windows at this point to make it accept your decisions and stop throwing ads in your face, all tucked behind multiple layers of dark patterns.
But in the end, you could run what you needed, and move the garbage they threw in, out of the way. Now, I can't run Minecraft without logging into the MS Store. That was the last straw for me, and I built my entire career on Windows and .NET.