361–370 of 657 posts
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You basically have to treat all components of Windows as malware. Your personal threat model needs to include Microsoft as an attacker.
I have a Windows VM with net access (through a consumer VPN) that I install software in, make sure it's all up to date and whatnot. To do any real work I then take a snapshot and run it on its own VLAN with the only reachable thing being my own samba server.
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> Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft What? How? From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign. Solitaire is now a subscription service. I long for the halcyon days of Windows 8.
Everything before CoPilot was pretty standard CEO stuff. The real change was internally. Satya is well-known for eradicating the "Art of War" environment and bringing workers together. He also fully embraced open-source (Balmer hated OSS) and R&D has continued to innovate. (Still boggles the mind that F# exists and is awesome) Prior to CoPilot, my only beef was that Azure needs a ground up re-architecture. They bolte…
(strangely, perhaps my perception, this is roughly when the Mac M1 came out).
I’d pay good money to disable that feature and keep my pc as is. Or I’ll have to swap to Steam OS
> This feature is completely optional and is never turned on by default. You only need to pay $0.
This feature is completely optional and is never turned on by default UNTIL MS DECIDES OTHERWISE.
Sorry, I wouldn't take any chances.
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In my experience the problem with Debian is that sooner or later you're bound to want to use something that is only 5 years old and therefore not included yet, so you end up having to install it from source or something else, but something doesn't quite work right so you have to hack it one way or another, and over time all this cruft adds up and you end up with a broken system caused precisely because the base distr…
I no longer use Debian, but when I did, I always used Debian Testing, never had any major issues that weren't my own fault, and packages are way more up-to-date. Worth trying if you're in that ecosystem still, and you want later stuff than 1-2 years old softwrae.
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> Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere. They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.
They put a copilot button in Outlook. Which, when ask, gladly confesses it doesn't have access to your mail or calendar, completely negating any value it could possibly have.
I realised I don't actually need windows anymore, my light gaming is fine with the proton layer and for personal development I rarely use dotnet anymore and even when I do, I use .net core.
So, the neckbeard adventure begins. Arch will be the begining of the end of all my relationships maybe, but at least there wont be a copilot slop gen on my machine.
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"again"? What they did in the past seems absolutely neighbourly compared to what they're doing now. Get a VM of Windows 9x/2k/XP to experience what "good Microsoft" was like.
The other day I installed Windows 7 on a VM for fun.. it was not fun at all. I got weird wave of nostalgic sadness, like being teleported back in time, I felt/remembered how things were back in ~2010, the culture, my university life, how things were with an ex gf, ALL of it. The OS is engrained in my mind and it was gorgeous seeing those aero effects and hearing the startup sounds again. It is so simple and easy. It…
I mentioned to a friend recently that W11 is so difficult to use compared to Linux like Mint nowadays. He didn't understand it, though he tried Mint a decade ago but kept using Windows 10, upgraded to 11, continues to have driver problems with his laptop, some weeks network card stops working some weeks his sound card drops out completely. He uses usb dongles intermittently, it reminds me how I used on laptop Linux 20 something years ago and even then it wasn't that bad. I feel preaching Linux is almost counter-effective, but I'm tired of being asked to solve his hw problems caused by bad W11 drivers.
Imagine a new version of Windows being released called "Windows Optimal" In addition to Home, Professional and Pro you get to buy Optimal. The catch is that it is priced 4x the home version. You wonder why? Optimal is exactly what you think it is. A ground up 0 bloatware, 0 telemetry, 100% easily tweakable privacy and performance settings from a single screen with 0 AI features, 0 Edge and 0 games. Imagine getting yo…
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> Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere. They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.
They put a copilot button in Outlook. Which, when ask, gladly confesses it doesn't have access to your mail or calendar, completely negating any value it could possibly have.