this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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relatedly: msft turned semi-good for a couple of years (making tooling more accessible across platforms, actual foss work, etc), and then seems to have an internal about-turn on this, and seem intent on speedrunning being most-hated again. stiff competition too, that's why they're trying so hard
@froztbyte @dgerard @patterfloof I think the reality is that Microsoft hasn’t changed at all. It always does what will make Microsoft the most money. It’s just that over the last couple of years that has happened to be “good” (or at least semi-good) for us in the developer space.
Now, an opportunity (“AI”) has presented itself to shit all over that and instead sell to people in a very different space. People who will enjoy the convenience of their computer becoming a panopticon and disregard or simply not know the consequences of that.
They have had hands down the best accessibility in desktop markets for 20 years, no contest. Overwhelming market share for many assistive techs. Which is why I’m absolutely livid at them now. If they break Windows I have nowhere else to go. Garbage people making garbage choices.
yeah I'm passingly familiar with some of it (and also with how it compares on other platforms, in part because of having to touch the sharp edges there occasionally), and I can entirely understand your position
and it's also not just the OS - it's everything else built on that that you use and depend on
I'm hoping this mania can end sooner rather than later, so we can get things everywhere back onto a path that isn't this fucking batshit
If you really need Windows, then there is Windows 10/11 Internet of Things, Long Term Servicing Edition.
It's Windows, for enterprises, without any of the bloat they force upon consumers normally.
It doesn't even come with the Windows store, but that is trivial to reinstall, like only a single powershell command.
Microsoft was never good, they just felt constrained. Those are different.
A corporation can never be good, it can only be properly constrained.
I used to argue with people that from all of the giants (the FAANG nonsense) MSFT was "the good guys" because they were doing god's work with FOSS. I still think .NET is an amazing technology and everyone working on it should be praised.
But then I got actually hired by MSFT and... you quickly realise this is just surface level shit. No one in management could give less of a fuck about open-source, or anything other than Growth™ for that matter. I speedran disillusionment and quit after little more than a year. In the end, it's just a big corpo doing big corpo shit. It has no values. It has no morals. It has no vision, other than that of a high $MSFT number.
If MSFT did anything good it's despite internal pressures and incentives, not thanks to them.