Those of you who still use windows for one reason or more, where do you draw the line about the shitty things microsoft is doing? By drawing the line I mean using some other operating system no matter how bothersome it might be.
Not judging or anything, i’m just curious where the general mindset is about it.
I haven’t made the switch off of Windows, but I have started dabbling in Linux. I am ok with tech, better than the average person, but I don’t know anything about programming or coding or any of it. I have a Raspberry Pi, some other electronic stuff, and a book that is project based teaching of python. I’ve spent the last month or so reading up on self hosting, Linux, and other open source stuff.
My biggest hesitation is World of Warcraft. It’s the only game I play, it’s the only game I’ve ever really played, and I don’t want to lose access to that. I have started looking into how wow is run on Linux. But I’m not ready to fully switch yet.
You can play WoW on Linux, though there may be a few extra hoops to jump through when installing the BattleNet client. Hell, there was even a test case where someone got it running on their SteamDeck as a proof of concept.
It runs in Wine or Lutris, which acts as a compatibility layer. The compatibility layer doesn’t emulate Windows directly. It just translates the Windows-specific stuff into something that Linux can use, and vice-versa. That’s why lots of games can actually run better on Linux, because you’re running a Windows native program without fully emulating Windows. So you don’t have all of the Windows bloat that tends to bog down gaming PCs.
I’ve played it on Linux by installing Battle.net through Lutris. There are guides specifically about how to do it.
the line is when I can do everything I need to do in a better operating system. why would it be anything else
im using Arch btw
My gaming desktop is only running Windows out of inertia at this point. Windows 10 LTSC specifically; I’m just waiting on the security updates to stop. Everything else in my house is already running something better.
I can give my historical experience. Early 2025, I saw horrific articles on Copilot and decided to switch early. I had a bad distro hopping experience. First tried Linux Mint, might have been a slightly old install, but even my wifi didn’t work. Tried a later install, and it was much better, but game performance wasn’t great. Hitman WOA didn’t even load levels. Helldivers 2 had an annoying white border (I eventually fixed this a year later using an odd hack)
I then tried Bazzite. I didn’t quite like the layout, but it functioned. I had a hard time installing apps; it tried to simplify this with various virtualization/containerized solutions, but it meant so many tutorials for basic native-Linux apps didn’t work.
When W10 EOL came around, I tried another distro well touted: CachyOS. It was very smooth. I learned it’s Arch, same as the Steam Deck, and does have some “technical complexities” which I felt I wanted to avoid, but I guess in the end it’s been nothing I’m not a little used to from my work as a programmer. It mostly uses okay UIs for system settings, and some programs require you to use another package installer rather than their default “Octopi”. Some of my early issues came from installing Flatpaks rather than Arch User Repository items.
Games have been fantastic. Rarely when something uses video I need ProtonGE, which is an easy toggle; I should probably just make it default. Helldivers 2 and Division 2 seem to run better than on Windows.
The biggest decider has been: Changing to Linux was NOT annoyance free. There was transition, there was fiddly configuration, and I replaced some apps I use. A key thing is, Windows was quickly moving away from being annoyance free - stuffing Copilot and OneDrive ads into EVERYTHING. So, even accepting a few Linux struggles ended up being an overall lesser frustration.
At first I expected cachy to be just arch with calamares and kde but when I checked they even have their own kernel version. Very sophisticated.
I’ve never seen an EMR that runs on Linux and if I did I’d have to find an employer willing to run it.
A few years ago, and Mint is great. I’ll never look back.
I have no more excuses, the line has already been crossed. I was getting ready to move over to Linux last year, but this is the real year. I had to move houses and it cost a bit more energy then expected. I now expect to give my final good-byes to proprietary PC operating systems this feb/march.
I use a streamdeck combined with soundpad software as a soundboard on W10/11, and that functionality is not 1-1 on Linux. Whatevs. I’ll have to do without some options I had on windows. I’ll get there.
I use windows because the fire code mandates it, and cause having sunlight in rooms is nice. Also I can see the weather and when the mail arrives.
My dog’s use Windows to spot their dreaded enemy, the squirrel.
We will never be able to repay them for this vigilance
I had installed a dualboot setup but all programs I use worked natively on linux by luck so I just used that.
I forgot there was windows in my laptop over time until the distrohopping phase when I saw a partition taking up half my space and mounted it out of curiosity.
I have a PC running Windows 11 Professional that I use exclusively for gaming. It works fine for that and it doesn’t annoy me with OneDrive or Copilot etc.
I’m open to switching to Linux on that machine if Windows starts to annoy me, but as it stands Windows runs all my games without issues and I can’t be arsed messing with things that aren’t broken.
I wouldn’t dream of running Windows on a computer used for anything other than gaming though. Currently I use a Mac as a daily driver, but I’ve also used Linux in the past. The main reason for using macOS is that I spend too much time messing with computers at work to want to do it in my free time too. The Apple ecosystem makes it easy to have everything integrated without much effort. I’m aware it’s probably an unpopular opinion around here.
My red line is when the user experience becomes worse for me on Windows than on Linux. Not saying that Linux is bad, it’s definitely not, but it seems to use a completely different paradigm from Windows which is much less aligned with what I want out of an OS than Windows is. So fundamentally my user experience on Windows is better, the enshittification is just adding trade offs until they eventually outweight having to go with a paradigm I don’t agree with. And that point hasn’t been reached yet. Though we’re definitely getting close.
I wish there was an actual alternative that was just an opensource Windows without enshittification. I’d switch to that immediately if it existed. But with Linux, Windows will have to do some more enshittifying to get me there.
I dualboot. I run windows whenever I want to use a certain software that is not supported on linux. Other than that, my daily routine and 99% of the games I play/wish to play run on Linux.
Now my main SSD runs Window11 and external one runs Bazzite. Once I finish ripping DVDs/Blurays I got from a friend, I will try to switch OS’es places.
Why anyone is OK with Microsoft’s key logging of everything including passwords is beyond me.
I thought this was about recall but no, there is a second keylogger in Windows lol
Step 4: Toggle the switch off under Getting to Know You. The keylogger is now off.
Well that’s not creepy at all…
Oh, don’t worry your little head. Microsoft is taking very special care of all your passwords and nothing bad can happen.
But seriously, I would be shocked if Microsoft’s password stores weren’t already hacked. I think at some point Windows users are going to wake up to some very unpleasant news.
Thank you for mentioning that, wasn’t aware it was doing that. Disabled it now.
You can find plenty more shit like this just taking a scroll through the settings app/menu. Anything mentioning “predictions”, “suggestions”, “send data to microsoft”, “help us make your experience better”, “automatic personilazation”, “use your data to improve”, “telemetry” and the like is data collection for Microsoft’s sake with little to no direct impact on the function of the OS or other software.
So, it’s easy to point fingers at a scary sounding sub-system and scream, but has anyone done any true analysis of what the feature actually does?
There’s plenty of ways to check this shit. Just off the top of my head, checking the files it accesses using process explorer would be a start. Should be pretty obvious if one of them grows with keystrokes.
Those are some pretty damn big claims for “trust me bro”.
It used to be that with shit like this you could actually find stuff like “Hey, I’ve analyzed network traffic from the PC, and can confirm that once an hour it’s sending encrypted data to a server in Redmond that matches the size of the image thumbnails generated by Explorer in the last hour. If Explorer hasn’t generated thumbnails in that time, no data is sent.” with receipts when someone claimed that MS was collecting everyone’s image thumbnails.
Now it’s just Microsoft bad! Trust me bro!
Regardless of validity though, it concerns me that people use their computers without taking 30 minutes to go through the settings and shut off shit they don’t want.
Whether the implementation of this is a true keylogger or not, I get no benefit out of Microsoft analyzing my typing, and I’m not using any sort of touch screen or stylus so handwriting analysis is a waste too.
I disabled it within the first hour post-install.
So, it’s easy to point fingers at a scary sounding sub-system and scream, but has anyone done any true analysis of what the feature actually does?
There’s this search engine called Google and it magically returns lists of technical articles from sources who have done exactly that.
Now it’s just Microsoft bad! Trust me bro!
Microsoft’s keylogging started with a Windows 7 update and has been well documented for over a decade, but I’m sure you can find something more to your liking from a Youtube paid shill who will tell you how great Microsoft is.
Cool it with the attitude. If it’s so easy to find this evidence, you could have posted links yourself to it instead of whatever the hell you think this is. Public shaming?
There’s plenty of easily proven reasons to hate Microsoft without pulling stuff out of our collective asses. Like the collection of image thumbnails I already mentioned, which as I said was confirmed (as much as analyzing SSL encrypted web traffic can be without breaking the encryption) by traffic analysis.
I have a decade of experience doing tech work in Windows environments. More than half of that time now in systems administration and infrastructure “engineering”. I’m better versed in Microsoft’s bullshit than the average bear, and I’m definitely not trying to argue they’re great.
Proof of this sort of thing can make a career in infosec, so I don’t have any issues believing that people have been digging deep for any evidence of this. If direct evidence is out there, you’re right that it shouldn’t be hard to find.
Did my research, I'm not finding the hard evidence.
That said, all I’m finding are unsourced insistences that it exists, and that those particular settings to disable it. I’ve done writeups before on Wi-fi security citing white papers and thesis research. Usually I have no issues finding the hard evidence, even the crazy cryptographic math fomulae behind certain cryptography related security issues.
For this though? From what I can find, there’s no direct evidence this is a keylogger in the traditional “stealing your data” sense. There’s no evidence of the typing data being stored on disk or transmitted back to “home base”.
I’m also finding plenty of conversations in information security communities online (and a few news articles) saying what I’ve already said here. It seems to be clickbait headlines that have turned into an urban myth of sorts.
What I’ve found in regards to it not being a keylogger (in so far as you can attempt to prove a negative):
- Reddit post about how to disable the predictive text features, calling it a keylogger. Lots of comments pointing out the misleading wording of calling it that, that predictive text is common, that it asks you if you want it or not during install, and that it doesn’t store the stuff anywhere for people to be able to use it to look at previous input.
- Reddit r/netsec discussion of reasons pointing towards Windows not keylogging everyone, and the types of signs security professionals and others would look for as proof of it. Signs that aren’t there.
- Another reddit post asking about the truth of the keylogger headlines, asking for any technical evidence, much like I am. None provided.
- Specific comment on a reddit post about telemetry in the Calculator application, where someone actually looks at the damn .cpp file under the hood with the data logging functions and finds that they are only active with a debugger process attached. Notes that this is pretty common practice with a lot of programs to ease debugging.
- Stack Exchange discussion of the keylogger claims/headlines. Same shit, notably misleading headlines, no hard evidence known.
The best evidence in favor of the keylogger are discussions about keylogging in the Windows 10 Preview builds, which Microsoft was explicitly open and direct about. But even this is somewhat suspect, and there’s no evidence even close to what was found in the preview builds that this is occurring in the prod releases.
There’s also a mountain of articles like this one that again, point to the written privacy policy and settings like they’re definitive evidence, but again I’m finding no WireShark analysis, no testing through multiple VMs or a control install and an install with tons of keyboard input, no actual testing and results, no snippets of code from any of the source code leaks in the last decade. No hard proof.
So now I’ve danced to your tune. I’ve “done my research”.
If this is so damn obvious, please for the love of all that is holy just link me the damn receipts. I promise I can handle whatever hacker writeups, white-papers, etc that you could throw at me. I want to see them. Please don’t blueball me.
I posted about a long known Microsoft practice with a link to one of dozens of 3rd party articles about that practice. You objected to the very idea Microsoft would do something like this, and without doing the slightest bit of research (or apparently even clicking the link) responded, “Now it’s just Microsoft bad! Trust me bro!”
You fucking “cool it with the attitude.”
BTW - I’d have no problem providing links for something difficult to research, but this isn’t much more difficult than asking Google the time. You are evidentially capable of typing, so “for the love of all that is holy” open a new tab and ask Google yourself.
I read your link, and you need to retake basic literacy if you believe that satisfies any sort of proof. All it says is “Microsoft totally has a keylogger, this setting disables it.” It does not show any evidence of the claim. It does not link to evidence of that claim.
No one’s arguing that they aren’t gathering typing data. I’m arguing that it isn’t a full-on keylogger siphoning passwords.
Please stop fighting a strawman. I’ve not said anything good about Microsoft here. I’ll insist again that I’m more familiar with their rot than most, given my career.
I did Google, with multiple search terms. Check my last post again. There’s a spoiler with plenty under it. It’s the line in a section all it’s own that says “Did my research, I’m not finding the hard evidence.” Tap to expand the multiple paragraphs not only summarizing my findings but also linking specific examples. If you have some specific issue with what I found, let’s hear it.
I’ll state it again and clearly: Everyone should turn off the feature. But hundreds of sites copy pasting the same article, the headline claiming it’s a keylogger, the same instructions to disable predictive text data collection, and nothing else is not evidence. It’s copy paste tech support slop.
If sites claiming things about how Windows worked were reliable, or repetition meant reality, “sfc /scannow” wouldn’t be a meme in the sysadmin world. 90% of the time it doesn’t help. It’s a specific tool for fixing issues caused by corruption to the OS files, not the cure all it’s touted to be by many sources.
So show me some network traffic analysis. Show me a whitepaper. Show me a security reseacher’s write up. Show me process explorer screenshots showing the file lock for the file where the data is stored. Show me someone testing two default Windows installs in VMs, one with keystrokes entered and one without, and the clear difference in network traffic, file activity, anything.
Anything more than simply saying “trust me bro”.
Because headlines can’t be wrong right? The CrowdStrike outage was totally an issue with Microsoft Update, as originally reported far and wide, and not an issue with an update to CrowdStrike software running at kernel level that mirrored the same issue they caused in Linux deployments a few months earlier. People still don’t get that wrong, not at all.
Look. The ball’s in your court. Again, if it’s so easy, prove it. Stop wasting effort trying to rub my nose in it like I’m a bad dog, and just prove I’m wrong.
My research doesn’t show what you insist is so evident it doesn’t need to be sourced. If it’s as you say, spoonfeed me. Prove it. It’ll be faster, and I’ll gladly edit all my previous comments here to say whatever disparaging thing about myself you desire.
Crow is delicious and I look forward to eating it.
Come. On.
Edit: I’m not normally the kind of person to look up who up/downvoted me, but I spent the better part of an hour trying to find evidence in support of this guy’s claim. Apparently it’s easier to downvote than prove me wrong in such a simple way that they claimed I couldn’t have done a google search or I would have found it.
So let’s fucking go. I’ll extend this “bet” to anyone.
Show me evidence that Microsoft is capturing all (or most) keystrokes, specifically including passwords entered across multiple programs, through the setting for predicitve text and handwriting analysis which can be switched off through the settings menu, it is happening on live/prod/general use releases of Windows, not preview builds, and it does not rely on unlikely edge cases like a user somehow accidentally running Calculator with a debugger attached to the process and then typing passwords into Calculator.
Note: Being able to hijack the service and exploit speculative execution shit like spectre to access other areas in memory doesn’t count. This has to be inteded behavior.
If you can prove that for Windows 7, 10, or 11, I will do just about anything you want as a punishment. Want me to speedrun getting banned across the fediverse? Want me to make a video smearing peanut butter on my junk while singing your praises?
No doxxing myself, no physical harm, permanent body modifications, nothing that would get the cops called, make me ill, or jeapordize my job. Monetary cost can’t be over $20. Thinking more like I’d write that you were right on my ass, make it my profile picture here, and edit every comment I made on here (over 4000 at time of writing) to add praises for you and to point to my shame. That sort of thing.
If you can get the instance admins in on it, I’d fully accept old 4chan rules of deliver or suffer permaban.
Just to cover my ass for Microsoft doing something dumb as hell with Recall, that doesn’t count (see specifications about it having to be connected to this predictive text/handwriting thing), and this offer is only valid for the year of 2026.
I wish I could switch, I even tried recently(last week). But one of my hobbies is sim racing, and the main game just works extremely poorly, like 30 - 130fps, and Devs have said that they don’t want to support linux so they will likely turn of the anti cheat support.
No, I can’t really switch because there isn’t anything equivalent that works on Linux.
As soon as that works well, or I build a 2nd PC I will switch (no I am not going to bother with dual booting cause I will just spend most of the time in windows)
I have Windows 10 for games, but it’s firewalled so hard that it can’t check for updates or do any of its other shady stuff. I can’t even install components like WSL, because that works through svchost, the single executable doing too much.
I’m using Simplewall for that. The prohibitions for MS shenanigans are a couple checkboxes in the menu.
