Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's Move Towards a Surveillance State
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
scottrlarson.comTechstoryHigh profile
heatedmixed
Debate
80/100
Windows 11Linux AdoptionMicrosoft Surveillance
Key topics
Windows 11
Linux Adoption
Microsoft Surveillance
The article discusses Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state with Windows 11, prompting some to consider switching to Linux, while others debate the practicality and feasibility of such a switch.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
N/A
Peak period
104
0-6h
Avg / period
16
Comment distribution160 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 15, 2025 at 9:00 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 15, 2025 at 9:00 PM EDT
0s after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
104 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 19, 2025 at 2:25 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45600338Type: storyLast synced: 11/22/2025, 11:00:32 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
So I have to decided to promote Linux over Windows for computers I build for customers. If you have any suggestions on how I can make this promotion, better let me know.
if you promote, facillitate, provide resources for installation free of charge, thats probably fine. providing a system for sale, with linux pre-installed, may require, at least some attribution.
Linux - the kernel is GPL 2 - that means you can use it to your heart's content. If you make changes, it would be nice if you shared them, please do.
A Linux distro will generally have a similar license. Again the idea is that positive changes that you make are made available to everyone.
That is the idea of the GNU Public License: If you take our freely available stuff and add to it, you should make your changes public too.
Seems fair!
the idea that positive changes are made available to everyone, is not yet broadly salient. at least now, poster is probably aware of that condition.
you seem to be up on GPL2 , what happens when someone packages distros on disk or stick, and sells them for profit ? thats something to be aware of as well.
On my motorcycle, there’s an option to view the software licenses used on the bike. The GPL is in there somewhere. So are a lot of other things.
And, no, during checkout at the dealer, we didn’t spend any time talking about software licenses.
As a bundler you’re obligated to provide the licenses. You’re not obliged to point them out, highlight them, point folks to links, or archives, or explain how they work or what rights users may have.
They just have to be available.
now the next is the nature of linux as a common good, generated by many contributors over some time. is it acceptable for anyone to turn a profit from distributing copies of linux on media, or as a component of a retail unit, for an additional price ?
how does that scale up? suppose thousands of ISOs or live distros are sold, enriching the seller by some thousands of dollars, is that ok?
could i, or you, or anyone, burn a couple hundred disks, or rufus thumbdrives, then sell them for $40 each, and have no concerns ?
the submission, links to what is clearly, a profit oriented business. what limitations exist? none if you just pack a GPL2 in with it? can he charge a fee as if he is selling linux to the end user? is public awareness, and availability a suitable contra for financial profit from sale of a product of many contributions from many individuals over many years?
just how philanthropic is the community?
GPL version 3 explicitly says "you may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey". The MIT license also explicitly allows selling the work.
No other free or open source license forbids selling either. In fact the Open Source Definition from OSI expressly says: "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources."
Linux distributions have been commercially sold for decades. Red Hat built its entire RHEL business on that, even when they still played nicer with open source. (Of course the key really was the support they provided to their paying customers but I think you still needed to pay to get your hands on RHEL anyway.)
Of course the problem you'd be facing if you wanted to sell free software at a significant price would be that since you can't forbid redistribution of the copies you sold (and you need to provide source code), someone else can take what you sell and redistribute it for free. So you can only really sell other people's free software if you either get ignorant people to buy it despite the same thing being available for free elsewhere, or if you provide something else on top of it that people are willing to pay for.
That severely limits the possibilities of making big bucks by just selling free software developed by others.
Perhaps the community is philanthropic to the point of providing free software for other people to sell. But the community or the authors of the licenses aren't naive. The possibility has been known from the start, as was the fact that it's after all quite difficult to charge a lot of money for selling something when free downloads are also almost guaranteed to exist.
I'd be a lot more concerned about how volunteers assume active maintenance burden and responsibility for software libraries that are used for free by just about every software company on the planet.
I don't see anything about trinsic2's (or anybody else's) promoting Linux or installing it on customers' computers that would be in contradiction with open source, even morally. I certainly don't see how a "license" could be required for doing so when the individual licenses of each included piece of software already permit commercial distribution. The only way he might need a separate license would be if he installed a distribution that's actually not entirely open source and bundles proprietary components that are not freely distributable.
theres nothing wrong with a wage for time and effort.
i think contributors could probably handle free coffees extended toward acknowledgement of the effort.
Well, you should, because doing so generally requires exploitation of the ignorant or an outright scam.
But the additional value provided might be as simple as (pre)installing the OS and making sure it works with the hardware. Or transferring the customer's data from their old OS for them. I see nothing wrong with charging for those. I might not pay for them since I can easily do them myself but they can be valuable services to others.
Hypothetically you could also sell copies of a distro on physical media to somewhere with poor internet access and it would be fine. People did that in the 90's even in rich countries.
Of course it all sort of depends on how much you charge and for what. You probably still couldn't charge $100 just for the copy without some kind of exploitation since informed people would figure out cheaper ways of getting it.
And of course if you just took an existing distro, changed its name and branding to RolphOS without adding anything of value, and then sold ISO images for $100 to the ignorant by presenting it as your unique special OS, you would get a bad name in the community. It probably still wouldn't violate copyright if all the software were open source, you didn't claim copyright for anything you didn't write and you retained the original licenses, but it would be scammy.
Assuming that someone has customers, they have a viable business model, that's what happens.
That was, in fact, the business model of most Linux distros before we were all terminally online.
Don't be shy. Tell us what you're concerned about and why you think that's an issue.
Are you implying some sort of illegality or breach of license?
Ever.
Forever.
A device can be woken up at silly o'clock and "apt update && apt upgrade && apt autoremove && shutdown -r now" can be run via cron.
apt as deployed by Debian itself has options for automatic updates (via cron), which is the better option. Have a look under /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/
It can't. The device is in my room and making noise when on. If that device wakes up and wakes me up, it's either getting a force shutdown (breaking the update) or getting in the trash. Plus the device is generally left in suspend mode, so shutting it down would interrupt my workflow.
[1] https://getaurora.dev/
The business customers might want to know that databases are a lot cheaper on Linux, especially for small business.
Literally spoke to an automation company the other week that told me "we have to delete a bunch of stuff every time the database gets near 10GB or we'll have to pay Microsoft".
Plus there's no license cost for linux itself either.
This stuff might not be viable for hundreds of employees in a business where MS is already entrenched, but for a small business it absolutely is a better deal.
I run firefox+UBO+privacy badger on my machines, and the only sites I've had to disable my privacy extensions in the last few years for were work related, B2B SaaS apps. A few years ago I pushed UBO to user machines (Chrome on win10) at work, and had a ton of user issues. I finally had to disable it, it wasn't a net benefit to us. It's not just a 'turn it on and leave it alone' thing, and people don't always think or remember to try toggling it off and reloading the page when they encounter issues.
That said, it's insane to me to be paying MS for a database with a 10GB limit, but I've seen their price lists. I've also worked with small businesses that don't have in-house IT, and they just end up overpaying for crappy service for many of those things.
I hope this win11 migration causes more MSPs and consultants to move small businesses over to linux though, MS has been predatory on pricing for business customers for far too long and with as much work has migrated to a browser there will be way less issues switching than there were years ago.
It's really easy to just say it's the LUsers fault and make pebkac jokes, and I definitely enjoy BOFH style humor, but honestly not everyone will remember the 30 seconds of training to go into this menu and toggle off an extension if netsuite throws a cryptic error or won't behave properly. I find it's better to have some empathy for other people, not everyone thinks like a computer and connecting 'I have this error message full of gibberish about API calls' and 'the IT guy mentioned 2 months ago that if a site isn't loading, I need to turn off this thing'.
Never had one and I have been using uBlockOrigin for a decade. If a SaaS doesn't work with it, report it to them or skip it (if not already vendor locked on it).
Probably an unpopular thing to say here, but in my experience pushing non-tech people to use libreoffice as part of a Linux transition is a fast track to getting them to hate Linux.
Using Google Docs has been much more welcoming in my experience. Something about libreoffice doesn’t resonate with a lot of non-tech people.
Categorized ribbon is an improvement for most people. Especially new generations who simply can't enjoy the effect of shared conventions with other software.
> LibreOffice is a UI time capsule..more archaeology than productivity.
I agree. Seeing the comments here claiming the outdated UI is a good thing, actually, brings up one of the big problems with a lot of open source and/or Linux soecific software: The resistance to UI change is huge among die-hard users so the projects tend to get stuck in whatever UI language they had a decade ago when they started
When I introduce people to open source versions of different software I find myself starting with “The UI has a steep learning curve, but…”.
It would be so much easier if we could give people apps that were targeted at familiar UI patterns of today, even if it angers a vocal minority who want every UI to look like it came out of the 90s or early 2000s when they first discovered their love of computers.
Oh, worse: stuck in whatever weird, half-baked UI decisions that were made because someone had a great idea that they did not test at all, or because they hated the industry standard approach that everyone else uses. It's no secret that Blender adoption exploded when they added normal menus, and then made right-click select an optional function, and then finally added an auto Maya-like interface option.
But that's one instance where we lucked out. Not just because they fixed it, but also because the thing that needed to be fixed was in users' face and obvious.
I'll grant that it's personal preference and OP should do what his customers prefer, but what you said is a good thing. UIs have sucked for some time now, so something which deliberately uses an older style is generally far superior.
My understanding is that the issue is the way OO/LO and the OS work together to handle file writes, which will not be changed because Linux distros do it right and Windows does it wrong and too bad that I was trying to use OO on a Windows PC. But I can't get a straight answer, and even if I were to, it wouldn't fix the bug - because the bug would be that I was using Windows. And now that I know that this is something that happens, I don't have any real guarantee that tomorrow the problem won't be the particular distro that I use, or whatever weird personal ax-to-grind led to the design decision that would now be giving me a headache. And that probably goes doubly for your average Windows user who doesn't really know what they're getting into.
Obviously, Google's support situation isn't any better. They've also had their share of catastrophic data loss fun-times. I genuinely don't know what the answer is.
As an example, I recently submitted a manuscript following standard format [0] with libreoffice. Nothing difficult, just basic professional functionality.
The only way to do it involved editing global default page styles (because custom page styles can't be used for title pages?) and other advanced features. Fair enough, at least it was possible. It's a shame the export process didn't preserve the formatting and screwed up page numbering.
I had to fix the manuscript in gdocs instead, where it was easy.
[0] https://www.shunn.net/format/story/1/
FWIW I'm not trying to interrogate you, I'm just trying to understand your perspective. From mine I just checked their checklist [1] and it's unclear to me what on that list you're suggesting required advanced features in Libre Office to achieve.
[1] - https://www.shunn.net/format/2024/01/a_brief_manuscript_form...
Libreoffice only allows either headers on all pages of a specific style, or no headers. So, how to apply a different style to just the first page? It supports that with the title page concept. But that menu only allows you to select either the Default and First Page styles, not custom styles you've added, so you have to modify the global defaults.
Then there's the numbering. LO requires headers to be the same across all pages, up to left/right distinction. That means you can't manually number. If you want to use the shunn "name/title/number" format you have to write "name/title/" and then enable the checkbox, accepting the slightly uneven spacing.
This is probably half a dozen menus altogether, which I consider advanced. It also confused the page numbering and tried to label the title page as the last page.
Another issue is that shunn's requires multiple alignments within a single line. This isn't directly supported in a reasonable way, but the same workarounds are required in MS word and gdocs so it's not like LO is especially deficient.
Smart quotes also don't work on copy-pasted text, only by a primitive typo correction system when typing. That's more of a personal process issue, since I was copying out of the markdown I do my actual editing in.
Exactly.
Just work in the finance or insurance industry for a year, and you will see how it is part of the daily workflow to use very obscure, advanced Excel feature combined with VBA. If a proposed Microsoft Office alternative cannot handle this, it's not suitable.
I personally observe that a lot of nerds who barely use Excel in their daily workflow patronising that ... (in particular LibreOffice) is an alternative to Microsoft Office. Better first learn how the actual powerusers' workflows (in particular for Excel in the finance and insurance industry) actually look like.
1. Got barcode reader and scanned some barcodes from books
2. Looked up these from online API
3. Wrote result in ISBN;Name;Year to output
4. Tried to copy result to Google Sheets
5. No import from custom CSV? (Excel has very good tooling)
6. Actually to split I had to use =SPLIT() and then copy paste results in weird way to actually be able to use first column...
Is this really better? Or good enough...
I have Libre Calc installed because I am on mint at home and even if it could do everything excel could do, I don't know how to do things the same way. Neither do most people. The personal experience and network effect is insurmountable for other software.
Most people using Excel/Sheets/Word/Docs are not power users. Pretty much all home use is covered by OpenOffice and that is the majority by user count.
Examples: [1] I selected a range of cells recently, by clicking and dragging, and when I let go of the mouse button, all of the selected cells shifted up and to the right by one cell, and CTRL-Z didn't undo it! [2] I have a workbook and when i duplicate a sheet with a chart, the chart is blank, so i have to delete it and re-insert a new one. [3] Sometimes the left-hand X-axis is cut in half, and I have no idea why, but if I create a new doc it goes away. I really, really want to promote LO, but it is very buggy. I can deal with it but I don't think others would.
Oh, another nifty feature of gnumeric: if you save it in its uncompressed format, it's literally .xml (good both for version control and for scripting certain kinds of things)
It's time for change. VMware have tossed themselves off into limbo and MS seem hell bent on alienating a vast swathe of humanity with W11's requirements - weirdest A/B test ever.
I'm working on some bigger clients ...
IMO, if they need Office, they should just use Windows.
IMO, if a user's needs can be met with a Chromebook, Linux + a browser + email + Zoom/or whatever would suit them well.
I think you're going to have a hard sell if they rely on Office or other Windows-only software, and although well meaning, it might be doing them a disservice if they can't run the software they're accustomed to.
I think this is even more true in the era of LLMs, because on the rare difference somebody might get hung up on - there's no longer real need for support. LLMs absolutely excel at questions like 'In MS Office I can do [x] to achieve [y]. How do I do that in Libre Office?'
For example, to be that supplier that whose documents never quite look quite right or who always struggles with the docusign /PDF /email /spreadsheet /whatever whatever.
For an SMB, fitting in with the de facto IT herd that is represented by your customers and partners is essential for survival. Sure, some SMBs do decide to buck the trend and move over, but it's hard and not for the faint hearted.
Time will tell if this problem solves itself as 365 becomes a pure web app and Windows becomes an RDP-like Cloud PC.
The irony of Bill Gates vision of a Personal computer where you run what you like and not what the mainframe gives your terminal becoming Windows where you consume what you are told to is not lost on me.
Linux machines don't normally include Arial due to the license, and only PDF/A includes the fonts used in the document.
In practice however most programs seem to include fonts in exported PDFs?
PDF/A has given me all kinds of issues (windows users get incorrect glyp placement with very bad results). Regular PDF has worked fine for me.
Which, as companies switch away from using Microsoft products, are now the people using Microsoft Office.
Everybody can open a PDF. Do you want to be the ones having problems sending Office documents to companies that have already stopped using it?
You have to open and edit documents you get from outside of the office. Clients regularly send me spreadsheets that don't work in Libreoffice, for example.
Why wait for mass survellience and remote attesention when u can have it today!!! :D
I avoid snap myself because I use apt, but apt is a hard sell and arguably not ideal as well. E.g. I added Spotify repos which in theory could break other packages. In practice this doesn't happen (probably due to Ubuntu essentially freezing major versions for packages in their releases).
Create a 'showroom', virtual through network screen sharing or physical if possible. Demo machines where you can let customers get a bit of immediate experience with GNOME, Xfce and possibly something more. You can walk them through checking their email, creating a document and doing a bit of web browsing.
Don't front 'Linux', it's a tainted word that is of no use to typical public sector and small to medium business people, preferably don't mention it. Instead talk about your solutions being secure, cheap, enterprise grade, customisable, long term supported, things like that.
The Linux choice matrix is confusing even for programmers. Like I can understand the pieces in theory, but in practice with hardware, user-installed software, varying degrees of compatibility between components, and updates...
The problem is not that they exist or that Windows 11 supports them. It's that Microsoft pretends they are required, when they are not.
But it's kind of MSFT's choice whether TPM and secure boot are requirements for their software. If their software makes security assumptions that the OS has access to trusted hardware then it's a requirement. One could argue that they should create secure and less secure versions of Windows, but I don't think anyone is really going to take that seriously beyond rhetoric.
There are a lot of advantages to assuming the hardware is mildly trustworthy. The downside is you may not want Microsoft to be controlling what counts as trusted on your machine. If so, then you probably don't want MSFT to have root in your machine either and you're better off with a different OS.
In an IT security context, "trusted" (example: "trusted computing") means distrusting the users.
TPM also enables things that average users care less about like DRM, but Passkeys are a good idea and having them more-secure-by-default is good for the average user (even with accidental vendor lock-in implications).
There are security boons, sure, but these are a side effects. They are not what TPM is for.
Stated primary intent by Microsoft for TPM is Passkeys (because Microsoft has key incentives to kill Passwords and reduce Phishing) and Netflix-class DRM (because people want to still be able to watch Netflix on their PCs).
Sure, Microsoft has also tried locked down "Store-only" versions of Windows (partly to appease Educators who moved to Chrome OS for that need/compliance requirement), but also has heard loud and clear that isn't the version of Windows that will drive sales from the market at every one of those attempts. At this point there should be no way that Microsoft still thinks they can lock down Windows as much as Apple and Google lock down their phones. If anything Android moving even more locked down seems to be a marketing opportunity for Windows to point out that they generally won't.
Microsoft isn't perfect, and isn't a monolith (I'm sure there are executives that wish Microsoft was in the position of Apple or Google right now), but the flip side, Microsoft is a company with products to sell and the market tells it doesn't want locked down Windows and for the most part Microsoft is incentivized still to not lock down Windows. Basic greed is an easier explanation for their past and future behavior than imagining some conspiracy where Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all in it together to kill the unlocked computer.
Microsoft has tried, and failed, before but there is a culture shift here. All platforms are becoming locked down and consumers are being accustomed to being treated like cattle. Some even prefer it, beg for it.
One day, the time will come, and Microsoft will have all the tools. Because you gave them the tools.
They can also often be used as a (slow) source of hardware randomness.
Most modern intel (seris 8 onwards) and AMD Zen onwards have fTPM too. Often these can be enabled in the bios during upgrade then disabled again.
Personally I upgraded to Win11 the moment it became available, but that's because I want to continue my run of free MS windows forever and I only ever boot into it to play games, with even that becoming less common.
I think that's what "artificial limitations" mean. Microsoft pretending they are required when they are not.
If you want to add better security to a computer make it opt-in and not expect people to use it who don't need it.
Win11 is a hard no, I’m keeping a laptop with Win10 for the small amount of games I play. I will likely even try WINE for them soon but just haven’t got around to it.
I have a bog standard AMD graphics card that does not work in Linux. I've tried multiple distributions and version in those distributions and both the Linux and AMD drivers. It just randomly flashes. Where do I go to get help? Who knows?
I hear you though, I still have printing problems with my Epson WF printer.
AMD's kernel developers are incredibly responsive there, I've worked with them to fix a bunch of bugs I've run into.
Use-case is:
* Dual-boot where I choose in BIOS/UEFI to go to either the existing Win10 drive or new Linux drive.
* I don't need unattended boot at all, I'd rather enter a passphrase every time.
* Resistance to evil-maid attacks is nice but not top-priority compared to theft.
* I want to be able to take my drive out of a dead computer and access it elsewhere if something goes wrong, as opposed to needing to reformat and reload from backups.
* If I install a distro with secure-boot off, can I turn it on later for benefits, or vice-versa?
So for it to be effective against the evil maid, you really need to bind the LUKS key to it. But you can do that _and_ set a strong PIN for your LUKS key.
1. Your data on the drive/partition is encrypted by $BIGKEY, which basically never changes because that would require redoing everything.
2. The LUKS header stores one-or-more encrypted versions of $BIGKEY, generally encrypted using a more convenient $SMALLKEY that a human could memorize. Optionally, $PIN can also be part of the encryption step.
3. Unlike $BIGKEY, the $SMALLKEY and/or $PIN can be changed over time. This changes the ciphertext of $BIGKEY and rewrites the LUKS header.
4. Optionally, secure boot is capable of storing and retrieving $SMALLKEY into system chips in such a way that most tampering ought to destroy $SMALLKEY.
> So for [Secure Boot] to be effective against the evil maid, you really need to bind the LUKS key to it.
If my $SMALLKEY is not stored inside the secure-boot chips, I can see how that would be inconvenient, but I'm not sure how that is safer.
Is it because the route $SMALLKEY automatically travels bypasses tricks like a hardware keylogger?
Your drive does need to support OPAL though, check out sedcli for managing SEDs.
Just put linux's boot drive on a removable USB that has boot priority over the builtin drive. Then configure UEFI secure boot so that it works for both windows and your custom keys.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Sakaki/Sakaki%27s_EFI_Inst...
This setup has the added benefit of making it so that windows can't overwrite your linux boot drive, but from linux you can still access your disk from disklocker
Other than that, FDE and Secure Boot are unrelated.
The board's UEFI will boot the EFI binary that is either your kernel + initramfs (UKI binary), or a bootloader of your choice that then boots your kernel + initramfs. Depending on your distro, you may have a bootloader like grub or systemd-boot that is already signed by the MS third-party CA and your board may already allow the third-party CA, in which case you don't need to generate and sign with your own keys. Otherwise generate your own keys, set up Secure Boot with them, and then figure out how to sign your UKI binary / bootloader binary with those keys.
This initramfs will then be responsible for locating and mounting your root etc partitions. For a systemd distro using the UAPI Discoverable Partitions spec (use a specific type ID for the root partition), systemd has a builtin cryptsetup target that will prompt you on tty to enter the LUKS password for that partition. Otherwise investigate your distro's initramfs options for doing that.
>* Dual-boot where I choose in BIOS/UEFI to go to either the existing Win10 drive or new Linux drive.
grub and systemd-boot both show menus to select one of the available EFI binaries to chain to. Otherwise your UEFI might give you a similar menu.
>* I want to be able to take my drive out of a dead computer and access it elsewhere if something goes wrong, as opposed to needing to reformat and reload from backups.
Any other PC can mount and decrypt the drive with cryptsetup just like your original PC could, as long as you specify the same password.
>* If I install a distro with secure-boot off, can I turn it on later for benefits, or vice-versa?
Yes. You will launch board's UEFI, set the SB status to "Setup mode", boot your OS, then generate and enroll new keys which will set the SB to "User mode" and start enforcing signatures on next boot. And if it breaks you can set it back to "Setup mode" in board's UEFI, boot the OS and troubleshoot / re-enroll keys. The OS wouldn't care that you had previously enabled SB but are now booting with SB disabled.
Note that Secure Boot != Measured Boot. With a standard Measured Boot setup the disk encryption key is protected by secure element on the board (eg TPM) measuring the boot chain, so your disk will automatically decrypt when the boot chain matches the previous measurement and automatically fail to decrypt when it doesn't match. Your concerns about failing to decrypt the disk apply to this setup, not to SB. But also LUKS-encrypted partitions can have multiple keys to unlock them, so you can have both a Measured Boot-guarded encryption key and an emergency fallback password to unlock the disk manually.
You can set HDD/SSD password via the BIOS/UEFI or (my preferred method) using HDPARM —SECURITY commands.
Then if you take the drive out you can unlock it from another computer so as long as you plug it in directly and the UEFI supports HDD/SSD unlocking during post; if not you can install a Pre-Boot authentication on the drive that runs Linux to unlock the drive and then once unlocked it with the PBA it re-boots and it works as a normal un-encrypted drive.
Look into HDPARM and OPAL standard for full disk encryption.
Try to identify the problems the customers have. If privacy isn't one of their concerns, convincing them to switch PC OS is not a great fit on that basis.
Normies desperately want privacy, but think it is too hard to do, they're too dumb to figure it out, even if they figure it out it still won't really work, and that they won't be able to use stuff that they don't want to live without. They are often right, because they are smarter than they think and the industry is working against them full-time. A lot of people's incomes (on this very site) depend on keeping normies ignorant.
I feel like there needs to be some way to explain the changes to Windows 11 as hostile from a longevity perspective with the ads and the lock-in.. With one-drive being activated and moving customer data to the cloud without consent, the LLM that gets in the way of the user experience, recall, ect. It would still be their choice but at least they would know what they were getting into..
I feel like id be doing some justice by letting customers who qualify (who don't have use-cases that Linux cannot handle) know that its a better experience because Microsoft is creating friction in the desktop experience now..
But of a bait and switch from that to the actual article title…
> Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state
If nothing else adhering to HN’s guideline on titles would have saved me having to suffer through reading “recomming.”
332 more comments available on Hacker News