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 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 drew the line at “Ads in the start menu,” and fully switched when a game that I’ve played on and off for ~15 years started working on Linux. I’ve been using Linux for most of my life, but I uninstalled Windows for the last time about 4 years ago
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.
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 responded, “Now it’s just Microsoft bad! Trust me bro!”
You fucking “cool it with the attitude.”
BTW - I’m not your research assistant and 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. 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.
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.
Cachy is reallt cool, they even have their own kernel version made for gaming compatibility I believe.
The line is between my home and the office. Linux at home for nearly twenty years and windows at work because so few know better.
I only use Windows at work because that is what they have me on my work laptop and I haven’t replaced it. I just use Linux in a VM instead. That way I don’t need to explain a thing to internal IT, but just work within the VM.
My work is maintaining a distributed windows network. Domain controllers VM’s and over a hundred workstations in several locations.
Just be aware that using a VM without telling IT can jeopardize your company’s IT insurance in case of an attack and can get you fired for cause.
can jeopardize your company’s IT insurance
Sounds like something they don’t pay me enough to care about
OK but if getting fired is also something they don’t pay you enough to care about, then you might as well stay home.
It’s pretty unlikely though
Yep. IT gives everyone Windows, and I don’t have an important reason they would grant me an exception. So Linux stays at home
IT would give you whatever you wanted. Management insists on windows because reasons. All of my domain controllers and most of my VM’s run on KVM/QEMU. All of our digital signs run raspberry pi’s. Simple truth is that most shops run windows due to long standing tradition. One they will not question.
Eh, I’m sure it’s some combination of legal’s opinion on risk, purchasing’s contract with Microsoft, and IT’s desire to stop end users from breaking things. At the end of the day, it doesn’t bother me too much
I am IT where I work. It has nothing to do with legal where I work. It just ingrained habit and opinion. I have several linux machines running there now and no one has noticed expect one lady who commented ‘it never messes up anymore’ in reference to a kiosk they use to look up items. Over the last five years I have improved things there until the only problems I have are windows problems. Killing the microsoft store was a big move forward. Now no local admin actually keeps people from installing programs on their own.
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.
I’ve played it on Linux by installing Battle.net through Lutris. There are guides specifically about how to do it.
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 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 drew the line when my Windows box told me I couldn’t do something even with admin. Kid, you work for ME, not the other way around. Always preferred Linux over Windows, but I had issues with games on it. I just decided that I wouldn’t play any games that didn’t work. That was a couple of years ago now, and things have only improved since. My fiance, who is not a technical person, even decided she wanted her new PC to run Linux unprompted, which is a hell of a win for Linux and for me in not having to support a Windows box in the house.
Windows 10 stops working for my purposes (gaming, browsing internet, office docs, some other windows exclusive programs).
Unfortunately with the way you asked, and especially with asking on Lemmy, you’ll get a lot of tech saavy people, and FOSS enthusiasts. You’ll also get a handful of people here who can’t help but talk down to anyone who dares to say that Windows isn’t just the fucking worst.
I’m primarily Windows, with an Ubuntu VM for working with obscure FOSS utilities (like I had to use someone’s college project to recover data off a USB HDD where the enclosure broke, and it turned out the manufacturer used whole disk encryption so you couldn’t just shuck it and go, but it was thankfully trivial with the key stored in a specific sector) and to work with github projects that only provide build instructions for Linux.
I run a personally customized and debloated install of Windows 10 Pro on my desktop, and Windows 10 Ameliorated (someone else’s debloat setup I cribbed a decent amount from) on a laptop that is mostly used as a remote endpoint for the desktop through sunlight/moonlight (whatever the open source version of nVidia streaming is). The debloating took maybe 4 hours (6 if you include the time to figure out how to stream updates and drivers into the install media) and I’ve had no issues with any of the shit people complain about. I’m in control of my own updates (although you can’t delay them indefinitely, you can push them back multiple weeks and prevent auto-restarts), no onedrive, stripped out telemetry shit and blocked through host file and DNS in case any was missed or added later. No updates have reset any settings I’ve set, despite the common insistence that everyone says they do.
But I also have almost a decade in supporting Windows, from intro IT help desk to many years as a sysadmin and IT infrastructure “engineer”. I know what levers Microsoft has built for businesses to use to kill the bullshit, anf I cry at just how ridiculously bad a shit ton of Windows advice online is.
As far as Linux goes, I’m no stranger to it, and have been poking around with it since Knoppix was one of the only options (if not the only) for live-boot. I’m the go to guy on my team for the few Linux based appliances we run that don’t belong to the network team. I want it to be a competitive alternative for corporatized software.
But I bounced off it in the mid-late 00’s as I got tired of how much tinkering it took. By the time I was interested in checking it out again, I was working in IT, and nothing drains you of energy to tinker with computers at home like doing it eight hours a day for work. I wanted my stuff at home to just work, to the point that I even was mostly gaming on console.
I’m out of my burnout now, built a new desktop when I got my sysadmin/infra position, and built up a homelab of VMs to try (and fail to) speedrun studying for the MCSE before MS stopped offering it, since I work in a primarily Windows environment.
Whenever I finally get some free time, I plan to sit down and document customizing Win11 to not suck for the sake of all the people online that insist it simply isn’t possible at all… and to set aside a dedicated drive to try out some more modern Linux distros again.
But I’ll be honest, most Linux troubleshooting stuff still seems to be pretty finicky and still a tradeoff compared to the amount of stuff that “just works” on Windows (nVidia GPUs, HDR, VRR for a few examples). Definitely far better than it used to be, but still not to the point where the OS just gets out of your way. Windows still seems to be able to get to that point more easily.
I hope to proven wrong in my opinions about the current state of things.
I hate Windows more than anything or anyone in this world. Pretty sure my blood pressure is up a little just thinking about dealing with that OS.
Last time I used Windoze was to create a live usb to install Linux.
The AI nonsense would need to personally disrupt my user experience on a daily basis.
I’ve already made up my mind about switching due to the AI nonsense that has already happened, but I’ve been putting off actually doing anything about it.
Every tool for it’s job.
I have 4 windows boxes 5 linux boxes and 3 macs in the house.
I will not force the children off Roblox I will not buy the children macs. I will not put forth monumental effort for a substandard experience just to get rid of windows.
If roblox gives in to linux with a native app or wine, (or they age out of roblox) I’ll give it a test run with the kids assuming they don’t have another game that requires the same.
I cannot eradicate the last Windows box for work because there are closed things I must occasionally deal with. That said it’s use is around once a week.
I will eventually eradicate my security camera VM, but I need a lot of time to work on frigate.
Roblox is banned in our house. Not due to o/s concerns, but child grooming concerns. Snapchat, also banned.
There’s no chat for underaged kids anymore, so it’s less of a concern.
You can run Roblox on Linux with “Sober”.
It’s the android emulation client
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It’ll only work until they decide to make it not work. When it stops working I’ll have to reinstall windows which would be worse.
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It does not preform well and the controls are different. For really big builds in build a boat and obstacle courses, it underperforms enough to make them upset.
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Frigate’s setup is a bit fussy at first but is well worth the time and effort. I’ve been running 2 instances for two years and can count the number of false positives on one hand.
So what I have going on is Blue-Iris. I have a load of pixel barriers and notifications wrapped around times. If someone opens the community mailbox not between 2 and 4 pm on week days or 11am on Saturday, it sends me a webhook ntfy with the image and an emergency alarm (mail thefts been happening). I have it doing ALPR on two streets and then I have alarms for humans in the driveway and humans on the back porch at specific hours with more webhook ntfy. I dedupe alarms and use Blue-Iris for scrubbing and storage.
My cameras are super good at AI person detection and provide it through ONVIF so I don’t know that I’ll get a lot more out of it, but getting rid of the Windows laptop running the job would be nice.
I believe Frigate can do all that, but you’re looking a huge investment of time to duplicate your Blue-Iris configuration. If it were me I’d be tempted to put up with Windows until something forced a change.
were me I’d be tempted to put up with Windows until something forced a change.
I’ll get to it eventually before it breaks :) Of all the windows needs, that’s the lowest hanging fruit.
Home Assistant already draws feeds from the cameras in tandem, so the alerts themselves could be replaced easily, but getting the offending image and the pixel barriers would require Frigate. I’ll probably build it up in a container and pass through a USB Coral
You may not even need the Coral. I moved from a old system with an ancient CPU and usb Coral to a small laptop with a Intel N200 processor. The N200’s object detection is just as fast as the Coral with almost no impact on CPU utilization.
If I could do it fast enough, the windows laptop has a decent mobile gpu
But I kinda want to do it in a VM, and i’d rather pass through the coral than suck up the cpu cycles on the box from the other vm’s
Seems like there’s work around for Roblox on Arch but it uses closed source tech. Still maybe an improvement over Windows if you haven’t given it a try.
Thanks for looking it up, I’ve already been there, it’s Android emulation and it doesn’t perform well enough for what they’re doing. One is doing split timing stuff, and the other is doing perverse things to build a boat that won’t even run under native Android.
Back when the straight wine client was allowed, it was good enough I could have switched, but I walk have been back where I am now.
I’m a bit concerned that even if I did convince them to use an emulator, Roblox would get a case of the ass and block it as they did for Linux.
As disappointed as I am that they’re stuck in Windows, I’d be irrationally angry having to reinstall Windows.
Ah that’s unfortunate. Hopefully they can fix their rectal cranial inversion and just allow people to play the game.
At work I’m paid for it. The software is very much specialised and while probably possible to run under Linux it’s just too much of a headache.
I did install Linux on our SVN server though.
