It’s a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The headlining feature of its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which is supposed to drive millions of PC sales over the next couple of years, is under significant fire for being what many say is a major breach of privacy and security on Windows. That feature in question is Windows Recall, a new AI tool designed to remember everything you do on Windows. The feature that we never asked and never wanted it.

Microsoft, has done a lot to degrade the Windows user experience over the last few years. Everything from obtrusive advertisements to full-screen popups, ignoring app defaults, forcing a Microsoft Account, and more have eroded the trust relationship between Windows users and Microsoft.

It’s no surprise that users are already assuming that Microsoft will eventually end up collecting that data and using it to shape advertisements for you. That really would be a huge invasion of privacy, and people fully expect Microsoft to do it, and it’s those bad Windows practices that have led people to this conclusion.

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    Ya, a PR nightmare for the next 15 minutes until the next unbelievable thing comes along and the ADD nature of people forgets windows is watching everything they do.

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      That’s usually what I think too, but after watching how Twitter’s gone to shit since the two big user departures, I think this could legitimately affect Microsoft’s bottom line.

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        That will rely on businesses moving away from Windows. That is where they make a ton of their money with Enterprise licenses and Office 365 subscriptions.

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            They do care about keeping their company secrets and proprietary info though. Recall could make corporate espionage a cake walk.

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            We handle a lot of IP on our Windows PCs so it’s debatable. However, in recent years, Microsoft has taken over most of our services with SSO, office 360, teams, etc so who knows.

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            If you look at sysadmin forums and groups it seems like most recommend disabling recall. Just about every enterprise will have confidentiality, security, or legislative requirements that recall is simply inconsistent with. It’s understandably been a hot topic.

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          Yup. It’ll depend on how they handle Recall at the institutional level.

          It’s a given that hospitals and law firms will have to turn it off, as they’re required by law to honor privilege. We’ll see what choices they make.

          I find the nosedive in Twitter’s stock price these last few years encouraging. It seems for many there is a red line.

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        I believe the biggest thing that will hurt MS is moving to subscription. The vast majority of users aren’t gonna wanna have a forever fee when they buy a laptop/PC

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          That’s definitely going to be a problem for them, yes, because it’s also going to drive a ton of traffic to Linux and Linux is going to get even better.

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      A lot of people would have huge bursts of negativity about this, but at the same time remain stubborn enough to not even consider evaluating alternatives. Microsoft and Apple spent decades making sure this would work

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        For now at least, I block as much telemetry at the network level (DNS level) using pihole.

        Annoys my wife and kid at times. I try to explain why and what it means but convenience is king unfortunately.

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          My mom only really browses the web, writes emails, and edits and occasional document. I’ve given her my old XPS 9350, with Fedora installed on it, and she’s been very happy with it. Keeps saying that everything just makes sense, and when she needs something, it’s easy to find. She’s far from tech savvy, but not completely clueless either

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      I’m swapping to Linux finally because of it. Few things are black and white but these things do have effects and some additional percentage of users are shifting over because of it.

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      I agree with your point, but I think it’s important not to forget just how shitty tech media is a holding these companies to account. Half the shit most mainstream tech journalist publish borders on hagiography for these companies.

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      Ok fine, I’ll repeat it again:

      You’re right - many consumers will likely forget about it and just use it anyways. But enterprise customers absolutely, categorically will not. Even with their damage control, this is still going to hurt them a lot. Moreover, it’s going to hurt hardware sales from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, all of which have dumped MASSIVE amounts of capital into this tech. This is going to slow the rollout of NN-optimized chip tiles, and that is going to directly hit their bottom line. Microsoft hurt themselves AND the three most important hardware partners they have.

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    Microsoft has built a number of safety features into Windows Recall to ensure that the service can’t run secretly in the background. When Windows Recall is enabled, it places a permanent visual indicator icon on the Taskbar to let the user know that Windows Recall is capturing data. This icon cannot be hidden or moved.

    Oh my, that one is really cute

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    I mean 95% of their customers probably don’t care or even know what Recall is but…

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          And that IT department also knows how to disable it with a single Group Policy

          It really is a none issue

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        There will be corporate editions that Let you turn it off. There is no way that get activated in defence related businesses.

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        Yeah, you can be damn sure I’m going to disable this at some grand level for my ORG if it makes it to us.

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      Yeah this. Fed up with sensationalist headlines that are far from reality. Us Lemmy users have a better understanding of what’s going on but we shouldn’t be falling for this journalism as it’s nonsense.

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      I’m learning about it as a result of this thread. I’m still on 10, but I know what to look for when I inevitably am forced to switch to 11.

      A number of things I use still aren’t supported on Linux

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    My dad is now pissed at both Microsoft and Adobe, and curious about Linux. If I can find a Lightroom alternative, he might actually switch.

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      A couple years ago it wasn’t thoroughly and transparently sucking off every bit of personal data it could get, and gearing up to put adds on the desktop on top of that.

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      I’ve always trusted them to do what they’re great at… which is get a product nearly 100% perfect, then back it up about 20%, and polish it off by shooting themselves in the foot.

      Which I’ve always found it insane that EVERY product they ship is like that. The only exceptions (IMHO) to that were Office, DOS5, Win7, (Maybe XP)

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    I figured on my gaming and VR rig that I’d begrudgingly upgrade it to W11 when W10 stopped receiving security updates and support but at this point the recall feature (which will be used to train LLMs regardless of what Microsoft promises or guarantees) has ensured that I never install that kind of spyware as an operating system.

    I’d rather spend forever troubleshooting and getting my Valve Index to work with Ubuntu than deal with a giant backdoor.

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      I wouldn’t go for Ubuntu. They are also run by a corporation that has done problematic things with the project. It also just doesn’t work that well anymore. Better off going for something Debian or Fedora based, or even an Ubuntu derivative like Pop OS.

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          It’s Debian-based, but Canonical has been really Microsofty about its development. They now have Snap as a universal packaging format, and have mandated that all official Ubuntu flavors (so X/K/Lubuntu and others, but not derivatives like Mint) must include Snap, and must not include Flatpak in the default installation. They’ve also fucked with APT where installing certain packages, like Firefox, would first install Snap and then the application’s Snap package, without even telling the user. They’ve had some controversy with Amazon ads in the search results, and advertising Ubuntu Pro in the fucking terminal. The default GNOME desktop also has a ton of issues.

          I, and many others, recommend against Ubuntu. Linux Mint is the most commonly recommended “just works” distro. That being said, switching to Ubuntu, if able, is still preferable to staying on Windows.

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            I agree most of this is fucked up, though I don’t know what search results you mean. Also, I always find it funny that people refer to the Ubuntu pro thing as “ads”. Yes it technically is, but it is a fuck ton less shitty than what we’ve come to know as ads in literally every other context. It’s literally a couple lines of text about packages you can get premium updates and support for

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              The Unity desktop’s search would display Amazon ads based on the query. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Conformity_with_European_data_privacy_law

              It’s like the “nazi bar” anecdote. It always starts small. You let in a bit of ads, a bit of self-promotion, then the revenue reaches a plateau. You let in a little more ads, maybe a pop-up saying that you could be more secure. Then a few years later you have a Recall situation. If you let one nazi drink at your bar, he’ll bring his friends, and you’ll be running a nazi bar.

              I don’t trust Canonical to act with integrity.

            • kurcatovium@lemm.ee
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              IIRC: about decade ago Ubuntu (still with its own Unity DE) processed system search in a way it shoveled amazon ads to users in first places. Or something lime that.

        • wolf_2202@sh.itjust.works
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          It’s debian-based, but such an outlier from the rest of the linux ecosystem that it might as well be its own beast.

        • zbb@lemmy.ml
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          Yes, it is, although there are many differences between both.

          Many suggest Linux Mint (one of the best regarded beginner distro) as well, which has two versions, one based on Ubuntu and the other on Debian.

          So, the three are like Debian’s most popular branch.

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          It varies. I struggle with its interface personally. I also had to force it to switch to Wayland to get some things working reliably. The hybrid graphics mode has issues too using the GPU when it doesn’t need to. Other than that it works reasonably well out of the box, though you still occasionally have to deal with headaches from apt. A lot of the issues will hopefully be fixed when the cosmic desktop is ready. Some more can be fixed if they end up going immutable, which I believe they are working on right now. The Ubuntu version is also kinda old.

          Personally I would rather be on NixOS or Fedora right now, or UBlue’s Aurora. I am probably not a good candidate to be running something like Pop OS though. I am too experienced and my needs and wants are too complex for the poor thing.

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            I am sure you’re right about at least most of this but I will say my experience hasn’t been very troublesome. Other than a driver issue I had after an update 2 years ago, I haven’t had much trouble. Since I switched to an amd GPU especially, since gaming is much smoother. I had a lot worse issues when I used Elementary OS. Stuff broke a ton. For example, I had a weird graphical issue in Firefox for months.

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              Elementary OS probably isn’t what I want either.

              Are you talking about a desktop? I am on a laptop with Intel iGPU and Nvidia dGPU. The battery life in Windows isn’t great, but it actually seems worse in Pop OS. I did actually catching it using the dGPU when it shouldn’t be. Obviously Nvidia doesn’t help things, and I am glad it works as well as it does. Still it’s kind of sad. I might buy a second laptop just so I can have battery life that isn’t horrible.

              Cosmic desktop from my understanding will have a better implementation of the hybrid graphics mode to stop this nonsense.

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                Yeah, desktops. I do think though that the Intel/Nvidia combo you have makes Linux in general a bit tougher than any setup more Linux friendly than that.

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                  Very common setup sadly, actually the second laptop I have had like this. I can’t imagine AMD + Nvidia is much better though, as Intel graphics has great support on Linux. KDE was probably a better bet, and I would have to change distro to get KDE 6.

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      I would also suggest not Ubuntu, and instead say you should give Bazzite a try. They are specifically interested in gaming with Steam (they even have a spin for running on Steam Deck). They might have already put in the work troubleshooting the distro with your VR gear.

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    I’m telling everyone I know it’s time to move to Linux, or worst case Mac.

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        How many times do people need to get fucked over by privatized black box software before they realize that FOSS has a point?

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          Just like people who are beholden to their politics or their religion, they’ll get fucked over as often as possible until they’re dead. The majority of people are tribal and sadly they see Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc as some kind of extension of their tribal identity.

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        Helping people to prevent their privacy from being completely screwed isn’t the same as feeling superior and smug about one’s choices, lifestyle, or where one lives. The sooner people understand the difference, the better.

        But sure.

        I also use Arch, btw…got any “witty” response to it?

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        I don’t know what this post means… but I want to learn.

        Are you Vegan and moved to Europe and now do CrossFit?

        That actually sounds like fun.

        Especially the linux part.

        Did you flee from a country that was awful and move to somewhere in Europe?

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      I have down-voted this because in a worst case scenario, they should move to a less appealing version of Linux, like Arch

      (waiting for my down-votes)

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    A lot of people here seem to be missing the nuance.

    Sure, it’s problematic for their consumer market share, but you’re right that that’ll probably be forgotten by the mostly tech-illiterate populace over time. But that’s not the problem.

    Step 0 of MS’s plan for this should have been “make sure there is an absolutely bulletproof and ironclad way to disable that stuff completely for enterprise customers”. And they didn’t do that. So now, enterprise IT writ large is going to… you know… just not buy any of these devices. Which is absolutely their right.

    But the really frustrating bit is that MS may have significantly harmed the rollout of ARM-based laptops (as well as x86 chips with beefy NN-optimized tiles) with this, and additionally done real, massive harm to Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm by doing so. All three of those manufacturers have gone to ENORMOUS lengths to roll this tech out, largely at MS’s behest. They’re all going to take this on the chin if the rollout goes poorly. And the rollout is already going poorly.

    But MS thought they could Apple-handwave away the details. And they can’t, because a lot of people who understand the absurd security implications of continuous capture and OCR and plaintext storage of the OCR output. It’s not something you can handwave away. It’s entirely a non-starter in the context of maintaining organizational security (as well as personal data security, but we’ve already talked about why that’s a bit of a moot point with the general public). But enterprise IT largely does try to take their job seriously, and they are collectively calling MS’s bluff.

    The problem for the long term is that MS has pretty much proven to the IT industry with this stunt that they can’t be trusted to make software that conforms to their needs. That’s a stain that isn’t going to go away any time soon. It might even be the spark that finally triggers enterprise to move away from MS as a primary client OS. After all, Linux is WAY easier to manage from a security perspective.

    TL;DR: the issue is that MS has significantly damaged their reputation with this stunt. And you can’t buy reputation.

    Edit:

    The article has an update:

    Update noon ET June 7, 2024: Microsoft has released a statement noting it is making three significant changes to how Recal works including making it opt-in during setup, requiring Windows Hello to enable Recall, proof of presence is now required to view your timeline, and search in Recall, and adding additional layers of data protection including “just in time” decryption protected by Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-in Security (ESS) so that snapshots will only be decrypted and accessible when the user authenticates.

    It’s definitely a move in the right direction… but it also begs the question of why didn’t they do that in the first fucking place? Seriously, some heads are gonna roll over how badly this whole release was planned, and the very clear lack of due diligence.

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      For anyone for whom Micro$oft’s reputation wasn’t already cartoonish villainy, sure.

      For those of us from the olde worlde, who marveled at dancing monkey boy on a grainy quicktime file, it’s absolutely par for the course. They can shutter everything but cloud tomorrow and still rake in 100 Billion a year for the foreseeable future. It was a monopoly thirty years ago (convicted 20 years ago) that has eaten and shat whatever and wherever it wanted for decades.

      The judiciary and congress don’t understand shit, and if they did m$ bought them. Done.

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    it isn’t a nightmare for them. they will be fine. they normalize everything they do

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      Yeah like I hate Microsoft, I am migrating to Linux, and the things I read about recall were pretty fucking horrifying to me. At the end of the day though the general public doesn’t give two shits about tech other than it works out of the box.

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      I use Arch since 2009 (BTW), but I think I’m planted in reality enough to know that the average user not only doesn’t care, hasn’t even heard about it. This will not even move the needle regarding usage.

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    Pfffttt, Microsoft has been there, done this, and got a whole closet full of tee shirts for stuff like this many times over the years. In the end the users don’t care and can’t stop it. And they are, by in large, too lazy to change to something else to completely avoid it.

    It hasn’t ever affected the bottom line enough to matter to them. They will just pull this bug feature and wait for a better day. Or perhaps they will figure out a way to introduce it piecemeal to disguise it better.

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      My problem is my work provided pc. Will I know when they enable this?

      Ideally i’ll resign before that happens.

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    All I want from an Os is to launch my programs of choice and not suck up my battery running unnecessary junk I couldn’t care less about.

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      The worst part is that Windows can do that, but Microsoft insists on enshittifying it. Like Windows 11 isn’t that terrible if it wasn’t for all of the data collection and advertisements and other shit.

      I miss the Windows 7 days where you could download a stripped down ISO that was just the OS. It launched your programs of choice and didn’t suck up your battery running unnecessary junk.

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        Last week, I went to a friend’s house and asked to use her computer, which is still a core 2 duo with 2gb of ram and an hdd, running win7. I was a bit surprised to see her family having it as their only computer, but more surprised to see how fast it was. I expected to have the most laggish experience of my life, but it was… smooth. I’ve used machines with much modern low end cpus, more ram and ssds that performed much worse than that on win10. The enshittification is real.

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          Yup. I can say for sure that SSDs were certainly a game changer, but now we have systems with like 10x the processing power that operate at the same speeds because the power has been spent on poorly optimized code and bloatware.

          Sigh… I’m going to have to start fucking around with Linux, aren’t I?

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            Yeah, the signs are starting to manifest. You will embrace the penguin at some point to get what you desire.

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      It is okay to be the person that always recommends Linux, especially if you are a kind person with the patience to explain things to people in approachable terms (and you don’t just scream at people SOMEBODY ALREADY ASKED THIS QUESTION USE SEARCH whenever a newbie walks in the door and asks the obvious questions a newbie would ask).

      Now is the time, Linux is pulled up out front waiting to pick us up (with bags packed) and Microsoft is loudly shitting the bed upstairs, NOW is the time to walk straight out the front door, jump in the car with Linux and never look back. We owe it to Microsoft’s long relationship with consumers to leave Microsoft sitting confused on the porcelain throne wondering why they were abandoned and where all the toilet paper is (we are the toilet paper in this metaphor).

      • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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        SOMEBODY ALREADY ASKED THIS QUESTION USE SEARCH

        I don’t understand this approach, if you don’t want to answer, just don’t answer. Why would you waste time writing that you won’t answer?

              • FilthyCheese@lemmings.world
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                I think people are happy to eat shit. They’ll complain about it, sure. But they’ll slurp it up like ice cream.

                Otherwise, MTX heavy games wouldn’t be rewarded so heavily.

                Early on, you’ll see some movement. Some people will transfer to Linux - most will go back. A bunch of outraged threads.

                But it will die down. People will just accept it. They always do. They always will.

                • dumpsterlid@lemmy.world
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                  But it will die down. People will just accept it. They always do. They always will.

                  I understand the frustration and cynicism that comes from wanting something to happen and waiting a good stretch of your life for it to do so but I am sorry, this is not reflective of reality.

                  Don’t mistake your own fatigue for the behavior of people in general.

                  Support for software on Linux or Wine is now orders of magnitude more complete and functional than it was 5-10 years ago. There are fundamental changes going on, just because we operated in a paradigm that suffocated the possibility of Linux adoption in the past doesn’t mean that paradigm will continue indefinitely.

                  There is a difference between being permanently powerless and being powerless under a certain arrangement of forces and actors.

                  We are entering a period of the status quo being smashed for better or worse in almost every dimension of our lives, what was likely to happen in the past 20 years does not reliably predict what is likely to happen in the next 20 years.

                  There is actually a true opening for Linux here in a way there never has been.

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            1 year ago

            I mean… how big really is the category of software tasks that you can’t properly do on Linux in 2024? I feel like it is getting to the point where you do genuinely have to be specific about what Linux can’t do that is a dealbreaker for you rather than just falling back on “Linux can’t do what people need to do” as a general criticism of it.

            Windows can’t do what people need it to do, and it fails to do so while sucking up your private data (which if you work at a business with confidential information IS a dealbreaker). At least when Linux fails it usually isn’t simultaneously violating the IT security structure of your organization….

            The funny thing is businesses and government entities can’t even claim with a straight face that they can trust Microsoft to adhere to the meager insufficient data privacy laws that do exist when there is zero evidence Microsoft would behave that way based on the track record even if the financial penalties for failing to do so were actually real to the ruling class and not just theoretical thought experiments that involve a slap on the wrist or more like a light tickling with a feather on the nose.

            • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Oh i totally agree with you. I have a feeling that the only real obstacle on the way out from windows is proprietary software, especially adobe and some custom apps for specific hardware.

        • I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Not sure about that. They try to get you to sign up for services, and they deliberately broke something with installing from certain file types.

          • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            It’s still perfectly functional and easy to use, just say no if they ask you to sign up to a service, if you come from windows you’ll ve surprised of how easy it is to dismiss those offers

  • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    It’s also important to remember that Microsoft has no monetary incentive to force people to use Windows Recall.

    With that in mind, there would be no reason for Microsoft to automatically enable Windows Recall in an update down the line. If it does happen, the user will be able to instantly tell thanks to that that visual indicator and turn it off again.

    This article is nothing but propaganda. There is huge monetary incentive to force people to use Windows Recall and collect their data, and Microsoft routinely uses Windows Update to enable data collection. They began that practice years ago on Windows 7. It’s a ridiculously simple matter for MS to disable the visual indicator and force This Week’s Plan on their users to monetize their data.

    Windows Central pretends to be critical of plans to enable a feature that can be made into malware by Microsoft in a couple of minutes, but then back peddles and says it can’t be done (utter BS) and if it could be, it wouldn’t be that bad.

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Even if the database remains local only forever, which I don’t believe for a second, the computer will eventually make hyperspecific requests for ads based on the spying.

      • Luccus@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Only data that is not stored cannot fall victim to attackers. It does not matter whether it is a ‘nigerian prince’, Microsoft or some agency. Even if you completly trust whatever entity with your data right now, they may become problematic in the future.

        This is why a low profile is a crucial component of OPsec.

        Recall is objectively stupid, even if Microsoft only had their users best interest in mind. And they don’t.

    • widw@ani.social
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      1 year ago

      You just wait and see. I’ll bet it goes all the way down to 96 and then they’ll really be sorry.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        MS’s frequent missteps - win11, total recall, ai inescapable etc., - may just finally catch up with them. While they continue to devour game studios and shut them down for irrational reasons, who knows?

        Stop being so negative and open your mind. Hell, MS did, you can use bash on the command line now. Times do change.

    • Tryptaminev@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Gradual shifts can snowball into huge shifts. a few years ago Linux gaming only existed for the dedicated crowd, that somehow managed to make it work. Now for many it is no different from their Windows experience for most games, sometimes even better.

      Think of it like bubbles pressing against each other. It matters not only how much pressure your own bubble has, but also how much pressure the other bubbles have in finding the equilibrium. The Windows bubble isn’t only weakening itself, the Linux bubble is getting stronger and stronger

      • MagicShel@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        For me, gaming was the one thing holding me back from really adopting Linux. When I got a PS5, I felt the time was right to make the switch, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find pretty much my whole Steam library works fine on Linux. VR still doesn’t work for me, but it seems to be getting there.

        There is still a lot of googling and frustration involved in using and maintaining it, but I’m slowly learning through exposure. There is nothing I want to do on a PC any more that I need windows for. If the auto update stuff worked better, I’d probably recommend it to everyone. But I’ve tried both Mint and Ubuntu and the software updater constantly runs into issues very quickly after install. I’m guessing because of all the different ways to install software, but I can’t understand why it doesn’t just apt update/upgrade behind the scenes because that seems to work just fine.

        • lastweakness@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          But I’ve tried both Mint and Ubuntu and the software updater constantly runs into issues very quickly after install.

          I have a Blue-Build based custom distro (not many customisations tbh), that I’m planning to ship for my sister as well as me. So far, updates have been painless because it’s just one base image overwriting the other. I have a feeling that that’s where Linux distros in general is headed. I can imagine Bazzite being just right for you if you’re into gaming.

          • MagicShel@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Primarily I use my Linux box for development, but I do like to game on the PC from time to time. And then also I like to connect to oculus for SteamVR. I haven’t been able to do that since I got off windows. Yeah, I could dual boot or whatever, but I just don’t want to.

            I’ll look into Bazzite because maybe I can move my kids’ computer to Linux as well. They do nothing but game/discord on theirs.

    • c0ber@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      i assume you mean that sarcastically but that is a nightmare for them and every bit of lost marketshare makes it easier to lose more

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Hey, if it makes some SVP not get their quarterly bonus then maybe we’ll see a marginal change for sex months! Maybe!