> droves of people are proclaiming they will proudly switch to Linux or Mac in the wake of it
Citation needed. What kind of rag is this? The entire article is full of falsifiable claims without any links to surveys or any sort of data. They have screenshots of tweets or whatever, but that's essentially useless.
I am absolutely not defending Microsoft's moronic behavior here, but I have a hard time believing the VAST majority of Windows users have even heard of Recall, much less are concerned about it, and even fewer would have the wherewithal to even be able to switch.
To me, even on paper it's a terrible idea. I never want this, ever, or anything like it. I imagine this hypothetical paper as just having the words "your computer is now a way to create a vector describing your buying characteristics" and there's a big circle drawn around it, and all the Ss have been turned into dollar signs.
We launched a FOSS alternative two days ago OpenRecall https://github.com/openrecall/openrecall we're fleshing out the roadmap to build a more privacy-friendly/auditable/secure alternative that is not dependent on OS or specific hardware
As much as I think this is bad i doubt it makes much of a difference for the enterprises that buy microsoft. It's mostly journalists and devs complaining about it, not the people with the money and that make decisions.
I used Windows to develop daily from 2015 or so to 2022 because it just worked. I switched to Linux because I just got tired of all the management I had to do to get the OS out of my way, and also the "just worked" part was starting to become less true.
Desktop Linux sucks, but at least it's not pulling the crap MS pulls. I like Linux Mint. I also use PopOS and am moving away from it to LM with XFCE on all my machines.
I’m a ex-Mac user who switched to Windows a few years ago due to Apple’s soldered RAM and storage. I am considering making a switch to FreeBSD for my Framework laptop (contingent on driver support; otherwise I’d use Linux) and my daily-driver Ryzen 9 desktop. Linux would be fine for me, but I have a preference for FreeBSD.
I admit that I will miss Microsoft Office (I currently have an Office 365 subscription), but after reading about the latest changes made to Photoshop’s TOS, I’m not confident about the future of other SaSS providers, and I’d like to transition to FOSS tools that respect my privacy, even if these tools aren’t as feature-rich as their proprietary counterparts. Plus, in the case I need Microsoft Office or other proprietary tools, I have an old 2013 Mac Pro that I could boot up, and I have a perpetual license for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.
I’m increasingly concerned about the future of personal computing. It seems that there is a trend toward increasingly locked-down devices that serve the vendor rather than the user.
>I’m increasingly concerned about the future of personal computing. It seems that there is a trend toward increasingly locked-down devices that serve the vendor rather than the user.
I feel like tech companies are constricting their future talent pools by doing this. But maybe they want to kill their future competition too. You already get university students now who don't know what files and folders are, which they need before moving into the basics of navigating a command line or source tree.
Usable and accessible computers are great. But locking them down to the point of eliminating user agency and learning seems really shortsighted.
I’m not the person you posed this question to, but I’d recommend the general strategy of making a list of features and functionalities that you personally need and want. By making your decisions against such a list, you are less at the whims of trends because unless your needs change, your tool doesn’t need to. The key is to be honest about what you really need. Applies to all of life, really.
Notepad++ ...There are alternatives, but none that save the current session (including unsaved files). The best option was to run it through Wine, but that seems overkill for a notepad style app.
And thats my beef every time I switch to Linux, I come back to Windows because the apps in Windows are there and it just works. I used Linux Mint for a year, but it was a lot of finding similar but not quite as good apps as what I would use on Windows.
Plug for FreeOffice, a file-compatible MS Office clone for Mac and Linux! (That said, MS Office is cloudified now, afaik, so you might be able to continue using it on the web.)
I'm not so sure about that. Many people who write software have learned not to care about anything other than developing for the platform(s) where the users are, in the most expedient way possible. So unless there really is a mass user exodus from Windows, which I doubt will happen, we'll continue to develop for Windows.
It's not so much that nobody cares, it's mostly that nobody has real agency over their os. Replacing it with linux still involves a lot of steps that make it impossible at scale
@Dang - is it possible to update the URL please?
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...