This blog post is my personal opinion. Except where otherwise stated or cited, I am not portraying my opinions as immutable facts, I am simply expressing my personal opinions and concerns.
Several years ago I purchased a Nokia Lumia 640 phone. It had been years since I had owned a smart phone, having opted to carry around a “dumb” phone, or what might now be referred to as a feature phone; a very basic flip phone with some very basic apps and games written in Java. I only know this because whenever you’d open one of these very basic games it would almost always have a little logo that said “Powered by Java”. My wife and I were doing some shopping at a newly opened Cabela’s in Lexington, KY. We’re not from Lexington though, so we’re not intimately familiar with its layout. After Cabela’s we decided we wanted to do some more shopping and maybe grab a bite to eat, but we had no idea where we were. We talked it over and just decided we’d run into the nearest department store, which happened to be a Target, and grab a reasonably priced smart phone. When we got there I noticed there was a Cricket Wireless Nokia Lumia 640 that ran Windows 8. I set it up real quick in the car and used the pre-installed maps application (Bing?) to find an Applebees nearby to eat dinner at. I carried that phone for ages and fell in love with it. The interface looked polished and felt responsive, the camera was great considering the price of the phone, the apps were stable, and the device “just worked”. The phone eventually received an upgrade to Windows 10. I began to enjoy using Cortana to do all kinds of things from placing calls while I was driving to setting reminders, playing music or even just turning on my flashlight while my hands were full. I loved the Windows Phone platform so much that when, after a few years, it got damaged and needed to be replaced, I ordered an Alcatel Idol 4S with Windows Phone 10 so I could continue using the platform I had grown to know and love to stay in touch with friends and family and to get things done.
A couple of years after I bought the Lumia 640, I decided that I wanted a gaming PC. Part of that process was purchasing a copy of Windows 10 Home Edition to install on it. I had used Linux quite a bit over the years, but when it comes to gaming, Windows is the go-to operating system because the overwhelming majority of PC games, if not all of them, are targeted at Windows, with Linux and Mac OS being an occasional afterthought. Since the primary purpose of that PC was going to be gaming, I wanted to be able to play games without having to fiddle with and tweak things constantly; I wanted my games to “just work”. I eventually even set up Cortana on my PC as well so I could create reminders. One thing in particular I found useful was simply asking my computer to give me the weather report and read some news headlines while I got dressed for work. Cortana would give me the current conditions and the upcoming weather forecast, and read some news headlines to me, without ever having to actually touch or interact with my PC. Reminders created on my PC would automatically show up on my Windows Phone so I could say things like, “When I’m near the Dollar General Store, remind me to pick up toilet paper”, and sure enough, the next time I was near that store my phone would beep at me while sitting at the red light and remind me to pick up toilet paper, or whatever it was I wanted to be reminded about that day. Gaming on Windows on that PC was some of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I had never before played games at such high framerates and resolutions. I had gamed on PC in the past, but there was a big difference between playing World of Warcraft at 20fps on a laptop, or cranking down the shadows on Morrowind to get it to run at 30fps at 1024×768, and playing Resident Evil 7 at max settings with a locked 60fps and a 27inch curved monitor.
As you may have surmised from the title however, my love for all things Microsoft didn’t last forever. From privacy concerns to sudden performance problems with games that used to run fine, from the abandonment of Windows Phone to sudden hardware issues with untested Windows Updates being pushed out to the public, I soon found myself running back to Linux. I’d like to take this opportunity air some grievances I have with Microsoft and the current state of their products, and why I not only stopped using Microsoft products, but stopped trusting Microsoft enough to use their products again, unless they make some big changes in the future.
Whether it was mis-management or a lack of good marketing, a lack of hardware deals, etc., they abandoned Windows Phone, which I was using on a daily basis. Windows Phone wasn’t at its peak, if there ever was a “peak” for it, even when I bought my Lumia 640, but it was usable, and useful. It was a viable alternative, especially for those who didn’t have a need for specific apps that weren’t available on the platform. I had all of the Microsoft apps that I used such as OneNote, Outlook, Maps, etc., plus Facebook and Facebook Messenger, an official app for my bank, a web browser, Pandora, a KeePass app for accessing my KeePass database, etc. All of the apps I wanted were there, and then some. As time went on however, apps slowly started disappearing. Mobile games stopped working due to a lack of updates, Facebook got pulled so I had to use the Facebook mobile page in the Edge browser; even the app for my bank eventually got pulled so I had to use their mobile page, which was not feature complete and meant I couldn’t scan in paper checks. The “app gap” that wasn’t that bothersome at first became more and more obvious, to the point that even the Android versions of Microsoft applications were getting more features and updates than the versions on Microsoft’s own mobile operating system. I was still wary of the prying eyes of Google though, so I stuck it out for as long as I could. Eventually there was a big security update for Windows Phone 10 pushed to my Alcatel Idol 4S, after which the operating system itself, the reliable foundation upon which my mobile life hinged, became an unstable and unreliable mess. The phone would randomly restart, it would randomly freeze during a phone call; sometimes in ways where I could hear the other person, but they couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t interact with my phone, and sometimes in ways where the screen literally froze and nobody could hear anything and I would just have to hard reset the device. Microsoft apps that previously worked fine would freeze or crash randomly. A couple more updates to the operating system were pushed, none of which ever restored my phone to a state that could be called reliable. I even tried doing a factory reset on the device, and as soon as I started installing Windows updates the issues started cropping up again, so my choice was to continue using it in a vulnerable state, or deal with constant crashes. In the time that I was a Windows Phone user it went from a new, different platform that I was excited to try and found useful, to something that could not reliably perform the most basic “phone” related task of placing a call, and Microsoft seemed indifferent as they begain pouring effort into porting everything good about Windows Phone over to Android via their library of apps.
I had heard complaints about Windows 10 prior to purchasing it myself, but I needed it to play games. At first everything was fine, it functioned as expected and I was able to play my games just fine, most of the time. As time went on however, my frustrations with the PC operating system grew. Several things happened that caused me to eventually replace it, most of them a result of bloat and Microsoft’s move from selling software as a “product” to selling it as a “service”.
For example, even though I paid the full ~$100 price tag for a license key, upon installing it one of the first things I noticed was that it was randomly installing things like “Candy Crush Saga” in the background without my permission. If I had bought an HP pre-built from Walmart I might expect to find garbage like this bundled with it, but this was coming straight from an official OEM copy of Microsoft’s operating system, and being installed on a PC that I built myself. This was now a part of Windows itself, and to the best of my understanding, is the kind of thing that Microsoft wanted to eliminate when they introduced their “Surface” line of products. They wanted users to have a positive out of the box experience that didn’t include adware, free trials, etc. In the past, even if you bought a pre-built PC, you could get a stand-alone install disc of Windows XP or 7 or whatever and install it, and it was JUST the operating system; you didn’t have to spend several hours removing all of the bundled crapware, you could just install Windows Updates and start working. With Windows 10 all of a sudden you’ve got games, shortcuts to Amazon and TripAdvisor and all the normal garbage you would expect to come bundled on a pre-built PC, but now it’s coming directly from Microsoft themselves, and the ultimate slap in the face is that paying $100 for the software doesn’t get you a version without this nonsense, you have the same experience whether you use it for free and deal with the watermark, or pay the full retail price. This leads right into the privacy concerns. One of the biggest changes in Windows 10 is that it regularly “phones home” or sends metadata back to Microsoft with details about what files and applications you open, your system configuration, etc. What’s worse is that this cannot be completely turned off. You can adjust it somewhat, but your selections often get reset to their default state when you install updates. When installing Windows the option to create a local only account isn’t even visible if you’re connected to the internet, forcing most people who don’t know better to sign into a Microsoft account, at which point your contacts, calendar and other personal information get shared with Microsoft instead of staying local only on your PC, and further identifying you in the metadata your PC sends up to Microsoft so that they can serve advertisements to you and show you “Suggested Apps” in the Start menu. The privacy concerns have gotten to the point that there are literally third party apps and walkthroughs on how to tweak the registry so that people can use Windows with at least some semblance of privacy, keep it from randomly reinstalling games without user consent, etc.
Another thing that started happening was that the Windows Updates were unpredictable at best. I read several articles about one broken update after another, some of which deleted users’ files, but none of that ever happened to me. Then one day I installed a Windows Update and all of a sudden my audio over HDMI didn’t work any more. It was there, I hadn’t changed anything about the configuration, and in the sound properties dialog, when I would play sound, the meter would react as if sound was being played, but nothing actually came out of my speakers. I made sure my graphics card drivers were up to date and everything, tried disabling and re-enabling the device, uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers altogether with DDU, moving the graphics card into a different PCIe slot, etc., and nothing helped. A day or two later, an article came out talking about how my very issue was affecting other people wich certain graphics cards. Mine was an AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB, a reasonably popular graphics card at the time, and probably still in use quite a bit today, so it’s not like I was using some oddball graphics card that they couldn’t test, it was, at the time, one of the most popular cards on the market, and an official Windows Update broke the audio over HDMI that went through it.
Performance hitches were another thing that seemed to crop up randomly. There were times I’d be playing a game, everything would be fine, and then out of the blue my framerate would tank, or it would start spiking up and down. It would stay at 60 for a bit, and then bounce around between 30 and 40 for a while, then back up to 60 for a minute, then drop back down again, seemingly at random. I’d alt+tab out of the game and some random process would be eating up 100% of my disk bandwidth. Sometimes it was the “Windows Search Indexing Service”. Others it was just the “System” process, or some sub-function of it that wasn’t explicitly named. Sometimes it was Windows Defender. Other times it was Windows Update. When I tried killing whatever process was eating my frames that day, it would usually immediately respawn itself, so my only choice was to try and finish my match or get to a good stopping point and wait for my computer to finish whatever it was doing. These issues continued even after the update (I think it was 1803) that added the “Game Mode” feature that was supposed to give priority to games so that you wouldn’t get interrupted. I would manually bring up the XBox Game bar any time I started a game and make sure I had the “Game Mode” option toggled, but I could never tell that it actually did anything, because those same services would randomly pop in and eat my disk bandwidth. Of course I could have disabled those services entirely, but then I wouldn’t be able to get Windows Updates, quickly search for files on my hard drive, etc. I didn’t mind that those servies existed, I minded that they randomly started doing things while I was actively using the computer. Sometimes I had a friend over and we would take turns playing rounds of Battlefield 1. I wanted to show him the glory of the PC Master Race, max settings, a locked 60fps, the whole shabang. Since he was a console gamer I connected an XBox One controller, and later his own Playstation 4 controller, and let him play. There was more than once that he would have to stop playing because of random services deciding they needed to index the contents of my hard drive, and once the game randomly minimized itself in the middle of a match, even though he was playing with a controller and sitting in a chair several feet away from the screen, so there was no way he accidentally hit a key combination like alt+tab to do it. The end result was that the operating system I chose specifically for gaming was making it hard for me to reliably play games because it was just kinda doing its own thing in the background at random times without checking to see if some user owned process was trying to access that same disk or CPU time. To be fair, “most” of the time I could game just fine, and like I said earlier, I had some of my best gaming experiences in Windows, but the problem was that I never knew when it was going to be one of those “sometimes” that I couldn’t game because of inconsistent and unpredictable Microsoft software.
In recent months Microsoft has been slowly diminishing the role and availability of Cortana. I just read an article today revealing that Microsoft is discontinuing the app outside of the US, and this article is just one in a series of moves by Microsoft that has seen Cortana get outpaced by its rivals while Microsoft slowly withdraws it from the public light. Of course Microsoft insists they’re not killing her off, they’re only removing her from the Microsoft Launcher for Android, and removing the dedicated apps for people outside the US, but if you look at the history of not just Cortana, but their other products like Windows Phone that they’ve created and then abandoned, it’s obvious that it won’t be long before Cortana will have been a flash in the pan concept that was, for me, and could have been for others, a useful tool to get things done, but a lack of innovation and motivation on Microsoft’s part lead to its demise.
Skype is a chat service that offers text, voice and video chat. At one point in time it was an industry standard, and even today it’s not uncommon to see news broadcasters or talk show hosts interview people remotely over Skype. In 2011 Skype was acquired by Microsoft. For a while it didn’t seem like much happened. Over the years however, Microsoft’s ambitions with the application have only hurt its appeal to users. For starters they migrated users from Skype’s own independent login to Microsoft account logins. Users could merge their accounts, which I did, but the process was not painless. Even after I linked my Skype and Microsoft accounts, for a while I could still log into each one independently and have separate contact lists. Eventually it seems like Microsoft did away with a separate contacts list for Skype entirely, instead opting to merge your Skype contacts list with your Outlook contacts, regardless of whether everybody in your Outlook contacts actually used Skype or not. This initially made it odd for me to find people whom I had previously added using their separate Skype username. Additionally, Microsoft has fragmented the development of Skype into two separate versions, the classic desktop version, and the UWP app from the also floundering Windows app store, and the two different versions do not have 100% feature parity, but are being co-developed in parallel with one another, which means they’re needlessly splitting resources into developing two different versions of the same application for the same target platform. On top of all that, even in the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013, it wasn’t until early 2018 that Skype finally introduced end-to-end encryption as an optional feature (not the default). Skype isn’t dead by any means, it’s not nearly as big a failure as some of Microsoft’s other products and acquisitions, but it is not nearly as popular now as it once was, nor has it kept pace with competitors like Signal, Wire and Telegram that are often simpler and more secure, and that points to indecision and a lack of good project leadership on Microsoft’s part. Even Skype’s optional end-to-end encryption uses the Signal protocol. This isn’t a bad thing since several applications have adopted that standard, but Signal is a free project that until very recently was being sponsored by the “Freedom of the Press Foundation”, a group currently presided over by Edward Snowden, who is literally in hiding in Russia, and in some ways it out-paced and set the standard for a Microsoft backed Skype.
All of this, along with some personal soul searching about my own personal values and education about online privacy, lead me to leave Microsoft as a services provider. I’ve since switched all of the PCs in our house back over to Debian Linux. My wife, of all people, was skeptical of Windows from the very beginning, and was glad to go back to using Linux on the desktop, and there’s several advantages I’ve been reminded of or discovered:
- With the advent of Valve’s “Proton” project, a fork of Wine, the vast majority of my games, even Windows exclusives, run flawlessly on Linux with Steam.
- The operating system is predictable. I’ve never had an update break anything out of the blue when it worked fine before. I’ve had the opposite happen, a flaky driver perform better with a newer kernel, but I’ve never had an update actually break something worse. Services don’t randomly start eating up resources in the background while I’m gaming either. This predictability is probably the single biggest advantage to using Debian. It does a very good job of staying out of my way so I can get work done, whether that’s actual “work” like writing this article or editing a video, or playing video games.
- Updates do not take nearly as long. Windows Updates take an insanely long amount of time to perform what should be the straight forward task of checking for new software, downloading new software, verifying checksums and digital signatures, creating a restore point, extracting the new software over top of the old, and restarting if necessary. I can install major OS upgrades in a fraction of the time it would take to install a Windows service pack of the same file size.
- It’s much more flexible than Windows, and for zero monetary investment. While I do donate to the Debian project occasionally, my use of the software is not contingent on that payment; it’s totally free as in freedom, as well as free of cost, and I can use it to run a home server, play games, etc. Meanwhile Windows 10 Home Edition costs about $100 USD, has many of its more technical features locked behind an additional pay wall (such as drive encryption), and even has a clause in its license agreement that you’re not supposed to use it as a server OS, even though Microsoft discontinued the old “Windows Home Server” project, so home users who want to run their own server have no viable option from Microsoft that doesn’t violate the EULA of the product or cost $500+. Debian gives me the flexibility to use it as a server OS, a desktop OS, to encrypt the system drive during the initial installation, etc.
In summary, Microsoft has demonstrated a history of creating products, getting users on-board, and then abandoning them. They’ve butchered their desktop operating system to the point that in many cases, it is no longer the best choice for end-users. They levy unreasonable fees for the use of their software without having the best products available for their respective use cases, and have even been accused of bribing or threatening government agencies who consider switching to open source or alternative platforms such as Linux. They’ve abandoned Windows Phone, abandoned Cortana and turned Windows on the PC into a spyware and adware laden resource hog. If I’m going to pay for software, it’s going to be software that respects my privacy, puts ME in control, makes its source code available for public review, and stays out of my way so I can get my work done. Whether that’s communicating with loved ones, playing video games or making a phone call, I need my software to be reliable, predictable, secure, available for public audit, and I need to know it’s not going to just magically disappear because the corporation that bought it couldn’t figure out how to turn a profit on it.
All of this is why I moved to Debian on the PC, and moved to a heavily modified Android device for my mobile phone, although I have considered switching to an iPhone for privacy and security reasons. Microsoft and its products have proven to be, in my opinion, unreliable and untrustworthy. Even in the wake of all their “Microsoft ❤ Linux” rhetoric, I can’t help but think back to their bad decisions of the recent past, the strict licenses they sell their PC operating systems under, and the stance they once held, and probably still hold on Linux. They’ve taken me from a point where I was excited to use a new Microsoft product, and lead me to a place where I trust them less, and honestly need them less than I ever have in the past.
Gerowen's Corner 