A PR disaster: Microsoft has lost trust with its users, and Windows Recall is the straw that broke the camel's back

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.

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

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.

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.

I'm using windows 11 and after hearing about recall and all the other shit they've done, I've finally decided to make the jump to Linux

So for atleast me, this was the final straw

I both agree and disagree. I agree that there isn't going to be a single 'straw', because everyone's thresholds are different. For me it was back when Microsoft auto-upgraded my PC to Win 8, which was also when they started putting in hard-to-disable telemetry and bad UI. It sounds like Recall is the threshold for some other people.

Also don't discount that MS' market share is dominated by a ton of corporate users (who lack a choice) and casual users (who don't care / are unaware), but at least anecdotally they've been losing the power users in my life, which if true in general which will have negative downstream effects for them moving forward (IT departments working to support alternatives, software developers refusing to build on Windows Server / MS software stack, etc.)

the vast majority don’t care or they would have stopped using it a long time ago

It's a little disingenuous to claim people should've stopped using something that hasn't come to market yet. I was looking for other options when they started trying to force me to upgrade to Windows 11, but this absolutely is the last straw that I won't use Windows on my next computer.

I just read they decided to default it to off. They should remove it entirely imo, but with this move, it costs IT departments $0 and 0 hours of their time to worry about.

I think business + government + education usage is more important for them than personal, and as long as this costs them nothing, I doubt it makes a dent in anyone's plans. Could have been an apocalypse if defaulted to on though.

For at least 3 decades. That's twice more than the time between Second Boer War and WWI. That's the time between the start of WWII and the initial versions of Unix. Or between the initial versions of Unix and Start Wars the Phantom Menace. More than between the original Star Wars and the Phantom Menace.

Malware will disable that icon. Law enforcement will buy [that] malware.

Well find out in 10 years that that wasn’t true and that it did capture data when the icon wasn’t present whoopsies.

This icon cannot be hidden or moved.

Or what? Your computer will take out a club and beat you to death?

You can't convince me someone couldn't do it with a simple registry edit, or even just replace the icon with something else by swapping an icon file somewhere in Windows/

I remember when everyone was complaining about how terrible Safari is. The lead developer started having a go and ranting on Twitter, saying that raising bug reports is not constructive feedback.

That was a mess.

Apple is not blameless but they are a shit-ton better than Microsoft. I have to have M$ for a few work apps but I’m primarily MacOS for desktop and Linux for everything server-side. I avoid M$ as much as possible.

Don't forget the fact they're locked onto luxury hardware, and you can't build your own flavor for it. Even worse is, notebook manufacturers copied them so much there's less variations among them. I was looking for some "subnotebook" as a potential portable PC, but I had like a few options (many of which would have included AliExpress junk), but there's an endless supply of same-looking 14-16" ones, that are thin ("real" portability according to techbros), lightweight, "desktop replacements", and run at a constant 95°C.

95% of their customers are businesses, who no, they don't understand that. But their IT department does.

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.

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

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.

I remember when Windows 10 first came around, and people were trying to bring attention to the privacy issues in the TOS. Now it's been widely adopted just about everywhere, and this is probably going to be the same.

Like darktable?

I've heard that RawTherapee is good, but not quite on the same level.

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.

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.

better get W10 LTSC in VM and use it until EOL and beyond, it'll be more privacy friendly this way

Bullshit

Just passing through and corrupting children.

This is for the enterprise market more than anything. Large companies are already logging and mining everything. Slack, Teams chat, Teams voice, email, keystrokes...literally everything. Microsoft's problem is that Enterprises are using third party products to do so. Recall solves that competitive issue for MS. I have no doubt that it will be tied to their cloud offerings, and I have no doubt that MS will retain the right to use it all of the data from the consumer side for AI training.

Bunter2

baloney

For the majority of commercial users they literally don't give a fuck either. It's on techies that really care about his stuff sadly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"It's raining, I see" says the blind man as he pisses into the wind

I love it when Apple pushes advertising that touts their focus on privacy... when in reality, they're breaching user privacy in all the ways that every other company does.

My bigger concern is that almost every company now has it in their contracts/terms of services, that all users are not allowed to participate in a lawsuit, be it class action, or court case against them Most of them even have a maximum sue limit too! There's a lot that have a rule that initial arbitration cannot have a lawyer, but that won't be enforced.

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.

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

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

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

And the annoying thing is, this tech can be exceptionally useful when it's actually been implemented thoughtfully.

Effortlessly cleaning up audio recordings using AI tooling is incredible, for example. There are audio recordings that I've been able to make sound great that previously would've required me to make some calls and ask for a bunch of re-recordings and added days of delays to a project.

AI in image recognition to vastly speed up medical imaging diagnosis, or analysing lab work? Amazing. Asking unpaid medical students to laboriously pore over thousands of images sounds like a nightmare.

Better offline translation? Sign me the fuck up.

Image description for the visually impaired, like my sister? Genuinely life changing. A lot of content online isn't properly tagged, or has zero attention placed on accessibility.

The list goes on. Unfortunately, with big tech being as they are, their first thoughts turn to "which implementations of AI will aid us the most in scraping userdata and showing ads?"

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).

Companies and their legal departments do care though, and that's where the big money lies for Microsoft when it comes to Windows

Windows Recall does NOT require NPU hardware to run. Currently Recall has been tested on Windows 11 with only a CPU and it seems to be fully operational. Of course performance is not as good as with an NPU. I believe Microsoft will try to push AI to local computing by only enabling on computers with NPUs to begin with. In the future it will most likely be able to be enabled on PCs which does not have an NPU but with a warning of bad performance in front of it.

I think Windows 7 was good, and their last decent desktop OS before they started backporting Windows 10 garbage into it late in the lifecycle.

I'm in the same boat as you now. Earlier this year I'd had enough and there was no way I was going from my de-shittified Win10 Enterprise install to Win11. I'm on Tumbleweed for my main PC now.

When they announced Win7, I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06, “Dapper Drake”.

Windows Vista was so bad that it gets forgotten even in a retrospective about how Windows versions sucked. But yeah, Win7 didn't come out for another few years after that, to rescue the world from Vista.

I hated Windows from the day I saw the 3.1 floppies had no write tab (that tiny piece that allowed you to write the disk). My first though was "we've payed for this and they forbid us to write on them? Fuck MS". It was the last original Windows in any PC at home. And I used DRDOS, so even worse (Windows 3.11 had a "bug" that made it crash if it ran on DRDOS).

Get everything: https://www.voidtools.com/ (the alpha version can also index the content of files). It's search is instant. As in < 1 second for any file on any of your harddisks (even ones not connected right now).

For base linux cmdline tools I just install Git for Windows it includes tail, sed, grep, tee, iconv, less, scp and tons more. I need git anyways so win-win.

File search is really awful on windows for no reason at all. Your complaints about commandline utilities is not accurate though. Windows has native powershell equivalents to both grepand tail. You use Select-String instead of grep and Get-Content -Wait instead of tail.

Windows Search used to be awesome, and then they decided to over-complicate it.

https://superuser.com/questions/12943/how-do-i-replace-the-stupid-windows-xp-dog-assistance-search-with-the-classic-wi /s

I doubt the majority of MS users need to tail a log file. And of those of us that do, how many don't know that Notepad++ does it?

Get-Content  -wait

Or do you mean in cmd not powershell?

For those of you that are tired of Microsoft's bullshit, a great place to start is Linux Mint or, if you want to be on the bleeding edge with a rolling distro that still gets some testing, openSUSE Tumbleweed (which is what I'm using).

Signed,

Linux daily driver convert of ~3 months now.

https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-placing-ads/

Tell me about gaming on Linux. Most if my gaming is via Steam and I have a Steamdeck which I know runs on a flavor of Linux so it can be done. Is it fair to say that any game that runs on the Steam runs on Steam Linux?

I just got a new prebuilt with Windows 11 Pro and I've been curious about Linux for the past few months. I know the variations have gotten better over the years but haven't done too much research into it. I hear Mint and Arch quite a bit.

lol, yeah that’s an important asterisk for sure!

There's no reason to run Windows unless there's specific software that won't run in a virtual highly contained environment of Windows within Linux.

Friends don't let friends use windows.

You might try OnlyOffice 😄

The thing is, during the 95/98/ME/XP/Vista days Microsoft had less competition in the consumer computing space, smart phones weren't really a thing, and a PC was "the" way to get online. Nowadays everyone and their dog has an iPhone or Android device instead, and ever dwindling numbers of people even bother to have a PC anymore. So in modern times, there is a nonzero possibility that on a consumer level at least, Microsoft might finally slide into irrelevance. That's not to say they'll go out of business anytime soon, but they might not be able to remain the Microsoft we've known so far for too many more years.

Nerds use Linux. A lot of people who want to buy an off the shelf computer that "just works" buys a Mac. And everyone else just uses their phone for everything.

Microsoft doesn't actually do anything (except make the XBox, I guess) that non-corporate users give a shit about except "make computer machine go" and "stupid subscription ribbon bar program I need to use to open files work sends me."

This is why M$ has been so gung-ho about their path to enshittification in recent years, I'm sure. This is a profitability thing. They see the writing on the wall that just selling operating system and office suite licenses to rubes is not going to remain a profitable business model much longer. Instead, they have to scrape and datamine and sell adds and push subscriptions and all the rest of it for alternative recurring revenue, because no member of the public will willingly pay for a Windows license anymore. I sure as hell won't... If I need Windows, I'll pirate it. And there's no way they are shifting as many OEM licenses as they were in the early 2000's. People aren't buying computers like that anymore.

I cant believe im actually supporting the sentence "buy a mac" but its far far better than what ever microsoft is doing, and if you arent computer literate enough to install linux, its a decent alternative to windows.

Why wait?

just wondering, who's offering discounts and what'd you end up with? Thanks!

I built a kit car, painted a penguin on the side, and forgot to include the telemetry module. Oops.

I think I'll travel somewhere else.

Microsoft and Apple are not the only choices

Yeah the concept is pretty damn cool. It's just horrifying to have a company own and control that data. I suspect this is like Xbox One launch disaster in 2013, in which Microsoft initially required all consoles to have an always-online connection. People rebelled, but today and certainly on our current trajectory, it now looks like Microsoft was just a little ahead of the curve. I think people will eventually become a lot more comfortable with companies owning their data because the benefits will be so enormous. I'm not happy about that future, but I think I understand it.

It's gotten a lot better over the years

When I first tried it (back in 2010) it was pretty rough all around but after trying it again recently due to the whole TPM requirement for Windows 11 I've found it to be really straight forward

Linux Mint is really user friendly and is what I've even put on my grandma's pc

I don't think a casual user would in many cases even be able to tell the difference. I mean you have a desktop with some icons which most of people only use to start the browser which is absolutely identical in both systems.

You have a start menu with other programs and you have a task bar which shows the open programs and some status icons and a clock.

It is really not that different. Most people just start a browser and go on Facebook or eBay or whatever, use a simple word processor for the daily needs. I don't think they would be able to tell the difference.

It isn't impenetrable. ChromeOS and Android are Linux based after all. If you don't want to be prayed upon by Google you can use things like UBlue (inc. Aurora, Bazzite), PopOS, or Mint.

The advantage of PopOS and UBlue being you can download an image with Nvidia drives pre installed.

PopOS is a very mac like interface so you might not like it. Otherwise it's pretty much install and go, has good community support, and even comes pre installed on some high end machines.

In the case of UBlue they include images for specific manufacturers of laptops like ASUS, Framework, and Microsoft surface. You also get fully automatic atomic upgrades with rollback in case of failure, similar to Chrome OS. This means even if you do something very stupid like reboot in the middle of an OS update, it won't matter. It's engineered to be almost unbreakable even for new Linux users thanks to being partly immutable. You get a choice as well between varieties for normal users called Aurora, one of gamers called Bazzite, a development one called Bluefin, and a server version too. Being based on Fedora it's also reasonably up to date as well, but without sacrificing stability like Arch does.

Linux Mint is the classic easy to use Linux that runs on most computers made in the last 10 years and often older. It does sometimes struggle on newer machines with drivers though as it's not using an up to date kernel. What it's good for is that it pretty much just works when you have it installed and set up. It's popular so you should get plenty of community support. It's a quite similar interface to Windows while arguably looking better and definitely using less resources.

I've heard this a few times lately. It makes me curious how recent the impenetrable experience was.

I'm shocked at the idea that an average Windows user who tried this year's version of Debian Stable would find it even mildly confusing, much less impenetrable.

I switch between Windows 10 and Debian 12 Stable, daily.

I find that, on Debian, all the expected features are in the same spots, acting the same ways.

Disclaimer: I don't have an Nvidia graphics card to cause me headaches.

And I do understand that depending on hardware, installation can be tough. That's true with Windows, too, of course. At least installation doesn't have to be an issue for new purchases, since enough PCs can now ship with either pre-installed.

The only real limiting factor is that most computers that you just walk into a store and buy (and are not made by Apple) come with Windows, and people just use whatever comes with their computers.

People rarely switch even default settings, let alone the entire OS.

I'm sure if computers came with Linux, there wouldn't be that many complaints from casual users after they got used to it.

The hardest people to switch over are the Windows power users in my experience.

2002 called, they want their Linux attitude back

I’d say it’s really easy. The only requirement is making a choice to use something else, which most unfortunately is already asking too much for the vast majority of users.

They really should

No, unfortunately

Any enterprise working with sensitive data certainly has to disable the feature. And turns out, that's most enterprises.

I have heard very little, if any, enthusiasm about this. Nobody seems to be excited about it at all.

It's what they should have done from the beginning, there must be a horde of MSFT employees holding back the urge of saying "told you so" to their boss right now lol

And no one is going to trust them on this. They’ve burned that bridge.

I really hope the damage is done. They need to be knocked down a peg. This all should have been done first. Whoever thought this was a good idea is horrible.

Yeah bur for the non tech oriented user it's still difficult . Most devices bought come with OEM install.

Even for a regular user it's going to sound like There is a virus that reads and remembers everything on your computer but you can turn it off and trust us it would be off.