Thats bad actually, the free advertising to linux was a good thing. Now Windows users will slip back into apathy.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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Windows will continue to degrade as Microsoft fires more of its professional staff and turns to "Vibes Coding" for increasingly delicate systems development. They'll keep pushing out the OS as a vector for unwanted third-party advertisements. They'll keep ratcheting user control of the OS away from the hardware owners. And they'll keep injecting bloatware into their applications and services.
This isn't the end of enshitification. It is a brief retreat and regrouping by a company that has invested tens of billions of dollars into the AI sunk cost.
I read "a major shit"
Oh, and only now am I re-reading it to see that's not what it actually said...
common freudian slip when talking about windows
The only thing they're rethinking is how to repackage this so people accept it. They learned a lot from this, but I promise you it wasn't the right lesson.
It mostly looks like a mild slow down of user-facing release and rebrand of unpopular features.
It is not a retreat. The marketing team is just trying to figure out how to reframe things that caused public backlash.
Too late, trust is already gone and im old enough to know all of this is CEOs bullshit and pure marketing.
Microslop Microslop Microslop. Microslop?
Microslop.
Won? They will do it again. The only winning move is not to play their game. Choose Free Software.
Genuine question: What do you recommend? I want to replace Windows 10 on a 8-year-old midrange laptop with something that works reasonably well in terms of performance with a connected 4K monitor.
I've already tried Ubuntu, but unfortunately the experience has been marred by bugs such as poor performance, visual glitches, windows jumping around when attempting to move them, and DPI settings not being able to be applied per screen.
I've had more luck with Mint, thanks to its Windows-adjacent GUI and user-friendly on ramp. Still encountered a few issues (a couple of peripherals that didn't support Linux drivers). But on the whole, it's improved system performance over Win10 and synced smoothly with my workstation.
Linux is definitely the route. A lot of people use Mint or Ubuntu. But they are usually running out of date drivers.
I'd recommend looking into distros based on Fedora Workstation. It stays up to date but not as much as Arch so that it's stable.
My recommendation is any of the Universal Blue images that fit your need. They are based off of the Fedora Atomic image with added quality of life features.
I can't say I've had those issues myself, so my recommendation may not be valid in your case. I'd say maybe give Fedora with KDE Plasma a try, and try switching between X11 and Wayland sessions if issues persist.
I personally don't like Ubuntu, but that's mostly because of Canonical making the occasional sketchy decision.
On the whole, distro choice doesn't matter quite as much these days, as most distros should work fine out of the box. Whatever issues you have should technically be solvable with a bit of troubleshooting.
Sometimes Linux just doesn't play well with your setup. Good luck, and I hope you find something that works for you!
If you identify your laptop (including model number) someone who has the same hardware might be able to make a solid recommendation.
...for now.
I swear. Society at large will never learn from Microsoft's games.
I won? Of course I did, I don't use Windows anymore, I've been using Linux for years now.
Too little too late. I'm already over to Linux now. Shit's been going downhill even before this whole AI craze went off the rails. I hope Microsoft Windows crashes and burns
"Are you really staying off windows for good?"
Yes | Remind Me Later
I've won when everybody gets the principles of free software philosophy, along with other essential freedoms, free roaming, free speech, free assembly, free press, free energy, free healthcare, etc.
It's the freedom.
Free to use, study, share, change.
The Free Software Definition
The free software definition presents the criteria for whether a particular software program qualifies as free software. From time to time we revise this definition, to clarify it or to resolve questions about subtle issues. See the History section below for a list of changes that affect the definition of free software.
The four essential freedoms
A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: [1]
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
In any given scenario, these freedoms must apply to whatever code we plan to make use of, or lead others to make use of. For instance, consider a program A which automatically launches a program B to handle some cases. If we plan to distribute A as it stands, that implies users will need B, so we need to judge whether both A and B are free. However, if we plan to modify A so that it doesn't use B, only A needs to be free; B is not pertinent to that plan.
I bet they turn this into even more AI
After pushback from users? Or after realising how much it's costing them on the server end?
"This is going very poorly, we will pretend to listen to our customers so it looks like we are course correcting, winning favor with investors and customers (big businesses, not home users)."
They may even switch CEOs if the situation worsens, but the practices remain.
I haven't won until Microslop is a company that is used in past tense.
Microslopped
The irony of having a copilot and right below this post
I got a popup on my work PC 5 mins ago advertising co pilot. 
Why does your lemmy client have ads?
I use boost. It has an ad free version.
Though you're making me wonder if I should change given your surprise haha
I believe I used it on reddit, long ago but there were no ads. I was surprised since no other client I know of has them (and no lemmy server has ads).
I use voyager, it’s great.
I'll give it a look. Thanks!
Seriously! I cannot understate how strange that is.
Understand that they're not doing this because of user feedback; they're doing this because shareholders got cold feet about the whole thing after the backlash (so indirectly it's still down to user feedback, but not really)
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