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Microsoft sucks!

April 4, 2017

Several months ago...

I’m a polite guy that does not ventilate strong opinions unless they matter. Today I have a strong opinion that matters: Microsoft sucks! You probably wonder what Bill did to upset me like this.

First, I must admit that at home, I still have my family computer running Windows. Being a Linux-enthusiast, that does not seem logical. It even hurts. However, my wife and kids are embedded in a Microsoft-minded world. In addition, I’m not the guy that dictates what they must do.

So what happened today, that got me in extreme rage?

The list of incidents:

  • Today, at 13h20 my computer told me: ‘your computer will restart itself at 13h35 to install updates.’ No choice to postpone this, I only had the option to click a button to run the restart instantly. I was scanning a long documents, so that was no option. So far one’s authority over one’s own computer.

  • At 13h30, five minutes before the deadline, my computer shut itself down to go through the update process. Perfect, they’re not only brutal, they’re also inable to manage time?

  • Then, it took two full hours to install updates! Are you kidding, Bill !?!

  • When I finally got to log in again, all my settings were gone. A short but incomplete list:

    • My desktop background, gone.

    • My default application settings, gone. It’s Edge all over again. I don’t want that piece of crap.

    • My cisco VPN software, gone.

    • The ‘action center’ (what a name) keeps spitting out errors and warnings.

    • My setting to avoid auto-login (that took me to edit the registry by hand), gone.

    • Whenever I open a PDF document, despite having set acroread as my default application, Edge intercepts and asks to make it the default application. Even more: Edge does not take no for an answer. The only way to get past it, is to kill it using the task manager. It would not surprise me if in the near future, they would deactivate the option to kill Edge using the task manager.

My wife is complaining, because things don’t work anymore like before, and she blames me for it. I cannot but conclude: the Redmond guys are incompetent ánd villain.

A few months later….

My Windoze OS pulled a new trick on me: it shows the login screen without account names: no way to login whatsoever. After finding out that you have to abort booting (by pulling the cord) twice in order for the machine to boot in safe-mode (no F8 anymore), I got my account names back, but only in safe mode. Fundamental problem in safe mode: your Microsoft Office license will no longer work.

This event crossed the line. I reinstalled the machine the very same day to run GNU/Linux as base operating system. Windows now runs in a contained virtual machine for my wife and kids. If it ever pulls nasty tricks on me again, I just make a copy of the original disk image, and we are back on again. It’s like cloning a child before it grows up. Because… if Windows ages, it takes nasty turns.

Since then, my life is sweet like chocolate.