Indeed.... It has made me switch to an OS that doesn't have all that so-called 'A.I.' crap in it...

Use Windoze at your peril from this moment forward.

Your information will be monetized and you won't see a dime as it is sold onto multiple corporations. Your info will be used against you in the form of higher insurance payments because you have a "riskier lifestyle." Your movements will be tracked 24 / 7 / 365 and all activity on your PC logged. You'll be blasted with ads based on your email, web and online activity. Your social connections will be tracked which may impede getting a job because you "hang around with the wrong people" or spend too much time thumb tapping during the day.

Just because you can't imagine the depths of your own info being used against you, does not mean it won't happen.

Many of us warned you a decade ago, but the majority wanted their FaceTube and TwitTok to watch funny cat videos. Today, here we are. Feed the machine that will rule your life.

Nah, only a few more months and then no more worries of Windows 10 updates. Free at last, free at last, no more updates that remove functionality or screw up settings, free at last!

Wholly agree with Mentat74 and Microsoft I have changed my computer usage, two machines already migrated to Linux Mint a third with an additional M2 drive added preparing to hit it with a dual boot stripped Win 10 and Mint once support ends and the danger of unwanted additions ends. The insistance on adding more unwanted features (AI driven) was the final straw along with the disingenuous removal options which just like a stage magician hides the object in his other hand.

It is nice to see them actually finally admitting who they think owns the things though...

Curious, what OS did you land on?

**WARNING: POSSIBLE FANBOY RAVING AHEAD ABOUT A LINUX DISTRIBUTION**

Been using Linux since you could get the install CD's in magazines, but I would not consider myself any kind of Linux guru.

"Mostly competent" would probably be a good description of my skills and I often have to look things up to do them as I'm not in the machinery as much as I used to be. Pewdiepie would kick my ass at Linux, he made may jaw drop a bit with what he has done with Arch.

Anyway I had moved a lot of the day-to-day and work things to an install of QubesOS, but was unable to step away from my Windows 10 gaming box. This meant it was dual boot for me depending on what I wanted to do, which is not really that big of a deal as I have been doing that forever anyway toy try out new distros.

That is until I stumbled across a Youtube about the new SteamOS; I had played with the older one years ago, and had run Steam on Ubuntu for a while, but the capability wasn't quite there yet, so I didn't keep using it.

After digging some more about the new SteamOS, I randomly picked Bazzite from the bunch of similar ones, and it is, and I don't want to oversell it, kind of amazing,

It works for all the Steam games I play; all the EA games using Bottles, BattleNet games using Steam, and Epic games using Heroic. Note: I don't play any massive online ones with the anti cheats so there is a definitely a gap there for a lot of folks.

I can run most of the apps I used on Windows, which to be fair is somewhat limited and often Open Source, such as; putty, OBS, Remmina ( instead of Windows RDP), filezilla, LiberOffice, Chrome (work), Firefox (work) and Brave (personal).

The only ones I haven't tried to set up yet are Davinci Resolve and DVDFab, though DVDFab had a Linux port at one point, not sure if its still around. Guess these will be future evening puzzles to try and solve.

For me Bazzite was the tipping point for not booting back into Windows. The partition is still there in case I run into something, but I haven't booted it in two weeks so far.

In a way I would consider it a bit of a Windows replacement appliance vs the standard type of distros I am used to as I don't seem to drop to the terminal to do anything in it, at least so far.

Sorry this is a bit long winded, but I haven't been this excited about a Linux distro in a long time and thought I'd share.

I had a play with Bazzite last year and quite liked it. My gaming desktop is soon to switch from Windows 10 to either Kubuntu or Linux Mint once W10 goes EOL. Probably dual boot at first.

The biggest issue I ran into with Bazzite was it using the Steam Flatpak, which didn't play at all well with the seperate games SSD on my system, refusing to remember it existed after closing the steam client. It appears that due to the way Flatpaks get sandboxed, a fair bit of tweaking is needed to allow it persistent access to other drives on a system.

However the .deb version available from their website works exactly like the Windows client - and runs perfectly on a Ubuntu-based distro.It's now just a case of making sure everything I have works on it properly....

Yeah, I ended up using my games drive for both games and the Bazzite install as Windows still has the original OS drive. I figured eventually when I fill the drive up I can just do some mount trickery to put the other drive under my Home folder.

So far performance is fine and I have lots of space as I've only installed games I'm still playing

Looking at windows alternatives for gaming, so I looked up Bazzite.

Top hit: Linux Gaming Distro Bazzite is Looking at its Demise Due to Fedora’s Latest Move! https://news.itsfoss.com/fedora-could-kill-bazzite/

And there's the alternative / FOSS problem in a nutshell. An enthusiast can make something great, useful, helpful... only to have it all burn up because the distro they used gets b0rked.

That resulted from Fedora planning to remove 32-bit support, which has since been rescinded. Doesn't invalidate your point though - not the first or last time a downstream distro has arrived at issues due to those happenings.

GNOME 3 and Linux Mint developing Cinnamon is a good example of how this can sometimes spin into a good thing however.

Been using Linux since you could get the install CD's in magazines

Ha! N00b! *real* linux early adopters had to download it floppy by floppy (with the inevitable re-download when floppy 5 proves too be unreadable - and I didn't have decent internet at home or work so my friend did it at work. Unfortunately, either his or my floppy drive was out of calibration so it was hit or miss whether mine could read them..).

"Mostly competent" would probably be a good description of my skills

Mine were good enough to blag my way into a Unix/network sysadmin job (I'd never used Solaris or Cisco but gave a good impression of knowing what I was talking about!)

Nowadays I mostly use MacOS for desktop (laptop?) use and either FreeBSD or Devuan for server VM use (hosted on TrueNAS which also does stuff like Apple Time Machine)

Ohhhh the bad ol days....The real question is did you do it on 5 1/4 or 3 /12 ? I am sure there is some stone age dude that is going to chime in "I did it on punchcards"...lol at my age at least I can remember floppy disks.

Punch cards. Luxury!

We used to have to type it in by hand from a listing, including typo's, debug it, and if we were lucky we could then save it to a cassette tape.

Actually, I think I may have downloaded RedHat and a bunch of others back in the stone age like that from the University sites, but I think it was during the early CD burner era.

I should have pushed harder to find UNIX admin jobs, but they were rare where I had my contacts.

Yeah, I've run a bunch of Linux and Unix servers for years for my own stuff.

I currently use Ubuntu and Debian for most of my servers on top of Proxmox, though I am planning on moving to OpenBSD for most of the VM's, including my email server which I want to move to OpenSMTPD.

For storage, I used the free Solaris with ZFS then moved to Nexenta, then OmniOS commercial, then migrated that install to OmniOS community with Napp-it (running on a USB stick), which is a rock as a general NAS server that is also provisioned as NFS to my Proxmox boxes.

Always a huge pain with the OmniOS install though, I usually have to burn a CD/DVD to get it to install for whatever reason , but once its on, it just works and works and works.

I never got on with MacOS for whatever reason, though I'm sure it is a solid OS.

I did the jump almost 2 years ago. Mint for myself, although only as I was already familiar with it.

I'm on a home built desktop, with multiple M.2 NVME drives, so I left Windows 10 on Drive 0, cleared off all the files on Drive 1 and wiped it, and popped Mint on there, along with GRUB. So not touching the Windows boot drive at all. I then just told the system to boot from Drive 1 by default instead of Drive 0, and GRUB automatically noticed Windows and gave me a selection menu. This has the advantage that when Windows updates itself, it doesn't touch the GRUB installed on the other drive (or at least has never done so far, and I switch over once a month just to patch everything).

I switched backwards and forwards initially, but was using Windows less and less, and as Proton (Valves gaming focused WINE) improved, I used Windows less. Now I use Windows so little, I'm planning on wiping it.

I had a look at Bazzite recently (in a KVM) and have to say it looks quite nice. I'm considering installing Bazzite onto Drive 0, replacing Windows, as I'm just not using Windows now (plus I've got Win 10 in a KVM anyway if needs be). But I'm also keeping an eye out on Steam OS.

One note of warning for gaming on Linux, be aware that some (not all) multiplayer games have Kernel level anti-cheat, and these don't work via Proton (by the dev/publisher choice, as there are non Kernel options). So check on the Proton DB web site if you play these games, and see if they work okay in Linux or not. This doesn't impact myself, as the only multiplayer game I play is War Thunder, and that's native Linux anyway!

And do needs be?

I've not used Windows for decades (getting on for 30 years) and have never missed it.

LOL, to be honest, not often. :-)

It's mostly there for reference, as I've still got family/friends who use Windows, and I'm basically the family tech support (like many of us I would guess!). Easy to boot up the VM and check something, than switch over to the alt boot OS.

The only software installed is Firefox, Shut-up 10 and Winaero Tweaker. I don't use the VM for running any actual software, and if I was going to test something for someone else, I'd take a snapshot, and then revert once done anyway.

I'm more likely to try and run a Windows app via WINE/Proton, that I am to boot up the VM, and so far (other than games) I think I've done this maybe once in two years, and that was just an experiment.

I switched to using LibreOffice years ago (and before that Open Office), and I don't use tools like Adobe or CAD software. So Linux fits my use case.

I did have a Win 7 VM as well for a long time (no network), for playing legacy games that didn't like newer versions of Windows (or ran but were a bit crash happy!), such as 'Sword of the Stars'. C&C Generals, KotoR 1 & 2 etc, but these play fine under Proton these days, so the Win 7 VM was retired a while back now.

What is this Linux thing I keep hearing about?

Is it like a better version of powerpoint?

I'd say it's more Microsoft is forcing this change on how we use OUR PC's.

After all, that's MY computer, not Microsoft's, and I do NOT want AI forced on me, let alone it copying anything from my PC and sending it elsewhere. That could be my online banking details, my healthcare records, my home finances, personal online purchases...

Okay, I don't do home banking or shopping or healthcare from my PC (that's for gaming so... meh) but Google is pushing their idea of AI onto everything, so is Apple... And while I'd hope Linux doesn't go that route, there's then the question of the software we're using: That's also getting 'AI' and could also start slurping data...

While we might have GDPR in Europe, that's not going to stop these corporations from grabbing everything they can and pretending it's all fine and dandy, even when it's leaking to every hacker and scammer on the planet due to badly coded AI systems (or even systems where the AI is a bunch of people in an office being paid peanuts to do the work so aren't going to care about privacy or a person's rights)...

For any of the "secure" activities like banking, working customers infrastructure etc I have a QubesOS machine (or a dual boot on other machines) where you can spin up a VM at the click of a button (on TOR if you like), do you tasks and click another button destroying the VM when you are done.

Its a bit of a different mind set to use, but I had it as my daily driver for quite a while, unless I wanted to game, then it was Win 10.

After all, that's MY computer, not Microsoft's

I'm afraid it hasn't been yours for a long time if you are running Windows.

If you have an administrator account on a machine and you can't kill any process you like, it's not your computer.

If you can't chose what software to install on a machine and when (without it coming back every update), it's not your computer.

If you can't permanently disable unwanted features such as AI and advertising, it's not your computer.

To be honest, it was Win 8 that did it for me. It deprecated a very expensive film scanner and an expensive large format drawing office printer. MS response at the time was to suggest I "just" replace them with hardware which was "Win 8 compatible" - about £3k even then; vastly more today. I was then astonished to discover that all this hardware still worked perfectly under Ubuntu. Guess what I did

It is fair to say that MS FORCED me to move to Linux. This article is simply the latest example of the same thing. Are MS so desperate to "succeed" with their concept of AI that they have lost all focus on their customers? And will therefore lose them because of this "obsession"? If so, they deserve what they get.

That is all.

According to a Microsoft spokesperson back in April, users' data will not be stored long-term

Microsofts T&Cs go on to state "long term" is defined solely by Microsoft and is 'subject to change'.

So long-term could be "more than 10,000 years" if they wanted.

Recall is STILL a nightmare. Broken encryption system that can be bypassed by a small child with an abacus was used deliberately. This is Microsoft basically hoovering up data so they can blackmail future politicians and presidents into doing whatever Microsoft wants.

The recall system can be remotely re-enabled by microsoft update "hotfixes" which install silently in the background and cannot be skipped even on Enterprise-level systems. So they'll just wait til the heats off, Win10 has passed out of support and the number of windows 11 installs goes up THEN they'll 'accidentally' and quietly re-enable Recall and copilot vision in full

Microsoft has even been 'testing' how many users will put up with features constantly turning themselves on/off after being enabled or disabled. Telemetry, Sound settings (Loudness Equalization) etc etc, all 'randomly' re-enable/disable themselves at unpredictable intervals, so they can work out how far they can push re-enabling the software after it's disabled.

NEVER forget recall is designed to hide itself when task manager is opened (reducing cpu cycles taken/memory footprint so its not top of the list), the process list is interrogated etc, and has code to check if packet-sniffing software is installed locally, then it goes quiet for a bit until the connection is idling. It's unlikely most people have a 2nd PC JUST to run packet sniffing software.

MS didn't spend $50 BILLION USD on a gigantic storage datacentre thats hooked directly to recall for nothing. Hell to comply with EU laws, they've started construction on "local" data/storage/blackmail data centres in EU countries.

Nobody will care, just keep pumping "news" every week about how the enemies of the day (China, Russia, Iran, Eurasia, Eastasia, Oceania, etc.) are hacking our systems and stealing our data, and nobody will care that we are stealing a lot more, by design. Nothing like a good misdirection.

What do you mean? We've always been at war with Eastasia

" This is Microsoft basically hoovering up data so they can blackmail future politicians and presidents into doing whatever Microsoft wants. "

Wouldn't it be easier for them to just buy an island and fly them out there?

Isn't that method patented?

Yes, but it requires that you own the jet and the local police.

Care to bet on how many islands Microsoft owns?

The recall system can be remotely re-enabled by microsoft update "hotfixes" which install silently in the background and cannot be skipped even on Enterprise-level systems.

You must not work in the enterprise space because if I want a machine, or machines, to not reach the internet, or microsoft in particular, it won't.

Unplug the network cable and not install wireless?

Yup: Air gap firewalls are the real hard core way to block unwanted network traffic. Just have to be able to handle the OS trying to call 'home' to verify it's a legit install.

But if you do connect to the internet, then it's a lot harder: That call 'home' can be to a server that doesn't show as being Microsoft, but does the licence verification. That server could also be used as a pass-through for data slurping. 'cause for every brilliant idea we have as to how to beat the greedy barstewards, those barstewards will find an alternative to get what they want.

This is Microsoft basically hoovering up data so they can blackmail future politicians and presidents into doing whatever Microsoft wants.

Hasn't that been the case since Windows 10 with the Speech, Inking, and Typing option enabled (and possibly re-enabled after an update)?

Nice little revenue stream /arm twister for Microsoft, IF... they had a similar feature 25 years ago when a some property developer and a financier used to hang out at parties

Where do you think they got the idea from?

"Hell to comply with EU laws, they've started construction on "local" data/storage/blackmail data centres in EU countries."

..and if I remember correctly a Microsoft lackey has stated under oath in a French senate hearing that there is no guarantee that information hosted on these "EU" servers will not get passed onto the US TLAs.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

...the new AI settings changer or using the current windows settings UI.

I can understand why they need AI to help/cock-up windows settings. But perhaps they should consider why it's such a mess in the first place.

Well with the existing settings UI, you, generally, know the setting has been set how you want, until the next update. With AI you don’t know if it really has changed the setting or is just telling you it has.

I think the better question is, will the ai be any more successful than a human ?

I mean, sure the AI can invoke the windows device troubleshooter automatically, but it will still be told "Everything is working"

"Windows 11 is the home for AI, offering the most expansive and capable AI experiences for consumers today on Copilot+ PCs"

Are they boasting or confessing?

"Windows 11 is the home for AI, offering the most expansive and capable AI experiences for consumers today on Copilot+ PCs a complete steaming turd of an OS which should be avoided at all costs."

There, FTFY.

I could not find a single item in the whole article that was desirable. Windows is a train crash of an OS (I use the term loosely)

...to eventually become "a true companion,"

And with everything you do sent back to the mother-ship you will also have Uncle Sam along as a passenger.

Avoid!

Your plastic pal who's fun to be with

Is Microsoft into dildos now?

It thinks it knows what to do with the customer base.

It thinks it has us pegged.

Even if they were, would you expect them to be competent enough to make them fun? Also, dildos generally aren't plastic.

we are all victims of the greatest crime against humanity the world has ever seen at this point. It's time to go underground. Get off the internet. Disconnect your pc's and build a better os.

There will be a segment of the population that will happily embrace anything with "AI" written on it, just the same way some people do with "Apple" and the letter "i" (lower case only, please).

Let them have it. After their personal data get sold, pwned and recycled on the dark interwebs, it'll only give us something to sneer about. Watching the world burn is turning into a joyful spectator sport, if you keep your sense of humour about it.