by blackcatsec | 2026-01-11 02:17:45+00:00
This is a thread that's certainly going to go over well.

There are some valid criticisms of Microsoft, and a great many criticisms that are unfounded or are often misdirected. Or in some cases, the vast majority of folks don't use enough of their operating environments to encounter the same types of problems. After all, it's not like Linux operating systems are "perfect". Especially when you begin to push the platforms beyond the most basic functions, problems quickly become apparent.

Microsoft's largest challenge in the Wintel environment is the diversity of hardware, software, and skill levels involved in making it all work together. And quite frankly, most often people trying to cut corners in places they shouldn't or don't know they shouldn't.

On the hardware front, there's a lot of cheap nonsense out there. And lots of folks clamor for cheaper hardware. For example, my $500 Asus motherboard has a checks Device Manager Mediatek Wifi 7 card in it. Now, the reality is that Intel, widely seen as an incredible network chip manufacturer (both ethernet and wlan), doesn't have a Wifi 7 chip available for 3rd parties (i.e. AMD boards). So in order for Asus to get Wifi 7, they have to look elsewhere.

Mediatek's website appears that they focus on supporting new standards first, often before they're stable or solidified, but simultaneously does not provide a robust driver environment that supports multiple platforms.

At any rate, this is just one example. There are many thousands more. Much of this is driven by consumers either wanting features faster, platform vendors aiming for differentiation, or both clamoring for some middle ground between cost and margin. And Microsoft is stuck in the middle.

Maybe the current driver that Mediatek has released through IHVs doesn't have fixes for certain bugs. Perhaps the IHV (motherboard makers, etc.) doesn't have a robust enough team to want to package and release regular driver updates released by the vendor.

As it stands, Mediatek doesn't offer a driver for this card for Linux, either: https://github.com/openwrt/mt76/issues/927

But again, Microsoft often gets the blame for problems with this type of hardware (vendors that barely support it, etc.) whereas on Linux it's totally acceptable to say "yeah just ditch that and go buy an Intel Wifi NIC" or something and people just accept that as being a totally okay answer. And then suddenly the hardware problem just 'disappears'.

As far as things that are a bit more in Microsoft's control, for example, requiring cloud accounts to log in and use the computer. I still stand by that this is far less important than the shriekers on the internet make it out to be. But it's most often one of the most primary arguments (because there are actually very few to really make).

Google and Apple require you to login with a cloud account on any of their devices and platforms. In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of you reading this page right now have Google Chrome signed in with a Google Account that's syncing your history, favorites, passwords, autofill, and tabs right now. You effectively can't use an iPhone without signing in with an iCloud account, and Google is just about ready to force that direction as well by disabling the ability to sideload applications in Android. They already long effectively killed rooting devices (although it is possible in specific circumstances).

In fact, every time you visit a Google property using any other browser than Chrome, Google makes sure to tell you that you really should be using Chrome. And any time you visit a Google property using Chrome, they insist you sign in using Chrome (to your Google account, no less.)

So I really don't get the abject hatred for Microsoft on this front. After all, once you light up Windows Hello on a modern system with TPM2.0 and Windows 11 24H2 or newer, you effectively get free software passkey support (pending the web application properly supports it and isn't using an ancient FIDO2 library that insists on hardware tokens).

For the aforementioned Google account: I'm using a Microsoft Account sign-in to my desktop with Windows Hello, with a TPM-protected passkey to sign into the aforementioned Google account. I get SSO to all Microsoft properties, and "soft" passkey support for all of my Google accounts as-needed, with unlimited passkey storage. No USB dongles required (although I have those, too).

About the only other end user facing problem that is well within Microsoft's control is the amount of Copilot and AI nonsense. I contend that Satya Nadella is well beyond what his tenure should be at Microsoft, but can you blame them for having FOMO? I mean after all, the mobile phone and tablet markets were hundreds of billions of dollars that they missed out on. They also missed the mark on cloud platforms where Amazon raked in hundreds of billions. If they flood the zone with their AI products, and AI happens to catch on somewhere eventually, they're well-positioned to take advantage of it.

Microsoft also lost out on being the primary development environment, when they stopped innovating in the computer browser and software development space, effectively handing the keys to the kingdom over to Google. They only partially regained that with VSCode (which was the perfect blend between their full-fledged commercial IDE and the text-driven IDEs used prior to VSCode's dominance such as Textmate).

As far as "ads" on the platform, I don't really have any. But I turn a lot of stuff like the widgets off. At least the widget bar is isolated and isn't annoyingly embedded into the software like you'll find the ample ad-based notifications being spammed at you via mobile phone notifications. And unable to disable them because you also need those same notifications to actually get time critical information (here's looking at you, Doordash).

This is ultimately a long conversation and has many layers to it. But what I've found in reality is that software of all sorts and all platforms isn't as rosy as the people pitching them as solutions tend to tell you. I think it's silly, for example, on Linux that you have to split your engineering between multiple software development stacks to accomplish typical systems administrator goals (Ansible/Python, Bash, perhaps some Go thrown in there if someone on your team wants to mess around, tons of YAML and JSON). Whereas on Windows it's pretty well unified behind PowerShell and .NET.

To be fair, I often encounter situations where available Powershell tooling doesn't exist and I need to call .NET APIs anyway, or if I really want to secure the environment I need to drop the ability to use Add-Type and end up having to create proper powershell modules anyway. But at least the paradigm and language used is mostly the same.