> that frankly, were settled two decades ago

No, it wasn't. Windows didn't have a camera, TPM, TPM 2.0, and mandatory Microsoft online account requirements two decades ago, nor did it come "bundled" with Cortana, Teams, advertisements in your Start menu, Windows Defender, forced/"highly incentivized" OS updates, loads of dark patterns meant to try to get you to use a Microsoft account or switch to Edge, and telemetry that repeatedly re-enables itself after you disable it.

All of that is new in the past two decades, and even before that, Microsoft was pulling anti-competitive shenanigans like the Secure Boot requirements and bundling IE with Windows.

This article is extremely timely given the recent release of Windows 11, and gave me new information that I didn't have before (such as the requirement to have a camera). Poorly-written as it is, it's still both useful and relevant.

> It will never be the year of the Linux desktop (and that's totally OK!) and poorly-written articles like this do nothing to help change that.

Are you able to predict the future? This is such a shallow dismissal, and the logic is both absurd and defeatist. Even if you had good reason to believe that "the year of the Linux desktop" (which is kind of a straw-man to begin with) was never going to happen, it's still useful to encourage people to switch away from a user-hostile operating system, both to preserve their own freedoms, and also to pressure Microsoft to walk back some of their anti-features.

> Plus, the article is wrong.

One point that you can kind-of contrive to not be universally true out of eleven doesn't seem like a good reason to call the whole article "wrong".

> There are plenty of Linux distributions with tons of telemetry and spyware

Telemetry? Sure. Telemetry that's mostly opt-in and doesn't magically (re-)enable itself, and sends data to a source that I trust. Telemetry that doesn't fit those requirements, and has actual spyware, is rare both by user count (except for Deepin, which is kind of irrelevant for non-Chinese users) and absolute number of distros - and, you know, you have a choice as to which distro you use, whereas I believe that all versions of Windows 11 share the same set of anti-features...

> Again, use whatever you want.

Nobody (well, except maybe RMS), including the article, is telling you that you must switch to Windows. The article is a persuasive piece - and there's nothing wrong with that? If anything, I would expect to see persuasive content on HN (although, ideally, better-written than this one), right alongside technical content.

From the guidelines:

> What to Submit - On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Persuasive pieces generally satisfy my intellectual curiosity. Rants without any good arguments made? Not so much.

> just because people want to get territorial about what computing platform other people use

Sure, some people might be getting territorial - but many others (most?) are actually talking about the very real issues that Windows 11 has. If your best friend tells you that they're planning on quitting their job to play video games full-time, you might get worried about them, and try to talk them out of it, right? That's exactly what's going on here.

> I'm disheartened to see it rank so highly on HN

I'm more disappointed to see responses to it that rely on a bunch of emotional manipulation and shallow dismissals that don't stand up to scrutiny.