What an interesting comment thread.

One of the more interesting additions to the article linked in the OP refers to this site: https://www.techspot.com/news/97535-windows-11-spyware-machi... - I'm not sure if I would consider techspot is good journaling. That's all I'll say about that.

> Microsoft is imposing its surveillance on the game of Minecraft by requiring every player to open an account on Microsoft's network.

It's ok when it was Mojang, but it's "surveillance" when Microsoft does it? I mean - Mojang required a login account for the longest time, also. I considered it a good approach simplifying accounts so people can play together across iOS and PC.

Anyways... onto commenting the comments below;

I see people complaining about Office being slow, and taking very long to load. Office apps are one of the fastest applications on my system, often taking a second to load. Yes, Excel loads in a ~second. It's so fast, that it puts LibreOffice to shame taking at least 30 seconds to load for me. And Excel is one damn polished of software. I wouldn't trade it for Calc, or Apple's Numbers.

VS being a terrible dev environment; yet I don't see anyone suggesting something better. It takes 15 seconds to load cold and is pretty quick to load after. Doing dev in Notepad++ and then building in VS afterwards is just.. what?

> Free software makes it possible for me (my business, etc) to pay someone other than the original developer to make the software do what I want. No proprietary license gets me that.

Why not pay the original developers if they're doing such a good job?

> Nonfree software is controlled by its developers, which puts them in a position of power over the users

Yet most users cannot modify software because they do not have the technical know-how. The developers are still in control, and even if you are an experienced developer yourself - there's a good chance you aren't familiar or comfortable enough with the target language to make such changes yourself.

I do acknowledge that FOSS has an important place in our society and our future. I've been a UNIX/Linux sysadmin for a very long time, yet treating it as something of a religion and taking a "cult-like" approach isn't really the best way to make progress. GNU is being held back by this, because there is tons and tons of non-free software built by sole developers who don't want their work and time stolen from them (which the GPL purports to prevent- but this is not true in practice). Yet by the FSF definitions, that makes sole developers evil- and pushes many of them away from the free software platform.

Re; forced software updates...

Anyways, forced software updates is the results of years and years of people not wanting to update their software through their own obstinance, getting viruses and malware as a result and blaming Microsoft and leaving them on the hook for damages. Yes, you can disable the updates with Windows Server - I have NO IDEA how some of you guys are complaining about that. I'm only a middling Linux admin but even I know how to manage Windows boxes at a basic level.

> A lot of malware comes from piracy, not from vulns.

My sweet summer child. A lot of malware and/or viruses do not come from piracy. They come from people who click random web links and/or e-mail and run software that pops up on there. While piracy obviously exists and the web has made it much easier to do so, the vast majority of malware and viruses come from "stupid" users that don't understand what it is they're doing.

Anyways, that's all the energy I have for today. I'm not under any illusion about Microsoft either but being evangelistic about this matter isn't going to help anyone.