so i had a question the other day that
said hey titus is windows bad
and the answer to this is kind of funny
i i want to answer this first is it's
what we all know it is a tool that had
been developed and used and been a
monopoly in the space
and dominated all of the pc market from
the 90s and it still has like something
like 80 percent market share it's
falling and it's not as
dominant as it once was but
it begs the question
is it bad
but before we get into that we really
need to understand what it does well
and the big thing is
most hardware and software is made with
windows in mind
almost all of it out there is if you
want the maximum compatibility with
software and hardware
windows is pretty much the only game in
town because it's been designed that way
it's been a monopoly for decades
and it's just going to continue
for a while yet you know it's not going
to just be a couple years from now that
someone else is going to be using stuff
even though that market share is falling
and i think it's in the 70s now with mac
and linux and chrome os and all these
other ones starting to rise because of
some of the issues windows has but it's
what we know i would say any computer
person anybody that worked in it you
have to know windows because it's what
everyone uses and a lot of times that's
what we grew up on so it begs the
question why would you use something
else that's not windows
and i'd go over these things because i
really do want to answer it is it bad
but just to say yes or no it doesn't
really do that question justice so why
would you choose something other than
windows and really the first thing that
comes to my brain is better security
windows fundamentally has a lot of
different things that have happened to
it over the years but one thing that any
security researcher will tell you is
windows is a security nightmare
from the fact it was hacked back in 2017
in nsa exploit a back door that they
used to gain access to windows system
was discovered and openly shared
that spawned massive amounts of
ransomware around the entire world from
the wannacry virus and many others
not just that but i mean hey you can go
through the entire eternal blue exploits
and really do a deep dive into how poor
the security is in windows
and a lot of that is just because of
this flawed proprietary design so
security is a big deal where a lot of
the nix systems out there linux mac os
they don't have nearly the security
flaws that windows does especially when
it comes to remote execution exploits
and then the second thing is privacy
when it comes to privacy
windows doesn't have a great track
record and most people know about like
its telemetry and its telemetry by
default settings is so egregious that it
has a key largo logger that will
literally track every single keystroke
you make it's going to report back all
your websites that you visit it's going
to report back your cpu it's going to
report back event metrics state changes
accessory data microsoft store logs
in-depth system specs app logs browser
activity logs enhanced reporting i mean
i could go on and on about all the
telemetry in windows
but just read up on it if you're curious
about privacy in windows it's kind of a
joke
but at the same time i've done a lot
with like my script and stuff to try and
pull back some of that telemetry but
it's kind of a
something's better than nothing kind of
approach because we can never really
kill
microsoft's telemetry because there's
just so much of it throughout the entire
system and this even exists dates all
the way back to windows 7 as that was
patched to add a lot of this telemetry
in as well but really when you get into
the modern day person most people don't
care about security and they don't care
about privacy
i think just look at social media
it's not really a thing but
i would say the thing that most people
care about and the one reason why i
switched off windows for a lot of my
daily driving
was consistency
windows became very inconsistent and the
windows 10 rolling updates has been a
bit of a gripe and there's been a lot of
bugs it's probably been the most buggy
os
that you can put on any system just
because
of the lack of consistency through
windows update now there's a lot of
things you can do and i usually
in businesses set like policies in place
where it's not updating every patch
tuesday but waiting four or five days to
vet those patches and only doing
security updates and letting feature
updates uh you know postpone for about a
year before the feature updates go
through where the security updates are
usually postponed only about four days
and that's usually my solution to fix
the windows update problem but i
honestly when it comes to you know mac
os or linux those update cycles are so
much cleaner so much better and a lot
less problems so all that doesn't sound
that bad it just sounds like differences
when you look at the technical on its
surface when you look at windows mac and
linux
they all have their pros and cons and
these are like the pros and cons of
windows and it doesn't necessarily make
it bad by that
but where this really starts to turn and
this is where
the bad comes in is when you look
at the hate and
the
history of microsoft and the
ruthlessness and how they destroyed so
many companies and lives
just from their anti-competitive
practices and how they achieved
market dominance and they still do this
to some extent but let's get into that
so many people have heard of
you know embrace extend and extinguish
and this all came from a u.s department
of justice when they were investigating
microsoft for anti-trust practices back
in the 90s and this
is something that internally microsoft
executives used to basically pull
competition in embrace it they'd extend
it with you know offering an olive
branch to get them on the windows
platform to get that uh
that vendor lock in and then they'd
extinguish it usually by using their own
product or
competiting to their product they've
done this in the browser they've done it
to netscape got killed off in the 90s
and it gets even more nefarious than
that because they specifically blocked
many companies and vendors from being
able to work with them
and made it so they had to use the
microsoft component specifically
internet explorer was known for doing
this they did it with java any kind of
windows java thing they purposely broke
the cross platform capabilities and they
forced all this vendor lock in and this
is kind of why everyone uses windows
today because they had to
that was the only thing that could work
on all because microsoft never really
played fair microsoft has a huge hold on
email
and you can see this through their
proprietary mappy protocol and they they
just actually as of october 1st of 2022
stop supporting um ews which is an old
version of exchange sync rps pop imap
and eas
they still support some smtp traffic but
that gets disabled if not used as
they're really trying to force people
into the mappy protocol and that's in
the email side and this more for the
business email because in businesses
most people use exchange online or o365
and google has a pretty good uh hold on
other emails so there's still some
competition in this space but uh it's
something that i really worry about
because between google and microsoft
they pretty much own all of our email
and i didn't even go into a lot of the
nitty gritty details of windows
and how like the foundation of dos was
actually an iteration of someone else's
creation quick and dirty dos was
actually a clone of something from a guy
named gary kildart cold fusion did an
amazing video kind of explaining all
that and gary kildahl actually ended up
killing himself
by drinking himself to death because
he he could have been the microsoft but
a lot of that just was something that
never happened and there's so many
stories along the way that microsoft is
responsible for and just the
ruthlessness of bill gates in the 90s
was
something of of
just
legend i mean wow so that's why people
hate microsoft i mean there's so many
missed innovations
companies that were forced to shut down
that really if the market was fair and
open it wouldn't have and the lives that
were destroyed all to make the microsoft
monopoly