Well it's a good thing there's no shortage of free replacements.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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My understanding of the different operating systems
MacOS: One time hardware payment for their service (plus for every other device)
Linux: Free as in price free and freedom
Windows: 30+ subscriptions to edit 1 file, then cooldown till next day or upgrade subscriptions to enterpise version for a kidney/per user/per month.
Title
ChomeOS: Communism for the children, supported by the Education System
Apple heavily pushes their users towards iCloud subscriptions. More so on iOS than macOS but still.
imo macOS is better value than Windows. A Windows PC of similar quality to what Apple offers (built quality and specs) is not that much cheaper and with a Mac you get a ton of actually usable software included.
Obviously FOSS still wins offering a ton of good software for free, lots of choice and the option to choose from hardware at any price point. But Windows is just bad unless you're an enterprise user or gamer (and the latter is changing fast in Linux favour).
Have you ever built PCs? Macs are significantly more expensive for the same spec
The rest I agree with, it doesn't help that Windows has been steadily going downhill with each new version...
I guess for desktops you have a point, especially if you build it yourself. I was thinking of laptops mostly and also considering the build quality and things like the keyboard/trackpad, screen and speaker quality. If you want something comparable running Windows the price difference isn't going to be massive.
You can buy a top CPU laptop then upgrade or even pay to upgrade with high quality ram and storage modules and you would still be paying less than an equivalent Mac. Which you can't upgrade of course, because the only option is buying as is out of the gate. No matter what Apple says, 32 GB of ram simply doesn't cost $300, their pricing is meant to fleece customers.
Is there a particular model you're thinking of? Not just the line. I usually find that Windows laptops don't have enough cooling or make other sacrifices. If you want good cooling, good power (CPU and GPU), good screen, good keyboard, good battery, good WiFi, etc., the options get limited quickly.
Even the RAM cost misses some of the picture. Apple Silicon's RAM is available to the GPU and can run local LLMs and other machine learning models. Pre-AI-hype Macs from 2021 (maybe 2020) already had this hardware. Compare that to PC laptops from the same era. Even in this era, try getting Apple's 200-400GB/s RAM performance on a PC laptop.
PC desktop hardware is the most flexible option for any budget and is cost-effective for most budgets. For laptops, Apple dominates their price points, even pre-Apple-silicon.
The OS becomes the final nail in the coffin. Linux is great, but a lot of software still only supports Windows and Apple; Linux support for the latest/current hardware can be a hit or miss (My three-year-old, 12th-gen Thinkpad just started running well). If the choice is between Mac OS or Windows 11, is there much of a choice? Does that change if a company wants to buy, manage, and support it? Which model should we be looking at? It's about time to replace my Thinkpad.
Finally, I can proudly proclaim that I'm no longer bound Microsoft's bullshit. Been a rocky start, but I've been happily using Kubuntu on my Surface for a while now, and it's going awesome
I have a lenovo yoga 14s which is similarly transformable. Are there good resources out there for installing linux on these kinds of laptop, or are they mostly focused on surface laptops?
Honestly Windows on it is just a nightmare and I'd love to ditch it.
Nothing I could find immediately. I found an Arch Wiki entry which shows that most features work out of the box. Not sure if that's your exact model and can't comment on how reliable the information presented is too.
Thanks! Looks like on the talk page there's doubt about whether it even has a touchscreen, which is a little discouraging. I guess I can just try, but It's good to know a resource like this exists.
Hey, great for you! Which Surface do you have and did you get the camera(s) working properly?
It's a Surface Go 2, 8GB RAM, I think - maybe 4 - and a couple years old now. Haven't tried, actually, since I rarely if ever need the cameras. However, I read that getting the cameras to work is a bit of a hassle. Not impossible but annoying
Microsoft what the fuck are you doing.
You fucking idiot's.
Notepad++ FTW
Sublime Text for me. It has some nifty features that NP++ doesn't, and looks better out of the box.
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This is misinformation. They added the login requirement for their Generative AI and the actual notepad doesn't require a login. But I guess we're ragebaiting today.
Having this LLM bullshit in Notepad should be the real news
They really do seem to be on a mission to cram it into everything
Yeah. This is why I've disabled copilot and Gemini on my devices altogether. It's not worth it to have this nonsense filling up everything you use or rely on on a daily basis.
Upvoted for visibility.
I recommend Notepad++.
I use Kate on the windows work pc
I love Kate, but I've only been using it since last August. Been using npp for a decade before that, even as my IDE, and I felt like it was stronger than Kate.
Kate has a lot of features that are not well documented or that you have to tape together to make something functional, while npp just works out of the box or with one of its many addons. Additionally the Kate documentation website is atrocious, lacking even basic search functionality. I had to join their IRC channel to get help figuring out something (path to some obscure config file that the latest version actually reads from), and while they were most helpful, I really shouldn't have had to go through all that trouble.
Maybe my approach to trying to solve a problem was wrong, coming from Windows + npp.
Maybe I'll give npp a test again. But I've been using kate because I've been using it on my linux system and found out I can install it at work on windows as well
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Is the Genevieve AI enabled by default?
After opening the notepad app does it ask you for that login?
Is your access to notepad restricted by the login?
No, only in so far as the button to use it existing passively
No
And no
"But it turns out that, while this screenshot is indeed real, those eagle-eyed enough should already be able to tell that something isn't quite lining up here. In fact, nearly any Windows 11 user could open up the fully updated Notepad without getting this pop-up at all, even if they aren't already signed into a Microsoft account. So, what's the deal here?"
"The key is in the exact wording, identifiable within the first sentence: "Sign in with your Microsoft account to use Rewrite and its features in Notepad." This is a prompt that exists, yes, but one that's exclusive to Copilot+ PCs and explicitly requires the user to trigger it by clicking the Rewrite button, as confirmed by our own testing."
Please read the article. No. My access to notepad is not restricted. I also don't run any copilot features of any kind on windows 11. Yes, I believe Generative AI Copilot is enabled by default, but in this case the only time you get promoted to login is when you use a feature in notepad that directly needs copilot in order to work and you the user have to select that feature. Meaning you can use notepad without it entirely and never even see this prompt at all.
Microsoft is a tech giant with all the bad crap that implies. They do enough terrible things that we don't need to lie to make them look bad.
So, turns out that they final push that convinced me to start learning Linux is the ol' Text Document.txt of all things. Swear to God, I thought that it would be the automatic updates nuking my unsaved work (again), but here we are...
It's so stupid that they're making these additions to notepad. There is a need to have a basic text editor on an OS that isn't going to try to "help" by giving recommendations, automatically backs up files or whatever other shit they're trying to jam into it.
They had wordpad and if they wanted to add additional features into that, that's completely fine. There are use cases for something that does a bit more than a simple text editor like notepad can do.
My guess is that they tracked that people used notepad more often than wordpad so they removed wordpad. Then started making notepad more like wordpad without considering why people used notepad more frequently.
It is batshit crazy. Notepad was never meant to be what they are making it into. Not even WordPad should have AI nonsense. It's just not for that. It would be like adding advanced spreadsheet functionality to Microsoft Word. It's not what that's for, you have Excel for that.
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Notepad++ is way better anyway
How much shit are people going to endure before realizing Windows isn't for them any more?
Dump the damn thing and use Linux. Yes, Linux is friendly, easy to use, you can play most games, you don't need your proprietary programs because there are Free alternatives that are just as good that might take you a moment to adjust to (don't cry about how it's different, that's Baby Duck Syndrome), and so on.
And Microsoft facilitates fascism and government spyware and all sorts of evil crap. So does Apple. And Google. Throw away your phone, use Linux on your PCs, free yourself.
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