The micro distribution devs found that Replay is now a dependency for explorer. They have to install it and then disable it. Seems MSFT really wants those screenshots.
Instead of an Overton window imagine an Overton amoeba. Microsoft, as a monopolist, has for two decades been pushing out pseudopods in all directions against the boundaries of acceptable behavior for an operating system. ("All" directions, but overall in the direction of more corporate surveillance and less control and visibility for users, as well as profligate resource use.) So it's not that the bar was higher or lower in the past, just that the amorphous shape of the effontery is pushing out a new lobe.
>What if you could remember everything? Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell draw on their experience from their MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable increase in electronic memories. In 1998 they began using Bell, a luminary in the computer world, as a test case, attempting to digitally record as much of his life as possible. Photos, letters, and memorabilia were scanned. Everything he did on his computer was captured. He wore an automatic camera, an arm-strap that logged his bio-metrics, and began recording telephone calls.
Blurb for Total Recall (2009), with foreword by Bill Gates.
Personally, I think this has the same root cause as Microsoft trying to force everyone to log on to the local machine with an online Microsoft account, and telemetry that even the administrator can not completely turn off.
They want to gather personal interest data from your your computer use to fill out your online advertising profile.
They are looking to fully embrace the surveillance capitalism business model that has previously been so successful at Google and Meta.
I think it's simpler. They were tired of their name and OS being dragged through the mud by your average user who has no idea what they're doing. So they started forcing updates, providing their own anti-virus, started adding lots of metrics to track what your average user was actually doing, and tied your documents to an account with cloud storage so that when the user inevitably broke something, it was recoverable in an easy manner. I think people forget that earlier versions of Windows were virus-laden wastelands that had to be fixed all the time because of all the mistakes users were making (most famously all the viruses they'd download and run on their machines that hadn't been updated in 5 years).
I’ll argue iPhone won the smartphone because Windows was such a minefield that a foolproof device like that meant everybody could compute safely.
People who are arguing for freedom to mess up their own computer and those of the tech-illiterate (the kernel access maximalists, the people conflating code signing with corporate oversight) are arguing for giving general computing to closed systems because a majority of users need protection from themselves.
They were always like this. They deliberately broke early Windows compatibility with non-MS DOS implementations for no good technical reason. They bundled Internet Explorer as an unremovable component of Windows during their browser war with Netscape and made it hard to change defaults. They artificially added nonsense dependencies on IE throughout the OS like "ActiveDesktop", which rendered an HYML page as your desktop background. They created the atrocious Windows 8 desktop shell changes (now entirely rolled back) in a desperate effort to gain tablet market share. They added extensive phone-home telemetry with an uninspectable data stream that seemed to log every keystrokes at some point. They try to force the use of Microsoft Accounts to log into Windows. The current replay effort is only remarkable among all the other user-hostile changes in that it is a the biggest invasion of user privacy yet. In every other way, this is standard MS behavior.
My theory is that they're now a Cloud Services company with a bunch of legacy junk attached that they really don't know what to do with, kind of like a person who changed careers but can't let their old wardrobe go. Azure and everything in its orbit are the stars of the company now; Windows is more and more of a distraction and an expense that needs to find ways to fund itself since consumers aren't willing to pay for a desktop OS, much less for constant updates. The solution is to make the users the product that's for sale.
Adjusting for inflation, those numbers suggest very minimal growth.
But also, if you look at their 2023 report[1] it is contracting substantially:
Windows revenue decreased $3.2 billion or 13% driven by a decrease in Windows OEM. Windows OEM revenue decreased 25% as elevated channel inventory levels continued to drive additional weakness beyond declining PC demand. Windows Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 5% driven by demand for Microsoft 365.
Some of that may be cyclical because hardware purchases went way up during the pandemic period and are coming back down to earth, but that doesn't matter anymore to stock value when investors are chasing quarterly or annual performance.
Microsoft used to earn a lot of revenue from selling perpetual software licenses (like any software company in the 1990s). Now they've pivoted over to services, SaaS, and ad-driven freemium software (Windows itself). They're not seeing any growth in Windows installs (and haven't in years), so in order to continue growing they've got to enshittify the existing install base!
It's change for the sake of change. Features unrelated to the cloud, like Notepad, Calculator, Control Panel, context menus, and now File Explorer, are constantly being tweaked and nerfed.
I could never have imagined this coming back in the '00s. Like it or not, Windows was miles ahead of Linux in terms of usability. Their business practices were terrible as ever for sure, but it was not an OS that constantly tried to screw over the user at every chance it could get.
Fast forward 20 years later, Windows is a UX nightmare cramming in a barrage of user-hostile changes every month. It's the least usable desktop operating system out there. What the heck happened?
Yes, this is sort of my perspective to. Well, I switched around 2010, maybe a bit earlier, so I wasn’t on Linux during the real heyday of Windows villainy. But there were lingering sentiments. It is and odd sort of sentimentality to look at them and say “wow, how did they go from competently evil to just embarrassing.” Time makes IBMs of us all I guess.
As a semi-functioning adult, I am sympathetic to the argument that the term “enshittification,” while accurate, is also too vulgar of a term in some settings. It’s one thing to use it on Hacker News, but I personally wouldn’t use this term at church or when talking to K-12 students. Not everything can be PG-13 all the time; sometimes we need G-rated language.
There needs to be a more professional-sounding, G-rated term that describes the degradation of quality of software services.
Regardless of whether the word is vulgar, I often see it thrown around as a meme that has became overused. Even if the original phrase used different words, they will become less and less meaningful once they start appearing in every other comment thread.
You're overstating the impact of the term. No one is going to change the world or overturn the status quo or shift the dominant paradigm by using slightly vulgar language. The only value it has is in the catharsis it provides by comparing something to shit. It isn't a technical term (even though it used to masquerade as one.), it's evocative, so let's be honest. People just like saying things they don't like are shit. It's snark. It's weirdly the only kind of snark that gets past HN's filter.
And since "enshittification" is applied to everything now, and no longer refers to the specific context for which it was coined, we can say we're witnessing the enshittification of enshittification itself.
You’re underestimating how much this stuff matters. There’s an old George Carlin bit about “soft language” that is very relevant here:
“Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it.”
There’s a reason why clickbait is a thing, it’s because if you don’t find a way to punctuate the noise then people don’t pay attention, and people’s brains are affected by the things that grab their attention.
If I was Apple or Microsoft, convincing people to use the term “enshittification” is actually the best possible outcome.
Nobody can use it in a TV ad.
Nobody can use it in political messaging.
Nobody can use it in G-rated settings.
Nobody can use it in a party platform.
Nobody can use it on the debate stage.
Nobody can use it in marketing on why they are better.
Nobody can use it in a courtroom without being accused of bias.
Nobody can use it who is generally soft-spoken or has strong cultural inhibitions.
The term itself silences speech. Anyone who calls this out is labeled a prude, which is perfect from a corporate planning point of view.
The only possible better outcome would be to use the term “assholeification” or something stronger. Call it “companies fucking with consumers” - that’s even better from a PR perspective.
Because people recognize dog whistles when they see them. Calling Adderall amphetamines is literally correct, the generic is "amphetamine salts." Nobody denies it and so there's no reason to point it out in a discussion except as a means to tie someone's medication to the existing negative associations people have with amphetamines/speed/meth.
Whether swearing sounds childish is a cultural convention, particularly in the case of such a mild swear as “shit.” My experience is that it is not something that carries this baggage you describe for the typical person. Of course we’re both commenting from inside our bubbles.
Neither here nor there, but in my cultural context (Anglo-Canadian, middle millennial) “shit” is usually considered one of the most vulgar swear words (second only to “fuck”) outside of the slurs.
I guess I did miss your point, I thought by “we” you meant us currently in this conversation here, instead of some other hypothetical situation. In that case, sure, it would be good to have a sanitized named to describe the thing.
Enshittification seems to have found resonance with the folks who engage with tech often, so I think it is a good term for us as. But maybe something like “abusive platform cash-in” would be a better name in other contexts.
Things that are “adult” or “mature” tend to reinforce the status quo and reduce the probability of change.
Think about why you dislike the word “enshittification”, it’s likely because the word is both very direct and is based on a swear word. These both give the word impact and switching to a word that doesn’t have these properties would likely have less impact and be less likely to catch people’s attention.
Digging even deeper there is also a class dynamic as swear words are considered lower class. I don’t want to write an essay so I won’t go in-depth but “adult” and “mature” could also be considered code for “imitating the upper class” as the upper class loves to protect its identity and uses these dynamics in their favor. Consider for example how, historically, dressing in a suit is both considered upper class and mature, but what function does a suit really have? The primary function is signaling to other people.
The point I’m making is that the upper class generally doesn’t want change, they want to keep their status and power. So many of the things we consider “adult” or “mature” tend to really be imitating the upper class and indirectly maintaining their power and the status quo.
Is this Replay the same as Recall? The take a screenshot every 5 seconds AI thing?
I saw disabling Recall would revert explorer to an older version. Personally I don't care for the changes to explorer, but how much will the system break if I leave the old version up.
It was possible to disable it vs. removing using ShutUp10 in July. Have they since patched that away? If so could one create a scheduled job that runs in the same security scope that would truncate all the files? Or maybe add a RAM disk overlay? There must be a way to put an arrow in it's knee.
Yeah thought I needed a new laptop but with XFCE instead of bloated windows I can code as much as I want now with almost 50% more drive space with XFCE than windows.
Not trying to sound like a dork, but 9 GB -- that's nothing.
MacOS routinely eats 30-40 GB of HD space in Volumes/Preboot and "macOS Install Data" for god knows what. Plus even a bare bones XCode installation will cost around 20 GB, much more if you actually want to run your code on connected devices.
But of course saving disk space is not exactly #1 on Apple's priority list when the 512 GB and 1 TB disk upgrades sell at 80% margin.
Even 1TB isn't enough for me these days, especially since Lightroom requires your catalog be on your boot disk.
But 2TB and 4TB upgrades, in addition to a cost of I think $400/$800 respectively, require you move up a CPU model as well - a HUGE increase in cost that most users can't justify through improved performance.
Depedns on the use case. As someone using all 3 major desktop operating systems regularily, guess which one is my choice for performance critical, rugged, cheap applications.
And before someone says that mjcrosoft doesn't go after that space: a lot of ticket automats, ATMs, Kiosk displays etc. run Windows under the hood. And 9GB times the amount of devices out there are a lot of gigabytes someone has to pay.
And even if for that usecase there is a special slimmed down version of the OS one could argue that they would profit from their main desktop OS and their main embedded OS not drifting apart.
There's a subdirectory in the Windows folder (WinSxS) that can easily eat up 50+GB and deleting files there or in the Installer subdirectory can easily break things like updating any Adobe products you might have installed (which I've experienced directly and seen plenty of reports about online). 9GB is a joke and so is that article.
WinSxS (introduced with NT6.0, Vista) is the component store. It stores most of system files which are versioned and it's what solved DLL hell. Files in other system folders are hardlinks to them.
On my 1 year old install, it's 9GB with only 4GB allocated i.e. with no hardlinks outside WinSxS. So delete stuff outside instead of messing up with this folder.
I agree. I don’t run Windows, but even a relatively cheap laptop will have a 1tb disk. It seems silly to worry too much about an extra 9 gigs used by the OS.
I want to love Linux, but No. Last time I tried Mint, I had to use a script that runs on startup to configure mouse scrollweel speed?!
No.
There's probably a long list of these types of experiences ranging from scaling issues on external monitors (if they work at all) to other basic hardware and functionality just not working.
The best coders I know use Mac or even Windows while managing FreeBSD on their servers. There are reasons why they don't use Linux or (non-Apple) Unix on their desktop.
There are 2 usable desktop OS'es for the masses and those are Windows and Mac. Don't take my word for it, just look at the market. The market has spoken.
Not trying to be a jerk to you but this is the type of response that keeps Windows firmly ahead of Linux. Most users don't care who in the Linux ecosystem is at fault for things not working, they just know some function that works without a thought on Windows is an issue on Linux and they don't care about who in what stack is to blame. If they have to research which combination of distro, desktop environment, and bundle of hacks and flags they need, they'll go back to Windows where the scroll wheel just works. Ditto for all the excuses and finger pointing over audio, printing, and dozens of other pain points that have lingered around for decades.
Yeah, I use Mint on my laptop (not my main PC), but it's a bit rough around the edges. I spent an hour trying to get the fingerprint reader to work, having to compile the driver myself, and it's still a bit buggy sometimes.
Bluetooth also randomly bugs out, mouse or airpods refuse to connect for no reason. Touchpad a bit wonky, pinch zoom doesn't work out of the box, I assume it's some setting somewhere but can't be bothered.
Discord can't update itself, I have to download and install it from a file each update.
Little things that add up to hours and hours of your time wasted.
I've never had to deshittify Windows, everything just works. But every time install Linux, I have to spend hours searching for little configuration problems. Like why Ctrl+C doesn't work in the terminal. Why doesn't Shift+arrow select text? Yes, there are solutions for these problems, but you have either install some crap or copy-paste stuff into config files.
This post is evidence against. There’s hundreds more. Ctrl+C has always worked—but there are real issues, which makes me think you’re not being honest.
I don't think it's that bad, the duration is certainly not enumerated in hours, at least on Windows. It depends on how high a standard you have, but since other people were long aware of the issue, third-party scripts and software to automate a lot of the tedium exist and work pretty well, anything else can be smoothed out by hand.
Freeing up the disk space in a VM is definitely an hours long struggle the first time, must count research time into it as well. I did it last year. Don’t forget the privacy tweaks and research. Sure you could script most of it, like anywhere.
Any such tools that are worth their salt have their code posted publicly, you can check it yourself. Most of it isn't some groundbreaking stuff, a lot can be stripped out by just changing registry values and other deeply-ingrained settings that would take a long time to find and edit by hand. I also don't see how "trust into Microsoft" factors in here - it's not about trust, we know there's telemetry that can't be disabled through standard settings, and I know there are features I'd like to uproot entirely (like deep OneDrive integration).
I have been a full-time Linux use for over a decade, running Linux desktop on all my machines. But there is a reason for the year of Linux desktop not coming: it is garbage. Horrible defaults everywhere, every customization is hidden in some totally unexpected place, bad error handling, driver quality all over the place...
Learning Linux as a user and developer made my career, but I use it at home just out of spite (I feel a special hate towards MS), and not because it is such a great experience.
i'd rather have MS taking 8GB away from my 1TB disk than having Linux taking away at least 6 hours of my life per week cause something broke or cause I have to hoop through the entire internet to install or configure some shit that could've been a single click in windows.
This isn't 2010 any more. If you're doing any dev work at all native linux will cause way less headaches than WSL/mingw or whatever. Even the old folks in my family are all using linux these days because everything they do is in a browser and it's easier for them than windows. That and microsoft constantly changing things out from under you and reverting settings you thought you picked for your own computer.
I've used Linux Desktop for 2 years in 2018 for IT studies, it was mandatory. We were like 20 students and there was a new Linux-related complaint, timewaste and workaround every day. Nobody got their degree and thought "Y'know what? i'm gonna use linux at home!"
I still use Linux for servers nowadays, though.
> If you're doing any dev work at all native linux will cause way less headaches than WSL/mingw or whatever.
I use visual studio and I don't dev for linux, so I don't have this problem.
> Even the old folks in my family are all using linux these days because everything they do is in a browser and it's easier for them than windows.
If all you do is use a web browser, you might as well just use a chromebook.
> That and microsoft constantly changing things out from under you and reverting settings
My settings are never touched, but I agree they sometimes change stuff in a way that bothers me. Like, removing file explorer functionality in W11 and remaking it months later. But they usually make up for it by adding other cool features. Such as native (but slow) unzipping, file explorer tabs, power toys and so on.
Yes, Microsoft will not touch your settings if you haven't disabled all the anti-features they force upon users.
For the rest of us, they are relentless. They won't take no for an answer. They won't hesitate to take their users' precious time as hostage. During each update, they coerce users to enable their numerous spyware with full screen nags riddled with dark patterns. They revert explicit opt-outs. They remove user choice altogether if things don't go their way. This has been reported in the media so many times. You can't just pretend that this hasn't happened.
When is enough enough? Windows bombards you with ads, installs junkware users never asked for, forces you to use Edge, collects keyboard input, records your screen, and outright steals your email. On top of that, their UX is far worse than it was 2 decades ago.
In contrast, desktop Linux has improved dramatically. Unzipping and file browser tabs? They've been around since forever. They're only cool new features on Windows.
Yeah, I know Linux can do gaming, dev and is stable and good. But there is always something which needs a hack / fix, different lib or something.
"Normal" people just take the convenience of a working system out of the box than having a privacy respecting OS.
Personal anecdote, installed Linux Mint on an old Laptop of a friend. First thing, we open Firefox and go to YouTube, hard freeze of the whole OS. Not a single key worked anymore.
Not the best advertisement for the stable and better OS Linux I was showing him.
It’s just not ready for a non-technical user. Try to explain to your mother how to properly get NVIDIA graphics cards running. I couldn’t even do it myself. When I installed Debian, the included open source drive was unusable (lagging even when just moving the mouse) so I wanted to get the driver by NVIDIA. You need to mess around with secure boot and even then, I couldn’t log in using Wayland and would just loop back to the login screen because Wayland didn’t start properly. That’s not acceptable for noobs.
My mother taught me to program, and ran my first programs (FORTRAN) on paper with me. Please don't casually use "mother" or "grandmother" to mean technically incompetent.
For 1., I was citing Debian as an example which doesn’t include it, and that’s certainly a big distro. Other might be better and this isn’t needed for them. For 2., as i said, the default driver was absolutely unusable for me.
Yeah, the ideal Linux desktop for non-technical people is a Chromebook. Roast me if you want, but that's what my mom uses. I did have her using a Ubuntu install awhile ago but the amount of times I had to provide technical support or her to do very normal stuff just made it impractical.
I try to completely get into Linux desktop at least once a year.. Been more than 20 years I've been doing that. There is always some blocker. Had 2-3 months of exclusive linux use a couple of times but never stuck.
My latest main issue btw:
Fractional scaling does not work reliably. It just results in different type of fuckery for different apps. Yeah yeah I know wayland x11 this that. No. There are workarounds for different apps, env vars, cmd line flags. Some simply do not cooperate (JetBrains...) It is complete shit show.
It is just not worth it. I'm fine with macOS desktop and Linux on servers. And I salute all the masochists running Linux on their desktops.
At this point, I am afraid that you will never be able to switch to Linux completely. You know what they say, can't teach old dog new tricks. Linux has it's issues and Windows also has it's own issues. You have to choose which ones you can live with one you cannot.
For me, I use a FHD display where 100% scaling looks the best and also it's the small things I cannot live without, like Super+drag to drag/scale windows from anywhere, middle-click paste, powerful POSIX shells (yes, yes I know PowerShell, too old to learn a new shell), etc. But I cannot live with Windows privacy nightmare, mouse-heavy desktop environment.
Just do use what you like. Just have fun computing.
Ironically, Windows still being the best system for keyboard GUI usage is an important reason why I continue using it. With Cygwin for my POSIX shell needs.
I am on Windows for the same reason but KDE finally has fractional scaling that works just as well as Windows. AFAIK, it is the only Linux DE that has it though.
Oh Windows is worse than that: basically every patch or installer you've ever run is also kept on your system. In addition to the files it installed. Remove them and it leads to lots of pain with updates & de-installations.
Haha oh I thought you meant all the other crap windows hordes that you can’t delete like, copilot, weather, news, internet explorer, Skype, teams, new teams , old teams
F you Microsoft , what does any of this garbage have to do with an operating system ??
The funny thing is that I'd been looking at switching to Windows from MacOS in the last 5 years -- main thing is Microsoft's tradition of backwards compatibility, which respects user investment in software, something that much of the industry is briming with contempt for, and the kindest thing I could say about Apple on this particular topic is that they're not the worst offender.
So, bought a Windows Laptop and a Surface Pro, explored that for a bit, and it was ... OK. I could see my hopes getting some kind of payoff with enough work, when I got around to the work. Until this OS-level surveillance stuff went down.
And that's it. I can't imagine investing in their platforms. I can't imagine trusting that the product stakeholders are even capable of learning to act with user interests in mind, or that executive management that created a team making decisions this bad is capable of learning either.
MacOS and Apple have their issues, but they haven't crossed that threshold yet and I can probably fix my backward compat issues with VMs.
(Some responsibility for trusting MS has to fall on me given the "fool me twice" principle, it was clear that they were fundamentally untrustworthy at least as far back as the 90s antitrust trials, now also seems clear that the recent image rehab was exactly that: image, nothing more.)
Apple is pretty bad. They nuked all 32-bit support at some point, which made almost my entire Steam library unplayable until I cobbled together a Windows box. When coupled with the idiotic UI design direction they have taken the last 10 years, MacOS is no longer a contender for me.
Doesn't Administrator account have permission to register new system services (e.g. in services.msc) and have them run as SYSTEM account? I thought it is the case but never tried.
Yes, this is precisely how the (now owned by Microsoft) Sysinternals PsExec [1] tool can spawn a shell as SYSTEM — it creates a service which spawns a shell in your current desktop session.
its worse than that; for instance in w10 the registry will have a whole slew of SYSTEM owned items, but only the TrustedInstaller (still SYSTEM) has permissions to traverse the registry tree; sadly the specfics escape me at the moment (im pretty sure the last ASUS laptop i'll ever own corrupted the nvme drive; so replicating that project that produced the results i was seeking is on the backburner)
i was using NSudo for elevation to that scope when needed (wow looks deprecated now in favor of new tooling, neato)
Looking at all the articles about this issue, this seems to be more about a bug in the Windows cleanup tool that lets the user delete old update files. Maybe the tool isn't working properly, or it's flagging update files as deletable and they're not supposed to be. Admin users can still delete whatever they want manually, unless the system or something else is currently accessing the file. The OS sometimes protects its system files by having them be owned by the SYSTEM user, but the admin can take ownership of them to delete them. This hasn't changed and I can't see it changing.
This shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Microsoft’s Windows has a long and proud history of using users’ hard drives as their own dumping ground for trash, and for package management that fails to entirely clean up after uninstallations and updates. No respect whatsoever for the user’s filesystem.
LTSC eliminates so many antifeatures present in 11 and 10 Home, and also solves the problem of the EOL for 10 next year - Win10 IoT Enterprise LTSC is good through 2031.
Grab the "en-us_windows_10_iot_enterprise_ltsc_2021_x64_dvd_257ad90f" ISO, sha1 begins 76c3c10e, from Microsoft:
That’s way too complicated for the average person or business, who probably doesn’t even know recall is spying on them. We need to regulate and to break up or heavily tax megacorps like Microsoft
If Recall is all that needs to be fixed, it can just be disabled pretty easily from systems that have it (I presume that most don't, and it doesn't even exist on my current Windows PC).
LTSB/LTSC is very much viable for businesses that can obtain it legit through bulk licensing as a build of Windows Enterprise. The complicated process above is intended for individuals, who can't get buy it directly. Even then, it's more oriented towards HN users and such, not the average person.
Starting to get the feeling that Microsoft puts all of their best devs and managers on Azure, and perhaps BI/Dynamic, with legacy products like Windows getting people they're going to PIP out the door eventually.
reply