Microsoft has been slowly but surely enshittifying Windows, while trying to inject AI into everything, and I am completely over it.

What broke me

Windows 11 (and Windows 10 before it) have a really cool feature. On the login screen they will periodically rotate the background image. The images are always really high quality, sometimes they're of interesting pieces of architecture, other times they're really cool landscapes, or other stunning images of nature and wildlife. As someone who does a lot of nature photography as a hobby, I really enjoyed seeing these photos. Alongside this background image there would also be a prompt related to the image, and if you clicked it, it would take you to a Bing search about the subject of background image. I never clicked these prompts, because I never cared to be navigated to Microsoft's shitty search engine, and they were never really in the way enough for me to care about them.

In the past week or so it got bad. The image was a stunning photo of the Amazon Rainforest, but it was accompanied by not one, but two prompts, proclaiming that AI is powering the effort to protect the Amazon Rainforest. Those prompts take you to a page that has some PR fluff about researchers using supposed AI to enhance their efforts at protecting the wildlife in the Amazon Rainforest.

This is, of course, green washing at its worst. Microsoft is in the news this week because they just released their 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report. In the report Microsoft's carbon emissions are up 30%, thanks primarily to their rush to dominate in the AI space.

But that's not all

Obviously, this isn't the sole reason why I'm ditching Windows. Windows 11 has been OK at best since the very beginning. Out of the box it is one of the most bloated operating systems ever released. By default it's jam packed full of ads, and searching for something from the start bar doesn't prioritize local applications or data, instead it does a Bing search and heavily promotes those results. If you put some effort in, you can disable most of this trash, but it's really frustrating to pay for an operating system and be fed a constant stream of advertising.

In recent months Microsoft has added its new "Copilot" assistant into Windows 10 and 11, with no way to disable it. You can hide it, but if you hit the wrong keyboard shortcut (win + c) you'll be opening co-pilot. As someone who has to switch between Mac OS and Windows pretty regularly I find myself accidentally hitting win + c quite often, and it's infuriating every time I see Copilot open.

Given the state of AI, and all of the surrounding hype, I suspect that Copilot is just the beginning. We're probably only a few months away from additional AI features being embedded into Windows 11, and with each one they add it will probably be harder to disable. If I had to guess we're probably about a year away from Microsoft completely replacing the existing search functionality built into Windows, with one powered by so-called AI.

What's next?

For me, I will be moving back to Linux. I started using Linux when I was a kid (I've always been a huge nerd). At some point around 2006 I started using Ubuntu as my primary operating system. I was completely fed up with how much of a piece of shit Windows XP was, and around that time I was also primarily a console gamer, so it was an easy transition. In 2011 I bought a new PC so I could play games with my friends back home, and that's when I switched back to using Windows as my primary operating system, this time Windows 7. I skipped Windows 8, and upgraded to Windows 10 when I bought another PC in 2021. I upgraded to Windows 11 last year, as it was free, and I've disliked it since the beginning.

I'm hopeful that this time around I'll be able to commit to using Linux, and also still be able to play games with my friends. Thanks to the work that Valve has done, and the popularity of the Steam Deck, Linux support for gaming seems to be at an all time high, and only getting better. I just got my hands on a new SSD that I'll be installing today, and I'm planning on giving Bazzite a go. Hopefully it just works, but I'm sure there will be some growing pains; this isn't my first rodeo, so I'm pretty confident I can figure it out.

I'll plan to keep this blog up to date with information about my journey back into Linux as a desktop operating system. Hopefully I can help some other people out as they transition away from Windows as well.