I felt the same way for years - I was a Slashdotter, used to run a Linux desktop for about a decade and talk about 'MS' and occasionally use a dollar sign. Hey, I was 20, everyone was doing it.

I recently had a conversation about how much I like powershell on HN. Someone called me a 'microshill' and I smiled a smile that comes with age.

I'm not sure I feel the same way, and I will probably be downvoted for it.

Microsoft's entire existence is largely based on incredibly aggressive, (perhaps) unethical behavior against its perceived rivals. FUD, threats of litigation and patent extortion, etc. Trying to destroy the entire open source movement. Why do they need forgiveness? They are a profit-seeking entity that has tried to crush many things I hold dear. Think about where we'd be today if Microsoft actually succeeded in what it set out to do long ago. It's only because they failed that we are having this discussion.

I don't forgive you.

I don't forgive you for putting ads on my Start Menu. Or on my lock screen. I don't forgive you for taking away my choice on when I want to update my computer. I don't forgive you for firing your QA team and then using the public as your beta testers. For taking away features in Windows Pro that could force people to upgrade to Enterprise. For us having to pay for support on top of buying your software. For not allowing home users to turn off Telemetry. For all of the product confusion and terrible naming conventions. I won't even go into past practices...

I don't get how years of screwing everybody over can suddenly be turned around with some marketing saying "we <3 linux" and open sourcing a few projects out of desperation. They only <3 Linux because they have to. It's going to take a long time for me to regain their trust.

If you'd told me ten years ago that I'd be working for Microsoft today, you'd have made an enemy.

If you'd told me five years ago that I'd be working for Microsoft today, I'd have laughed at you.

I sometimes still marvel that I work at Microsoft today, and don't hate myself for it. In fact - and it's still a little hard to believe - I really like what Microsoft has become, and I'm excited to contribute to it.

I'm not on the forgive train yet, but with the Apple computer ecosystem (as in things that look and behave like a PC-esque device) becoming increasingly hostile, I'm actually seriously considering going back to Windows.

The deal breaker is having a unix shell. I have worked on a system with a native unix environment for a decade and a half, going back to to the windows shell is not an option.

Thankfully, the Linux Subsystem for windows works pretty well already and with some further iteration I think it could become viable for most of my development needs.

When that happens I don't feel any loyalty to apple and will happily move over.

No, sorry, to paraphrase Richard Gere, this is not a cuddly new Microsoft. Though Windows got downgraded from "the literal bane of that part of my existence that involves interacting with computers" to "death by a thousand paper cuts". File I/O is still slow, process spawning is still slow, Windows 10 is a privacy clusterfuck, and there are endless other annoyances. No thank you, I'll avoid all that if possible and stick with Linux.

I explained it to a friend thus. Imagine living in a world everyone drove a Ford Pinto. You could try driving not-a-Pinto; however, people will look at you funny and your boss may fire you. 99% of auto shops only sell Pinto parts and there are some roads you can't go on, which will shred up your tires because they're not Pinto tires. That was the situation in the Windows 9x era.

Later, after millions of complaints about the Pinto's tendency to explode, Ford Motor company finally issues an upgrade option for the Pinto: the Ford Taurus. You are still expected to drive a Taurus, and to use it for everything, including grand touring, drag racing, and pulling heavy loads. Some Taurus drivers assure me that their modern fuel-injected Taurus engine really is more powerful than the Cummins V8 diesel in my Dodge pickup, but I will treat that story with suspicion until I see Tauruses pulling trailers full of lumber or equipment up grades that the Dodge can't handle, and I haven't seen that yet. But the status quo today is, at least, better than a fucking Pinto.

That's where we are today.

Agreed. The Surface Studio looks amazing - I'm not a creative type, so it isn't really designed or intended for me, but boy do I want to play around with one. And the Surface Book also looks phenomenal - when coupled with the Linux subsystem, it could be a machine that does 90% of my daily tasks.

Unfortunately that remaining 10% involves running and debugging sites and apps on iOS, which requires macOS. So I'm still on a Mac for now, but the temptation to get a Hackintosh running inside a VirtualBox VM increases every day...

For all the good steps Microsoft have made recently I still hate that I cannot run Windows 10 how I want.

In the latest version, 1607, I can't even disable the lock screen when I resume from sleep ffs. So frustrating.

I don't need to forgive Microsoft. I moved to GNU/Linux (Debian, thank you very much) and never looked back.

All the drama regarding forced updates, stealing user bandwidth, etc. does not affect me personally. But it does prove that once an abuser, always an abuser.

Once the dust settles on .NET, I may take a serious look at it. That doesn't need me to forgive or trust Microsoft, since I can study the source code and do whatever I want with it.

Once I learn how to set up my own reliable email server, I plan to dump GMail, as well.

Edit: typo

Funnily enough, I am a lifelong Microsoft Windows user who only recently switched to Linux because I got fed up with Microsoft's continued W10 bull.

But what about infamous Win10 data collection, forced updates, etc.?

It is all about choices. As long as you know that alternatives exist, all is fine. But for many people, there only is the Windows world. Or OSX. This is how i don't want it to be for my children.

See...

I have been using Linux since 1999, exclusively since 2001, this includes home and also business. Yes, there are lots of win specific software, but you know, wine got so much better over the years, if really needed i can use VM and as last resort, even reboot to win7.

As my kids been growing up, we have played many games on Linux (WOT Blitz, WarThunder, Minecraft... some natively, some via steam, some via wine steam... playonlinux has been interesting too, and not only for games... and i have been amazed that all this has been possible. This all on a mid range laptop randomly purchased, with full hardware support, touchscreen, sleeping/resuming... you name it.

And my kids are proud to use Linux, knowing there are many people contributing, rather then promoting large company, who, besides other bad stuff, has been known for making fake police reports on stolen software in this country.

So this is a good story, good experience. Certainly possible on any platform, but sometimes good platforms are tainted by bad companies.

I used to always "wince" when I had to use Windows or other Microsoft software. Now, Windows 10 is an absolute dream over previous versions, Office is pretty much second to none, and Microsoft's initiatives into hardware (Halolens) are pretty damn awesome. I'd say the company has made me into a non-hater again.

I think, based on my history, a lot of people would call me a shill, but I still think it's important to stress the company is not perfect. There are still question about the data collection in Windows 10 and the company still does collect payments from Android vendors for the patents it owns.

There's still some elements of the "Evil Empire" left, but overall, from a development and consumer device perspective, they do seem to be taking notes of what's working in the market.

Whoa, didn't see this coming. During the event yesterday I was tweeting back and forth with some people about what Microsoft's future prospects look like, and someone said they're doomed because they'll never get developers back, specifically citing DHH's "real programmers don't use Windows" rant. At the time I thought it was time to re-examine that rant and maybe see if DHH was wrong, but it looks like the guy himself beat us to the punch.

I was close to forgiving them, but I'm holding onto my grudge because of forced automatic updates.

I've felt similarly about Microsoft. I disliked their strategy and their taste for a long time. But I found their Surface Book announcement compelling and so I bought one. It went through some bumps and hiccups, and it still isn't as smooth as I would like, but it gave me the drawing experience I really wanted. I still think a Surface Pro 4 with a cellular modem built in would be killer. So if you're listening Surface team, go talk to the Nokia guys you bought and get the radio/antenna from the Lumia series phones and find some place to stick it inside your tablet please!

On topic of "new Microsoft", has anyone spent decent time with the Linux Subsystem for Windows 10?

I've been slowly putting it through its paces for my (admittedly simple) dev workflows, which mostly involves web development tools like PHP, Ruby, git and node-based toolchains, but so far it has been a pretty good experience..

I might be willing to forgive (not forget) but not while MS is doubling down with the "telemetry", ignoring privacy, forcing their corporate choices, and in bed with government divisions of ill repute.

The console/terminal/command prompt/whatever is still hot garbage. I recently installed Bash for Windows on my Windows 10 laptop excited that maybe I could use it for dev again. Nope, uses the same terrible console that has been in Windows since they dropped DOS.

If they really want to go after devs this needs to be an "all hands on deck" thing they fix. Stop everything you are doing and focus exclusively on this. Don't try to make incremental improvements to the existing terminal; start from scratch.

Here are some requirements:

1) Copy/paste must just work like it does in all other app. Including selection.

2) Standard menus, not right-click on the window chrome and "Properties".

3) Has to look decent by default. Not 8px fonts. Not 0px padding. Not a scrollbar before there's anything to scroll. Make it look decent.

4) Tabs

That's it! I (and no one else) cares if its embeddable or not, just make a terminal that is decent, like Terminal.app (which I don't use but is fine).

PS: Please do not reply with command prompt wrappers that try to fix these issues. I've seen them all and they aren't good enough (through no fault of their own, they have to work with the command prompt).

Around three generations of users only know one kind of computer. These are the people that hate computers.

Because Excel. Because Abort, Retry, or Fail[0]. Because software(license)-limited number of concurrent connections.

Because they delayed the release of features to maximize profit.

The world is in a mess today. I don't have a crystal ball, I don't know if we'd be better or worse off if we'd had machines that were only limited by hardware, not software, for all these years...

But I'll stand my ground, hold my grudge, just in case, thank you very much. Somebody's got to keep an eye on them.

EDIT: Whoops, I forgot the footnote!

0: ARF would be great if there were any practical difference between Abort and Fail... When you pick one or the other, a different errno is sent back to the application. The application then could take a different path... Just like a "Restart" in Common Lisp. However, MS's own flagship applications abstained from such behavior, again missing an opportunity to demonstrate, to teach...

I'm not ready to forgive yet. There are very few places I can buy a computer with Linux preinstalled, and too much Linux-unfriendly hardware, and I still wonder when the UEFI hammer will fall.

I have a windows 10 vm .. it applies updates every week that force me to restart. No thanks.

My Surface Book is by far the nicest piece of hardware I've ever used. It does everything, and is beautiful to boot.

I can let bygones be bygones on the whole paying for Windows when I wasn't buying the machine to run Windows, but I just cannot get over the whole gathering of data they do and the choices they have taken away from Windows 10 Pro. The only version that really can have all of the stuff turned off is the Enterprise edition which I cannot buy. If they got rid of the BS phone home stuff, I would forgive. Until then, its just the same old crud modernized to do it the Advertising way.

I can't help but want to be on the opposite side of whatever this guy is talking about. His belief in the objective correctness of his own opinions rivals Stallman's.

So DHH basically hates whoever is the successful one at the time, I guess (or two).

Seems like the majority of the rest of the internet as well. Haters gonna hate, for all time.

This is just flat out wrong. Microsoft has improved a lot and is doing some cool stuff but they are still doing horrible shady things too.

Windows 10 installs with very invasive default settings, and updates have re-enabled those invasive settings, requiring users to be aware of that and go in and turn them off again.

I applaud the moves to Open Source and standardization. But they have further to go before I would call them a "puppy".

Microsoft, if you open source Windows plus whatever SDK du jour (Win32, Win64, et al) you want me to code against such that I can build from source where all your telemetry and other "advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers" nonsense are ripped the F--- out, THEN you'll get juuuust enough dispensation from me that when you die you won't go to hell, just purgatory.

Forgiveness? Dream on.

Linux is by programmers, for programmers, and also for power users who are programmers in the making.

Windows' target audience is average users and these users are their main source of revenue. A while ago, I said in another thread that their open source efforts are a means to an end and nothing else. I also see their recent subsystem for Linux as an halfhearted effort.

I barely use Windows these days, mostly Mac and Linux both at work and at home. I'm interested in the Linux subsystem in Windows 10 but haven't had time to look at it. I'd like to believe that Microsoft is now a cuddly Teddy bear, but the strong arm tactics around Windows 10 updates and the International Harvester attitude about my personal data have been very off putting. Sadly, Apple is getting arrogant about updates as well, spamming me constantly about upgrading my phone to iOS 10. If they would both back off on some of that, I'd be a lot happier.

Having said that, the video I watched yesterday of the Surface Studio presentation was really impressive and I'm sure the content creation people will love it. Apple seems to have decided that they no longer care about that market, one they used to own. I'm saddened by that.

Edit: I especially liked the 3:2 aspect of the Studio screen! 16:9 is not the One True Aspect Ratio!

No matter who wrote this post, what it says, or what the people here say in the comments this will always read as viral marketing as if people are paid to praise microsoft.

It's a consequence of the fact I'm now wired to expect it, because these companies have big budgets and actually do spend their money on astroturfing.

I think there's tremendous untapped potential in an easel-like all in one workstation PC. I would love to make a serious stats package that has a round-trip visual editor that generates code. For certain things that are very process oriented, why aren't we making live diagrams of this stuff and letting users edit those with large touchscreens?

(Disclosure: I once worked for a successful company that did this with something as complex as energy scheduling, though it wasn't round trip. (Didn't need to be.) I know that you can build useful, orthogonal, and darn useful diagrams that allow one to do serious work.)

I think their most egregious sin revolves around document formats. Their mendacity in pretending to support Open Standards while doing the exact opposite was serious Dr. Evil shit.

I think what has happened is Microsoft was perceived to be evil because they held what was thought to be a monopoly and people don't like companies being in that position, it makes them feel like they are always being screwed. Then Google and Apple usurped them and people rejoiced, only to soon find out the Apple and Google are just as dodgy and monopolistic as Microsoft was.

And i just had to roll back the GPU driver because MS silently upgraded it, in the process nuking my ability to use a external screen...

"Tim Sweeney claims that Microsoft will remove Win32, destroy Steam"

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/now-ti...

Sure the Hardware is amazing but the OS feels way too much like that slimy car salesman...."trust me, it's the best deal out there".

>Besides, the company just isn’t scary any more. Or tone-setting. Or, in many areas of past glory, even relevant.

Ironic, considering the author of this article.

I'd be happier if I could update my laptop and wife's laptop to be encrypted. It's 2016, that should be in every OS be default.

Why limit yourself? I have a laptop running Windows. My other laptop simultaneously runs Mac OS and from there I VNC into my linux server.

Know everything.

Microsoft needs to seek absolution for forcing people to windows 10. it may be an unforgivable sin

While I don't believe in Heaven, I do believe that Bill Gates can buy his way there.

It's the same wolf, just got smarter and fancier clothing, old man ...

No way. I have a long memory. I'all resist as long as I can.

Too soon?

>...hoping, jumping, dancing buffoon

Wasn't this too much?

this is one of the stupidest thing I've read today

wow much old and experienced greybeard masterman. much smile and knAwledge. much superior to linux kiddies. much much ms very good boy like powershell.

Agreed.

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#ForgiveMicrosoft

#ForgiveMicrosft