Microsoft's Software Is Malware
On one hand, I&#x27;ve been one of Microsoft&#x27;s biggest fans. I&#x27;ve been using Windows since it first came out, then NT, then 95, then 2000, and so on. I&#x27;ve been using Visual Studio since 2003. They used to be my favorite products.<p>And yet I hate what they&#x27;re doing now. I turned off automatic updates, or so I thought, and returned to my  machine one day last week to find it had restarted anyway. I&#x27;d spent a fair amount of preparing a commit and most of my work had vanished. Another time I returned to an unwelcome restart and I had actually lost a fair amount of work. Sure, I retyped it, but really?<p>On the same machine, I have another account on the same machine that I use for testing. Every single time I sign in to that account, I have to start Task Manager as an administrator and then kill Windows Compatibility Telemetry, even though I have allegedly(?) disabled it several times. Otherwise it consumes so much CPU that I can&#x27;t get my work done.<p>Also, Visual Studio is a hot mess. Why do I have to wait when I drag and drop an int into the watch window? Why does my machine slow to a crawl when I&#x27;m running debug builds? Why are there so many bugs with breakpoints? A lot of the time, I have to use page up&#x2F;page down to see the breakpoint appear even though I hit F9. Why is it agonizingly slow to type things when I&#x27;m debugging? Why do I fantasize about finding a new job that doesn&#x27;t require me to use Visual Studio? Visual Studio has become my least favorite piece of software. There are days when I just write code in Notepad++ and only use Visual Studio to build.<p>It&#x27;s frustrating. The seeming inability to exert developer-level control over Windows makes me feel like my devices aren&#x27;t mine. For fuck&#x27;s sake, I had to tell Windows that my internet connection was metered in order to get them to stop with the updates.<p>Yes, the article might be hyperbolic, but the whole jail argument is starting to line up pretty well with reality. Dear Microsoft, please stop fucking with everything.