Microsoft's Software Is Malware
On one hand, I've been one of Microsoft's biggest fans. I've been using Windows since it first came out, then NT, then 95, then 2000, and so on. I've been using Visual Studio since 2003. They used to be my favorite products.<p>And yet I hate what they'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'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'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'm running debug builds? Why are there so many bugs with breakpoints? A lot of the time, I have to use page up/page down to see the breakpoint appear even though I hit F9. Why is it agonizingly slow to type things when I'm debugging? Why do I fantasize about finding a new job that doesn'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's frustrating. The seeming inability to exert developer-level control over Windows makes me feel like my devices aren't mine. For fuck'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.