Over the past few years, I’ve become incredibly familiar with the work of a lot of tech reporters. I am a worker in the tech industry, after all, so it makes sense that I’d be interested in the goings-on of the industry as a whole, but the primary reason I’ve added this to my interests is because of Windows and the rise of LLMs. I’ve had access to a computer of some kind or another for my entire life and have always enjoyed them. The first big thing I ever bought myself was a laptop I could use for computer games that ate up all of my carefully horded babysitting money when I was a teenager, and I’ve been spending a lot of time on a computer ever since. Most of the time, it has largely been a device I took for granted–something that I largely ignored except as a vehicle to deliver other things: video games, my writing, digital access to my friends, and so on. A few years ago, as I became isolated during the first summer of the pandemic, my relationship with my computer changed drastically, turning from the aforementioned vehicle into the portal through which I accessed all of existence other than the physical place my body occupied and the grocery store. Since then, it has shrunk somewhat, but computers still loom large in my life and I can say no cloud has darkened my horizon quite like the appearance of LLMs and every software company’s attempts to shoehorm them into everything. This capitalistic and ruinous desire, the appeal of these plagiarism and theft machines, is actively driving me away from everything to do with computers and would maybe even drive me back into being a console-only gamer except that I know for a fact that the console companies will also shoehorn that shit in if they can ever figure out a way to do it.

Nothing exemplifies this frustrating focus quite like Windows 11 and their incredibly unpleasant LLM “Copilot.” Did you know that Windows 10 was once advertised as the last Windows version? That it was supposed to be the end of major version incrementation and the start of consistent support of a single platform that would get us all away from the need to update our computers every few to several years. This, obviously, did not stay true for long. Microsoft saw a way to extract more “value” from their customer base and so they pitched all of their plans, tossed out the incredibly bad Windows 11, and now we’re all stuck living in a capitalist hellscape where you can find advertisements in your start menu and you’re constantly under threat of having the unescapable LLM that is Copilot being turned into Microsoft’s spyware so they can turn all the work you do into training for their next generation of LLMs, copyright and security be damned. Thankfully, the last two attempts to do that last thing were met with such resistance and public outcry that Microsoft walked the feature back not long after it was noticed, but they’ve clearly signaled that they’re still interested in pursuing that featureset in the future, one way or another. Given that all LLMs are built on a foundation of theft, it really wouldn’t surprise me if we eventually found out that every Windows computer was actually feeding data back to Microsoft no matter what your settings are or what you’ve tried to restrict. If they’re willing to steal every single creative work ever produced despite the illegality of such and action, what’s supposed to stop them from just monitoring everything you type and do on your computer anyway?

The only way to even sort of avoid Copilot and it’s enshittification of every single Microsoft product is to stick with Windows 10, which unfortunately won’t be an option for much longer. Given the slow adoption of Windows 11 (largely due to how awful and inescapable copilot is, and how difficult it is to disable all the adware that comes preinstalled), Microsoft announced that they’re going to stop supporting Windows 10 this year. This would force a lot of enterprise customers (other companies and whatnot) to swap to Windows 11 if they haven’t already, since not using the latest version of Windows potentially leaves them exposed to security issues. Currently, if someone figures out a hack they can use to access someone’s computer through Windows 10 (or any kind of system built on the Windows 10 operating system), Microsoft fixes it and any relevant stuff in Windows 11. Once they stop supporting it, only Windows 11 will get updates and any flaws in Windows 10 will remain unfixed. So, a lot of customers who don’t see a need to update or actively want to avoid Windows 11 (like me) are living on borrowed time. If we don’t update, there’s a chance that something might break eventually and Windows 10 will become unsafe or entirely unuseable. Or, like a lot of older operating systems, it will sit on whatever devices had it installed and remain largely unbothered until the hardware decays into inoperability. Anything is possible, but it is probably more risky, from a safety perspective, to stick with Windows 10 than update to Windows 11. I would still rather die, though. Which I say only mostly hyperbolicly. I’d certainly rather not use a computer again.

Aside from my rabid hate for LLMs and how they’re getting shoehorned into everything (and every constituent part of that whole mess of utter shit), Windows 11 is also just a bad operating system. Ads in your start menu unless you’re a proficient computer user who knows how to disable them, copilot in everything unless you can figure out how to disable it, settings getting changed on you as Microsoft updates your computer and re-enables copilot again, and so much resource drain! All of that crap running in the background takes up so much more of your computer than Windows 10 does! I’ve got a pretty decent computer at my workplace now, thanks to an upgrade a little while back, but my old one still ran better because the OS was less demanding. That thing occasionally stutters and skips because of the inexplicable demands on it that spike and vanish, but my home PC continues to run smoothly even if I’m running a demanding program on every single screen. I regret letting go of my old Windows 10 work computer and that’s even without considering all of the bullshit I had to set up in order to actually use this machine. Couldn’t log in after doing initial setup because it wouldn’t allow me to log in until I’d created a passcode, which is exactly like a password but it uses the word “code” instead of “word” to subtly and uselessly suggest to users that they make a more complex security phrase without telling people they’ve been doing it wrong. Had to go into all my setting AFTER set up to disable all the stuff the setup process told me was present but wouldn’t let me disable during setup. Absolutely miserable experience.

You know, most poeple didn’t have opinions about operating systems. They were the price of doing business and you just used whatever you had access to. Sure, there were plenty of people who cared deeply about their operating systems, but they were nowhere near the majority. Most people’s main concern was about the hardware they got and if it would accomplish the task they wanted. Now, though, lots of people have opinions about operating systems and the most common one is that software is just painful to use. Given the way that companies like Microsoft are screwing over the usuability of their software in order to extract more “value” from their customers, I don’t blame them! Wanting a computer and getting a nigh-unusable brick because the operating system is bogging down the cheap, simple computer you bought would absolutely suck! Better to stick with your phone which at least runs better most of the time. It’s wild to think that we got here, with horrible computers that suck to use being the most popular computers bought, from the amazing days of the early Personal Computer and the awesome power of the dial-up internet back in the day. Really, we should have just stopped developing software with Windows XP and never done anything new after that. Life would be so much better without all the shit that came afterwards…