It Is Truly Embarrassing to Keep Using Windows Now
I’m just confused why people still put up with this
I grew up with Windows. Yeah. Actually fond memories.
Most of my generation grew up with it. XP was home. Windows 7 was fine. And then it went downhill. And it hasn’t stopped. In a decade.
Windows now is a joke. But worse. Because it’s not funny. It’s dangerous.
The password thing
If you use Microsoft’s New Outlook (why the hell would you), it syncs your email passwords to Microsoft’s cloud. Without asking. Without a confirmation dialog. Without telling you.
Your passwords. Their servers.
Microsoft built a mail client that uploads your credentials to their infrastructure.
Recall
Recall. The AI feature that takes a screenshot of your desktop every few seconds so you can “search your past activity.”
Every. Few. Seconds.
Your banking. Your therapy session on Zoom. Your private messages. Your tax documents. All of it, screenshotted and stored locally in a searchable database.
Microsoft says it’s local. Sure. But security researchers found that malware could access that database. And “local” doesn’t mean “private.” It means “not uploaded yet.”
240 million devices in the trash
Windows 11 requires a TPM 2.0 chip. A security module built into newer hardware. If your computer doesn’t have one, you can’t upgrade. Period.
That decision alone is estimated to send around 240 million perfectly working computers to the landfill.
240 million…
Many of those machines run Windows 10 just fine. They have multicore processors, enough RAM, fast SSDs. They work. They just don’t have the right “chip” on the motherboard.
Sustainability and e-waste is a hot topuic every other week, but Microsoft decided that a quarter billion devices are now garbage.
Your encryption keys aren’t yours
BitLocker, the built-in disk encryption on Windows, stores your recovery keys in Microsoft’s cloud by default. Tied to your Microsoft account.
And Microsoft hands those keys to law enforcement when asked.
So your “encrypted” drive isn’t really encrypted in any meaningful way. Not from Microsoft. Not from anyone with a legal request.
Ads in an operating system you paid for
Windows collects telemetry data. A lot of it. And it uses that data to show you ads. In the Start menu. In File Explorer. In the lock screen.
You paid for this operating system. A lot! Or your hardware manufacturer paid for the license and baked it into the price. Either way, money was exchanged. And you still get ads… Not even Google, the masters of data collection do this. At least their stuff is “free”.
Also, Candy Crush. A freaking game. That was pre-installed on everyone’s machine at some point. Not because anyone wanted it. Because someone paid Microsoft to put it there.
And when you go into settings and tell Windows you don’t want to share your data, Microsoft has been ignoring those preferences.
Ryzen
When Windows 11 launched, it shipped with a bug that silently ate up to 15% of your CPU performance on AMD Ryzen processors. Pretty popular desktop CPUs.
15% of your performance.
Most users didn’t notice, because who monitors CPU cache latency on a Tuesday. But it was there.
And of course, no apology. Just a patch, eventually. And by eventually, we mean months into it.
Settings from three different decades
Try to find a specific setting in Windows 11.
Some settings live in the new Settings app. Some still live in Control Panel, which Microsoft has been “phasing out” since approximately 2015. Some are only accessible through Group Policy Editor. Some require PowerShell.
It’s like renovating a house but leaving three of the rooms untouched since 1998 because you ran out of budget.
BUT freaking Microsoft didn’t run out of budget. They’re worth trillions.
And then there’s Bing in the Start menu. You type the name of an app installed on your own computer, and Windows decides to search the internet instead. Through Bing. Which nobody asked for. Why would they?
Politics
I live in Europe. In Schleswig-Holstein.
The US under Trump has become unpredictable.
The EU responds with digital tariffs, every Microsoft license, every Azure subscription, every Office 365 seat gets more expensive overnight.
If you depend entirely on Microsoft for your operating system, your office suite, your cloud storage, your email, and your AI tools, you’re a basically a hostage right now. You go where they go. You pay what they charge. You accept what they change.
A Windows subscription model is not as crazy as it sounds. Microsoft already moved Office to subscriptions. Game Pass is a subscription. Data is becoming less valuable because AI can generate it synthetically now. So what’s left to monetize? The OS itself.
I can easily believe that Microsoft is turning Windows into a monthly subscription soon. And not a cheap one.
The irony
People say Linux is hard. That you need to be a “tech person” to use it.
Meanwhile, to make Windows 11 usable, you need to:
Disable telemetry through registry edits.
Remove bloatware through PowerShell.
Block ads through Group Policy.
Find settings across three different interfaces.
Fix Bluetooth issues that have existed for years.
Work around a Start menu that searches Bing instead of your own files.
And all that in an OS you paid for.
If you can do all that, you can install Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin OS or others in 20 minutes and never think about it again.
The “Linux is complicated” argument really is dead.
Modern Linux distributions have app stores, plug-and-play hardware support, and updates that don’t force a reboot.
A clean Windows now requires more technical knowledge than a Linux distro.
Options
If you’re on Mac, the hardware is expensive. That’s still somewhat true, although the MacBook Neo is changing that pretty quickly right now.
Still, price for hardware aside, at least Mac doesn’t track you, take your money, AND shows you ads.
Software compatibility is still a thing on Mac for some people. If your job requires specific Windows-only applications, you’re out of luck in many cases.
Same is true for Linux. In some cases.
Adobe doesn’t run on Linux. Some niche business software doesn’t either. That’s not a small thing for many people.
But it’s becoming less of an issue by the day.
But, yes, switching costs time. Relearning muscle memory, finding alternatives, setting everything up. Even if it’s easier than people think, it’s not zero effort.
But, hell, it’s worth it. Mac or Linux. Either way. Nothing is more embarrassing than using Windows in 2026.
The Bottom Line
Microsoft took a functional operating system and turned it into an ad platform, a data collection machine, and a funnel for cloud subscriptions.
They made 240 million computers obsolete for a “security” chip. That really has nothing to do with security in the grand scheme of things.
They screenshot your desktop every few seconds and call it a feature. They upload your email passwords without asking.
And people still use it. Because it’s what they know.
Switching is effort. But at some point, the effort of staying becomes bigger than the effort of leaving. I think we’re past that point.
I wrote about this before, and I’ll probably write about it again. Because it keeps getting worse. Not better. Worse.