Breaking up with Micro$oft

I grew up on Microsoft. Every family and personal computer I used up until the last few years has run on Windows. I owned an original Xbox (long live The Duke controller), got red-ringed by the Xbox 360, and continued on through the Xbox One. My original Hotmail account is one of my oldest still-in-use accounts. My primary/favorite tool while teaching high school math was a Surface Pro tablet. When I first dove into the coding world during my data analytics degree, I made my way to VS Code and GitHub. Currently, I work remotely and spend a LARGE portion of my day using SharePoint, Word, Teams, and Outlook.

Things have changed.

I am not going to delve into all of the reasons I no longer enjoy using any of their services, but it goes beyond their insistance on shoving experimental AI into everything they own. Broadly, I feel that each individual Microsoft product is a worse user experience than it was even a few years ago. It is a walled garden filled with fake flowers.

The Decouple

It is nearly impossible to avoid Big Bad Business. Even if you find a business that exemplifies “this is how it should be done!”, there is a good chance one of the jugernauts in Big Bad Business will buy them up and absorb them into their gelatinous cube. This isn’t just tech. We see versions of this in every industrusty, even our grocery stores.

When I stopped using Amazon, nothing on their end changed. They didn’t notice any impact to any metric due to my actions. They have done nothing but grow larger and more powerful since I bounce. I didn’t do it to punish Amazon, I did it to benefit myself.

That is my outlook(!) here. Microsoft doesn’t need me, but that goes both ways.

Operating System: Linux

My first step in getting away from Microsoft was the scariest: breaking up with Windows.

I was reasonably happy with Windows 10 but small annoyances kept building. As Windows 11 started to take shape, older computers with specs that hit the requirements weren’t allowed to install the new OS. Extra requirements kept popping up, pushing further into the always-connected, always-tracked realm. My custom gaming PC was definitely past its prime but still well above the required specs to run the new verison of Windows. Despite this, the upgrade wasn’t allowed. I don’t even remember what the arbitrary brick wall was that Microsoft threw at me, but I was done. I started my journey into Linux.

Originally I only installed Linux on my aging desktop PC, leaving my laptop as a Windows safety net. I jumped between several distros. Sometimes I changed because I wanted to try something new, sometimes I changed because I didn’t quite understand what I was doing and hard borked my system. Over time I learned more about what features I liked, which desktop environments worked for me, and how to not be afraid of the command line…when used responsibly.

I am now a few years into my Linux journey with no Windows on any device of mine. About a year ago I built a new custom PC. I wanted to up my nerd cred so I chose hard mode and installed Arch Linux by following the ArchWiki installation guide. This computer is my primary device, used for work, gaming, hobby coding, and everything in between. Thanks in large part to Steam Deck and Proton, gaming on Linux has become incredibly functional.

Along the way I have experimented with Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Arch, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, SteamOS, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and probably a few others I forgot about. Each has things I like and don’t like. Often I changed just because I wanted to see what another option was like. I’ve found that the distros based on Arch are the ones that I keep installed the longest before getting that itch to see what something else is like.

At the moment, CachyOS (a distribution built on Arch Linux) has my eye. I am using my laptop to test out the CachyOS + Cosmic desktop environment combo before bringing that to my desktop with the near year.

Gaming: Steam

My first gaming memories are playing the early Nintendo consoles: NES, SNES, and Gameboy. However, the first console I remember being “mine” (and a bit my little brother’s) was the original Xbox. My senior year of high school, my friends and I started a Video Game Club that met every Friday. The sole purpose of the Video Game Club was to play Halo. I continued my trajectory with the Xbox 360 in college, and bought an Xbox One during my early teaching years. I wanted an Xbox Series X when they released, but years later and that price has only gone up so I simply don’t care anymore. Combo breaker!

Look, I’m a gamer. I play games, and have played games for a while. My console journey is only half of the story. I played Starcraft on the family Gateway computer in middle school, bought a Sager gaming laptop in high school for LAN parties, and have had a VERY active Steam account for the last 17 years.

I came from an era of buying games on disks and finding sketchy patches to run them without a disk in the drive. Steam being the only real option for PC gaming is a problem, but unlike all of the other failed/failing PC gaming storefronts, they focus on games, enhancing gamer’s ability to play games, and stay in their lane. Nearly everything about Steam is better today than it was a year ago, and 100x times better than it was in 2008 when I made my current account for my first Steam Winter Sale.

Internet was a part of PC game long before it showed up in consoles. It took a few generations, but as Microsoft’s Xbox gained more capabilities through the internet, those capabilities were often a detriment to the actual process of playing games. Ads. I’m talking about ads. Ads for games. Ads for services. Ads for whoever paid to show up on the home screen of my console and hide the games I’m trying to launch. You want to know what ads I get in Steam? Advertisements for new games and advertisements for sales. Those show up in designated zones, not in my list of games trying to trick me into clicking them.

At this point I regularly play my Steam Deck, game on my desktop PC, and occasionally crank it up with my Playdate handheld. My Xbox One is in storage after collecting dust for years. Xbox Live was my longest running paid subscription, started in college and most of the way through my teaching career across two more generations of Xboxes. While Microsoft has added countless extra “services” and “perks” to their Xbox subscriptions, those subscriptions keep rising in price and simply don’t hold value for me.

Plus paying money to play online for a game you already own is dumb.

Email: iCloud, Gmail

I mostly use Outlook for work, where an enterprise license paid for by a university takes some of the pain away. I get very few actual emails to my personal Microsoft email address but each time I am reminded that I am a second class user for not paying their subscription fees. As unpleasant as most ads are, placing them in a free product/service is understandable. What is not is making those ads look like fake unread emails at the top of my inbox. You aren’t trying to sell me, you are trying to trick me. Gross gross gross.

This shift was an easy one because there are infinite options. Most of those options are just as Big Bad Business as Microsoft, but there are other players in the game to choose from. My Hotmail/Outlook has never been my primary email address, that honor has been held by Google since back in the invite-only Gmail days.

Aside from an abandoned Yahoo! address, that was the extent of my email adventures until a few years ago. My wife and I upgraded our ancient Android phones with iPhones to see how the other side lives. With that came an iCloud address. I’ve also spent time here and there playing around with privacy-focused email providers like Proton and Tuta, but neither service convinced me to resubscribe once my year ended.

I pay for the cheapest iCloud+ subscription which includes some cloud storage, plus the ability to use custom domains with Apple’s email services. I am now seeing how hard I want to commit to the iCloud life, knowing it will likely lead to a similar disappointing road like the one I am currently getting off with Microsoft. Staying with Gmail is that same sad path. I guess what I am saying is I am done with Outlook, but I haven’t settled on my replacement yet.

Productivity: Markdown

I don’t know when Word became the most frustring thing in the world to use, but it needs to be burnt to the ground. The more Word tries to guess what it thinks I want, whether it is auto suggested text or random formatting changes, it just always feels in the way of what I am trying to do. If I have to use a Word-like document editor, I use LibreOffice. I have a lot of similar complaints there, but it is a free product that isn’t trying to constantly upsell me so I am more forgiving. Cloud-based options are fine, but I don’t like things I can’t use without internet.

As I go deeper down the nerdy rabbit hole, I have become obsessed with Markdown. Web development opened my eyes to the beauty of separating the information from the formatting of information. Markdown can easily be converted to other formats, including print-friendly .docx or web-friendly HTML. Markdown files are human readable text tiles that can realistically be opened on any computer running any operating system using any free or paid text editor. They open quicker than Word files, take up less storage space, and don’t require a maze of nested ribbon menus to manipulate.

Vendor lock-in (aka being stuck with a tool because the things you made won’t work anywhere else) is something I used to not think about, and now it is one of my primary concerns. Especially when an eternal subscription fee is attached. Markdown live free from any particular software or company, and is what I am using to write this post right now behind the scenes.

Live a little and join me in Markdown land.

Coding: Zed, Codeberg

It’s only within the last few years that I started using VS Code and GitHub. VS Code to write the code, and GitHub as the cloud repo. Originally I did both in the context of data analytics projects, but for the last few years have spent way more time digging into web development. I am a solo hobbyist coder, so haven’t even touched the collaborative side of this. Just my own messy repos containg a pile of partial projects.

Over this period, generative AI took off. GitHub Copilot became a thing, and that became a bigger thing as Microsoft Copilot. VS Code was originally the simple Visual Studio (not confusing at all when VS = Visual Studio). But every update brought more features and more noise. VS Code is still very much the go-to code editor for both professionals and hobbyists. Honestly, my complaints with VS Code and GitHub are pretty minor. But I have no trust for Microsoft’s direction and assume the enshittification will only get worse. I am getting out before I experience vendor lock-in.

I’ve tried a few text/code editors, including Sublime Text, Codium, and now Zed. I can’t quite pinpoint what I like better but Zed won me over instantly. Even if I wasn’t intentionally breaking up with Microsoft I think I would still be making this change. All code editors these days seem to have AI features built in. I don’t mind AI coding helpers when they are an option, but hate them popping up and trying to guess what I am about to code. It influences my thinking. I don’t want somebody standing next to me guessing what word I am going to say next. I don’t want my phone to insert words it thinks I want to send next in my text. And I don’t want my code editor to pop in suggestions that make it harder to read the code I am thinking over. Zed gives some pretty good granular controls on how AI shows up, including not showing up at all.

Getting away from GitHub was trickier. My current web stack includes Github for the repo and Netlify for the web host. When I push my code to GitHub, Netlify automatically recognizes the change and rebuilds my site based on the updated code. No manually uploading files anywhere in the process, all with good version control. However, that automated pipeline really only exists for the bigger cloud repo places like GitHub and GitLab.

I recently came across Codeberg and love their approach. I’m in the process of migrating each of my GitHub repos to Codeberg, then archiving my GitHub repos. Worst case I can un-archive and come back if this experiment doesn’t work out. I decided I can be an adult and manually trigger my Netlify rebuild after I push my code changes. Netlify has a decent command line tool that means I can run a simple command in my local dev environment and trigger the build. It does mean I can and will forget to publish recent changes, but no bigs.

Final Thoughts

Do what is best for you. Use the tools you like using, pay for the features you find valuable, and give your time/money/attention to those that earn it. Above all else, the decisions you make today do not need to be the decisions you make tomorrow.