Microsoft paywalling AI features in Notepad and Paint

> the old windows 95 start me up commercials

Yes, so do I. I worked as editor for a computer magazine and as such was invited to the launch event and was flabbergasted by them selecting a song which' next line was "you make a grown men cry". It sure did, in many ways but not as they intended.

Maybe I should add that I was and am more of a Linux person? Windows 95 was a house of cards built on quicksand, it out-guru-meditationed the Amiga, it was OS/1.13 to OS/2 2.x but boy did it sell well.

I also remember a sales droid showing me the "security" offered by the policy manager, "look you can restrict which programs your users can run". Sure, I thought, let's see how deep that goes and opened a document in Windows Write, added an embedded (OLE) document for the program he just removed from the user's start menu through the policy manager and double-clicked the resulting icon in the Write document. The "forbidden" program started, the sales droid looked surprised, the hypothesis was proven.

macOS (OS X for those old enough to remember when it exuded quality) is no picnic either. Apple's software is arguably buggier than Microsoft/Windows these days. I haven't seen a real Blue Screen of Death in years, but my M4 Pro Mac Mini with 64GB RAM routinely hard-locks on a black screen when simply trying to reboot it, or starts beachballing with some process called 'audiomxd' eating my CPU.

Me coming from Amiga, I didn't love Windows (starting around 95-98 versions). It should have been more modern and quick, but in many aspects it wasn't. I learned to tolerate it, and I became good at working with it. After years I tried hackintosh (OsX Lion, 2011), and I was amazed at the difference. Even hackintosh was completely stable (unlike windows) on my hardware and I loved all the features and polished things. I still kept a windows machine or two somewhere around to deal with work, etc. and from what I've seen, it went downhill so much since the XP era. Although I think even macos goes downhill, but it's night and day difference to Windows. YMMV of course.

I ran to Linux(pop os is legit pretty good)

When I do need windows I run a version called Ghost Spectre which is a slimmed down version that removes a ton of annoying Microsoft shit.

https://www.apple.com/in/apple-intelligence/

You're right about them not wanting to give away requests for free, but in fact they don't rely on OpenAI directly - thanks to the agreement Microsoft has with OpenAI they get model weights for all OpenAI models before OpenAI "achieves AGI", and Microsoft hosts all of these on their own Azure cloud [1].

Oh, and as a counterpoint, o3 mini is completely free and relatively unlimited (I don't know, probably there are actual usage limits) in Microsoft Copilot in chat. See the original announcement [2] and in the tweet [3] they mention that they "updated it" to o3 mini (high)

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/o...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/blog/2025/...

[3] https://x.com/yusuf_i_mehdi/status/1897783236354515420

What's wrong with tabs in notepad?

I personally find them super useful.

I think Linux, at least if you have an AMD graphics card, has gotten a lot better as a desktop OS in the last decade or so.

For a long time you'd have issues with graphics drivers and wifi drivers and X crashing and PulseAudio just deciding to not work, but nowadays that really hasn't been an issue for me. AMD drivers are built into the kernel, Wayland is generally stable, Pipewire with Pulse works ok, and most Wifi seems to work out of the box for me. Hell, I have a network card in a desktop computer from the infamous Broadcom, and even that worked out of the box in Linux now.

I'm sure it's more difficult if you're a FOSS purist, but I'm not. I allow the unfree stuff in NixOS, and things have generally been pretty good, at least in my current laptop (ThinkPad P16s Gen 2 AMD).

Until the past 2 months, I was an avid Windows user. Up until 2 years ago, I had 7 machines with legitimate copies of Windows installed, several functioning in a server capacity.

Unfortunately, the path Windows continues down does not align with me for most of the same reasons as everyone else.

Accordingly, I have fully embraced Unix via FreeBSD and EndeavourOS. To a lesser extent, I use Debian and Ubuntu in specific circumstances.

Surprisingly, I don't miss Windows all that much. If I need it for something, I just spin it up in a VM. Life is great on the other side, so to speak!

As someone that dual booted since 1995 to 2009, these nuisances are mostly bareable versus dealing with having 100% of everything working on laptops.

If OEMs actually supported Linux for consumers, outside Android and ChromeOS.

Instead Linux OEMs are companies relying on reversed engineered drivers and even them can hardly help when things go wrong.

i keep coming back to windows. For some reason linux on my laptop is horrible. extremely short battery life, continuous heating, broken sleep state.

I know it's not linux fault that the driver is shitty, but as an end user i just want a machine that work.

I had the same reaction to the article. I'm not so quick to laugh at the poor bastards though. Even if we are unshackled ourselves, we still have to live in a society that largely is--and there are costs to that.

At least there'll be no confusion about Microsoft suddenly changing the default option to "enable" at a later date and suddenly all your Notepad/paint data is getting processed by an Azure box somewhere.

Unless Microsoft decides to make those features free and enable them for all to increase adoption...

They can have my MS Word and Excel 2010 install binaries when they pry them from my cold, dead hard drive. I've been using them for 15 years and so far have no need to pay a penny more for what is essentially the same thing, only with more bloat and less control.

I've kept every version of Windows and major releases of popular Linux distros, but didn't know exactly what to do with them other than test certain things when I'm teaching someone an ecosystem.

Add binary storage and versioning to the list of reasons I keep my NAS going.

Leadership wants more AI. And every product team at Microsoft scrambles to find applications for it

The news is that they're pushing more code onto your machines that has hooks back to Microsoft's data centers. It doesn't matter how much they pinky promise that they won't use this without your consent, they're not trustworthy or competent enough for any such promise to be believable. It's better if the code simply isn't there at all.

I don’t think they will keep it at that though.

Putting paywall on notepad and paint features, wether it's ai ones is still disrespectful to their user.

You pay for the operating system, in exchange you get a system that will track on everything you do, show you advertisement everywhere and now will nag you about buying a subscription to unlock all features.

It's more or less what used to be the scammy software 10 or 15 years ago you could download on sketchy website.

Although one difference is that they would also silently change your default search engine to Yahoo.

I've been using Pinta, but I find it slow to open (Paint is also slow). Is paint.net quick to open? I'm talking 1-3 seconds; Pinta & Paint take 6-10 seconds. Granted, this is on a work machine with a bunch of AV and other things slowing it down.

Paint has gotten some surprisingly decent updates in the past few years, same with notepad (tab support etc.), so of course Microsoft had to sabotage themselves before people realized.

It does seem like they should have left these bits out rather than take a known product and turn it into Spirit Airlines of an app. Even if it is an actual bonus feature, nobody likes this kinda vibe.