Microsoft paywalling features in Notepad and Paint

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.

> 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.

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).

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...

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.

As a recovering Windows user now on Linux for a couple months now, I agree about feeling sad for Windows users. Occasionally I think "maybe Windows wasn't as bad as I thought", and then I hear or read something about it that makes me go, "Ohhhhh THAT'S why I got the hell away from that trash heap."

Also, personally I prefer VSCodium. I love Kate more frankly, but unfortunately for some reason it doesn't support the standard Unix "Ctrl-Shift-U" Unicode hex input method, and as someone who likes to write in their free time, that's a dealbreaker for me.