I do. I trust them with whatever I provide to them and the services they provide. They’ve consistently delivered an experience I’ve enjoyed using in a variety of different ways and for quite some time now. I was pretty much all-Microsoft for a while with a Windows 8 Phone and a Windows laptop and everything else. I was more than happy, and my data helps their services be more tailored to me. They’ve proven to do pretty well with securing important data from being breached, especially things like my passwords and accounts in general. I do like Microsoft. Especially now with devices like the Surface Laptop.
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That’s about the size of it.
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Only to a certain extent. I like some Microsoft products, like the Xbox & VSCode, but I’m not a fan of Windows.
Y’know what would make me like them more? If they make Xbox Studios games compatible with Linux (even with Proton) & they contribute to Wine.
@christopher_scott, It’s the Linux folks like myself who actually had the job of Linux Sysadmin in a corporate setting, who are the ones who will likely have some bitter grudges. It’s those sysadmins who get crunched in between the worlds of Windows and Linux, and Microsoft doesn’t like playing nice with other competitors having servers and crucial, foundational services (which thereby have a lot of power and influence) on the same LAN.
Different network-related vendor software products (including those from Apple, they can also be nasty) often won’t play nice with each other, and often especially not with Linux. These vendors try their best to create incentives to use the whole product range within their own ecosystems, not straying outside that product range/ecosystem, or subtle “punishments” start cropping up from the strangest places.
Sysadmins are in the unfortunate position of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear: trying to create a nice, smooth, Highly Available experience for corporate users of all Operating Systems, in using all self-hosted LAN (and maybe also DMZ) servers and services.
If you’re just a casual, home user of Linux, then you wouldn’t really have a sense of the subtle battlefield which is the corporate LAN, which different vendors fight over, and silently try to stab each other in the back when they can get away with it.
Seasoned Linux Sysadmins can give deep technical explanations of the subtle (but sometimes showstopping) uglinesses which occur in these “mixed” LAN’s. @christopher_scott, those are the people you should seek out to talk to, to learn about their trust issues with Microsoft.
I would love to hear some long format interviews between yourself and the following esteemed podcasters/Youtubers, whom I would personally vet as really knowing their stuff in this particular domain:
- Noah Chelliah. @kernellinux
- Alan Jude.
- Wes Payne.
- Wendell over at L1 Techs.
- Joe Ressington.
- Any senior Linux or network admin at Linus Tech Tips.
I feel that paying for the time and valuable Business Intelligence of these these experts, to engage you in an interview, is very reasonable and highly justified, considering how much money Microsoft has.
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Isnt M$ Windows WATCHING ME? It’s not a matter of distrust, it’s a matter of dislike. I dislike M$, always have.
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Great insight, as usual, @esbeeb.
If I haven’t mentioned this before, what I’m going after here with engagement around developing trust with Microsoft is a personal project officially. It is not part of my job role and I would have no capacity for an official interview of anyone, especially not paying for their time to do so.
I would really like to hope that if I can get enough attention on this topic, someone high up enough will take interest and really engage with the community and folks like those you mentioned. For now, it is my personal crusade, so to speak, as it relates to my own passions.
Small fish, large ocean of a company, trying to influence change in the right direction one step at a time.
Lastly, while I certainly find value in the perspectives of the past and how we got to where we are, what I am most interested in is how we move forward. I know things were done poorly in the past. I believe today’s MS is a much different company than in years prior and honestly, I want to hold “their” feet to the fire with statements like “Microsoft <3 Linux” and engage the community on how that could be proven as we look to tomorrow. Don’t take that as me saying we should sweep the past under the rug, just something I cannot directly address. There’s a new captain at the helm (Satya) who has a much different perspective than the previous ones.
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Is Windows “watching you”?
Yes, in the sense that you have no assurance at a technical level that Windows is not a so-called “Panopticon”, what with Cortana being unremovable. My understanding is that all you can do is disable, at best, your own personal usage of Cortana.
To me, even the word “uninstall” has lost all meaning in Windows. I just installed a Windows 10 VM recently, and as the admin user, I went through the menu, right-clicking all the default Apps I knew I wouldn’t need, such as Xbox, etc, clicking “Uninstall”, paring it down.
Then I created a second non-admin user, and logged in as that user. Hey, all those Apps which I had supposedly just “Uninstalled” were all there again for that new user, such as Xbox! So it’s an uphill battle for every new user account to be cleaned up manually. Great! A sysadmin’s delight! (Sarcasm).
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Trust? Well, in a sense, yes.
Like any publicly traded company, I trust Microsoft to do whatever will maximize their profit. This is what the board and the shareholders of the company will invariably insist upon. Relatively few dollars are invested in shares of companies because people like the company’s philosophy or moral standing. People buy those shares hoping and expecting to make a profit, and if senior management can’t make that happen then they are fired and replaced until they can.
So, I don’t think Microsoft is evil or has any hidden agenda. They simply do what one expects for a corporation: whatever’s best for them. If that happens to align with things that help the Linux community, they’ll be fine with that. If that happens to be detrimental to Linux, they’ll be fine with that too.
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Preach it!
I’d like to add: Patent Trolling would have to end yesterday, and Microsoft Tax on companies like Canonical would have to end as well. Other than that, I echo what this gentleman is saying.
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My distrust of MS is what has driven me to use Linux full time at home, and remove Windows 10 from my machine entirely.
For me they would need to put work into making Windows applications in general run comfortably in Linux, or helping the Wine folks out with code.
Also, their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy would need to be buried for me to trust them, especially when they’re sniffing around the Linux sphere like a hungry predator IMO.
But the design philosophy of Windows 10, where most things are hidden from the user, general UI dumbing down, pushing app adverts, spying on users, sending files from users PCs to verify Defender’s “accuracy” and on and on and on…
Nah, I’m well shot of them at home, but unfortunately being an SCCM Engineer Windows 10 deployment is my job, so I can’t escape it entirely! 
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I guess not but I cannot really answer that question because honestly I do not care about Microsoft at all. I do not use any of their products. OK I have a disposable email address at Outlook from the times I owned a Vista machine.
I think I am indifferent because I have no interest in Microsoft and no contact with it other than my mom’s computer where I distrust many of the functionalities of the operating system, e.g. phoning home etc.
That is all. No hard feelings or any particular sympathy for the company.
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I trust them now as much as before…
They are doing for open source only things that benefit them greatly, not things that are really beneficial for the open-source in general.
If they are to gain more trust, then changing few more things and replying with actions on few questions might help, like:
- why the latest version of sccm, which is very popular in the enterprise, does not support Linux anymore and points that for clients on Linux people should look at the Azure management tools? If they ‘love’ Linux then this is a regression and should be fixed. It seems that they only ‘love’ Linux on Azure, nothing else.
- why are they not reaching to, supporting and working with the people developing Wine and the people running big Wine projects like CodeWeavers, Lutris… etc.?
- why are we are still waiting for Linux native OneDrive client, OneDrive for business client, Skype for business and MS Teams?
- why none of their office applications work on Linux? If they can make MS SQL Server run on Linux, surely making the Office do the same should not be that difficult for them.
- why is their Edge browser moving to the Chrome engine and not to the Mozilla one? If they really want to support open-source, Linux and the community in general, and on the top of that comply with all web standards, they should work with and support Mozilla not Google.
…etc…, but this should be enough for starters…
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Here’s a fun experiment for anyone out there to try. Install Windows 10 in a Virtualbox VM, which I’ve done, even with a proper License key, and it’s activated. The Virtual Networking is “bridged”, not “NAT”.
Then, while the VM is shut off, run “sudo nethogs”:
When I did this, note how my Linux laptop is making no connections whatsoever. It just sits obediently, not connecting anywhere until I actually launch some app.
Then I start the Windows 10 VM (and restart nethogs again right after, to catch the virtual network interface of the Windows VM), which is set to auto-login as a non-admin user. Nethogs registers several immediate network connections, but I didn’t start anything in Windows yet:
The only software I installed so far in Windows is syncthing, and WinSCP (and these don’t start at boot time). Note that I’ve tried to tighten down any privacy-related settings that I possibly could have, and double-checked them too.
Sure, I can understand connections for things like: verifying the Windows license is authentic, checking for updates, and maybe Windows defender looking for new virus definitions. But only 1 address even reverse-resolved (to “a-0001.a-msedge.net”), when I checked those addresses with the “host” command.
That initial explosion of network traffic to servers whose DNS hostnames do not reverse-resolve, which is a sign of creepiness, really bugs me. My Linux machine doesn’t do that.
Here are some unresolvable addresses my VM connected to:
23.97.69.20
40.90.23.206
40.90.137.125
117.18.237.29
What will you find with “nethogs”, if you do the same? Where are your Windows VM’s connecting to, which look creepy and unexplainable, and you can’t reverse-resolve the addresses with the “host” command?
Microsoft, this is the sort of creepy, behind-the-back behavior that makes me not trust you. You provide several privacy-related settings, allowing the user to tighten them, and thereby feel a misguided sense like they’ve tightened Windows down, but then Windows just silently connects wherever the heck it wants anyway, as soon as the user logs in.
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Perhaps this kind of network activity is a bit advanced for me to understand, but why are you only receiving data from the active network connections on the Windows VM?
(Also, yes this is a bit disturbing!)
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Before W10 I didn’t care much about trusting them or not and Linux wasn’t a viable option for my usage. Felt like I had no choice.
Then with W10, my trust kind of vanished.
It looks like a privacy nightmare with all the data collection.
It gets more and more bloat with useless apps and updates and becomes unusable on low specs computers. Sounds more interesting for selling new PCs and W10 licenses than for the end user as well as the ecology.
Can you really trust a company that destroys all your files and/or weeks of work for installing an update you did not ask for (Build 1809 release drama. Yeah, I know, people who were affected should have had backups) or prevents you from working because it decided it had to install updates and takes 4 years to solve the issue ?
It just feels like they don’t do things the right way (software as a service ? No thanks) and sound more like a company you have to cope with than one you love to support and adopt its products.
When it comes to “Microsoft loves Linux”, I guess only time will tell. Would like it to benefit everyone but provided their history with Linux, I’m quite doubtful.
What should they do to improve ? Forget about W8 and W10 failures that sound more like forced adoption than awesome operating systems people desired when you read the overall feedback. Listen to their users, stop spying on them and respect their privacy.
Man, that’s some creepy S right there. Luckily my one MS machine has absolutely no vital info on it. 
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I’m going to mention WINE only as a paradigm for thinking not an answer.
Answer: work to make it possible to purchase, install, and run commercial Windows compatible software on Linux. I probably wouldn’t do so but people I support would. There are one or two mission critical apps that they are willing to pay for on a regular basis but would rather run on a Linux base. Bonus points for helping make drivers a cross platform thing, actually this may even be a critical part of it.
Note that I am not pretending the title says “trust Windows”, or “run Windows”. I’m just saying that if I could actually talk to Microsoft about future profitability, adding a whole (albeit very small at the current time) class of users to the list of potential customers, not just for you but for developers who work in your system would go a long way and maybe even pay for the itself.
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I was a Windows 7 user until earlier this year, when I figured I’d jump before I was pushed by the end of support early next year.
I have dealt with both Windows 8 & Windows 10 on my parents computers, and had nothing but trouble. The OS is using all of everything the hardware has available, leaving it to struggle to complete even the most basic tasks (admittedly they don’t have the best hardware in the world, as they keep going out any buying a new computer without speaking to anyone who actually understands all of the acronyms, but still, software that used to work quickly on lesser hardware running Windows 7 now takes a noticeable amount longer to do anything).
With the current state of things I’d try and get my parents over to something like Ubuntu or Linux Mint if I lived in the same town (or even country). One of the few things standing in the way of that is the lack of available software, which is slowly diminishing anyway as more and more of the dated applications which my parents use are rendered obsolete by updates, and more publishers realise that there is a market for their software on Linux.
From my own perspective Microsoft would have to do a few things before I start using their software again, in particular Windows.
- Stop being greedy. You sell an operating system. For money. Then you want to harvest personal data on top? That’s going too far, you want paying twice for the same product.
- Stop sending my information back to Microsoft. I accept that when I am online I will be spied on, and I can take measures to minimise the impact of that, but there’s not a lot i can do about it when it’s baked into the OS.
- Stop forcing features onto the customer than nobody wants. I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t still use a start menu, it works. I don’t need all of those tiles to confuse matters, with the things I find least important on those massive ones. I know I could probably fix that, but i shouldn’t have to, let me decide what gets a massive tile. And lets just not talk about Cortana.
- Stop bundling adverts into the base OS. for the same reasons as point 1.
- Make your software available on Linux. I don’t care if you make the source open personally, I probably won’t use it, but I’d advise a lot of other people to as it is what everyone else uses in a lot of cases.
In short, stop trying to sell a product for money, then sell it for advertising, then sell it for personal data. Pick one.
All of the above won’t get me back at this point, I’m happy on Linux, so Microsoft now need to be better than where I’m at, by a fair margin too if they want me to pay for the OS, and they currently aren’t even drawing level.
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