Check out the behind the bastards episodes on Gates. Even his charity foundation is just another way to exert control.

This is par the course for Microsoft. Gates is/was such a piece of shit.

Does anyone use Microsoft because they like the software? Because all I ever hear is "I need it for games", "I need it for work", or "It's the only system that works with my hardware".

One wonders what the market share for OSs would look like if people were able to freely choose what software they liked.

Microsoft has been pulling this since the 80s... Bill Gates was personally responsible for destroying WordPerfect, dbase,etc competing office software.

And then I accidentally found this article on ACPI debugging, which references the memo written by Bill Gates in 1999:

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows-specific. If seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. … Maybe we couid define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something relaled to this.

What. The. Heck.

This is insane.. Isn’t it like the textbook definition of lobbying? I wasn’t expecting to find a whole conspiracy while trying to fix my Deck, perhaps the memo is a hoax or something, but this all just lines up so naturally. If it really was his plan, then he succeeded.

Given that the the memo was submitted in court as evidence in a 2002 case, Comes v. Microsoft, it's probably real. If anything, it didn't succeed enough. It probably would have been possible to lock Linux out entirely, but by 1999, there were already too many Linux and *BSD x86 server deployments. Couldn't ignore them. Had to make it just kinda shitty rather than battening it all up.

Billionaires are a cancer on society. No healthy economy can survive the corruption that billionaires create. These people could do amazing things and change society for the better ... but all of them decide that evil suits them.

Kind of half related, but Microsoft loves to fuck with dual booting as well in various ways. Just last year a security patch broke dual booting, required a complicated workaround to get out of, and was only properly fixed 9 months later. Historically some "fast boot" shenanigans have been known to actually be "fucking with linux dual boot". At this point if I need Windows for some adulting, it’s done in a virtual machine. Microsoft has simply lost their privilege to bare metal access on my PC.

EDIT: Stories like this post are disheartening though, since they show that Microsoft can use their weight to make everyone else’s experience worst even if you completely avoid them.

I remember they once tried some similar shit with the Kerberos protocol, sneaking a patented feature in there so they could then seize the whole thing in the name of Active Directory, but I think they were forced to back down(?)

I’m actually having difficulty finding details on it now because they’ve done a solid job drowning the story out from the search results...

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows-specific. If seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. … Maybe we couid define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something relaled to this.

This is insane.. Isn’t it like the textbook definition of lobbying?

No, that’d be something along the lines of racketeering and/or bribery. Lobbying is trying to influence someone to do something. If you do it with nice words that’s not typically much of a problem. But when you say you’re going to make sure they’re going to earn a lot of money from doing X then that’s bribery.

I wasn’t expecting to find a whole conspiracy while trying to fix my Deck, perhaps the memo is a hoax or something, but this all just lines up so naturally.

My experience is that it is intentional, just like countless other examples of monopolistic anti-competition behavior. Especially with gaming, where a duopoly of video card manufacturers has spent the last several years intentionally crippling virtual GPU support on consumer-grade hardware. There are many others to blame though since Windows is designed to collect as much telemetry as possible, making it near impossible to fully disable its collection. There are entire forensic analysis toolkits dedicated to the troves of data that Windows stores on nearly every activity you perform. So while Microsoft's actions may clearly violate antitrust legislation, the intelligence agencies saw Microsoft as their biggest ally & worked to help them maintain the status quo.

After digging a bit the rabbit hole I'm still not sure I understand... But this issue is mostly related to portables devices (Laptops, Steam deck...), battery mangement and legacy BIOS?

After going through this written blog post that's what I "understand".

Another reason to hate Bill Gates !

Still better than Device Tree though right?

How's that workin' out for ya', billy boy?