Anything but Microsoft Windows

I’m done with it.  Windows 11 is the straw that broke the camel’s back from my perspective, and that Camel’s back has been straining for a few years.

I’ve had the dubious pleasure of working with (among others) the Microsoft Platform since MS-DOS.   I’ve seen the O.S. go from a green screen (or black screen depending upon your monitor), to Windows.  I’ve had to deal with the changes to businesses as Windows progressed through versions 1.0, 2.0, and 2.1 and all the intermediaries.  Yep, I had to deal with the GUI change between the tiled windows before Windows 2, and the overlapping windows in Windows 2 and above.

With the advent of Windows 3 came virtual memory, shared drivers and shared memory space and the start of real security risks.

Windows 3.1 saw a facelift, and Windows 3.1.1 saw the addition of networking, with no real thought to the security issues.  Then along came Windows 95.

All these Windows changes came within 10 years, and most of the later versions of Windows were all sold and supported at the same time.

Each version had massive changes, most of which were unnecessary.

Graphical User Interface Changes, underlying network handling changes, and administrative tool changes.  All done without prior notice to the users, i.e. Us.

With Microsoft (and several other I.T. consumer-facing companies) it’s rapidly becoming a case of, “We know best what you want”.  What we want is less change for change’s sake, more fixing of bugs before the product gets out onto the market, and less breaking things that have worked for years.

Not only Windows but Also…

It’s not just the operating systems Microsoft seems to want to break.   It’s their applications too!

Take for instance the relatively recent move toward cloud computing.  First came Office 365.  Then came the need for having a Microsoft account to install Windows, and then came the linking of existing products (such as One-note) to that cloud account, allegedly for security purposes.

If you had a One-note version from 2013-2019, it worked fine.  You could password-protect sections.  Then you synchronise it with the cloud.  Then along came One-note for Windows 10.  It automatically updates your desktop version and promptly breaks the security password mechanism.

All your nicely secured documents are gone.  There’s no chance of recovery because even if you move the synchronized files to any machine with the old desktop version,  it won’t open until it’s re-synced on the originating machine, which it can’t do because One-note for Windows 10 won’t open the file.

Microsoft’s position?  You have to update because of the EULA, and we’re dropping Onenote anyway.

Now we are seeing mass mail bounces from any recipients using outlook.com.

Servers configured with anything else but Windows software and Windows Email services,l sending to Windows email systems run the risk of the emails being bounced.

The bounce messages from Microsoft are wrong and misleading, suggesting the sending server is guilty of spamming, when in fact it’s the way the Windows recipient server has been configured.

Message from Microsoft outlook.com server:

This is the mail system at host <MY DOMAIN>.
I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.
For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.
The mail system <thscontracting@hotmail.com>: host hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[104.47.17.97] said: 550 5.7.1
Unfortunately, messages from [<MY SERVERS IP>] weren’t sent.
Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list (S3140).
You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.

So, here’s my issue with this:

1. Checking our server with mxtools shows that there are no problems in the configuration, nor that the server shows up on anyone’s block list.
2. The Email Error message “550 5.7.1” is an access denied message and means the email was rejected either because of security policies or incorrect configuration on the recipient side.
3. Microsoft’s own website suggests that the error is at the recipient’s end.

Again, it shows that Microsoft is incapable of informing the consumer with accurate and correct information about problems their systems are identifying/causing which leads to people like mean spending countless hours to diagnose problems that don’t really exist.

This is why I’m dumping all systems that run Windows and Microsoft applications, and moving fully to open-source systems or systems based on Unix.  Unix has been around longer than Microsoft.  The open-source versions are free, in my opinion, more secure, and have less resource loading on the systems, because they can be tailored PRECISELY to the needs of the user.

Oh, and the bonus?  I don’t have to buy all new hardware, because Linux runs on stuff that Windows 11 won’t run on.