I have been a Notepad ++ user for years. I sometimes forget that the Microsoft Notepad even exists.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Will you need a subscription to turn-off the computer now?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAA
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AHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAHA
I can hear this image
At this point anyone that voluntary uses windows is just braindead. I love Linux but if you don't wanna use that then even Mac is better than that... For now
Can't wait for the task manager to get forced AI support that terminates processes automatically, so that they can paywall it, too...
Are you actually joking
I switched to Linux recently, you can too. It's easy and works well now. No more of this bullshit from Microsoft.
Which version? And for those of us yet to switch, are there any handy guides that you'd recommend?
For new comers Linux Mint is a great out-of-the-box experience. You will find tons of info and guide on youtube, but it's pretty much as simple as installing windows now.
I personally like Fedora and Nobara but the latest sometimes break with updates so you need to handle this.
You can try most distros in a virtual machine before installing, to get a general idea of the look and feels.
Linux has always worked ok. It's the desktop environments that are unpolished. And the driver model.
Unlike the polished experience in Windows where the UI completely changes every 5 years and there are, literally, 6 different menus for adjusting the volume because removing them literally breaks the kernel.
What, precisely, is the user-facing problem with this (the volume one)?
I'm not going to argue that tech companies change UIs and usually for the worse and usually dont fix them. I mean look how shit gnome is after it merged together the worst parts of windows 8 and windows 11. It's awful. Or chrome's insistent efforts to return chrome to chrome even though it's point was being a low chrome browser. Or Firefox deciding that small chrome was too complex to support and dropping that feature. Or every bank turning their website into the shittiest form of single page app. I agree -- all of these behaviors are not great. KDE gets and deserves credit for being the same clunker with tiny incremental improvements it's been for years. I saw in kde6 they rounded some buttons? Good for them!
If I'm using VoIP, it reduces the system volume by 50%.
There isn't an option to change this in the Windows 10 UI. You have to dig through the options to find the Windows XP menu to change it. This setting no longer saves between reboots, so every time I boot I have to dig through the same 3 layers of volume settings.
Lots of network settings are unavailable in the modern settings menu. You have to find the "advanced" menu which is just the menu from older versions of Windows.
Each major system update there's a new layer of configuration menus, each with a different set of options some are redundant. They're all integrated with the system in their own unique way and the people that worked on them are not part of the team that's working on the next iteration.
They can't remove the old menus so they just add another one on top. At least in a Linux DE, you know that pipewire is the sound system and there is one way to configure it. You can choose from many different GUI applications if you want a graphical interface, but they're all editing the same configuration.
Never experienced anything like that with KDE Plasma.
Experienced having more than one way to change the volume? Or you've looked into the source of kde and confirmed there aren't old sliders sneaking around taking up 3 kB of space?
Yes, that polished windows patching screen. Or is it the ads you're referring to?
I don't know what randomly selected one-off failure you're referring to.
I'm referring to the daily experience of clunk from kde or the smooth glidey uselessness of gnome.
Notepad++.
That is all.
I don't want to get into a text editor war - because these are all good options - but it's definitely also worth giving the "Kate" editor from KDE a go, it's available as a native Windows app from the MS store and everything:
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NWMW7BB59HW
I personally find it considerably nicer to use than Notepad++, and it means I don't have to give up 25 years of muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts when I have to switch to a windows machine.
Also some crazy how, it uses less RAM than Notepad‽ (With no files open, 61 vs 71MB) Not sure what Microsoft are up to, but it's definitely something strange.
Been using nedit for a long time, then medit aka mooedit. When that became abandonware, I switched to Bluefish. Even though it's 100% what I need, it's the best for me, for now.
To each their own for sure, but the takeaway here is that there are definitely better notepads than Notepad by now, especially since having AI baked into your plain text editor isn't something that anyone ever asked for.
At this rate you may a well use a slab of some granite and a chisel, or maybe even vim.
gedit is available from the Microsoft store.
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It boggles the mind the things MS does to their OS without any apparent shame.
This is literally not an example of enshittification and the article is intentionally misleading.
First of all, all of the original Notepad functions are unchanged and still free.
Literally nothing got shittier.
Which is why describing Notepad as getting a paywall is quite frankly flat out disingenuous.
They are adding new, cloud running, AI features to Notepad that are locked behind a paywall. You can not like that for whatever reason, but that's not an example of enshittification. That's an example of them charging for new functionality.
But the prompt to sign in is the default.
The only way to get rid of it is through Settings.
The popup is shittier, also takes a lot longer to open than it used to, but yeah, the article is definitely misleading clickbait.
It's sensationalist
Even if you're right, why the fuck add in unnecessary features to a simple word program?
the same reason why every program gets an ai feature: data farming, and reason to ask money for it
It's not even a simple "word" program - that's what write/WordPad was. Notepad is supposed to be just a bare bones text editor, like for altering an .ini file or writing a website in 1997.
I love wordpad. Still used it when I sucked Bill Gates' chesticles on the Windows machine
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That's like how enshittification starts, "oh we're just going to paywall these features, don't worry all the old ones will be free!" And then the old parts start getting replaced by "New and improved!" Parts that also somehow need to be on the cloud and paywalled.
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Why the hell would I need cloud AI functionality to edit basic txt files???????????
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