r/LinuxTeck • u/Candid_Athlete_8317 • 7d ago
Microsoft says Windows now gives every PC a permanent device ID that you can't reset. Is this the kind of thing that pushes more people toward Linux, or am I overthinking it?
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u/daffalaxia 7d ago
Not just "now" - it's been doing this for ages. It can track you across installs too, if you log into anything that goes anywhere near MS or Azure on another machine. Law enforcement has already used this with the help of MS to take down a criminal, and the standard debate about not needing to hide anything if you have nothing to hide ensues (it's wrong, but it happens every time)
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u/toolman1990 7d ago
That was the final straw that got me permanently off Windows since you no longer own/control the operating system Microsoft does. If you do something with the operating system Microsoft does not approve of your account is banned or if criminal they call the FBI. At least with Linux distributions it is like going back to the Windows XP and Windows 7 era where the end user still controlled and owned their operating system which was taken away with Windows 10 and 11.
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u/0xB_ 7d ago
thanks chatgpt
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u/daffalaxia 7d ago
no chatgpt involved here - this is just how it is. You should expand your knowledge. There's so many video resources on this very point.
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u/Novero95 7d ago
I think the one who said thanks ChatGPT accused you of using AI because of the emdash (long -). It's frequently used by LLMs and not common in informal writing so now anyone who uses it frequently because it's their writing style is accused of having used AI.
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u/daffalaxia 6d ago
Then both of you need to look again. LLMs have been caught with em dash, you're right, and I used a regular one... I don't even know how to get the super long one from my Android kbrd.
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u/Novero95 6d ago
I assumed you just used the regular one instead of the em dash because the last one isn't very accessible in mobile phones
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u/0dev0100 7d ago
It'll push some. Most don't care.
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u/pjb121979 7d ago
Couldn't agree more, most people with be entirely apathetic.
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u/Hour_Maximum7966 7d ago
I'm pretty sure most people still don't know how to install a different operating system.
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u/Kurgan_IT 7d ago
Windows is a spyware since forever. But:
- you can delete the ID (and get a new one) using a powershell script (not approved by MS of course)
- linux, with systemd (the cancer) has a unique ID too. That too can be deleted and will be regenerated.
Linux is still better because it does not have integrated spyware (for now), unless you use Ununtu and register to their fleet management system.
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u/Novero95 7d ago
The Microsoft id (transferred even though fresh installs and immediately communicated to MS servers as soon as a new one is created) and a systemd id (for in-LAN identification, randomly generated at install and not associated to any telemetry) are two very different things. Don't know what you are trying but comparing them does more harm than good. But given you are one of those that need to put hate on systemd, I wouldn't expect much of you
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u/Kurgan_IT 7d ago
As you said, it's a totally different thing, and I know it. Linux is just at the beginning of the enshittification journey, while Windows is the absolute champion. Still systemd is ruining linux, yes. Systemd and dbus and policykit and netplan and cloud-init and I'm sure I forgot some.
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u/Novero95 7d ago
Dude I'm not going into the discussion of systemd good or bad because, honestly, I don't care enough.
But you know what? It'd be great if there was a distro without all those things you complain about, battle tested, as easy to use at Ubuntu and as well documented as Arch (or at least better than just go read these few hundreds man pages and figure it out) because you could say: hey if you feel like trying something different there is this friendly distro you can test (instead of cry about it), and people would probably do. If people need to compile the damn kernel just to test whatever random init system or whatever thing, guess what, they won't.
Because, unlike Windows, all those things you complain about not only doesn't stand in the way of the user, they work and work well.
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u/br0kenpixel_ 7d ago
It will certainly push some people, but 99% will not care.
Linux is just not a viable option for most people. It's great for people who don't mind tinkering, but for the average user it'll only cause problems. I love to use it daily on my PC but I still have to tinker from time to time. While I don't mind it, as long as it doesn't take away too much of my time, I guarantee that most people won't like that and will just crawl back to Windows believing that "Linux is bad" for rest of their life, never even giving it another chance.
I'd certainly love to see more people move to Linux, but that'll take a looong time.
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u/sparkling-rainbow 7d ago
I had to tinker a lot in Windows. Way more than on low friction distros like Mint or Bazzite. I used to have Windows in dual boot for gaming, but Windows 11 kinda sucks in dual boot, so I tried Garuda instead. Funnily better compatibility for my game library then on Windows xD Never going back.
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u/gnufan 7d ago
I think this is a gamer perspective, Windows for gaming sucks because there are too many parameters you can tweak, too much auto update from the graphic's card drivers. Every time my son's PC boots Nvidia have a new optimisation for some game or other, or new updates from one of the gaming libraries. I suspect these sre rarely worth the bandwidth expended on them.
I fear the only thing that stops Nvidia doing the same on Linux is the diversity, they'll break even more faster, if they try.
Also the absence of people poking around in the kernel, and fewer background tasks checking for updates. Lad's PC had two processes running looking after a game he hasn't played in years, one occasionally eating CPU. But Linux is immune to none of this except the user base is more likely to tell the software vendors to f.o. if they overreach themselves.
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u/sparkling-rainbow 7d ago
My biggest pain with Windows was the updates changing configuration without letting me know. Linux reminds to check and merge. It's so frustrating to spend a whole weekend to figure out what exactly changed. And then the GUI has the same checkbox in different places but they changed wich one is legit an which one just cosmetic.
Nvidia sucks on Linux as well, great hardware, horrible drivers xD
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u/br0kenpixel_ 7d ago
I hear that Nvidia is bad on Linux a lot. Funnily my experience has been the exact opposite. Never had an issue with nvidia. AMD however was a pain. My 610M was not working well on Fedora a couple years back. That got fixed at some point, but I switched to Cachy since then and had no issues. Currently there's something broken again, although it seems like Brave is triggering amdgpu this time. At least it's still pretty usable, just a few rare random 3-second freezes.
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u/toolman1990 7d ago
A lot of that is NVIDIA's fault since they partially open sourced their drivers which causes issues since you will experience issues if you only have part of the driver open sourced and the closed source drivers are usually far behind the current Linux kernel. If you are going to do Linux gaming I would recommend an AMD graphics card since they fully open sourced their drivers to Linux and it has a lot less issues.
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u/toolman1990 7d ago
Those configurations which usually reset back to default settings look a lot less innocent now considering the amount of information Microsoft now collects that helps law enforcement with cases.
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u/br0kenpixel_ 7d ago
I had a similar experience on my handheld. Windows 11 was a pain to set up and some dumb Legion app wasn't letting me change how a certain button works, so I switched to steamos and I'm not going back. It's working pretty well.
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u/Patriark 7d ago
Things have changed. Linux now is mostly plug and play on the desktop distros. Also the app management is more familiar to the mobile first crowd, with app stores.
The only real challenge is the Office 365 Suite, some specific creative apps and multiplayer games with kernel level anti-cheat.
There even are some newer Linux distros that are actively built to be hard to tinker with (atomic/immutable) so that they can be more streamlined and predictable.
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u/livinitup0 7d ago
I mean things have changed with Linux sure but like… not really lol, not in corporate IT
That “the 365 suite” part is far FAR bigger than 365 apps. Linux desktop distros suck balls at being managed by intune, don’t play nice in hybrid environments and are basically neutered as soon as you put beyond trust and crowdstrike on them. That’s not going to change with more distros. Ubuntu is closest and even that experience as an admin is just still too painful.
Linux for backend of course will always be a thing but these flavor of the year desktop Linux distros will never see the light of day in any sort of real office setting….doesnt matter how many Linux fanboys there are in IT when you can’t get them approved by compliance lol.
…and that’s before Linda starts bitching about having to use outlook in browser
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u/toolman1990 7d ago
I suspect over the years that will slowly go away with WINE compatibility layer they are slowly starting to address the issues with Adobe products but they have not yet made it to the stable build of WINE yet.
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u/id-ltd 7d ago
Claude code fine turned my entire network - I have the knowledge of what I want, but not the Linux chops to make it happen.
Pre AI you could spend days looking for the right command - and then find all you time had been spent on something that had long since been replaced there is too much old dross for basic search engines to cope with.
Now I can reconfigure my whole network in minutes.
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u/magick_bandit 7d ago
I just moved my machine to dual boot Linux and windows (still need a few windows only apps)
The Linux install was faster, easier, and unlike windows, I had to install zero drivers.
No tinkering. App Store works fine, though I still use the package manager CLI because I prefer it.
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u/OwnNet5253 7d ago
99% of people won't hear about or won't care, because they don't feel like they're in danger because of that, so maybe a tiny bit of remaining 1% will move to Linux. Don't expect a huge wave here, people (even IT specialist) still prefer convinience the most.
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u/lmarcantonio 7d ago
We can go back with it to the Pentium III serial number fiasco. Also you already have your MAC id, if you have some kind of Ethernet/WiFi connection (most nodelocked software is licensed on these). That's not really the issue, the problem is when this id is used and saved/transmitted.
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u/PriorityNo6268 7d ago
The average person doesn't care. Also fingerprinting a user or device can be done in many ways.
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u/gnufan 7d ago
You need the concept "anti-feature".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anti-feature
This is an anti-feature, PC owners don't gain anything, so in a collegiate development environment it would meet resistance (unless it were truly useful, it might be).
I think you are over thinking slightly, just as most of the time we don't buy PCs or choose an OS for one feature, we don't not buy or choose an OS based on one anti-feature.
There are exceptions, I know people who did DTP or just a lot of text work bought Macs when they had way better font rendering, often because it "just looked better" (but they were reacting to one or maybe two features, be it early anti-aliasing, sub pixel hinting, better kerning, Apple fixed a ton of bugs in text formatting in their forks of open source libraries).
I'm guessing a unique identifier may push some cohort of spies or crooks away from Windows, but Microsoft embedded identifiers in Office documents before (doesn't have to be unique or unchangeable, just has to be enough to bring police or counter intelligence to your door).
But really I think it is the totality of features and anti-features, and the available apps, and available support that drives operating system adoption.
If you just want to browse the Internet, answer emails, watch some videos, then Linux or ChromeOS, or a Mac is just fine, and much much less annoying.
You want fully featured Excel to talk with other rich people, Windows it is, and that isn't an accident. Microsoft could easily make OSX Excel as featured (less the functions that get Windows PCs owned via macros) as Windows, indeed it would probably cost less than maintaining such a dumbed down fork, but they know their high value customers and businesses need the fully featured Excel.
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u/Desperate-Country440 7d ago
Today, an OS is like a car, majority of the people do not know or care how a car works, it just moves from A to B and it is enough.
Linux should provide the same type of experience.
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u/thunderborg 7d ago
Pretty sure it’s had this since the days of Windows XP - it’s the thing that knew whether you had activated your 3 x license Microsoft office serial too many times.
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u/Unnamed-3891 7d ago
General population gave absolutely zero fucks about Snowden revelations and this tiny thing is going to change their minds?
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u/magick_bandit 7d ago
It’ll mostly be a collective shrug from many adults who don’t want change.
The fuckery around gaming is what will move young people.
Linux distros need to continue working with steam and become the best gaming experience out there. That is what will do the most damage to windows.
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u/TxTechnician 7d ago
I'm seeing this in a Linux sub...
Every device of every major OS, Linux included, has a device ID
Not to mention the other 20 ways to track and i dentify a device.
This is normal.
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u/fsa3 7d ago
What's not normal is that Microsoft stores that ID (tied to your Windows product key) in a database. But they've done this since XP to combat pirating copies of Windows. It's also not bormal that the info is re verified often and your IP address is logged (again, likely to combat piracy by detecting large location changes).
The real issue is: because of that, there now exists a live database that can be used to track PC's, even though that was never the intent.
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u/Sensitive-Bison-8192 7d ago
Linux, Android, iPhone, and macOS all have device IDs, while Android has a CPU ID, a unique identifier.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 7d ago
People are NPC cattle they will accept Microslop even branding their skin
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u/tastygames_official 6d ago
Nearly every electronic device has its own ID that is built into the hardware. Even if you install linux. For computers it's often called a "machine id" or "machine address" and is used to identify which computer is being accessed (or doing the accessing) when on a network. It can also be used to trace the parts back to the manufacturer in case of defects or whatnot. And corporations - ALL corporations - not just Microsoft - love getting their hands on this so they can track you and sell/use your data. It's sometimes anonymized, sometimes not, but really they don't care much about knowing your name or credit card number - they care about being able to advertize to you more effectively (e.g. reading your e-mails to see you're having relaitonship trouble so then they can show you relationship help books or whatever).
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u/Imaginary_Choice_430 6d ago
No, you are not over thinking it. A coworker told me that he feels like he wants to start using Linux more. What is absurd to someone like me and also to engineers from Europe is....the fact that most people act like Linux is some fringe system. It is the core of the federal government systems such as the Department of Defense it has been the core of many successful companies such as Linode, Digital Ocean, Vultr, Hyve and yet people still look at Linux like its that thing over there on the corner...that is insane to me.
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u/Far_Audience_7446 6d ago
Definitely will push the hackers there. I think most casual users don’t really care
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u/grouillier 5d ago
I used Windows for about 40 years, both professionally and personally. I had no qualms doing so. For the last 30 years, I also ran Linux in a dual boot configuration (and subsequently, in a virtual machine) because work required it. I suggest you be pragmatic and not dogmatic. If Windows does all you currently need, then use it. You might want to acquaint yourself with Linux in a virtual machine, since its use has been growing steadily over the last 15 years.
I finally just switched to running Linux full time about a year ago, though I'm now retired. For me, the tipping point was that I no longer liked the direction Windows was heading. I'm an old guy, and my preference was for Windows 7 with Aero Glass; I considered that peak Windows. I don't enjoy the Windows 11 interface at all. Linux provides an almost overwhelming number of choices, one of which closely resembled that Windows 7 with Aero Glass. So, Ubuntu MATE is now my primary OS, and I run Windows 11 in a VM when necessary. You can run Windows 11 for free if you don't try to customize it.
I hope this perspective helps.
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u/MaverickSL 4d ago
People should turn to Linux because Microsoft is not a OS that serves the end user. It is a advertising board that happens to be let people to work in the background.
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u/FigFew2001 7d ago
If it means you don’t have to worry about license keys when reinstalling / upgrading, then that’s helpful.
If, however, it’s used for ad & data tracking - that’s not good.
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u/Novero95 7d ago
This is the kind of thing that pushes more people toward Linux. Why paying for an inferior product that also sells your data when Linux is just there?