Hey, so I've decided to see how far I can get in my life without paying Microsoft a dime (and doing it legally). So here's a thread I hope can be filled with programs, products, tips, ideas, etc. of things that are ABM (anything but Microsoft). But before we fight, we must "Know Thy Enemy"
Microsoft Products:
OS - XP & Vista
Web Browser - IE
IM - MSN Messenger
Media Player - Windows Media Player
Portable Media Player - Zune
Gaming Console - Xbox 360
E-mail - Outlook
Office Apps - Microsoft Office
Video Editor - Windows Movie Maker
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head...
Posts
Hotmail - Web Mail
Live - Other Online Services (bwuh?) [edit: Online portal?]
[edit 2]
Oh, MSN.com - Online portal (again?)
Honestly not sure about the last two
OS - Xubuntu or Ubuntu with Gnome
Web Browser - Opera
IM - Pidgin
Portable Media Player - DS with an R4
E-mail - Opera
Office Apps - Abiword, resorting to open office if I really have to.
Ubuntu has a ton of games these days once you enable the repositories, and I hear Wine is getting better (I just suck at setting it up, it seems).
In windows, I use:
OS - XP Home (Came with the box and a real disk, so I'm not going to complain)
Web Browser - Opera
IM - Pidgin
FTP - Filezilla
CD/DVD burning - Infra Recorder
PIC programming and simulation - MPLab
Anti-Spyware - Spybot S&D, HostsXpert, Ad Muncher (not free),
Media Player - Foobar2000, Media Player Classic and VLC
Portable Media Player - Ds and R4
Gaming Console - Wii, piped through Dscaler
E-mail - Opera, googlemail, my own hosted email account
Office Apps - Abiword
As far as I can remember, this is all free and ABM.
OS - Ubuntu & PCLinuxOS
Web Browser - Firefox & Opera
IM - Pidgin
Media Player - KMPlayer/Amarok
Portable Media Player - Ipod Nano?
Gaming Console - Nintendo Gamecube (Or Wii if you have no interest in running Linux natively?)
E-mail - KMail/Evolution
Office Apps - Open Office
Video Editor - Cinelerra
Refuse to patronise any businesses that utilise Microsoft Server technology, including Microsoft's automated telephone and speech recognition systems or do their accounting with Microsoft Money. Many businesses will use NetMeeting. Don't let them anywhere near your precious money, or Microsoft will get their cut!
Don't forget to refuse to purchase any programs made using the vast Microsoft Visual Studio, or anything that requires the DirectX API or Microsoft .NET. They were programmed with the blood of a thousand independant developers.
Murder any Microsoft Certified Professionals in your path, as well as anyone who has benefited from the Microsoft Academic Alliance and any Microsoft Student Partners. Don't forget to tell the news networks why you did it. Know Thy Enemy!
Speaking of news networks, kill yourself if you get any news from MSNBC.
Actually, why not just kill yourself right now, before Microsoft roll out industry-destroying ranges of knives, guns and nooses. End your life now, while you may do so independant of Microsoft's vile business practices.
I would lime all of this, but it might look like too much. I agree with it all wholeheartedly though. Hating Microsoft just because they're Microsoft is as silly as you can get. Hating a Microsoft product because it is a bad product, on the other hand, is sensible, but that goes for any company and is on a product by product basis.
I have no such qualms about liming it. I laughed my ass off Mumbly, good job.
How's the stone age going for you?
Thank you. Microsoft makes a half-assed, bloated, user-unfriendly operating system, the latest version of which somehow has less compatibility with my computer than Ubuntu. On the other hand, I'm quite happy with my Xbox 360. Don't be retarded, OP.
Although depending on who you ask, (our glorious overlords at) Apple are just as evil as MS, so YMMV.
or Brawl. 4854.6102.3895 Name: NU..
I guess you could browse Slashdot using one of those classic text-only browsers.
Ditto. The only MS thing I use (without being paid to do so) is my 360. Not some anti-MS bias, I just think their software is shit.
Then what's the point?
Ever used Visual Studio?
Avoiding giving Microsoft any money by directly supporting their products, instead of going overkill in an ideological fashion that would make RMS proud as suggested by some of the morons* who have posted in this thread.
*By morons, I'm including Mumblyfish for getting the ball rolling, as well as EvilBadman and Dusda for following in his footsteps.
Seems to be that not buying any MS products is going overkill already.
Edit: By the way, it's not only about not using his own money. Last I checked, media player was free. So is MSN messenger. And IE (but that's a piece of shit, so don't get it 'cause of that, not 'cause it's by MS).
Visual Studio is nice but have you ever tried to accomplish anything with their database products?
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Nope, but the point is, that not all their software is shitty shit shit. Oh sure, some of it is, but due to the way that MS is structured with lots of different competing teams, there's no real standardization of quality. Some of it sucks, some of it doesn't.
Their OS division in particular is crap, but other stuff not so much.
Alright, fair enough (I don't like Office much either, I'm a WordPerfect man). I'd just rather people judge individual products, not the whole thing. MS is so god damn huge that you can't really say how something is gonna turn out before trying it. Sometimes it works really well. Sometimes it's a piece of hellspawn that shits on everything you know and love.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Yeah, I used to work with a lot of that stuff, and I'll have to agree about the databases. The worst part about them though, is the fact that they constantly change their interfaces and how the user interacts with them everytime they put out a new version. It's like you have to relearn all of their software every time they put out new versions of anything.
Their solution sucked just as much. It basically amounted to copying the pages from a 2008 >Beta 3 server. What the hell kind of solution is that?
Anyway, I'm mostly MS free at home (have a 360 and use office for Mac) although at work I have to use their stuff for testing.
There's nothing wrong with not liking software. There's nothing wrong with not liking any of it. But wanting to not use something just because it's "omg teh M$" is retarded.
How is that a problem? I use Linux (Ubuntu) almost exclusively, with the odd reboot for when I want to play any games that will run on my PC. I still use Windows 2000 because XP and Vista offers nothing that I care about, and won't be upgrading until it is no longer covered under the extended support phase (meaning when it no longer gets security updates).
Those are likely supported from the purchase of Windows. Besides, if XP or Vista is an "enemy" I don't know why the hell he would be using any of those applications since he shouldn't be using an OS that supports them ;-)
That said, I find VLC or Mplayer to be superior than WMP on the video side of things. Perhaps it was a bug in the CCCP release I was using, or the DirectShow decoder was slow, but 720p video that was (IIRC) encoded in H.264 absolutely killed WMP, giving me incredibly choppy playback on my machine (which uses an old Athlon XP-M 2500+). Mplayer handled it without a hitch.
Pidgin > MSN messenger, but I'm also a person that doesn't give a flying fuck about webcams and prefers having a single application for all of my IM needs.
I'll go ahead and admit that I'm not your typical PC user.
EDIT:
If that is your sole reason, sure. But I don't see anything wrong with not wanting to use software by a company with despicable business practices any more than, say, not wanting to buy clothing from a company that uses sweatshops for their labor.
That said, you'll have to blacklist a lot of companies if you want to apply that standard across the board.
Trying to generally avoid a company's products because you've been burned after having tried to use a number of them is pretty good sense, though.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
I don't know, I don't specifically avoid any of Microsoft's products, I just tend to use alternatives because they're better. I switched to Firefox because IE6 sucked. I switched to VLC because Windows Media Player doesn't play nice with all codecs or new video types. I switched to Pidgin because MSN and AIM are both terrible clients. I switched to OpenOffice because I'm not fucking paying hundreds of dollars just to open Word documents.
And I prefer OS X and Linux over Windows because I don't have to install a bunch of applications on top of it to get some simple functionality. I mean, grep? cat? awk? What the fuck, how does Microsoft not have a decent set of command line tools, let alone some of the more useful things you get out of Leopard or any linux window manager?
If Microsoft comes out with something new, I'll check it out, and if it's good, fantastic. But with so many alternatives that are better, there's no reason to use 90% of their software.
Doing it for some childish "eff M$!!" reason is silly, but who cares why people use the listing?
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Except that he actually mentioned the 360 in his OP, and excluding such a fine system because of it's manufacturer is retarded.
Yeah, there's really no denying that.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
So? Saying:
isn't being very constructive. I'm sure that the OP would feel that your reply was unneeded, as it would appear that the purpose of this thread was to request additions to his list of Microsoft products that he might "unwittingly" purchase (I find that the company logo sticks out like a sore thumb), not to solicit condescending responses about his choice to avoid supporting Microsoft.
If he wants to lose out of the games that are available on that platform, that is his choice. I can't say that I agree with Microsoft's attempts to buy their way into the console market, but more competition with Sony can't be a bad thing. It certainly isn't enough to make me swear off buying another 360 sometime in the future.
I find that the unreliability of the 360 to be good enough of a reason not to own one. I sold mine at the beginning of the year since it was locking up after a few hours of being on and I didn't feel like playing the console lottery. I missed out on some good games, but that just means I'll have to leech off of a friend.
That's not only useful for the OP's wants but also useful in general. Heck I'd like a list like that. It's always good to know what choices I have available.
I chimed in on the "no to all MS stuff" because he wanted to exclude the 360. It implied he wanted more than just a list of alternative software to use and I, like the others, chose to highlight some of the more commonly used services on the web that rely quite heavily on Microsoft products. Hardly overkill, in my opinion.
check and mate
Also, disable XHTTPRequest capability in your browser. Besides the fact that everyone and their mother uses it on their site now, including this one.
So why would you come back and bitch about what the OP said. The Xbox 360 is a Microsoft product. He doesn't want to buy Microsoft products. It doesn't matter if said product is of good quality, he has chosen not to actively support the manufacturer through patronage of their products.
just sell your 360 and buy a ps3! problem solved!
I try to avoid paying for technologies whenever I can, but when I have to purchase for my own needs I politely make amends. There's nothing wrong with endorsing a product when it meets your needs.
First off, I guess I really need to watch my wording. The "Know thy enemy" line was supposed to be a light hearted jab, not the war-cry of a fanboy. I apologize to anybody who took it the wrong way.
Secondly, I was originally going to have this thread be about XP/Vista OS alternatives, but it was 3 am and I got to thinking that if we were going to talk about different OS's, why not branch out a bit and hence the list of all the other things that are Microsoft products to keep this thread going after the first Linux post. And plus, i thought it could start up other threads (Anything But Apple, Anything But GM, Anything But Dell, Anything But Facebook, Anything but Google, etc.)
Thirdly, I don't hate Microsoft. My current desktop and laptop are both running XP, I just BOUGHT the Office 2007 Ultimate Edition and while my Wii is sitting in a box (I don't remember which box since it's been so long.... side note: if you want to buy a barely used Wii, PM me.) the 360 is sitting right next to me with Halo 3 being the last disc it saw. But they are a large company who's products span lots of software and even now hardware, and who have a huge market share with most of them. And so it would be a perfect litmus. Oh, how does this alternative compare to what Microsoft has got?
Finally, I hope I cleared up a little of the mess. If you guys feel that this thread can get out of the mud, I'm fine with continuing it here, but if anybody wants to start this all over again on the right foot, I'm fine with that too.