Technology

Exactly. The issue is that it's a freemium model, where they advertise a product with additional features in Notepad. But Notepad itself is still free.

That's still bad, but so is the title.

Don't take this the wrong way, but it's hard for me to contain my incredulity: have you been asleep for the last decade? Has a very obvious pattern of enshitification not been constantly proven as a rule on the tech sector? And an article is... outrage?

The click bait will never die my friend.

Likely you'll have to pay for some AI service, because the executives' children cried after watching an old sci-fi, that "we can't have intelligent conversations with out computers in 2016 in the real world, while in 2015 in the movie adaptation of Don't Build The Torment Nexus, there was Torment Nexus the intelligent and smart computer".

Having this LLM bullshit in Notepad should be the real news

I turned off that AI stuff as soon as I saw it. Click the gear icon in Notepad in the upper right to open settings and turn it off.

Upvoted for visibility.

I recommend Notepad++.

I'm not even willing to use Windows for free. I have it installed w/o a license, and I haven't booted into it in... 2 years? 3? I honestly don't remember, but I haven't used Windows in any meaningful sense for >10 years, other than to test Windows-specific things.

Reject this nonsense. There are alternatives that could probably work for you, depending on your requirements.

Apple heavily pushes their users towards iCloud subscriptions. More so on iOS than macOS but still.

CheomeOS: Let Google silently start tracking your kids until they are old enough to sell all of that accumulated data.

MacOS

And you get the privilege of making that one-time $2000 purchase every 2-3 years when Apple eventually nerfs their hardware with bad firmware updates

Notepad is useful for saving a simple piece of info to your hard drive somewhere, it's not a daily driver for code editing or anything. If I'm on the phone with some customer service rep and they give me some reference number, I'll pop open notepad to write it down and save it.

Seriously though, Android, macOS, Steam OS, Android TV, Chrome OS, Debian, heck, Ubuntu, Linux Mint

Some of those are not competitors to Windows. Android, Android TV, Steam OS are installed on specialty devices.

macOS is not a good OS. I wouldn't consider it a better alternative to Windows. macOS often lags behind Windows in certain features such as tiling Windows. Apple is more hostile toward developers than Microsoft is and Apple ships their own versions of coreutils which are vastly inferior GNU coreutils and often totally out of date (Apple uses a build of bash from 2007 that was the default shell until the switch to zsh, and they STILL ship this bash binary today).

For any other Linux variant, the answer is the same as it has been for 20 years: normies don't install their own OS, and also only use their machines to browse the internet, so it makes no difference to them.

I use Notepad on my work computer daily. I never save any documents, but it is handy for a quick copy/paste of info I need for a short period of time. We aren't allowed to install anything on the computers, so it's what is available.

I could live without it, but I do find it marginally useful, basically as digital "scrap paper".

I use notepad alongside notepad++ it is fine.

(neo)vim for life :)