Commercial desktop software is getting worse, not better. I’ve been generally aware of this for a while — the relentless pull away from “you pay for it once and own it” to monthly subscription models that extract money from you forever has been a leading indicator.
But my friend @DrInsensitive reports that the enshittification is accelerating. He says that in addition to a lot of tediously stupid UI changes, his most recent upgrade of CorelDraw now spams ads at him even when CorelDraw itself is not running! Furthermore the plague of microtransactions that has afflicted AA games for years is spreading — the set of free fill patterns for rectangles that his old version had is gone, instead when he tries to fill a rectangle he gets a pop-up invitation to buy an extra-cost feature pack of them.
When one asshole vendor thinks they’ve successfully numbed their user base into accepting this kind of crap, others immediately follow. We’ve seen this movie before, we know how it ends — with applications, like games, designed to be deliberately frustrating and low-level awful, intended to give you itches that you can only scratch by buying their endless parade of “enhancements”.
I’m sure a surcharge to suppress the spammy CorelDraw ads won’t be long in coming. And soon after that it will be everywhere.
If this goes on, open-source software will finally win the desktop not because it’s gotten enough better but because closed-source desktop applications have reached final form as an intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches.
This is not the way I was looking forward to winning.
ESR, Twitter, 2025-03-22.
August 30, 2025
QotD: SaaS – software as an “intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches”
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A recent Microsoft update to Win11 uninstalled Wordpad. I assume as a way to push folk to using some form of Office, on-line of course, the easier to scrape your data.
I copied the .exe and the .dll to another folder. Wordpad works from there. And the program and Start menu icon vanished after an update. Wordpad still works.
I don’t need Word. When I need fancy fonts and colored text, Wordpad is enough for me. I use mostly use Notepad.
Comment by paul — August 30, 2025 @ 14:52
I use text editors more than full-service applications like Libre Office or Microsoft Weird. I used to use Notepad, but over the last few years I mostly use Editpad Lite and Notepad++ both for ordinary text and for my HTML coding.
Comment by Nicholas — August 30, 2025 @ 16:27