Having used a distro that expose me to the sausage making, i am not.
One either have to rely on everything being updated in lockstep with everything else, or expect to do some massive backporting.
This because outside of a few projects, the kernel being one of them (Qt being another, oddly enough), nobody can be bothered to actually adhere to API, never mind ABI, stability beyond their own use for them.
It's not that cut and dry for me. I do see objective differences in the Microsoft of today.
* Visual Studio Community is now free.
* Visual Studio Code is free and surprisingly awesome, IMO. It's now my default text editor, having replaced Sublime Text.
* I think what they're doing with .NET Core, VS Code etc. is great, they've realised after completely missing the boat on mobile that they can't control all the platforms anymore, they've been forced to think cross-platform. They've been forced to think beyond Windows for the first time in their history really, and that's a good thing.
* Their traditional allergic reaction to anything open source seems to have been given a strong dose of antihistamines. They've open sourced a bunch of their own stuff and they're now #1 for open source contributions on GitHub.
* I like Azure, I like that they're making their own hardware - I used a Surface Pro 4 as my main machine for a while and it was pretty good, "devices and services" as Nadella has said.
Bear in mind that I hated Microsoft back in the day. I only ever begrudgingly used Windows, I stayed well away from any of their development tools, preferring open source languages and frameworks even when working on top of Windows. If I needed to run a server, it was Debian (this is still more or less the case for me today). I used to run Debian as my main desktop OS for a few years. Today a Mac is still my main machine. I say this because I want it to be clear that I'm coming at this topic from a place well outside the world of Microsoft. I am well acquainted with the alternatives.
Besides Ballmer, there has been a generational change at Microsoft. Is the publicity around this change somewhat marketing driven? is there still plenty of room for improvement? Sure, no doubt. But I think it's a bit disingenuous and overly cynical to 100% attribute it all to marketing/PR spin.
Windows 10 and so on. Yeah I know, I get it and it's not OK. They're obviously not alone in the exploitation of their user's data, however. I say that not as some kind of equivalence-based excuse but because it's a problem involving multiple organisations and industries. And while my main point is that Microsoft has - in some ways - changed for the better, in most cases, at the end of the day, the nature of a public company will always be to make profit measured in quarterly periods. And much like the proverbial scorpion (and frog), a public company will keep trying to make profit measured in quarterly periods to the potential detriment of its own long term viability and that of the greater societal context within which it exists. My point here being I don't think it's realistic to expect that anything other than external pressure will change the privacy situation you highlight.
And when the majority doesn't seem to care about loss of privacy unless maybe it's about their dick pics[1], I think you're right in that the privacy situation as it currently stands is not going anywhere.
Perhaps a little more on topic, the HR practices of Microsoft may have improved somewhat, but I have some acquaintances that work there and it's still not all roses in that area either from what I hear.
So I can commend Microsoft for what they're doing better while still recognising where they suck. It doesn't have to be a binary all or nothing situation. At least not for me. It ceased being a religious war for me a long time ago.
