I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account.
Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password because it was tied to the Microsoft account and you can't change the password locally.
I don't need Copilot managing my inbox through AI, nor do I need a more exciting widget experience.
I just want an OS where if something like the above happens there's a way to fix it without having to reinstall. It doesn't seem like much to ask.
Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)
> I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming.
I see a likely inversion of motives here: you earn your living coding or otherwise are deeply vested in Windows, so you are committed for survival to Windows and to fixing the absurd account problem that MSFT has inflicted on you.
The expression "muscle memory" here just means the cognitive load of working with a technology. MSFT has added a hard-blocking piece of stupidity to your cognitive load.
I am sure this is not the first time! Registry problems, update problems, and now for pity's sake account problems.
As a long-time user of both Linux and Windows, I'd say my OS cognitive load with Linux is almost entirely related to efficient actions, whereas with Windows I have a quiver of stupid arrows to shoot at all the problems that MSFT inflicts.
When people advise you to switch to Linux if you can, they are giving solid advice.
My Ubuntu servers have been in an undefined state since canonical botched a regular upgrade to 26.04 LTS due to the ongoing DDOS. Their status page says everything works. A simple ping tells me nothing works.
Let's not pretend Microsoft has a monopoly on idiocy in the software world. All major Linux distros are hell bent on repeating the mistakes of Windows. Especially since the people in control of the stack (minus the kernel) are the rejects who couldn't make it in Microsoft and Apple in the 90s and 00s but really wanted to.
Meanwhile my small happy place with OpenBSD and Guix just works.
They are caused by moral busy bodies who think they know better.
To quote CS Lewis:
>Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
> They are caused by moral busy bodies who think they know better.
If you know better just hack it your way. Linux is an open platform. Nothing prevents you from gutting Ubuntu and making it your own. You can't say the same for Windows though.
So I guess is not a matter of monopoly of idiocy, but whether you can do something about idiot decisions when they are made. This is why an open platform will always win. It's just architecturally better for the end user.
While this might be technically true, I also think it's a lazy argument that ignores practical reality. It's basically a way to avoid any kind of accountability or self-reflection on the part of developers. "Users aren't happy? If they don't want to make the change themselves, they can fuck off." This is a toxic attitude which I see a lot in discussions of free software.
In practice, 99% of the time it's not worth the time and effort to fork and maintain a large project. Even in a free ecosystem, users get locked into specific products and technologies. This is why sane technical leadership and responsiveness to user feedback are important, even (especially?) in open source projects.
Can you tell me an instance where users got locked into a dying ecosystem in Linux?
What I can tell you is that CentOS, which was used extensively in servers, died and you didn't really see much issue, at least not as much as compared to the pain and suffering users are having to go through now that Windows is the dying place.
What's lazy is the repetition of this realist fallacy of the technical lockin, when in fact what you really have is what you see, an open platform you can very well just leave for another when you disagree with the current vendor.
Dislike Ubuntu and you can very well migrate. That's the practical reality.
There are several software packages that are essentially mandatory if you want to run a modern distro with good desktop hardware support. Some that come to mind are glibc, systemd, and Wayland. These projects have made controversial design decisions which impact the entire ecosystem of Linux software.
I actually did leave Ubuntu because background Snap updates were randomly crashing running applications. Now, I'm fairly happy with Fedora, but it's far from perfect. I reject the idea that if I have technical critiques of these projects, that the fault somehow lies with me if I'm not willing to waste my time jumping distros or rewriting them myself. That attitude is exactly analogous to the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft.
> These projects have made controversial design decisions which impact the entire ecosystem of Linux software.
> I reject the idea that if I have technical critiques of these projects, that the fault somehow lies with me if I'm not willing to waste my time jumping distros or rewriting them myself. That attitude is exactly analogous to the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft.
I understand it's frustrating when your distro or OS starts acting up. It's a means to an end, it should get out of your way and let you do your work.
On the other hand, it's impossible to appeal to everyone, so every decision will make some people happy and others unhappy. There's no way around it. The only thing that matters is whether we can live with it or not, in which case the option is to fix it or move on.
It's frustrating but nobody owes you anything. The sooner you realise this the better.
I for instance wasn't happy with anything available. The closest thing was hyprland so I made my own micro-distro on top of it: https://github.com/gchamon/archie. It's way less work than you think in the age of AI, but it does require you intimate knowledge of the system.
If the expected Linux experience is "go build your own if you disagree", then I'm not clear how that is any better than being told the same by Microsoft/Apple
It's better because at least you can. With windows and apple you have to live with it. But that's not the expected experience. UX in Linux has only become better with time, all things considered.
There are alternatives to Wayland, Systemd, Vulkan, etc. on Linux. There are far fewer options on macOS and Windows, "build your own" typically entails starting from scratch.
> There are several software packages that are essentially mandatory if you want to run a modern distro with good desktop hardware support. Some that come to mind are glibc, systemd, and Wayland.
I run Gentoo on one machine and Alpine on several. I promise, none of those are required.
>If you know better just hack it your way. ... It's just architecturally better for the end user.
As an end user I want the product/tool to serve me well out of the box, I don't have time to hack it to fix what I dislike about it on my own dime. That's what my job is for.
This is not always available. What smartphones "serve well out of the box", meaning zero telemetry, root privileges, open source, not requiring an account in a foreign country (and not spamming notifications about this), and working? Google Pixel requires time to fix, despite costing like 3-4 ordinary smartphones.
The same probably can be said about laptops. Linux is great but buggy, and proprietary OSes do not pass the requirements.
How ironic. Reactionary old fart mostly known for writing moralistic children’s novels wants you not to listen to moralistic crusaders. I shall take his advice.
CS Lewis certainly got it wrong, if he believed that the greed of robber barons can ever be satisfied. I’ll take the moral busybodies, if I have to take either.
and I am a GNOME user and I find it totally fine to use KDE. Thats the cool thing about open plattforms. Just some people having too much time to make a UI interface part of their personality rant too much on the internet about other UI interfaces.
> My Ubuntu servers have been in an undefined state since canonical botched a regular upgrade to 26.04 LTS due to the ongoing DDOS. Their status page says everything works. A simple ping tells me nothing works.
So is it the DDOS that's responsible, status page notwithstanding?
Doesn't require a GUI, so it can be used for servers/headless too. Please note that's it's not a backup solution, just an OS snapshot one, albeit with scheduling.
> Let's not pretend Microsoft has a monopoly on idiocy in the software world.
Entirely fair, but let's not pretend the situation is symmetrical. Canonical doesn't have monopoly on the linux or broader *nix world the same way that Microsoft has on the Windows world.
Yeah, so, to be clear: I'm fairly sure Linux will also have its fair share of issues that I occasionally would have to repair.
I don't necessarily even have a problem with Windows occasionally needing a bit of hand-holding, either. It sucks, but it's IT so meh, unfortunately it still comes with the territory.
What I'm mostly pissed off about is the fact that I have a perfectly useable machine but since I'm unable to login due to vague Microsoft nonsense and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix it I need to reinstall. This seems wholly unnecessary.
Even having some sort of repair installation that doesn't blow away all installed applications would have been somewhat ok as a last resort, but that doesn't exist either.
> Yeah, so, to be clear: I'm fairly sure Linux will also have its fair share of issues that I occasionally would have to repair.
Issues with account, login and passwords would be none of them. Sure, there are other areas of common issues at times, but I have never, ever had issues logging into any of the linux OS I ran for the last 23years or so.
I've had PAM break due to distro's ridiculous policy of updating the system in place allowing for invalid combinations of files to exist. I've had Linux distros break the booting process countless times.
> When people advise you to switch to Linux if you can, they are giving solid advice.
They absolutely are not. Switching operating systems isn't like switching toothpaste. They are declaring, without evidence, that you don't need Windows, without knowing if you do or not. They are avoiding the problem that the person is having entirely and asking that the user replace their single problem with a whole new class of problems that the user has no idea how to solve. And there will be problems, because someone who has never used Linux before isn't going to know how to do anything in Linux. They aren't going to know what software to use to do anything, they aren't going to know how to install software or update it, they aren't going to know what to do when any problem comes up at all.
"Just switch to Linux" is a malevolent and self-serving recommendation, is absolutely not realistic, and is not ever intended to actually help the user needing help with a problem they are having.
Also years of Windows muscle memory here, especially the keyboard shortcuts. I’ve used Windows since 1997. I’ve decided I’m done. A new PC arrives in a month. It’ll be running Ubuntu. I’m done.
Maybe there is a Linux language similar to DirectX you might transition to? Maybe test code in a VM? (Although that gets you right back into Win11.)
I've been watching Linux from a safe distance for 25+ years. The one thing that remains constant over the decades is that whenever someone says "You're having this problem? Well what did you expect, you're using X distro. Obviously you should use Y distro, then all your problems will be solved" and then another person comes along and says "No, you idiot, Y distro is completely broken, any sane person would use Z distro!" And if you play that game long enough, you eventually complete the circle.
Haven't seen this specific "you're using wrong distro" so far. I'm more often bumping on a general rude attitude of people answering. As if asking questions, looking for solutions is not what all these distro forums were made for.
I have no problem using Debian (I’m actually a Linux sysadmin by profession) so I have no problems later switching distros. But as of today, I’m happy with Ubuntu on my road laptop and I would no doubt be happy switching the home PC, too. (Actually the road lap is Lubuntu and it currently has zero visible AI influence.)
To be fair, they're allegedly experiencing under attack by the Iranian government. I doubt Guix or OpenBSD would be able to sustain service under a similar attack, though granted there's a reason Cannonical is the target and not OpenBSD.
Quite the extrapolation from "A group sympathetic to the Iranian government" -> "the Iranian government" especially considering the source: "posts on Telegram and other social media".
Same. I used to develop Windows apps with Borland C++ once, that's how old I am. Last year, I finally installed a second Linux Mint boot - for Windows games!
The level of disregard for quality from MS is just obnoxious. We are really crossing some kind of line here, I think, where taking the pain of migrating once seems easier than dealing with all this nonsense.
(I had to clean install Windows after that infamous update with system check infinite loop at boot time).
I have no problem using Debian (I’m actually a Linux sysadmin by profession) so I have no problems later switching distros. But as of today, I’m happy with Ubuntu on my road laptop and I would no doubt be happy switching the home PC, too. (Actually the road lap is Lubuntu and it currently has zero visible AI influence.)
Do both. Insist that the authorities reform the abuser AND leave the relationship.
In a real life abusive relationship that would look like both calling the cops and leaving. In the case of software, demand reform and also switch OSes.
> These suggestions are like telling someone that that is being harassed to maybe wear something different.
Weird analogy - it's telling someone who is paying to be abused to simply stop paying...
If Windows was actually free, as in download a copy and use it as you wish, then sure, maybe you might have a (very tiny) point, but it's not like that at all.
Many legit users have a license applied to their Microsoft account that predates the current situation. That is to say, a license carried over from windows 10 and possibly as far back as windows 7, since there was a time where Microsoft was offering free license transfers. Many people see windows 7 as being not shitty and abusive.
> there was a time where Microsoft was offering free license transfers
I don't think they ever stopped. Maybe they ceased advertising it, but installing Windows 10 over 7 or 8 would silently inherit the license far past the original terms. The time-limited offer was just a FOMO-inducing marketing scam.
You don't choose to use Windows. You have to. Because it's the only OS that supports whatever tool you need for your work. Windows is mandatory in many situations, which is why it can afford being obnoxious.
your analogy would be fitting for a jurisdiction that had no sexual assault laws or way for victims to defend themselves. In which case "Don't provoke an attack" is sound advice.
in other industries, you can sue product manufacturers if their defects cause you inordinate grief, lost wages, or excessive repair costs.
I used Windows since my first PC on 3.1. But recently it just became too much. Switched over to Mint for just over a year now and loving it. No issues at all for development or gaming. The machine just works. No lag at the lock screen, typing in your password and hitting enter has the desktop loaded instantly. It just works the way you expect and with the performance you expect. I used to defend Windows but I cannot say the same about it anymore.
Hello fellow DirectX programmer! I gave up and got a Mac. I made myself get used to the defaults. I can't go back. I tried putting together a gaming pc a couple years ago and Windows annoyed me too much. It's better here!
And yeah - I gave up on DirectX programming to do it. I do like Metal...
As Windows more and more difficult to use at very basic, after passing certain threshold, just developing on Linux is more practical. Even for DirectX.
Have you considered Linux on bare metal and a Windows VM for your coding? Two monitor setup and you can have Windows on one side when working then all your other daily stuff is in Linux. Shared drives and clipboards make things pretty easy.
Also just debloat the Windows install, why are you suffering with Co-Pilot? I have a VM running on Proxmox and I rdp to it from Linux when needed, but daily use, no way and honestly there really is no reason to put all your eggs in the Windows basket in this day and age.
> I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account
Not sure what's so confusing here... When Windows is online, it checks your password against the cloud and updates the local store. When Windows is offline, it checks your password against a local store. By previous password, Windows just means the password you used on the last successful login for the user on that machine.
Clearly if that was the actual issue I would've been able to get it working :)
The thing is, I was online, I had a working internet connection (and confirmed this by doing the 'utilman' hang to get a command prompt and getting a working ping command). It was just that Windows corrupted some kind of internal Microsoft Account connection and was locking me out.
The day I can’t make a local-only account on windows (for personal use, work is a different matter unfortunately) is the day I stop using windows.
It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts. I can skip it, which is nice, but just don’t show the screen. If you’re installing linux you either know what you’re doing or you don’t: if you do you know it’s possible and don’t need it jammed in your face, and if you don’t you’re probably not quite tall enough to understand it isn’t needed and you probably don’t want it anyways.
I don't even want a local account, I just want to be able to set a custom username for my account instead of some autogenerated jumble of letters.
My Microsoft Account email is "contact@<my-domain-name>". If I set up a new Windows 11 computer using this account, Windows picks the first 4 letters of my email address and sets that as the username. So my username becomes "conta", and the path to my user directory becomes "C:\Users\conta".
I know this is a really small thing, but I find it incredibly irritating. I can't be typing that into the terminal all day long! It's not the end of the world, but it speaks to a lack of polish and care across the whole product, not to mention a disrespect for their users' intelligence.
I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue. Maybe there's a secret keycombo I can press during install? Or some unrelated checkbox that I can toggle that will do the magic? I just know that I login via my iCloud account on all my Macs, and Apple has always allowed me to choose my own username and home directory.
I don't think this is high on their list of issues to fix so I'm not very hopeful that this will ever get addressed. Maybe I should just change my legal name to Conta?
> I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue.
5ish years back I used to have a PCI passthrough via OVMF [0] setup for my GPU and my windows VM (Arch host) so I could game on windows.
Then I realized Proton/wine had gotten good enough to play all my games (I don't play AAA competitive shooters) and I dropped the VM and never looked back.
I would encourage everyone to give Steam/Proton on Linux a shot if you haven't recently and see if you're able to drop windows for good. These days, I don't even look at compatibility - 95% of games work OOTB and the other 5% work by changing the proton version (i.e. proton-ge). YMMV of course but I've been much happier without windows on my system.
“ To create an offline (local) account during Windows 11 setup, disconnect from the internet, then use the command OOBE\BYPASSNRO in the command prompt (Shift+F10) to enable a "I don't have internet" ”
This is what I do. I have heard this has been patched out. My work gives me an MSDN account, and so far I’ve been able to still do this. When this goes away forever and I lose all my ISO’s/access to ISO’s that allow this, I’ll be done with windows forever.
> It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts.
I don't quite understand what you are saying here. If you're talking about setting up an account to use the system, it's the same idea as setting up a local account on Windows.
If you're talking about online accounts, I believe you are referring to a convenience feature offered during setup. Ironically, it was put there to guide people who are coming to Linux from Windows.
No, I guess I didn’t explain it, though I thought I had. Don’t ask me to turn on location settings, don’t ask me to connect my email/online accounts, during a gui install. I can turn those on myself if I want to. Someone else up-thread pointed out that this probably exists to help windows uses transition over to a Linux install in a way that feels more familiar, and that makes sense. I don’t like it, but I can accept that.
Oh. I thought you were talking about making a user account.
I've never seen anything like that on any linux install I've ever done. But then I've been pretty much Debian-only since I started using Linux over 30 years ago.
You also attributed this to "Linux", instead of whatever guided installer/desktop environment you chose. I have never encountered the screens you are lamenting.
on a similar vein, it deleted all my mfa tokens without telling me, as part of an update that also disabled the built-in finger reader as a token source.
woulda been nice to know before hand that it was going to do that, so i could make sure those other accounts werent so reliant on that finger reader working
A friend of mine has been running the same Arch install since 2009. Does this mean Linux is problem-free and people who struggle with it are doing something wrong? No, it doesn't. Same with Windows.
there are (will be) lots of calls on the muscle memory slacking off. I can't think of anything that is not reproducible on Mint.
I have tons of Windows experience (starting off by manually installing windows w/o installation floppies and manually editing win/system.ini, through win32 to current day nonsense), yet I find the command line interface of linux a lot more powerful.
I am not aware of the exact use of directX, it should be possible to run Windows through virtualization just for this task. (unless wine is sufficient)
M$ account is not strictly "mandatory" as you claim. There are ways to work around this. I NEVER in my life had an M$ account, I have a GitHub Account, but that is still separate AFAIK. Rufus can mod the ISO for it, and there is another way around it during install. They just want you to use one so they can spy in you better. It's on you to have an OS account to an online service in the first place. Then entire concept is utterly retarded, I do not care who it is M$ or some of the best champions of Open Source and ethical Linux distro, I will not use any fucking account of them to log into my LOCAL PRIVATE OS, it makes ZERO sense and its pathetic how that managed to lure so many morons onto doing this.
I remember first seeing this during a Win install and instantly looked for a way around it, I think they even have removed a workaround to make it even harder for people to work around this BS.
That's one thing that struck me in TFA, almost everything mentioned was stuff I never asked for and never wanted: CoPilot in my inbox, some Insider Program bumf, widgets and feeds, the sole thing in there that means anything is that updates are slightly less annoying.
So TFA is really "we've spent the last two months monkeying with the crap that no-one asked for or wants, and Update is mildly less annoying". That's not really much of an announcement.
> Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)
The computer on my left uses Windows (Win10) so I still use Microsoft-related software. I switched to Linux in late 2004 or so. Linux kind of spoiled me here; every time I transfer files on Windows and notice how slow it is, I wonder what the heck Microslop is doing here. Why does it waste my time and my computer's resources so much? That's one example of so many more. It would be kind of great to be able to abandon Windows completely. For that Linux has to improve a lot, so that Average Joe also is able to use it just fine.
Well for decades Windows was adequate-to-excellent for small business and individual consumer use in major ways that Windows 11 is recently continuing to disrespect more and more, as it migrates away from how worthwhile Windows formerly used to be.
All this fluff about the insider program seems to be very ignorantly missing the point.
What's needed more than ever is No BS instead of more BS.
Namely get Microsoft Accounts back out of the picture unless opted in.
Along with curtailing Bitlocker, One Drive, Copilot, and things like that.
Now to make it really good again, there needs to be no further disk activity after Windows has booted, other than user-initiated saving & loading. Plus of course no network traffic other than user-directed bandwidth usage.
Along those lines I think it goes without saying that as soon as Microsoft has any legitimate commitment to open-source efforts, we'll know by the way they document & release everything they know about NTFS.
Yeah I've found modern KDE's shortcuts are not only similar to the best parts of Windows, but also slightly better (Win arrow keys reposition without doing minimize/maximize, only win pgdn/pgup minimize/maximize) so I can move shit around more fearlessly.
Same, I had to use some hack to trigger sticky keys on the login screen to launch cmd.exe, then I could run the few elevated commands I needed to get back in.
What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is.
Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user base.
The incentives are alomost perpendicularly misaligned.
Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. People are looking for the exit, finding there is indeed a door, and stopping them will take far more than just some reassurance from the DJ boot.
It's always the MBAs. The organizational structure incentivises them on the wrong metrics. So they adapt and optimize for that. In real life, after a while, you hit a plateau with features and market demand. What these MBA clowns love to do is take what's already perfectly fine and mess it up and create a road map for it to fix something to being it the way it was, so they can justify to their higher ups they are "adding value" to the company. And half way through this, they leave the company. Now some other new employee comes in, has no idea why this had to be reworked and messes it up even more. You have this loop enough times, you end up with how software engineering works in the fortune 500.
The moment you hear "let's circle back" enough in meetings, that's your tell tale sign to quit the workplace infested with MBAs. A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.
> A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.
I wish this were true, but unfortunately, I've seen enough evidence otherwise to strongly disagree. MBAs weren't born evil, they were made that way in business school. The same corrupting process works on engineers and can happen outside of business school contexts (one common corrupting force is Hacker News comments). An MBA-brained engineer as a manager is orders of magnitude worse than a regular MBA.
They want to be Apple. Apple sells hardware, services, and takes a huge cut being a software store.
Microsoft sells software. They turned office into a service but it's still software. Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.
Microsoft's strategy for turning into Apple is kneecapping their own software.
Considering that at this point most Microsoft OEMs are failing, Microsoft should just start building a lot of consumer hardware.
Apple makes more money selling consumer hardware than the entire PC hardware market combined. I'm exaggerating, but only a little. This would have been unimaginable in 1999.
It didn't have to be. The same toxic dynamics that compromised their software poisoned their hardware, but they had too many products, or eras of a product, that Just Worked(TM) for it to have been a fluke. Someone knew what they were doing. They were screwed over by competing interests.
Zune people loved their Zunes. Windows Phone 8 people loved their Nokias. I've seen Surface Pro 2s "boot" to the same session for half a decade (that is: put it to sleep, stick it in a drawer for a year, take it out, plug it in, turn it on, all of the same files and folders and apps are open; I've NEVER seen this happen with any other device, they always lose state after enough time unplugged). And it's crazy how badly the Courier/Surface Duo was botched, given the excitement for it. Even newer Surfaces are great for the first year, before all of the compromises and poor engineering decisions make themselves known.
Imagine if it had been managed by someone who actually cared about their users, instead of people who treated them like marks and rubes.
I got a Zune on clearance when they were shutting down the whole mess (a nice fugly brown one for 80% off).
Build quality was rock solid, UI felt premium, and it mostly just got out of my way/let me play tracks. They were great little media players, as good as or ahead of the equivalent iPod.
Hardware was really good out of MSFT at the time, although when mistakes were made (e.g. the RROD Xbox 360 debacle), the broader organization seemed allergic to making thing right.
I dunno about "gently". The XBone was a pretty major face-plant and so was the Series S/X split. The only really successful Xbox was the 360, and that's mostly because Sony went mad with power while designing the PS3. It also helped that PSN was a disaster compared to Xbox Live in a generation where every game had a multi-player mode side-car'd onto it.
D'oh, that's the most obvious example and I completely missed it. Even then, they were somewhat hamstrung by weird decisions - RROD as mentioned, but also remember their hard drive/memory card scheme for the 360? They HAD their family room Trojan horse, at the nascence of streaming and HD broadcast - imagine if they had gone full Nintendo and pushed a TV tuner and/or integration with cable networks? Truly an Xbox, the only one you need under your TV.
It's crazy how the corporate machine just chews up obvious courses for sustained profitability and customer delight and spits out expanding batteries and DRM.
xbox is a catch-it-umbrella that includes all the studios bought, and game pass. The xbox hardware sales are beyond appalling[0], $220m a quarter, and it'd be below $1b yearly. That's revenue - the consoles have pretty terrible profit margin by design. (likely negative when it comes to xbox)
Being a console ecosystem owner doesn't work if one doesn't have a console?
Hence why it makes sense to look at their gaming division revenue as a whole: a large part of that revenue is attributable to shipped to date XBox units.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of that revenue is PlayStation. That's why they've been porting their entire catalog over, claimed the end of exclusives etc.
Last I heard the current Xbox generation has sold less than the last, at approximately 30 million. This gives it about 1/3rd the sales of Sony.
Different sector, but I'd say Blackmagic Design seems to be run by people who actually use their own products and care about both product experience and engineering.
In the creative industry there is a bunch of these "boutique" companies that places great care on the final experience. Probably Blackmagic Design is no longer "boutique" to be fair, but seems they still got the culture right.
Valve and the few sane startups / small/mid sized companies you can be lucky enough to end up in.
I was part of the transformation of a healthy mid size engineering led startup company that got taken over by MBAs and Indian employees and saw the whole lifecycle.
I don't use its products myself but Apple fits this definition perhaps; its current CEO is a former engineering head, the previous CEO was a former operations head and the one before him was Steve Jobs.
> Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge.
Microsoft needs to learn consent. Everywhere there's a Yes and "Remind me later", there has to be a No. And the No has to work and be remembered forever, not forgotten after the next update. Using Windows has to stop feeling like you're being roofied all the time.
Yeah this seems to be a trend over the last few years.
Google does this too. I don't have photos backed up to my Google account on a Pixel and every few days if I open the photos app it prompts me to backup to the cloud and I always have to click "maybe later", "not now" or whatever they decide to name it.
It's messed up because if I were to accidentally ever click yes to that it would fill up my Google storage and I would no longer be able to receive email since I'd have 0% storage. I don't get how something so dangerous can be shoved in front of you so frequently. I know it's marketing / advertising to constantly remind you of something even if you don't want it, but I would have thought customer happiness would outweigh that.
I host an Immich server for us. They don’t want Google Photos syncing and they know to watch out for the dark patterns, but, eventually, they come over with Google Photos syncing.
The other day my mother came to me with a OneDrive prompt on her Pixel. It was asking if she wanted to “free up space”. I’m pretty sure it was trying to get her to sync photos. I wish I would have taken a screenshot. She’s not low on space.
Of course, the only way space gets freed up is if they delete your local copies. It’s practically ransomware and they can’t figure out why people hate them.
or every time you click a YT link in firefox on android it asks "do you want to open this in the YT App?" where you're options are Yes (with an always use app checkbox) and "Cancel" to open in the browser. Like "Cancel" means "no, get out of the way and do what I want before you injected yourself in this flow"
You can disable the YouTube app's handler for YouTube URLs. In the app info, open by default. I haven't tried it, but presumably, all YouTube URLs will then open in your browser.
This is how you can tell that they just don't get it.
Microsoft, your users include developers and power users. We are not all someone's tech illiterate relative who needs constant reminding to check that backups are on, nor do we want to use OneDrive.
If we turn it off, it means off. Updates off = they stay off until turned back on, don't worry, we'll remember. Backup off = it stays off. Edge off = it stays off. Ads off = I don't want ads.
The battle they are fighting is that by using Google, tech illiterate people have found buttons like the ability to disable updates, but don't understand what they're doing, and then leave them off and now their OS becomes part of a botnet in a few months. So Microsoft believes that they are doing a greater good by not offering a real option to actually turn certain things off. But this babysitting behavior is annoying as shit when you want to leave something running that is going to take 6 days. Sure yes put it on a cloud vm. But if I was still using Windows as my OS, why should I have to? Just because your OS can't handle a developer doing something else than using Outlook and OneDrive to store pictures of aunties family get-together?
OneDrive isn't a backup solution but a way to put your personal files in danger as was proven many times. And nowadays probably also a fastest way to get data mined - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45551504
Microsoft has options to provide local image-based backups but they want to make you dependent on their online services - which surely isn't surprising to anyone.
Last time I was installing Windows 10 I had a bunch of 3rd-party tools that gave me back control to some degree. And these worked for most of the things you did mention but Windows Update maintenance services were most pesky component. Nearly every idle period would spawn a bunch of processes which were placed to ensure that updates will be delivered Microsoft way. And while I'm on CachyOS I have W11 in the vm and looks like nothing has changed and I doubt anything will despite these pretty claims up there.
The lack of control over Windows that advanced, power users have to deal with is nowadays insulting.
their VSS system is actually better than btrfs snapshots, IIRC. It allows you to take atomic snapshots of multiple volumes simultaneously. I haven't found a way to do it with btrfs yet, there's always a race condition.
It's wild to me that they don't have an Android-esque "Developer mode" that requires an obscure thing that you need to look up to see the options that can harm you (Click X times on the "Build info", etc).
Historically, Microsoft never had to consider that, because Windows was always in developer mode.
The Windows pedigree assumed that everything would at most have an ini or registry setting or group policy to override 99.9% of Windows' behavior or at least an undocumented but accessible internal API to set it.
The Windows 11 transition was the first time Microsoft shipped a sufficiently bullshit OS that it actually needed a developer mode.
But most scathingly... and the original sin... was that some shit-for-brains Microsoft leader made the decision to disable configurability for purpose of boosting platform revenue.
Fuck that person, because they knew exactly what and why they were doing it, and still made that decision.
Tolerate or hate them for all their sharp business elbows, but Microsoft of yore (Gates and Ballmer eras) intentionally made the decision that if they built and owned a platform that most people used (because it worked for them) then there would be more than enough money for everyone. And that it was healthy to leave money on the table for their developers, because developers and the apps they built drove people to the platform (see "Developers, developers, developers!").
> Microsoft, your users include developers and power users.
But their customers are enterprises. Until you’re bringing in the money that those enterprise contracts are, you’re a pathetic speck who can and will get what you’re offered and no more.
Good luck with that. I have a Windows computer I sometimes have to run stuff on overnight, like renders or what not. I've disabled everything I can related to Windows Update, plus setting "Active hours" or what not, so the computer doesn't reboot because of updates in the middle of the night.
Today I woke up, went to check the progress and wouldn't you know, Windows Update updated the computer and rebooted, and what I was waiting for was aborted... So fucking tiresome to use shit like this.
That's the biggest reason why I stayed on Windows 7 for so long. I could run Blender for two or three days and not give a shit. Meanwhile my friends couldn't even play a game of Factorio without Windows hijacking the computer and rebooting. There was an infamous incident years ago, early in the life of Windows 10, where members of Achievement Hunter lost half of an episode because one of the computers that recorded the audio tracks decided it had to update while they were recording. This has been going on for a decade now and shows no signs of being stopped.
I've seen people resorting to disconnecting machines from the internet to prevent this. They load up the software they need, then it never goes online again, so updates can never bother them or otherwise get in the way. The software thus stays exactly as they want it to be. It's an appliance at that point.
It's annoying to have to shuffle files over to it, if that's needed for its job, but I think it's still a worthwhile thing to consider (it's insane that we've gotten to this point, but such is life). If it isn't workable, then fine. But if it is, the hassle of shuffling files using external SSDs or whatever is probably better, or at the very least more consistent, than turning on your machine one day and finding it corrupted itself due to an update, or the software in question got a UI update which breaks your workflow for a month.
Hm, yeah, can't really disconnect it, I'm using it for (local) CI purposes as well. I could disconnect it from the internet though, keep the local connection, but maybe actually explicitly blocking anything windows/microsoft for the period I want it to stay online, might work sufficiently.
> I've seen people resorting to disconnecting machines from the internet to prevent this.
The Windows Update processes were really a stubborn bunch in W10 - not sure if anything have changed in W11. These probably were given the highest privileges that made them spawn periodically outside any scheduled tasks settings somehow. Some 3rd-party tools were able to neuter most of them but these were like zombies. Continuously rising up.
Turn off almost all outbound connections in Windows firewall, except the ones your apps actually use. Then it never gets updates unless you install them yourself.
Have you tried using a program that regularly simulates keypresses or mouse movements so the computer thinks the user is still active? The `SCROLL` key for instance can be pressed without causing unwanted side effects, but it stops my Windoze VM from going to sleep.
haha this reminds me of what I did for my speakers. They turn themselves off after about 1 and a half hours of silence. So I added a cuckoo clock chime on the hour. Problem solved.
It's not just Microsoft but they do it in the one of most nastiest ways. I won't count how many times I was checking if my Windows settings weren't randomly reverted to Microsoft-safe-defaults back after updates. And I'm still doing that on iOS and Android today - at least my desktop is free of such gymnastics.
We're at such point in the software history that perhaps this should be regulated. I know that such idea isn't particularly welcomed among hn but what else there left? A blind hope that some wind of changes will do the work? I don't think so.
Truth is that nearly every commercial software and service operates with compromising user privacy by default. It's the same constant nagging up until user surrenders. All of this so someone on the top of the corporate structure could get higher bonus from statistics.
Regularly being presented with a "Set up Windows" after boot forcing you to click "no thanks" on a bunch of Microsoft services is exactly the kind of thing that irritates me. I've politely declined their services about 10 times already, make it stop!
When I get tired of Battlefield 6 I'm likely going full Linux. It is simply not worth putting up with Microsoft Windows for gaming. More and more games seem to work either directly on Linux or at least via things like Proton (courtesy Valve Software).
I got one of those external drive enclosures for an NVMe drive after I upgraded.
The only reason I still have Windows is the little screw securing the drive into the enclosure is in the wind and I can't be bothered to find it (for backup of all of my things so I can delete windows and install linux)
been on linux for a month now, i found the exit and stepped through it. the pain points change from getting shafted by m$ to doing research and learning how to make the system work. at least the second option gives me some agency, and now its all set up i wish i had of switched sooner! ive got to say valve is doing the lords work, along with all the other linux enthusiasts.
as a long time linux user, my advice is : make backups , and don't mess with your system too much. Definitely take OS updates every few months, but don't chase the perfect utopia of UX. at least, buy another computer that you tweak and test on. If you break your main PC, it's very unpleasant and frustrating to fix.
To be frank, I have always thought of "Now I switched to Linux and am happy" to be some kind of meme that appears on every Windows discussion.
Until it happened to me last month. The ads in Windows somehow popped up during important Zoom calls and I couldn't find a way to skip or switch off immediately. In addition to that, my paid version of Minecraft stopped working.
Using Windows home edition has now become rage inducing. I had a lot of patience for incompetence, but the intentional disruption of my work for making a few bucks is really something different.
Nah, not anymore - Linux is usable for ordinary daily tasks for more than 10 years now. And even gaming is in good shape thanks to Proton - that is, unless you have some particular choices which are known to not work.
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible
I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it.
I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me.
Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case.
What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else.
Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process.
Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.
From my point of view, the ideal here is something like pre-OS-X Mac OS, where the OS itself was barely even an OS and more just a substrate just complete enough to run the desktop and third party applications on.
The majority of bells and whistles (which Windows Hello falls under) were not baked into the OS, but instead implemented as system extensions that the user could disable and prevent from loading into memory at will.
This meant that even with the last release of Classic Mac OS (9.2.x), if you disabled all extensions you got a desktop reminiscent of the 1985 System 1 except with color and modern resolution support.
I think it should be more of a goal for desktop OSes to try to emulate this. If a Windows user wants a quiet no-frills Win2000 like experience except with choice exceptions like Hello, they should be able to have that without having to resort to messy hacks that impact stability and undo themselves if you update.
You had Windows ME which was a terrible, buggy OS. I don’t know a single person who didn’t lose all their data on Windows ME.
Shifting personal windows to the Windows NT foundation provided a massive relative boost, but even that took until XP SP2 to reallt settle in, which was followed by the disaster that was Vista.
Then Windows 7 came along and it was genuinely really good. Probably peak Windows.
And then you came to an actual straitjacketing of windows in Windows 8, where the entire desktop Windows ecosystem was relegated to being a single app no better than calculator in the mobile first, completely undeveloped Windows 8 interface.
Windows 10 got us back to sanity, and barring a few minor UI mishaps Windows 11 was originally a nice refinement. This was the longest stretch of Windows being decent as a personal computer. The addition of WSL (well actually it took until WSL2) made Windows competitive with Mac as a developer desktop.
That was nearly a decade of enjoyable and productive Windows. Unfortunately, now we have AI, and Windows is once again being destroyed to serve the its AI master.
The problem is that "to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run" changes when they want it to run something new. They don't care about cloud backup for their data? One hard drive failure, and suddenly they do. And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later.
But there needs to be a way to turn something off that you don't want, and to not get nagged about it repeatedly thereafter. But for that to work, there has to be a clear, easily findable way to turn it back on later.
> And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later.
The answer is: make the OS extremely modular so that the user can have configure whether he wants an absolutely minimalistic OS or something with "batteries included".
They think they know better than what the user wants. If someone who is not a power user Googles "how to turn off updates" they do not want that user to be able to find an option on how to do it, because the user won't understand the dangers. They won't read any warnings. They will follow the steps, turn it off and be part of a botnet soon. If there is ANY possible way to turn it off, someone will make a video and the people who should not find it will find it.
What if you are ACTUALLY someone who knows what they are doing and need to run a perf test over a multiple day period and need it running and uninterrupted? You can't. You are not a part of their target customer base, and at this point their actions have made it clear that they want such users to leave.
But I really wonder, is wanting a "little OS" just a hacker thing? For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS. I don't have a solid take on this yet.
"For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS."
I don't think so. Most people just want to get to their websites or email. They don't care about the OS, and may not even know what an OS is.
The problem is that they may just click "yes" on any popups, to make them go away - which is probably what Microsoft wants. "Yes" track me, "yes" show me ads, etc.
For your average user, Xubuntu or Mint are both great choices: simple, understandable desktops, and otherwise they stay out of the way. I set up Xubuntu for my elderly BIL a few months ago. He's a smart guy, but completely non-technical. One support call since, otherwise he has reported no problems.
I think the challenge is where do you draw the line between the OS and the set of baseline applications it comes with, and then further questions on what is included in that (default?) set or how full featured they are. What is a feature of the OS? That's before considering how users discover and manage other software for activities not covered by whatever is OS provided.
> as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
The perfect OS/Desktop is one you don't even notice, or know is there; it just works. Macos used to be invisible, but then then some ego-driven developer decided to push Apple Glass on to everyone. HEY LOOK HOW COOL I AM!
Although at the rate of LLM improvement, I'm thinking the Next big os, will just be a really good API (gui/sound/graphics...) , you boot to a prompt screen, and then you just tell it what you want to do with the computer and it builds the apps you need from scratch.
Mac OS used to have the benefit of a more native application philosophy. So even though the OS got out of your way, all the applications felt unified and consistent with each other.
No, thank you. LLMs are great for fuzzy things. But there are still a lot of things I do on my computer that are just a few mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts away, achievable in less than 3 seconds. It'd be a disaster if that got removed.
I'm not saying the LLM would run or find apps for you, I was saying the LLM would write the application that you use every day. If you wanted something like Alfred to quickly run applications, you would just tell the LLM to build something like that specific to your use cases and without all the bloat you don't need.
Most application are done after the first or second version, and then companies keep adding features because they need to justify their jobs/product. Wouldn't it be nice to have apps that just do what you need them to do without all the bloat, maybe say, a notepad that doesn't have copilot built into it?
> Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy.
I do believe the OP meant to say that the incentives are orthogonal (i.e., misaligned, or 90deg to each other), and perpendicularly misaligned is a close fit.
Not sure why folks felt you should be downvoted for an heartfelt comment, an explanation is a much better feedback. Downvotes are counterproductive, IMO, if you're trying to have a debate or come to a meeting of minds, so I almost never use them anymore, except for where I detect ill-intentions.
DirectX fragmented the market (it really is a pity they couldn’t work with OpenGL). But I will concede at least the API was nice from a developer perspective.
Internet Explorer did everything it could to fragment the market place with non-standard HTML tags, VBScript, ActiveX and so on and so forth.
Microsoft released their own JVM that was incompatible with Sun Java code and caused headaches for millions of people.
Win95 used shady tactics to break compatibility with Dr-DOS.
MS Chat (or whatever it was called) was the bane of public IRC servers.
Win98 locked people into IE4.
WinMe was a clusterfuck.
MS refused to allow retail stores to sell Windows if the store also sold PCs with competitors OSs. Killing any chance for BeOS and others to
Compete.
Steve Ballmer referred to Linux as “communism”.
I could go on but you get the idea. Microsoft have always been a shitty company.
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
Citation needed. “As little OS as possible” would mean not having a standard clipboard, not having a standard way to install fonts, etc.
Even interpreting that as “all the functionality, but limit applications to utilities for managing the hardware”, I think there people who want that, but I doubt that’s what people, in general, want. Having to choose (and, likely, pay for) a photo manager, a simple word processor, etc. is just too much of a hassle for many.
Also, why would any commercial entity develop such an OS? The margin is in the
The margin is in the exact place where players on the market left it. With macOS being free but paid by expensive hardware, and Windows having practiced hiding in OEM to be popular rather than to bring money, expectations have been set. It's entirely these companies' doing, not an immutable reality that's impossible to overcome.
I will not stop using a demanding tone for my expectations towards companies which can't deliver on them, because they shat their bed years ago and have to now deal with that. The fact that your uncompetitive practices caught up with you does not constitute a reason for me to shed a tear for you and to tap over your shoulder in sympathy.
There is a huge difference between having a text editor included and running it by default on startup to pretend fast launches.
And then there is the whole world of nearly impossible to avoid 'services' you realy do not want but will keep popping up regardless of your wishes ('Telemetry', Onedrive, Copilot, Edge, Recall, Bing adds in the start menu ffs...).
Let us also not forget being forced into a Microsoft account against your wishes ... does it still feel like it's your computer?
"i hate how the current system is, i see some other guys have something that doesnt have these issues, what the other system needs to do is make their system exactly like my current, so that I dont need to spend ANY effort myself"
The normies are what makes Microslop money, though. We need to get the normies onboard in order to fight MS' stranglehold on computing. Gatekeeping isn't the right move here.
I can't delete my comment now, but I think you're right. I don't consider "take it or leave it" to be gatekeeping, but when the world's biggest corporations pose a threat to software liberty, distros becoming more palatable to average users is strictly a good thing.
Not that I'm even involved with distro development anyway. Probably would've been better to let the real OS engineers have the discussion on that one.
> Linux would need to be willing to safe the work millions of people put into memorizing excel, word and windows workflows.
It's a fair point. Organizational and personal inertia is a real thing.
Maybe think of it as going through a divorce and entering a new relationship. You do it mostly because you want to, and sometimes you do it because you have to.
OS as a digital spouse analogy? too far-fetched? think of how much time you spend with it in a day :-)
Executive management at MS must be seeing interesting (migration) numbers on their dashboards, so they've gotten involved in white-washing their reputation without changing business strategy, hence the executive-level manifestos and platitudes coming out as of late.
I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consumers becomes even more important, but the first attempt will be at improving reputation without changing business strategy (ads, data monetization, ai are the future revenue drivers). And only if that fails will the business strategy change.
Posted this originally as a reply to a comment, but I think it should be its own top-level comment.
> They went all in on pretending to care about quality since the MacBook Neo. The numbers they're seeing must be terrifying.
Yeah. Worldwide Neo sales at 5 million units + production raise to 10 million? [1] Even if only 50% of those are US consumers, add to that the number of folks switching over to linux [4]; and suddenly that's not small potatoes, considering there are only about 162 million working folks in the US.
There are only about 50 million folks at 100+ employees, and 16 million at 1000+ employees in private firms. [2]
All these folks switching over? Once they get comfy with non-Windows OSes, they'll ask for those at work. And at the smaller employers - 100 or less employees or even 1000 or less employees, that won't be hard to support, especially if one or two management types make the switch and drive the change.
You have to read a bit between the lines, but an estimate is that 35-50 million have access to Google Workspace at work, and 25-40 million paid Google Workspace users. [3]
And Azure? same number problems, and there seems to be a general discontent with the way things are going with cloud.
Combined with the EU/Worldwide decoupling, suddenly that MS moat isn't looking so deep. It's easy to imagine an inflection point at which MS becomes the minority OS provider, even in the US. The Kodak-ization of Microsoft.
On Nadella's watch, no less. Should we expect a change in leadership soon? Either Nadella deciding to do something different with his time or the Board pushing for a change? They've both got to be seeing the same numbers we are, plus additional insight based on internal metrics.
Those production numbers for the Neo are global and from unnamed supply chain sources. I'm not sure why you brought the US workforce population into the equation as that mixes up scales, nor is there a 1:1 relationship between people and computers (I have 5 x86 systems and 2 M-series laptops in my home between work and personal use).
Lenovo shipped roughly 16m units in Q1 2026 at #1, with Apple shipping roughly 6m in the same timeframe at #4, WW. [0]
Linux is hardly a blip and even the Steam survey #s back that up if you want to be targeted towards a particular audience. It's a lot of noise in forums like this, not so much on the general street. Windows overall gaining ~1.1% with Linux overall declining ~0.8% (and macOS continuing to be poorly represented for obvious reasons) in April.
> Those production numbers for the Neo are global and from unnamed supply chain sources.
Good point. Fixed.
> Linux is hardly a blip and even the Steam survey #s back that up
The IDC link doesn't provide Linux numbers. These links [1][2] do; [2] backs up the numbers you're quoting. The trouble is how to interpret them in context - are the 1% changes per OS on a monthly basis even statistically significant?
The statcounter numbers show desktop share for linux as 5.2% in December, 2.8% in February, 3.1% in March, 2.63% in April. Chrome OS as 4.3%, OS X as 15%, macOS as 8.8%. There's an interesting huge peak for OS X in Oct 2025, Linux in Dec 2025, macOS in Jan '26, with 'unknown' showing a continuous rise to 9.4% in April. Even Windows is showing monthly variations with 58% at the lowest and 65% at peak.
I don't know what to make of those numbers. And how do you separate that from the ebbs and flows to Steam and Statcounter properties?
I think one can make a case for 7 million Linux users in the US, with 18 million if including Chrome OS. Now throw in say 50% of the Neo worldwide buyers, so say 2.5 million (to grow to 5 million at new production levels), and the analysis holds up. What's even more important is the trend - and that seems to be on the upswing, and may not be showing up in these measurements quite yet. And I'm sure MS has internal dashboards showing windows users in some detail.
Linux users are notoriously hard to measure. macOS users are not broken out by country. So that leaves us reading the tea leaves, so to speak, based on sales numbers and estimates on the US breakdown.
Your first point seems flawed: Apple production numbers are to supply markets worldwide. All the other numbers focus on the US only. That alone makes the threat at the OS level evaporate. Lenovo reportedly sells around 50 million units per year, Dell is at 25 million. 5 to 10 million units is tiny.
> Your first point seems flawed: Apple production numbers are to supply markets worldwide.
That's a good point. Still, assuming 50% US sales since US purchasing power is still relatively higher and Apple penetration in RoW is lower, it's not an order-of-magnitude difference, so the analysis is still useful. An additional indicator is that MS themselves are taking high-level executive action, so they're worried about something.
So I moved from Win 11 to Fedora Workstation some months back. I dual-booted back into Windows once or twice to check something, to upgrade my audio receiver with a serial port, that sort of stuff.
Everyone talks about execs monitoring metrics. What sort of metric would I have registered as? You see a desktop that's on 24/7 suddenly going offline. There's no way these people find out indirectly that I'm now using Linux on the same hardware. What are they going to do, somehow correlate my user agent string when I hit one of their websites or SSO endpoints? I mean, it's possible but I am wondering how much of this topic is wish fulfillment fantasy.
Monthly average user. Uptime for Win 11. Uptime not counting screensaver. Uptime for non-enterprise consumer. If you were a Win 11 enterprise user, then Uptime for enterprise users. Unique hardware indicators - number of distinct PCs in Win 11 ecosystem, separated from new activations. And I'm sure a few others that I haven't thought of.
Declining stats on these measures indicate a problem somewhere in the Win 11 ecosystem. Combine with competitor indicators like sales, and other Win ecosystem OSes.
A single person switching probably doesn't do much to move the indicators. But as a collective?
They'll notice if no Windows machines phone home from your IP address anymore. It doesn't matter so much what you switched to, more that you're no longer giving Microsoft those sweet, sweet KPIs
If a decent number of people migrate away, it would definitely show up in aggregate: Windows Update traffic, for example. Or sales of Windows-specific software/subscriptions. It doesn't require correlated tracking at an individual customer level to see the broader trend.
Losing market share to ChromeOS and Apple has to be the most significant and obvious hit. The Steam Deck and second generation Steam Machines are also likely to nibble away at the edges.
I am not a Mac person, I actually hate a lot of how they operate. Yet, if a tech-illiterate friend were looking for advice, I would likely steer them towards those computer appliances so as to avoid Microsoft's nonsense.
> We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Great! We've progressed back to Windows XP of 22 years ago.
Great, this is actual progress. Now it would be amazing if "Update and Shut Down" would actually update and shut down, instead of doing so like 50% of the time with the other 50% just updating and restarting with an actual shut down. (This is on various very diverse machines so I'm rather sure is common, and not just an interaction with a particular machine).
It's baffling that a company like MS can leave this kind of obvious problems lingering for months.
Great to know. I would say that it happened to me more recently but it may have been in machines that had been unused for some months and ran an old version.
According to the link, it "only" took them 5 years to solve the bug. Better late than ever though, I guess :)
This behaviour really trumped me when I was working on a friends Windows-11 PC on the new year. My Family Big-Home PC (> a decade old) still has Win-10 since it cannot upgrade, so I was confused at WTF was happening. I could not believe Microsoft had actually broken this.
It only shows "Update and shut down" (which is a lie as it still will reboot) or "Update and reboot.
I think all this was a response to severely outdated Windows machines being infected with worms and what not. Microsoft got bad press for this and went (way) overboard with trying to force users to install updates as soon as released.
I wonder whether it has to do with the actual installation being in progress in the background. There is probably a time window in some updates where an interruption leaves the OS in a bad state.
That doesn't justify it because the user should still be able to decide when to initiate it. People are ok with not interrupting the update if they get to choose when it starts.
It fascinates me to speculate about who this is for. At least among people I've talked to, the ones who still want windows (instead of the obvious alternatives) cite wanting things to "just work", often claiming that they "don't want making the computer work to become a second job" or similar. I personally don't think these preferences reflect the reality of how much effort using e.g. a linux distro is in this day and age, to be clear, but these are the beliefs I encounter. Are there really people who want to deal with providing feedback and stress testing an operating system and its various software components and features, but doing this for a corporation that sets the terms of their transparency efforts and ultimately does this for profit and will still grab the reins and exert control against their users' will when they feel like it?
Right, but it's hard not to claim those people would likely get more out of an OS they could customize more, and also that it's considerably more exploitative of those people across the divide of corporate product versus community project
Sometimes it’s just about using the path of least resistance. I’ve also contributed to Apple Maps’ and Google Maps’ data, even though I’d prefer to exclusively contribute to OSM and other open platforms instead. But, it was just easier to go through a quick form in the (Apple|Google) Maps app, because that’s where I was at that point in time. Maybe the excuse is laziness and/or force of habit?
Edit: I also imagine the reach of the mainstream platforms to be much higher (e.g. Windows vs. Linux or Google Maps user reviews vs. <is there even an alternative?>).
First of all, in many countries outside of EU/US it's just not possible to buy laptop without preinstalled Windows 11 (except Apple). For example, even if a model supports Linux in the US as many Lenovo Thinkpads do, in Singapore it's just not sold without Windows.
Second, Microsoft has broken sleep with pushing S0 sleep in UEFI. Bettery life is shit now, and hibernate is disabled by default in most OS. Also, hibernate in Linux is a complete disaster comparing to windows one (windows presaves memory to disk continuously, while in linux you have to wait until the whole ram (+ vram, if gpu) is saved/restored). It takes time. Sleep s3 is needed, but Microsoft killed it. So linux is really a bad choice for laptop. But Windows 11 is much worse, especially if you don't really like ads.
I don't really understand the rationale behind disabling S3 sleep...
Was it simply that getting every device and driver to properly support it was hard, so the easiest option was to remove it and have the machine always powered up?
> in many countries outside of EU/US it's just not possible to buy laptop without preinstalled Windows 11
Wipe and install something else. Previously you would just have been eating the OS license cost paid, and the benefit was taking control and supporting the free-as-in-freedom ecosystem.
But now the additional benefits are that you'll be preventing them from monetizing your data on an ongoing basis, denying data for training ai, and enhancing your privacy, so it's economically justifiable too.
ACPI defines power state of power-saving capable offbrand fake IBM computers(among other things, and also the "fake IBM" part is almost completely moot at this point).
ACPI power state S0 is everything running. S1 pauses CPU and CPU I/O bus. S2 puts CPU to reset. S3 cuts power to CPU. S4 cuts off everything(not actual power off). S5 cuts off everything(actual power off).
S3 and S4 are often referred to as Sleep and Hibernation. In Sleep, RAM contents are kept as-is, and sleep handling code just restore CPU internal states that gets lost. In Hibernation, OS usually dump RAM contents to disk, and write back to RAM upon bootup - S4 and S5 aren't always clearly separated and both Windows and Linux tend to go through standard boot processes, then do the state resume using RAM dump they find on disk.
For SOME reason, Microsoft forced laptop vendors to quit supporting S3 in favor of their custom "S0iX" state, which is more or less just machine running at full power, which can be extremely wasteful as far as sleep state goes.
The official explanation for this pressuring is that everybody want notification and this is the only way Windows could possibly handle notifications. A lot are skeptical about that.
The bit we all care about: S3 is sleep mode proper. Most everything is physically powered off, only enough is kept on to keep contents of RAM alive.
S0 is.. just on. The PC is completely powered up. Microsoft has done this so that they can force your computer to wake itself up to install updates you don't want. Literally you aren't allowed to turn off your computer because some middle manager needs to see update stats go up. If your computer happens to be in a bag and cooks itself to death, well that's your problem. Fuck you for trying to keep Microsoft's statistics down.
> hibernate in Linux is a complete disaster comparing to windows one
Part of this is that hibernation can't be cancelled mid way, which is dumb. Ideally a computer is like a light switch - you can turn it on and off instantly whenever. To get closer to that, if you turn it off, but then immediately on again, the hibernation should be cancelled and return you to your desktop.
Also, the whole idea of a 'hibernation image' which is read from disk in one huge 10+ second read is best for hard drives. Now that everyone uses SSD, it should all be demand-paged in.
I love macOS for a "just working" OS but I wouldn't think people spending a lot of time using Office would prefer the Web versions. They are just (by definition) sluggish, like most web apps are. Use the native apps, whether it's on Windows or Mac.
> cite wanting things to "just work", often claiming that they "don't want making the computer work to become a second job"
I feel this way, yet I've used Linux on the desktop for a decade before, even selecting my hardware for compatibility. Yet even when using "stable" distros like Ubuntu, it did require maintenance regularly. With more hyped distros like Arch it was constant. Sure I was always able to fix it, but I had to do it.
I installed Windows back when I started having kids. I just don't have the time and mental space anymore to dedicate to fixing the OS regularly. I need to be able to let updates happen and not wonder whether I need to have 20 minutes free afterwards to fix something.
I used to daily drive Windows 10 for many months before official release. It was great. I wish I could stay on development builds that still had Windows 7 style Start menu.
Sadly now I use Windows 11 just because manufacturer of my laptop didn't bother to ensure that their sound driver worked corrctly on Windows 10.
My mouse lags for seconds when gpu is busy, even with something as trivial as alt-tabbing from a game.
Windows 11 is what happens when no one speaks up at product team meetings. People nod their heads, get on with the build and the marketing team decides they want another 40 hooks into customer data for monetization.
Windows 11 today is a spectacular example of customer disrespect and disregard. MS believes it can manage with enterprise customer revenue alone. Well, best of luck with that, even enterprises are getting fed up.
Windows is what happens when there are too many cooks in the kitchen, without a single authority figure, ultimately responsible for maintaining the OS (and only the OS), guarding against and saying no to all attempts to leech the user base.
I can name features, but everything I can think of are technical features rather than obvious surface level stuff: DX12, better support for SSDs (Windows 7 doesn't natively support TRIM), HDR (I guess, but it still seems broken to me). And none of these are things that couldn't be implemented in Windows 7. The UI has nothing to do with these things, and there's no reason we couldn't have them without the trouble Windows 10/11, other than the fact that MS doesn't want to do things that way.
This was true at least as of 2023-25 when last checked, having been super annoyed by HDR just looking flat out wrong on my PC vs my Mac (which is probably the only OS that gets everything right given their large audience of Creative/visual professionals and mobile experience).
On Windows 11, when you reconnect to a monitor or set of monitors that you've connected to before, it will automatically return your open windows to the layout across those monitors that you had when you last disconnected (assuming those windows are still open).
This is extremely nice and saves me time on a literally (not figuratively) daily basis, to the point that I generally forget that it hasn't always worked that way.
I wish this worked! I have to go to the office on my hybrid schedule. When I switch between home and office, Windows is "smart" enough to keep the windows on the correct window in the task bar while generally placing the windows on the opposite window where I want it (and literally opposite where it is on the task bar!) It's so annoying and I dread the days I'm switching between office and home for this reason, as I have to drag each window to the opposing window before things are back to how I want them. It would be less bad the old way, where they were just stupidly thrown on the "primary" monitor and I only had to drag half of them over.
"Well, they turned the entire OS into a tracking, sales and ad/propaganda delivery service, but they managed to make a single feature non-dumb, so guess we're even."
(propaganda - Windows 11 default widgets are "offering" a lot of russian-biased media, because Microsoft is too dumb to recognize that and they take any news source - and russian connected outlets are happy to use this delivery vector that most gullible people leave turned on)
I don't think that any of the news-oriented default Windows application since W8 had an option to provide a custom RSS channel. It was always a default pool of sources they were bringing.
For my dual monitors, they have a conflict with this feature where they do not detect signal and then switch inputs and eventually power down. Then windows sees a different config and switches again causing an endless spiral. I have to turn both monitors on to the correct input while plugging in the laptop to the dock. I wish there was a way to save specific monitor setups and manually toggle them.
Yet when I switch between home and work I have to fully restart my laptop about half the time in order for it to even detect the monitors. I also find this feature has an issue with certain programs (Obsidian in particular) where it opens the window almost off screen.
Even aside from the malevolence, Windows is rotten from the thirty-year old metaphor that it started with: windows themselves. The job of positioning and resizing applications is a confusing mix of responsibility between the user and the system.
Once you've switched to tiled window managers, examples like these sound like Stockholm Syndrome.
I hate tiling window managers. After I start a program, I move and resize its window to the perfect position, and it stays there for weeks. I don't ever want it to be moved or resized automatically, which is what tiling window managers do by default.
I will offer that you can resize/move/float in most tiling managers. Remembering your modifications is usually possible too. It's the default behavior that separates the experience.
I can't see a practical world where the OS doesn't need to take control of window positioning in certain situations. As a core example, there is full screen. Minimize is another, but that doesn't have a clean analogue in the tiled universe.
There's a natural strong reaction folks have to window managers, because it forces you to mentally remap at such a foundational level.
I prefer tiled managers because the user offloads most responsibility. Open something and by default it uses as much space as is available. If you have a special need, you can float or resize, but the vast majority of cases it makes the right call.
At heart, it's offloading cognitive load. They're more predictable and require less faffing around.
DirectX 12, better SSD support, HDR, restoring window layout when reconnecting monitors, WPA3, DNS over HTTPS, WSL2, Windows Sandbox, per monitor DPI scaling, QUIC, dark mode/tabs/previous session/better encoding in Notepad, Windows Terminal.
All these sound really nice to be honest. The things I want my OS to get.
The only problem is: these are the improvements what this OS got in the last 20 years, not last year. Microsoft is a $3T company.
Wine is more like emulating Windows API behavior on Linux, while WSL is Microsoft throwing their hands in the air and saying "Lets just VM Linux wholesale".
Both aim to avoid Windows, neither replace Linux but instead tries to move more to Linux.
>Both aim to avoid Windows, neither replace Linux but instead tries to move more to Linux.
I don't agree: WSL is an attempt to use programs developed for Linux in Windows. It is clearly for people who want to use Linux programs but don't want the headache of setting up Linux or dual booting.
> WSL is an attempt to use programs developed for Linux in Windows.
Then I'd think it be available as a "right-click > Launch Linux Program" or something like that, like WSL1, rather than the VM approach WSL2 takes which gives you entire environment. Even Microsoft themselves market WSL like that:
I agree with your last part though, it's for people who want to use Linux without the headache of dual-booting or managing their own VMs, so they use predefined packaged VMs ala WSL instead.
I guess I was more contesting that WSL is for people to get away from Windows, when it is actually the other way around; it reduces the friction between tools developed to only work on Linux and Windows users, so that the Windows user can stay using just Windows. Back when I used Windows, this was always a point of contention for installing most dev related apps, and trying to use MinGW was such a pain (WSL was broken on my computer then due to Hyper-V being BIOS disabled). I used Linux now on my main computer, but I recently tried WSL on a family member's computer and I can see how if you just do all dev work in WSL, you would never have to go through the process of migrating to an entirely new OS and still get all of the benefits.
If I run WSL it’s because I try to avoid Linux - but I want to run something that needs a Linux environment. I think the argument about what’s avoiding what is pretty strange.
WSL1 seemed great, until it wasn't. Then WSL2 came along, which is just a VM and works identical to VirtualBox et al. Still huge hassle to deal with various things that get confused when you run it in a "Linux-but-not-really-but-also-Windows" environment.
Better to just go straight to what you actually want, which seems to be a proper Linux distribution, everything just works as expected then.
I used to run all three major OS' where I saw no real difference in me using it for the apps etc I needed. As I leaned more heavily on the development side, linux kind of prevailed. Windows 8.1 and Yosemite were the last of the other two I've used for real. Never had to look back to other two since, be it for work, games or whatever.
Even occasional need for Adobe things stopped. I would still really like to see Adobe suite on linux, but if they don't want my money that's cool too I guess. I suspect the software tools people use for work is what's holding them back mostly, like Altium, CADs etc. Funnily enough, Microsoft office is just fine without OS native version most of the time.
This may be unpopular, but they made three legitimately GOOD changes to Notepad, before they went absolutely batshit.
- Dark mode
- Tabs
- "Continue previous session" (restore after restart)
But they also made a HUGE regression which isn't talked about enough:
- Previously, if you delete the underlying file, Notepad didn't "notice." Meaning you could Save to recreate it. The file existed in an ephemeral state, as long as the Notepad window remained open. Right now, if you delete the underlying file, Notepad notices immediately, errors out, and closes that tab -- content gone.
VSCode handles this correctly, it puts a line through the filename in the tab (and red-font), but doesn't close the tab on you suddenly. Ephemeral state retained.
In my ideal world Notepad needs exactly ONE new feature:
- Right Click Tab: "Copy Path."
Then just REMOVE: Spell Checker, Formatting, CoPilot, Markdown(!), and Autocorrect. Completely inappropriate functionality for Notepad, and the Vibecoded Markdown implementation already added a security vulnerability(!) to freaking Notepad. Branch off into a product called "Wordpad" and then create all of that garbage in there.
Notepad also understands line endings and text encodings now, instead of always writing as CRLF UTF-16. That eliminates a whole class of “save file in notepad, corrupting it” trouble.
Yeah, I thought it was an odd couple of recommendations. Alacritty is an awesome terminal emulator that'll run on Windows (although I'd say Windows Terminal is still pretty close to decent)
They talk about improving memory footprint and performance, but simply removing (or making optional) the massive amount of cruft and telemetry in a default Windows 11 install would go miles.
Installing Tiny11 and then running a debloat over its corpse results in a much faster and less memory hungry default clean install.
> They talk about improving memory footprint and performance, but simply removing (or making optional) the massive amount of cruft and telemetry in a default Windows 11 install would go miles.
Executive management at MS must be seeing interesting (migration) numbers on their dashboards, so they've gotten involved in white-washing their reputation without changing business strategy, hence the executive-level manifestos and platitudes coming out as of late.
I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consumers becomes even more important, but the first attempt will be at improving reputation without changing business strategy (ads, data monetization, ai are the future revenue drivers). And only if that fails will the business strategy change.
Cruft can be removed yes but the telemetry is literally how they measure quality. Their metrics of whether it’s good or not is the status of telemetry on a given device set and figuring out root cause. So they can’t easily roll back the telemetry without a massive rethink in their quality strategy
Along with this, which is how nearly every major piece of software works today, removing telemetry likely wouldn't have a measurable impact on performance or memory usage. Those aren't heavy subsystems.
My mental model remains that the Windows team is mostly governed by designers on Macs who want to see a user-visible change to get their promo and never use Windows.
There's no amount of progress that will make me go back to Windows.
1. Microsoft accounts. No.
2. Ads in my OS. No.
3. Slow copying of files. No.
4. A maddening mix of UI/UX paradigms and implementations. No.
5. AI deeply embedded in my OS. No.
Not even the MBA types would mess things up this bad, it feels like Microslop is now full of programmers that make something and just ship it, no thought or any brain cells involved.
> it feels like Microslop is now full of programmers that make something and just ship it
I just don't see that happening in an Agile (the tech software dev term) workplace - it's got to be clueless Product Managers driving this. And even those folks have to answer to their management.
Tying it back to what's happening at the broader business level over the past few months - see this comment of mine [1] - there's got to be some degree of chaos at the business strategy level, and that's showing up at our consumer level.
> The theme is simple: fewer disruptions, more clarity, more control. This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates, and gives you more flexibility to time updates around your schedule. We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Finally, like seriously, so many times I have to "shutdown" (aka restart) for an update before going to bed. I don't want to have to babysit my desktop computer when I want to finish up for the night.
> realign the experiences to those that provide the most value to users
Aside from the fact that nobody actually takes what Microsoft says seriously (they are professional bullshitters [with full time PR firms perfecting their bullshit] and have been for 30 years), it's funny that even this line can be reasonably interpreted as pushing more blatant nonsense onto consumers as long as it's what C-suite types think they should be paying for.
Notice that what provides the most value to users is not at all necessarily the same thing as'what our users want'. And it isn't even clear that Microsoft is thinking of consumer users here as opposed to corporate users and corporate IT departments, which are in most cases these days their actually direct customers. Most home user consumers don't pay for Windows directly.
>We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Multiple times I've wanted to shutdown my laptop so I can go home and Windows says no, sit here for 5 minutes.
I don't trust sleep mode to not keep running and overheat, so I wait.
Macbooks with 1TB drives are getting cheaper every day. Music production on Linux isn't really practical. A lot of this stuff barely runs on Windows/OSX.
Competition is great. But this is about the Mac Neo( and left over M4 Macs crashing in price ). Desktop Linux is still a challenge.
I consider myself an advanced Linux user, and it still took me an hour this morning to figure out how to get a VPN to work on Open Suse.
> I don't trust sleep mode to not keep running and overheat, so I wait.
People have been expressing their dissatisfaction at Windows Updates strategy for so long - Modern Standby was so badly implemented it basically cooked laptops in bags and while leaving users wondering what was happening. I had to reflow a laptop because of it.
> Macbooks with 1TB drives are getting cheaper every day.
Also high-speed external storage is very accessible now - so having large built in storage for your DAW isn't really necessary. The 1 USB 3 port on the MacBook Neo is more than fast enough for this.
> Music production on Linux isn't really practical.
I would somewhat disagree with this. Linux has much better low-latency, multi application audio support than Windows & Mac now (via JACK) and some pretty incredible native DAWs like Bitwig - so the moat certainly isn't as large as it used to be. I would say it's practical if your workflow doesn't require features of Mac/Windows or tools specific to those platforms.
As impractical as it would be for normal users - even Ableton works pretty well under WINE.
> Competition is great. But this is about the Mac Neo( and left over M4 Macs crashing in price ). Desktop Linux is still a challenge.
I think between this and they've maybe had a bit of a scare from Valve and SteamOS - because that's historically been one of their other big moats. They kicked off a similar initiative to make Windows nicer for gamers back in December.
I agree that desktop Linux is still a challenge - it's better than it used to be and you can get away without a terminal now if you're just doing basic Internet/Office tasks. In a lot of places the UX can get pretty gnarly.
A lot of VSTs really don't work well with Wine. I also really just don't want to fight with wine. I haven't had a good experience with it outside of gaming via Steam.
I hate external drives with a passion. Unless the computer itself is stationary, like a Mac Mini.
My current setup is a 400$ laptop plus a 2 TB I brought for about 100$.
It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.
If I move on from this, it's straight to a 1TB Macbook. You have a degree of assurance things will work on a Mac.
On Windows and Linux no one knows why your audio isn't working.
With Apple ONE company is responsible.
Most people never install an OS. So unless valve or someone comes out with a $400 Linux book, Linux is going to remain a niche OS.
However, I do believe Linux can grant a lot of "obsolete" Windows laptops a second life. I'd love to donate to a charity that rehabs old Windows laptops with Linux.
For light programming, and email, a 100$ used laptop off eBay is probably enough. At 250$ I've seen a lot of very capable machines.
I was at Microsoft for that particular transition but it is still wild to me that a post about improving quality starts with details about windows insiders.
By changing two settings in Windows, you can fix the worst of it.
Using a local group policy, you can change when "Preview builds and Feature updates" and "Quality Updates" become available in Windows Update.
By delaying those with 30 or 60 days, you will never have preview updates applied to your system, and feature and quality updates will have at least 1 or 2 months' worth of fixes before you get them.
start > run > gpedit.msc > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Manage updates offered from Windows Update >
1) Enable "Select when preview builds and feature updates are received". Set days to 60
2) Enable "Select when quality updates are received". Set days to 30 (max value)
When people cricitize Linux there's always people responding "it's simple really, just run this super long command and do this and that".. looks like the same thing to me.
I hated that Linux has all these commands you had to go through, then I installed Windows 11 and tutorials were telling me run all these commands to fix it. I figure I'd just use Linux at that point.
> I hated that Linux has all these commands you had to go through
Was this still your experience though? I am using Fedora on GNOME and I rarely have to use the terminal. I like to use it but if you don't want to, you don't have to. There is a graphical installer, settings panel, software center, file manager, disk utility software, etc.
Similarly, people love to talk up MacOS while paying $30 per tool to fix basic issues.
Every OS is utterly terrible right now. Linux is free at least and the work Valve has put into it has dramatically improved the normal person experience.
At first they ridicule people with general disrespect, privacy violations and ads in Start Menu, then they expect the same people to treat them seriously. That's a cognitive dissonance right there, and now they have to live with it. Psychotherapy may help.
Took the beta for a quick spin and... wow, the speed is truly astonishing!
Windows doesn't feel slow because the kernel or the filesystem is inherently "that" slow, it feels like a sloth overdosing on heroin because nobody at Microsoft gives the slightest crap about making it even a tiny bit faster.
It's staggering how the instant you double-click a file in File Pilot you're... back in the tar pit. (The Windows image preview app just spins... and spins... while it does God-knows-what with my CPUs.)
The contrast of going from one to the other makes the quality difference glaringly obvious.
I'm sure it did, but that app looks like a Win XP-era app (not even Win7). FilePilot is fast, looks good & feels modern (support a command palette, fuzzy search, etc). The only downside is that it runs on the GPU and so running it inside a VM is a bit of a hassle.
Why the hell would I want a file manager to be run on the GPU. it's supposed to be light on requirements and run on a potato, it's a file manager ffs not a 3rd person shooter.
Lets be real, Microsoft is incentivised to treat their users as products so they’ll constantly test the limits of the user’s patience. Okay, they found a limit, now they’ll back off a little and try a different direction for a while until they run into another limit.
Abandon windows, and abandon any software that runs only on windows. It’s the only way out.
With Windows Update what I really want is control over reboot. Don't automatically reboot, instead let me save documents, close applications and reboot manually. "Pausing" updates doesn't do that, and could be dangerous as urgent security updates are delayed.
With AI features, the most annoying thing has to be the Copilot key on my laptop keyboard. If you accidentally hit it it opens a Copilot window, interrupting your typing. The Settings app for this key only allow you to specify whether it activates search or copilot, it doesn't let you turn it off. There are other workarounds like installing an app from the Store, but all those workarounds come with unwanted excess baggage.
What should be also bring back is the selective choice for installing updates. That would allow users again avoiding patches which have been confirmed as dangerous to the system stability.
> The Settings app for this key only allow you to specify whether it activates search or copilot, it doesn't let you turn it off.
That's because it's not your computer, it is Microsoft's ;-)
Seriously, though, there will be quirks like with almost any OS. OS devs make choices that abstract some of the complexity in order to make it useful for a broad audience.
With Linux or the BSDs, you have the freedom to take it to any level of detail or customization that you wish to, with all that entails being outside of an externally maintained OS. Ask me how I know :-)
Not a Windows user, have never been (since Windows 3.11). But if I were, I would think this is just PR unless they changed some fundamentals, like bringing back local user support without jumping through five hoops.
Microsoft degrading user experience plus lower price on Mac computers it maybe their downfall. E.g., removing local accounts, unwanted advertising, arbitrary decisions (forced TPM requirement), etc.
I have a feeling that my fat ass switching over to Linux is going to outrun their attempt to roll back decades of accumulated tech debt, institutional incompetence and burned bridges.
I feel like your sentiment mirrors my thoughts exactly on this.
Since this isn't the Reddit comment section (I hear people here prefer a bit more elaboration and argumentative nuance with their $BEVERAGE), I feel compelled to add some of my own personal experience.
I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity. Copilot, for example, is just another gadget Microsoft simply cannot not put in. In '95 is was Clippy, but the deliveries never stop, and frankly I feel like an old man that finally decided to kick a bad habit because I truly see now all the empty talk from Microsoft I've heard countless amount of times before, wrapped in different packaging, and that Windows is like it is _by design_ and that it's bad for my health (in a different way than Linux can ever be, I feel).
Ever since Windows '95 the addition of slop has been accelerating, admittedly Microsoft _were_ much different then, but it's the _curve_ I am referring to, not that they were always _as bad_. Frankly, the "churn" is insane now, I think it's one or the other adage I can't recall where "available operating system" fills "available resources" and Microsoft are there to prove it.
The problem is also they are experimenting on their users to no end. I don't mind being part of the "user experiment" for "user experience" but how many decades do they need to arrive at the same fundamental conclusions -- that people prefer less bloat, and fewer interruptions in their face? Occam's Razor tells me it's rather that Microsoft is pretending to care but their agenda is their own alone (surprise).
Just the other day I had to spend 2 hours trying to "fix" some very-background OneDrive update because I suppose I am sucker enough to use OneDrive -- one of the least liked of Microsoft products I've had the misfortune to use -- with Windows using my laptop as a BitCoin farm, wasting cycles in some infinite loop produced by what evokes comparisons to those monkeys with typewriters. Half a dozen Powershell commands and 3-4 reboots later the `wsappx.exe` process finally was healthy enough to idle. These things happen constantly to people everywhere and there's little Microsoft can or wants to do anything about. It's a cost they're willing their users to pay.
To stop rambling, one of these days -- summer vacation perhaps -- I will remove the blasted thing finally (after decades of using both Windows and Linux) and grit my teeth through Linux, which I have tried avoiding only because I am on a Thinkpad and there's always another tweak that's needed for the whole thing to work as well as Windows does on a _good_ day. To be clear, I prefer Linux by and large, it's just that I want to avoid spending weekends configuring sleep, power states, Trackpoint, full-disk encryption, the docking station, etc.
The fact I am going to do it anyway, just to rid myself of the Windows experience that's just been getting worse and worse, says it all really.
You're probably correct. Windows can be fixed, but it's stuck in the hands of MS who never will, so true ideas on how to fix it are little more than intellectual exercises.
> I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity.
I'm not so sure that Windows is unfixable. It could probably be fixed, but doing that would require rebuilding every burned bridge back to its old standard, and probably then some, and that's something the relevant people aren't going to agree to do (since they were the ones who burned them).
Mandatory updates? Now they aren't any more.
Onedrive stole your files and deleted them? Now Onedrive is enabled/disabled on first setup.
Shitty start menu? Now you can pick which one you want, all the way back to the Windows 7 one.
Shitty right click menu? Now the old one is back.
All AI? Now there's a toggle on install to enable/disable it all.
Now settings menu sucks? Here's the old control panel back as standard.
Telemetry? How about no?
If MS did all of these things (and probably more), their trust level would rise skyhigh, since they'd be doing tangible things to fix the pain points we've all talked about. Now they've hit one point out of probably 50+, and many of the remaining ones are much harder to fix than updates being forced.
> Onedrive stole your files and deleted them? Now Onedrive is enabled/disabled on first setup.
That's the one that really shocked me, and I haven't even experienced it for myself. I'm not normally that prone to excessive hyperbole, but that's about the most terrible thing I could ever conceive of an OS doing. All of the other stuff is a little annoying, but I could deal. But how in the hell could it ever be considered acceptable by anyone for your own OS to delete your files and move them to OneDrive or any other cloud service automatically? It's almost like ransomware, but the ransomware people will at least give you your files back for one flat payment. And the ransomware people at least know they're doing something nasty, and didn't try to integrate it as a default operating system feature. I guess they have better ethics than Microsoft!
It's just so obviously wrong, it's hard to even believe that it's a real thing. I don't think I could ever install an OS that even had a feature to do that at all, even if I could maybe temporarily turn it off with some scripts downloaded off the internet.
someone tries to scam, steal, beat you up. they then make efforts to stop doing that, and their trust would rise skyhigh? what does someone have to do to earn that kind of loyalty? would you apply this to anything else?
If they've given all the money back that they've scammed and otherwise made all the people they've hurt whole again, and are then continuing to provide a service people find use in, then yes. I'd probably need some time to be convinced that that's what's happened, and that they've truly changed. MS obviously isn't there, but there are theoretical worlds where this can happen.
Obviously, Microsoft can't give people back their deleted Onedrive files, but they can make good on a promise that it will never happen again (given that their efforts are founded in reality and not marketing speak), and hide behind a shield of 'that wasn't our intention'. Same goes with most other things you could complain about Windows.
If you have no reason to believe that Windows will screw you over, since MS has course-corrected on all major points of contention, then why not stick around? (The answer is that MS may change course again, but for those who haven't jumped ship, I'm sure this will provide good enough reason to stick around. It's not like the ship isn't providing them any utility. They've stuck around this long for a reason.)
If this is what the Windows considers 'quality updates' after 2 months, then Windows is in really rough shape.
Rebranding Copilot in Notepad is the kind of thing I expect from a modern day Microsoft, where they can't possibly understand what people mean when they say the word 'no thank you'. The actual change here should be a global toggle somewhere to just turn it off, forever, with no arguments from the OS. But of course we can't have that because engagement for a product no one wants might fall off.
I so, so badly wish this team would pull their head out of their ass, but if this is what their idea of improvement is, then I guess I might be done with Windows when I can't use W10 any more.
I know it’s intentional to build rapport but seeing the wording and language from windows on this stuff is insane considering their tenure and dominance and attitude of the last 30 years.
I don’t mean this in thee sense you should warm to them I mean it as in they’re on the back foot.
Microsoft is trying to sell things like extended servicing agreements. They purposefully make Windows worse so they can sell you solutions to fix it. They purposefully keep it insecure so you need their updates. It’s about taking the customers hostage.
There are two mentions of "reliab[ility]" (I searched for the first five letters to be sure I got other morphological forms of the word). It appears twice: once near the top, as a general goal, and once at the bottom, as part of the general goal. Nothing in between, like saying "we'll be using {less AI | more AI debugging | more human screening | magic wands | secret sauce} in an effort to improve reliability". So at least as far as this post goes, hardly even lip service. Given the number of botched updates reported earlier this year, that's astonishing.
My first hand experience with Windows vs Linux this month:
A friend of mine recently bought a very expensive laptop to do some gaming. I helped him set it up and god that was a horrible experience. For example, we could not get rid of LinkedIn and other crap Microsoft wanted to force on him. Disabling copilot and removing Office required registry surgery. And the damn fans were always running because of some unknown activity in the background, maybe Microsoft is moving into bitcoin mining business?
He eventually got fed up, installed Ubuntu 26.04 as an experiment and a week later still seems to enjoy the experience. Games run fine on steam and his laptop finally feels like his own.
Most surprisingly, Linux worked fine out of the box. Windows 11 on the other hand needed a bunch of PowerShell and registry hacks to be copy pasted from various sources before it was even remotely usable. It's funny how it felt as if Windows was the OS for nerds with too much free time on their hands while Ubuntu was created for ordinary people. And my god, Ubuntu feels so much more fluid on the same hardware. The difference is *huge*.
But it's the kind of things you'd expect Windows to take care of automatically, or in the worst case, to prompt the users to install on first boot, especially if Linux (with overall less driver support from manufacturers).
And with a preinstalled Windows (tuned to the laptop) this behavior should not be observed at all.
I have never personally owned one, but I have been told that some Alienware and similar flavored devices have had issues like this when you closed their bespoke Alienware management software because it was the thing driving the fan controls.
I got a new computer a couple weeks ago, with a 5070, and installed ubuntu on it and it was incredibly slow. I looked online and found some claim that 24.04 has some incompatability with nvidia, tried installing a bunch of different driver versions and nothing helped, tried turning everything off in gnome tweaks and still slow, tried installing 26.04 and 22.04 but the installer hangs forever in both, tried linux mint 24.04 still slow, gave up and installed windows with WSL :/
I'm running Ubuntu on a 9950x3d and 5090 and it is not slow. Games in Steam with Proton are buttery smooth.
One hiccup was I had to disable variable refresh rate because moving the cursor didn't "count" as a reason to update the screen, so moving the cursor on its own (rather than e.g. moving a window) looked choppy.
But a choppy mouse cursor isn't "slow".
Tip: if you have a performance problem, run Claude Code (or an AI agent of your choice) and ask it to investigate.
Claude Code would probably attach a profiler and take a peek under the hood. Agents are making sysadmin and system introspection way more accessible, and the tools, unlike Windows, are generally command-line, easy for an agent to automate.
Mac chose another path. You buy a pc and OS and the same vendor makes both. You can’t choose but at least you also never need to wonder whether your laptop and OS work together.
Microsoft took a more difficult path. They have close contact with OEMs, run certification programs etc. A massive apparatus to make it somewhat likely that hardware will ”just work”.
Both of these are valid models. I’d be happy to use either. I’m not very keen on doing this work myself though. I can buy a PC with Ubuntu but then it’s still hit and miss if I buy something new for it. There is no canonical store selling canonical gear like the Apple Store
Came here to say that. I've recently tried linux mint and it just works. You don't have to use the terminal if you don't want to, but i do enjoy using it. It's a breath of fresh air after windows. I'm now waiting for the year of the linux desktop. Though i'm not holding my breath. The average person will carry on using their system until it grinds to a halt under all the crap they've installed on it, and then complain their computer is too old.
This is a choice for you! I'm a pretty heavy PC gamer and whilst I've run Linux since I was in college (UK college, not US) I've always had a Windows install for gaming.
A few years ago, I finally decided I'd had it with Windows and their crap and uninstalled it. If I game doesn't run on Linux, I don't play it. Simple as that.
I'm lucky in that a majority of games I play run fine on Linux, the only real game I'd love to play is Vermintide 2. My friends also run a mix of Linux and Windows and so we're fairly fine skipping games as a group if we can't play on Linux.
That is a problem of any operating system switch, you need to figure out what software is compatible or weather there are suitable replacements. It's the same even if you switch between iOS and Android.
That said, Linux used to be a tough cookie because there were so little support for software people wanted to run and the alternatives didn't do it any favours, plus the barrage of problems you used to get installing it on a random machine was discouraging, at best. Nowadays your chances of running it well on a random machine is pretty damn good and getting the software you need is lot more feasible. But don't go YOLOing a linux install, see if meets your use cases. There is nothing wrong with waiting until it's good enough.
I'm just down to Creative Cloud now. It's the only thing I still need Windows for. Everything else runs on Linux or there is a suitable alternative. So I've got several Debian machines running at home and at work, and one Windows machine that I boot only for photo editing.
The main problem with Windows is that it's half baked with "let's see what sticks" strategy. It feels like a constant beta, not a mature, serious platform.
I think since apple is looking at the lower-end consumer market, it must also be looking at the corporate desktop market. Supporting enterprise software/fleet is a whole different ballgame. But it does play well into apple's strength, in that apple is great at letting others experiment and learn lessons from their failures.
If the new leadership at apples even glances in that direction, it will be wild for the desktop computing industry in general. Perhaps microsoft will rethink things, but better yet, entire companies and governments might start switching to MacOS.
Linux desktop is not ready for mass adaption, but it isn't that far off either. My opinion is that people using more macs get them more familiar with the unixy way of doing things. But better yet, a lot of the tooling and libraries for macs is easier to port to linux than from windows. macs dominating enterprise and consumer markets can mean improvements in linux desktop, and the eventual reality (perhaps in a decade) of seeing GNU/Linux desktops in those same spaces as viable options (Android/Linux is already there in the lowest of the low markets).
moving away from microsoft in the eu is intended to cut digital reliance on the US. The EU governments will not switch to macs ever. If they did that, they might as well stick with windows, because apple is also american and beholden to american laws.
I get that, it's just geopolitics, but practically speaking, it is doable for some companies and governments, but can regular every day people manage their own linux desktops? the EU needs a mac competitor, and they're not spending to make that happen. They're just buying into Linux because of its popularity there, and they haven't seen the real price tag of "free as in beer" FOSS software.
The SAME as Windows 2000 in terms of what is installed. NO TPM REQUIREMENT.
Even better: when installing Windows, there should be a "install minimal" option, and if you select it then it should be so fucking minimal - so little on there, that all you get is control panel and a way to install new software - NOTHING more.
That's your win, Microsoft. I'm 2000% certain nothing even slightly close to that will be delivered.
Yeah it’s funny how at this moment I’d pay more for less Windows.
But I’ve found my way on Linux long ago. Sure not all software is there and MS365 fully from browser has so many annoyances, but I love the OS minimalism, how clean it is.
My ideal windows in indeed win2000, but in a transparent VM so I can just do the Windows apps. I need LSW, Linux subsystem for Windows, essentially.
I live in Linux but still have some need for the Windows Runtime from time to time. If only Windows containers were at the level of the Linux ones, I’d flip the whole world up side down.
podman run ms365-full —license-key FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
I’d pay for that. But such a system only provides value, it does not extract it. It is a 180 of the way they have been thinking for a long time now.
its worth trying really really hard to get windows apps running through wine before reaching for a vm imho. once you open a vm you have to deal with ... well... windows.
I did it in the past, vmware (where the desktop was transparant so it was like Windows on Linux), CrossOver office, Wine (bottles).
Recently I tried to get Windows running using quickemu but that also failed.
All just so that I don't have to experience MS365 in the browser where I will regularly click "New message" (in Outlook) and start typing but my browser interprets all characters as shortcuts (as if I held alt or something??) messing up my inbox to various degrees before I become aware, ending up with a pile op messages in "archive". I hate the daily re-logins in Teams (which does not tell you it's logged out, your messages just hang and the menu is empty). Word simply deletes my last 2 sentences from time to time (even though it assures me on every frightened ctrl-s that it's all fine!!), etc, etc.
And we're not even talking about the hoops you have to jump through when a doc is not on SharePoint/OneDrive but on a NAS.
sounds painful, just searched on "how can i get ms office running in linux using wine" and the results included a containerised windows vm that looks very interesting. but yes i agree, they seem to have gone to a lot of effort to make office use a billion microservices that would be a nightmare to run through wine.
edit: nvm, the docker vm thing looks really slow, id rather use libreoffice (which is quite good really). and now europe is trying to cut the umbilical you can probably expect a lot more open source productivity stuff in the near future too.
Very unconvincing. Microsoft seems to want to calm the storm.
I think a dead-giveaway is the realisation that issues that come
with Microsoft-specific software, is met with an increasing amount
of complaints by end users. Thus, either we buy into the PR explanation
by Microsoft, or we rely on what end users says. Now there is a
question how accurate the end users are, but the amount of complaints
is not static; it has increased a lot in the last some weeks, and
even way before that. There is a reason why Microsoft is now called
Microslop - the decrease in quality is one big reason for that. AI
has not led to an increase in quality - Microsoft needs to acknowledge
that. But they won't, because they already committed totally to AI
without any way back now.
It is beyond naive, and I don't know how it can be anything but disingenuous to pretend that the top priorities of "Windows Insiders" are sensible defaults, a calm discoverability feed and how AI works in notepad. The reality is this guy obviously got promoted and assigned "win-back OS users" task, in the face of an organization that overwhelming wants to leverage Windows for short-term, user-hostile bumps in AI usage, advert impressions and questionable engagement scores. He's not going to be allowed to mess with things like the marketing strategy or sales targets, and you see that in these "highlights". Your target audience asked for things like "let me manage my machine locally" and you're delivering "a more muted and polished consumer experience". It's lipstick on a pig, only the pig is dead, and actually a pile of garbage.
Even if you do "get it", you ain't going to be allowed to deliver it.
Exactly. I mean they literally, in this same release[0], just turned WIN+R (Run) from a classic FAST Win32 UI into a modern slow monstrosity. Who was this for?
I use WIN+R instead of the Start Menu Search/PowerToy's Alt+Space because it is INSTANT and 100% CONSISTENT. You just made my instant thing slower, great, thanks, mission accomplished!
Feels wildly out of touch, to almost a comical degree.
You’ve managed to brick w11 VMs completely running in your native cloud. Kill laptops in the April update and trigger bitlocker on consumer machines which users having zero experience recovering their devices because the GUI is crap.
You’ve been busy.
Stop shipping features, ship stability and quality.
I’m most excited for the scheduler and memory footprint improvements. As bad as I hear Windows 11 is, I’ve rarely had issues with it. For the most part it just works and stays out of my way. My only gripes are the occasional forced updates and a rare hard crash that happened once in a span of a year of using it as my daily driver.
Well that and I have to be mindful of running too many resource starving processes at the same time including WSL. Otherwise performance will quickly degrade. But that’s not much different than my 2015 ASUS zenbook running Linux off of 8gb of ram. In comparison my work laptop runs on 32gb of ram with much more powerful cpu cores.
WSL is my favorite and most used feature of Windows 11. So I’ll be happy as long as they don’t screw that up.
I think I’m more bothered by the paper cuts I experience every minute.
Starting from web based start menu taking forever to launch, to everything resisting to you to be in control of your computer.
Some say the speed is fine, but forget that these machines are running at nanosecond level instructions and there’s no reason for a simple task to take milliseconds unless somebody is optimizing for service revenue and user tracking (to be sold later to advertisers, not for user experience improvements).
Microslop is just scared out of mind with the European and Asian countries moving to Linux based platforms to get out of their grip. Can you imagine the amount of intelligence they will loose, and how much harder they will need to work to compete for real after three decades of being the default in everything.
I discovered NixOS this year and I'm afraid I won't be back Windows. TBH Windows has been pretty good to me. This laptop was running at least 4 years on the same install. I never really found that Windows got in my way except for "This file is being used by another process" annoyances that I don't get with Linux. For ages I felt that Windows + WSL2 was the best of both worlds, but NixOS gives me a reproducible OS configuration that means I'll never have to fully build my OS again, and every installed app / routine is documented in code. This feels like the way forward.
I really like Windows. I just wish Copilot could be made fully optional.
Honestly, I can live with Windows 11 being a little slow, and I can deal with File Explorer issues. I can write my own tools to manage some of that, and PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks. Those parts do not bother me that much.
What bothers me is Copilot being pushed into the operating system experience itself. I wish it could simply be treated as an optional feature.
Windows is an operating system. An operating system is the foundational layer that governs the user’s work. Because of that, AI should be an opt-out assistant, not a premise that changes the default behavior of the system.
When I move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, Copilot feels like something that damages the user experience itself.
If Copilot were at the level of GPT or Claude, I probably would not complain as much. But I do not understand why the quality gap feels so large.
Why accept mediocrity when Microsoft has shown to be capable of producing something better than their current iteration of Windows? Whether you prefer Windows 2000 or XP or 7 or one of the server versions over 10/11, all of those were in many ways 'better' than 11.
> I can deal with File Explorer issues
Again, why? It is not as if those issues are the result of Microsoft adding something useable or worthwhile, they're just the result of MS adding even more ballast to an already overburdened system.
> I can write my own tools to manage some of that
Yes, you can, and...
> PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks
...so you're getting to experience the power of the shell like *nix-users have been espousing for more than half a century now. Welcome to the club and welcome to the CLI. Here we use words to communicate instead of pictures, we outgrew those once we left play school.
If you want to use Windows just use one of the previous versions as long as you can while preparing to move over to the greener Wine-yards in Linux-land. Unless there is a big shake-up within Microsoft - unlikely - it looks like Windows as an operating system is a dead-end street. It will be turned into a straight jacket where you will comply with whatever the current business plan dictates. Escape while you still can I'd say, there are many alternatives on offer.
Do you need to use Windows 11 though? If you're using Windows to drive industrial equipment I assume those machines are not connected to the internet? If so you should be fine running Windows 7 or - if need be - 10. There's plenty of medical devices running Windows 2000, some of them use even older versions. As long as they're kept away from the internet and from random USB sticks they remain useable without fear of compromise.
I'd not want anything like Windows 11 controlling industrial equipment as that OS does not need to be compromised to be untrustworthy.
> This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates
I just can't, gotta ask - what about c++ updates? What about integral os components that were migrated to the store and if you disable it, you won't get updates? What about defender updates (not definitions but app update) that won't get applied if you have another anti malware?
The thing I hate about windows updates is that microsoft can't even update all their own stuff with a single button.
edit: almost forgot - why is office not in windows update, and what the hell is wrong with teams and why it is seperate from office updates
Just updating windows is a complete and utter mess and every single Linux distro is 100x better
Install Windows 11 Education edition (which rips all of the AI shit out mostly with sane defaults for schools). If you need the ISO, Microsoft's default Win11 ISOs have it. Use https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/ to get a good autounattend set up to rip out the extra bloat and set up a clean install. Activate with Massgrave HWID. You're done.
I'll vouch for this. I have a USB drive set up with Ventoy, which has the ability to install its TPM certs when booting from USB. It has a couple Linux ISOs and one Win11. It also has a Ventoy config tying that ISO to an autounattended XML built from that exact site.
The result is an install with no copilot/cortana/widgets, a win defender that can be disabled, no auto updates at all, a local account only, no taskbar shenanigans, properly configured explorer, some registry tweaks, runtimes pre-installed, extra drivers if needed, and QoL settings tweaked how I want them.
The OS installs itself in a few minutes with no intervention after the disk/partitioning stuff which I kept manual. It ends up being faster than the Ubuntu and CachyOs installs from the same drive. Then 2mins with massgrave post install if I haven't provided a key already.
When it is set up that way, Windows is decently fast and stable. And I have some control over it, at least whenever I need to enforce something.
Wasn't aware that there was an Edcation version but that unattended installer site seem like a great way to install, without using a bunch of random Power Shell scripts.
I will disclose that it generates a lot of random Powershell scripts to do all the unattended tweaks and magic... but yes, it's still a great way to install.
Sweet Jesus, when are these guys going to understand that I want to be able to turn off automatic updates completely and forever. I'm fine if my computer melts and explodes if I didn't get the update, but let me do it on my own schedule permanently!
I understand your point and motivation completely. And I agree...
However in today's world if you expose an unpatched "anything" to the internet then it is very possible that it will be discovered and eventually used to (silently) do things you don't want. Think DDOS farms, illegal software distribution etc...
What is the middle ground? I don't think there is one. We need to have reliable, automatically updated OSes which don't suck and , much more importantly, run the applications we need.
A car parks outside and there's a knock at your door. Before you can even get up you hear the first shouting: "FBI OPEN UP!" Your door disappears, instantly replaced by a cloud of dust. You start to get up and the agent raises his automatic rifle, pointed at your head. You slowly sit back down. Another agent swiftly moves behind you and applies the handcuffs. "W-what's going on?" you stammer. "You were hacking the NSA" says the agent. "N-no I wasn't! What the hell!" The agent carries you out the door. "Should've enabled updates."
You can't advocate for people to be responsible for everything that happens on their computer and also advocate for being able to disable updates. That combination makes you a top-level felon completely at random and outside of your control. If your computer will be hacked (there is no can be hacked, only will be hacked), you'd best not be responsible. If you're responsible, it best not be hackable.
I won't, as I don't take responsibility for someone stealing my street legal classic car, which is parked on the street right now without any special anti-theft device, and using it to run over you.
If someone takes over my computer, I'm the victim as much as you. You can't force your security standards on me, just as you can't prohibit people from connecting an arbitrary version of Windows, Linux or MacOS to the Internet just because it could inconvenience you.
Who decides whether a computer is "unpatched"? What patches are needed? To all running software? To system software? What is system software?
What about patches that bring new features that introduce new vulnerabilities? Can I claim I didn't want the update because I was concerned about the new AI thingy introducing EVEN more security issues and turning my reasonably secure, mostly patched, computer into your "loaded gun"?
It feels like there is no one person in control of Windows.
It feels like there is a committee and every Microsoft marketing group gets their changes that they want in Windows to help push their product.
Windows should have someone at the top - with TASTE - and the authority and strength and vision to actually make real change happen.
Real change isn't possible because assuming someone is in charge of Windows then they are weak and without their own vision to even understand all the things that are being said over and over and over in threads like this.
People would LOVE it if when installing Windows you could choose "text only/no GUI", or "minimal install" or "select the components you want" or "super special with the lot". Why the fuck can't Microsoft work out on its own to do this.
And for gods sake drop the stupid TPM thing which was required by the Microsoft new PC sales licensing division.
And NO ADS - it's an operating system not a billboard.
> We know there’s a lot of excitement for Taskbar customization – and that’s coming soon.
This will never not be funny to me. These clowns really did remove something that existed for decades and then spend more than a decade trying to edge their users to the fact that they were gonna bring it back. In 500 years when somebody looks up enshittification on Wikipedia, this should be the first example.
This announcement terrfies me. I dont think MS now has developers that are competent enough to reliably change core parts of Windows like the Explorer (taskbar). This plan will not only introduce bloat with reduced performance, but will also reduce core stability further. (Explorer has hanging issues since the april update). So please, please, please @Marcus. If you want to add stuff, please do it in side apps. Leave the core alone, that's above your ability currently. For the core please only focus on bug fixing and removing bloat again.
Who gets to do the customizing though? Suspecting that "auto hide the taskbar" will suddenly become more popular. Oh no! "Your taskbar buttons will be back after these important messages"
This reads... Weird? As in, I know it's marketing speech but expressions seem misused and ideas don't follow from each other:
>You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Not... the other way around? Updates decide when I happen?
>Last month we said we would reduce where Copilot shows up across Windows, focusing on bringing AI where it’s most valuable. [...] in Notepad, we’ve replaced the generic Copilot icon with a clearer “Writing Tools” label that better describes what it does.
Windows Explorer always freezes for me. Teams is constantly interrupting me with popovers to tell me about features I’ll never use. on startup, it takes some time for panels to load.
The file system still uses drive letters. Can’t they scrap the old file system folder layout to something… organized?
> The file system still uses drive letters. Can’t they scrap the old file system folder layout to something… organized
There's no point doing so. Folder mounts are possible in diskmgmt.msc, and on Linux partitions end up mounted in /mnt/crap (and removables in /media/crap :D) anyway.
I was the same way (I suppose I still am since I never deleted the partition), scoop + tailored pwsh profile + 'debloat' tweaks etc. I never really understood any of the popular complaints about Windows/W11 since I always reign my install in.
There is no argument, just vague gesturing toward the grass. I recognized myself in your post.
Fair enough. I am not against Linux at all, but work does mandate Windows (or OSX but...) and Windows for gaming is still a must imo due to anti-cheat and my Steam library is massive. Gamepass is not a bad deal too.
They wouldn't have had to face such embarrassment and rollbacks and spend billions had they just stuck to maintaining Windows 10 in the first place. To this day any improvement W11 offers over W10 is still an enigma.
I don't need transparency, I don't want a shared sense of pride. What I want is for someone to put in a switch to can Mica so that I can have color in the active titlebar again.
In ideal world, but it's too late. The codebase is old. It's very difficult to backport/reimplement/integrate features (tons of APIs, kernel features, etc) that new software relies on. Also, because of compatibility you can't remove all the mess.
It's not that old. In fact, there is little new stuff added to Windows after version 7 that is really worth keeping. Even Windows XP supports most recent Chromiums, albeit with a lot of hacky patches.
I would even say that from the usability perspective, Windows 2000 beats them all, but quite some useful APIs were added in XP and 7, including better Unicode support, driver signing, UAC. But 10 and 11 were just a waste of effort.
WSL1 is just an upgraded Interix, which had been with Windows since at least 2000, maybe even NT4. All the APIs are there, porting WSL1 on 7 should be not a problem at all.
WSL2 is just a virtual machine. Hyper-V was first shipped in Windows 8, which is not too far from Windows. But things are even more bright. Qemu already had the "kqemu", which what eventually became KVM when merged into the Linux kernel, and it worked _even on windows NT 4_, and if course it worked on 2000 and XP.
So porting Hyper-V/WSL2 as a driver onto Windows 7 should be even less of a problem than WSL1.
Bunch of weak willed half measures and a whole lot of marketing around it. I fixed all of my Windows problems by switching to Linux years ago. No more humiliation rituals.
For 2 months now the „put in admin credentials“ dialog is so fundamentally broken - ui-wise, it is unbelievable (in the sense that I do not believe it actually made it to production even though I see it with my own eyes).
There are so many anecdotes about slop by now, the working parts become the anecdotes.
By now Windows, for me is more like a reality TV show than an OS.
Windows 10, especially when they added WSL2 was genuinely great and an awesome platform for development, with essentially native/fast Linux.
Since Win11, it has all been downhill (imo), speed dropped massively, even opening task manager now takes seconds, weird slowdowns that only reboot resolves (temporarily).
I hope Microsoft starts taking performance seriously and tries to get back to what was lost after Win10, but I have big doubts.
Why would you describe windows 10 as great? Forced updates and the beginning of ads, massive increase in telemetry while basically giving you a mediocre reskin and virtual desktops. Windows 11 sure moved the overton window.
11 years of mandatory telemetry in Windows, and it still takes a huge amount of noise from users and journalists online over a long time for Microsoft to notice and finally make change. What good is the fucking telemetry then? Why can I still not turn it off?
Besides, infesting Windows with Spyware and AI what they did to the start menu was among the most atrocious changes they made.
I was always a taskbar top guy, because it simply makes more sense, this is not opinion this is fact. Browser tabs are on the TOP, your mouse hovers over the top of the screen WAY more, and It's stupid to have to spend miles in mouse travel time to the bottom of the screen. Window controls like close, minimize, fs are TOP. Most things are on the TOP. Whoever made the decision to remove that ability to move the taskbar while Linux basically offers EVERYTHING you can imagine and more is insane. I was using Explorer Patcher, but it was buggy for me, so I use Start 11 now, its works fine, but it should not need a 3rd party closed source software to basically just have what Windows always offered.
I use Windows only for gaming, everything else I do on Linux. I think It's too late to realize these things. M$ started by just buying software and building a monopoly they were never the good guys so I can not say the "lost it" but whatever this BS is they are doing now its worse. I also use AtlasOS to bring some sense into Windows, also something that should not be needed and be that way out of the box with few simple switches. It's just a bloated mess, at least its stable for the most part.
IMHO the last truly brilliant and consistent version was 7. Ideally MS should do such improvements on Windows 7. Sadly, Windows developers also have to deal with the mess created during Windows 8/8.1/10/11.
OK so I see someone at Microsoft decided that their strategic decisions do have impact on their income so they are implementing a crisis management strategy.
The way I read this, it sounds like "We're not giving up on disabling local accounts, telemetry, ads in the OS and other things most people complain. However, we're willing to make some concessions in how aggressively the updates are pushed on users and a few minor points or things we planned to implement at some point anyway but didn't consider that important."
Windows 2000 had sequential service startup. It took /ages/ to boot. The boot screen was pretty, though.
XP was a security nightmare and out the gate was BSOD city, much of that thanks to 3rd party drivers, but the OS had fundamental kernel bugs, too.
7 was okay, but it isn't something you'd want to go back to with modern hardware. It lacks many features we find essential. TRIM being a big one. I'd argue that the Windows 7 iconography wasn't very nice.
I'm more of a fan of NT4 for it's utilitarian look, though service management was no where near as nice as what the MMC brought.
From a stability perspective, it really wasn't until Windows 8/10 where we got to the "PEAK" Windows versions, where stability was not an issue at the OS level with Microsoft-shipped code, but rather at a driver or hardware level. No longer were we seeing some fundamental kernel bug halting the system, instead it shifted over to garbage 3rd party drivers (largely fixed thanks to Windows' unique ability to restart the graphical subsystem/removal of kernel mode print drivers) or failing hardware. You won't find that level of stability in Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows 7.
> You won't find that level of stability in Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows 7.
Nice try but you won't deceive any attentive readers. Everything you've told in that paragraph was applicable to Windows 7, it had all the stability and none of the user hostility of later versions.
I think you strung together a bunch of words that don't jive with real world experiences.
Windows 7 still had some fundamental kernel quality issues. WDDM 1.1 wasn't mature to the point of providing a stable experience across the board and vendors were still adapting to the WDDM model; kernel mode printer drivers were still common, both a stability and security knock for those older versions of Windows.
So no, Windows 7 did not have "all of the stability" of Windows 10 or 11.
> I think you strung together a bunch of words that don't jive with real world experiences.
I know the real world experience I've had, thank you very much.
> Windows 7 still had some fundamental kernel quality issues.
No it didn't, it was solid as a rock.
> WDDM 1.1 wasn't mature to the point of providing a stable experience across the board and vendors were still adapting to the WDDM model;
Display drivers adapted by the time Vista SP2 was released, and 7 was a solid release from start without even needing a SP.
> kernel mode printer drivers were still common, both a stability and security knock for those older versions of Windows.
First time I've heard a printer driver crashing the system, are you sure you're not making it up? ( print queue hanging is annoying but it isn't a BSOD)
> So no, Windows 7 did not have "all of the stability" of Windows 10 or 11
Okay I give up, Windows 11 is the bestest release, Satya is the broest tech CEO and you're the number 1 fan boy
If you believe they'll accomplish anything beyond changing a handful of dialogs before getting reorg'd, I got an Agentic AGI Python script you can use on Windows to sell you.
Windows is adding features nobody asked for, like scroll wheel zooming everywhere, like in cmd.exe. Wtf do you need zooming for in the terminal?? I get false positives, and no benefit, at all.
Another is Windows Explorer, loses focus all the time, no hint to where it went, preventing keyboard navigation. Basic UI conventions are being violated, for no reason than having no clue what Windows is.
Windows is apparently being infested by young hackers who think Linux is the best thing since sliced bread and who just want to add tacky features using sloppy AI.
Do you mean Ctrl + scroll wheel? I use that feature quite a lot, I like my font size small but it can be difficult to see for other people so being able to quickly scale it up is really useful
I use Ctrl + <number> to switch between different workspaces on Mac, and half of the time I come back to MS web pages or apps (like Teams) the font is either 9000+pt or then -3pt. Outlook takes the cake though, where for whatever reason they decided to support different font "zoom" levels in different parts. And everyone were dreaming of having the inbox menus in 1pt while having email with 1000pt, right?
All: "zomg just use linux loser" is not helpful to anyone, and in fact, just makes you an asshole.
The way to convince someone to try Linux is not to be as big of a rancid asshole as possible.
I've been using Arch btw for 15 years and even I hate people like this. Stop it. You're making the problem worse by pushing people away from Linux and the rancid sacks of assholes that use it. If you have nothing to say to a struggling Windows user than berating them, it is in everyone's best interest (including you) if you instead shut the fuck up and let someone who isn't a sack of moldy shit try to help that Windows user.
...and there's clearly huge market-demand for Windows LTSC amongst retail customers, and yet, MS's C-levels already decided for them that no amount of love nor money - excepting a sufficiently large enterprise licensing contract - can legally entitle you to a license - or even official media - for Windows LTSC.
It reminds me of when Adobe ended perpetual licensing and switched to cloud(TM)-only, subscription licensing for Photoshop, et al: many of us (myself included) assumed that Adobe was surely making a foolish mistake to abandon perpetual-license customers, but it turns out[1] that was the plan all along: those customers are a vocal minority who can demonstrably afford to pay more, the rest of the customer-base doesn't care enough to switch to a competitor. Over 10 years later (2013), we haven't seen any of Photoshop's then-promising upstart competitors come close.
...on that basis, I don't think MSFT's recent backpedalling on Windows 11's disrespect for its own users is in any way a response to us power-users complaining online - or even because any number of us did fully migrate off Windows and onto Linux, but instead because of all the recent talk overseas from foreign governments (France, Germany) taking active steps to secure their digital-sovereignty and deploying more Linux desktops; and a good way to get people (and decision-makers in government and large businesses) personally interested in digital-sovereignty is by pointing out how shitty their own corporate desktop UX has gotten.
I'll gladly eat my hat when/if MS graciously allows regular retail consumers, and not just large organizations - and those of us with a $2000/yr MSDN Subscription - the privilege of paying for an OS without advertising built-in to the shell and having hard dependencies on proprietary online services.
I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account.
Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password because it was tied to the Microsoft account and you can't change the password locally.
I don't need Copilot managing my inbox through AI, nor do I need a more exciting widget experience.
I just want an OS where if something like the above happens there's a way to fix it without having to reinstall. It doesn't seem like much to ask.
Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)
> I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming.
I see a likely inversion of motives here: you earn your living coding or otherwise are deeply vested in Windows, so you are committed for survival to Windows and to fixing the absurd account problem that MSFT has inflicted on you.
The expression "muscle memory" here just means the cognitive load of working with a technology. MSFT has added a hard-blocking piece of stupidity to your cognitive load.
I am sure this is not the first time! Registry problems, update problems, and now for pity's sake account problems.
As a long-time user of both Linux and Windows, I'd say my OS cognitive load with Linux is almost entirely related to efficient actions, whereas with Windows I have a quiver of stupid arrows to shoot at all the problems that MSFT inflicts.
When people advise you to switch to Linux if you can, they are giving solid advice.
My Ubuntu servers have been in an undefined state since canonical botched a regular upgrade to 26.04 LTS due to the ongoing DDOS. Their status page says everything works. A simple ping tells me nothing works.
Let's not pretend Microsoft has a monopoly on idiocy in the software world. All major Linux distros are hell bent on repeating the mistakes of Windows. Especially since the people in control of the stack (minus the kernel) are the rejects who couldn't make it in Microsoft and Apple in the 90s and 00s but really wanted to.
Meanwhile my small happy place with OpenBSD and Guix just works.
Linux has lot of bugs and issues, but they are not caused by intention to make users' life worse.
They are caused by moral busy bodies who think they know better.
To quote CS Lewis:
>Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
> They are caused by moral busy bodies who think they know better.
If you know better just hack it your way. Linux is an open platform. Nothing prevents you from gutting Ubuntu and making it your own. You can't say the same for Windows though.
So I guess is not a matter of monopoly of idiocy, but whether you can do something about idiot decisions when they are made. This is why an open platform will always win. It's just architecturally better for the end user.
>If you know better just hack it your way.
While this might be technically true, I also think it's a lazy argument that ignores practical reality. It's basically a way to avoid any kind of accountability or self-reflection on the part of developers. "Users aren't happy? If they don't want to make the change themselves, they can fuck off." This is a toxic attitude which I see a lot in discussions of free software.
In practice, 99% of the time it's not worth the time and effort to fork and maintain a large project. Even in a free ecosystem, users get locked into specific products and technologies. This is why sane technical leadership and responsiveness to user feedback are important, even (especially?) in open source projects.
Can you tell me an instance where users got locked into a dying ecosystem in Linux?
What I can tell you is that CentOS, which was used extensively in servers, died and you didn't really see much issue, at least not as much as compared to the pain and suffering users are having to go through now that Windows is the dying place.
What's lazy is the repetition of this realist fallacy of the technical lockin, when in fact what you really have is what you see, an open platform you can very well just leave for another when you disagree with the current vendor.
Dislike Ubuntu and you can very well migrate. That's the practical reality.
There are several software packages that are essentially mandatory if you want to run a modern distro with good desktop hardware support. Some that come to mind are glibc, systemd, and Wayland. These projects have made controversial design decisions which impact the entire ecosystem of Linux software.
I actually did leave Ubuntu because background Snap updates were randomly crashing running applications. Now, I'm fairly happy with Fedora, but it's far from perfect. I reject the idea that if I have technical critiques of these projects, that the fault somehow lies with me if I'm not willing to waste my time jumping distros or rewriting them myself. That attitude is exactly analogous to the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft.
> These projects have made controversial design decisions which impact the entire ecosystem of Linux software.
> I reject the idea that if I have technical critiques of these projects, that the fault somehow lies with me if I'm not willing to waste my time jumping distros or rewriting them myself. That attitude is exactly analogous to the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft.
I understand it's frustrating when your distro or OS starts acting up. It's a means to an end, it should get out of your way and let you do your work.
On the other hand, it's impossible to appeal to everyone, so every decision will make some people happy and others unhappy. There's no way around it. The only thing that matters is whether we can live with it or not, in which case the option is to fix it or move on.
It's frustrating but nobody owes you anything. The sooner you realise this the better.
I for instance wasn't happy with anything available. The closest thing was hyprland so I made my own micro-distro on top of it: https://github.com/gchamon/archie. It's way less work than you think in the age of AI, but it does require you intimate knowledge of the system.
If the expected Linux experience is "go build your own if you disagree", then I'm not clear how that is any better than being told the same by Microsoft/Apple
It's better because at least you can. With windows and apple you have to live with it. But that's not the expected experience. UX in Linux has only become better with time, all things considered.
There are alternatives to Wayland, Systemd, Vulkan, etc. on Linux. There are far fewer options on macOS and Windows, "build your own" typically entails starting from scratch.
> There are several software packages that are essentially mandatory if you want to run a modern distro with good desktop hardware support. Some that come to mind are glibc, systemd, and Wayland.
I run Gentoo on one machine and Alpine on several. I promise, none of those are required.
> If you know better just hack it your way. Linux is an open platform.
The GP already knows about FOSS. He uses OpenBSD and Guix and in his own words this is his "small, happy place".
Guix in particular is an excellent example of FOSS innovation.
>If you know better just hack it your way. ... It's just architecturally better for the end user.
As an end user I want the product/tool to serve me well out of the box, I don't have time to hack it to fix what I dislike about it on my own dime. That's what my job is for.
This is not always available. What smartphones "serve well out of the box", meaning zero telemetry, root privileges, open source, not requiring an account in a foreign country (and not spamming notifications about this), and working? Google Pixel requires time to fix, despite costing like 3-4 ordinary smartphones.
The same probably can be said about laptops. Linux is great but buggy, and proprietary OSes do not pass the requirements.
Tangential, but how is
> The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated
Holding up in 2026? Pretty poorly, I’d say.
How ironic. Reactionary old fart mostly known for writing moralistic children’s novels wants you not to listen to moralistic crusaders. I shall take his advice.
CS Lewis certainly got it wrong, if he believed that the greed of robber barons can ever be satisfied. I’ll take the moral busybodies, if I have to take either.
CS Lewis: a prolific author of fantasy, science fiction, and Christian apologetics
Does that mean what he says is less valuable?
> Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Said by a monster himself, but doesn't make it any less true.
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
Intention or not, Gnome 3's "desktops are outdated" caused even Linus to switch away from it.
He actually still uses GNOME, at least as recently as 5 months ago.
I'm a KDE user but I get why people like it.
and I am a GNOME user and I find it totally fine to use KDE. Thats the cool thing about open plattforms. Just some people having too much time to make a UI interface part of their personality rant too much on the internet about other UI interfaces.
What's your point? At least he was able to switch away from it and choose from any plethora of other options.
… Linux literally just had the age-verification outcry, and the "let's put AI in Ubuntu" thing, and that's just off the top of my head.
I want to toot the Linux horn too, and I do think MS is on another level here, but let's take a look in the mirror first.
There is plenty of elitism going on where everyday users' experience is intentionally made bad.
> My Ubuntu servers have been in an undefined state since canonical botched a regular upgrade to 26.04 LTS due to the ongoing DDOS. Their status page says everything works. A simple ping tells me nothing works.
So is it the DDOS that's responsible, status page notwithstanding?
Anyway, heard about Timeshift for Ubuntu on here, might be worth taking a look at it: https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift
Doesn't require a GUI, so it can be used for servers/headless too. Please note that's it's not a backup solution, just an OS snapshot one, albeit with scheduling.
> Let's not pretend Microsoft has a monopoly on idiocy in the software world.
Entirely fair, but let's not pretend the situation is symmetrical. Canonical doesn't have monopoly on the linux or broader *nix world the same way that Microsoft has on the Windows world.
normalize coming up through slackware like many did in the 90s
You can download from a different mirror in linux and open source you always have another option
Yeah, so, to be clear: I'm fairly sure Linux will also have its fair share of issues that I occasionally would have to repair.
I don't necessarily even have a problem with Windows occasionally needing a bit of hand-holding, either. It sucks, but it's IT so meh, unfortunately it still comes with the territory.
What I'm mostly pissed off about is the fact that I have a perfectly useable machine but since I'm unable to login due to vague Microsoft nonsense and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix it I need to reinstall. This seems wholly unnecessary.
Even having some sort of repair installation that doesn't blow away all installed applications would have been somewhat ok as a last resort, but that doesn't exist either.
> Yeah, so, to be clear: I'm fairly sure Linux will also have its fair share of issues that I occasionally would have to repair.
Issues with account, login and passwords would be none of them. Sure, there are other areas of common issues at times, but I have never, ever had issues logging into any of the linux OS I ran for the last 23years or so.
I've had PAM break due to distro's ridiculous policy of updating the system in place allowing for invalid combinations of files to exist. I've had Linux distros break the booting process countless times.
I don't know where you are but oobe/bypassnro worked for me just 2 weeks ago.
I've reinstalled using this trick, so this issue won't bite me again in the future.
> When people advise you to switch to Linux if you can, they are giving solid advice.
They absolutely are not. Switching operating systems isn't like switching toothpaste. They are declaring, without evidence, that you don't need Windows, without knowing if you do or not. They are avoiding the problem that the person is having entirely and asking that the user replace their single problem with a whole new class of problems that the user has no idea how to solve. And there will be problems, because someone who has never used Linux before isn't going to know how to do anything in Linux. They aren't going to know what software to use to do anything, they aren't going to know how to install software or update it, they aren't going to know what to do when any problem comes up at all.
"Just switch to Linux" is a malevolent and self-serving recommendation, is absolutely not realistic, and is not ever intended to actually help the user needing help with a problem they are having.
> When people advise you to switch to Linux if you can, they are giving solid advice.
I am forced to use Linux at work and I dread updating anything because the result is usually a broken system. I never have that problem with Windows.
So YMMV is as always valid here.
Also years of Windows muscle memory here, especially the keyboard shortcuts. I’ve used Windows since 1997. I’ve decided I’m done. A new PC arrives in a month. It’ll be running Ubuntu. I’m done.
Maybe there is a Linux language similar to DirectX you might transition to? Maybe test code in a VM? (Although that gets you right back into Win11.)
> Maybe there is a Linux language similar to DirectX you might transition to?
Yes: DirectX. Just make sure that it runs in Wine or Proton.
Nit: DirectX is a bunch of APIs and libraries, not a language. Same for Wine and Proton.
DXVK works great for DirectX 11. However, it's rather annoying to debug through this intermediate layer. I wouldn't recommend this for development.
Sure is nice as a user. I get better frames in some games than Windows users do!
>It’ll be running Ubuntu. I’m done.
https://status.canonical.com/
You're in for a bad time. It's been three days and they still can't get updates to work.
Get Debian if you must. Use something sane like Guix and OpenBSD if you can.
I've been watching Linux from a safe distance for 25+ years. The one thing that remains constant over the decades is that whenever someone says "You're having this problem? Well what did you expect, you're using X distro. Obviously you should use Y distro, then all your problems will be solved" and then another person comes along and says "No, you idiot, Y distro is completely broken, any sane person would use Z distro!" And if you play that game long enough, you eventually complete the circle.
Haven't seen this specific "you're using wrong distro" so far. I'm more often bumping on a general rude attitude of people answering. As if asking questions, looking for solutions is not what all these distro forums were made for.
It's always the exact same distro, and it has been for 10+ years. Nobody is recommending it anymore but users still come with issues due to that.
There are different distros for different taste/needs, but Ubuntu always has been the worst choice of all.
Zero issues with Lubuntu on my road laptop for over a year now. I’ve tested most of the apps I would install at home.
Not everyone hits the edge cases.
I have no problem using Debian (I’m actually a Linux sysadmin by profession) so I have no problems later switching distros. But as of today, I’m happy with Ubuntu on my road laptop and I would no doubt be happy switching the home PC, too. (Actually the road lap is Lubuntu and it currently has zero visible AI influence.)
To be fair, they're allegedly experiencing under attack by the Iranian government. I doubt Guix or OpenBSD would be able to sustain service under a similar attack, though granted there's a reason Cannonical is the target and not OpenBSD.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/05/ubuntu-infrastructu...
Quite the extrapolation from "A group sympathetic to the Iranian government" -> "the Iranian government" especially considering the source: "posts on Telegram and other social media".
OpenBSD can be downloaded from a variety of mirror hosts (including ones hosted by Cloudflare).
So OpenBSD would probably be able to sustain service at least in terms of being able to download updates.
Same. I used to develop Windows apps with Borland C++ once, that's how old I am. Last year, I finally installed a second Linux Mint boot - for Windows games!
The level of disregard for quality from MS is just obnoxious. We are really crossing some kind of line here, I think, where taking the pain of migrating once seems easier than dealing with all this nonsense.
(I had to clean install Windows after that infamous update with system check infinite loop at boot time).
Ubuntu will also introduce AI. Why not use pure Debian? (and the distribution flame war starts)
I have no problem using Debian (I’m actually a Linux sysadmin by profession) so I have no problems later switching distros. But as of today, I’m happy with Ubuntu on my road laptop and I would no doubt be happy switching the home PC, too. (Actually the road lap is Lubuntu and it currently has zero visible AI influence.)
they want to start with 26.10, will be interesting if they include it with a long term release
These suggestions are like telling someone that that is being harassed to maybe wear something different.
While it would, yes, likely avoid the problem happening again, it shifts the responsibility to the party that should not be at fault.
Meanwhile the harasser is like “what’s wrong? I took an anti-harassment class?”
It's more like telling someone in an abusive relationship to leave the abusive relationship.
Do both. Insist that the authorities reform the abuser AND leave the relationship.
In a real life abusive relationship that would look like both calling the cops and leaving. In the case of software, demand reform and also switch OSes.
> These suggestions are like telling someone that that is being harassed to maybe wear something different.
Weird analogy - it's telling someone who is paying to be abused to simply stop paying...
If Windows was actually free, as in download a copy and use it as you wish, then sure, maybe you might have a (very tiny) point, but it's not like that at all.
Many legit users have a license applied to their Microsoft account that predates the current situation. That is to say, a license carried over from windows 10 and possibly as far back as windows 7, since there was a time where Microsoft was offering free license transfers. Many people see windows 7 as being not shitty and abusive.
> there was a time where Microsoft was offering free license transfers
I don't think they ever stopped. Maybe they ceased advertising it, but installing Windows 10 over 7 or 8 would silently inherit the license far past the original terms. The time-limited offer was just a FOMO-inducing marketing scam.
You don't choose to use Windows. You have to. Because it's the only OS that supports whatever tool you need for your work. Windows is mandatory in many situations, which is why it can afford being obnoxious.
your analogy would be fitting for a jurisdiction that had no sexual assault laws or way for victims to defend themselves. In which case "Don't provoke an attack" is sound advice.
in other industries, you can sue product manufacturers if their defects cause you inordinate grief, lost wages, or excessive repair costs.
> Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)
Understood. However, your choices are:
1. Keep complaining while paying $$$ for the privilege of complaining.
2. Switch to something else.
My tolerance level is much lower than yours (I switched my daily driver around 1998), obviously...
`irm https://get.activated.win | iex` lives in my head rent-free
I used Windows since my first PC on 3.1. But recently it just became too much. Switched over to Mint for just over a year now and loving it. No issues at all for development or gaming. The machine just works. No lag at the lock screen, typing in your password and hitting enter has the desktop loaded instantly. It just works the way you expect and with the performance you expect. I used to defend Windows but I cannot say the same about it anymore.
Hello fellow DirectX programmer! I gave up and got a Mac. I made myself get used to the defaults. I can't go back. I tried putting together a gaming pc a couple years ago and Windows annoyed me too much. It's better here!
And yeah - I gave up on DirectX programming to do it. I do like Metal...
As Windows more and more difficult to use at very basic, after passing certain threshold, just developing on Linux is more practical. Even for DirectX.
Have you considered Linux on bare metal and a Windows VM for your coding? Two monitor setup and you can have Windows on one side when working then all your other daily stuff is in Linux. Shared drives and clipboards make things pretty easy.
Also just debloat the Windows install, why are you suffering with Co-Pilot? I have a VM running on Proxmox and I rdp to it from Linux when needed, but daily use, no way and honestly there really is no reason to put all your eggs in the Windows basket in this day and age.
> I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account
Not sure what's so confusing here... When Windows is online, it checks your password against the cloud and updates the local store. When Windows is offline, it checks your password against a local store. By previous password, Windows just means the password you used on the last successful login for the user on that machine.
Clearly if that was the actual issue I would've been able to get it working :)
The thing is, I was online, I had a working internet connection (and confirmed this by doing the 'utilman' hang to get a command prompt and getting a working ping command). It was just that Windows corrupted some kind of internal Microsoft Account connection and was locking me out.
The day I can’t make a local-only account on windows (for personal use, work is a different matter unfortunately) is the day I stop using windows.
It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts. I can skip it, which is nice, but just don’t show the screen. If you’re installing linux you either know what you’re doing or you don’t: if you do you know it’s possible and don’t need it jammed in your face, and if you don’t you’re probably not quite tall enough to understand it isn’t needed and you probably don’t want it anyways.
I don't even want a local account, I just want to be able to set a custom username for my account instead of some autogenerated jumble of letters.
My Microsoft Account email is "contact@<my-domain-name>". If I set up a new Windows 11 computer using this account, Windows picks the first 4 letters of my email address and sets that as the username. So my username becomes "conta", and the path to my user directory becomes "C:\Users\conta".
I know this is a really small thing, but I find it incredibly irritating. I can't be typing that into the terminal all day long! It's not the end of the world, but it speaks to a lack of polish and care across the whole product, not to mention a disrespect for their users' intelligence.
I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue. Maybe there's a secret keycombo I can press during install? Or some unrelated checkbox that I can toggle that will do the magic? I just know that I login via my iCloud account on all my Macs, and Apple has always allowed me to choose my own username and home directory.
I don't think this is high on their list of issues to fix so I'm not very hopeful that this will ever get addressed. Maybe I should just change my legal name to Conta?
> I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue.
5ish years back I used to have a PCI passthrough via OVMF [0] setup for my GPU and my windows VM (Arch host) so I could game on windows.
Then I realized Proton/wine had gotten good enough to play all my games (I don't play AAA competitive shooters) and I dropped the VM and never looked back.
I would encourage everyone to give Steam/Proton on Linux a shot if you haven't recently and see if you're able to drop windows for good. These days, I don't even look at compatibility - 95% of games work OOTB and the other 5% work by changing the proton version (i.e. proton-ge). YMMV of course but I've been much happier without windows on my system.
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
Yes, just a username.
“ To create an offline (local) account during Windows 11 setup, disconnect from the internet, then use the command OOBE\BYPASSNRO in the command prompt (Shift+F10) to enable a "I don't have internet" ”
This is what I do. I have heard this has been patched out. My work gives me an MSDN account, and so far I’ve been able to still do this. When this goes away forever and I lose all my ISO’s/access to ISO’s that allow this, I’ll be done with windows forever.
My account email is info@<domain-name>.com.
I feel you.
And what I do is create a local account and then add the Microsoft account to it after creation.
> It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts.
I don't quite understand what you are saying here. If you're talking about setting up an account to use the system, it's the same idea as setting up a local account on Windows.
If you're talking about online accounts, I believe you are referring to a convenience feature offered during setup. Ironically, it was put there to guide people who are coming to Linux from Windows.
What are you suggesting here? Everyone who runs linux should log in and run everything as root all the time?
No, I guess I didn’t explain it, though I thought I had. Don’t ask me to turn on location settings, don’t ask me to connect my email/online accounts, during a gui install. I can turn those on myself if I want to. Someone else up-thread pointed out that this probably exists to help windows uses transition over to a Linux install in a way that feels more familiar, and that makes sense. I don’t like it, but I can accept that.
I’ll still grumble when I see that screen though.
Oh. I thought you were talking about making a user account.
I've never seen anything like that on any linux install I've ever done. But then I've been pretty much Debian-only since I started using Linux over 30 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW7Z892bsG4
At about 1:15.
You also attributed this to "Linux", instead of whatever guided installer/desktop environment you chose. I have never encountered the screens you are lamenting.
That's fair, its mostly "mainstream" distros. Here is an example:
https://d3t0tbmlie281e.cloudfront.net/igi/framework/q6Yb16Bq...
Linux was too broad a term.
The funny thing is I actually had Windows 11 reliably black-screen on me after creating a local account. On a recent Surface Pro device, no less.
I blame Nadella. Gates or Ballmer had their own deficiencies but they would never have tolerated the absolute bullshit going on at Microsoft today.
on a similar vein, it deleted all my mfa tokens without telling me, as part of an update that also disabled the built-in finger reader as a token source.
woulda been nice to know before hand that it was going to do that, so i could make sure those other accounts werent so reliant on that finger reader working
I run Windows 11 on my gaming PC powerful desktop and a good work laptop. No issues.
No idea what you guys are doing.
I can also now run and install over cmd powershlle with choco, scoop and winget.
Get Firefox, VLC, MPV and all that.
Get Powertoys.
Run Christitustech utlity for tweaks.
So even less usage for Linux imo.
> No idea what you guys are doing.
A friend of mine has been running the same Arch install since 2009. Does this mean Linux is problem-free and people who struggle with it are doing something wrong? No, it doesn't. Same with Windows.
Doctor, it hurts when i put this screwdriver in my eye, please help!!
there are (will be) lots of calls on the muscle memory slacking off. I can't think of anything that is not reproducible on Mint.
I have tons of Windows experience (starting off by manually installing windows w/o installation floppies and manually editing win/system.ini, through win32 to current day nonsense), yet I find the command line interface of linux a lot more powerful.
I am not aware of the exact use of directX, it should be possible to run Windows through virtualization just for this task. (unless wine is sufficient)
This exact problem was the last straw for me and pushed me to Linux on my desktop. Haven't looked back.
M$ account is not strictly "mandatory" as you claim. There are ways to work around this. I NEVER in my life had an M$ account, I have a GitHub Account, but that is still separate AFAIK. Rufus can mod the ISO for it, and there is another way around it during install. They just want you to use one so they can spy in you better. It's on you to have an OS account to an online service in the first place. Then entire concept is utterly retarded, I do not care who it is M$ or some of the best champions of Open Source and ethical Linux distro, I will not use any fucking account of them to log into my LOCAL PRIVATE OS, it makes ZERO sense and its pathetic how that managed to lure so many morons onto doing this.
I remember first seeing this during a Win install and instantly looked for a way around it, I think they even have removed a workaround to make it even harder for people to work around this BS.
That's one thing that struck me in TFA, almost everything mentioned was stuff I never asked for and never wanted: CoPilot in my inbox, some Insider Program bumf, widgets and feeds, the sole thing in there that means anything is that updates are slightly less annoying.
So TFA is really "we've spent the last two months monkeying with the crap that no-one asked for or wants, and Update is mildly less annoying". That's not really much of an announcement.
FWIW I've done some d3d9 and d3d11 tinkering and my stuff looks like it works pretty good under proton.
> Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)
The computer on my left uses Windows (Win10) so I still use Microsoft-related software. I switched to Linux in late 2004 or so. Linux kind of spoiled me here; every time I transfer files on Windows and notice how slow it is, I wonder what the heck Microslop is doing here. Why does it waste my time and my computer's resources so much? That's one example of so many more. It would be kind of great to be able to abandon Windows completely. For that Linux has to improve a lot, so that Average Joe also is able to use it just fine.
Well for decades Windows was adequate-to-excellent for small business and individual consumer use in major ways that Windows 11 is recently continuing to disrespect more and more, as it migrates away from how worthwhile Windows formerly used to be.
All this fluff about the insider program seems to be very ignorantly missing the point.
What's needed more than ever is No BS instead of more BS.
Namely get Microsoft Accounts back out of the picture unless opted in.
Along with curtailing Bitlocker, One Drive, Copilot, and things like that.
Now to make it really good again, there needs to be no further disk activity after Windows has booted, other than user-initiated saving & loading. Plus of course no network traffic other than user-directed bandwidth usage.
Along those lines I think it goes without saying that as soon as Microsoft has any legitimate commitment to open-source efforts, we'll know by the way they document & release everything they know about NTFS.
[dead]
There are ways of changing a lot of the shortcuts on Linux to be the same. And a lot of the default KDE shortcuts are similar to windows' ones iirc.
Yeah I've found modern KDE's shortcuts are not only similar to the best parts of Windows, but also slightly better (Win arrow keys reposition without doing minimize/maximize, only win pgdn/pgup minimize/maximize) so I can move shit around more fearlessly.
Same, I had to use some hack to trigger sticky keys on the login screen to launch cmd.exe, then I could run the few elevated commands I needed to get back in.
At least notepad has rich text, AI, tabs! /s
you just can't keep supporting that adware with operating system functionality and keep hoping they'll make it more convenient for you
What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is.
Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user base.
The incentives are alomost perpendicularly misaligned.
Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. People are looking for the exit, finding there is indeed a door, and stopping them will take far more than just some reassurance from the DJ boot.
It's always the MBAs. The organizational structure incentivises them on the wrong metrics. So they adapt and optimize for that. In real life, after a while, you hit a plateau with features and market demand. What these MBA clowns love to do is take what's already perfectly fine and mess it up and create a road map for it to fix something to being it the way it was, so they can justify to their higher ups they are "adding value" to the company. And half way through this, they leave the company. Now some other new employee comes in, has no idea why this had to be reworked and messes it up even more. You have this loop enough times, you end up with how software engineering works in the fortune 500.
The moment you hear "let's circle back" enough in meetings, that's your tell tale sign to quit the workplace infested with MBAs. A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.
> A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.
I wish this were true, but unfortunately, I've seen enough evidence otherwise to strongly disagree. MBAs weren't born evil, they were made that way in business school. The same corrupting process works on engineers and can happen outside of business school contexts (one common corrupting force is Hacker News comments). An MBA-brained engineer as a manager is orders of magnitude worse than a regular MBA.
They want to be Apple. Apple sells hardware, services, and takes a huge cut being a software store.
Microsoft sells software. They turned office into a service but it's still software. Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.
Microsoft's strategy for turning into Apple is kneecapping their own software.
> Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.
Considering that at this point most Microsoft OEMs are failing, Microsoft should just start building a lot of consumer hardware.
Apple makes more money selling consumer hardware than the entire PC hardware market combined. I'm exaggerating, but only a little. This would have been unimaginable in 1999.
>Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.
It didn't have to be. The same toxic dynamics that compromised their software poisoned their hardware, but they had too many products, or eras of a product, that Just Worked(TM) for it to have been a fluke. Someone knew what they were doing. They were screwed over by competing interests.
Zune people loved their Zunes. Windows Phone 8 people loved their Nokias. I've seen Surface Pro 2s "boot" to the same session for half a decade (that is: put it to sleep, stick it in a drawer for a year, take it out, plug it in, turn it on, all of the same files and folders and apps are open; I've NEVER seen this happen with any other device, they always lose state after enough time unplugged). And it's crazy how badly the Courier/Surface Duo was botched, given the excitement for it. Even newer Surfaces are great for the first year, before all of the compromises and poor engineering decisions make themselves known.
Imagine if it had been managed by someone who actually cared about their users, instead of people who treated them like marks and rubes.
I got a Zune on clearance when they were shutting down the whole mess (a nice fugly brown one for 80% off).
Build quality was rock solid, UI felt premium, and it mostly just got out of my way/let me play tracks. They were great little media players, as good as or ahead of the equivalent iPod.
Hardware was really good out of MSFT at the time, although when mistakes were made (e.g. the RROD Xbox 360 debacle), the broader organization seemed allergic to making thing right.
And that’s without mentioning XBox, a brand they built up to be pretty good over many years, and now they don’t seem to know what to do with.
They have a HW+SW+store ecosystem right there. Gently stagnating.
I dunno about "gently". The XBone was a pretty major face-plant and so was the Series S/X split. The only really successful Xbox was the 360, and that's mostly because Sony went mad with power while designing the PS3. It also helped that PSN was a disaster compared to Xbox Live in a generation where every game had a multi-player mode side-car'd onto it.
D'oh, that's the most obvious example and I completely missed it. Even then, they were somewhat hamstrung by weird decisions - RROD as mentioned, but also remember their hard drive/memory card scheme for the 360? They HAD their family room Trojan horse, at the nascence of streaming and HD broadcast - imagine if they had gone full Nintendo and pushed a TV tuner and/or integration with cable networks? Truly an Xbox, the only one you need under your TV.
It's crazy how the corporate machine just chews up obvious courses for sustained profitability and customer delight and spits out expanding batteries and DRM.
Not sure why you are downvoted.
> Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.
*XBox and Microsoft gaming's $23.5b revenue (~10% of MS's total) enter the chat*
You were saying something about not letting facts get in the way of a preferred narrative, I believe?
xbox is a catch-it-umbrella that includes all the studios bought, and game pass. The xbox hardware sales are beyond appalling[0], $220m a quarter, and it'd be below $1b yearly. That's revenue - the consoles have pretty terrible profit margin by design. (likely negative when it comes to xbox)
No need for snarky remarks.
[0]: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/111349/xbox-hardware-revenue-...
You realize it's a whole thing, right?
Being a console ecosystem owner doesn't work if one doesn't have a console?
Hence why it makes sense to look at their gaming division revenue as a whole: a large part of that revenue is attributable to shipped to date XBox units.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of that revenue is PlayStation. That's why they've been porting their entire catalog over, claimed the end of exclusives etc.
Last I heard the current Xbox generation has sold less than the last, at approximately 30 million. This gives it about 1/3rd the sales of Sony.
Which company would you say is the example(s) of the latter? Sounds like utopia I'd like to be a part of.
Different sector, but I'd say Blackmagic Design seems to be run by people who actually use their own products and care about both product experience and engineering.
In the creative industry there is a bunch of these "boutique" companies that places great care on the final experience. Probably Blackmagic Design is no longer "boutique" to be fair, but seems they still got the culture right.
Valve and the few sane startups / small/mid sized companies you can be lucky enough to end up in.
I was part of the transformation of a healthy mid size engineering led startup company that got taken over by MBAs and Indian employees and saw the whole lifecycle.
I don't use its products myself but Apple fits this definition perhaps; its current CEO is a former engineering head, the previous CEO was a former operations head and the one before him was Steve Jobs.
> Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge.
Microsoft needs to learn consent. Everywhere there's a Yes and "Remind me later", there has to be a No. And the No has to work and be remembered forever, not forgotten after the next update. Using Windows has to stop feeling like you're being roofied all the time.
Yeah this seems to be a trend over the last few years.
Google does this too. I don't have photos backed up to my Google account on a Pixel and every few days if I open the photos app it prompts me to backup to the cloud and I always have to click "maybe later", "not now" or whatever they decide to name it.
It's messed up because if I were to accidentally ever click yes to that it would fill up my Google storage and I would no longer be able to receive email since I'd have 0% storage. I don't get how something so dangerous can be shoved in front of you so frequently. I know it's marketing / advertising to constantly remind you of something even if you don't want it, but I would have thought customer happiness would outweigh that.
This happens to my family :-(
I host an Immich server for us. They don’t want Google Photos syncing and they know to watch out for the dark patterns, but, eventually, they come over with Google Photos syncing.
The other day my mother came to me with a OneDrive prompt on her Pixel. It was asking if she wanted to “free up space”. I’m pretty sure it was trying to get her to sync photos. I wish I would have taken a screenshot. She’s not low on space.
Of course, the only way space gets freed up is if they delete your local copies. It’s practically ransomware and they can’t figure out why people hate them.
or every time you click a YT link in firefox on android it asks "do you want to open this in the YT App?" where you're options are Yes (with an always use app checkbox) and "Cancel" to open in the browser. Like "Cancel" means "no, get out of the way and do what I want before you injected yourself in this flow"
You can disable the YouTube app's handler for YouTube URLs. In the app info, open by default. I haven't tried it, but presumably, all YouTube URLs will then open in your browser.
The worst thing is it even does it if your photos are being backed up, but to something that is not Google.
If it makes you feel any better, on iOS all the google web pages and apps (like YouTube) continuously ask you to use or "open in" the iOS Chrome.
Google is an advertising company and the product managers there are now incentivized to tie everything to revenue.
Those are dark patterns for sure. I don’t know how big companies can still pull that in 2026
People were eased into a defeatist attitude over time. Easily done when everyone's trying to achieve it.
Management and PM kung fu:
System working as pathologically-intended.The root problem is there are seemingly no user experience quality KPIs on the development side to counterbalance revenue / usage / adoption ones.
You have a Pixel? Install GrapheneOS.
This is how you can tell that they just don't get it.
Microsoft, your users include developers and power users. We are not all someone's tech illiterate relative who needs constant reminding to check that backups are on, nor do we want to use OneDrive.
If we turn it off, it means off. Updates off = they stay off until turned back on, don't worry, we'll remember. Backup off = it stays off. Edge off = it stays off. Ads off = I don't want ads.
The battle they are fighting is that by using Google, tech illiterate people have found buttons like the ability to disable updates, but don't understand what they're doing, and then leave them off and now their OS becomes part of a botnet in a few months. So Microsoft believes that they are doing a greater good by not offering a real option to actually turn certain things off. But this babysitting behavior is annoying as shit when you want to leave something running that is going to take 6 days. Sure yes put it on a cloud vm. But if I was still using Windows as my OS, why should I have to? Just because your OS can't handle a developer doing something else than using Outlook and OneDrive to store pictures of aunties family get-together?
OneDrive isn't a backup solution but a way to put your personal files in danger as was proven many times. And nowadays probably also a fastest way to get data mined - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45551504
Microsoft has options to provide local image-based backups but they want to make you dependent on their online services - which surely isn't surprising to anyone.
Last time I was installing Windows 10 I had a bunch of 3rd-party tools that gave me back control to some degree. And these worked for most of the things you did mention but Windows Update maintenance services were most pesky component. Nearly every idle period would spawn a bunch of processes which were placed to ensure that updates will be delivered Microsoft way. And while I'm on CachyOS I have W11 in the vm and looks like nothing has changed and I doubt anything will despite these pretty claims up there.
The lack of control over Windows that advanced, power users have to deal with is nowadays insulting.
their VSS system is actually better than btrfs snapshots, IIRC. It allows you to take atomic snapshots of multiple volumes simultaneously. I haven't found a way to do it with btrfs yet, there's always a race condition.
It's wild to me that they don't have an Android-esque "Developer mode" that requires an obscure thing that you need to look up to see the options that can harm you (Click X times on the "Build info", etc).
Historically, Microsoft never had to consider that, because Windows was always in developer mode.
The Windows pedigree assumed that everything would at most have an ini or registry setting or group policy to override 99.9% of Windows' behavior or at least an undocumented but accessible internal API to set it.
The Windows 11 transition was the first time Microsoft shipped a sufficiently bullshit OS that it actually needed a developer mode.
But most scathingly... and the original sin... was that some shit-for-brains Microsoft leader made the decision to disable configurability for purpose of boosting platform revenue.
Fuck that person, because they knew exactly what and why they were doing it, and still made that decision.
Tolerate or hate them for all their sharp business elbows, but Microsoft of yore (Gates and Ballmer eras) intentionally made the decision that if they built and owned a platform that most people used (because it worked for them) then there would be more than enough money for everyone. And that it was healthy to leave money on the table for their developers, because developers and the apps they built drove people to the platform (see "Developers, developers, developers!").
gpedit.msc
> Microsoft, your users include developers and power users.
But their customers are enterprises. Until you’re bringing in the money that those enterprise contracts are, you’re a pathetic speck who can and will get what you’re offered and no more.
Good luck with that. I have a Windows computer I sometimes have to run stuff on overnight, like renders or what not. I've disabled everything I can related to Windows Update, plus setting "Active hours" or what not, so the computer doesn't reboot because of updates in the middle of the night.
Today I woke up, went to check the progress and wouldn't you know, Windows Update updated the computer and rebooted, and what I was waiting for was aborted... So fucking tiresome to use shit like this.
That's the biggest reason why I stayed on Windows 7 for so long. I could run Blender for two or three days and not give a shit. Meanwhile my friends couldn't even play a game of Factorio without Windows hijacking the computer and rebooting. There was an infamous incident years ago, early in the life of Windows 10, where members of Achievement Hunter lost half of an episode because one of the computers that recorded the audio tracks decided it had to update while they were recording. This has been going on for a decade now and shows no signs of being stopped.
I've seen people resorting to disconnecting machines from the internet to prevent this. They load up the software they need, then it never goes online again, so updates can never bother them or otherwise get in the way. The software thus stays exactly as they want it to be. It's an appliance at that point.
It's annoying to have to shuffle files over to it, if that's needed for its job, but I think it's still a worthwhile thing to consider (it's insane that we've gotten to this point, but such is life). If it isn't workable, then fine. But if it is, the hassle of shuffling files using external SSDs or whatever is probably better, or at the very least more consistent, than turning on your machine one day and finding it corrupted itself due to an update, or the software in question got a UI update which breaks your workflow for a month.
Hm, yeah, can't really disconnect it, I'm using it for (local) CI purposes as well. I could disconnect it from the internet though, keep the local connection, but maybe actually explicitly blocking anything windows/microsoft for the period I want it to stay online, might work sufficiently.
Regardless, thanks for the ideas!
> I've seen people resorting to disconnecting machines from the internet to prevent this.
The Windows Update processes were really a stubborn bunch in W10 - not sure if anything have changed in W11. These probably were given the highest privileges that made them spawn periodically outside any scheduled tasks settings somehow. Some 3rd-party tools were able to neuter most of them but these were like zombies. Continuously rising up.
Windows power / restart has gotten absolutely fucked in the last 10 years.
Hibernate? Gone by default.
Sleep? Ineffective 1/2 the time because a Microsoft utility force-wakes it.
It's sad that 15 year old Windows system was more usable than one today.
Close Windows laptop and leave it on desk, open in morning... 50/50 chance:
1. Laptop has most of its battery life still because it slept successfully and predictably
2. Laptop drained battery to 5% and only then slept
Turn off almost all outbound connections in Windows firewall, except the ones your apps actually use. Then it never gets updates unless you install them yourself.
Have you tried using a program that regularly simulates keypresses or mouse movements so the computer thinks the user is still active? The `SCROLL` key for instance can be pressed without causing unwanted side effects, but it stops my Windoze VM from going to sleep.
haha this reminds me of what I did for my speakers. They turn themselves off after about 1 and a half hours of silence. So I added a cuckoo clock chime on the hour. Problem solved.
I have not, interesting idea and I'll definitively try it out. Thanks!
There are some well-known scripts. All variants of the same pattern.
E.g. https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c... or https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/...
Scroll lock and F13 are commonly used
I much prefer an ahk script to move the mouse a few pixels periodically...
It's not just Microsoft but they do it in the one of most nastiest ways. I won't count how many times I was checking if my Windows settings weren't randomly reverted to Microsoft-safe-defaults back after updates. And I'm still doing that on iOS and Android today - at least my desktop is free of such gymnastics.
We're at such point in the software history that perhaps this should be regulated. I know that such idea isn't particularly welcomed among hn but what else there left? A blind hope that some wind of changes will do the work? I don't think so.
Truth is that nearly every commercial software and service operates with compromising user privacy by default. It's the same constant nagging up until user surrenders. All of this so someone on the top of the corporate structure could get higher bonus from statistics.
This shouldn't be tolerated.
Avast does this well. It has "do this" options for now, in an hour, in a day, and "next century".
Regularly being presented with a "Set up Windows" after boot forcing you to click "no thanks" on a bunch of Microsoft services is exactly the kind of thing that irritates me. I've politely declined their services about 10 times already, make it stop!
When I get tired of Battlefield 6 I'm likely going full Linux. It is simply not worth putting up with Microsoft Windows for gaming. More and more games seem to work either directly on Linux or at least via things like Proton (courtesy Valve Software).
I got one of those external drive enclosures for an NVMe drive after I upgraded.
The only reason I still have Windows is the little screw securing the drive into the enclosure is in the wind and I can't be bothered to find it (for backup of all of my things so I can delete windows and install linux)
You can disable that behavior in the settings app.
And then Windoze decides it knows better and optimizes your settings right back.
been on linux for a month now, i found the exit and stepped through it. the pain points change from getting shafted by m$ to doing research and learning how to make the system work. at least the second option gives me some agency, and now its all set up i wish i had of switched sooner! ive got to say valve is doing the lords work, along with all the other linux enthusiasts.
as a long time linux user, my advice is : make backups , and don't mess with your system too much. Definitely take OS updates every few months, but don't chase the perfect utopia of UX. at least, buy another computer that you tweak and test on. If you break your main PC, it's very unpleasant and frustrating to fix.
To be frank, I have always thought of "Now I switched to Linux and am happy" to be some kind of meme that appears on every Windows discussion.
Until it happened to me last month. The ads in Windows somehow popped up during important Zoom calls and I couldn't find a way to skip or switch off immediately. In addition to that, my paid version of Minecraft stopped working.
Using Windows home edition has now become rage inducing. I had a lot of patience for incompetence, but the intentional disruption of my work for making a few bucks is really something different.
Nah, not anymore - Linux is usable for ordinary daily tasks for more than 10 years now. And even gaming is in good shape thanks to Proton - that is, unless you have some particular choices which are known to not work.
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible
I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it.
I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me.
Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case.
What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else.
Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process.
Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.
From my point of view, the ideal here is something like pre-OS-X Mac OS, where the OS itself was barely even an OS and more just a substrate just complete enough to run the desktop and third party applications on.
The majority of bells and whistles (which Windows Hello falls under) were not baked into the OS, but instead implemented as system extensions that the user could disable and prevent from loading into memory at will.
This meant that even with the last release of Classic Mac OS (9.2.x), if you disabled all extensions you got a desktop reminiscent of the 1985 System 1 except with color and modern resolution support.
I think it should be more of a goal for desktop OSes to try to emulate this. If a Windows user wants a quiet no-frills Win2000 like experience except with choice exceptions like Hello, they should be able to have that without having to resort to messy hacks that impact stability and undo themselves if you update.
Windows has been “this bad” for a long time.
You had Windows ME which was a terrible, buggy OS. I don’t know a single person who didn’t lose all their data on Windows ME.
Shifting personal windows to the Windows NT foundation provided a massive relative boost, but even that took until XP SP2 to reallt settle in, which was followed by the disaster that was Vista.
Then Windows 7 came along and it was genuinely really good. Probably peak Windows.
And then you came to an actual straitjacketing of windows in Windows 8, where the entire desktop Windows ecosystem was relegated to being a single app no better than calculator in the mobile first, completely undeveloped Windows 8 interface.
Windows 10 got us back to sanity, and barring a few minor UI mishaps Windows 11 was originally a nice refinement. This was the longest stretch of Windows being decent as a personal computer. The addition of WSL (well actually it took until WSL2) made Windows competitive with Mac as a developer desktop.
That was nearly a decade of enjoyable and productive Windows. Unfortunately, now we have AI, and Windows is once again being destroyed to serve the its AI master.
The problem is that "to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run" changes when they want it to run something new. They don't care about cloud backup for their data? One hard drive failure, and suddenly they do. And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later.
But there needs to be a way to turn something off that you don't want, and to not get nagged about it repeatedly thereafter. But for that to work, there has to be a clear, easily findable way to turn it back on later.
> And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later.
The answer is: make the OS extremely modular so that the user can have configure whether he wants an absolutely minimalistic OS or something with "batteries included".
They think they know better than what the user wants. If someone who is not a power user Googles "how to turn off updates" they do not want that user to be able to find an option on how to do it, because the user won't understand the dangers. They won't read any warnings. They will follow the steps, turn it off and be part of a botnet soon. If there is ANY possible way to turn it off, someone will make a video and the people who should not find it will find it.
What if you are ACTUALLY someone who knows what they are doing and need to run a perf test over a multiple day period and need it running and uninterrupted? You can't. You are not a part of their target customer base, and at this point their actions have made it clear that they want such users to leave.
And can change their mind later. And it's clear how to change their mind later, and easy to do it.
But I really wonder, is wanting a "little OS" just a hacker thing? For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS. I don't have a solid take on this yet.
"For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS."
I don't think so. Most people just want to get to their websites or email. They don't care about the OS, and may not even know what an OS is.
The problem is that they may just click "yes" on any popups, to make them go away - which is probably what Microsoft wants. "Yes" track me, "yes" show me ads, etc.
For your average user, Xubuntu or Mint are both great choices: simple, understandable desktops, and otherwise they stay out of the way. I set up Xubuntu for my elderly BIL a few months ago. He's a smart guy, but completely non-technical. One support call since, otherwise he has reported no problems.
I think the challenge is where do you draw the line between the OS and the set of baseline applications it comes with, and then further questions on what is included in that (default?) set or how full featured they are. What is a feature of the OS? That's before considering how users discover and manage other software for activities not covered by whatever is OS provided.
serious question: What does "full featured" mean?
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
The truth is - it's more complicated than that. People want three contradictory things:
1. To not be nagged for things like setting up cloud backups.
2. To not have data sent to the cloud without consent.
3. To be able to get their data back, if their hard drive dies.
Microsoft picks 2 and 3.
Yup.
I loved working in Windows for a long time. I could get what I wanted done and move on.
Now Windows feels pointed AT ME by someone who wants to decide what I’m going to do….doesn’t care that I want to do other things.
> as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
The perfect OS/Desktop is one you don't even notice, or know is there; it just works. Macos used to be invisible, but then then some ego-driven developer decided to push Apple Glass on to everyone. HEY LOOK HOW COOL I AM!
Although at the rate of LLM improvement, I'm thinking the Next big os, will just be a really good API (gui/sound/graphics...) , you boot to a prompt screen, and then you just tell it what you want to do with the computer and it builds the apps you need from scratch.
Mac OS used to have the benefit of a more native application philosophy. So even though the OS got out of your way, all the applications felt unified and consistent with each other.
No, thank you. LLMs are great for fuzzy things. But there are still a lot of things I do on my computer that are just a few mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts away, achievable in less than 3 seconds. It'd be a disaster if that got removed.
I'm not saying the LLM would run or find apps for you, I was saying the LLM would write the application that you use every day. If you wanted something like Alfred to quickly run applications, you would just tell the LLM to build something like that specific to your use cases and without all the bloat you don't need.
Most application are done after the first or second version, and then companies keep adding features because they need to justify their jobs/product. Wouldn't it be nice to have apps that just do what you need them to do without all the bloat, maybe say, a notepad that doesn't have copilot built into it?
https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html
> perpendicularly misaligned
Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point.
Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy.
Of course, for most people things that are “parallel” would seem to be in close agreement.
> Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point.
Unless you are trying to screw your loyal users in 3 or more dimensions which seems to be the case here
> Unless you are trying to screw your loyal users in 3 or more dimensions which seems to be the case here
That made me chuckle ... good one
Right - sorry, my pattern suggests 2-dimensional thinking.
> Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy.
I do believe the OP meant to say that the incentives are orthogonal (i.e., misaligned, or 90deg to each other), and perpendicularly misaligned is a close fit.
Not sure why folks felt you should be downvoted for an heartfelt comment, an explanation is a much better feedback. Downvotes are counterproductive, IMO, if you're trying to have a debate or come to a meeting of minds, so I almost never use them anymore, except for where I detect ill-intentions.
This has been Microsoft’s playbook since the 90s. You talk about this as if it’s something new and people should have trusted them before.
90s microsoft was awesome for the user. what are you talking about? NT4, MSDN, DirectX. they weren't perfect, but the UX was amazing.
DirectX fragmented the market (it really is a pity they couldn’t work with OpenGL). But I will concede at least the API was nice from a developer perspective.
Internet Explorer did everything it could to fragment the market place with non-standard HTML tags, VBScript, ActiveX and so on and so forth.
Microsoft released their own JVM that was incompatible with Sun Java code and caused headaches for millions of people.
Win95 used shady tactics to break compatibility with Dr-DOS.
MS Chat (or whatever it was called) was the bane of public IRC servers.
Win98 locked people into IE4.
WinMe was a clusterfuck.
MS refused to allow retail stores to sell Windows if the store also sold PCs with competitors OSs. Killing any chance for BeOS and others to Compete.
Steve Ballmer referred to Linux as “communism”.
I could go on but you get the idea. Microsoft have always been a shitty company.
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
Citation needed. “As little OS as possible” would mean not having a standard clipboard, not having a standard way to install fonts, etc.
Even interpreting that as “all the functionality, but limit applications to utilities for managing the hardware”, I think there people who want that, but I doubt that’s what people, in general, want. Having to choose (and, likely, pay for) a photo manager, a simple word processor, etc. is just too much of a hassle for many.
Also, why would any commercial entity develop such an OS? The margin is in the
The margin is in the exact place where players on the market left it. With macOS being free but paid by expensive hardware, and Windows having practiced hiding in OEM to be popular rather than to bring money, expectations have been set. It's entirely these companies' doing, not an immutable reality that's impossible to overcome.
I will not stop using a demanding tone for my expectations towards companies which can't deliver on them, because they shat their bed years ago and have to now deal with that. The fact that your uncompetitive practices caught up with you does not constitute a reason for me to shed a tear for you and to tap over your shoulder in sympathy.
Hacker News Guidelines #19:
There is a huge difference between having a text editor included and running it by default on startup to pretend fast launches.
And then there is the whole world of nearly impossible to avoid 'services' you realy do not want but will keep popping up regardless of your wishes ('Telemetry', Onedrive, Copilot, Edge, Recall, Bing adds in the start menu ffs...).
Let us also not forget being forced into a Microsoft account against your wishes ... does it still feel like it's your computer?
> “As little OS as possible” would mean not having a standard clipboard, not having a standard way to install fonts, etc.
There can be other equally valid interpretations than your own, it's probably best to not have dogmatic views like this.
Linux would need to be willing to safe the work millions of people put into memorizing excel, word and windows workflows.
“Linux” needs to do nothing of the sort.
People who want to save their work by moving to a platform without those issues need to be willing to either do the work or pay for it.
I've never read a more archpilled comment
"i hate how the current system is, i see some other guys have something that doesnt have these issues, what the other system needs to do is make their system exactly like my current, so that I dont need to spend ANY effort myself"
few moments later
"i hate how the current system is"
"We should throw away the gdp of the us for a year or two so people can then have the same productivity" year of the le nukes desktop
Linux is doing just fine without normies.
The normies are what makes Microslop money, though. We need to get the normies onboard in order to fight MS' stranglehold on computing. Gatekeeping isn't the right move here.
I can't delete my comment now, but I think you're right. I don't consider "take it or leave it" to be gatekeeping, but when the world's biggest corporations pose a threat to software liberty, distros becoming more palatable to average users is strictly a good thing.
Not that I'm even involved with distro development anyway. Probably would've been better to let the real OS engineers have the discussion on that one.
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> Linux would need to be willing to safe the work millions of people put into memorizing excel, word and windows workflows.
It's a fair point. Organizational and personal inertia is a real thing.
Maybe think of it as going through a divorce and entering a new relationship. You do it mostly because you want to, and sometimes you do it because you have to.
OS as a digital spouse analogy? too far-fetched? think of how much time you spend with it in a day :-)
Libre Office (and a couple others) is pretty close to MsOffice. Not exact, but close.
Not for people who use Excel professionally, not even close. Excel is undefeated.
It even got ribbon interface not so long ago - it's pretty pretty close, at least by UI
Executive management at MS must be seeing interesting (migration) numbers on their dashboards, so they've gotten involved in white-washing their reputation without changing business strategy, hence the executive-level manifestos and platitudes coming out as of late.
I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consumers becomes even more important, but the first attempt will be at improving reputation without changing business strategy (ads, data monetization, ai are the future revenue drivers). And only if that fails will the business strategy change.
Posted this originally as a reply to a comment, but I think it should be its own top-level comment.
They went all in on pretending to care about quality since the MacBook Neo. The numbers they're seeing must be terrifying.
> They went all in on pretending to care about quality since the MacBook Neo. The numbers they're seeing must be terrifying.
Yeah. Worldwide Neo sales at 5 million units + production raise to 10 million? [1] Even if only 50% of those are US consumers, add to that the number of folks switching over to linux [4]; and suddenly that's not small potatoes, considering there are only about 162 million working folks in the US.
There are only about 50 million folks at 100+ employees, and 16 million at 1000+ employees in private firms. [2]
All these folks switching over? Once they get comfy with non-Windows OSes, they'll ask for those at work. And at the smaller employers - 100 or less employees or even 1000 or less employees, that won't be hard to support, especially if one or two management types make the switch and drive the change.
You have to read a bit between the lines, but an estimate is that 35-50 million have access to Google Workspace at work, and 25-40 million paid Google Workspace users. [3]
And Azure? same number problems, and there seems to be a general discontent with the way things are going with cloud.
Combined with the EU/Worldwide decoupling, suddenly that MS moat isn't looking so deep. It's easy to imagine an inflection point at which MS becomes the minority OS provider, even in the US. The Kodak-ization of Microsoft.
On Nadella's watch, no less. Should we expect a change in leadership soon? Either Nadella deciding to do something different with his time or the Board pushing for a change? They've both got to be seeing the same numbers we are, plus additional insight based on internal metrics.
A Perfect Storm, if you will.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/macbook-ne...
[2] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/susb.html
[3] https://expertinsights.com/saas-app-security/google-workspac...
[4] updated to reflect that [1] has global sales numbers based on feedback from responses below.
Those production numbers for the Neo are global and from unnamed supply chain sources. I'm not sure why you brought the US workforce population into the equation as that mixes up scales, nor is there a 1:1 relationship between people and computers (I have 5 x86 systems and 2 M-series laptops in my home between work and personal use).
Lenovo shipped roughly 16m units in Q1 2026 at #1, with Apple shipping roughly 6m in the same timeframe at #4, WW. [0]
Linux is hardly a blip and even the Steam survey #s back that up if you want to be targeted towards a particular audience. It's a lot of noise in forums like this, not so much on the general street. Windows overall gaining ~1.1% with Linux overall declining ~0.8% (and macOS continuing to be poorly represented for obvious reasons) in April.
[0] https://www.idc.com/resource-center/press-releases/1q26-pc-t...
> Those production numbers for the Neo are global and from unnamed supply chain sources.
Good point. Fixed.
> Linux is hardly a blip and even the Steam survey #s back that up
The IDC link doesn't provide Linux numbers. These links [1][2] do; [2] backs up the numbers you're quoting. The trouble is how to interpret them in context - are the 1% changes per OS on a monthly basis even statistically significant?
The statcounter numbers show desktop share for linux as 5.2% in December, 2.8% in February, 3.1% in March, 2.63% in April. Chrome OS as 4.3%, OS X as 15%, macOS as 8.8%. There's an interesting huge peak for OS X in Oct 2025, Linux in Dec 2025, macOS in Jan '26, with 'unknown' showing a continuous rise to 9.4% in April. Even Windows is showing monthly variations with 58% at the lowest and 65% at peak.
I don't know what to make of those numbers. And how do you separate that from the ebbs and flows to Steam and Statcounter properties?
I think one can make a case for 7 million Linux users in the US, with 18 million if including Chrome OS. Now throw in say 50% of the Neo worldwide buyers, so say 2.5 million (to grow to 5 million at new production levels), and the analysis holds up. What's even more important is the trend - and that seems to be on the upswing, and may not be showing up in these measurements quite yet. And I'm sure MS has internal dashboards showing windows users in some detail.
Linux users are notoriously hard to measure. macOS users are not broken out by country. So that leaves us reading the tea leaves, so to speak, based on sales numbers and estimates on the US breakdown.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
The Linux numbers went up because Valve did a better job of cleaning the results from the skewed Chinese data.
For what it's worth, Framework sells more of its new Pro line with Ubuntu than with Windows.
Your first point seems flawed: Apple production numbers are to supply markets worldwide. All the other numbers focus on the US only. That alone makes the threat at the OS level evaporate. Lenovo reportedly sells around 50 million units per year, Dell is at 25 million. 5 to 10 million units is tiny.
> Your first point seems flawed: Apple production numbers are to supply markets worldwide.
That's a good point. Still, assuming 50% US sales since US purchasing power is still relatively higher and Apple penetration in RoW is lower, it's not an order-of-magnitude difference, so the analysis is still useful. An additional indicator is that MS themselves are taking high-level executive action, so they're worried about something.
they can not compete with that level of hardware and Apple and they know it too
So I moved from Win 11 to Fedora Workstation some months back. I dual-booted back into Windows once or twice to check something, to upgrade my audio receiver with a serial port, that sort of stuff.
Everyone talks about execs monitoring metrics. What sort of metric would I have registered as? You see a desktop that's on 24/7 suddenly going offline. There's no way these people find out indirectly that I'm now using Linux on the same hardware. What are they going to do, somehow correlate my user agent string when I hit one of their websites or SSO endpoints? I mean, it's possible but I am wondering how much of this topic is wish fulfillment fantasy.
> What sort of metric would I have registered as?
Monthly average user. Uptime for Win 11. Uptime not counting screensaver. Uptime for non-enterprise consumer. If you were a Win 11 enterprise user, then Uptime for enterprise users. Unique hardware indicators - number of distinct PCs in Win 11 ecosystem, separated from new activations. And I'm sure a few others that I haven't thought of.
Declining stats on these measures indicate a problem somewhere in the Win 11 ecosystem. Combine with competitor indicators like sales, and other Win ecosystem OSes.
A single person switching probably doesn't do much to move the indicators. But as a collective?
Considering Win11 being, well, Win11, I wouldn't be surprised if they were sending partition tables of hard drives to detect other OSes.
They won't be able to detect which Linux distro it is that way, but they'd definitely know it's ext4 or whatnot, which heavily implies Linux.
Yes for sure. My point is they won't know if I moved to Mac, Linux or just a Chromebook, or just decided to stop using a desktop PC.
They'll notice if no Windows machines phone home from your IP address anymore. It doesn't matter so much what you switched to, more that you're no longer giving Microsoft those sweet, sweet KPIs
If a decent number of people migrate away, it would definitely show up in aggregate: Windows Update traffic, for example. Or sales of Windows-specific software/subscriptions. It doesn't require correlated tracking at an individual customer level to see the broader trend.
Losing market share to ChromeOS and Apple has to be the most significant and obvious hit. The Steam Deck and second generation Steam Machines are also likely to nibble away at the edges.
I am not a Mac person, I actually hate a lot of how they operate. Yet, if a tech-illiterate friend were looking for advice, I would likely steer them towards those computer appliances so as to avoid Microsoft's nonsense.
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> We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Great! We've progressed back to Windows XP of 22 years ago.
Great, this is actual progress. Now it would be amazing if "Update and Shut Down" would actually update and shut down, instead of doing so like 50% of the time with the other 50% just updating and restarting with an actual shut down. (This is on various very diverse machines so I'm rather sure is common, and not just an interaction with a particular machine).
It's baffling that a company like MS can leave this kind of obvious problems lingering for months.
They recently acknowledged and fixed this issue. I can personally confirm it hasn't happened to me since the update.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-fixes-update-and-shut-d...
Great to know. I would say that it happened to me more recently but it may have been in machines that had been unused for some months and ran an old version.
According to the link, it "only" took them 5 years to solve the bug. Better late than ever though, I guess :)
This behaviour really trumped me when I was working on a friends Windows-11 PC on the new year. My Family Big-Home PC (> a decade old) still has Win-10 since it cannot upgrade, so I was confused at WTF was happening. I could not believe Microsoft had actually broken this.
For me it never updates and shutdown. It always just updates and restarts.
> You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
What's the other way around? "Updates decide when you happen"?
Sounds like part of a Yakov Smirnoff joke.
Updates decide when your work happens.
Microsoft doesn't allow its users even to reboot the computer without permission?
It only shows "Update and shut down" (which is a lie as it still will reboot) or "Update and reboot.
I think all this was a response to severely outdated Windows machines being infected with worms and what not. Microsoft got bad press for this and went (way) overboard with trying to force users to install updates as soon as released.
Update and shutdown was fixed in Oct '25.
https://windowsforum.com/threads/windows-11-update-and-shut-...
I wonder whether it has to do with the actual installation being in progress in the background. There is probably a time window in some updates where an interruption leaves the OS in a bad state.
That doesn't justify it because the user should still be able to decide when to initiate it. People are ok with not interrupting the update if they get to choose when it starts.
I hope a miracle happens and it keeps progressing until we have Windows XP 2.
It fascinates me to speculate about who this is for. At least among people I've talked to, the ones who still want windows (instead of the obvious alternatives) cite wanting things to "just work", often claiming that they "don't want making the computer work to become a second job" or similar. I personally don't think these preferences reflect the reality of how much effort using e.g. a linux distro is in this day and age, to be clear, but these are the beliefs I encounter. Are there really people who want to deal with providing feedback and stress testing an operating system and its various software components and features, but doing this for a corporation that sets the terms of their transparency efforts and ultimately does this for profit and will still grab the reins and exert control against their users' will when they feel like it?
Windows insider builds have always been for people who like being on the cutting edge, it's the same as people who run nightlies for Linux.
Some people just enjoy testing and the pain that comes with it.
Right, but it's hard not to claim those people would likely get more out of an OS they could customize more, and also that it's considerably more exploitative of those people across the divide of corporate product versus community project
Sometimes it’s just about using the path of least resistance. I’ve also contributed to Apple Maps’ and Google Maps’ data, even though I’d prefer to exclusively contribute to OSM and other open platforms instead. But, it was just easier to go through a quick form in the (Apple|Google) Maps app, because that’s where I was at that point in time. Maybe the excuse is laziness and/or force of habit?
Edit: I also imagine the reach of the mainstream platforms to be much higher (e.g. Windows vs. Linux or Google Maps user reviews vs. <is there even an alternative?>).
Except nightlies for Linux don't typically include user-hostile, lock-in motivated, changes.
> obvious alternatives
First of all, in many countries outside of EU/US it's just not possible to buy laptop without preinstalled Windows 11 (except Apple). For example, even if a model supports Linux in the US as many Lenovo Thinkpads do, in Singapore it's just not sold without Windows.
Second, Microsoft has broken sleep with pushing S0 sleep in UEFI. Bettery life is shit now, and hibernate is disabled by default in most OS. Also, hibernate in Linux is a complete disaster comparing to windows one (windows presaves memory to disk continuously, while in linux you have to wait until the whole ram (+ vram, if gpu) is saved/restored). It takes time. Sleep s3 is needed, but Microsoft killed it. So linux is really a bad choice for laptop. But Windows 11 is much worse, especially if you don't really like ads.
I don't really understand the rationale behind disabling S3 sleep...
Was it simply that getting every device and driver to properly support it was hard, so the easiest option was to remove it and have the machine always powered up?
Probably to improve some manager's KPI (updates) and also to make using laptops under other OS hard (ok, there's almost no other OS than Linux).
> in many countries outside of EU/US it's just not possible to buy laptop without preinstalled Windows 11
Wipe and install something else. Previously you would just have been eating the OS license cost paid, and the benefit was taking control and supporting the free-as-in-freedom ecosystem.
But now the additional benefits are that you'll be preventing them from monetizing your data on an ongoing basis, denying data for training ai, and enhancing your privacy, so it's economically justifiable too.
True. I have Fedora and FDE, if I enter Hibernate it's a crash on bext boot.
> Microsoft has broken sleep with pushing S0 sleep in UEFI
> Sleep s3 is needed, but Microsoft killed it.
Would you or someone else here mind explaining this?
ACPI defines power state of power-saving capable offbrand fake IBM computers(among other things, and also the "fake IBM" part is almost completely moot at this point).
ACPI power state S0 is everything running. S1 pauses CPU and CPU I/O bus. S2 puts CPU to reset. S3 cuts power to CPU. S4 cuts off everything(not actual power off). S5 cuts off everything(actual power off).
S3 and S4 are often referred to as Sleep and Hibernation. In Sleep, RAM contents are kept as-is, and sleep handling code just restore CPU internal states that gets lost. In Hibernation, OS usually dump RAM contents to disk, and write back to RAM upon bootup - S4 and S5 aren't always clearly separated and both Windows and Linux tend to go through standard boot processes, then do the state resume using RAM dump they find on disk.
For SOME reason, Microsoft forced laptop vendors to quit supporting S3 in favor of their custom "S0iX" state, which is more or less just machine running at full power, which can be extremely wasteful as far as sleep state goes.
The official explanation for this pressuring is that everybody want notification and this is the only way Windows could possibly handle notifications. A lot are skeptical about that.
1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/k...
The bit we all care about: S3 is sleep mode proper. Most everything is physically powered off, only enough is kept on to keep contents of RAM alive.
S0 is.. just on. The PC is completely powered up. Microsoft has done this so that they can force your computer to wake itself up to install updates you don't want. Literally you aren't allowed to turn off your computer because some middle manager needs to see update stats go up. If your computer happens to be in a bag and cooks itself to death, well that's your problem. Fuck you for trying to keep Microsoft's statistics down.
> hibernate in Linux is a complete disaster comparing to windows one
Part of this is that hibernation can't be cancelled mid way, which is dumb. Ideally a computer is like a light switch - you can turn it on and off instantly whenever. To get closer to that, if you turn it off, but then immediately on again, the hibernation should be cancelled and return you to your desktop.
Also, the whole idea of a 'hibernation image' which is read from disk in one huge 10+ second read is best for hard drives. Now that everyone uses SSD, it should all be demand-paged in.
> Are there really people who want to deal with providing feedback and stress testing an operating system and its various software components
Feedback is there on their feedback site. They just wouldn't listen.
Why would they use windows and not macos for "just working" ? Even office moved to web for most companies
I love macOS for a "just working" OS but I wouldn't think people spending a lot of time using Office would prefer the Web versions. They are just (by definition) sluggish, like most web apps are. Use the native apps, whether it's on Windows or Mac.
> cite wanting things to "just work", often claiming that they "don't want making the computer work to become a second job"
I feel this way, yet I've used Linux on the desktop for a decade before, even selecting my hardware for compatibility. Yet even when using "stable" distros like Ubuntu, it did require maintenance regularly. With more hyped distros like Arch it was constant. Sure I was always able to fix it, but I had to do it.
I installed Windows back when I started having kids. I just don't have the time and mental space anymore to dedicate to fixing the OS regularly. I need to be able to let updates happen and not wonder whether I need to have 20 minutes free afterwards to fix something.
I used to daily drive Windows 10 for many months before official release. It was great. I wish I could stay on development builds that still had Windows 7 style Start menu.
Sadly now I use Windows 11 just because manufacturer of my laptop didn't bother to ensure that their sound driver worked corrctly on Windows 10.
My mouse lags for seconds when gpu is busy, even with something as trivial as alt-tabbing from a game.
Windows 11 is what happens when no one speaks up at product team meetings. People nod their heads, get on with the build and the marketing team decides they want another 40 hooks into customer data for monetization.
Windows 11 today is a spectacular example of customer disrespect and disregard. MS believes it can manage with enterprise customer revenue alone. Well, best of luck with that, even enterprises are getting fed up.
Windows is what happens when there are too many cooks in the kitchen, without a single authority figure, ultimately responsible for maintaining the OS (and only the OS), guarding against and saying no to all attempts to leech the user base.
I literraly can’t name one feature since Windows 7 what was worth it, even on the contrary: every update made the system worse.
I had to restore Notepad, Calculator and Paint from Windows 7. What the hell Microsoft?
I can name features, but everything I can think of are technical features rather than obvious surface level stuff: DX12, better support for SSDs (Windows 7 doesn't natively support TRIM), HDR (I guess, but it still seems broken to me). And none of these are things that couldn't be implemented in Windows 7. The UI has nothing to do with these things, and there's no reason we couldn't have them without the trouble Windows 10/11, other than the fact that MS doesn't want to do things that way.
> I guess, but it still seems broken to me
You would be correct. It uses a wrong tone curve (piecewise-sRGB vs gamma 2.2/2.4) which makes the darks look off: https://github.com/dylanraga/win11hdr-srgb-to-gamma2.2-icm
This was true at least as of 2023-25 when last checked, having been super annoyed by HDR just looking flat out wrong on my PC vs my Mac (which is probably the only OS that gets everything right given their large audience of Creative/visual professionals and mobile experience).
On Windows 11, when you reconnect to a monitor or set of monitors that you've connected to before, it will automatically return your open windows to the layout across those monitors that you had when you last disconnected (assuming those windows are still open).
This is extremely nice and saves me time on a literally (not figuratively) daily basis, to the point that I generally forget that it hasn't always worked that way.
I wish this worked! I have to go to the office on my hybrid schedule. When I switch between home and office, Windows is "smart" enough to keep the windows on the correct window in the task bar while generally placing the windows on the opposite window where I want it (and literally opposite where it is on the task bar!) It's so annoying and I dread the days I'm switching between office and home for this reason, as I have to drag each window to the opposing window before things are back to how I want them. It would be less bad the old way, where they were just stupidly thrown on the "primary" monitor and I only had to drag half of them over.
"Well, they turned the entire OS into a tracking, sales and ad/propaganda delivery service, but they managed to make a single feature non-dumb, so guess we're even."
(propaganda - Windows 11 default widgets are "offering" a lot of russian-biased media, because Microsoft is too dumb to recognize that and they take any news source - and russian connected outlets are happy to use this delivery vector that most gullible people leave turned on)
I don't think that any of the news-oriented default Windows application since W8 had an option to provide a custom RSS channel. It was always a default pool of sources they were bringing.
For my dual monitors, they have a conflict with this feature where they do not detect signal and then switch inputs and eventually power down. Then windows sees a different config and switches again causing an endless spiral. I have to turn both monitors on to the correct input while plugging in the laptop to the dock. I wish there was a way to save specific monitor setups and manually toggle them.
Yet when I switch between home and work I have to fully restart my laptop about half the time in order for it to even detect the monitors. I also find this feature has an issue with certain programs (Obsidian in particular) where it opens the window almost off screen.
Have you tried restarting your dock instead? I have had some luck with this when detection goes awry.
Even aside from the malevolence, Windows is rotten from the thirty-year old metaphor that it started with: windows themselves. The job of positioning and resizing applications is a confusing mix of responsibility between the user and the system.
Once you've switched to tiled window managers, examples like these sound like Stockholm Syndrome.
Windows has plenty of tiling utilities built for it, i.e. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon..., or even the built-in Windows Snap which can be driven by mouse or keyboard, along with using pre-defined layouts.
I hate tiling window managers. After I start a program, I move and resize its window to the perfect position, and it stays there for weeks. I don't ever want it to be moved or resized automatically, which is what tiling window managers do by default.
I will offer that you can resize/move/float in most tiling managers. Remembering your modifications is usually possible too. It's the default behavior that separates the experience.
It sounds like you’re both agreeing that windows should be controlled by either the user OR the OS, not both.
I can't see a practical world where the OS doesn't need to take control of window positioning in certain situations. As a core example, there is full screen. Minimize is another, but that doesn't have a clean analogue in the tiled universe.
There's a natural strong reaction folks have to window managers, because it forces you to mentally remap at such a foundational level.
I prefer tiled managers because the user offloads most responsibility. Open something and by default it uses as much space as is available. If you have a special need, you can float or resize, but the vast majority of cases it makes the right call.
At heart, it's offloading cognitive load. They're more predictable and require less faffing around.
> This is extremely nice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bird_in_a_Gilded_Cage
Windows sometimes thinks I'm running 640x480 display upon wake from sleep and smashes all of my windows into the top left corner. Very helpful.
So, to sum it up:
DirectX 12, better SSD support, HDR, restoring window layout when reconnecting monitors, WPA3, DNS over HTTPS, WSL2, Windows Sandbox, per monitor DPI scaling, QUIC, dark mode/tabs/previous session/better encoding in Notepad, Windows Terminal.
All these sound really nice to be honest. The things I want my OS to get.
The only problem is: these are the improvements what this OS got in the last 20 years, not last year. Microsoft is a $3T company.
Is even one of these unique to windows
I can’t tell if this is serious or sarcasm.
WPA3, DNS over HTTPS, WSL2, Windows Sandbox, Per monitor DPI scaling, QUIC, DirectX 12. The list can be made pretty long.
Funny that you mention wsl as a great windows feature - the ability to get out of windows.
Wine is a great thing on Linux too…
Wine -> Running Windows programs on Linux
WSL -> Running Linux VM inside of Windows
Wine is more like emulating Windows API behavior on Linux, while WSL is Microsoft throwing their hands in the air and saying "Lets just VM Linux wholesale".
Both aim to avoid Windows, neither replace Linux but instead tries to move more to Linux.
>Both aim to avoid Windows, neither replace Linux but instead tries to move more to Linux.
I don't agree: WSL is an attempt to use programs developed for Linux in Windows. It is clearly for people who want to use Linux programs but don't want the headache of setting up Linux or dual booting.
> WSL is an attempt to use programs developed for Linux in Windows.
Then I'd think it be available as a "right-click > Launch Linux Program" or something like that, like WSL1, rather than the VM approach WSL2 takes which gives you entire environment. Even Microsoft themselves market WSL like that:
> Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/
I agree with your last part though, it's for people who want to use Linux without the headache of dual-booting or managing their own VMs, so they use predefined packaged VMs ala WSL instead.
I guess I was more contesting that WSL is for people to get away from Windows, when it is actually the other way around; it reduces the friction between tools developed to only work on Linux and Windows users, so that the Windows user can stay using just Windows. Back when I used Windows, this was always a point of contention for installing most dev related apps, and trying to use MinGW was such a pain (WSL was broken on my computer then due to Hyper-V being BIOS disabled). I used Linux now on my main computer, but I recently tried WSL on a family member's computer and I can see how if you just do all dev work in WSL, you would never have to go through the process of migrating to an entirely new OS and still get all of the benefits.
Yet again, because it helps avoid windows.
If I run WSL it’s because I try to avoid Linux - but I want to run something that needs a Linux environment. I think the argument about what’s avoiding what is pretty strange.
WSL is a great feature and was a part of Windows 10.
WSL1 seemed great, until it wasn't. Then WSL2 came along, which is just a VM and works identical to VirtualBox et al. Still huge hassle to deal with various things that get confused when you run it in a "Linux-but-not-really-but-also-Windows" environment.
Better to just go straight to what you actually want, which seems to be a proper Linux distribution, everything just works as expected then.
So you install an launcher to run linux. Ditch the launcher i'd say.
For all its problems, WSL is the single greatest power feature that Windows has ever had.
Debian itself is a superpower.
WSL 1 was a piece of garbage.
WSL 2 is supposed to be a VM ... all problems solved ... until they aren't.
Hint: try to use normal USB stuff natively (Linux) in WSL 2 ...
WSL sounded great, until it didn’t.
It’s still not so easy to use, plus they ditched it anyway for VM solution.
Tabs on notepad and file explorer are extremely nice.
I can't believe it took them 20 years to add them, but at least they're finally here.
I used to run all three major OS' where I saw no real difference in me using it for the apps etc I needed. As I leaned more heavily on the development side, linux kind of prevailed. Windows 8.1 and Yosemite were the last of the other two I've used for real. Never had to look back to other two since, be it for work, games or whatever.
Even occasional need for Adobe things stopped. I would still really like to see Adobe suite on linux, but if they don't want my money that's cool too I guess. I suspect the software tools people use for work is what's holding them back mostly, like Altium, CADs etc. Funnily enough, Microsoft office is just fine without OS native version most of the time.
This may be unpopular, but they made three legitimately GOOD changes to Notepad, before they went absolutely batshit.
- Dark mode
- Tabs
- "Continue previous session" (restore after restart)
But they also made a HUGE regression which isn't talked about enough:
- Previously, if you delete the underlying file, Notepad didn't "notice." Meaning you could Save to recreate it. The file existed in an ephemeral state, as long as the Notepad window remained open. Right now, if you delete the underlying file, Notepad notices immediately, errors out, and closes that tab -- content gone.
VSCode handles this correctly, it puts a line through the filename in the tab (and red-font), but doesn't close the tab on you suddenly. Ephemeral state retained.
In my ideal world Notepad needs exactly ONE new feature:
- Right Click Tab: "Copy Path."
Then just REMOVE: Spell Checker, Formatting, CoPilot, Markdown(!), and Autocorrect. Completely inappropriate functionality for Notepad, and the Vibecoded Markdown implementation already added a security vulnerability(!) to freaking Notepad. Branch off into a product called "Wordpad" and then create all of that garbage in there.
Notepad also understands line endings and text encodings now, instead of always writing as CRLF UTF-16. That eliminates a whole class of “save file in notepad, corrupting it” trouble.
Windows terminal
I wouldn’t say Windows Terminal is great. Have you ever used a proper one, like Ghostty or iTerm2?
Neither Ghostty nor iTerm2 work on Windows.
Yeah, I thought it was an odd couple of recommendations. Alacritty is an awesome terminal emulator that'll run on Windows (although I'd say Windows Terminal is still pretty close to decent)
I never said they are. I just stated, they are better than Windows Terminal.
It's because iTerm2 incorporates AI in it, amirite? ;-)
Not sure what you mean. I’ve never used any AI features in a terminal.
Did you restore Internet Explorer from Windows 7?
It seems uncontroversial that the state of web browsers is improved since Win 7
Being able to search for the names of specific settings is a plus, typing "env ..." so I can add something to PATH for example.
Snipping tool.
Some WINKEY+arrows combos for arranging windows.
The new terminal.
How did you do this?
I tried to get notepad and mspaint from an older Windows 10 build -> Windows 11 on a surface pro, but gave up after a few hours...
AutoHDR is nifty and useful
They talk about improving memory footprint and performance, but simply removing (or making optional) the massive amount of cruft and telemetry in a default Windows 11 install would go miles.
Installing Tiny11 and then running a debloat over its corpse results in a much faster and less memory hungry default clean install.
> They talk about improving memory footprint and performance, but simply removing (or making optional) the massive amount of cruft and telemetry in a default Windows 11 install would go miles.
Executive management at MS must be seeing interesting (migration) numbers on their dashboards, so they've gotten involved in white-washing their reputation without changing business strategy, hence the executive-level manifestos and platitudes coming out as of late.
I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consumers becomes even more important, but the first attempt will be at improving reputation without changing business strategy (ads, data monetization, ai are the future revenue drivers). And only if that fails will the business strategy change.
Cruft can be removed yes but the telemetry is literally how they measure quality. Their metrics of whether it’s good or not is the status of telemetry on a given device set and figuring out root cause. So they can’t easily roll back the telemetry without a massive rethink in their quality strategy
> So they can’t easily roll back the telemetry without a massive rethink in their quality strategy
Given how that strategy has gone, that sounds like a great idea.
Along with this, which is how nearly every major piece of software works today, removing telemetry likely wouldn't have a measurable impact on performance or memory usage. Those aren't heavy subsystems.
Have you got some before and after numbers for this?
> You want to see what we’re doing, understand our decisions, and see progress through shipping. Second, a shared sense of pride.
So basically: - recent changes are all crap - so why did you make them?
Because mortages need paid, and when you’re working as a programmer, you deliver what the top brass wants
Microslop: In service revenue and shareholder dividends we trust.
[flagged]
More likely: "People needed to get promotion packages, don't you understand?!"
I would guess many of the bad changes are caused by perverse incentives which do not even help shareholder value.
My mental model remains that the Windows team is mostly governed by designers on Macs who want to see a user-visible change to get their promo and never use Windows.
There's no amount of progress that will make me go back to Windows.
1. Microsoft accounts. No. 2. Ads in my OS. No. 3. Slow copying of files. No. 4. A maddening mix of UI/UX paradigms and implementations. No. 5. AI deeply embedded in my OS. No.
I don't know wtf their design team is doing.
> I don't know wtf their design team is doing.
They're doing what management/business-strategy is asking them to do.
Not even the MBA types would mess things up this bad, it feels like Microslop is now full of programmers that make something and just ship it, no thought or any brain cells involved.
> it feels like Microslop is now full of programmers that make something and just ship it
I just don't see that happening in an Agile (the tech software dev term) workplace - it's got to be clueless Product Managers driving this. And even those folks have to answer to their management.
Tying it back to what's happening at the broader business level over the past few months - see this comment of mine [1] - there's got to be some degree of chaos at the business strategy level, and that's showing up at our consumer level.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47996910
I like how there are still two control panel UIs after... Five years now?
> The theme is simple: fewer disruptions, more clarity, more control. This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates, and gives you more flexibility to time updates around your schedule. We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Finally, like seriously, so many times I have to "shutdown" (aka restart) for an update before going to bed. I don't want to have to babysit my desktop computer when I want to finish up for the night.
You can just turn it off at the socket or hold down the power button. It usually doesn’t break anything
> Second, a shared sense of pride. We want to be proud of what we build...
Yep, that's marketing. You don't care about your users.
I guess their intent was to instil a sense of pride and accomplishment for those who’ve sunk intangible investments into their platform.
Yes, they do admit that.
> a broader shift to make AI in Windows more intentional and realign the experiences to those that provide the most value to users
To be fair they are claiming a shift away from their previous policy of not aligning the product to provide value to users...
> realign the experiences to those that provide the most value to users
Aside from the fact that nobody actually takes what Microsoft says seriously (they are professional bullshitters [with full time PR firms perfecting their bullshit] and have been for 30 years), it's funny that even this line can be reasonably interpreted as pushing more blatant nonsense onto consumers as long as it's what C-suite types think they should be paying for.
Notice that what provides the most value to users is not at all necessarily the same thing as'what our users want'. And it isn't even clear that Microsoft is thinking of consumer users here as opposed to corporate users and corporate IT departments, which are in most cases these days their actually direct customers. Most home user consumers don't pay for Windows directly.
Seeing what happen to Windows since W7, I'm not sure where would that pride come from.
Or perhaps this should be read as proud of the whole Windows up until this time - if so, then there's even less to be proud of.
>We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Multiple times I've wanted to shutdown my laptop so I can go home and Windows says no, sit here for 5 minutes.
I don't trust sleep mode to not keep running and overheat, so I wait.
Macbooks with 1TB drives are getting cheaper every day. Music production on Linux isn't really practical. A lot of this stuff barely runs on Windows/OSX.
Competition is great. But this is about the Mac Neo( and left over M4 Macs crashing in price ). Desktop Linux is still a challenge.
I consider myself an advanced Linux user, and it still took me an hour this morning to figure out how to get a VPN to work on Open Suse.
> I don't trust sleep mode to not keep running and overheat, so I wait.
People have been expressing their dissatisfaction at Windows Updates strategy for so long - Modern Standby was so badly implemented it basically cooked laptops in bags and while leaving users wondering what was happening. I had to reflow a laptop because of it.
> Macbooks with 1TB drives are getting cheaper every day.
Also high-speed external storage is very accessible now - so having large built in storage for your DAW isn't really necessary. The 1 USB 3 port on the MacBook Neo is more than fast enough for this.
> Music production on Linux isn't really practical.
I would somewhat disagree with this. Linux has much better low-latency, multi application audio support than Windows & Mac now (via JACK) and some pretty incredible native DAWs like Bitwig - so the moat certainly isn't as large as it used to be. I would say it's practical if your workflow doesn't require features of Mac/Windows or tools specific to those platforms.
As impractical as it would be for normal users - even Ableton works pretty well under WINE.
> Competition is great. But this is about the Mac Neo( and left over M4 Macs crashing in price ). Desktop Linux is still a challenge.
I think between this and they've maybe had a bit of a scare from Valve and SteamOS - because that's historically been one of their other big moats. They kicked off a similar initiative to make Windows nicer for gamers back in December.
I agree that desktop Linux is still a challenge - it's better than it used to be and you can get away without a terminal now if you're just doing basic Internet/Office tasks. In a lot of places the UX can get pretty gnarly.
A lot of VSTs really don't work well with Wine. I also really just don't want to fight with wine. I haven't had a good experience with it outside of gaming via Steam.
I hate external drives with a passion. Unless the computer itself is stationary, like a Mac Mini.
My current setup is a 400$ laptop plus a 2 TB I brought for about 100$.
It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.
If I move on from this, it's straight to a 1TB Macbook. You have a degree of assurance things will work on a Mac.
On Windows and Linux no one knows why your audio isn't working.
With Apple ONE company is responsible.
Most people never install an OS. So unless valve or someone comes out with a $400 Linux book, Linux is going to remain a niche OS.
However, I do believe Linux can grant a lot of "obsolete" Windows laptops a second life. I'd love to donate to a charity that rehabs old Windows laptops with Linux.
For light programming, and email, a 100$ used laptop off eBay is probably enough. At 250$ I've seen a lot of very capable machines.
> My ask of you: try the experiences, pressure test them, and let’s keep building a product we are proud of.
Translated: We fired our Quality Assurance. You are the QA now.
I was at Microsoft for that particular transition but it is still wild to me that a post about improving quality starts with details about windows insiders.
Only if that QA in form of "enthusiastic" Windows Insiders would actually result in something
By changing two settings in Windows, you can fix the worst of it.
Using a local group policy, you can change when "Preview builds and Feature updates" and "Quality Updates" become available in Windows Update.
By delaying those with 30 or 60 days, you will never have preview updates applied to your system, and feature and quality updates will have at least 1 or 2 months' worth of fixes before you get them.
start > run > gpedit.msc > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Manage updates offered from Windows Update >
1) Enable "Select when preview builds and feature updates are received". Set days to 60
2) Enable "Select when quality updates are received". Set days to 30 (max value)
I don't know if you realize it but your post single-handedly demonstrates a lot of the reasons why Windows is bad ...
When people cricitize Linux there's always people responding "it's simple really, just run this super long command and do this and that".. looks like the same thing to me.
That's actually why I started using Linux.
I hated that Linux has all these commands you had to go through, then I installed Windows 11 and tutorials were telling me run all these commands to fix it. I figure I'd just use Linux at that point.
> I hated that Linux has all these commands you had to go through
Was this still your experience though? I am using Fedora on GNOME and I rarely have to use the terminal. I like to use it but if you don't want to, you don't have to. There is a graphical installer, settings panel, software center, file manager, disk utility software, etc.
Similarly, people love to talk up MacOS while paying $30 per tool to fix basic issues.
Every OS is utterly terrible right now. Linux is free at least and the work Valve has put into it has dramatically improved the normal person experience.
At first they ridicule people with general disrespect, privacy violations and ads in Start Menu, then they expect the same people to treat them seriously. That's a cognitive dissonance right there, and now they have to live with it. Psychotherapy may help.
It's fascinating that one of the top features insiders are interested in is making File Explorer more dependable.
They took a real punch to the gut when File Pilot rolled out and showed them what their own devs should have been doing.
Took the beta for a quick spin and... wow, the speed is truly astonishing!
Windows doesn't feel slow because the kernel or the filesystem is inherently "that" slow, it feels like a sloth overdosing on heroin because nobody at Microsoft gives the slightest crap about making it even a tiny bit faster.
It's staggering how the instant you double-click a file in File Pilot you're... back in the tar pit. (The Windows image preview app just spins... and spins... while it does God-knows-what with my CPUs.)
The contrast of going from one to the other makes the quality difference glaringly obvious.
The Windows filesystem is very slow. It's not the main cause of slowness in Explorer, but it's still a real problem.
Directory Opus has been doing that for decades.
I'm sure it did, but that app looks like a Win XP-era app (not even Win7). FilePilot is fast, looks good & feels modern (support a command palette, fuzzy search, etc). The only downside is that it runs on the GPU and so running it inside a VM is a bit of a hassle.
You can completely customize how it looks.
Why the hell would I want a file manager to be run on the GPU. it's supposed to be light on requirements and run on a potato, it's a file manager ffs not a 3rd person shooter.
The reqs are likely a side effect of how the application is built and the fact that its made by a solo dev.
I find it more pleasant to do UI within the context of a video game renderer than to bother with ui libraries and native hooks.
You only have to deal with windows enough to get you a rendering context: then you can do everything in your walled garden.
Hadn't heard that name since the Amiga days and had no idea it was still around!
Lets be real, Microsoft is incentivised to treat their users as products so they’ll constantly test the limits of the user’s patience. Okay, they found a limit, now they’ll back off a little and try a different direction for a while until they run into another limit.
Abandon windows, and abandon any software that runs only on windows. It’s the only way out.
With Windows Update what I really want is control over reboot. Don't automatically reboot, instead let me save documents, close applications and reboot manually. "Pausing" updates doesn't do that, and could be dangerous as urgent security updates are delayed.
With AI features, the most annoying thing has to be the Copilot key on my laptop keyboard. If you accidentally hit it it opens a Copilot window, interrupting your typing. The Settings app for this key only allow you to specify whether it activates search or copilot, it doesn't let you turn it off. There are other workarounds like installing an app from the Store, but all those workarounds come with unwanted excess baggage.
What should be also bring back is the selective choice for installing updates. That would allow users again avoiding patches which have been confirmed as dangerous to the system stability.
Pausing, postponing isn't a solution here.
> The Settings app for this key only allow you to specify whether it activates search or copilot, it doesn't let you turn it off.
That's because it's not your computer, it is Microsoft's ;-)
Seriously, though, there will be quirks like with almost any OS. OS devs make choices that abstract some of the complexity in order to make it useful for a broad audience.
With Linux or the BSDs, you have the freedom to take it to any level of detail or customization that you wish to, with all that entails being outside of an externally maintained OS. Ask me how I know :-)
> That's because it's not your computer, it is Microsoft's ;-)
I think it is because allowing the key to be disabled will make Microsoft look dumb for adding the key in the first place!
Not a Windows user, have never been (since Windows 3.11). But if I were, I would think this is just PR unless they changed some fundamentals, like bringing back local user support without jumping through five hoops.
Oh of course it's the same PR as we've seen 44 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47459296
Careful, it's over 1k comments there
Migrating off windows, win server and exchange saved us a lot of money and was suprisingly not as challenging as we had feared.
Microsoft degrading user experience plus lower price on Mac computers it maybe their downfall. E.g., removing local accounts, unwanted advertising, arbitrary decisions (forced TPM requirement), etc.
I have a feeling that my fat ass switching over to Linux is going to outrun their attempt to roll back decades of accumulated tech debt, institutional incompetence and burned bridges.
I feel like your sentiment mirrors my thoughts exactly on this.
Since this isn't the Reddit comment section (I hear people here prefer a bit more elaboration and argumentative nuance with their $BEVERAGE), I feel compelled to add some of my own personal experience.
I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity. Copilot, for example, is just another gadget Microsoft simply cannot not put in. In '95 is was Clippy, but the deliveries never stop, and frankly I feel like an old man that finally decided to kick a bad habit because I truly see now all the empty talk from Microsoft I've heard countless amount of times before, wrapped in different packaging, and that Windows is like it is _by design_ and that it's bad for my health (in a different way than Linux can ever be, I feel).
Ever since Windows '95 the addition of slop has been accelerating, admittedly Microsoft _were_ much different then, but it's the _curve_ I am referring to, not that they were always _as bad_. Frankly, the "churn" is insane now, I think it's one or the other adage I can't recall where "available operating system" fills "available resources" and Microsoft are there to prove it.
The problem is also they are experimenting on their users to no end. I don't mind being part of the "user experiment" for "user experience" but how many decades do they need to arrive at the same fundamental conclusions -- that people prefer less bloat, and fewer interruptions in their face? Occam's Razor tells me it's rather that Microsoft is pretending to care but their agenda is their own alone (surprise).
Just the other day I had to spend 2 hours trying to "fix" some very-background OneDrive update because I suppose I am sucker enough to use OneDrive -- one of the least liked of Microsoft products I've had the misfortune to use -- with Windows using my laptop as a BitCoin farm, wasting cycles in some infinite loop produced by what evokes comparisons to those monkeys with typewriters. Half a dozen Powershell commands and 3-4 reboots later the `wsappx.exe` process finally was healthy enough to idle. These things happen constantly to people everywhere and there's little Microsoft can or wants to do anything about. It's a cost they're willing their users to pay.
To stop rambling, one of these days -- summer vacation perhaps -- I will remove the blasted thing finally (after decades of using both Windows and Linux) and grit my teeth through Linux, which I have tried avoiding only because I am on a Thinkpad and there's always another tweak that's needed for the whole thing to work as well as Windows does on a _good_ day. To be clear, I prefer Linux by and large, it's just that I want to avoid spending weekends configuring sleep, power states, Trackpoint, full-disk encryption, the docking station, etc.
The fact I am going to do it anyway, just to rid myself of the Windows experience that's just been getting worse and worse, says it all really.
Windows isn't fixable because Microsoft isn't fixable.
Microsoft's biggest and most consistent product is contempt for its users - consumers especially, but also business users.
When you understand that all of Microsoft's offerings are vectors for that contempt, the rest falls into place.
A user-centric Microsoft is an oxymoron. The company is literally incapable of it.
You're probably correct. Windows can be fixed, but it's stuck in the hands of MS who never will, so true ideas on how to fix it are little more than intellectual exercises.
> I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity.
I'm not so sure that Windows is unfixable. It could probably be fixed, but doing that would require rebuilding every burned bridge back to its old standard, and probably then some, and that's something the relevant people aren't going to agree to do (since they were the ones who burned them).
Mandatory updates? Now they aren't any more.
Onedrive stole your files and deleted them? Now Onedrive is enabled/disabled on first setup.
Shitty start menu? Now you can pick which one you want, all the way back to the Windows 7 one.
Shitty right click menu? Now the old one is back.
All AI? Now there's a toggle on install to enable/disable it all.
Now settings menu sucks? Here's the old control panel back as standard.
Telemetry? How about no?
If MS did all of these things (and probably more), their trust level would rise skyhigh, since they'd be doing tangible things to fix the pain points we've all talked about. Now they've hit one point out of probably 50+, and many of the remaining ones are much harder to fix than updates being forced.
> Onedrive stole your files and deleted them? Now Onedrive is enabled/disabled on first setup.
That's the one that really shocked me, and I haven't even experienced it for myself. I'm not normally that prone to excessive hyperbole, but that's about the most terrible thing I could ever conceive of an OS doing. All of the other stuff is a little annoying, but I could deal. But how in the hell could it ever be considered acceptable by anyone for your own OS to delete your files and move them to OneDrive or any other cloud service automatically? It's almost like ransomware, but the ransomware people will at least give you your files back for one flat payment. And the ransomware people at least know they're doing something nasty, and didn't try to integrate it as a default operating system feature. I guess they have better ethics than Microsoft!
It's just so obviously wrong, it's hard to even believe that it's a real thing. I don't think I could ever install an OS that even had a feature to do that at all, even if I could maybe temporarily turn it off with some scripts downloaded off the internet.
someone tries to scam, steal, beat you up. they then make efforts to stop doing that, and their trust would rise skyhigh? what does someone have to do to earn that kind of loyalty? would you apply this to anything else?
If they've given all the money back that they've scammed and otherwise made all the people they've hurt whole again, and are then continuing to provide a service people find use in, then yes. I'd probably need some time to be convinced that that's what's happened, and that they've truly changed. MS obviously isn't there, but there are theoretical worlds where this can happen.
Obviously, Microsoft can't give people back their deleted Onedrive files, but they can make good on a promise that it will never happen again (given that their efforts are founded in reality and not marketing speak), and hide behind a shield of 'that wasn't our intention'. Same goes with most other things you could complain about Windows.
If you have no reason to believe that Windows will screw you over, since MS has course-corrected on all major points of contention, then why not stick around? (The answer is that MS may change course again, but for those who haven't jumped ship, I'm sure this will provide good enough reason to stick around. It's not like the ship isn't providing them any utility. They've stuck around this long for a reason.)
yes at some point broken trust dictates that no amount of fixing will ever fix it.
[dead]
Too little too late. I've already fully migrated to Fedora 43.
The same people who made Windows that bad are now tasked with making it slightly better.
Yeah, I wouldn't bet on this.
If this is what the Windows considers 'quality updates' after 2 months, then Windows is in really rough shape.
Rebranding Copilot in Notepad is the kind of thing I expect from a modern day Microsoft, where they can't possibly understand what people mean when they say the word 'no thank you'. The actual change here should be a global toggle somewhere to just turn it off, forever, with no arguments from the OS. But of course we can't have that because engagement for a product no one wants might fall off.
I so, so badly wish this team would pull their head out of their ass, but if this is what their idea of improvement is, then I guess I might be done with Windows when I can't use W10 any more.
I know it’s intentional to build rapport but seeing the wording and language from windows on this stuff is insane considering their tenure and dominance and attitude of the last 30 years.
I don’t mean this in thee sense you should warm to them I mean it as in they’re on the back foot.
Microsoft is trying to sell things like extended servicing agreements. They purposefully make Windows worse so they can sell you solutions to fix it. They purposefully keep it insecure so you need their updates. It’s about taking the customers hostage.
There are two mentions of "reliab[ility]" (I searched for the first five letters to be sure I got other morphological forms of the word). It appears twice: once near the top, as a general goal, and once at the bottom, as part of the general goal. Nothing in between, like saying "we'll be using {less AI | more AI debugging | more human screening | magic wands | secret sauce} in an effort to improve reliability". So at least as far as this post goes, hardly even lip service. Given the number of botched updates reported earlier this year, that's astonishing.
Disclaimer: I switched to Linux last year.
Just switch to Linux people!
My first hand experience with Windows vs Linux this month:
A friend of mine recently bought a very expensive laptop to do some gaming. I helped him set it up and god that was a horrible experience. For example, we could not get rid of LinkedIn and other crap Microsoft wanted to force on him. Disabling copilot and removing Office required registry surgery. And the damn fans were always running because of some unknown activity in the background, maybe Microsoft is moving into bitcoin mining business?
He eventually got fed up, installed Ubuntu 26.04 as an experiment and a week later still seems to enjoy the experience. Games run fine on steam and his laptop finally feels like his own.
Most surprisingly, Linux worked fine out of the box. Windows 11 on the other hand needed a bunch of PowerShell and registry hacks to be copy pasted from various sources before it was even remotely usable. It's funny how it felt as if Windows was the OS for nerds with too much free time on their hands while Ubuntu was created for ordinary people. And my god, Ubuntu feels so much more fluid on the same hardware. The difference is *huge*.
I installed CachyOS for my 8-year old son and his desktop instead of Windows.
It's been wonderful.
Gaming on Linux works pretty good now. Setup is easy thanks to Steam and other launchers (e.g. heroiclauncher).
Sure, for many games Riot games / others with kernal level anticheats dont support linux sadly
Not the main focus but, FYI, a number of pieces of hardware will default to full tilt fans unless you have their tooling running to manage things.
NVIDIA GPUs were infamous for doing this with nouveau on less ideally supported cards, for example.
But it's the kind of things you'd expect Windows to take care of automatically, or in the worst case, to prompt the users to install on first boot, especially if Linux (with overall less driver support from manufacturers).
And with a preinstalled Windows (tuned to the laptop) this behavior should not be observed at all.
One would hope.
I have never personally owned one, but I have been told that some Alienware and similar flavored devices have had issues like this when you closed their bespoke Alienware management software because it was the thing driving the fan controls.
I got a new computer a couple weeks ago, with a 5070, and installed ubuntu on it and it was incredibly slow. I looked online and found some claim that 24.04 has some incompatability with nvidia, tried installing a bunch of different driver versions and nothing helped, tried turning everything off in gnome tweaks and still slow, tried installing 26.04 and 22.04 but the installer hangs forever in both, tried linux mint 24.04 still slow, gave up and installed windows with WSL :/
What was slow?
I'm running Ubuntu on a 9950x3d and 5090 and it is not slow. Games in Steam with Proton are buttery smooth.
One hiccup was I had to disable variable refresh rate because moving the cursor didn't "count" as a reason to update the screen, so moving the cursor on its own (rather than e.g. moving a window) looked choppy.
But a choppy mouse cursor isn't "slow".
Tip: if you have a performance problem, run Claude Code (or an AI agent of your choice) and ask it to investigate.
>What was slow?
Everything, huge input delay in every interaction, clicking on anything, opening menus, typing, tabbing between windows, everything had 1-2s of delay.
>disable variable refresh rate
I think I tried this but dont recall, there were a few things related to monitor refresh I tried that probably included this
Claude Code would probably attach a profiler and take a peek under the hood. Agents are making sysadmin and system introspection way more accessible, and the tools, unlike Windows, are generally command-line, easy for an agent to automate.
In case it helps I have the same experience on Windows right now. :_(
If you wanted to run Ubuntu from the beginning, it would be better to search for a computer designed for it, not for Windows.
This is the one thing I want from an OS: I want it to work for the hardware I have, and the hardware I get tomorrow.
Without having to google whether it will, or what hardware to buy.
Without having to google some workaround or configure anything to get the most of it.
Then your only option is Apple. The same happens with Windows too.
Your expectations are not reasonable. Imagine complaining about MacOS not working on a Windows laptop or vice versa.
You should buy preinstalled the OS you want instead.
Mac chose another path. You buy a pc and OS and the same vendor makes both. You can’t choose but at least you also never need to wonder whether your laptop and OS work together.
Microsoft took a more difficult path. They have close contact with OEMs, run certification programs etc. A massive apparatus to make it somewhat likely that hardware will ”just work”.
Both of these are valid models. I’d be happy to use either. I’m not very keen on doing this work myself though. I can buy a PC with Ubuntu but then it’s still hit and miss if I buy something new for it. There is no canonical store selling canonical gear like the Apple Store
I run a computer with a 5070 and Nobara. Nvidia and Linux always seem to be at odds but that has gotten a lot better with some distros.
Try CachyOS instead. Ubuntu is not great.
Hard to overstate the sunk-costness of it all
Unfortunately, Linux is nowhere near ready for the desktop outside of the techies/programmers who read Hacker News.
Switch to Mac OS on the MacBook Neo, actually. Much better.
Came here to say that. I've recently tried linux mint and it just works. You don't have to use the terminal if you don't want to, but i do enjoy using it. It's a breath of fresh air after windows. I'm now waiting for the year of the linux desktop. Though i'm not holding my breath. The average person will carry on using their system until it grinds to a halt under all the crap they've installed on it, and then complain their computer is too old.
No thanks
Except I can't because of the games I play?
This is a choice for you! I'm a pretty heavy PC gamer and whilst I've run Linux since I was in college (UK college, not US) I've always had a Windows install for gaming.
A few years ago, I finally decided I'd had it with Windows and their crap and uninstalled it. If I game doesn't run on Linux, I don't play it. Simple as that.
I'm lucky in that a majority of games I play run fine on Linux, the only real game I'd love to play is Vermintide 2. My friends also run a mix of Linux and Windows and so we're fairly fine skipping games as a group if we can't play on Linux.
>If I game doesn't run on Linux, I don't play it. Simple as that.
yes ive reached that point too.
Especially because technically games run pretty amazing on Linux. The issue is always the anti-cheat that they decided to implement.
There's at least one anti-cheat that "works" on Linux so they have options.
That is a problem of any operating system switch, you need to figure out what software is compatible or weather there are suitable replacements. It's the same even if you switch between iOS and Android.
That said, Linux used to be a tough cookie because there were so little support for software people wanted to run and the alternatives didn't do it any favours, plus the barrage of problems you used to get installing it on a random machine was discouraging, at best. Nowadays your chances of running it well on a random machine is pretty damn good and getting the software you need is lot more feasible. But don't go YOLOing a linux install, see if meets your use cases. There is nothing wrong with waiting until it's good enough.
I'm just down to Creative Cloud now. It's the only thing I still need Windows for. Everything else runs on Linux or there is a suitable alternative. So I've got several Debian machines running at home and at work, and one Windows machine that I boot only for photo editing.
The main problem with Windows is that it's half baked with "let's see what sticks" strategy. It feels like a constant beta, not a mature, serious platform.
It looks like it's the year of the MacOS desktop.
I think since apple is looking at the lower-end consumer market, it must also be looking at the corporate desktop market. Supporting enterprise software/fleet is a whole different ballgame. But it does play well into apple's strength, in that apple is great at letting others experiment and learn lessons from their failures.
If the new leadership at apples even glances in that direction, it will be wild for the desktop computing industry in general. Perhaps microsoft will rethink things, but better yet, entire companies and governments might start switching to MacOS.
Linux desktop is not ready for mass adaption, but it isn't that far off either. My opinion is that people using more macs get them more familiar with the unixy way of doing things. But better yet, a lot of the tooling and libraries for macs is easier to port to linux than from windows. macs dominating enterprise and consumer markets can mean improvements in linux desktop, and the eventual reality (perhaps in a decade) of seeing GNU/Linux desktops in those same spaces as viable options (Android/Linux is already there in the lowest of the low markets).
moving away from microsoft in the eu is intended to cut digital reliance on the US. The EU governments will not switch to macs ever. If they did that, they might as well stick with windows, because apple is also american and beholden to american laws.
I get that, it's just geopolitics, but practically speaking, it is doable for some companies and governments, but can regular every day people manage their own linux desktops? the EU needs a mac competitor, and they're not spending to make that happen. They're just buying into Linux because of its popularity there, and they haven't seen the real price tag of "free as in beer" FOSS software.
The Windows we want:
The SAME as Windows 2000 in terms of what is installed. NO TPM REQUIREMENT.
Even better: when installing Windows, there should be a "install minimal" option, and if you select it then it should be so fucking minimal - so little on there, that all you get is control panel and a way to install new software - NOTHING more.
That's your win, Microsoft. I'm 2000% certain nothing even slightly close to that will be delivered.
Yeah it’s funny how at this moment I’d pay more for less Windows.
But I’ve found my way on Linux long ago. Sure not all software is there and MS365 fully from browser has so many annoyances, but I love the OS minimalism, how clean it is.
My ideal windows in indeed win2000, but in a transparent VM so I can just do the Windows apps. I need LSW, Linux subsystem for Windows, essentially.
I live in Linux but still have some need for the Windows Runtime from time to time. If only Windows containers were at the level of the Linux ones, I’d flip the whole world up side down.
podman run ms365-full —license-key FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
I’d pay for that. But such a system only provides value, it does not extract it. It is a 180 of the way they have been thinking for a long time now.
its worth trying really really hard to get windows apps running through wine before reaching for a vm imho. once you open a vm you have to deal with ... well... windows.
I did it in the past, vmware (where the desktop was transparant so it was like Windows on Linux), CrossOver office, Wine (bottles).
Recently I tried to get Windows running using quickemu but that also failed.
All just so that I don't have to experience MS365 in the browser where I will regularly click "New message" (in Outlook) and start typing but my browser interprets all characters as shortcuts (as if I held alt or something??) messing up my inbox to various degrees before I become aware, ending up with a pile op messages in "archive". I hate the daily re-logins in Teams (which does not tell you it's logged out, your messages just hang and the menu is empty). Word simply deletes my last 2 sentences from time to time (even though it assures me on every frightened ctrl-s that it's all fine!!), etc, etc.
And we're not even talking about the hoops you have to jump through when a doc is not on SharePoint/OneDrive but on a NAS.
sounds painful, just searched on "how can i get ms office running in linux using wine" and the results included a containerised windows vm that looks very interesting. but yes i agree, they seem to have gone to a lot of effort to make office use a billion microservices that would be a nightmare to run through wine.
edit: nvm, the docker vm thing looks really slow, id rather use libreoffice (which is quite good really). and now europe is trying to cut the umbilical you can probably expect a lot more open source productivity stuff in the near future too.
The minimal install should be so minimal that you feel naked, like you need to immediately start installing stuff to get anything useful done.
I do not care what you give people who don't select "minimal install" - that's their problem.
Yes, that's what is needed in the first place and it should be the industry standard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45500845
Sadly, I don't think we ever see such approach.
There even used to be a "minimal install" option back when installing Windows 95.
Hopefully they don’t give up the TPM requirement given it also comes with a VBS capable processor which is important to Windows kernel security.
Very unconvincing. Microsoft seems to want to calm the storm.
I think a dead-giveaway is the realisation that issues that come with Microsoft-specific software, is met with an increasing amount of complaints by end users. Thus, either we buy into the PR explanation by Microsoft, or we rely on what end users says. Now there is a question how accurate the end users are, but the amount of complaints is not static; it has increased a lot in the last some weeks, and even way before that. There is a reason why Microsoft is now called Microslop - the decrease in quality is one big reason for that. AI has not led to an increase in quality - Microsoft needs to acknowledge that. But they won't, because they already committed totally to AI without any way back now.
It is beyond naive, and I don't know how it can be anything but disingenuous to pretend that the top priorities of "Windows Insiders" are sensible defaults, a calm discoverability feed and how AI works in notepad. The reality is this guy obviously got promoted and assigned "win-back OS users" task, in the face of an organization that overwhelming wants to leverage Windows for short-term, user-hostile bumps in AI usage, advert impressions and questionable engagement scores. He's not going to be allowed to mess with things like the marketing strategy or sales targets, and you see that in these "highlights". Your target audience asked for things like "let me manage my machine locally" and you're delivering "a more muted and polished consumer experience". It's lipstick on a pig, only the pig is dead, and actually a pile of garbage.
Even if you do "get it", you ain't going to be allowed to deliver it.
Exactly. I mean they literally, in this same release[0], just turned WIN+R (Run) from a classic FAST Win32 UI into a modern slow monstrosity. Who was this for?
I use WIN+R instead of the Start Menu Search/PowerToy's Alt+Space because it is INSTANT and 100% CONSISTENT. You just made my instant thing slower, great, thanks, mission accomplished!
Feels wildly out of touch, to almost a comical degree.
[0] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/05/01/announc...
Do you want to hear what the execs are doing about it from a trusted source instead of a marketing person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047#47223342
You’ve managed to brick w11 VMs completely running in your native cloud. Kill laptops in the April update and trigger bitlocker on consumer machines which users having zero experience recovering their devices because the GUI is crap.
You’ve been busy.
Stop shipping features, ship stability and quality.
I’m most excited for the scheduler and memory footprint improvements. As bad as I hear Windows 11 is, I’ve rarely had issues with it. For the most part it just works and stays out of my way. My only gripes are the occasional forced updates and a rare hard crash that happened once in a span of a year of using it as my daily driver.
Well that and I have to be mindful of running too many resource starving processes at the same time including WSL. Otherwise performance will quickly degrade. But that’s not much different than my 2015 ASUS zenbook running Linux off of 8gb of ram. In comparison my work laptop runs on 32gb of ram with much more powerful cpu cores.
WSL is my favorite and most used feature of Windows 11. So I’ll be happy as long as they don’t screw that up.
I think I’m more bothered by the paper cuts I experience every minute.
Starting from web based start menu taking forever to launch, to everything resisting to you to be in control of your computer.
Some say the speed is fine, but forget that these machines are running at nanosecond level instructions and there’s no reason for a simple task to take milliseconds unless somebody is optimizing for service revenue and user tracking (to be sold later to advertisers, not for user experience improvements).
Microslop is just scared out of mind with the European and Asian countries moving to Linux based platforms to get out of their grip. Can you imagine the amount of intelligence they will loose, and how much harder they will need to work to compete for real after three decades of being the default in everything.
Interesting. I replaced most of my gripes with power toys and WSL. That and a ridiculous amount of hardware. YMMV.
I discovered NixOS this year and I'm afraid I won't be back Windows. TBH Windows has been pretty good to me. This laptop was running at least 4 years on the same install. I never really found that Windows got in my way except for "This file is being used by another process" annoyances that I don't get with Linux. For ages I felt that Windows + WSL2 was the best of both worlds, but NixOS gives me a reproducible OS configuration that means I'll never have to fully build my OS again, and every installed app / routine is documented in code. This feels like the way forward.
I really like Windows. I just wish Copilot could be made fully optional.
Honestly, I can live with Windows 11 being a little slow, and I can deal with File Explorer issues. I can write my own tools to manage some of that, and PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks. Those parts do not bother me that much.
What bothers me is Copilot being pushed into the operating system experience itself. I wish it could simply be treated as an optional feature.
Windows is an operating system. An operating system is the foundational layer that governs the user’s work. Because of that, AI should be an opt-out assistant, not a premise that changes the default behavior of the system.
When I move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, Copilot feels like something that damages the user experience itself.
If Copilot were at the level of GPT or Claude, I probably would not complain as much. But I do not understand why the quality gap feels so large.
> I can live with Windows 11 being a little slow
Why accept mediocrity when Microsoft has shown to be capable of producing something better than their current iteration of Windows? Whether you prefer Windows 2000 or XP or 7 or one of the server versions over 10/11, all of those were in many ways 'better' than 11.
> I can deal with File Explorer issues
Again, why? It is not as if those issues are the result of Microsoft adding something useable or worthwhile, they're just the result of MS adding even more ballast to an already overburdened system.
> I can write my own tools to manage some of that
Yes, you can, and...
> PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks
...so you're getting to experience the power of the shell like *nix-users have been espousing for more than half a century now. Welcome to the club and welcome to the CLI. Here we use words to communicate instead of pictures, we outgrew those once we left play school.
If you want to use Windows just use one of the previous versions as long as you can while preparing to move over to the greener Wine-yards in Linux-land. Unless there is a big shake-up within Microsoft - unlikely - it looks like Windows as an operating system is a dead-end street. It will be turned into a straight jacket where you will comply with whatever the current business plan dictates. Escape while you still can I'd say, there are many alternatives on offer.
It is very simple. the factory work I do cannot run without Windows.
The software required for my work is supported only on Windows.
Of coures, Linux may give more control. But while people in the US may have a choice, in Korea, for this kind of industrial work, I usually do not.
Do you need to use Windows 11 though? If you're using Windows to drive industrial equipment I assume those machines are not connected to the internet? If so you should be fine running Windows 7 or - if need be - 10. There's plenty of medical devices running Windows 2000, some of them use even older versions. As long as they're kept away from the internet and from random USB sticks they remain useable without fear of compromise.
I'd not want anything like Windows 11 controlling industrial equipment as that OS does not need to be compromised to be untrustworthy.
The deterioration in the Windows and Office experience is astounding.
> This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates
I just can't, gotta ask - what about c++ updates? What about integral os components that were migrated to the store and if you disable it, you won't get updates? What about defender updates (not definitions but app update) that won't get applied if you have another anti malware?
The thing I hate about windows updates is that microsoft can't even update all their own stuff with a single button.
edit: almost forgot - why is office not in windows update, and what the hell is wrong with teams and why it is seperate from office updates
Just updating windows is a complete and utter mess and every single Linux distro is 100x better
Anyone have a good guide to (re)install Windows without any of the bloat? Preferably using Group Policy vs registry changes.
I've seen Tiny11 referenced but haven't seen a good guide for it.
Install Windows 11 Education edition (which rips all of the AI shit out mostly with sane defaults for schools). If you need the ISO, Microsoft's default Win11 ISOs have it. Use https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/ to get a good autounattend set up to rip out the extra bloat and set up a clean install. Activate with Massgrave HWID. You're done.
I'll vouch for this. I have a USB drive set up with Ventoy, which has the ability to install its TPM certs when booting from USB. It has a couple Linux ISOs and one Win11. It also has a Ventoy config tying that ISO to an autounattended XML built from that exact site.
The result is an install with no copilot/cortana/widgets, a win defender that can be disabled, no auto updates at all, a local account only, no taskbar shenanigans, properly configured explorer, some registry tweaks, runtimes pre-installed, extra drivers if needed, and QoL settings tweaked how I want them.
The OS installs itself in a few minutes with no intervention after the disk/partitioning stuff which I kept manual. It ends up being faster than the Ubuntu and CachyOs installs from the same drive. Then 2mins with massgrave post install if I haven't provided a key already.
When it is set up that way, Windows is decently fast and stable. And I have some control over it, at least whenever I need to enforce something.
Wasn't aware that there was an Edcation version but that unattended installer site seem like a great way to install, without using a bunch of random Power Shell scripts.
I will disclose that it generates a lot of random Powershell scripts to do all the unattended tweaks and magic... but yes, it's still a great way to install.
Ars Technica Made a guide:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/what-i-do-to-clean-u...
Sweet Jesus, when are these guys going to understand that I want to be able to turn off automatic updates completely and forever. I'm fine if my computer melts and explodes if I didn't get the update, but let me do it on my own schedule permanently!
I understand your point and motivation completely. And I agree...
However in today's world if you expose an unpatched "anything" to the internet then it is very possible that it will be discovered and eventually used to (silently) do things you don't want. Think DDOS farms, illegal software distribution etc...
What is the middle ground? I don't think there is one. We need to have reliable, automatically updated OSes which don't suck and , much more importantly, run the applications we need.
That is definitely NOT Windows.
That'd be my responsibility and choice. Which is why I nuked Windows Update a long time ago.
That's fine. I'll take responsibility for my decision. Show me a big warning message when I disable automatic updates.
If I'm concerned about this scenario, I'll just manually update it (by clicking the update button).
A car parks outside and there's a knock at your door. Before you can even get up you hear the first shouting: "FBI OPEN UP!" Your door disappears, instantly replaced by a cloud of dust. You start to get up and the agent raises his automatic rifle, pointed at your head. You slowly sit back down. Another agent swiftly moves behind you and applies the handcuffs. "W-what's going on?" you stammer. "You were hacking the NSA" says the agent. "N-no I wasn't! What the hell!" The agent carries you out the door. "Should've enabled updates."
You can't advocate for people to be responsible for everything that happens on their computer and also advocate for being able to disable updates. That combination makes you a top-level felon completely at random and outside of your control. If your computer will be hacked (there is no can be hacked, only will be hacked), you'd best not be responsible. If you're responsible, it best not be hackable.
The problem is not you being inconvenienced.
The problem is making your machine part of a botnet that will attack ME.
I don't like that.
The cost of your freedom is you being a threat to everyone around you. Do YOU take responsibility for that?
I won't, as I don't take responsibility for someone stealing my street legal classic car, which is parked on the street right now without any special anti-theft device, and using it to run over you.
If someone takes over my computer, I'm the victim as much as you. You can't force your security standards on me, just as you can't prohibit people from connecting an arbitrary version of Windows, Linux or MacOS to the Internet just because it could inconvenience you.
An unpatched computer on the internet is basically like leaving a loaded gun visible on the ledge of your first-floor opened window.
Aiding and abetting might come to mind, if someone gets hurt by that gun.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Who decides whether a computer is "unpatched"? What patches are needed? To all running software? To system software? What is system software?
What about patches that bring new features that introduce new vulnerabilities? Can I claim I didn't want the update because I was concerned about the new AI thingy introducing EVEN more security issues and turning my reasonably secure, mostly patched, computer into your "loaded gun"?
>"you want [...] a shared sense of pride"
MS is so cooked if they think they can fix quality issues with corporate culture slogans
It feels like there is no one person in control of Windows.
It feels like there is a committee and every Microsoft marketing group gets their changes that they want in Windows to help push their product.
Windows should have someone at the top - with TASTE - and the authority and strength and vision to actually make real change happen.
Real change isn't possible because assuming someone is in charge of Windows then they are weak and without their own vision to even understand all the things that are being said over and over and over in threads like this.
People would LOVE it if when installing Windows you could choose "text only/no GUI", or "minimal install" or "select the components you want" or "super special with the lot". Why the fuck can't Microsoft work out on its own to do this.
And for gods sake drop the stupid TPM thing which was required by the Microsoft new PC sales licensing division.
And NO ADS - it's an operating system not a billboard.
> We know there’s a lot of excitement for Taskbar customization – and that’s coming soon.
This will never not be funny to me. These clowns really did remove something that existed for decades and then spend more than a decade trying to edge their users to the fact that they were gonna bring it back. In 500 years when somebody looks up enshittification on Wikipedia, this should be the first example.
This announcement terrfies me. I dont think MS now has developers that are competent enough to reliably change core parts of Windows like the Explorer (taskbar). This plan will not only introduce bloat with reduced performance, but will also reduce core stability further. (Explorer has hanging issues since the april update). So please, please, please @Marcus. If you want to add stuff, please do it in side apps. Leave the core alone, that's above your ability currently. For the core please only focus on bug fixing and removing bloat again.
Who gets to do the customizing though? Suspecting that "auto hide the taskbar" will suddenly become more popular. Oh no! "Your taskbar buttons will be back after these important messages"
How long will it take them to realize they just need to re-release the Win7 start menu, kill ads, kill telemetry, and declare victory?
This reads... Weird? As in, I know it's marketing speech but expressions seem misused and ideas don't follow from each other:
>You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Not... the other way around? Updates decide when I happen?
>Last month we said we would reduce where Copilot shows up across Windows, focusing on bringing AI where it’s most valuable. [...] in Notepad, we’ve replaced the generic Copilot icon with a clearer “Writing Tools” label that better describes what it does.
We've reduced AI by renaming the button?
My sentiments exactly when reading that - I had to read the first one twice to verify what it said.
Wonderful, can't wait to be ambushed by Son of Clippy. Should have anticipated these kinds of shenanigans.
Man, Microsoft still struggling with shit macOS solved decades ago.
On the other hand, Apple still refusing to fix shit in macOS people have been asking for decades.
Windows Explorer always freezes for me. Teams is constantly interrupting me with popovers to tell me about features I’ll never use. on startup, it takes some time for panels to load.
The file system still uses drive letters. Can’t they scrap the old file system folder layout to something… organized?
> The file system still uses drive letters. Can’t they scrap the old file system folder layout to something… organized
There's no point doing so. Folder mounts are possible in diskmgmt.msc, and on Linux partitions end up mounted in /mnt/crap (and removables in /media/crap :D) anyway.
I run Windows 11 on my gaming PC powerful desktop and a good work laptop. No issues. No idea what you guys are doing.
I can also now run and install over cmd powershlle with choco, scoop and winget.
Get Firefox, VLC, MPV and all that.
Get Powertoys.
Run Christitustech utlity for tweaks.
So even less usage for Linux imo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Great argument buddy!
I was the same way (I suppose I still am since I never deleted the partition), scoop + tailored pwsh profile + 'debloat' tweaks etc. I never really understood any of the popular complaints about Windows/W11 since I always reign my install in.
There is no argument, just vague gesturing toward the grass. I recognized myself in your post.
Fair enough. I am not against Linux at all, but work does mandate Windows (or OSX but...) and Windows for gaming is still a must imo due to anti-cheat and my Steam library is massive. Gamepass is not a bad deal too.
They wouldn't have had to face such embarrassment and rollbacks and spend billions had they just stuck to maintaining Windows 10 in the first place. To this day any improvement W11 offers over W10 is still an enigma.
> To this day any improvement W11 offers over W10 is still an enigma.
Win 11 may not offer improvements for you, but it may be designed to offer big benefits for MS: ads, data monetization, ai, data for training ai.
I don't need transparency, I don't want a shared sense of pride. What I want is for someone to put in a switch to can Mica so that I can have color in the active titlebar again.
Purely anecdotally I have not noticed any improvement in FPS or performance while gaming.
The fact that some Windows games run better on Bazzite + Proton (/ Wine) is evidence in itself.
Windows can ensure its quality quite easily: restore support for Windows 7.
In ideal world, but it's too late. The codebase is old. It's very difficult to backport/reimplement/integrate features (tons of APIs, kernel features, etc) that new software relies on. Also, because of compatibility you can't remove all the mess.
It's not that old. In fact, there is little new stuff added to Windows after version 7 that is really worth keeping. Even Windows XP supports most recent Chromiums, albeit with a lot of hacky patches.
I would even say that from the usability perspective, Windows 2000 beats them all, but quite some useful APIs were added in XP and 7, including better Unicode support, driver signing, UAC. But 10 and 11 were just a waste of effort.
Maybe UWP and similar stuff isn't that popular, but about WSL?
WSL1 is just an upgraded Interix, which had been with Windows since at least 2000, maybe even NT4. All the APIs are there, porting WSL1 on 7 should be not a problem at all.
WSL2 is just a virtual machine. Hyper-V was first shipped in Windows 8, which is not too far from Windows. But things are even more bright. Qemu already had the "kqemu", which what eventually became KVM when merged into the Linux kernel, and it worked _even on windows NT 4_, and if course it worked on 2000 and XP.
So porting Hyper-V/WSL2 as a driver onto Windows 7 should be even less of a problem than WSL1.
Bunch of weak willed half measures and a whole lot of marketing around it. I fixed all of my Windows problems by switching to Linux years ago. No more humiliation rituals.
I’m not currently participating in the program, how come I’m seeing these changes already? Although they’re welcome.
For 2 months now the „put in admin credentials“ dialog is so fundamentally broken - ui-wise, it is unbelievable (in the sense that I do not believe it actually made it to production even though I see it with my own eyes). There are so many anecdotes about slop by now, the working parts become the anecdotes.
By now Windows, for me is more like a reality TV show than an OS.
Windows 10, especially when they added WSL2 was genuinely great and an awesome platform for development, with essentially native/fast Linux. Since Win11, it has all been downhill (imo), speed dropped massively, even opening task manager now takes seconds, weird slowdowns that only reboot resolves (temporarily). I hope Microsoft starts taking performance seriously and tries to get back to what was lost after Win10, but I have big doubts.
Why would you describe windows 10 as great? Forced updates and the beginning of ads, massive increase in telemetry while basically giving you a mediocre reskin and virtual desktops. Windows 11 sure moved the overton window.
Compared to what was before and after it was pretty great.
I remember windows 7 being better.
11 years of mandatory telemetry in Windows, and it still takes a huge amount of noise from users and journalists online over a long time for Microsoft to notice and finally make change. What good is the fucking telemetry then? Why can I still not turn it off?
Does it require a microsoft account to use?
If yes I dont care and I won't use w11
Still have w10 for steam, will switch to linux in the future
Besides, infesting Windows with Spyware and AI what they did to the start menu was among the most atrocious changes they made.
I was always a taskbar top guy, because it simply makes more sense, this is not opinion this is fact. Browser tabs are on the TOP, your mouse hovers over the top of the screen WAY more, and It's stupid to have to spend miles in mouse travel time to the bottom of the screen. Window controls like close, minimize, fs are TOP. Most things are on the TOP. Whoever made the decision to remove that ability to move the taskbar while Linux basically offers EVERYTHING you can imagine and more is insane. I was using Explorer Patcher, but it was buggy for me, so I use Start 11 now, its works fine, but it should not need a 3rd party closed source software to basically just have what Windows always offered.
I use Windows only for gaming, everything else I do on Linux. I think It's too late to realize these things. M$ started by just buying software and building a monopoly they were never the good guys so I can not say the "lost it" but whatever this BS is they are doing now its worse. I also use AtlasOS to bring some sense into Windows, also something that should not be needed and be that way out of the box with few simple switches. It's just a bloated mess, at least its stable for the most part.
just wanted to say that windows is a brilliant piece of software, and i look forward to the efficiency improvements.
as to the naysayers, they were clueless back then, they're clueless today, and they will continue to be clueless as windows gets better and better.
IMHO the last truly brilliant and consistent version was 7. Ideally MS should do such improvements on Windows 7. Sadly, Windows developers also have to deal with the mess created during Windows 8/8.1/10/11.
OK so I see someone at Microsoft decided that their strategic decisions do have impact on their income so they are implementing a crisis management strategy.
The way I read this, it sounds like "We're not giving up on disabling local accounts, telemetry, ads in the OS and other things most people complain. However, we're willing to make some concessions in how aggressively the updates are pushed on users and a few minor points or things we planned to implement at some point anyway but didn't consider that important."
Prove me wrong.
Windows 10 still working fine.
People complain about telemetry but that’s how you get improved features.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-new-run-dialo...
Yet somehow PEAK Windows versions ( whether it was 2000, XP or 7 depending on person) all predates introduction of forced or opt-out telemetry.
Peak in what way?
Windows 2000 had sequential service startup. It took /ages/ to boot. The boot screen was pretty, though.
XP was a security nightmare and out the gate was BSOD city, much of that thanks to 3rd party drivers, but the OS had fundamental kernel bugs, too.
7 was okay, but it isn't something you'd want to go back to with modern hardware. It lacks many features we find essential. TRIM being a big one. I'd argue that the Windows 7 iconography wasn't very nice.
I'm more of a fan of NT4 for it's utilitarian look, though service management was no where near as nice as what the MMC brought.
From a stability perspective, it really wasn't until Windows 8/10 where we got to the "PEAK" Windows versions, where stability was not an issue at the OS level with Microsoft-shipped code, but rather at a driver or hardware level. No longer were we seeing some fundamental kernel bug halting the system, instead it shifted over to garbage 3rd party drivers (largely fixed thanks to Windows' unique ability to restart the graphical subsystem/removal of kernel mode print drivers) or failing hardware. You won't find that level of stability in Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows 7.
> You won't find that level of stability in Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows 7.
Nice try but you won't deceive any attentive readers. Everything you've told in that paragraph was applicable to Windows 7, it had all the stability and none of the user hostility of later versions.
I think you strung together a bunch of words that don't jive with real world experiences.
Windows 7 still had some fundamental kernel quality issues. WDDM 1.1 wasn't mature to the point of providing a stable experience across the board and vendors were still adapting to the WDDM model; kernel mode printer drivers were still common, both a stability and security knock for those older versions of Windows.
So no, Windows 7 did not have "all of the stability" of Windows 10 or 11.
> I think you strung together a bunch of words that don't jive with real world experiences.
I know the real world experience I've had, thank you very much.
> Windows 7 still had some fundamental kernel quality issues.
No it didn't, it was solid as a rock.
> WDDM 1.1 wasn't mature to the point of providing a stable experience across the board and vendors were still adapting to the WDDM model;
Display drivers adapted by the time Vista SP2 was released, and 7 was a solid release from start without even needing a SP.
> kernel mode printer drivers were still common, both a stability and security knock for those older versions of Windows.
First time I've heard a printer driver crashing the system, are you sure you're not making it up? ( print queue hanging is annoying but it isn't a BSOD)
> So no, Windows 7 did not have "all of the stability" of Windows 10 or 11
Okay I give up, Windows 11 is the bestest release, Satya is the broest tech CEO and you're the number 1 fan boy
They can telemet someone else. It should be opt in. I don't want to be telmeted.
We need a faster way to uninstall copilot and download chrome
Will I still have the urge to stab myself in the hand repeatedly?
MS Windows is the Pontiac Aztec of operating systems.
valve is on the brink of replacing windows with steam for many people
it's probably not a big dent in market share, but it's probably a good tipping point
Not everyone is a gamer.
I did not say everyone is a gamer, but it's still a big market share
If you believe they'll accomplish anything beyond changing a handful of dialogs before getting reorg'd, I got an Agentic AGI Python script you can use on Windows to sell you.
Windows is adding features nobody asked for, like scroll wheel zooming everywhere, like in cmd.exe. Wtf do you need zooming for in the terminal?? I get false positives, and no benefit, at all.
Another is Windows Explorer, loses focus all the time, no hint to where it went, preventing keyboard navigation. Basic UI conventions are being violated, for no reason than having no clue what Windows is.
Windows is apparently being infested by young hackers who think Linux is the best thing since sliced bread and who just want to add tacky features using sloppy AI.
Do you mean Ctrl + scroll wheel? I use that feature quite a lot, I like my font size small but it can be difficult to see for other people so being able to quickly scale it up is really useful
I use Ctrl + <number> to switch between different workspaces on Mac, and half of the time I come back to MS web pages or apps (like Teams) the font is either 9000+pt or then -3pt. Outlook takes the cake though, where for whatever reason they decided to support different font "zoom" levels in different parts. And everyone were dreaming of having the inbox menus in 1pt while having email with 1000pt, right?
The "sense of pride" bit makes me think they're not even taking it seriously... either that, or they hired EA's PR person that managed this record voted comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...
Microsoft strategy is adverse to Windows quality.
Microsoft wants a fucking medal for appearing to give a shit about their customers for the first time in 10 years.
the post shared here is clearly written with AI.
You're absolutely right!
Wake me when the left side taskbar is restored to the stable version
Lmao, since the neo they’re panicking. It’s over microslop.
Smoke and mirrors. Microsoft will never change.
All: "zomg just use linux loser" is not helpful to anyone, and in fact, just makes you an asshole.
The way to convince someone to try Linux is not to be as big of a rancid asshole as possible.
I've been using Arch btw for 15 years and even I hate people like this. Stop it. You're making the problem worse by pushing people away from Linux and the rancid sacks of assholes that use it. If you have nothing to say to a struggling Windows user than berating them, it is in everyone's best interest (including you) if you instead shut the fuck up and let someone who isn't a sack of moldy shit try to help that Windows user.
"quality" lol
"trust me bro"
Yeah exactly. They already have a fixed distro that is Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC.
...and there's clearly huge market-demand for Windows LTSC amongst retail customers, and yet, MS's C-levels already decided for them that no amount of love nor money - excepting a sufficiently large enterprise licensing contract - can legally entitle you to a license - or even official media - for Windows LTSC.
It reminds me of when Adobe ended perpetual licensing and switched to cloud(TM)-only, subscription licensing for Photoshop, et al: many of us (myself included) assumed that Adobe was surely making a foolish mistake to abandon perpetual-license customers, but it turns out[1] that was the plan all along: those customers are a vocal minority who can demonstrably afford to pay more, the rest of the customer-base doesn't care enough to switch to a competitor. Over 10 years later (2013), we haven't seen any of Photoshop's then-promising upstart competitors come close.
...on that basis, I don't think MSFT's recent backpedalling on Windows 11's disrespect for its own users is in any way a response to us power-users complaining online - or even because any number of us did fully migrate off Windows and onto Linux, but instead because of all the recent talk overseas from foreign governments (France, Germany) taking active steps to secure their digital-sovereignty and deploying more Linux desktops; and a good way to get people (and decision-makers in government and large businesses) personally interested in digital-sovereignty is by pointing out how shitty their own corporate desktop UX has gotten.
I'll gladly eat my hat when/if MS graciously allows regular retail consumers, and not just large organizations - and those of us with a $2000/yr MSDN Subscription - the privilege of paying for an OS without advertising built-in to the shell and having hard dependencies on proprietary online services.
[1] (This article has some hallmarks of LLM "assistance" but gets the point across; and cites sources at the bottom): https://secondactsbiz.substack.com/p/adobe-the-transformatio...
lol nobody cares.
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Windows is scamware.